EBE
FILENAME: EBE.DOC
=============================================================================
Message #799 - INFO.PARANET
Date : 25-Jan-91 14:00
From : Michael Corbin
To : All
Subject : EBE #1
Recently, Jerry Clark published the first of three volumes titled "UFOs in the
1980s," an invaluable research tool containing a host of information on the
who, where and what of UFOlogy. With his kind permission and the kind
permission of Apogee Publishing Company, we are reprinting an article taken
from that book -- Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. In this article, Jerry
culls all of the past history and controversy surrounding the MJ-12
controversy and other related material that has spewed forth from the extreme
side of UFOlogy representing the ETH such as Lear, Cooper and others. Although
this might be considered by some to be "old news," Jerry's chronology of
events shed a different light on the players that have made up this compendium
of scenarios -- aliens eating humans, genetic experimentation and the gamut of
sensationalistic information that drove Paul Bennewitz to an NBD at the kind
hands of admitted-disinformant, William L. Moore.
This article is being presented here in its entirety contained in 18 messages
including this one. The entire body of these messages are copyrighted (C)
1990 by Apogee Books with license to ParaNet(sm) Information Service for
reproduction on this forum. No further reposting or copying is allowed
without express written permission of the publisher.
This file was provided by ParaNet(sm) Information Service
and its network of international affiliates.
ParaNet has received exclusive permission to reprint this
article by the copyright holder.
============================================================
For further information on ParaNet(sm), contact:
Michael Corbin
ParaNet Information Service
P.O. Box 928
Wheatridge, CO 80034-0928
============================================================
UFOs in the 1980s
(C) 1990 by Apogee Books and Jerome Clark
Pages 85 - 109
============================================================
EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES
Perhaps the strangest and most convoluted UFO story of the 1980s
concerns allegations from various sources, some of them
individuals connected with military and intelligence agencies,
that the U.S. government not only has communicated with but has
an ongoing relationship with what are known officially as
"extraterrestrial biological entities," or EBEs.
The Emenegger/Sandler Saga: The story begins in 1973, when Robert
Emenegger and Alan Sandler, two well-connected Los Angeles
businessmen, were invited to Norton Air Force Base in California
to discuss a possible documentary film on advanced research
projects. Two military officials, one the base's head of the Air
Force Office of Special Investigations, the other, the audio-
visual director Paul Shartle, discussed a number of projects. One
of them involved UFOs. This one sounded the most interesting and
plans were launched to go ahead with a film on the subject.
Emenegger and Sandler were told of a film taken at Holloman AFB,
New Mexico, in May 1971. In October 1988, in a national
television broadcast, Shartle would declare that he had seen the
16mm film showing "three disc-shaped craft. One of the craft
landed and two of them went away." A door opened on the landed
vehicle and three beings emerged. Shartle said, "They were human-
size. They had an odd, gray complexion and a pronounced nose.
They wore tightfitting jump suits, [and] thin headdresses that
appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands they
held a 'translator.' A Holloman base commander and other Air
Force officers went out to meet them" (Howe, 1989).
Emenegger was led to believe he would be given the film for use
in his documentary. He was even taken to Norton and shown the
landing site and the building in which the spaceship had been
stored and others (Buildings 383 and 1382) in which meetings
between Air Force personnel and the aliens had been conducted
over the next several days. According to his sources, the landing
had taken place at 6 a.m. The extraterrestrials were "doctors,
professional types." Their eyes had vertical slits like a cat's
and their mouths were thin and slitlike, with no chins." All that
Emenegger was told of what occurred in the meetings was a single
stray "fact": that the military people said they were monitoring
signals from an alien group with which they were unfamiliar, and
did their ET guests know anything about them? The ETs said no.
Emenegger's military sources said he would be given 3200 feet of
film taken of the landing. At the last minute, however,
permission was withdrawn, although Emenegger and Sandler were
encouraged to describe the Holloman episode as something
hypothetical, something that could happen or might happen in the
future. Emenegger went to Wright-Patterson AFB, where Project
Blue Book had been located until its closing in 1969, to ask Col.
George Weinbrenner one of his military contacts, what had
happened. According to Emenegger's account, the exchange took
place in Weinbrenner's office. The colonel stood up, walked to a
chalkboard and complained in a loud voice, "That damn MIG 25!
Here we're so public with everything we have. But the Soviets
have all kinds of things we don't know about. We need to know
more about the MIG 25!" Moving to a bookshelf and continuing his
monologue about the Russian jet fighter, he handed Emenegger a
copy of J. Allen Hynek's The UFO Experience (1972), with the
author's signature and dedication to Weinbrenner. "It was like a
scene from a Kafka play," Emenegger would recall , inferring from
the colonel's odd behavior that he was confirming the reality of
the film while making sure that no one overhearing the
conversation realized that was what he was doing.
The documentary film UFO's Past, Present & Future (Sandler
Institutional Films, Inc.) was released in 1974 along with a
paperback book of the same title. The Holloman incident is
recounted in three pages (127-29) of the book's "Future" section.
Elsewhere, in a section of photos and illustrations, is an
artist's conception of what one of the Holloman entities looked
like, though it, along with other alien figures, is described
only as being "based on eyewitness descriptions" (Emenegger,
1974). Emenegger's association with the military and intelligence
he had met while doing the film would continue for years. At one
point in the late 1980s his sources told him that He was about to
be invited to film an interview with a live extraterrestrial in a
Southwestern state, he says, but nothing came of it.
The Suffern Story: On October 7, 1975, a 27-year old carpenter,
Robert Suffern, of Bracebridge, Ontario, got a call from his
sister who had seen a "fiery glow" near his barn and concluded it
was on fire. Suffern drove to the spot and, after determining
that there was no problem, got back on the road. There, he would
testify, he encountered a large disc-shaped object resting in his
path. "I was scared," he said. "It was right there in front of me
with no lights and no sign of life." But even before his car
could come to a complete stop, the object abruptly ascended out
of sight. Suffern turned his car around and decided to head home
rather than to his sister's place, his original intended
destination. At that point a small figure wearing a helmet and a
silver-gray suit stepped in front of the car, causing Suffern to
hit the brakes and skid to a stop. The figure ran into a field.
Then, according to Suffern, "when he got to the fence, he put his
hands on a post and went over it with no effort at all. It was
like he was weightless" (UFOIL, n.d.).
Within two days Suffern's report was on the wire services, and
Suffern was besieged by UFO investigators, journalists,
curiosity-seekers, and others. Suffern, who made no effort to
exploit his story and gave every appearance of believing what he
was saying, soon tired of discussing it. A year later, however,
Suffern and his wife told a Canadian investigator that a month
after the encounter, they were informed that some high-ranking
officials wished to speak with them. Around this time, so they
claimed, they were given thorough examinations by military
doctors. After that an appointment was set up for December 12 and
on that day an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser arrived with
three military officers, one Canadian, two American. They were
carrying books and other documents. In the long conversation that
followed, the officers apologized for the UFO landing, claiming
it was a "mistake" caused by the malfunctioning of an
extraterrestrial spaceship.
The officers produced close-up pictures of UFOs, claiming that
the U.S. and Canadian governments had had intimate knowledge of
aliens since 1943 and were cooperating with them. The officers
even knew the exact dates and times of two previous but
unreported UFO sightings on the Suffern property. The Sufferns
said the officers had answered all their questions fully and
frankly, but they would not elaborate on what they were told.
Reinterviewed about the matter some months later, the couple
stuck by their story but added few further details.
The investigator, Harry Tokarz, would remark, "Robert Suffern
strikes one as an individual who carefully measures his thoughts.
His sincerity comes through clearly as he slowly relates his
concepts and ideas. His wife, a home-bred country girl, is quick
to air her views and state unequivocally what she believes to be
fact" (CUFORN, 1983).
EBEs in South Dakota: On February 9, 1978, a curious document--an
apparent carbon copy of an official U.S. Air Force incident
report-arrived at the office of the National Enquirer in Lantana,
Florida. Accompanying the document was an unsigned letter dated
"29 Jan." It read: "The incident stated in the attached report
actually occurred. The Air Force appointed a special team of
individuals to investigate the incident. I was one of those
individuals. I am still on active duty and so I cannot state my
name at this time. It is not that I do not trust the Enquirer (I
sure [sic] you would treat my name with [sic] confidence but I do
not trust others.) The incident which occurred on 16 Nov. 77, was
classified top secret on 2 Dec 77. At that time I obtained a copy
of the original report. I thought at that time that the Air Force
would probably hush the whole thing up, and they did. The Air
Force ordered the silence on 1 Dec 77, after which, the report
was classified. There were 16 pictures taken at the scene. I do
not have access to the pictures at this time" (Pratt, 1984).
The report, stamped FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, purported to be from
the commander of the 44th Missile Security Squadron at Ellsworth
AFB near Rapid City, South Dakota. The incident was described as
a "Helping Hand (security violation)/Covered Wagon (security
violation) at Lima 9 (68th SMSq Area), 7 miles SW of Nisland, SD,
at 2100 hours on 16 Nov. 77." The recipient of the report was
identified as "Paul D. Hinzman, SSgt, USAF, Comm/Plotter, Wing
Security Control." Two security men, Airmen 1st Class Kenneth
Jenkins and Wayne E. Raeke, experienced and reported the
incident, which was investigated by Capt. Larry D. Stokes and
TSgt. Robert E. Stewart.
The document told an incredible story. At 10:59 on the evening
of November 16 an alarm sounded from the Lima Nine missile site.
Jenkins and Raeke, at tHe Lima Launch Control Facility 35 miles
away, were dispatched to the scene. On their arrival Raeke set
out to check the rear fence line. There he spotted a helmeted
figure in a glowing green metallic suit. The figure pointed a
weapon at Raeke's rifle and caused it to disintegrate, burning
Raeke's hands and arms in the process. Raeke summoned Jenkins,
who carried his companion back to their Security Alert Team
vehicle. When Jenkins went to the rear fence line, he saw two
similarly-garbed figures. He ordered them to halt, but when they
ignored his command, he opened fire. His bullets struck one in
the shoulder and the other in the helmet. The figures ran over a
hill and were briefly lost to view. Jenkins pursued them and when
he next saw them, they were entering a 20-foot-in-diameter
saucer-shaped object, which shot away over the Horizon.
As Raeke was air-evacuated from the scene, investigators
discovered that the missile's nuclear components had been stolen.
