They Drove Him Insane: UFOs, Orbs and Obsession -The Dirty Operation against Paul Bennewitz

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor and I'm actually here. I've been abducted the last couple of shows, but they let me come back.

Let's go down the rabbit hole today, shall we?

Oh, please.

You know we like to talk about the UFOs.

Oh, the UFOs.

Yeah. And we're going to talk about two

doofos talking about U-FOS.

Hey, I got a. It's UAP to you, pal. That's if you want to be hip. It's now uap. It's not ufo.

Oh, yeah, uap.

Yeah, rebranded.

Sounds like a movie studio.

UAP present Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Because it now covers not only UFOs in the air, but also undersea craft

and, well, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I think that's what they use it for. That's right.

I thought it was anomalous.

I think it can be either. It's a bisexual phenomena.

Ambiguous.

That voice you're hearing is our guest today, Greg Bishop, who is an investigative journalist specializing in UFO UAP studies.

Kinda sorta.

His books include Project the Story of Paul Benowitz, National Security and the Creation of The A Modern UFO Myth, and another book called It Defies Essays on UFOs and Other Weirdness. Greg, thanks for coming.

Thanks for inviting me. This is a dream come true. I get to hang out with you guys.

Wow.

Very cool. And you've been writing about this and investigating it for how many years?

My first article on any UFO related subject was published in 87.

1887.

Greg and I have crossed paths through mutual friends over the years in this subject of study. And you're a hell of a drone pilot too.

Thank you. Yeah, I did some drone work for you and Chris for a documentary you were working on. And that's how we met.

Yes.

Chris o'. Brien.

Chris o'. Brien.

The late, great Rip o'. Brien. Chris o', Brien, yes.

Yeah. And he's known, of course, for probably one of the leading experts on cattle mutilation stories related to phenomena.

Where's the Beef?

He lived in the St. Louis Valley in central South Colorado, not far from the area of New Mexico that we're going to talk about today, which is a concentration of high weirdness in Colorado by the Great Sand Dunes National Park. But south of there, near Albuquerque, is what we're going to talk about today, a book you wrote about a gentleman named Paul Benowitz.The thing that attracts me to the subject matter is not so much what it is where they're from. I don't think that's necessarily knowable. But what I do find fascinating is how it reflects on the consciousness of people and how it triggers them.It's a very psychoactive subject matter because it's about the unknown.

Our interaction with it, I think, is what it is.We have no way of knowing what the source of this is, except that it appears to be intelligent and it appears to interact with us occasionally, either lightly when somebody sees something flying through the air, or a lot less lightly when somebody has something in their room or something apparently taking them away or whatever.

Something in their mind. My most memorable encounter with alien consciousness was in a dream. And I was talking with this alien on board the ship, and.And I realized we were communicating telepathically. And I said to him, telepathically, why don't you show me what you really look like?Cause he looked, you know, a human being, and he released the shield on his face or the projection he was doing to my mind. And I saw an alien and I went, oh, okay, cool. You know, thanks.

You know, thank God.

Phil, you've never told me that.

No, I know. Well, this seemed like an appropriate time to do it. But the manifestation that I've had, which I talked to who is our Whitley Strieber.

Yeah, Whitley Strieber. We had him on just recently, was.

I'm one of the streetlight people. Lights going on and off.

Yeah. There's a book about that called Sliders, I think.

Is that right?

Yeah. Oh, look it up. A whole book written just about people who would turn off streetlights.

But he also would say, I also find pennies all the time.

Yes.

And Peter Bergman, his partner. Proctor and Bergman. Pete and I were also partners. The three of us were partners.

I found coins. It wasn't just pennies.

Well, you know, I was making a fortune. Sometimes Pete and I would walk ahead and throw a couple of pennies down. Like, look, look, guys, I found a penny.

That's true.

They completely bamboozled me.

You wrote a book about this gentleman named Paul Benowitz, and we want to talk about it because it's like the perfect example of this region between human consciousness and whatever this energy intelligence is and how it reflects on human consciousness, whether it's an extension of human consciousness or it's an actual external, intelligent form. Energy.

Yes, to both, right?

Yeah. It tends to attract fringe, excitable people, some people that are prone to fantasy and hallucinations.And it has been exploited by the US government, probably other governments as well, in an effort to cover up covert military development of flying aircraft. And when people see this aircraft, like the Stealth bomber, before it was announced, it was convenient for people to say it was a ufo.I've never seen anything like it. And the government would actually.

Yeah, it was an unidentified flying object because we don't want you to know what it is.

This has been the case in many situations over the years, just as a covert device.

Yeah, I actually got a good story about that when you're done.

All right. Benowitz.

He'll never be done.

Yeah, I'll never be done.

Good.

