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In the early 1970s, ranchers across numerous states began to report their concern over a rash of cattle deaths that they believed to be unusual. This wave of mutilation, as it has been called, to use a phrase immortalized in song by the Pixies more than a decade later, came to develop specific indicators. These were not typical cattle deaths due to illness or predation. The cows were often said to have been the most healthy specimens of a herd, found dead overnight, their carcasses drained of blood, soft tissue organs like ears, eyes, udders, genitals and anuses cored from their bodies, with incisions uniformly described as surgically precise, and little sign of the typical scavenging these seasoned ranchers would typically expect to occur. Many believed these mutilations were the work of cultists, sneaking onto their properties at night to make ritual sacrifices and collect blood for their Luciferian ceremonies. Stirrings of the Satanic Panic had already begun to grip the country, and these ranchers had taken to patrolling their properties in armed posses. Blame soon shifted, however, when it was noted that no tracks, from animals, shoes, or tires, tended to ever be present around mutilation sites, and when sightings of strange lights in the sky, sometimes specifically identified as helicopters but described as eerily quiet, began to be associated with mutilation waves. Rather than witches and devil worshipers, the ranchers and local law enforcement investigating the mutilations began to whisper about aliens, or clandestine government experiments. With ranchers now arming themselves against the government and UFOs, and in some cases firing potshots at aircraft that flew over their properties, the story broke across the country through the Associated Press newswire and in pieces printed in major national magazines like Newsweek. No longer able to dismiss the phenomenon, and seeing in it something of the mass hysteria the Robertson Panel had predicted back in the 50s, more than one major investigation was conducted, by various state authorities, Fish and Wildlife, the ATF, and the FBI. These relied on expert analysis by academics of carcasses in necropsies performed at institutes of higher learning, and the consensus emerged that these cattle mutilations were indeed natural and explainable. These animals had died from any number of reasons, such as disease or animal attack, and only appeared to be drained of blood because blood had settled in their carcasses, or pooled on the ground and been consumed by scavengers and insects, as well as dried by the sun. The cored soft organs had been the work of blowflies and vultures, which pecked at the softest parts in order to get at the interior of a carcass. And what appeared to be surgical cuts were simply the splitting that occurs when carcasses stretch as they bloat. But some other investigators believed these official investigations were not examining true cases of cattle mutilation, which they said tended to cease whenever a large-scale investigation began. The findings of private investigations, on the other hand, still tend not to indicate E.T. but rather earthly culprits. Earlier state-level investigations claimed to have found evidence of the cattle having been tranquilized and treated with anti-coagulants. One newspaper reported that a Colorado sheriff had discovered a military style bag containing a scalpel, surgical gloves, and a bull’s penis at one mutilation scene. A New Mexico highway patrolman and a retired scientist claimed to have identified markings on cattle that could only be seen under ultra-violet lights, as well as rope marks and broken bones, indicating they had been marked and airlifted somewhere for experimentation before being dropped back onto their range—using decidedly human technology. One theory that has since been put forth is that these cattle were being covertly studied to determine the spread of radiation from local nuclear test sites, a theory that recalls the Villas Boas incident shared in the last installment, with silent helicopters posing as UFOs and abducting test subjects—remember Villas Boas’s vomiting and lesions, which sound an awful lot like radiation poisoning. Another theory developed by biochemist and paranormal researcher Colm Kelleher suggests that the mutilations may have represented a secret effort to discover how far the unusual pathogens that cause Mad Cow disease might have spread through the country’s beef supply. But still, when one hears cattle mutilation, one tends to think aliens, and perhaps that’s by design. One of the most well-known investigators into the topic is journalist Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary on the subject, A Strange Harvest, won her a regional Emmy. She has since made a career out of insisting that extra-terrestrials are behind not just the cattle mutilation phenomenon, but crop circles, and of course, UFO sightings and abduction claims. Howe’s success earned her a deal with HBO for a UFO documentary, and it also brought her the attention of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. An agent of the AFOSI, Richard Doty, invited her to Kirtland Air Force Base, where he confirmed that, indeed, aliens do exist and that the U.S. government had been in contact with them. He showed her official looking documents that outlined mankind’s contact with aliens at Roswell, the existence of a living extra-terrestrial survivor of the crash there, and the mind-bending revelation that these aliens had genetically engineered humanity and sent spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ to guide us in our evolution. Doty promised her footage of UFO crashes and landings, of aliens both deceased and living, and he suggested he might be able to arrange a meeting between Howe and this extra-terrestrial guest of the government. However, as the government seems to have done in the past to other filmmakers—as detailed in my recent patron exclusive—they never made good on their promises, and HBO canceled Howe’s project. Richard Doty denies that this meeting ever occurred, but if you know anything about Richard Doty, you know not to believe much of what he says. He certainly was an agent of the AFOSI, though, and we know that, at the Air Force’s behest, he had shared the very same falsified documents described by Howe with other UFOlogists, encouraging them to believe the same outlandish and fanciful tales, even if it broke their grip on reality.