Enquirer reporters suspected a hoax but when they called Rapid
City and Ellsworth to check on the names, they were surprised to
learn that such persons did exist. Moreover, all were on active
duty. The Enquirer launched an investigation, sending several
reporters to Rapid City. Over the course of the next few days
they found that although the individuals were real, the document
inaccurately listed their job titles, the geography of the
alleged incident was wrong (there was no nearby hill over which
intruders could have run), Raeke had suffered no injuries, he and
Jenkins did not even know each other, and no one (including Rapid
City civilian residents and area ranchers) had heard anything
about such an encounter. As one of the reporters, Bob Pratt,
wrote in a subsequent account, "We found more than 20
discrepancies or errors in the report -wrong names, numbers,
occupations, physical layouts and so on. Had the Security Option
alert mentioned in the report taken place, it would have involved
all security personnel at the base and everyone at the base and
in Rapid City (Population 45,000 plus) would have known about
it."
The Bennewitz Affair: In the late 1970s Paul Bennewitz, an
Albuquerque businessman trained as a physicist, became convinced
that he was monitoring electromagnetic signals which
extraterrestrials were using to control persons they had
abducted. Bennewitz tried to decode these signals and believed he
was succeeding. At the same time he began to see what he thought
were UFOs maneuvering around the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage
Facility and the Coyote Canyon test area, located near Kirtland
AFB, and he filmed them.
Bennewitz reported all this to the Tucson-based Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO), whose directors were unimpressed,
judging Bennewitz to be deluded. But at Kirtland, Bennewitz's
claims, or at least some of them, were being taken more
seriously. On October 24, 1980, Bennewitz contacted Air Force
Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Sgt. Richard Doty
(whose previous tour of duty had been at Ellsworth) after being
referred to him by Maj. Ernest Edwards, head of base security,
and related that he had evidence that something potentially
threatening was going on in the Manzano Weapons Storage Area. A
"Multipurpose Internal OSI Form," signed by Maj. Thomas A. Cseh
(Commander of the Base Investigative Detachment), dated October
28, 1980, and subsequently released under the Freedom of
Information Act, states:
"On 26 Oct 80, SA [Special Agent] Doty, with the assistance of
JERRY MILLER, GS-15, Chief, Scientific Advisor for Air Force Test
and Evaluation Center, KAFB , interviewed Dr. BENNEWITZ at his
home in the Four Hills section of Albuquerque, which is adjacent
to the northern boundary of Manzano Base. (NOTE: MILLER is a
former Project Blue Book USAF Investigator who was assigned to
Wright-Patterson AFB (W-PAFB), OH, with FTD [Foreign Technology
Division]. Mr. MILLER is one of the most knowledgeable and
impartial investigators of Aerial Objects in the southwest.) Dr.
BENNEWITZ has been conducting independent research into Aerial
Phenomena for the last 15 months. Dr. BENNEWITZ also produced
several electronic recording tapes, allegedly showing high
periods of electrical magnetism being emitted from Manzano/Coyote
Canyon area. Dr. BENNEWITZ also produced several photographs of
flying objects taken over the general Albuquerque area. He has
several pieces of electronic surveillance equipment pointed at
Manzano and is attempting to record high frequency electrical
beam pulses. Dr. BENNEWITZ claims these Aerial Objects produce
these pulses. . . . After analyzing the data collected by Dr.
BENNEWITZ, Mr MILLER related the evidence clearly shows that some
type of unidentified aerial objects were caught on film; however,
no conclusions could be made whether these objects pose a threat
to Manzano/Coyote Canyon areas. Mr MILLER felt the electronical
[sic] recording tapes were inconclusive and could have been
gathered from several conventional sources. No sightings, other
than these, have been reported in the area."
On November 10 Bennewitz was invited to the base to present his
findings to a small group of officers and scientists. Exactly one
week later Doty informed Bennewitz that AFOSI had decided against
further consideration of the matter. Subsequently Doty reported
receiving a call from then-New Mexico Sen. Harrison Schmitt, who
wanted to know what AFOSI was planning to do about Bennewitz's
allegations. When informed that no investigation was planned,
Schmitt spoke with Brig. Gen. William Brooksher of base security.
The following July New Mexico's other senator, Pete Domenici,
looked into the matter, meeting briefly with Doty before dashing
off to talk with Bennewitz personally. Domenici subsequently lost
interest and dropped the issue.
Bennewitz was also aware of supposed cattle mutilations being
reported in the western United States. At one point he met a
young mother who told him that one evening in May 1980, after she
and her six-year-old son saw several UFOs in a field and one
approached them, they suffered confusion and disorientation, then
a period of amnesia which lasted as long as four hours. Bennewitz
brought the two to University of Wyoming psychologist R. Leo
Sprinkle, who hypnotized them and got a detailed abduction story
from the mother and a sketchy one from the little boy. Early in
the course of the abduction they observed aliens take a calf
aboard the UFO and mutilate it while it was still alive, removing
the animal's genitals. At one point during the alleged
experience, the mother said, they were taken via UFO into an
underground area which she believed was in New Mexico. She
briefly escaped her captors and fled into an area where there
were tanks of water. She looked into one of them and saw body
parts such as tongues, hearts and internal organs, apparently
from cattle. But she also observed a human arm with a hand
attached. There was also the "top of a bald head," apparently
from one of the hairless aliens, but before she could find out
for sure, she was dragged away. The objects in the tank, she
said, "horrified me and made me sick and frightened me to death"
(Howe, 1989). Later she wondered about the other tanks and about
their contents.
The William Moore/MJ-12 Maze: Late in the summer of 1979 William
L. Moore had left a teaching job in a small Minnesota town to
relocate in Arizona, where he hoped to pursue a writing career.
Moore was deeply involved in the investigation of an apparent UFO
crash in New Mexico in July 1947, a case he and Charles Berlitz
would recount in their The Roswell Incident the following year.
After his move to the Southwest Moore became close to Coral and
James Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO) and in due course Moore was asked to join the APRO board.
The Lorenzens told him about Bennewitz's claims. Bennewitz, Jim
Lorenzen thought, was "prone to make great leaps of logic on the
basis of incomplete data" (Moore, 1989a).
The Roswell Incident was published in the summer of 1980 and in
September a debate on UFOs at the Smithsonian Institution was
scheduled to take place. Moore set off from his Arizona home to
Washington, D.C., to attend the debate and along the way promoted
his new book on radio and television shows. According to an
account he would give seven years later, an extraordinary series
of events began while he was on this trip.
He had done a radio show in Omaha and was in the station lobby,
suitcase in hand, on his way to catch a plane which was to leave
within the hour when a receptionist asked if he was Mr. Moore. He
had a phone call. The caller was a man who claimed to be a
colonel at nearby Offutt AFB, He said, "We think you're the only
one we've heard who seems to know what he's talking about." He
asked if he and Moore could meet and discuss matters further.
Moore said that since he was leaving town in the next few
minutes, that would not be possible, though he wrote down the
man's phone number.
Moore went on to Washington. On September 8, on his way back, he
did a radio show in Albuquerque. On the way out of the studio the
receptionist told him he had a phone call. The caller, who
identified himself as an individual from nearby Kirtland AFB,
said, "We think you're the only one we've heard about who seems
to know what he's talking about." Moore said, "Where have I heard
that before?"
Soon afterwards Moore and the individual he would call "Falcon"
met at a local restaurant. Falcon, later alleged (though denied
by Moore) to be U.S. Air Force Sgt. Richard Doty, said he would
be wearing a red tie. This first meeting would initiate a long-
running relationship between Moore (and, beginning in 1982,
partner Jaime Shandera) and 10 members of a shadowy group said to
be connected with military intelligence and to be opposed to the
continuation of the UFO cover-up. The story that emerged from
this interaction goes like this:
The first UFO crash, involving bodies of small, gray-skinned
humanoids, occurred near Corona, New Mexico, in 1947 (the
"Roswell incident"). Two years later a humanoid was found alive
and it was housed at Los Alamos until its death in the early
1950s. It was called EBE, after "extraterrestrial biological
entity," and it was the first of three the U.S. government would
have in its custody between then and now. An Air Force captain,
now a retired colonel, was EBE-1's constant companion. At first
communication with it was almost impossible; then a speech device
which enabled the being to speak a sort of English was implanted
in its throat. It turned out that EBE-1, the equivalent of a
mechanic on a spaceship, related what it knew of the nature and
purpose of the visitation.
In response to the Roswell incident, MJ-12-the MJ stands for
"Majestic"--as set up by executive order of President Harry
Truman on September 24, 1947. MJ-12 operates as a policy-making
body. Project Aquarius is an umbrella group in which all the
various compartments dealing with ET-related issues perform their
various functions. Project Sigma conducts electronic
communication with the extraterrestrials, part of an ongoing
contact project run through the National Security Agency since
1964, following a landing at Holloman AFB in late April of that
year.
Nine extraterrestrial races are visiting the earth. One of these
races, little gray-skinned people from the third planet
surrounding Zeta Reticuli, have been here for 25,000 years and
influenced the direction of human evolution. They also help in
the shaping of our religious beliefs. Some important individuals
within the cover-up want it to end and are preparing the American
people for the reality of the alien presence through the vehicle
of popular entertainment, including the films Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, whose climax is a thinly-disguised version of the
Holloman landing, and ET.
At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there is a thick book
called "The Bible," a compilation of all the various project
reports.
According to his own account, which he would not relate until
1989, Moore cooperated with his AFOSI sources-including,
prominently, Richard Doty-and provided them with information.
They informed him that there was considerable interest in
Bennewitz. Moore was made to understand that as his part of the
bargain he was to spy on Bennewitz and also on APRO as well as,
in Moore's words, "to a lesser extent, several other individuals"
(Moore, 1989a). He learned that several government agencies were
interested in Bennewitz's activities and they wanted to inundate
him with false information-disinformation, in intelligence
parlance-to confuse him. Moore says he was not one of those
providing the disinformation, but he knew some of those of who
were, such as Doty.
Bennewitz on his own had already begun to devise a paranoid
interpretation of what he thought he was seeing and hearing, and
the disinformation passed on to him built on that foundation. His
sources told him that the U.S. government and malevolent aliens
are in an uneasy alliance to control the planet, that the aliens
are killing and mutilating not only cattle but human beings,
whose organs they need to lengthen their lives, and that they are
even eating human flesh. In underground bases at government
installations in Nevada and New Mexico human and alien scientists
work together on ghastly experiments, including the creation of
soulless androids out of human and animal body parts. Aliens are
abducting as many as one American in 40 and implanting devices
which control human behavior. ClA brainwashing and other control
techniques are doing the same, turning life on earth into a
nightmare of violence and irrationality. It was, as Moore
remarks, "the wildest science fiction scenario anyone could
possibly imagine."
