Because of his business, Paul Bennewitz had friends at Kirtland AFB, among them Col. Ernest Edwards, chief of security at the base’s Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Area. From 1980 on, he would receive attention from a few more folks at Kirtland. And through his connections at the base, he’d also find someone within ufology who would listen to him.


A number of Kirtland personnel met with Bennewitz in 1980. One, Sgt. Richard Doty, gave him a copy of a teletype dated November 17, 1980 which read in part:

The official US Government policy and results of Project Aquarius is [sic] still classified TOP SECRET with no dissemination outside channels and with access restricted to MJ-TWELVE.

So, almost four years to the day before Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera received their first batch of documents in the mail, and seven years before these papers had become known to most ufologists at 24th Annual UFO Conference in San Francisco, Sgt. Doty had in his possession a teletype mentioning the alleged secret cabal of government insiders known to lore as Majestic Twelve. Moore, in fact, helped Bennewitz develop his research activities and theories, which were rapidly expanding beyond the twilight zone.

Now, it’s one thing to feed someone a steady diet of tall tales. It’s quite another to do so in a way that jeopardizes the listener’s health. And that seems to have been the case here. For years after his initial report to Kirtland, Bennewitz felt increasingly threatened by shadowy government and alien forces. Moore’s counsel didn't seem to help his despair, which came to a head in 1985 when Bennewitz suffered an emotional breakdown requiring hospitalization. As a result, Bennewitz, for the most part, fell silent on the matter of UFOs and EBEs (save for a few recorded conversations and informal interviews, such as he gave to Brad Smith in 1988 and 1989), and remained so until his death in 2003.

At first glance, we might think of Bennewitz as someone who might have seen, filmed and photographed anomalous activity in New Mexico, misinterpreted this evidence, and subsequently went psycho. Nevertheless, many ufologist and parapolitical writers, among them Greg Bishop, saw this as a case where a researcher named Bennewitz confused “the authority of the messenger with the truth of the message” (as put by Dee Finney—see Anne Strieber link at the bottom of this post). Perhaps both suppositions are true. In either case, he didn’t act alone. He got a lot of help.

The entire Bennewitz affair reached a climax on the night of July 1, 1989, during the Mutual UFO Network’s (MUFON) annual convention in Las Vegas. William Moore, a scheduled speaker, had uncharacteristically kept his presentation under wraps, not sending an abstract/summary to organizers, or hinting at what he would say, and declaring that he would take no questions after his presentation. So it came as a surprise to attendees when he publicly admitted to having served as a conduit of misinformation/disinformation to Bennewitz. Moreover, Moore said that his “…role in the affair…was primarily that of a freelancer providing information on Paul’s current thinking and activities.”

In short, Moore said that he spied on Bennewitz for Sgt. Richard Doty and other military personnel. He said he did this to maintain his confidential intelligence sources in sort of a quid-pro-quo deal. In exchange for extremely sensitive information on government UFO activities (which presumably included MJ-12, Project AQUARIUS and other alleged government programs), he would provide information about Bennewitz. In turn, Moore would also give information to Bennewitz, who must have been eager to receive it from the then head of APRO, an organization that months earlier had given him the bum’s rush. He would receive this intelligence because of the restlessness of a number of spies who chafed under the long-standing policy of non-disclosure, and itched for a way to finally break the story to the public.

Moore’s commentary during this 1989 presentation is quite fascinating, in terms of what might have possibly motivated members of the intelligence community to put forth outlandish stories about extraterrestrial visitation, and what led him to help government officials take down Bennewitz.

In early September, 1980, I was approached by a well-placed individual within the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high-level project dealing with UFOs. This individual told me that he spoke for a small group of similar indiivuals who were uncomfortable with the government's continuing cover-up of the truth and indicated that he and his group would like to help me with my research into the subject in the hope and expectation that I might be able to help them find a way to change the prevailing policy and get the facts to the public without breaking any laws in the process. The man who acted as liaison between this group and myself was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty. I knew I was being recruited, but at that point I had no idea for what.

Moore made clear that he knew of, and understood the process of disinforming Bennewitz, for he had a ringside seat. Moore also detailed the effect that this alleged individualized PSYOPS campaign had on the physicist:

I know that this whole body of information if false, because I was in a position to observe much of the disinformation process as it unfolded. And I can tell you it was effective, because I watched Paul become systematically more paranoid and more emotionally unstable as he tried to assimilate what was happening to him. He had guns and knives all over his house, had installed extra locks on his doors, and he swore that `they' (meaning the aliens) were coming through his walls at night and injecting him with hideous chemicals, which would knock him out for long periods of time. He began to suffer increasing bouts of insomnia. I knew at that time that he was not far from an inevitable nervous collapse. His health had deteriorated, he had lost considerable weight, his hands shook as if from palsy, and he looked terrible. I tried to counsel him to drop the entire UFO thing before his health was completely destroyed. Not long afterward I heard he had been hospitalized and was under psychiatric care.

On the one hand, we might surmise that Sgt. Doty might have been nothing more than a prankster, a troll who masterminded a grand hoax of UFO information simply to see how much he could influence an outré movement. The fact that someone mailed a mystery document claiming to report on a November 1977 alien encounter at Ellsworth AFB (Rapid City, SD) to The National Enquirer, while Doty was stationed there, supports this belief.**

Moore claimed he didn’t know the reason behind discrediting Bennewitz. He could only say that he and Doty were “pawns” acting under the orders of others. And considering the participation of such players as Col. Edwards and Captain Robert Collins, it seems far more likely that whatever occurred extended well beyond Doty, at least to within a circle stationed at Kirtland AFB.

More important, there were even earlier attempts to communicate alleged disclosure material to other ufologists.



*This title unintentionally ripped-off from a subsection of Anne Strieber’s fascinating essay “How Disinformation Experts Spread Fear about UFOs.”

**Moore told ufologist Jacques Vallee that Doty admitted to forging the document.