Linda Moulton Howe documenting the cattle mutilation phenomenon. Photo by Mark O’Kane. Accessed via IMDb. Image may be subject to copyright.

In Part One of this series, I spoke about the Roswell incident, and how it did not become a mythical episode in UFO lore until far later. There was some flap about the original Army Air Force intelligence office’s press release stating they had recovered a “flying disk.” It was, after all, the height of the Summer of Saucers, but the retraction that followed hot on the heels of this press release, which included photos of the less-than-impressive debris and identified it as a weather balloon really did settle the matter for more than thirty years. It wasn’t until 1979, when a high school teacher named William Moore made it into the myth it is today. Bill Moore taught French and Russian for more than a decade in Pennsylvania before moving to Minnesota to teach English at a Twin Cities high school. In his spare time, he pursued writing, with a special interest in UFOs. Some initial investigative pieces for the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) led to Moore’s co-authoring of The Philadelphia Experiment in 1978, a poorly supported account of the supposed disappearance of a U.S. Navy destroyer escort. Moore’s book relied entirely on rumor rather than direct eyewitness reports, and came to the dubious conclusion that the ship’s disappearance was the result of experimentation with a top secret cloaking technology, but despite its faults, it earned him a reputation as a spinner of credible-seeming paranormal accounts. Thereafter, while on the book promotion circuit, he met Stanton Friedman, a former nuclear physicist turned professional UFOlogist who over the course of his long career would be both praised for his scientific approach to the investigation of UFOs and criticized for his credulity and his fallacious arguments from ignorance. Moore and Friedman forged the Roswell myth together, and Bill Moore’s reputation as an investigator in the UFOlogist community was established. During his promotional tour for his second book, The Roswell Incident, Moore received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a government intelligence agent who had chosen Moore to receive classified UFO information and disseminate it to the public. Moore would take the bait, meeting with none other than AFOSI agent Rick Doty in Albuquerque, NM. Throughout the 1980s, Doty would offer astounding revelations to Moore and his associates, including earth-shattering evidence in the form of top secret memos, much as he did with Linda Moulton Howe during the same period. While Doty asked Howe only that she include these materials in her film, though, he had a further stipulation for Moore. In order to get his glimpse behind the curtain, Moore would be asked to spy on the investigations of fellow UFOlogists, and even to feed them false information. Moore accepted the arrangement, and during the following years, he collected supposedly genuine evidence of alien contact and government cover-up from Doty while leading his first target, one Paul Bennewitz, down a rabbit hole of disinformation and madness. In the end, when his efforts did real psychological harm to Bennewitz, and the documents Doty had been feeding him began to be uncovered as fakes, Moore came clean in a dramatic keynote speech at the Mutual UFO Network conference in Las Vegas in 1989, confessing to his disinformation activities. “I would play the disinformation game,” he said, despite the interruptions of boos and hisses from the audience, “get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do, and all the while continuing to burrow my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why.” This would be the end of Bill Moore’s UFOlogy career, as his declaration, rather than being seen as an important revelation of the government’s campaign of disinformation against UFOlogists, was instead taken as confession of his betrayal, making him a pariah. Still, for years afterward, Bill Moore would attempt to justify his cooperation with the AFOSI’s disinformation efforts.