But Bennewitz believed it. He grew ever more obsessed and tried
to alert prominent persons to the imminent threat, showing
photographs which he held showed human-alien activity in the
Kirtland area but which dispassionate observers thought depicted
natural rock formations and other mundane phenomena. Eventually
Bennewitz was hospitalized, but on his release resumed his
activities, which continue to this day. Soon the ghoulish
scenario would spread into the larger UFO community and beyond
and command a small but committed band of believers. But that
would not happen until the late 1980s and it would not be
Bennewitz who would be responsible for it.
In 1981 the Lorenzens received an anonymous letter from someone
identifying himself as a "USAF Airman assigned to the 1550th
Aircrew Training and Testing Wing at Kirtland AFB." The "airman"
said, "On July 16, 1980, at between 10:30-10:45 A.M., Craig R.
Weitzel. .. a Civil Air Patrol Cadet from Dobbins AFB, Ga.,
visiting Kirtland AFB, NM, observed a dull metallic colored UFO
flying from South to North near Pecos New Mexico. Pecos has a
secret training site for the 1550th Aircrew Training and Testing
Wing, Kirtland AFB, NM. WEITZEL was with ten other individuals,
including USAF active duty airmen, and all witnessed the
sighting. WEITZEL took some pictures of the object. WEITZEL went
closer to the UFO and observed the UFO land in a clearing
approximately 250 yds, NNW of the training area. WEITZEL observed
an individual dressed in a metallic suit depart the craft and
walk a few feet away. The individual was outside the craft for
just a few minutes. When the individual returned the craft took
off towards the NW." The letter writer said he had been with
Weitzel when the UFO flew overhead, but he had not been with him
to observe the landing.
The letter went on to say that late on the evening of the next
day a tall, dark-featured, black-suited man wearing sunglasses
called on Weitzel at Kirtland. The stranger claimed to be "Mr.
Huck" from Sandia Laboratories, a classified Department of Energy
contractor on the base. Mr. Huck told Weitzel he had seen
something he should not have seen, a secret aircraft from Los
Alamos, and he demanded all of the photographs. Weitzel replied
that he hadn't taken any, that the photographer was an airman
whose name he did not know. "The individual warned Weitzel not to
mention the sighting to anyone or Weitzel would be in serious
trouble," the writer went on. "After the individual left
Weitzel[']s room, Weitzel wondered how the individual knew of the
sighting because Weitzel didn't report the sighting to anyone.
Weitzel became scared after thinking of the threat the individual
made. Weitzel call [sic] the Kirtland AFB Security Police and
reported the incident to them. They referred the incident to the
Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), which
investigates these matters according to the security police. A
Mr. Dody [sic], a special agent with OSI, spoke with Weitzel and
took a report. Mr. Dody [sic] also obtained all the photographs
of the UFO. Dody [sic] told Weitzel he would look into the
matter. That was the last anyone heard of the incident."
But that was not all the correspondent had to say. He added, "I
have every reason to beleive [sic] the USAF is covering up
something. I spent a lot of time looking into this matter and I
know there is more to it than the USAF will say. I have heard
rumors, but serious rumors here at Kirtland that the USAF has a
crashed UFO stored in the Manzano Storage area, which is located
in a remote area of Kirtland AFB. This area is heavily guarded by
USAF Security. I have spoke [sic] with two employees of Sandia
Laboratories, who also store classified objects in Manzano, and
they told me that Sandia has examined several UFO's during the
last 20 years. One that crashed near Roswell NM in the late 50's
was examined by Sandia scientists. That craft is still being
store [sic] in Manzano.
"I have reason to beleive [sic] OSI is conducting a very secret
investigation into UFO sightings. OSI took over when Project Blue
Book was closed. I was told this by my commander, COL Bruce
Purvine. COL Purvine also told me that the investigation was so
secret that most employees of OSI doesn't [sic] even know it. But
COL Purvine told me that Kirtland AFB, AFOSI District 17 has a
special secret detachment that investigates sightings around this
area. They have also investigated the cattle mutilations in New
Mexico."
In 1985 investigator Benton Jamison located Craig Weitzel, who
confirmed that he had indeed seen a UFO in 1980 and reported it
to Sgt. Doty. But his sighting, while interesting, was rather
less dramatic than the CE3 reported in the letter; Weitzel saw a
silver-colored object some 10,000 to 15,000 feet overhead. After
maneuvering for a few minutes, he told Jamison, it "accelerated
like you never saw anything accelerate before" (Hastings, 1985).
He also said he knew nothing of a meeting with anyone identified
as "Mr. Huck."
In December 1982, in response to a Freedom of Information
request from Barry Greenwood of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy
(CAUS), Air Force Office of Special Investigations released a
two page OSI Complaint Form stamped "For Official Use Only."
Dated September 8, 1980, it was titled "Kirtland AFB, NM, 8 Aug-3
Sept 80, Alleged Sightings of Unidentified Aerial Lights in
Restricted Test Range." The document described several sightings
of UFOs in the Manzano Weapons Storage Area, at the Coyote Canyon
section of the Department of Defense Restricted Test Range. One
of the reports cited was a New Mexico State Patrolman's August 10
observation of a UFO landing. (A later check with state police
sources by Larry Fawcett, a Connecticut police officer and UFO
investigator, uncovered no record of such a report. The sources
asserted that the absence of a report could only mean that no
such incident had ever happened.) This intriguing document is
signed by then OSI Special Agent Richard C. Doty.
In 1987, after comparing three documents (the anonymous letter
to APRO, the September 8, 1980, AFOSI Complaint Form, and a
purported AFOSI document dated August 14, 1980, and claiming
"frequency jamming" by UFOs in the Kirtland area), researcher
Brad Sparks concluded that Doty had written all three. In 1989
Moore confirmed that Doty had written the letter to APRO.
"Essentially it was 'bait,'" he says. "AFOSI knew that Bennewitz
had close ties with APRO at the time, and they were interested in
recruiting someone within . . . APRO . . . who would be in a
position to provide them with feedback on Bennewitz'[s]
activities and communications. Since I was the APRO Board member
in charge of Special Investigations in 1980, the Weitzel letter
was passed to me for action shortly after it had been received."
According to Bruce Maccabee, Doty admitted privately that he had
written the Ellsworth AFB document, basing it on a real incident
which he wanted to bring to public attention. Doty has made no
public comment on any of these allegations. Moore says Doty "was
almost certainly a part of [the Ellsworth report], but not in a
capacity where he would have been responsible for creating the
documents involved" (Moore, 1989a).
Doty was also the source of an alleged AFOSI communication dated
November 17, 1980, and destined to become known as the "Aquarius
document." Allegedly sent from AFOSI headquarters at Bolling AFB
in Washington, D.C., to the AFOSI District 17 office at Kirtland,
it mentions, in brief and cryptic form, analyses of negatives
from a UFO film apparently taken the previous month. The version
that circulated through the UFO community states in its
penultimate paragraph: "USAF NO LONGER PUBLICLY ACTIVE IN UFO
RESEARCH, HOWEVER USAF STILL HAS INTEREST IN ALL UFO SIGHTINGS
OVER USAF INSTALLATION/TEST RANGES. SEVERAL OTHER GOVERNMENT
AGENCIES, LED BY NASA, ACTIVELY INVESTIGATES [sic] LEGITIMATE
SIGHTINGS THROUGH COVERT COVER.... ONE SUCH COVER IS UFO
REPORTING CENTER, US COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY, ROCKVILLE, MD
20852, NASA FILTERS RESULTS OF SIGHTINGS TO APPROPRIATE MILITARY
DEPARTMENTS WITH INTEREST IN THAT PARTICULAR SIGHTING. THE
OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT POLICY AND RESULTS OF PROJECT AQUARIUS IS
[sic] STILL CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET WITH NO DISEMINATION [sic]
OUTSIDE OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHANNELS AND WITH RESTRICTED ACCESS
TO 'MJ TWELVE'."
This is the first mention of "MJ-12" in an allegedly official
government document. Moore describes it as an "example of some of
the disinformation produced in connection with the Bennewitz
case. The document is a retyped version of a real AFOSI message
with a few spurious additions." Among the most significant
additions, by Moore's account, are the bogus references to the
U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and to NASA, which he says was NSA
(National Security Agency) in the original.
According to Moore, Doty got the document "right off the
teletype" (Moore, 1990) and showed it to Moore almost
immediately. Later Doty came by with what purported to be a copy
of it, but Moore noticed that it was not exactly the same;
material had been added to it. Doty said he wanted Moore to give
the doctored copy to Bennewitz. Reluctant to involve himself in
the passing of this dubious document, Moore sat on it for a
while, then finally worried that the sources he was developing,
the ones who were telling him about the U.S. government's alleged
interactions with EBEs, would dry up if he did not cooperate. So
eventually he gave the document to Bennewitz but urged him not to
publicize it. Bennewitz agreed and kept his promise.
As of September 1982 Moore knew of three copies of the document:
the one Bennewitz had, one Moore had in safekeeping, and one he
had in his briefcase during a trip he made that month to meet
someone in San Francisco. He met the man in the morning and that
afternoon someone broke into his car and stole his briefcase.
Four months later a copy of the document showed up in the hands
of a New York lawyer interested in UFOs, and soon the document
was circulating widely. Moore himself had little to say on the
subject until he delivered a controversial and explosive speech
to the annual conference of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in Las
Vegas in 1989.
In late 1982, "during," he says, "one of the many friendly
conversations I had with Richard Doty," Moore mentioned that he
was looking into the old (and seemingly discredited) story that a
UFO had crashed in Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. This tale was the
subject of Frank Scully's 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers.
(Moore's long account of his investigation into the affair, which
he found to be an elaborate hoax, would appear in the 1985 MUFON
symposium proceedings.) Doty said he had never heard the story
and asked for details, taking notes as Moore spoke.
On January 10 and 11, 1983, attorney Peter Gersten, director of
CAUS, met with Doty in New Mexico. There were two meetings, the
first of them also attended by Moore and San Francisco television
producer Ron Lakis, the second by Gersten alone. During the first
meeting Doty was guarded in his remarks. But at the second he
spoke openly about what ostensibly were extraordinary secrets. He
said the Ellsworth case was the subject of an investigation by
AFOSI and the FBI; nuclear weapons were involved. The National
Enquirer investigation, which had concluded the story was bogus,
was "amateurish." At least two civilians, a farmer and a deputy
sheriff, had been involved, but were warned not to talk. The
government knows why UFOs appear in certain places, Doty said,
but he would not elaborate. He added, however, that "beyond a
shadow of a doubt they're extraterrestrial" (Greenwood, 1988) and
from 50 light years from the earth. He knew of at least three UFO
crashes, the Roswell incident and two others, one from the 1950s,
the other from the 196Os. Bodies had been recovered. A
spectacular incident, much like the one depicted in the ending of
the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, took place in 1966
The NSA was involved in communications with extraterrestrials;
the effort is called Project Aquarius. Inside the UFO
organizations government moles are collecting information and
spreading disinformation. Doty discussed the Aquarius document
and said the really important documents are impossible to get out
of the appropriate files. Some are protected in such a way that
they will disintegrate within five seconds' exposure to air.