Benowitz was somebody who fell into that trap in such a remarkably weird way. That's what we're going to talk about. You wrote a whole book. It drove him insane.He was helped along the way by disinformation agents that were propped up by the government, the military.

Yeah. It even seems from the story that you tell in the book that they were using this poor guy as a way to experiment with the effects of disinformation.Right.

And cover up. I don't know. I don't know if that happened. Totally possible. I'm not downplaying what happened to poor Paul Benowitz.I think his life was shortened by this because of the stress. But as Ted said, it attracts people that are.Because it's such a subject that's not accepted or used to be a lot less accepted, people that are in different areas of reality than most people, the consensus reality, are going to latch onto it.And my, you know, my little quip about that is if you've got a loose piece of string on your mental sweater, the UFO will grab it and just unravel it.

If you like metaphor.

Yeah.

It'll unravel my mental sweater.

Yes. Well, the fabric of your sanity will be unraveled very quickly.If you let the UFO grab that little loose thing and just pull it, it'll just go and you'll just come apart. And I've seen it. I've seen it happen to people, and it's almost happened to me a couple of times.

Go to any UFO conference and you will see a lot of bow. When I first started studying it, it was a little overwhelming to me.And my defense mechanism was to back away for a couple years, three years, didn't even think about it. And then something would come up and made me curious again. That's how I stayed from falling into the rabbit hole permanently. I would crawl out.

Now, how did this poor guy get involved in all of this? He was just an observer from his Home basically near an Air Force base.

This took place starting in the 1970s. Paul Bennewitz was an electrical physicist. He lived in Albuquerque Co.Which still exists and is run by his family, his sons called Thunder Scientific.

Yeah, Alba Corky.

Yeah, Alba Corky. He was a UFO like investigator. He's interested in it.I've actually seen his application to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, which was the other big. MUFON came out of that. Actually, MUFON split off from apro. So he was interested in the subject.And so he saw lights doing weird things out on the Kirtland Air Force Base property, which was. You could see perfectly well and you still can from his house. He passed away three weeks before I started writing the book.Actually before I got out there, his

house was literally across the street from the fence to the base.

Yeah, exactly. There's a perimeter fence saying, you know, use of deadly force authorized US Government installation. And his company, Thunder Scientific.The back wall of Thunder Scientific is also part of Kirtland Air Force Base. It's right behind where the company is.

And Kirtland Air Force Base is adjacent to the Albuquerque International Airport.

Yes.When you fly in into Albuquerque and you're coming in, you can actually see pretty much all of Kirtland Air Force Base, including this giant test thing they used to have that they would put B52s on and blast them with electromagnetic so they could test EMF pulses, like when a nuclear explosion happens, to make sure that their electronics were hardened enough so that the plane could keep flying.

This was like the largest wooden structure ever built.

Yes.

And they could roll out C5A galaxies onto it. And they would then use. Because the wood was, I guess, non conductive. It could.

Yeah, no metal parts. Because they'd probably. One, they would affect the test and two, they might pop out of the thing from the high electromagnetic field.

So you'll see that when you fly into Alberta.

Yeah, you can see it. It's very obvious. I think they may be taking it down now, but it was there since the 80s, I think. Early 80s.

Bertlan Air Force Base has a lot going on there. I think in your book you write that there were at 1.160 different government agencies had a on that base, including the nsa, Sandia Labs.This is where they do a lot of weapons research and weapons testing. They had underground facilities, developed airborne lasers.

Skunk Baxter was involved with his Skunk works there.

Was that there.

It's also one of the largest repositories of nuclear weapons.

Or it was. I don't know if it is now.

So it was a very hot security zone.

Yeah. And Benowitz was seeing things like lights flying at night. He goes, oh, my God, UFOs. And he took video and film of it.Maybe not so much video, because this was the late 70s. Nobody really had video, really amateur video.So he was taking 8 millimeter films of these lights that were lifting up off the ground and then flying over these mountains and dropping.He saw many other things, some of which might have been true unknowns, but probably most of them were just things that are being tested, and they were just testing them right out in the open. But they were doing it like, you know, at the 1, 2, 3 in the morning when they supposedly. Everybody was asleep.

And most people don't see things right in front of them. And they were kind of banking on that. Yeah, maybe some might see an odd light in Albuquerque over Kirkland, but they wouldn't think twice about it.Benowitz, unfortunately for them, was not like that. He became pretty obsessed by it.

Yeah. I think most people just say or something they're testing.Which was most likely true because they were truly actually UFO incursions, apparently, according to some FOIA documents and documents given to researchers, one of which we can talk about. So he called up the Air Force and he said, do you know there's these weird things flying around on the base here? I don't know.And he was already thinking it was aliens and some kind of invasion because he was dealing with an abductee named Myrna Hansen. He was already an apro. And so he was already interested in the subject. So everything he saw, I mean, everything looked like a nail to him.If it's a weird light in the sky, it's a yellow light.