The eventual target of Rick Doty’s and Bill Moore’s disinformation campaign, Paul Bennewitz, should not be dismissed as a mere nutcase. In 1969, while pursuing his PhD in Physics, he started a successful tech company in New Mexico, Thunder Scientific, manufacturing instruments for gauging humidity and temperature for the Air Force and NASA. So frequent was his business with the military that he settled down and established his lab right near the borders of Kirtland Air Force Base. As a pilot with a history of service in the Coast Guard, Bennewitz admired the servicemen and officials he dealt with at Kirtland. He was a happy family man, interested mostly in playing his guitar and reading Western novels whenever he found any spare time. But he also had long been interested in UFOs. He was a member of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, or APRO, and sometimes consulted for them as a scientific expert. In 1979, this interest would begin to consume him. That April, a former astronaut turned Senator Harrison Schmitt held a news conference in Albuquerque about a spate of cattle mutilations across New Mexico. In the audience was Paul Bennewitz, who became convinced cattle mutilations were the work of extra-terrestrials and made the acquaintance of some of the phenomenon’s principal investigators. Also present were numerous representatives of interested government groups, like the FBI, and also the AFOSI. In retrospect, this may have been the first time that Bennewitz showed up on their radar, so to speak. Later that year, when Bennewitz was out watching the stars on the second-story deck of his rather posh home, he noticed what appeared to be lights of various colors hovering and swooping around the Manzano mountains within Kirtland Air Force Base. Throughout the rest of the year, Bennewitz went onto his deck nightly, setting up a surveillance platform with telephoto cameras aimed at the military installation in an effort to capture this aerial activity on film. In his mind, he was not spying on secret Air Force activity. These lights appeared to travel great distances almost instantaneously, and he was convinced that they were extra-terrestrial craft. As his investigation developed over the next year, he began aiming other instruments at the base and started detecting electro-magnetic pulses that he believed were signals emitted by the UFOs he was filming. Since in this area was the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, the nation’s largest underground stockpile of nuclear weapons components at the time, Bennewitz felt that he might have uncovered an alien campaign to spy on or even attack a strategic military site, and he had every intention of sharing his evidence with the Air Force.

Paul Bennewitz. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

As his investigation went on, however, he began to show signs of credulity and paranoia that may have served as a warning sign to those who would afterward manipulate and deceive him, suggesting that perhaps his mental stability was not strong enough to withstand the psychological operation that would eventually be conducted on him. In mid-1980, while he was still collecting evidence on the aliens over Manzano from this deck, one of his contacts in the cattle mutilation investigation referred to him a woman named Myrna Hansen, who claimed to have had a close encounter of the fourth kind, otherwise known as an abduction experience. Bennewitz welcomed Hansen and her son into his home, but dissatisfied with her recollection of the event, he called in psychologist and alien contactee researcher Leo Sprinkle to perform a hypnotic regression. The reputation of Sprinkle himself and the problems inherent in the entire practice of hypnotic memory recovery need not be explored in depth here for me to make the point that the man and the memories he supposedly recovered from his patients’ unconscious minds are extremely suspect. In this case, Hansen “recovered” memory of being taken to an underground alien base where she saw human body parts in vats and where she was implanted with a device that would allow the aliens to monitor her thoughts. While Sprinkle probably contributed to the development of this delusion during his hypnosis sessions, even he was disconcerted by Paul Bennewitz’s mental state later that summer, on his second visit to hypnotically regress Hansen. He found Bennewitz toting a gun, agitated by the idea that aliens were monitoring his home and might attack at any moment. Needless to say, it sounds very much like Bennewitz was already descending into mental illness, as though the presence of Myrna Hansen in his home had driven him over the edge into a shared delusional disorder, or folie à deux. That October, 1980, he finally informed Kirtland head of security about his investigation and its supposed findings, prompting the AFOSI to dispatch Rick Doty to his home to interview him. Thereafter, and somewhat curiously considering the nature of his claims, Bennewitz was granted an audience with the heads of every department at Kirtland AFB, to whom he detailed his evidence and his theory. One would think that everyone at this briefing recognized his instability as well as his eagerness to please the U.S. government. It seems officials at Kirtland might have quite handily put an end to the affair simply by discouraging Bennewitz’s surveillance of the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, telling him he was filming classified activities, and suggesting he seek psychiatric help. But instead, Air Force intelligence stationed at Kirtland, and perhaps National Security Agency personnel as well, encouraged him to continue his investigations and continue reporting back to them. It appears the NSA believed Bennewitz had somehow picked up new experimental signals they had been testing in the area and wanted to learn more about how he had managed to do it. As for the interest of the AFOSI, perhaps they believed that he had captured footage of experimental aircraft in filming the moving lights around the base, or perhaps they simply saw in poor Paul Bennewitz an opportunity to launch a broad disinformation campaign, not just against the unstable physicist himself, but against the broader UFOlogical community.