These documents tell of agreements between the U.S. government
and extraterrestrials under which the latter are free to conduct
animal mutilations (especially of cattle) and to land at a
certain base, in exchange for information about advanced UFO
technology. Doty also claimed that via popular entertainment the
American people are being prepared to accept the reality of
visitation by benevolent beings from other worlds.
At one point in the conversation Doty asked Gersten, "How do you
know that I'm not here to either give you misinformation or to
give you information which is part of the programming, knowing
you are going to go out and spread it around?" (Howe, 1989).
In the 1970s, as director of special projects for the Denver
CBS-TV affiliate, Linda Moulton Howe had produced 12
documentaries, most of them dealing with scientific,
environmental and health issues. But the one that attracted the
most attention was Strange Harvest, which dealt with the then-
widespread reports that cattle in Western and Midwestern states
were being killed and mutilated by persons or forces unknown.
Most veterinary pathologists said the animals were dying of
unknown causes. Farmers, ranchers and some law-enforcement
officers thought the deaths were mysterious. Some even speculated
that extraterrestrials were responsible. This possibility
intrigued Howe, who had a lifelong interest in UFOs, and Strange
Harvest argues for a UFO mutilation link.
In the fall of 1982, as Howe was working on a documentary on an
unrelated matter, she got a call from Home Box Office (HBO). The
caller said the HBO people had been impressed with Strange
Harvest and wanted to know if Howe would do a film on UFOs. In
March 1983 she went to New York to sign a contract with HBO for a
show to be titled UFOs-The ET Factor.
The evening before her meeting with the HBO people, Howe had
dinner with Gersten and science writer Patrick Huyghe. Gersten
told Howe that he had met with Sgt. Doty, an AFOSI agent at
Kirtland AFB, and perhaps Doty would be willing to talk on camera
or in some other helpful capacity about the incident at
Ellsworth. Gersten would call him and ask if he would be willing
to meet with Howe.
Subsequently arrangements were made for Howe to fly to
Albuquerque on April 9. Doty would meet her at the airport. But
when she arrived that morning, no one was waiting. She called his
home. A small boy answered and said his father was not there.
Howe then phoned Jerry Miller, Chief of Reality Weapons Testing
at Kirtland and a former Blue Book investigator. (He is mentioned
in the October 28, 1980, "Multipurpose Internal OSI Form"
reporting on Doty and Miller's meeting with Bennewitz.) She knew
Miller from an earlier telephone conversation, when she had
called to ask him about Bennewitz's claims, in which she had a
considerable interest. Miller asked for a copy of Strange
Harvest. Later he had given Howe his home phone number and said
to contact him if she ever found herself in Albuquerque. So she
called and asked if he would pick her up at the airport.
Miller drove Howe to his house. On the way Howe asked him a
number of questions but got little in the way of answers. One
question he did not answer was whether he is the "Miller"
mentioned in the Aquarius document. When they got to Miller's
residence, Miller called Doty at his home, and Doty arrived a few
minutes later, responding aggressively to Howe's question about
where he had been. He claimed to have been at the airport all
along; where had she been? "Perhaps," Howe would write, "he had
decided he didn't want to go through with the meeting, and it was
acceptable in his world to leave me stranded at the airport-until
Jerry Miller called his house" (Howe, 1989).
On the way to Kirtland, Howe asked Doty, whose manner remained
both defiant and nervous, if he knew anything about the Holloman
landing. Doty said it happened but that Robert Emenegger had the
date wrong; it was not May 1971 but April 25, 1964-12 Hours after
a much-publicized CE3 reported by Socorro, New Mexico, policeman
Lonnie Zamora. (Zamora said he had seen an egg-shaped object on
the ground. Standing near it were two child-sized beings in white
suits.) Military and scientific personnel at the base knew a
landing was coming, but "someone blew the time and coordinates"
and an "advance military scout ship" had come down at the wrong
time and place, to be observed by Zamora. When three UFOs
appeared at Holloman at six o'clock the following morning, one
landed while the other two hovered overhead. During the meeting
between the UFO beings and a government party, the preserved
bodies of dead aliens had been given to the aliens , who in turn
had returned something unspecified. Five ground and aerial
cameras recorded this event.
At the Kirtland gate Doty waved to the guard and was let
through. They went to a small white and gray building. Doty took
her to what he described as "my - boss' office." Doty seemed
unwilling to discuss the Ellsworth case, the ostensible reason
for the interview, but had much to say about other matters. First
he asked Howe to move from the chair on which she was sitting to
another in the middle of the room. Howe surmised that this was to
facilitate the surreptitious recording of their conversation, but
Doty said only, "Eyes can see through windows."
"My superiors have asked me to show you this," he said. He
produced a brown envelope he had taken from a drawer in the desk
at which he was sitting and withdrew several sheets of white
paper. As he handed them to Howe, he warned her that they could
not be copied; all she could do was read them in his presence and
ask questions.
The document gave no indication anywhere as to which government,
military or scientific agency (if any) had prepared the report,
titled A Briefing Paper for the President of the United States on
the Subject of Unidentified Flying Vehicles. The title did not
specify which President it had in mind, nor did the document list
a date (so far as Howe recalls today) which would have linked it
to a particular administration.
The first paragraph, written--as was everything that followed--
in what Howe characterizes as "dry bureaucratese," listed dates
and locations of crashes and retrievals of UFOs and their
occupants. The latter were invariably described as 3 1/2 to four
feet tall, gray-skinned and hairless, with oversized heads, large
eyes and no noses. It was now known, the document stated on a
subsequent page, that these beings, from a nearby solar system,
have been here for many thousands of years. Through genetic
manipulation they influenced the course of human evolution and in
a sense created us. They had also helped shape our religious
beliefs.
The July 1947 Roswell crash was mentioned; so, however, was
another one at Roswell in 1949. Investigators at the site found
five bodies and one living alien, who was taken to a safe house
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory north of Albuquerque. The
aliens, small gray-skinned humanoids, were known as
"extraterrestrial biological entities" and the living one was
called "EBE" (ee-buh). EBE was befriended (if that was the word)
by an Air Force officer, but the being died of unknown causes on
June 18, 1952. (EBE's friend, by 1964 a colonel, was among those
who were there to greet the aliens who landed at Holloman.)
Subsequently, it would be referred to as EBE-1, since in later
years another such being, EBE-2, would take up residence in a
safe house. After that, a third, EBE-3, appeared on the scene and
was now living in secret at an American base.
The briefing paper said other crashes had occurred one near
Kingman, Arizona, another just south of Texas in northern Mexico.
It also mentioned the Aztec crash- The wreckage and bodies had
been removed to such facilities as Los Alamos laboratory and
Wright-Patterson AFB. A number of highly classified projects
dealt with these materials. They included Snowbird (research and
development from the study of an intact spacecraft left by the
aliens as a gift) and Aquarius (the umbrella operation under
which the research and contact efforts were coordinated). Project
Sigma was the ongoing electronic communications effort. There was
also a defunct project Garnet, intended to investigate
extraterrestrial influence on human evolution. According to the
document, extraterrestrials have appeared at various intervals in
human history-25,000, 15,000, 5000 and 2500 years ago as well as
now--to manipulate human and other DNA.
One paragraph stated briefly, "Two thousand years ago
extraterrestrials created a being" who was placed here to teach
peace and love. Elsewhere a passing mention was made of another
group of EBEs, called the "Talls."
The paper said Project Blue Book had existed solely to take heat
off the Air Force and to draw attention away from the real
projects. Doty mentioned an "MJ-12," explaining that "MJ" stood
for "Majority." It was a policy-making body whose membership
consisted of 12 very high-ranking government scientists, military
officers and intelligence officials. These were the men who made
the decisions governing the cover-up and the contacts.
Doty said Howe would be given thousands of feet of film of
crashed discs, bodies, EBE-1 and the Holloman landing and
meeting. She could use this material in her documentary to tell
the story of how U.S. officials learned that the earth is being
visited and what they have done about it. "We want you to do the
film," Howe quotes him as saying.
When Howe asked why she, not the New York Times, the Washington
Post or 60 Minutes, was getting this, the story of the
millennium, Doty replied bluntly that an individual media person
is easier to manipulate and discredit than a major organization
with expensive attorneys. He said that another plan to release
the information, through Emenegger and Sandler, had been halted
because political conditions were not right.
Over the next weeks Howe had a number of phone conversations
with Doty, mostly about technical problems related to converting
old film to videotape. She spoke on several occasions with three
other men but did not meet them personally.
Doty suggested that eventually she might be allowed to film an
interview with EBE-3. But the current film project was to have a
historical emphasis; it would deal with events between 1949 and
1964. If at some point she did meet EBE-3, however, there was no
way she could prepare herself for the "shock and fear" of meeting
an alien being.
Howe, of course, had informed her HBO contacts, Jean Abounader
and her superior Bridgett Potter, of these extraordinary
developments. Howe urged them to prepare themselves, legally and
otherwise, for the repercussions that would surely follow the
release of the film. The HBO people told her she would have to
secure a letter of intent from the U.S. government with a
legally-binding commitment to release the promised film footage.
When Howe called Doty about it, he said, "I'll work on it." He
said he would mail the letter directly to HBO.
Then HBO told her it would not authorize funds for the film
production until all the evidence was in hand and, as Potter put
it, Howe had the "President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of
State and Joint Chiefs of Staff to back it up" (Howe, 1989). But
proceed anyway, Howe was told. Now she was furious at both HBO
and Doty.
When she called him at the base, he remarked that he had good
news and bad news. She and a small crew would soon be able to
interview the retired colonel (then a captain) who had spent
three years with EBE-1. The bad news was that it would be three
months before the thousands of feet of film of EBE-1 and the
Holloman landing/contact would be available. Meanwhile, before
she could screen the footage, Howe would have to sign three
security oaths and undergo a background check. She would also
have to supply photographs of all the technical assistants who
would accompany her to the interview.
