GB: I don’t think they go away and think about it. I think they know exactly what they’re doing the whole time. I think this guy was smart enough that he knew that he would direct the way that he would give me the information. He talked about a load of other things. He was interested in religion and spirituality, the Bible; He’s a very religious person. When we went out to lunch he would say grace before eating. He said it to himself; he wouldn’t make me do it. But we talked about so many other things as well and I didn’t really remember anything from those conversations because I didn’t think they were really important. Now I’m thinking it probably wasn’t very smart. You meet some of these government people and people that are involved in secret projects, and they’re completely different from anybody you might know. They might drink a beer and have fun and talk about when they were in Vietnam and whatever. But, if you’re asking direct questions about things, if they can talk about it they might just answer your question but if you’re not back grounded in figuring out what they’re saying, you’ll never catch it, and they don’t care. If you don’t catch it, they’re not going to repeat it. They’ll help you as much as they can, and I think those are the kind souls in the spy business. There are others that are either completely uncooperative or will say something to lead you astray specifically. I don’t think anybody I was talking to while I was doing the book did that in any specific or malicious way, as far as I could tell. I was really lucky with that.
SM: How high up the chain of command do you think Doty was How genuinely knowledgeable was he You start the book with you sat with him in this restaurant and he tells you straight out, UFOs are real.
GB: He believes that. As far as I can tell, I’m 80 to 90% sure of that. He’s been exposed to a lot of things that we argent and he said that. I don’t know for a fact but I’m pretty sure he has. He got to captain rank or something by the time he retired and he got into trouble for various things; making up stories and causing problems. He got a little over zealous in what he was doing and made some headaches for the air force. I talked to another guy, my friend Walter who was in AFOSI from about 92 to 96 approximately, he was an agent same as Doty was and they actually give them a lot of leeway as to how they do their job. They get orders but unlike a lot of other military organizations, they get a lot of latitude about how they go about doing their jobs. From our point of view, that looks like Doty had a lot of power and he was high up in the military etc. But the thing is, while not being a low level grunt, he was also not somebody in a command position. He was carrying out orders. It doesn’t mean he was stupid or that he didn’t know how to do his job or that he Couldn’t have had a higher rank or whatever. What his position and job description dictated as regards to Bennewitz and with what went on at the bases, he was tasked to keep tabs on who was looking at what, how much they knew and if they were communicating with anybody then how they were doing that and how to stop it. As I said, from our point of view that’s a lot of power, and it is, but from the military’s point of view, he was just doing the job of a detective.
SM: I suppose I meant more by my question, in terms of knowing the truth, the genuine reality, how far towards the top was he positioned in that sense
GB: He knew more than us, but not much.
SM: Really
GB: I don’t think so. He believes things in terms of what he was told by others in the military. If he actually saw something at Area 51 as he claims, I have no idea. But based on talking with him and with Bill about him, and they both believe there is some other civilization visiting here, they both think that but as far as Doty is concerned, I don’t exactly know what he thinks that interaction is. There are ways to dis-inform people on the inside as well as there is the rest of us. That’s the point of compartmentalization. Certain people will know certain things. One or two or three people will probably know everything. I’m sure the President doesn’t even know the whole thing and I don’t think any president ever has. Then there are maybe two or three hundred people that know a great deal about it and then there’s probably thousands that just know enough of what they need to know to do their job. And I think those very few who know the whole thing probably don’t even know the whole thing. They may only know this part or that part but its enough to really throw people through a loop if its true. Belief is a bad word but I think Doty has seen enough to make him believe that there is a, if not extraterrestrial, then at least another consciousness that deals with the human race and a lot of people in the government have known about that and have had interaction with it. I think he really believes that from what he was shown.
GB: Any sense of whether that race is benign or aggressive
SM: I didn’t ask him about that but from what I can tell, I asked him if it bothered him and he said no. If there was something that was endangering the human race associated with it, he probably would have couched it in different terms. I don’t think anybody, even abduction researchers think that.