He's throwing out some initials here.

Apro, Aerial Phenomena Research Organization.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. It was a precursor to mufon. Mutual UFO Network was a splinter group from apro. That was Lorenzen Coral and Jim Lorenzen,

a couple who I interviewed back in 1976.

That's amazing. I'd like to hear that.

Interviewed them about Travis Walton.

Yeah. So he told the Air Force about this, and they said, wow, there's somebody watching this stuff and making, you know, shooting film of it.Eh, we probably prefer he didn't do that. So they called me into the base. Why don't you show us what you've got? And I talked to an NSA guy that was. Oh, no, he wasn't there.But a guy that shared an office with him was at that meeting. And this was Very early on, I think it was 79.

National Security Agency.

Yeah. He said, sorry, I'm using these Alphabet soup terms. He said that within about an hour of the meeting, it was a couple hours long.He said most people left because the people at the base there was like, is this guy doing something that we care about? Most of them didn't like, no, it's not impinging on us, so we won't worry about it.But at the end of the meeting, the guy was in charge of security at the time, said, well, this is very interesting, Mr. Benowitz. Could you keep us informed about what you see? And people asked, like, why didn't they just tell him to cut it out?And they didn't do that because they can learn more about what's going on by just basically keeping him in their confidence, saying, look, let's work with you, and you tell us what you're seeing, because we're really interested in that. They're interested in what he was seeing and what was being revealed.He's a UFO researcher, and somebody just comes and says, hey, you know, what are you looking at? Can I get some photos? They could be anybody. They could be Russians or Chinese or somebody. And it's just part of their intelligence.Like, oh, okay, they're developing something that's supposed to do this. Oh, well, this guy, Mr. Benowitz in New Mexico, has something that looks exactly like what we're talking about.So it's just another data point for them. That's what they were worried about, which is why they told him to keep going.The problem is, eventually he was so convinced that the Air Force and whatever CIA, NSA were working with them. He was so convinced that they trusted everything he said and they didn't contradict him. They just kept saying, yes, please tell us more.It was just kind of like where you don't have any check on something. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier.And at least once that I know of, this UFO researcher we can talk about was told to pass him a note that actually said that the government was interested in what he was doing, that named him in a document.

This is where they're starting to manipulate him. They're actually being aggressive towards Benowitz. Instead of saying, thanks for your. Thanks for your patriotism, now go away.They're saying, keep us informed.

I think another reason.If you spread weird information through Benowitz and it shows up in a channel somewhere else in your signals intelligence, you know that whoever Benowitz talked to told them that weird Story.

Okay, so Bennewitz was a potential asset.

Yeah, he was an. Yeah, exactly. I think they were treating him as an unwitting asset. But the thing is, he was so unstable that it just.If you and I, if it was happening to us, we'd probably at some point go, what are you telling me? Because this is not what I'm seeing, or I don't want to feel paranoid. But he didn't have that filter. He just kept going.

And he was bright. Yeah, he actually came up with some

devices that could temperature and humidity. Instruments he built for the Air Force and for various contractors and I think for the Air Force at one point

came up with some kind of device decoding device about signals he was receiving from over Kirtland.

Yes, he was picking up signals and he figured out a way to decode them.

The pulsar signals, the laser signals.

They were radio signals. And from what I can remember, it sounds like microbursts. And in the late 70s, early 80s, nobody knew what microbursts were.

And they were kind of shocked that their institutional program inside the base wasn't able to do what he was able to do on a shoestring budget at home on his work.

Well, yeah, they were amazed that he was able to start to figure out and detect patterns. But the thing is, the patterns to him had to do with UFOs and aliens invading and not whatever those radio transmissions were for.

Benowitz made a leap.

Yes. As far as I know, this is from my research.

Sounds a little like Pluribus.

Did you watch this series? No, no, no.

Oh, you gotta watch it.

Oh, yeah, Pluribus shot in Albuquerque.

Ah, yeah, Albuquerque's huge now for production. I have a couple friends that move there specifically for that from la.

The same people made Breaking Bad, made Pluribus.

Okay, that's right.

Vince Gilligan.

How did you get turned onto this guy in your research? How did you find out about him and say, this is a story I gotta tell?

I met Bill Moore, who is a UFO researcher. He's best known for the first book on Roswell he co wrote with Charles Berlitz, the Roswell Incident.

They broke the Roswell UFO story, didn't they?

Stan Friedman did. But Bill and Berlitz took his information and more information that Bill got by going out to Roswell in the late 70s and interviewing people.He was one of the first people coming out there and asking about it after what, like a little over 30 years?

1947.

Yeah. So he was out there 76, 77, something like that.