The interview was repeatedly set up and canceled. Then in June
Doty called to say he was officially out of the project. This was
a blow because Doty was the only one she could call. She did not
know how to get in touch with the others and always had to wait
for them to contact her.
By October the contacts had decreased. The same month her
contract with HBO expired. All she had was the name of the
Washington contact. In March 1984 this individual called her
office three times, although she was out of town working on a
non-UFO story at the time. "Upon returning home," she writes, "I
learned the man was contacting me to explain there would be
further delays in the film project after the November 1984
election" (Howe, 1989).
For Howe that was the end of the matter, except for a brief
sequel. On March 5, 1988, Doty wrote ufologist Larry W. Bryant,
who had unsuccessfully sought access to Doty's military records
through the Freedom of Information Act, and denied that he had
ever discussed government UFO secrets or promised footage of
crashed discs, bodies and live EBEs. Howe responded by making a
sworn statement about the meeting an producing copies of her
correspondence from the period with both Doty and HBO.
In 1989 Moore said that "in early 1983 I became aware that Rick
[Doty] was involved with a team of several others, including one
fellow from Denver that I knew of and at least one who was
working out of Washington, D.C., in playing an elaborate
disinformation scheme against a prominent UfO researcher who, at
the time, had close connections with a major television film
company interested in doing a UFO documentary." He was referring
to Howe, of course. The episode was a counterintelligence sting
operation, part of the "wall of disinformation" intended to
"confuse" the Bennewitz issue and to "call his credibility into
question." Because of Howe's interest in Bennewitz's work,
according to Moore, "certain elements within the intelligence
community were concerned that the story of his having intercepted
low frequency electromagnetic emissions from the Coyote Canyon
area of the Kirtland/Sandia complex would end up as part of a
feature film. Since this in turn might influence others (possibly
even the Russians) to attempt similar experiments, someone in a
control position apparently felt it had to be stopped before it
got out of hand." In his observation, Moore said, "the government
seemed hell bent on severing the ties that existed between [Howe]
and [HBO]" (Moore, 1989b).
Doty's assertion that Howe had misrepresented their meeting was
not to be taken seriously, according to Moore, since Doty was
bound by a security oath and could not discuss the matter freely
Moore said that the Aztec crash, known beyond reasonable doubt
never to have occurred, was something Doty had added to the
document after learning from Moore of his recent investigation of
the hoax.
In December 1984, in the midst of continuing contact with their
own sources (Doty and a number of others) who claimed to be
leaking the secret of the cover-up, Moore's associate Jaime
Shandera received a roll of 35mm film containing, it turned out
what purported to be a briefing paper dated November 18, 1952,
and intended for president-elect Eisenhower. The purported
author, Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, reported that an "Operation
Majestic-12," consisting of a dozen top scientists, military
officers and intelligence specialists, had been set up by
presidential order on September 24, 1947, to study the Roswell
remains and the four humanoid bodies that had been recovered
nearby. The document report that the team directed by MJ12 member
and physiologist Detlev Bronk "has suggested the term 'Extra-
terrestrial Biological Entities', or 'EBEs', be adopted as the
standard term of reference for these creatures until such time as
a more definitive designation can be agreed upon." Brief mention
is also made of a December 6, 1950, crash along the Texas-Mexico
border. Nothing is said, however, about live aliens or
communications with them.
In July 1985 Moore and Shandera, acting on tips from their
sources, traveled to Washington and spent a few days going
through recently declassified documents in Record Group 341,
including Top Secret Air Force intelligence files from USAF
Headquarters. In the 126th box whose contents they examined, they
found a brief memo dated July 14, 1954, from Robert Cutler,
Special Assistant to the President, to Gen. Nathan Twining. It
says "The president has decided that the MJ-12/SSP [Special
Studies Project] briefing should take place during the already
scheduled White House meeting of July 16 rather than following it
as previously intended. More precise arrangements will be
explained to you upon your arrival. Your concurrence in the above
change of arrangements is assumed" (Friedman, 1987).
The Cutler/Twining memo, as it would be called in the
controversies that erupted after Moore released the MJ-12
document to the world in the spring of 1987, is the only official
document-not to be confused with such disputed ones as the
November 17, 1980, Aquarius document-to mention MJ-12. (Several
critics of the MJ-12 affair have questioned the memo's
authenticity as well, but so far without unambiguous success.)
The memo does not, of course, say what the MJ12 Special Studies
Project was.
MJ-12 Goes Public: Just prior to Moore's release of the MJ-12
briefing paper, another copy was leaked to British ufologist
Timothy Good, who took his copy to the press. The first newspaper
article on it appeared in the London Observer of May 31, 1987,
and soon it was the subject of pieces in the New York Times,
Washington Post and ABC-TV's Nightline. It was also denounced,
not altogether persuasively, both by professional debunkers and
by many ufologists. The dispute would rage without resolution
well into 1989, when critics discovered that President Truman's
signature on the September 24, 1947, executive order (appended to
the briefing paper) was exactly like his signature on an
undisputed, UFO-unrelated October 1, 1947, letter to his science
adviser (and supposed MJ-12 member) Vannevar Bush. To all
appearances a forger had appended a real signature to a fake
letter. The MJ-12 document began to look like another
disinformation scheme.
Although acutely aware of the mass of disinformation circulating
throughout the UFO community, Moore remained convinced that at
least some of the information his own sources were giving him was
authentic. In 1988 he provided two of his sources, "Falcon" (Sgt.
Doty according to some) and "Condor" (later claimed to be former
U.S. Air Force Capt. Robert Collins), to a television production
company. (Moore and Shandera had given them avian names and
called the sources collectively "the birds.") UFO Cover-up . . .
Live, a two-hour program, aired in October 1988, with Falcon and
Condor, their faces shaded, their voices altered, relating the
same tales with which they had regaled Moore and Shandera. The
show, almost universally judged a laughable embarrassment, was
most remembered for the informants' statements that the aliens
favored ancient Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. Critics
found the latter allegation especially hilarious.
Lear's Conspiracy Theory: Events on the UFO scene were taking a
yet more bizarre turn that same year as even wilder tales began
to circulate. The first to tell them was John Lear, a pilot with
a background in the CIA and the estranged son of aviation legend
William P. Lear. Lear had surfaced two or three years earlier,
but aside from his famous father there seemed little to
distinguish him from any of hundreds of other UFO buffs who
subscribe to the field's publications and show up at its
conferences. But then he started claiming that unnamed sources
had told him of extraordinary events which made those told by
Doty and the birds sound like bland and inconsequential
anecdotes.
According to Lear, not just a few but dozens of flying saucers
had crashed over the years. In 1962 the U.S. government started
Project Redlight to find a way to fly the recovered craft, some
relatively intact. A similar project exists even now and is run
out of supersecret military installation; one is Area 51
(specifically at a facility called S4) at the Nevada Test Site
and the other is set up near Dulce, New Mexico. These areas,
unfortunately, may no longer be under the control of the
government or even of the human race. In the late 1960s an
official agency so secret that not even the President may know of
it had made an agreement with the aliens. In exchange for
extraterrestrial technology the secret government would permit
(or at least not interfere with) a limited number of abductions
of human beings; the aliens, however, were to provide a list of
those they planned to kidnap.
All went relatively well for a few years. Then in 1973 the
government discovered that thousands of persons who were not on
the alien's list were being abducted. The resulting tensions led
to an altercation in 1978 or 1979. The aliens held and then
killed 44 top scientists as well as a number of Delta force
troops who had tried to free them. Ever since, frantic efforts,
of which the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is the
most visible manifestation, have been made to develop a defense
against the extraterrestrials, who are busy putting implants into
abductees (as many as one in 10 Americans) to control their
behavior. At some time in the near future these people will be
used for some unknown, apparently sinister, alien purpose. Even
worse than all this, though, is the aliens' interest in Human
flesh. Sex and other organs are taken from both human beings and
cattle and used to create androids in giant vats located in
underground laboratories at Area 51 and Dulce. The
extraterrestrials, from an ancient race near the end of its
evolution, also use materials from human body parts as a method
of biological rejuvenation. ("In order to sustain themselves," he
said, "they use an enzyme or hormonal secretion obtained from the
tissue that they extract from humans and animals. The secretions
are then mixed with hydrogen peroxide and applied on the skin by
spreading or dipping parts of their bodies in the solution. The
body absorbs the solution, then excretes the waste back through
the skin" [Berk and Renzi, 1988].)
One of Lear's major sources was Bennewitz, who had first heard
these scary stories from AFOSI personnel at Kirtland in the early
1980s. By this time Bennewitz had become something of a guru to a
small group of UFO enthusiasts, Linda Howe among them, who
believed extraterrestrials were mutilating cattle and had no
trouble believing they might do the same thing to people. Also
Lear, whose political views are far to the right of center, was
linking his UFO beliefs with conspiracy theories about a
malevolent secret American government which was attempting to use
the aliens for its own purposes, including enslavement of the
world's people through drug addiction. A considerable body of
rightwing conspiracy literature, some with barely-concealed anti-
Semitic overtones, was making similar charges. Lear himself was
not anti-Semitic, but he did share conspiracy beliefs with those
who were.
Another of his claimed sources was an unnamed physicist who,
Lear claimed, had actually worked at S4. To the many ufologists
who rejected Lear's stories as paranoid, lunatic or fabricated
(though not by the patently-sincere Lear), there was widespread
skepticism about this physicist's existence. It turned out that
he did indeed exist. His name is Robert Lazar, who, according to
a story broken by reporter George Knapp on KLAS-TV, the ABC
affiliate in Las Vegas, on November 11 and 13, 1989, claims to
have worked on alien technology projects at Area 51. Lazar, whose
story is being investigated by both ufologists and mainstream
journalists, has not endorsed Lear's claims about human-alien
treaties, man-eating ETs or any of the rest and has distanced
himself from Lear and his associates. His claims, while fantastic
by most standards, are modest next to Lears.
Cooper's Conspiracy Theory: Soon Lear was joined by someone with
an even bigger supply of fabulous yarns: one Milton William
Cooper. Cooper surfaced on December 18, 1988, when his account of
the fantastic secrets he learned while a Naval petty officer
appeared on a computer network subscribed to by ufologists and
others interested in anomalous phenomena. Cooper said that while
working as a quartermaster with an intelligence team for Adm.
