X Descending (23 page)

Everything I have seen, heard, and read about how military intelligence and security operate strongly supports that Edwards, and no doubt Doty, would have acted immediately on hearing of Paul’s activities. As mentioned earlier, if Paul had stumbled upon a known operation or exercise, security measures would certainly have already been in place for such a contingency. But whether he saw something known or unknown, AFOSI Counterintelligence would have needed to remain virtually invisible as it assessed and worked to control the situation. If there had been a sudden flurry of investigation and documents immediately after Paul's first call, there was a risk that, sooner or later, it would actually draw attention to what he had filmed and when it occurred. Likewise, if it ever became known that Counterintelligence was involved immediately, that information alone could have ended up throwing a spotlight on him and what he had filmed. A strategic delay would almost certainly have been necessary, and during that time a plausible reason for any action against Paul could be either found or created.

The first months of 1980 were the lull while an artificial storm was brewing. By shifting Paul’s involvement to appear to have come later in the year, and have his story appear to be just one of several generic sightings around that time, his initial sightings and films could slip off the radar with little if any notice. The documents eventually released would further the belief that what was important had happened later, at a time when security guards and others were also seeing things. The shift in the time frame obscured the fact that it all began with Paul and at a time when he alone had filmed disk shaped vehicles
landing
on the slopes of the weapons storage area.

Never before have there been films and still photographs—taken simultaneously—of repeated instances of disc-shaped vehicles landing inside a sensitive military installation. Considering Paul, who he was, and the company he owned, the fact that such films and photographs existed as evidence of what he had seen and where he saw them was undoubtedly a huge problem for someone. More than just Paul, his wife could also testify about what she had seen.

By the time of the November 10th meeting meeting was held at KAFB, there were already signs that a counterintelligence operation had been underway for months. The infamous “AFOSI Complaint Form”, signed by Doty in early September, had reported sightings that occurred a month earlier—long before his visit to Paul’s home with Jerry Miller. But, two months before even
that
report, someone had already been spinning a “flying saucers and aliens” web around Albuquerque, with a “Mr. Dody” conveniently at its center.

In July of 1980, a strange anonymous letter had arrived at APRO headquarters in Tucson (see Attachment B). Generally called the "Weitzel Letter", it would eventually be attributed to Richard Doty himself. With its references to an AFOSI agent named "Mr. Dody", this letter was the first overt evidence of the counterintelligence operation—practically an invitation for someone to come to Albuquerque and investigate the incidents it described. It seems to have been a veiled but targeted attempt to do what Doty's AFOSI Complaint Form eventually did on a larger scale. Both the Weitzel Letter and the Complaint Form suggested intriguing incidents of disc-shaped vehicles seen by military personnel, both pointed the reader to Kirtland AFB, and both would lead anyone investigating aerial objects around Kirtland AFB and the Sandia Reservation, sooner or later, to Richard Doty himself. This letter is prime evidence that by mid-year Richard Doty was set as the point man for all traffic relating to the Paul Bennewitz operation. (On a side note, both the fact that the Weitzel Letter was sent to APRO, and the timing of its arrival, lead to several other troubling questions. This is explored more fully in Chapter 19 under the section on Bill Moore's "recruitment".)

Following the Weitzel Letter, there were other more serious indications that the operation to contain and control Paul and the spread of his information was underway. Author Greg Bishop reports being told by Jerry Miller that when Miller and Doty visited Paul’s home in October of 1980, Doty had secretly photographed not only Paul’s equipment and pictures,
but the interior of the house
. What purpose could be served by having photographs of the inside of the Bennewitz home? Someone might have wanted Miller’s opinion of the films and other evidence Paul had, but Doty’s purpose in photographing the interior of the house suggests something far more nefarious was afoot.