It was where alleged UFO retrieval, evidently a collision between two UFOs.

Oh, yeah.

One crashed, wasn't it?

Between a UFO and a weather balloon?

That's what they'd like you to think. But Ed Mitchell, sixth man who walked on the moon, grew up in Roswell, and.

That's right.

One of the reasons he was so

interested, him and Dan Rather.

Yeah. He had familial connections growing up in the area. And the locals told Ed. Yeah, no, it happened. It happened.That's one of the reasons he was so solidly into it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you would be. I don't know what happened there.Something very important crashed that a lot of people or a few people did not want to talk about. And I don't know what that is. That might have been an alien craft or something else. I don't know. But Bill wrote that book.And because of that book, Bill Moore got contacted. He was at a radio station doing an interview for the Roswell book, and he got a phone call.It was the second phone call he'd gotten where somebody said, we think you're the only person that knows what you're talking about and we'd like to talk to you. And the first time he said, ah, there's just people messing with me. The second time actually happened at Albuquerque when he was at, I think.I think kob, I can't remember the big station in Albuquerque.But very soon after that, he met with the person that became known as Falcon and Doty, Richard Doty, who was the person at Kirtland Air Force Base, who was basically the Air Force's FBI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigation,

and they were very involved in the Bennewitz case.Yeah, Bill Moore and Doty, they're known within UFO research circles as, let's put it this way, interesting characters because they seem to be floating on both sides, sides of the intelligence community and the vox populi. As far as people involved in research,

Doty really not so much until in the last 10 or 15 years when he started, he retired from the State Highway Patrol. Now he's, like doing a lot of. He's doing the circuit, doing the UFO conventions and things like that.Bill, when he's admitted or told people what was going on and what he'd done, which nobody else ever did, he got blackballed out of ufology. And he just said, finally just said, well, then forget it.

And he said, wait, why did he get blackballed?

He went, as written in your book, in 1989, he attended a MUFON UFO conference in Las Vegas. And he was gonna make a profound announcement about the subject.

Yeah.

And there were a thousand people in the audience. And he got up there.

I was one of them. I was there. It's the best speech I've ever seen. It's because of the reaction. They had to stop the talk about four times to get people to calm down.What he said was, you guys know about Benowitz? Well, this is what happened. He was not targeted, because that sounds bad. He was identified as a very important person of interest for them.And I was offered a deal.I could get secret UFO documents and things people hadn't seen in exchange for basically just telling the Air Force and whoever else asked what he was thinking and maybe who he was talking to.

Benowitz.

Benowitz, yeah. Because there was no Internet then.I'm sure Benowitz had phone taps on and all that other stuff, but you actually had to have human intelligence, human talking to people.

Yeah.Well, that's where the disinformation starts and the manipulation starts, where the government, through Kirtland, is beginning to try to influence Benowitz's thinking, to lead him astray from the intelligence that he was gathering over the base.

What he did was he would tell them stuff, and then they would encourage certain parts of it. I don't know if they ever. They may have. I wasn't there at the time, ever, actually specifically told him stuff that was.That he hadn't heard before, just to encourage him, except the computer program. But that was also an extension of what he was doing, and we'll talk about that.But if he came up with something that he was excited about and they could push him off on that tangent and yet still retain the interest of whoever, because this was an intelligence operation, they didn't say, we're going to drive this guy crazy and get him out of here. No, that had nothing to do with it. What it was, was, let's see what he's seeing.Let's see how much he's seeing, how he's figuring out and who he's talking to, and even.Maybe not even who he's talking to, but who's getting information from him by figuring out, like I said, you go to Russian intelligence, talk wherever, that they pick up this intelligence, and they mention something that Benowitz did, obviously somebody's watching him.So they would just take things, as far as I know, would take things that he was already doing, interested in, looking at, theorizing about, and if they thought it was fruitful, or it would either do something interesting or useful or push him away from things they didn't want him looking at or whoever was watching him. Push them away from things they would encourage that.

The Russians released a record, I learned this on my trip to the Soviet Union in 59, of jazz, famous jazz songs. And one of them was called Summoned to Watch Over Me. And they retitled it My Little Shepherdess.

True story.

You're listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. Our guest today is author and investigator Greg Bishop. We're talking about a book he wrote about a gentleman named Paul Benowitz.It's called the Story of Paul Benowitz National Security and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.

Is it still a hot topic?

It's become so in the last few years because of all this. Interesting because of the article In 2017, the New York Times article by Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal.And suddenly it's okay to talk about this? Suddenly it's okay to talk about it in academia and in gov.

Yeah, but I think the value of it, again is the effect of the psychoactive nature of the subject matter and how fertile it is for manipulation of information and manipulation of public perception of the info.