Bernard Clarey, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Meet, in the
early 1970s he saw two documents, Project Grudge Special Report
13 and a Majority briefing. (In conventional UFO history, Grudge
was the second public Air Force UFO project, superseding the
original Sign, in early 1949 and lasting until late 1951, when it
was renamed Blue Book. Whereas Sign investigators at one time
concluded UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin--a conclusion the
Air force leadership found unacceptable--Grudge, as its name
suggests coincidentally or otherwise, was known for its hostility
to the idea of UFOs and for its eagerness to assign conventional
explanations, warranted or otherwise, to the sighting reports
that came its way.) Cooper's account of what was in these reports
is much like the by-now familiar story of crashes, bodies,
contacts and projects, with some elaborations. Moreover, he said
the aliens were called "ALFs" (which as any television viewer
knows, stands for Alien Life forms) and the "M" in MJ-12 is for
Majority not Majestic. Later he would say he had seen photographs
of aliens, including a type he called the "big-nosed grays"-like
those that supposedly landed at Holloman in 1964 or 1971. The
U.S. government was in contact with them and alien-technology
projects were going on at Area 51.
If this sounded like a rehash of Moore and Lear, that was only
because Cooper had yet to pull out all the stops. On May 23,
1989, Cooper produced a 25-page document titled The Secret
Government: The Origin, Identity And Purpose of MJ-12. He
presented it as a lecture in Las Vegas a few weeks later. In
Cooper's version of the evolving legend, the "secret government,"
an unscrupulous group of covert CIA and other intelligence
operatives who keep many of their activities sealed from even the
President's knowledge, runs the country. One of its first acts
was to murder one-time Secretary of Defense (and alleged early
MJ-12 member) James Forrestal the death was made to look like
suicide-because he threatened to expose the UFO cover-up.
Nonetheless, President Truman, fearing an invasion from outer
space, kept other nations, including the Soviet Union, abreast of
developments. But keeping all this secret was a real problem, so
an international secret society known as the Bilderbergers,
headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, was formed. Soon it became
a secret world government and "now controls everything," Cooper
said.
All the while flying saucers were dropping like flies out of the
heavens. In 1953 there were 10 crashes in the United States
alone. Also that year, astronomers observed huge spaceships
heading toward the earth and in time entering into orbit around
the equator. Project Plato was established to effect
communication with these new aliens. One of the ships landed and
a face-to-face meeting took place, and plans for diplomatic
relations were laid. Meanwhile a race of human-looking aliens
warned the U.S. government that the new visitors were not to be
trusted and that if the government got rid of its nuclear
weapons, the human aliens would help us in our spiritual
development, which would keep us from destroying ourselves
through wars and environmental pollution. The government rejected
these overtures.
The big-nosed grays, the ones who had been orbiting the equator,
landed again, this time at Holloman AFB, in 1954 and reached an
agreement with the U.S. government. These beings stated that they
were from a dying planet that orbits Betelguese. At some point in
the not too distant future, they said, they would have to leave
there for good. A second meeting took place not long afterwards
at Edwards AFB in California. This time President Eisenhower was
there to sign a formal treaty and to meet the first alien
ambassador, "His Omnipotent Highness Krlll," pronounced Krill.
He, in common with his fellow space travelers, wore a trilateral
insignia on his uniform; the same design appears on all
Betelguese spacecraft.
According to Cooper's account, the treaty's provisions were
these: Neither side would interfere in the affairs of the other.
The aliens would abduct humans from time to time and would return
them unharmed, with no memory of the event. It would provide a
list of names of those it was going to take. The U.S. government
would keep the aliens' presence a secret and it would receive
advanced technology from them. The two sides would exchange 16
individuals each for the purpose of learning from and teaching
each other. The aliens would stay on earth and the humans would
go to the other planet, then return after a specified period of
time. The two sides would jointly occupy huge underground bases
which would be constructed at hidden locations in the Southwest.
(It should be noted that the people listed as members of MJ-12
are largely from the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral Commission. These organizations play a prominent role
in conspiracy theories of the far right. In a book on the subject
George Johnson writes, "After the Holocaust of World War II,
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories became repugnant to all but the
fringe of the American right. Populist fears of the power of the
rich became focused instead on organizations that promote
international capitalism, such as the Trilateral Commission, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers, a group of
world leaders and businesspeople who held one of their early
conferences on international relations at the Bilderberg Hotel in
the Netherlands" [Johnson, 1983]. According to Cooper, the
trilateral emblem is taken directly from the alien flag. He adds
that under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter MJ-12 became known
as the 50 Committee. Under Reagan it was renamed the PI-40
Committee.)
By 1955, during the Eisenhower years, Cooper charged, officials
learned for certain what they had already begun to suspect a year
earlier: that the aliens had broken the treaty before the ink on
it had time to dry. They were killing and mutilating both human
beings and animals, failing to supply a complete list of
abductees, and not returning some of those they had taken. On top
of that, they were conspiring with the Soviets, manipulating
society through occultism, witchcraft, religion and secret
organizations. Eisenhower prepared a secret executive memo, NSC
5411, ordering a study group of 35 top members (the "Jason
Society") associated with the Council on Foreign Relations to
"examine aIl the facts, evidence, lies, and deception and
discover the truth of the alien question" (Cooper, 1989). Because
the resulting meetings were held at Quantico Marine Base, they
were called the Quantico meetings. Those participating included
Edward Teller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Nelson
Rockefeller.
The group decided that the danger to established social,
economic, religious and political institutions was so grave that
no one must know about the aliens, not even Congress. That meant
that alternative sources of funding would have to be found. It
also concluded that the aliens were using human organs and tissue
to replenish their deteriorating genetic structure.
Further, according to Cooper, overtures were made to the Soviet
Union and other nations so that all the earth could join together
to deal with the alien menace. Research into sophisticated new
weapons systems commenced. Intelligence sources penetrated the
Vatican hoping to learn the Fatima prophecy which had been kept
secret ever since 1917. It was suspected that the Fatima,
Portugal, "miracle" was an episode of alien manipulation. As it
turned out, the prophecy stated that in 1992 a child would unite
the world under the banner of a false religion. By 1995 people
would figure out that he was the Anti-Christ. That same year
World War III would begin when an alliance of Arab nations
invaded Israel. This would lead to nuclear war in 1999. The next
four years would see horrible death and suffering all over the
planet. Christ would return in 2011.
When confronted about this, claimed Cooper, the aliens candidly
acknowledged it was true. They knew it because they had traveled
into the future via time machine and observed it with their own
eyes. They added that they created us through genetic
manipulation. Later the Americans and the Soviets also developed
time travel and confirmed the Fatima/ET vision of the future.
In 1957 the Jason group met again, by order of Eisenhower, to
decide what to do. It came up with three alternatives: (l) Use
nuclear bombs to blow holes in the stratosphere so that pollution
could escape into space. (2) Build a huge network of tunnels
under the earth and save enough human beings of varying cultures,
occupations and talents so that the race could reemerge after the
nuclear and environmental catastrophes to come. Everybody else-
i.e., the rest of humanity--would be left on the surface
presumably to die. (3) Employ alien and terrestrial technology to
leave earth and colonize the moon (code name "Adam") and Mars
("Eve"). The first alternative was deemed impractical, so the
Americans and the Soviets started working on the other two.
Meanwhile they decided that the population would have to be
controlled, which could be done most easily by killing off as
many "undesirables" as possible. Thus AIDS and other deadly
diseases were introduced into the population. Another idea to
raise needed funds was quickly acted on: sell drugs on a massive
scale. An ambitious young member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a Texas oil-company president named George Bush, was
put in charge of the project, with the aid of the CIA. "The plan
worked better than anyone had thought " CooPer said. "The CIA now
controls all the worlds [sic] illegal drug markets" (Cooper,
1989).
Unknown to just about everybody, a secret American/Soviet/alien
space base existed on the dark side of the moon. By the early
1960s human colonies were thriving on the surface of Mars. All
the while the naive people of the earth were led to believe the
Soviets and the Americans were something other than the closest
allies. But Cooper's story got even more bizarre and byzantine.
He claimed that in 1963, when President Kennedy found out some
of what was going on, he gave an ultimatum to MJ-12: get out of
the drug business. He also declared that in 1964 he would tell
the American people about the alien visitation. Agents of MJ-12
ordered his assassination. Kennedy was murdered in full view of
many hundreds of onlookers, none of whom apparently noticed, by
the Secret Service agent driving the President's car in the
motorcade.
In 1969, reported Cooper, a confrontation between human
scientists and aliens at the Dulce laboratory resulted in the
former's being taken hostage by the latter. Soldiers who tried to
free the scientists were killed, unable to overcome the superior
alien weapons. The incident led to a two-year rupture in
relations. The alliance was resumed in 1971 and continues to this
day, even as a vast invisible financial empire run by the CIA,
the NSA and the Council on Foreign Relations runs drugs, launders
money and encourages massive street crime so that Americans will
be susceptible to gun-control legislation. The CIA has gone so
far as to employ drugs and hypnosis to cause mentally-unstable
individuals to commit mass murder of schoolchildren and other
innocents, the point being to encourage anti-gun hysteria. All of
this is part of the plot, aided and abetted by the mass media
(also under the secret government's control), to so scare
Americans that they will soon accept the declaration of martial
law when that happens, people will be rounded up and put in
concentration camps already in place. From there they will be
flown to the moon and Mars to work as slave labor in the space
colonies.
The conspirators already run the world. As Cooper put it, "Even
a cursory investigation by the most inexperienced researcher will
show that the members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral commission control the major foundations, all of the
major media and publishing interests, the largest banks, all the
major corporations, the - upper echelons of the government, and
many other vital interests."
Reaction to Lear and Cooper: Whereas Lear had felt some
obligation to name a source or two, or at least to mutter
something about "unnamed sources," Cooper told his lurid and
outlandish tale as if it were so self-evidently true that sources
or supporting data were irrelevant. And to the enthusiastic
audiences flocking to Cooper's lectures, no evidence was
necessary. By the fall of the year Cooper was telling his
stories--whose sources were, in fact, flying-saucer folklore,
AFOSI disinformation unleashed during the Bennewitz episode,
conspiracy literature, and outright fiction--to large crowds of
Californians willing to pay $l0 or $15 apiece for the thrill of
being scared silly.
Lear and Cooper soon were joined by two other tellers of tales
of UFO horrors and Trilateral conspiracies, William English and
John Grace (who goes under the pseudonym "Val Valarian" and heads
the Nevada Aerial Research Group in Las Vegas).
Few if any mainstream ufologists took these stories seriously
and at first treated them as something of a bad joke. But when it
became clear that Lear, Cooper and company were commanding
significant media attention and finding a following among the
larger public interested in ufology's fringes, where a claim's
inherent improbability had never been seen as an obstacle to
believe in it, the leaders of the UFO community grew ever more
alarmed.