Abduction researchers think they’re here to take all of our DNA and impregnate our women etc. That may be true but they seem to be the only ones saying that. I think the government for its part, I think they know what’s going on but they’re still confused about it. They’re more knowledgeable but they are knowledgeably confused! They don’t quite know how to handle it.
They know that that big piece of information carries a lot of power with it and they don’t want to let that out. If I was in that position and my job and my livelihood depended on it, I probably wouldn’t say anything either. I might say tantalizing things to a few people but I think its very easy for people to keep secrets. If Bill tells me something and says Don’t tell anyone then I don’t Its a courtesy. My job is my livelihood so there’s even more of an incentive to be like that unless someone pisses you off or whatever.
I think the people that know this information, and other things like weapons systems and so on are very good at keeping quiet plus they are legally bound not to talk about it.
SM: Why do you think were not being told then
GB: From what I said before. Because knowledge is power and if you know about something that nobody else does then you’ve got that much more of a lock in keeping them in their place and you in your place. And I’m not only talking about socially but I’m talking about politically too. I’m not sure if the United States knows what other nations think about it or what contact they’ve had. I’m sure they’re interested in it.
SM: I’m jumping about here a bit but something else that you strongly hint at in the book is that cattle mutilations are entirely a government organized event.
GB: Yeah. I don’t go out and do investigations, that’s just not what I do.
I’m not interested in doing such a thing which puts me at a loss, especially if you talk to Linda Howe. The reason I thought that is because the one person I talked to who knew more about cattle mutilations than just about anybody except Linda Howe and Chris O’Brien and a couple of other people, was Gabe Valdez, and he said that during a lot of these mutilations, especially when he was working with them in northern New Mexico in the 70s and 80s, they found gas masks lying about and radio chaff stuffed into a cows mouth in one instance why would aliens do that A lot of periphery things, hardware around these sites, like a boot or a glove or something like that.
They find these things and if its aliens doing it all the time, why would they leave these things It makes no sense whatsoever. I asked Linda Howe about this and I Couldn’t believe it when she said, The aliens leave that stuff there to make us think its humans. I think I said something like, Okay, I guess I don’t have anything else to talk about with you. Almost none of the stuff they do is outside the realm of human abilities, really, as far as I can tell, except that Linda Howe has said that organs are removed and no place they can see where they’ve been taken out except maybe a little hole which means they’d have to liquefy it somehow and suck it out.
SM: Well yes, the surgical procedures have been commented on in the sense that medical procedures have been carried out that argent practiced by the medical profession.
GB: But its not beyond the realm of possibility for humans to do. Almost none of it. There’s some of the things that happen that are which leaves the question open but what I was trying say in the book was that some if not most of these things are done by some sort of human agency. As to why, well I asked Gabe Valdez about that as well and Chris O’Brien who wrote Mysterious Valley and they think, and many researchers think the same thing, that there is some kind of pathogen that got out into the animal population sometime in the mid to late 60s and somebody is responsible for it and its starting to spread and they’re trying to figure out where it is and what its doing and how to stop it because it will decimate the native animal population because some of these things are found in elk and deer, I’m talking about some Mad Cow disease type stuff. People ask why they cant keep their own cows but then you don’t get a very good sampling.
SM: I know this argument Greg but they don’t need to keep their own cattle.
Why cant they just set up a legitimate wholesale business and buy in cattle from all over the country
GB: Because people would wonder why they were doing it. There’s other things too although this goes off into speculation. The way its done, there’s helicopters flying over these places, these things happen at night, sometimes right next to peoples houses and nobody hears anything. Well, its a good way to test in a real environment how well you can sneak by and do things right under peoples noses, almost literally. Also to find out how it affects the population and what people think of it and what kind of information is being spread about it. Its one of these intelligence operations, and I’m not saying the government are doing it maybe some quasi government or private agency that’s being supported by the government who know about it it covers a lot of bases.