By the time Bennewitz gave his briefing at Kirtland, AFOSI Special Agent Rick Doty, who had been stationed at Kirtland for a year, had already begun an ambitious disinformation campaign. Earlier that summer, he met with Bill Moore. The first piece of documentary evidence given to Moore, not by Doty but by Moore’s anonymous contact, known only as Falcon, had been a document detailing a “Project Silver Sky,” which mentioned the recovery of a UFO. Further investigation had revealed this to be a forgery, and at Moore’s first meeting with Doty in Albuquerque, he confronted his AFOSI contacts about the deception. Stupidly enough, Doty assured him that had only been a test, which Moore had passed. This was when Moore struck his Faustian bargain, agreeing to inform on and feed false information to his fellow UFOlogists in exchange for the real intel on UFOs. In November, just 7 days after Bennewit’z fateful presentation, Moore too was summoned to Kirtland, shown a document marked “Secret” with analysis of Bennewitz’s footage and mention of a “Project Aquarius.” Moore was subsequently tasked with befriending Bennewitz, which with Bill Moore’s UFOlogist clout was a simple task, and early the next year, Doty gave Moore a document similar to the one he had seen months before, instructing him to show it to Bennewitz. There had been, however, some curious additions to the document. It now mentioned an organization or group called “MJ Twelve” that received exclusive access to the results of Project Aquarius. These documents encouraged Bennewitz to fall ever further down his rabbit hole, as they indicated that the Air Force, NASA, and even higher, more secretive authorities were very interested in his findings and took them very seriously. Therefore, Bennewitz went public, informing UFO organizations and UFOlogists of his investigation’s conclusions, and thereby playing right into his manipulators’ plans and spreading misinformation throughout all of UFOlogy generally. But Bennewitz was only one prong of this operation. The other, Bill Moore, proved to be far more discerning and mistrustful, for obvious reasons. Yet he too proved to be a handy tool for the dissemination of the UFO myth in the long run.

Author Bill Moore. Accessed through UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

Bill Moore first learned about Project Aquarius and the shadowy organization known as MJ-12, later to be revealed as Majestic 12, from the documents that Rick Doty had shown him. The mythos developed by these documents became the subject for a fiction book that Moore had worked on for a number of years. Essentially, Aquarius was thought to be the real UFO program, buried under layers of secrecy so that it could deal with genuine alien contact, unlike the sham public-facing program Blue Book, and the Majestic 12 were the high-level panel of powerful individuals who oversaw the project. This story certainly made for compelling fiction, and in it we see many of the crazier beliefs still cherished by the UFO fringe: UFO crashes at Roswell and Aztec were real, the government had recovered alien corpses but also a living Extra-terrestrial Biological Entity or EBE, with whom we had communicated and learned a great deal. There were three ET species visiting earth, one benevolent, one bent on exploiting our resources, and a third, the greys, who were responsible for mutilating cattle and abducting people as part of a program for the harvesting of genetic material. Mankind’s presence on Earth was a result of such genetic manipulation, and human history had been guided by one or more of these alien species through figures such as Christ, Muhammad, and even Hitler. This is the same mythos, using the same official looking documents, that Doty would present to Linda Moulton-Howe. Indeed, it may be that Doty was encouraging Moore to publish a book with these claims as non-fiction. Moore certainly must have known better than to believe the contents of the Aquarius documents, which Doty openly admitted were disinformation, but Moore reportedly had wanted to present the material as non-fiction before his writing partner insisted it would have to be fictionalized since they had no evidence of the outrageous claims. Thereafter, though, Moore served as the conduit for the dissemination of documents that seemingly confirmed Majestic 12’s existence. I have spoken about this before, in my episode The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12. These documents were slipped through the door of Bill Moore’s TV producer, and afterward, corroborating evidence for the documents was turned up by Moore in the National Archives. The papers have since been roundly debunked as forgeries, based on factual errors in their content, typeface inconsistencies, and indications that the corroborative memo, which lacked an archival register number, may have simply been planted in the National Archives by Moore or someone else. Whether or not Moore was an active participant in every level of this hoax in his role as an AFOSI stooge is difficult to determine. He may have disbelieved most of the contents of the mythos established by the Aquarius documents, and yet believed that some element of truth may have been present in them. Thus, when the Majestic 12 documents appeared, still believing that he would be given the genuine documents promised him, he may have been played for a fool by Doty. Whatever the case, the fact that the MJ-12 hoax as well as most major elements of modern UFO mythology can be traced back to one Air Force intelligence agent tasked with feeding false info to the public should be enough to make a staunch skeptic of any true believer.