One leader who was not immediately alarmed was Walter H. Andrus,
Jr., director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the two
largest UFO organizations in the United States (the other being
the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies [CUFOS]). In 1987,
before Lear had proposed what some wags would call the Dark Side
Hypothesis, he had offered to host the 1989 MUFON conference in
Las Vegas. Andrus agreed. But as Lear's true beliefs became
known, leading figures within MUFON expressed concern about
Lear's role in the conference. When Andrus failed to respond
quickly, MUFON officials were infuriated.
Facing a possible palace revolt, Andrus informed Lear that
Cooper, whom Lear had invited to speak at the conference, was not
an acceptable choice. But to the critics on the MUFON board and
elsewhere in the organization, this was hardly enough. One of
them, longtime ufologist Richard Hall, said this was "like
putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage" (Hall, 1989). In a heated
telephone exchange Andrus called Hall's objections to Lear "just
one man's opinion" and claimed support, which turned out not to
exist, from other MUFON notables. In a widely-distributed open
letter to Andrus, Hall wrote, "Having Lear run the symposium and
be a major speaker at it is comparable to NICAP in the 1960's
having George Adamski run a NICAP conference! " (NICAP, the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, of which
Hall was executive secretary in the late 1950s and much of the
1960s, was a conservative UFO-research organization which
attacked as fraudulent the claims of Adamski, who wrote books
about his meetings with Venusians and distributed photographs of
what he said were their spaceships.) Hall went on, "You seem to
be going for the colorful and the spectacular rather than for the
critical-minded approach of science; you even expressed the view-
in effect-that having a panel to question Lear critically would
be good show biz and the 'highlight' of the symposium. Maybe so,
but it obviously would dominate the entire program, grab off all
major news media attention, and put UFO research in the worst
possible light." Hall declared, "I am hereby resigning from the
MUFON Board and I request that my name be removed from all MUFON
publications or papers that indicate me to be a Board Member."
Fearing more resignations, Andrus moved to make Lear barely more
than a guest at his own conference. He was not to lecture there,
as previously planned, and hosting duties would be handled, for
the most part, by others. Lear ended up arranging an "alternative
conference" at which he, Cooper, English and Don Ecker presented
the latest elaborations on the Dark Side Hypothesis.
Meanwhile another storm was brewing. On March 1, 1989, an
Albuquerque ufologist, Robert Hastings, issued a 13-page
statement, with 37 pages of appended documents, and mailed it to
many of ufology's most prominent individuals. Hastings opened
with these remarks:
"First, it has been established that 'Falcon,' one of the
principle [sic] sources of the MJ-12 material, is Richard C.
Doty, formerly attached to District 17 Air Force Office of
Special Investigations (AFOSI) at Kirtland Air Force Base,
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sgt. Doty retired from the U.S. Air
Force on October 1, 1988.
"How do I know that Doty is 'Falcon?' During a recent telephone
conversation, Linda Moulton Howe told me that when Sgt. Doty
invited her to his office at Kirtland AFB in early April 1983,
and showed her a purportedly authentic U.S. government document
on UFOs, he identified himself as code-name 'Falcon' and stated
that it was Bill Moore who had given him that name.
"Also, in early December 1988, a ranking member of the
production team responsible for the 'UFO Cover Up?-Live'
television documentary confirmed that Doty is 'Falcon.' This same
individual also identified the second MJ-12 source who appeared
on the program, 'Condor' as Robert Collins who was, until
recently, a Captain in the U.S. Air Force. Like Doty, he was
stationed at KAFB when he left the service late last year."
(Collins, a scientist, was assigned to the plasma physics group
at Sandia National Laboratories on the Kirtland Air Force Base.
Following his retirement he moved to Indiana and remains actively
interested in UFOs.)
Hastings reviewed evidence of Doty's involvement in the
concoction of various questionable documents and stories,
including the Ellsworth tale and the Weitzel affair. He also
noted important discrepancies between the paper Howe saw and the
MJ-12 briefing document. For example, while the first mentioned
the alleged Aztec crash, the second said nothing about it at all.
Hastings wondered, "[I]f the briefing paper that Sgt. Doty showed
to Linda Howe was genuine, what does that say about the accuracy
(and authenticity) of the Eisenhower document? If, on the other
hand, the former was bogus and was meant to mislead Howe for some
reason, what does that say about Richard 'Falcon' Doty's
reliability as a source for MJ-12 material as a whole?"
(Hastings, 1989). Hastings also had much critical to say about
Moore, especially about an incident in which Moore had flashed a
badge in front of ufologist/cover-up investigator Lee Graham and
indicated he was working with the government on a project to
release UFO information. (Moore would characterize this as a
misguided practical joke.)
Both Moore and Doty denied that the latter was Falcon. They
claimed Doty had been given that pseudonym long after the 1983
meeting with Howe. Howe, however, stuck by her account. Moore and
Doty said the real Falcon, an older man than Doty had been in the
studio audience as the video of his interview was being broadcast
on UFO Cover-up. . . Live. Doty himself was in New Mexico
training with the state police.
Moore's Confession: By mid-1989 the two most controversial
figures in ufology were Moore and Lear. Moore's MUFON lecture on
July 1 did nothing to quiet his legion of critics. On his arrival
in Las Vegas, Moore checked into a different hotel from the one
at which the conference was being held. He already had refused to
submit his paper for publication in the symposium proceedings, so
no one knew what he would say. He had also stipulated that he
would accept no questions from the floor.
Moore's speech stunned and angered much of the audience. At one
point the shouts and jeers of Lear's partisans brought
proceedings to a halt until order was restored. Moore finished
and exited immediately. He left Las Vegas not long afterwards.
In his lecture Moore spoke candidly, for the first time, of his
part in the counterintelligence operation against Bennewitz. "My
role in the affair," he said, "was largely that of a freelancer
providing information on Paul's current thinking and activities."
Doty, "faithfully carrying out orders which he personally found
distasteful," was one of those involved in the effort to confuse
and discredit Bennewitz. Because of his success at this effort,
Moore suggested, Doty was chosen by the real "Falcon" as "liaison
person, although I really don't know. Frankly, I don't believe
that Doty does either. In my opinion he was simply a pawn in a
much larger game, just as I was."
From disinformation passed on by AFOSI sources, and his own
observations and guesses, according to Moore, "by mid-1982"
Bennewitz had put together a story that "contained virtually all
of the elements found in the current crop of rumors being
circulated around the UFO community." Moore was referring to the
outlandish tales Lear and Cooper were telling. Moore said that
"when I first ran into the disinformation operation . . . being
run on Bennewitz . . . [i)t seemed to me . . . I was in a rather
unique position. There I was with my foot . . . in the door of a
secret counterintelligence game that gave every appearance of
being somehow directly connected to a high-level government UFO
project, and, judging by the positions of the people I knew to be
directly involved with it, definitely had something to do with
national security! There was no way I was going to allow the
opportunity to pass me by without learning at least something
about what was going on. . . . I would play the disinformation
game, get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those
directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly
what they wanted me to do, and all the while continue to burrow
my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about
who was directing it and why." Some of the same people who were
passing alleged UFO secrets on to Moore were also involved in the
operation against Bennewitz. Moore knew that some of the material
he was getting--essentially a mild version of the Bennewitz
scenario, without the horror, paranoia and conspiracy--was false,
but he (along with Jaime Shandera and Stanton Friedman, to whom
he confided the cover-up story in June 1982; Friedman, however,
would not learn of Moore's role in the Bennewitz episode until
seven years later) felt that some of it was probably true, since
an invariable characteristic of disinformation is that it
contains some facts. Moore also said that Linda Howe had been the
victim of one of Doty's disinformation operations.
Before he stopped cooperating with such schemes in 1984, Moore
said, he had given "routine information" to AFOSI about certain
other individuals in the UFO community. Subsequently he claimed
that during this period this emphasis) "three other members of
the UFO community . . . were actively doing the same thing. I
have since learned of a fourth. . . . All four are prominent
individuals whose identities, if disclosed, would cause
considerable controversy in the UFO community and bring serious
embarrassment to two of its major organizations. To the best of
my knowledge, at least two of these people are still actively
involved" (Moore, 1989b).
Although he would not reveal the identities of the government
informants within ufology, Moore gave the names of several
persons "who were the subject of intelligence community interest
between 1980 and 1984." They were:
(1) Len Stringfield, a ufologist known for his interest in
crashed-disc stories; in 1980 he had been set up by a
counterintelligence operative who gave him phony pictures of what
purported to be humanoids in cold storage.
(2) The late Pete Mazzola, whose knowledge of film footage from
a never-publicized Florida UFO case was of great interest to
counterintelligence types. Moore was directed to urge Mazzola to
send the footage to ufologist Kal Korff (who knew nothing of the
scheme) for analysis; then Moore would make a copy and pass it on
to Doty. But Mazzola never got the film, despite promises, and
the incident came to nothing. "I was left with the impression,"
Moore wrote, "that the file had been intercepted and the
witnesses somehow persuaded to cease communication with Mazzola."
(3) Peter Gersten, legal counsel for Citizens Against UFO
Secrecy (CAUS), who had spearheaded a (largely unsuccessful)
legal suit against the NSA seeking UFO information.
(4) Larry Fawcett, an official of CAUS and coauthor of a book on
the cover-up, Clear Intent (1984).
(5) James and Coral Lorenzen, the directors of the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) periodically "subjects of
on-again, off again interest . . . mostly passive monitoring
rather than active meddling," according to Moore. Between 1980
and 1982 APRO employed a "cooperative" secretary who passed on
confidential material to counterintelligence personnel.
(6) Larry W. Bryant, who was battling without success in the
courts to have UFO secrets revealed. Moore said, "His name came
up often in discussions but I never had any direct involvement in
whatever activities revolved around him."
These revelations sent shock waves through the UFO community. In
September CAUS devoted virtually all of an issue of its magazine
Just Cause to a harshly critical review of Moore's activities.
Barry Greenwood declared that the "outrageousness" of Moore's
conduct "cannot be described. Moore, one of the major critics of
government secrecy on UFOs, had covertly informed on people who
thought he was their friend and colleague. Knowing full well that
the government people with whom he was dealing were active
disinformants, Moore pursued a relationship with them and
observed the deterioration of Paul Bennewitz'[s] physical and
mental health. . . . Moore reported the effects of the false
information regularly to some of the very same people who were
'doing it' to Paul. And Moore boasted in his speech as to how
effective it was" (Greenwood, 1989). Greenwood complained further
about Moore's admission that on the disastrous Cover-up . . .