Field medical procedure, stealth, the spread of disinformation and rumors, so many different things. It sounds like I’m going around the bend to get away from the alien explanation, I’m not. The main reason I follow that line of thought, and Gabe Valdez who dealt with it intimately for many years follows the same line of thought, is that its the only thing that seems to explain some if not most of what’s going on. If there are aliens and they are out there performing cattle mutilations, they either might have done it first or someone is trying to copy them and hide under that scenario I don’t know but nothing seems able to explain everything. But human element within cattle mutilations seems to explain a lot of it. Chris O’Brien even found a group of people in the San Louis Valley that were trying to cover up for it and were seen there afterwards, some local outlaw type people, and the government and others are not above hiring criminals to do things if they think they can do the job properly. There are also aspects of ritual sacrifice and all that which enters into it. There are people who have actually witnessed others doing it. There’s a lot of activity around this nexus that can be explained in a lot of ways and a few that cant.
SM: You say there are people who have witnessed cattle mutilations taking place
GB: No, they haven’t witnessed the actual mutilation but they’ve seen people who don’t have access to helicopters and stealth technology and radios and all this wandering around near a cattle mutilation. Not actually killing it.
They’ve seen people in robes and there’s candles there and stuff they find afterwards. There have been witnesses out there that have seen humans around cattle that have been killed and mutilated.
SM: So you’re talking about copycats.
GB: Yeah copycats or opportunistic people. Somebody who’s made some blood sacrifice for something or other. It gets a lot weirder than that when I got into it with Chris O’Brien on my radio show.
SM: Another interesting point, one explanation for identifying a UFO is the performance of the craft. The fact that it can suddenly dart off and shoot up at an incredible speed or angle and the automatic response of course is that there is nothing terrestrial that we’ve got that can perform like that. But you seem to intimate that that’s not necessarily true and that we already have that technology.
GB: Well, I was hinting that we might. A lot of people have said we might have that technology and whether its taken from aliens a la Philip Corso or not, I don’t know. I read Corso’s book and there’s nothing in there to prove anything except his opinion. I’m not saying He’s lying and it sounds good if you’re a UFO researcher or a fan or whatever. Unfortunately, there’s no way of proving it. Kind of like Bob Dean and his stuff about NATO headquarters in the 60s. But as far as I could tell, if these documents are true, scientists have been involved, specifically the United States government and I think the British government too, have been involved in anti-gravity research since at least the 50s. If they’ve got anywhere with that, perfected it or whatever, there’s absolutely no way they’re going to tell anybody that they are doing that. Bob and Ryan Wood are trying to determine where the technology that Corso described as coming from the aliens actually came from. They’re looking into the history of transistors, lasers, fibre optics, etc.
SM: The next sequitur is, why argent we seeing these sorts of aircraft in operation
GB: People think they’re UFOs probably.
SM: Why haven’t we seen them in Iraq
GB: I don’t know, I haven’t been to Iraq and I don’t know who’s there and who is reporting it.
SM: Oh, I see. I see.
GB: Did you hear recently that the Iranian air force got an order to shoot down any UFO
SM: Well yeah, but they’re probably drones.
GB: If you look at purely physical science, you cant have a person sitting in one of those things with that kind of performance because they’d die. They’d get smashed unless they found a way to cancel out inertia. I am confused about how they can do these things and not produce a sonic boom while going at 14,000 miles an hour.
SM: With the benefit of hindsight now, Bennewitz does appear to have been a disaster waiting to happen. Above all, his location, his residence, right across the road from the air base, his background, his interests, it just seemed to be a disaster waiting to happen.
GB: I guess so but like we said, if they had just told him to cut it out, it would probably never have happened.
SM: Has writing the book affected you or changed you in anyway
GB: It didn’t change any of my beliefs about the subject. It made me feel good that I could finish a book on time. It was the first one Id ever written.
Id edited the Exclusive Middle anthology and that was great as so many people liked that. But to actually write a book about something, meet all these people and talk to them I tried to put it in some kind of context. That’s the essence of telling a decent story. I’m not totally happy with the book or the way the story was told but its a learning curve.
SM: What are you unhappy about with it
GB: Well that Publishers Weekly review kind of stumped me because I realized they were right. I didn’t develop the characters as well as I could have. But part of that is its the first one I’ve written and the other part of it is, especially with Bennewitz, how the hell am I going to get into his brain if He’s dead and nobody wants to talk about him who knew him that well. I cant make stuff up. I tried to stick to the information I had at hand and create a story with that.