I think somebody sometime before 2017 decided, let's get people interested in this in a big way and in a certain way. And I don't know what the reason is.I don't think it's because somebody or whatever group doesn't want to say, let's tell everybody what we know about UFOs and Rayville. It's like, no, it has something to do with intelligence and political theater and hiding technologies or misdirecting.I think it has to do with all of that stuff. And not really about UFOs actually.One thing an investigator told me once, he said every time the government says something about UFOs, UFO researchers think it's about them. And it's never about them. It's about whatever they want to use the subject for.

My theory about why it all came out in 2017 was pretty prosaic in that 2003 or five when the tic Tac video was first recorded was because they had just introduced forward facing radar technology in the nose cones of these F18s that were.

So talk to one of the pilots.

Yeah, they were so sick.

They all get cancer from it because of the or a lot of them do.

These sensors are so good now they can observe things that weren't observable before. And so these flying objects suddenly started showing up on these new Sensors. Initially they thought it was a bug in the new system, but then it

instead of bugs in a flying saucer,

then it was recorded on their infrared. And then eventually the pilots made visual contact. And so what happened was these objects were flying almost every day around carrier groups.It was a daily experience.And some of these guys were flying in tight formations and these spherical objects that they could actually see with their naked eye would fly right between their wings at supersonic speeds and freak them out. And it was happening off the coast of Virginia as well. It was happening on a daily basis.And they were all relieved to finally be deployed to the Middle east because they thought, we're going to get away from these UFOs. Well, the UFOs followed them there, but at one point they had a near miss and the pilots landed at the base.And their squadron commander saw these two pilots sheet white and said what happened? And they explained what happened.And this commander who was frustrated with the chain of command's inability or unwillingness to discuss these things and he didn't care about what it was.He was concerned for the safety of his pilots, of course, so he went above them and went to the Pentagon and said, listen, I don't care what it is, it is a safety issue.

Yeah.

And that's how it all blew up.

Yeah. No, that is another reason.I never think that when the intelligence community and all that moves in a certain direction, they don't do it for one reason. They do it for like eight or 10 or 20 reasons. And that was one of the reasons.It's like a good effect of this happening is basically they've taken the entire scientific and UFO and all that community and turned them all into researchers. For them, it's like crowdsourcing UFO research. And apart from the government starting this, I think it's great.I mean, the most interesting conversations I've had about this at this point are with academics. Like they're asking questions I haven't ever heard because I've been hearing the same dumb questions about this for 30, 40 years.

It's high time you keep this kind of information away from people. It stunts evolutionary progress.We look at a pretty frustrated, angry public these days because so much information is handled and people instinctively. What I understand is that, yeah, there's no honest brokering here.There may be good reason for keeping what's going on in the skies secret, but treating it the way they have has been a disservice to general public knowledge. And I think it's starting to fester in a bad way.But let's focus back on Benowitz and Kirtland, because Kirtland arguably had some weird things going on there. It's been fairly well documented that UFOs and the phenomena has shown a big interest in nuclear technology.They've been cited, they've shut down ICBMs both here and in Russia. Yeah. They have floated over missile sites. They have been seen over nuclear power plants.So Kirtland being one of the major nuclear facilities in the Air Force, it would make sense along that logic that there would be unknowns over that area. So is it possible that Benowitz did see unknowns?

Oh, yeah, I think there were actual unknowns over there. And if you trust a couple of documents that were released around the time that this stuff was going on, supposedly through foia.I don't know the provenance, but it described strange lights landing near nuclear facilities or at least on the base which had nuclear weapons.And I don't know if they had a bomber wing there, but the nuclear weapons were stored there and all these high technology things were being developed there like airborne lasers and, and other lasers. Medical testing was going on at least in the early parts of the. Right after World War II.

Any kind of rumors of reverse engineering

or anything like that, I don't think associated with Kirtland. All the recovered craft and all that other stuff was more concentrated on Wright Patterson Air Force Base and I guess Area 51 later.I could be wrong, but I don't know if any of that backend engineering stuff was ever associated with Sandy. Alas, in Kirtland, they were just purely developing stuff here for intelligence and the military.One of them was the adaptive optics at the Starfire Optical Range.

It's fascinating. Now, talk about this.They came up with a technology where they could photograph details of overflying Soviet satellites in orbit from the ground, even in broad daylight.

They probably knew every single spy satellite that was coming over the United States at the time. So it's like, okay, this one's coming over.This one's coming because when you're looking at stuff through a telescope, an optical telescope, the air has different. It messes up.

It's why stars twinkle.