It was also in October of 1980 that author Bill Moore, by then a board member of APRO, met with Richard Doty and quietly agreed to begin feeding him information on Paul’s activities. By November, when Paul was invited to present his evidence at a meeting at Kirtland AFB, the counterintelligence operation to undermine his credibility and defuse the growing situation was apparently set to go into full swing. Soon after this meeting, the obscure helicopter flight left from Kirtland AFB and headed north. Ernest Edwards had told me of this flight in an telephone conversation, saying only that soon after the November meeting, several of those in attendance had boarded a helicopter bound for the Archuleta Mesa. Though Edwards said he did not know the purpose of the flight, this flight is certainly suggestive of later ones that would be used to saturate Paul’s mind with ideas of alien bases in the wilds of northern New Mexico.

The Weitzel Letter, sent out in July, and the AFOSI documents of the next few months were the beginning of a divide-and-conquer approach to suppressing interest in Paul’s claims. Instead of just one witness—Paul—there were now a variety of witnesses: several security guards, several mentioned in the Weitzel Letter, and others, each with a story of strange unidentified objects and inticing rumors connected to the weapons storage area. With multiple sightings and multiple witnesses all telling bizarre stories, “who” no longer meant just Paul. He was being pushed back in the crowd, no longer the man of the hour.

Nevertheless, the counterintelligence operation needed to have a plausible reason behind it...something releasable if questions were ever asked, but that would be virtually impossible to verify—let alone refute. Before looking at other aspects of the operation against Paul, consider the only explanation ever given for why he warranted any attention at all:
he was intercepting NSA secrets
. Surprisingly, to this day the most proffered explanation for all the interest in Paul has been the very thing dismissed earlier by Jerry Miller as possibly coming from a number of conventional sources: the electronic recordings Paul had collected. It may have been Richard Doty
⁵¹
who first suggested that Paul had actually been picking up and decoding signals from NSA facilities located in the area east of Albuquerque. Conveniently, the NSA explanation requires no mention of the vehicles Paul saw and filmed over the MWSA—his whole reason for calling the Air Force in the first place. Not much was known about the NSA at that time, but during the 1980’s its very secrecy made it something of a hot topic, and conveniently hush-hush.

Of course, all of this begs the question of whether sensitive NSA signals or frequencies are transmitted freely into the airwaves around Albuquerque? If it was true in 1980 that our intelligence agencies, NSA or otherwise, transmitted sensitive information into the air around Albuquerque, then anyone in the area could have set up equipment to intercept these transmissions. Reasonably speaking, someone like Paul should have been the least of the NSA’s or the Air Force’s worries. Thunder Scientific, the company Paul founded in 1966, has a long list of distinguished customers, including NASA and virtually all branches of the military. Is there any reason to doubt that his company, the owners, and its employees, all went through security checks? Nevertheless, if Paul had inadvertently intercepted NSA signals, would it have taken months, or years, to stop him?

Still, what if the NSA or some other agency
was
transmitting signals that anyone in the area could intercept? Our intelligence agencies have had decades of experience dealing with efforts by foreign nations to intercept communications and signals intelligence, both in war time and peace time. These are known concerns, and security would be considered before, during, and after the fact because of the expectation that someone could always be listening. Paul’s interests notwithstanding, many curious people have an interest in government secrecy, with entire communities of enthusiasts bent on uncovering the latest military secrets. Hobbyists patiently monitor radio transmissions listening for signs of new experimental aircraft, while others stake out sensitive areas hoping to see flight tests. The classified location known as Area 51 has now become almost a Mecca for prying eyes.

The vast part of Nevada that includes Area 51 is one of the most highly classified areas in the country. The entire region is closed off from the public and protected by both military and private security, buried sensors, and signs that threaten deadly force. The government has co-opted public lands for this range and, in 1995, reportedly seized thousands of additional acres in an effort to block the public from seeing the facilities or the tests conducted there. With existing laws in place to protect this area and discourage anyone who pries into its secrets, it is worth mentioning how the government reacted to one man that it felt broached the security of Area 51.