SM: I think you’ve written a brilliant book and one that deserves the attention of the UFO community.
GB: British people seem to be interested in it because there’s a healthy skepticism. I don’t know if its the education system in the UK or what, but it comes out in Nick [Redfern] too. They’ve got a healthy, (and to some American minds pathological) skepticism. about things and I respect that. Maybe not skepticism. but an enquiring attitude; Well, what are the pros and cons
Does this make sense, does this not make sense. Leave your belief at the door and see if it can be changed by some sort of checkable facts. That’s another reason why I wrote the book too actually, to answer that question and I’m glad you brought it up. If you cant get past somebody’s decent research, checkable facts, actual living people who have been asked questions, documents etc. and make a conclusion that this isn’t what it seems to have been in the past, if you cant get past what you find with that, and if it makes you have to change your opinion, well, then you’re probably doing ufology a disservice.
SM: I would agree with you but I think you’re doing your fellow Americans a disservice as well. I understand what you mean when you say we have a more skeptical attitude but my response to that would be, Where’s it got us
If anything were worse off here then you are in the States. You seem to have achieved much more than what researchers here have.
GB: (At this point, Greg made reference to another book coming out later this year by a well known author which I had not heard about it and would have expected to. I later asked someone else about it who confirmed that it was a well kept secret until publication. Sounds like its going to be a bomb shell. I know the subject matter but not what its about). I just had a little part. My part was just along the edge, mostly of interest to UFO researchers because I’m basically saying the same thing Bill said in 1989.
There are more receptive ears now as people have had 16 years for it to sink in.
I think I’m not getting nearly the flack that Bill got. I think he helped me as much as he could to do the book because its a book he wanted to write maybe at some point but he just Couldn’t do it and didn’t want to. I went ahead and did it for him. He said there were things in the book he disagreed with but they were philosophical disagreements and I cant make you change what you wrote. For the most part he said it was accurate and agreed with most things I had said. I asked him some very nasty questions about some things about why he did certain things and didn’t he feel guilty and this and that. He was really straight forward. Sometimes he got irritated but at all the time he answered my questions as best as he could. They were the same things he’d been saying for years just in more detail. I don’t have any reason to believe that anything that came from Bill was either a lie or disinformation. But he wouldn’t tell me who Falcon was, even though He’s dead.
SM: Darn, I was going to ask about that. Greg, its been fascinating, thank you. Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth by Greg Bishop is published by Paraview-Pocket Books. The Excluded Middle editor, radio host, author and lecturer Greg Bishop has provided the field of UFO research with what is without doubt one if its major, published contributions. The subject matter of Project Beta is an unusual one; and were it not for the fact that the story is meticulously detailed, referenced and researched, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled upon a high-tech, X-Files-meets-Robert Ludlum-style thriller.
But Project Beta tells a very real story – and one that is as harrowing as it is informative. In essence, the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction book relates the story of physicist Paul Bennewitz, who after stumbling upon Air Force and National Security Agency secrets that he believes are connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials and UFOs, is bombarded by the murky world of officialdom with a mass of disinformation, faked stories and outright lies in order to both divert him from his research and lead to his mental and psychological disintegration.
While anyone and everyone with an interest in UFOs should read Greg’s book, it is unlikely to please some – particularly the I-want-to-believe crowd that foam at the mouth whenever the words “underground base,” “cattle mutilations,” and “alien abductions” surface. As Greg shows, many of the cornerstones upon which today’s ufological lore are built, had their origins in the fertile minds of military intelligence and the behind-the-scenes spook-brigade. The UFO truth might not be “out there” after all – it may all be one big con behind which a veritable plethora of classified, military projects have been hidden.
Hopefully, Project Beta will open the floodgates that lead to questions being asked at a higher, official level about the Bennewitz affair, and those who manipulated the man to the point of collapse will be made to answer for their actions.
Greg Bishop can be contacted at www.excludedmiddle.com.
Related articles