To Paul Bennewitz, already teetering on the edge of a paranoid mental break, the slow disclosure of the Aquarius mythos served to reinforce his most nightmarish delusions. They confirmed his assumptions about the malevolent nature of the aliens whom he believed had abducted and tagged his friend Myrna Hansen. These were the same aliens he had been filming from his deck, whose EM pulse transmissions he believed he had been decoding. When they saw their disinformation driving him toward a mental break, Doty and the AFOSI, as well as perhaps the NSA, which had apparently taken an interest in the program he had devised to decipher the signals he was picking up, kicked their PsyOp into high gear, sending him a new computer, reportedly delivered by former Blue Book consulting scientist turned UFOlogist darling J. Allen Hynek, convincing him that the program in this new computer would aid in his decoding of the alien signals. In fact, his torturers had set up in a vacant house across the street to beam signals right into his reception arrays, and suddenly the transmissions of the ETs were crystal clear, confirming all his fears with statements like, “Our race is dying on the home planet,” “women of Earth are needed,” and “military of US delivered embryos.” Bennewitz was in such a state that he doesn’t even seem to have suspected that this mysterious new computer dropped off at his house might be feeding him lies, nor does he seem to have questioned the nature of these decoded messages. He does not seem to have wondered why these aliens would be broadcasting their plans and motives into the aether like some monologuing villain in a bad movie. Instead, he focused on figuring out where their base was, and based on UFO sightings and cattle mutilation activity, he came to the conclusion that the underground base Hansen had described in her hypnotic regressions was beneath Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico, a few hours north of Albuquerque.

Whether his AFOSI handlers led Bennewitz to focus on Archuleta Mesa, wanting his attention turned away from the activities around the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, is uncertain, but Rick Doty has admitted to encouraging his belief in what would come to be known as Dulce Base. The Air Force actually began hauling old equipment out to Archuleta Mesa—derelict vehicles and structures, and even standing vents connected to nothing that made it appear as if some complex had been built into the mountain. Kirtland dispatched Special Forces to stand around like they were guarding something, and the local Army base was incentivized to use the mountain for their training exercises. These military forces cleared brush for helicopter landings, and even set up powerful lights to sweep across the clouds, simulating the strange lights Bennewitz filmed over Manzano. All this, according to Doty, to encourage Bennewitz, who had taken to piloting his own plane over Archuleta Mesa searching for evidence of his theory. It seems a big expenditure of money and manpower just to encourage a nosy UFO theorist, and unsurprisingly, it worked. By the late 1980s, when both Moore and Doty claim their PsyOp against Bennewitz had ceased, Bennewitz spiraled. He couldn’t sleep, believing aliens were creeping into his bedroom and drugging him. He described waking in his car in the middle of nowhere with no memory of how he had gotten there. Eventually, he began accusing his own wife of being under alien control, and after barricading himself into his house, his family finally had him committed. Both Moore and Doty have told interviewers that they considered Bennewitz a friend and had tried to caution him against pursuing his obsessions any further, seeing how it was affecting his mental health, but this sounds an awful lot like someone trying to save face. The fact is that Bill Moore and Rick Doty and whatever other AFOSI officials were involved, as well as any NSA agents who according to Doty had mounted their own PsyOp against him, were all directly responsible for destroying Paul Bennewitz’s life.

AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

It remains unclear whether the NSA really was involved in the operation against Bennewitz. This may have been another obfuscation from Rick Doty. Some have cast doubt on whether Doty even worked for the AFOSI, but his service records are clear: he joined the Air Force in 1968, basic training in Texas at Lackland AFB, then service as security at Sheppard AFB before shipping out to Vietnam. After the war, Doty ended up at McChord air base in Washington state, followed by a stint in West Germany, and then back to the states, to Ellsworth base in South Dakota, during which time a hoax report about a UFO encounter at this base was sent to the National Enquirer, prompting some to suspect Doty got into the AFOSI disinformation game around this time. Then in 1979, at the height of the cattle mutilation wave in the area, Doty was stationed at Kirtland in New Mexico. Any doubt about Doty’s agency affiliation, raised by some who suggest Doty may have been an independent meddler or the agent of some other, unknown group, should have been laid to rest by the 2013 release of AFOSI documents under the Freedom of Information Act that clearly confirm Doty’s role as special agent in charge of investigating Paul Bennewitz. The questions that remain all boil down to one question. Why? The simplest explanation seems to be that Bennewitz had been monitoring classified activities at Kirtland. Certainly we know that the electromagnetic pulses he was detecting came from the nearby Sandia National Laboratories, where they were generating EMPs such as occur in nuclear explosions in order to test how effectively their radiation hardening processes had protected electronic systems in aircraft. As for the strange lights in the sky over Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, FOIA documents indicate that numerous UFO sightings over Kirtland may have been attributable to helicopter activity. Indeed, the cattle mutilation incidents in the area were also sometimes accompanies by reports of silent helicopters. One might think back to Bosco Nedelcovic’s claims about Operation Mirage, in which helicopters were specially equipped with strange lights in order to appear as UFOs, and how his claims accorded well with the account of abductee Villas Boas. The silent chopper has long been a fixture of government conspiracy theory, and as such is dismissed by some as nonsense, but the fact is that the Pentagon began developing stealth helicopters with noise reduction technology back in the late 1960s, and rotor acoustics research has developed steadily ever since. We now know that a quiet helicopter has been flying since as early as 1972. The Hughes500P, which used contra-rotating coaxial rotors as well as an exhaust muffler, was able to reduce noise substantially. And as recently as last year, Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs announced research into electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft, utilizing the kind of technology commonly seen in commercial drones to develop silent and absolutely maneuverable aircraft. If the Army is openly publishing press releases about this research, and the technology itself has been so widely available that civilian hobbyists have been using it for years, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to believe the U.S. government has been using it in secret for far longer.

However, Paul Bennewitz and many other UFO eyewitnesses claim that the lights they have seen in the skies display speed and maneuverability unlike anything a helicopter could possibly match. What other kind of aircraft might the Air Force and the CIA want to obscure with tales of flying saucers? The rather obvious answer would be spy planes, of course. It has been estimated by historians of the CIA like Gerald Haines that most UFO sightings as far back as the 1950s were actually sightings of Top Secret spy planes out on maneuvers, aircraft such as the U-2, the A-12 Oxcart, an the SR-71 Blackbird. And speaking of flying saucers, the government was flying some of those at different points as well! Since before the modern UFO phenomenon erupted in 1947, disc-shaped or “circular wing” aircraft have been developed numerous times. The first, the XF5U-1, warmly referred to as the “Flying Flapjack,” was developed by the US Navy for its short-takeoff-and-landing capabilities. Rumors persist of a more advanced model of the Flying Flapjack, called the Skimmer, which was said to have hovering capabilities, but if the Navy did achieve this technology, they kept it well under wraps. In 1953, the Toronto Star reported that Canadian Aircraft Manufacturer Avro Canada was developing a flying saucer aircraft capable of reaching speeds of 1,500 miles per hour and vertical takeoff and landing, which meant hovering capability. This was indeed a real undertaking, Project Y, the Avro Ace. History tells us the project never got off the ground, so to speak, as the Canadian government didn’t have the budget it would require, but the US Air Force stepped in with all the money the developer would need, resulting in Project Y2, proposing 2 saucer craft, the Silverbug and the Ladybird, interceptors capable of reaching Mach 3.5. These designs further developed into the Avro MX-1794 turbojet flying disc, which underwent wind-tunnel testing at Wright-Patterson and then promptly disappeared after Avro announced a forthcoming prototype in 1957. Of course, it is tempting to believe that this craft went Top Secret once it proved functional, but the fact is that Avro afterward developed a disc-shaped hovercar, the VZ-9AV or Avrocar, for the Army, which turned out to be a rather shaky and unbalanced disappointment. So perhaps all of Avro’s flying saucers were likewise failures, explaining why no one heard much more about them since the early stages of their development. This seems to be a pattern with disc-shaped craft, such as the Convair Lenticular Defense Missile, codenamed the Pye Wacket, which was a radio-controlled missile in the shape of a disc about 5 feet across, that if it hadn’t been officially canceled after wind-tunnel testing was hoped to be capable of achieving Mach 7. Of course, rumors persist about these flying disc programs going dark, funded by black money, and being further tested at the highest security testing grounds like White Sands. Given what we know about the secrecy surrounding the development of other spy planes and even more recently with stealth airstrike drones, it does seem far more rational, if equally speculative, to believe that most UFO eyewitnesses, when they weren’t mistaking natural phenomena for an aircraft, were actually seeing experimental aircraft like these. Perhaps even the strange TicTacs, Gimbals, and Spheres seen in the latest UAP videos may actually represent the next generation of stealth aircraft or drone technology, projects that the US government would prefer the public believe are alien spacecraft in order to preserve for some further years the secrecy of a game changing technology.

