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.
Bennewitz IllustrationWhat’s been called “The Bennewitz Affair,” has been written about in many books besides X Descending, including the 2005 book by Greg Bishop, Project Beta, and the 2010 book by Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men, and the focus is on what is believed to have been an AFOSI-sanctioned disinformation operation targeting Bennewitz and UFO researchers with whom he had contact. This seems to have been put into action after Bennewitz contacted security at Kirtland AFB to alert them to what he saw as a security problem. Bennewitz owned and operated a company, Thunder Scientific, that made precision instruments and often worked on military contracts.
There are AFOSI documents that show that AFOSI SA Sgt. Richard Doty was sent to Bennewitz’s house where he saw the images captured by Bennewitz and also saw film and radio surveillance equipment aimed at Kirtland. With him was Jerry Miller, who was chief scientific advisor for the Air Force Test and Evaluation Center at Kirtland and a former Project Blue Book investigator. A meeting was arranged at the base and Bennewitz presented what he felt was evidence of an alien invasion of Kirtland before a gathering that included a brigadier general and the director of the Air Force Weapons Lab.
The story of what happened after this comes mainly from the testimony of Doty and William Moore, co-author with Charles Berlitz of the 1980 book, The Roswell Incident. Moore was on the board of directors of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, of which Bennewitz was a member. According to Doty and Moore, Doty recruited Moore to help neutralize Bennewitz by feeding him disinformation that would convince him that his increasingly paranoid fantasies of an alien invasion were real. In exchange, Moore was promised inside information on what the government knew about UFOs. Bennewitz ended up in a mental facility, no doubt due in part to his contact with Doty, although he seems to have been rather unbalanced before that.
Bennewitz-Stanford:MyraboX Descending is unique in that a great deal of it is devoted to examining images captured by Bennewitz, speculating on what kind of technology could be behind them, and whether that technology existed on Earth at that time. Lambright presents actual images from the films of amber, dome-shaped lights that could be objects with white, blue-tinged bottoms that, according to him, Bennewitz called “power rings.” Lambright describes “vehicles” seeming to be in different power states, indicated by the intensity of the light.
According to Lambright, on what might have been the first or second night of the sightings, Bennewitz saw four pulsating lights on or near the ground, “one of them considerably larger than the others.” After several hours, there was a flash underneath them, they all became brilliantly lit, and shot up into the air up to about 300-400 feet. After hovering for a moment, they darted to the south and disappeared around the other side of the mountains. The light prior to take-off (said to have been observed repeatedly in “the nights to come”) is described as being so bright that Bennewitz expected to hear something like an explosion, but instead there was only silence. According to Lambright, Bennewitz saw “vehicles” on other nights, as did his wife.
Lambright describes his interest in Bennewitz’s experiences as “meshing” with his interest in the 1964 Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, which he was investigating in the early 80s in his efforts to make “illustrations of the some of the best UFO sightings on record.” One of the first private investigators to arrive on the scene in 1964 was Ray Stanford, who wrote a book about the incident, A Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry, published in 1976, which is recommended by Lambright. According to Lambright, he was impressed by Stanford’s thoughtfulness and attention to detail and made a point of remembering his name in case he “ever ran across him.”
According to Lambright, he ended up meeting Stanford at a UFO convention in 1984, and this led to Lambright finding himself in Stanford’s living room in Austin, Texas, in 1986 after accepting Stanford’s invitation to visit him there. Lambright tells the reader he was shown a film by Stanford, taken months before. That film has since become legendary, primarily due to the fact that Stanford has shown it only to a select few and has yet to release it to the public.
Lambright describes seeing a disk that was captured on the film that was oriented vertically and travelled horizontally, the opposite of how a disk is usually described travelling in a Frisbee-like fashion. He says he saw a pulsing beam projecting in front of it with a “subtle pattern” that fanned out ahead of the disk. Lambright says his thought was that the beam was creating a “vacuum corridor.” He says the disk was one of four on film out of the eight Stanford reportedly saw.
After this, Lambright describes his quest to determine whether the technology seemingly demonstrated in the film could have existed on Earth. It wasn’t until 1995 that he came across a paper by a professor and two graduate students from the Rensselar Polytechnic Institute, that he saw a technology breakthrough that resembled what was on Stanford’s film. He says he called Stanford to describe it and as he paused in an effort to properly pronounce the professor’s name, Stanford said, “Oh, that must be Leik Myrabo from RPI. He was at my house a few years ago and spent three days looking at my films!”
Lambright includes an image he created based on Stanford’s film along with an image he created of Myrabo’s concept, and they are quite similar. Lambright conjectures from this that the technology seen in Stanford’s film wasn’t developed on Earth and he includes a letter to Myrabo addressing this. He says Myrabo expressed an interest in discussing the matter and that arrangements were made for Stanford to present his film before the International Society for Beamed Energy Propulsion, but “the possibility quickly evaporated” due to the plan to have Stanford’s film run automatically “during breaks and with no commentary at all!” which caused Stanford to refuse to participate.
While it is hoped that Stanford will one day release his film, the images caught by Bennewitz are intriguing and Lambright’s book remains out there to remind us that these were the beginning of the “Bennewitz Affair.” An interesting aspect of the case is that it is one of many where incursions of UFOs have been reported around nuclear weapons facilities. This is touched on by Lambright when he mentions that Brigadier General William Brooksher, who was in attendance during Bennewitz’s presentation at Kirtland, had been commander at Malmstrom during a UFO incursion over a Minuteman missile silo there just five years earlier in 1975.
Thanks to Christian Lambright for his permission to use the photos and illustrations from X Descending.
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