Yeah, it bends the light. And if it does that, you can't really tell what you're looking at in space. It's going to be blurred out.So what adaptive optics did, which was developed at kirtland in the 70s, astronomy didn't hear about it until the early 90s.And the military finally said, okay, you can have it, but what they did was they'd shoot a laser through the atmosphere, and a camera or some sensor would figure out which way the laser light was being bent. And there was a mirror, like a big reflecting telescope, the objective mirror. It had plungers under it.Now it's done digitally, but at that time, it had little plungers that would deform the mirror exactly the opposite way that the atmosphere was bending it. So it was basically reacting to the natural.

Strangely clever.

It was like a camera stabilization.

Yeah, yeah.

Like steampunk, too.

Yeah, yeah. At this point, it was. When you talk about it that way,

and not only that, but as you wrote in the book was once they were able to do that, they were able to send messages somehow to the Soviet craft and reorient them. So they would go off course and making the Russians think that something went wrong with their technology.

Yeah, as the way it was told to me, that would point the camera in a different direction. It would come over our side of the globe, it would do its thing, and then would come back over the other side.The Russians would pull down all the photographic information and all that.So what happened was they figured they had people in Russia, apparently, that were working in these plants that were making the satellites, and they figured out how to control. And they weren't controlled, I think, with radio waves, because those can be intercepted. They were controlled by lasers, I believe.So they would send laser pulses to the satellite to tell it what to do and where the cameras to point and all that. So when it came over the United States, every few times, they would tell the camera to point in a different direction.Then it'd come back over Russia, and they'd go, what's going on? We had pointed it in the right direction, and they'd reorient it. And then they'd come over and they'd just leave it alone for a couple more.And they would do this with all these satellites.And so, one, it would mess up their intelligence a little bit, and two, it would make the Russians wonder what was going on and if there's something wrong with our satellite. But they didn't want the general public to know this, obviously. But that was just one of the projects that was going on there.I don't know if it was related to Benowitz. I do have a photo that was taken in daylight.Bennewitz was talking to Bill Moore, and he told Bill, take your camera and point it at the base and put it on, like, a thousandth of a second. He said, why a thousandth? He goes, well, you'll see. And he just said, take a bunch of pictures. He said, there's a whole bunch of pictures he took.And one picture he took. There's a light coming up, like a column of light coming up from the base in broad daylight. And it stops mid atmosphere.It just like a light goes up and then it just stops. Like somebody put a wall there. And I don't know what that was, but it might have been part of that technology. Like a pulse. Yeah.

Wow.

And I bet Benowitz was told to do that too by some government contact just to keep his interest.

You know, as an aside, Art Bell, who was the king of late night talk radio and ufo.

I told you my first interview ever radio interview was Art Bell.

No, that's not too intimidating. It was very intimidating. George Bell cracks like Garnet Bell.Well, when he was starting to crack and he had weird stuff happening, started to really throw him. He was knocked off the air for 20 minutes.

Yeah, I remember that.

It freaked him out because it was the satellite that would beam his show to all the affiliates. And he was told by the satellite company that the satellite itself had been jarred. So Bell went nuts thinking the UFOs.And I'm thinking in terms of what you're saying, maybe some laser technology knocked the. Who knows what they did to Art, but they definitely messed with him big time.

I tend to believe that, which makes me the least paranoid. Even if it's wrong, it's just a survival mechanism. I'm still open to the paranoid stuff.

You wrote something in the book that really kind of blew our minds, which was, uh.

Oh, what did I write?

Well, you wrote that not only did you. Did Benowitz see orbs inside his home that were not connected to any incandescent lamps, Little glowing orbs. Glowing orbs.

I have two other witnesses too, besides. Because in bed told. Yes.

Under his staircase or his living room or something. It was like.

I don't even remember writing it.

Yeah, it was in the house.

I remember there was one book. Yeah, I should read my own book. It's 20 years ago. All I remember is they were floating up near the ceiling. And Bill was there.When he told me the story, he said, paul, what's that? And Paul said, oh, those are here all the time. Like he accepted that they were part

of like a plasma.

Yeah. Whatever he was doing, he said they were about the size of maybe like a grapefruit or a softball. They were orange or peach colored.And if you went up to. If you got on a ladder, went to the ceiling and tried to touch them or whatever. He said they would shut off and they wouldn't like blink out.He said it was like you were turning off an incandescent light. It would just fade out really fast.

You know what's interesting about that is that orbs, as you know, I'm sure, are the most commonly spotted anomalous aerial objects. And they are very commonplace. I saw one over what I found out after the fact was Golden Ball Hill in England over the crop circles.It was also extremely common to the family at Skinwalker Ranch in that whole area. And the colors are significant. The orange and those are sort of benign. But the blue orbs put the fear of God in people.The family that owned the Skinwalker Ranch before Bigelow bought it said that when the blue one showed up, you just felt this core fear that was unlike anything you'd have ever felt before.

Yeah, like blue balls.

Yeah.

Makes you feel uncomfortable.

The mysteries are revealing themselves.