Army Avrocars depicted as "flying jeeps" in company literature. Public Domain image.

When one considers the Bennewitz affair in its entirety, one begins to realize that it could not possibly have been about just discrediting Paul Bennewitz. There would have been no need to discredit him, since he came first to the Kirtland head of security and confided everything Only after the AFOSI encouraged his delusions for years did he go public with his evidence and theories. If the AFOSI or the NSA or whoever had wanted to silence him, they could have warned him, or they could have arrested him and seized everything he had collected and all his equipment under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Communications Act of 1934. Instead, they fed him a myth, and it seems clear they hoped he would spread that myth to the larger UFOlogical community, which he eventually did. Bill Moore, too, served this end, as he was instrumental in the dissemination of the Majestic 12 papers and the larger myth of alien contact and government coverup that developed from them. It is all too easy to dismiss UFO sightings with as little evidence as the UFO witnesses themselves present, as we have seen, and likewise, it is a simple matter to suggest that there are no silent choppers or unknown experimental aircraft in the skies being kept secret by our government. It’s even an easy matter to argue that the PsyOp against Paul Bennewitz never took place. Bill Moore is a liar, you might say, and perhaps he anticipated some other result from his confession rather than the ruin of his reputation with his audience and therefore the self-destruction his writing career. Rick Doty too is a liar, even according to his own version of events, which changes from telling to retelling. If documents prove he worked for the AFOSI, they do not prove that he took point in this psychologic operation against Bennewitz, and the Air Force, of course, denies any knowledge of such disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, we know that, even after his retirement, Doty appears to be up to his same old tricks. In 2005, an anonymous source calling himself “Request Anonymous” revealed to UFOlogists via email a UFO myth much like the one Doty is said to have previously passed off on Linda Moulton Howe, Bill Moore, and Paul Bennewitz. After a saucer crash in New Mexico in ’47, an EBE survivor commenced communication between aliens and the US government. In this story, 12 US astronauts left on a spacecraft in 1965, bound for the alien world of Serpo in Zeta Reticuli, much like the iconic ending of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, the physics of the story didn’t add up, and on further investigation into the IP address of “Request Anonymous,” the informant turned out to be none other than Richard Doty, who was active under his own name on the same web forum.

Does his responsibility for the Serpo hoax prove that Doty had always acted alone in his disinformation campaign? Or does it reveal that he never truly retired from the intelligence and disinformation game? Or does it just show that old habits die hard? Doty has since made some money from his involvement in the UFO world through books and interviews. Is he peddling his lies now just to make a buck? We may never know. In the late ‘80s, the FBI conducted an investigation into the doctored MJ-12 documents to determine whether they were indeed the leak of Top Secret documents, and who had leaked them. Curiously, the AFOSI asked the FBI to investigate, but during the course of their investigation, the FBI came to suspect the AFOSI themselves, or at least the local Kirtland office. In the end, though, they could determine only that the documents were bogus, not who was responsible for them. Once again, it is easy to say there is nothing here, that if there was a conspiracy against Bennewitz or the larger UFOlogical community, that it was localized, unofficial. However, I saved the story of the Bennewitz Deception for last because, just like my principal source Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, I wanted to show the context of the entire history of the modern UFO phenomenon and other indications that the government encourages belief in extra-terrestrial visitation because I have come to believe it provides a coherent and rational explanation for the entire mystery. And if we accept this, then a further conclusion can be deduced. If the government really were covering up alien contact, they would not encourage the belief that they were covering up alien contact. If UFOs were not of this world and the government didn’t want the public to know this, wouldn’t they instead encourage the belief that these craft are our own? That’s my reasoning anyway, and I’m sure some will think me an agent of disinformation for encouraging this conclusion.

UFO Disinfo: Part Three - The Bennewitz Deception

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