By Charles Lear
If one was to pick a point when UFOlogy went off the rails, October 14, 1988, is one to consider. That was the date that a television show, UFO Cover-Up? Live!, aired on 130 syndicated channels throughout the United States. It was a flop, but an examination of the people who were involved in the production provides insight into how it came to be that a few dubious individuals left us with what have been convincingly argued are bogus stories and documents that support the idea that the GOVERNMENT has recovered crashed alien spaceships and bodies. A lasting belief is that this came about as the result of an organized GOVERNMENT disinformation program targeting the UFO community. A question this writer is examining is whether or not this too is bogus.
This is a complicated story that starts with self-proclaimed disinformation agent Richard Doty. Doty’s Air Force service records show that he worked his way up from being a gate guard at Wiesbaden Air Base in Germany in 1973, to being a detective with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1979. During his time with AFOSI, he became involved with William Moore, who had just come into prominence with a 1980 book, The Roswell Incident, co-authored with Charles Berlitz. According to both Doty and Moore, Doty made an arrangement with Moore to provide him with information that the GOVERNMENT had on UFOs and extraterrestrials in exchange for Moore’s cooperation in monitoring private UFO investigators and disseminating disinformation.
This arrangement is reported to have been partly responsible for the mental collapse of investigator Paul Bennewitz. Greg Bishop, a friend of Moore’s, wrote a 2005 book, Project Beta, which presents what he could put together of this story. According to Bishop, Bennewitz had his own company, Thunder Scientific, and worked on military contracts. He believed he had seen and filmed UFOs over the Manzano weapons storage facility, which he could see from his second-story deck. He was skilled in electronics and set up an array of signal detection devices and became convinced that he was receiving alien transmissions. He approached officials at Kirtland, which has offices housing a wide variety of intelligence agencies including the CIA and NSA, and he made a presentation of his findings. Naturally, they became concerned, given that Bennewitz had signal detection equipment aimed at a secure facility and was, most likely, recording classified transmissions.
According to Doty, he was tasked with diverting Bennewitz’s attention away from Kirtland, and he convinced Bennewitz that there was something to Bennewitz’s belief that there was an underground alien base in Dulce, New Mexico, and went so far as to plant props in the area that would support this and then fly him over the area pointing them out.
In addition to this, Moore and Doty visited Bennewitz at his home to review his findings. Bishop, in his book, described the interactions of Doty and Moore with Bennewitz. According to Bishop, Bennewitz built his own computers and wrote his own software for them to fit his needs. He was interested in decoding what he believed were alien messages and wrote a program he believed could do that. Bishop tells the reader, “He later wrote that he had ‘established direct contact with the Alien using a computer and a form of Hex Decimal Code with Graphics and printout.”
There is another story, the sole source of which Bishop writes was Moore, that J. Allen Hynek confessed to Moore during a 1982 Mutual UFO Network convention that he had given Bennewitz a computer with the same sort of program at the behest of the Air Force. A look into Hynek’s life and efforts should shed light on the credibility of Moore’s claim, and also, on the credibility of Moore.
Other books have been written covering this story and one of them, Mirage Men, written by Mark Pilkington and published in 2010, was made into a documentary with the same title and released in 2013. In these works, as in Bishop’s, the story is told that Moore and Doty encouraged Bennewitz’s beliefs while discussing his findings with him, and he eventually became extremely paranoid.
Bennewitz believed there was an alien invasion underway and wrote a report he called Project Beta. Bishop published the report as an appendix in his book, and states that it was previously only available on the internet in the form of “incomplete or severely edited copies.” According to him, Bennewitz “sent copies to Senators Domenici and Schmitt, President Reagan, APRO, and other researchers.” Among the things described in the document are these: alien communications, an “alien base” in Dulce, plans for an alien takeover using mind control through implants, cattle mutilations by the aliens for the purposes of feeding “humanoids” and alien-human gene splicing, and how “the Alien” can be fought using a beam weapon that had been “funded and constructed by my company.”
According to Bishop, Gary Massey, a friend of Bennewitz, described this: “Bennewitz had finally barricaded himself in the house and had piled sandbags all around the windows.” Bishop tells the reader that, in 1988, Bennewitz’s family took him to Anna Kaseman Mental Health Facility “and checked him in for nervous exhaustion.”
The two main sources for the story are Moore and Doty. Moore told his version to Bishop, and Doty told his version to both Bishop and Pilkington. Moore and Doty also became involved in the MJ-12 story, which involved a suspected group of GOVERNMENT insiders who knew the truth about crashed and recovered UFOs and alien bodies, and who prepared briefings for every U.S. president from Truman to Reagan. A story also came out that Doty was part of another group of insiders who used the names of birds as codenames and that group became known as “The Aviary.” This group supposedly included some who promoted public disclosure of what it was that the GOVERNMENT knew about UFOs. If true, there seems to have been a struggle between efforts at disclosure and efforts to dis-inform.
If one takes this tale at face value, it’s complicated and convoluted. If one applies the principle of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, which is the idea that when there are competing theories regarding a particular question, the simplest one is to be preferred. The simplest explanation for the actions of Doty and Moore and how they led to the fantastic stories promoted by them and others on UFO Cover-Up? Live!, seems to be that Doty was a serial liar who puffed himself up as a covert CIA trained disinformation agent in the eyes of the UFO community, and that Moore was driven by a combination of belief and avarice. Next week we’ll look at the evidence to support this.