In 2003, in the small town of Rachel, Nevada, Chuck Clark, a retired astronomer who moved to Rachel to pursue his interest in Area 51, received a visit from federal agents. The FBI showed up at his door and, in an action that seemed straight out of an X-files episode, entered his home and confiscated his equipment while neighbors watched and took photographs. Perhaps more than coincidentally, Clark was not at home at the time of the raid and came home only to find a nice list of all the items that had been taken. No clear reason was given for the action, but the speculation has been that it was because Clark had been making news about intrusion sensors he discovered hidden far off the base on public land. Whatever justification there might have been for the raid, it had all the earmarks of sanctioned retaliation. Nevertheless, the point was made. It may be impossible to stop people from monitoring transmissions out of an area or block visibility from mountain peaks miles away, but pose enough of a threat or cross some unseen line and there is a quick response. Federal agents show up and confiscate your equipment.

In the 1980s, there were signs on the fence surrounding Kirtland Air Force Base and the Sandia Reservation warning that no photography was allowed. The sensitive nature of the area, the facilities, and the projects conducted there was and still is widely known by the residents in Albuquerque. Even so, Paul went straight to the Air Force and announced that he
had
been filming and photographing the area
and
had equipment monitoring the local magnetic field. No one showed up at his door to confiscate his equipment and, to my knowledge, he was never asked to cease and desist even though he was prying into an area full of sensitive projects and national secrets.

That should be reason enough to suspect, if not outright reject, any assertion that the counterintelligence operation against him was due solely to his eavesdropping on NSA frequencies or communications. Paul’s reputation and business in Albuquerque may have afforded him some consideration, but in this country, standing and reputation seldom guarantee protection when it comes to national security. Something much more serious than eavesdropping had to be at stake to warrant such a secretive and long lasting counterintelligence operation.

Nevertheless, though Paul may have honestly thought he was detecting 'alien' frequencies, with no evidence of their actual source the frequencies could have been coming from anywhere. Someone with a little knowledge of Paul’s equipment and capabilities could have sent frequencies, signals, and even messages tailor-made specifically for him. In fact, that exact scenario is more than hinted at in a story told to Greg Bishop by Bill Moore.

According to Moore, in 1981 J. Allen Hynek, former scientific advisor to Project Blue Book, the Air Force UFO project, delivered a computer to Paul Bennewitz.
⁵²
By then Hynek had become a strong public proponent of serious study of UFO phenomena, despite his earlier Air Force ties. He was the founder of the Center for UFO Studies and had served as a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”, even making a cameo appearance. What was so shocking about Moore’s story is that Hynek allegedly gave the computer to Paul at the request of the Air Force
without telling Paul where the computer actually came from
. Even more suspicious is that it reportedly contained software provided by the Air Force to facilitate Paul’s communication with “aliens”.

Why would the Air Force want to get a computer with such a bizarre program into Paul’s hands without him knowing that it came from them? It does not take much imagination to sense a setup. Someone wanted to make sure that out of the frequencies Paul was detecting he would end up with decoded messages he believed came from aliens. It should be noted that Bishop does stipulate that Moore was the sole source for the Hynek story. Nonetheless, surreptitiously sending a computer to Paul to facilitate his communication with "aliens" does have all the earmarks of a counterintelligence maneuver.

If Moore’s story of Hynek’s duplicity is true, then Paul’s belief that he was communicating with aliens around Albuquerque may have been the result of an elaborate charade. It not only involved a computer system (not a cheap proposition in 1981), but also a software program that had to be created for this specific purpose. The programmer would likely have needed to know the specific frequencies or signals Paul could detect, how information was being encoded in them, and how it would be fed into the software program to reveal the final message. With strong evidence that Paul had already begun detecting signals early in 1980 and he already believed he was communicating with aliens well before the November 1980 meeting at KAFB, there is only Moore’s word that the computer was, in fact, delivered in mid-1981, and not mid-1980.