Oh my God.

Was this non human intelligence or was it some.

Or a monitor of some sort or.

It was a bizarre technology we're not aware of that the government has developed.

Foo fighters.

Were they observing the manipulation of Benowitz? It's not the first I've read of situations like that. It's just so weird.

Yeah, I don't know if I can ascribe that to some earthly technology maybe. I don't know.I would assume that it was some kind of technology where whoever was watching him and who was ever around his house could do that or make those, or make it appear that those were there as a projection. I do not know. But I don't know if that was in the literature enough for them to know. Well, an orb is. So who knows?

And we're going back to the 70s and 80s here.

Yeah. And this was way back when, so I don't know what it is. Although I wouldn't put it past somebody being able to do that with technology at the time.And also Gabe Valdez, who was the New Mexico State Highway Patrolman, was also hanging around with Benowitz. And people tell me, well, Bill Moore told you that he could probably be lying. It's like one.One I've never found Bill Moore to ever lie to me once over what, 40 something years. And the other is that Gabe, who was actually anti government and very suspicious of government entities as a highway patrolman. Yeah, exactly.He told me he saw it too. So some of my intel from outside the UFO community, or at least outside officialdom, came from Gabe, who knew him pretty well.Gabe passed away a few years ago.

The time we have left. Let's talk about Benowitz's fate. What happened? He really went deep into this. He discovered in the mountains outside of Kirtland he could fly.And he went over areas and he claimed to have seen air vents for underground bases. Because the big thing in the UFO business is that there are these massive underground bases that aliens cohabitate with cooperative humans.

I think there are a lot of underground bases. Open source literature tells you that.

Really, but. But not there. Yeah, they even set up dummy vents, Shaft, to confuse Benowitz and others.

Well, they flew him over this area in Dulce, New Mexico, which is close to the San Luis Valley, I don't know what, 50 miles south. And actually put, I was told, put props up there to draw his attention towards there and away from the base for Benowitz.Yeah, they flew him on a helicopter up there with a military person, I think twice, and showed him this stuff. And then he went back with his airplane and looked for more, but I think they'd actually grabbed them all and put them away.But then he went up in the mountains, something crashed up. There was probably either a drone or an early Stealth fighter.He saw it from his plane and he said, this is a. I don't know where he got this idea, maybe it was leaked to him.But he said this is a plane that was developed from alien technology and it was given to the United States and it crashed and it's nuclear powered and there was a big problem with the possible nuclear contamination.And he took pictures of it, which are frustratingly blurry, and then drove up there with Gabe Valdez and they couldn't find anything, although they did find some broken trees, some disturbed soil, and a pen that says Property of US Government on it. So somebody had dropped it there when they were cleaning it.So something did crash there, but it probably wasn't a nuclear powered aircraft or spacecraft.

This notion that they employed these people to set up a dummy base and flew him on military aircraft to go see these dummy situations, that's a lot of resources directed to an individual who was unhinged. What the hell did Benowitz find that forced him to do such an ambitious.

Make people not believe what he was.

Do they think Benowitz had so much sway in public opinion that if they could twist him, they could twist the whole research community?

No, I think they were just trying to. Nobody really knew about him. I mean, people at APRO knew about him.

Then why?

Because apparently they just wanted to take his Attention away from the base.And he was already talking about he had been there and he said that he had seen things flying around and he had taken some video of it or photos of it. And they said, okay, if that's what you're interested in, let's just pull your attention over there. To me, that's why it happened.It's just like, okay, we're done with you watching stuff at the base. We'd rather you didn't. So we're gonna show you this place that's like way out in northwestern New Mexico on a Native American reservation.And then your noise will be about this and not about what's going on at the base.

Is the government then basically saying that they want to subvert the observation by individual citizens of unidentified activities in our skies and in our lives?

Is that what I think they wanted to subvert his attention being drawn to things they didn't want attention being drawn to which were earthly.

And I'm saying that by extension, why

would they spend so much time on

the one guy if they weren't basically saying to the whole community, stop, just leave it alone.

Or they were just dealing with a menace on the perimeter of the base?

Yeah, I think it was just him at the time. Whatever ancillary benefits could accrue from them doing that was fine. But it was basically, they were working with him.He was looking at stuff he wasn't supposed to be. They were trying to direct his attention away. And also there's another really important aspect of this.I asked Bill about this too, and he said the Benowitz thing was a tiny cog in a giant machine.

That's what I'm looking for.

Yeah. He said, imagine the operation that was doing this was, was a 24 hour long play, like a stage play. The Benowitz thing would have been.He said one scene of one minute in a 24 hour play.

Well, at least they didn't just kill him.

I don't think they do that anymore. They misdirect people or embarrass them.

This is a weird twist in the story too. One of the greats in the business of investigating UFOs was J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book.

