by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Bennewitz picIn December of 1979, Paul Bennewitz, a man who wrote he had been studying the UFO phenomenon since 1948, was told by his wife that she heard a high-pitched buzzing sound right over their house after being woken up by their small dog who was barking before dawn one morning. Bennewitz had been recently seeing strange lights over Archuleta Mesa in Dulce, New Mexico, and thought to himself (not wanting to alarm his wife) that maybe what he had been observing was now observing him. His house, in the Four Hills neighborhood east of Albuquerque, had a second-floor observation deck with a view of the Manzano Weapons Storage Area at Kirtland AFB to the south. He began watching the skies nightly and managed to capture images over the MWSA of what he was convinced were brightly lit objects with unusual characteristics. This set off a train of events that involved the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, a self-proclaimed CIA-trained disinformation agent, and a well-known author and UFO researcher. What Bennewitz caught on film tends to get lost in the many tellings of this story, but a detailed examination can be found in the 2012 book, X Descending by Christian Lambright, from which the details of above account were taken. Read more
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After the termination of Project Blue Book was announced on December 17, 1969, throughout the early months of 1970, much was made in the press of the fact that the Air Force was no longer in the flying saucer/UFO game. Then, the existence of a physics textbook being used at the Air Force Academy that had an entire
In the midst of the excitement created by the publication in 1980 of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, a set of documents reportedly came into Moore’s possession that seemed to support the story of a flying saucer recovery near Roswell and a secret government body, Majestic 12, that handled such things. These became known to UFO researchers and later, the general public. They consist of eight pages, seven of which are seemingly a briefing document for President Eisenhower, and an additional page, which is a letter dated September 24, 1947, from President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal authorizing the creation of Majestic 12. The subject of the briefing document is “Operation Majestic Twelve,” and the collection of pages is often referred to as “The MJ-12 Documents.” Naturally, UFO researchers considered the possibility that the documents had been forged. Barry Greenwood and Brad Sparks came to the conclusion that they had, as did the FBI, which has made copies available on their
This is the fourth part in a
This is the third part in a
In last week’s
The history of civilian UFO/flying saucer research in Brazil goes back as far as that of the United States. The first organization to be formed there was Civil de Objetos Aéreos Nao Identitificados (Civil Investigation Center for Unidentified Aerial Objects) founded by Húlvio Brant Aleixo in Belo Horizonte in 1954. Aleixo was a professor of psychology at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais and was an active investigator for much of his life. He was one of the people Bob Pratt worked with when he did his investigations for his 1996 book UFO Danger Zone, and according to his
In the April 1971
by Martin Willis
UFOs were big news in 1973. Besides the 
In last week’s
After Project Blue Book was deactivated in 1969, civilians were left with no official government body prepared to deal with UFO reports. This is still the case (the