He really. I knew you were gonna mention this.

Yeah, he was a respected.

Yeah, he was very respected and he was respectful and he was trying to, to bring light to the subject. That didn't work out, but he was regarded as unimpeachable. But you write in your book that he was involved with Benowitz.What did Hynek do with Benowitz in the book?

I said, there is one source for this, and it was more. And the reason I put it in the book is because I wanted somebody to substantiate it or find some kind of documentation.What happened was Witts said that J. Allen Hynek showed up at his door with an entire computer and said, here, this will help you with your research. If you're a UFO researcher and Hynek shows up at your door with a computer in the room with a computer, and you just kind of go, whoa.Benowitz could build computers. That's how he was starting to decode some of the stuff. And they wanted him to decode it in a different way.So they said, you're working with the government. Here's something to help you out.But the thing is, it just took everything he was thinking he was telling them and just spit it back to him with a little bit more context.

So if Hynek did it. Because you're not saying it's for sure.

It's not for sure, but I'm pretty

sure you're speculating here. But do you think that Hynek was aware that he was duping this guy?

I'm not sure.

Okay.

I do not know. And that's a big question. And I've asked his son Paul, and Paul said he didn't even know that was going on. He was a kid when it was happening.

What happened to Benowitz?

Eventually he got so upset and so destabilized, you know, chain smoking, all this. I always said about shortening his life, his family set. This is ruining our lives. Your life, your company is suffering because of it.They actually put him in a mental health place for about a month or two.

Oh, wow.

And he went in willingly. And after he came out, it ramped down considerably.He still talked about it, still talked to researchers and all that, specifically Linda Howe, John Lear, and a few other people.

Linda Howe was played also.

Yeah, and that's in the book as well. But he basically stopped the extreme stuff, although he still was interested in it for the rest of his life.It's just he didn't really talk about it too much. I think he eventually just passed away. Yeah, and he passed away in 2003 or four, actually.I got there and I wanted to talk to him, and he had died three weeks before I got there, and

his sons are still running his business, and they don't want to talk about it.

Yeah, I went there and asked one of his sons, and first I went in they said, okay. Yeah, okay. You want to. To talk? I think it was Brad. And the guy said, yeah, come on in the conference room.And I sat down at Thunder Scientific with one of his sons and I told him what I was doing. And before I finished the sentence he said, absolutely not. We don't have anything to do with it. And I said, but I have to write the book.It's on an assignment. He said, I don't care. We don't want anything to do with it. And he basically kicked me out of there.I almost called the publisher and said, I can't do this because I don't want to do this to these people.

Family trauma.

Yeah.

The second book you wrote is about various other incidents. Incidents and things that are related to the UFO phenomenon.

Yeah, some. Some and some not. Yeah. By.

From your experience, what is the end game? Is an extraterrestrial intelligence going to reveal themselves to us in order to what? Unify us into the universe?

I don't think that's going to happen because when we get to a certain point where we accept. We're already accepting a lot of it.

Yes.

When we get to a certain point where we accept these things, it'll be a fait accompli. I mean, it just. Everybody will think so. Anyway.Willy Strieber said this a long time ago, I think in a Majestic, which is one of my favorite books of his. He said the UFO intelligence, whatever's behind it, reveals itself in the most democratic way possible from the bottom up.It's not going to go from the top. That's what I've heard.

It'll be just a general consciousness.

Yeah. And I don't think the aliens are going to land on the wire house lawn or any of that stuff. It's just.

Drat.

Yeah.

And what the heck is behind the cattle mutilations? And what do you think about whether they're interbreeding with humans to create a

super race or biological entities that can travel?

Possibly. I don't know. Possibly. Okay. Yeah. You know, Phil, I have this.

What are you on the show?

Part of my. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just so lucky I've got this. This way my brain thinks I will believe everything at once just so I can keep the channel open.

Yep.

But I don't sit with any one of them. I sit with some of them occasionally. Like having a frame.

You're an investigator?

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it holds my interest and there is something behind it and it is intelligence. But I don't know what that intelligence is or how it.Where it comes from. I just know it's there.

I think we need to continue this conversation with you.

Yeah, I had stuff I wanted to ask.

Phil, would you come back?

I would love it.

Greg Bishop, thank you so much. Greg's an investigative journalist specializing in UFO studies.As you probably deduced by now, the book we've been talking about is Project the Story of Paul Benowitz, National Security and the Creation of the Modern UFO Myth. You can get that on Amazon.

And I can't wait to see what kind of questions you want to get from me. Yeah, Because I have a few secrets, too.

We will have you back. Thanks again for listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer show here. All our shows on our website. Sexy. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor. I'll be here again live next week.

Oh, boy.

God willing.

Have a great week, folks. Take care.

Stay safe.