Live show Falcon and Condor had said things that they knew were
untrue. "In the rare situation where two hours of prime time
television are given over to a favorable presentation of UFOs,
here we have a fair portion of the last hour wasted in presenting
what Moore admits to be false data. . . . Yet he saw fit to go
ahead and carry on a charade, making UFO research look ridiculous
in the process. Remarks by Falcon and Condor about the aliens'
lifestyle and preference for Tibetan music and strawberry ice
cream were laughable." So far as Greenwood and CAUS, skeptical of
the MJ-12 briefing document from the first, were concerned, "July
1, 1989, may well be remembered in the history of UFO research as
the day when the 'Majestic 12' story came crashing to Earth in a
heap of rubble. Cause of death: Suicide!"
Nonetheless it seemed unlikely that MJ-12, EBEs, and other
cover-up matters would pass away soon. The Dark Siders appeared
well on their way to starting a new occult movement in America
and elsewhere. Among movie conservative ufologists many
legitimate questions about conceivably more substantive matters
remained to be answered. A reinvestigation of the Roswell
incident by Don Schmitt and Kevin D. Randle of CUFOS produced
what appeared to be solid new evidence of a UFO crash and cover
up. The emergence of Robert Lazar, who even a mainstream
journalist such as television reporter George Knapp concluded is
telling the truth as he knows it possibly suggested a degree of
substance to recurrent rumors about developments in Area 51 and
S4. Even Moore's critics were puzzled by the extraordinary
interest of intelligence operatives in ufologists and the UFO
phenomenon, going back in time long before Bennewitz's
interception of low-frequency signals at Kirtland and ahead to
the present. Why go to all this trouble and expense, with so many
persons over such a period of time, if there are no real UFO
secrets to protect?
Moore says he is still working with the "birds," who are as
active as ever. The birds tell him, he says, that disinformation
is used not only against ufologists but even against those
insiders like themselves who are privy to the cover-up. Those in
charge are "going to great lengths to mislead their own people."
At one point the birds were told that there is no substance to
abduction reports, only to learn later, by accident, that a major
high-level study had been done. "Even people with a need to know
didn't know about it," he says. "The abduction mess caused a lot
of trouble. There may have been an official admission of the
cover-up by now if the abductions had not come into prominence in
the 1980s."
As for the stories of ongoing contact between the U.S.
government and extraterrestrial biological entities, he says
there is, in his observation, a "pretty good possibility, better
than three to one," that such a thing is happening. "But I don't
think we can communicate with them. Perhaps we only intercept
their communications. Or maybe they communicate with us."
He thinks he has found MJ-12. "It's not in a place anybody
looked," he says. "Not an agency one would have expected. But
when you think about it, it fits there" (Moore, 1990).
Doty, now a New Mexico State Police officer, was decertified as
an AFOSI agent on July 15, 1986, for "misconduct" related to an
incident (not concerned with UFOs) that occurred while he was
stationed in West Germany. In August Doty requested a discharge
from the Air Force and was sent to New Jersey to be separated
from the service. But then, Doty says, the Senior Enlisted
Advisor for AFOSI made a trip to the Military Personnel Center at
Randolph AFB, Texas, and asked that Doty be reassigned to
Kirtland, where his son lived. In September Col. Richard Law,
Commander of AFOSI District 70, rescinded Doty's decertification
and assigned him to Kirtland as a services career specialist
(i.e., an Air Force recruiter). When he left the Air Force in
October 1988, he was superintendent of the 1606 Services
Squadron. Doty remains close to Moore and uncommunicative with
nearly everyone else. All he will say is that one day a book will
tell his side of the story and back it up with "Official
Government Documents" (Doty, 1989).
Sources:
Berk, Lynn, and David Renzi. "Former CIA
Pilot, Others Say Aliens Are Among Us." Las Vegas Sun (May 22,
1988).
Cannon, Martin. "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers: THe Amazing
Story of John Lear." UFO Universe 9 (MarcH 1990): 8-12.
Clark, Jerome. "Editorial: Flying Saucer Fascism." International
UFO Reporter 14, 4 (July/August 1989): 3, 22-23.
Cooper, Milton William. The Secret Government: The Origin,
Identity, and Purpose of MJ-12. Fullerton, CA: The Author, May
23, 1989.
Doty, RicHard. Letter to Philip J. Klass (May 24, 1989).
Emenegger, Robert. UFO's Past, Present and Future. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1974.
Friedman, Stanton T. "MJ-12: THe Evidence So Far." International
UFO Reporter 12, 5 (September/October 1987): 13-20.
Govt. -Alien Liaison? Top-Secret Documents. New Brunswick, NJ:
UFO Investigators League, D.d.
Greenwood, Barry. "A Majestic Deception." Just Cause 20
(September 1989): 1-14.
Greenwood, Barry. "Notes on Peter Gersten's Meeting witH SA
RicHard Doty, 1/83." Just Cause 16 (June 1988): 7.
Hall, RicHard H. Letter to Walter H. Andrus, Jr. (MarcH 18,
1989).
Hastings, Robert. The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments.
Albuquerque: THe Author, March 1, 1989.
Howe, Linda Moulton. An Alien Harvest: Further Evidence Linking
Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms.
Littleton, CO: Linda Moulton Howe Productions, 1989.
Information Originally Intended for Those in the Intelligence
Community Who Have a "Need to Know" Clearance Status. Canadian
U.F.O. Research Network: Toronto, n.d.
Johnson, George. Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and
Paranoia in American Politics. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher,
Inc., 1983.
Maccabee, Bruce, ed. Documents and Supporting Information
Related to Crashed Flying Saucers and Operation Majestic Twelve.
Mount Rainer, MD: Fund for UFO Research, 1987.
Moore, William L. "Crashed Saucers: Evidence in Search of
Proof." In Walter H. Andrus, Jr., and Richard H. Hall, eds. MUFON
1985 UFO Symposium Proceedings, 130-79. Seguin, TX: Mutual UfO
Network, Inc., 1985. Rept.: Burbank: The Author, 1985.
Moore, William L. Interview with Jerome Clark (January 5, 1990).
Moore, William L. The Roswell Investigation: Update and
Conclusions 1981. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1981. Rev. ed.: The
Roswell Investigation: New Evidence in the Search for a crashed
UFO. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1982.
Moore, William L. "UfOs and the U S Government, Part 1." Focus
4, 4-5-6 (June 30
1989a): 1-18. '
Moore, William L. "UfOs and the U S Government, part 11." Focus
4, 7-8-9 (September 30, 1989b): 1-3.
Pratt, Bob. "The Truth About the 'Ellsworth Case.'" MUFON UFO
Journal 191 (January 1984) 6-9. '
Scully, Frank. Behind the Flying Saucers. New York: Henry Holt,
1950,
Scully, Frank. "What I've Learned Since Writing 'Behind the
Flying Saucers.'" Pageant 6 (February 1951): 76-81.
Steinman, William S., with Wendelle C. Stevens. UFO Crash at
Aztec: A Well Kept Secret. Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives, 1986.
Stringfield, Leonard H. "Status Report on Alleged Alien Cadaver
Photos." MUFON UFO Journal 154 (December 1980): 11-16.
Todd, Robert G. "MJ-12 Rebuttal." MUFON UFO Journal 261 (January
1990): 17-20.
END
FILE NAME: EBE.DOC
--- FD 1.99c
* Origin: ParaNet Information Service -- Leading UFO Research Network
(1:310/9
----- EOF -----
=============================================================================
Message #799 - INFO.PARANET
Date : 25-Jan-91 14:00
From : Michael Corbin
To : All
Subject : EBE #1
Recently, Jerry Clark published the first of three volumes titled "UFOs in the
1980s," an invaluable research tool containing a host of information on the
who, where and what of UFOlogy. With his kind permission and the kind
permission of Apogee Publishing Company, we are reprinting an article taken
from that book -- Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. In this article, Jerry
culls all of the past history and controversy surrounding the MJ-12
controversy and other related material that has spewed forth from the extreme
side of UFOlogy representing the ETH such as Lear, Cooper and others. Although
this might be considered by some to be "old news," Jerry's chronology of
events shed a different light on the players that have made up this compendium
of scenarios -- aliens eating humans, genetic experimentation and the gamut of
sensationalistic information that drove Paul Bennewitz to an NBD at the kind
hands of admitted-disinformant, William L. Moore.
This article is being presented here in its entirety contained in 18 messages
including this one. The entire body of these messages are copyrighted (C)
1990 by Apogee Books with license to ParaNet(sm) Information Service for
reproduction on this forum. No further reposting or copying is allowed
without express written permission of the publisher.
This file was provided by ParaNet(sm) Information Service
and its network of international affiliates.
ParaNet has received exclusive permission to reprint this
article by the copyright holder.
============================================================
For further information on ParaNet(sm), contact:
Michael Corbin
ParaNet Information Service
P.O. Box 928
Wheatridge, CO 80034-0928
============================================================
UFOs in the 1980s
(C) 1990 by Apogee Books and Jerome Clark
Pages 85 - 109
============================================================
EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES
Perhaps the strangest and most convoluted UFO story of the 1980s
concerns allegations from various sources, some of them
individuals connected with military and intelligence agencies,
that the U.S. government not only has communicated with but has
an ongoing relationship with what are known officially as
"extraterrestrial biological entities," or EBEs.
The Emenegger/Sandler Saga: The story begins in 1973, when Robert
Emenegger and Alan Sandler, two well-connected Los Angeles
businessmen, were invited to Norton Air Force Base in California
to discuss a possible documentary film on advanced research
projects. Two military officials, one the base's head of the Air
Force Office of Special Investigations, the other, the audio-
visual director Paul Shartle, discussed a number of projects. One
of them involved UFOs. This one sounded the most interesting and
plans were launched to go ahead with a film on the subject.
Emenegger and Sandler were told of a film taken at Holloman AFB,
New Mexico, in May 1971. In October 1988, in a national
television broadcast, Shartle would declare that he had seen the
16mm film showing "three disc-shaped craft. One of the craft
landed and two of them went away." A door opened on the landed
vehicle and three beings emerged. Shartle said, "They were human-
size. They had an odd, gray complexion and a pronounced nose.
They wore tightfitting jump suits, [and] thin headdresses that
appeared to be communication devices, and in their hands they
held a 'translator.' A Holloman base commander and other Air
Force officers went out to meet them" (Howe, 1989).
Emenegger was led to believe he would be given the film for use
in his documentary. He was even taken to Norton and shown the
landing site and the building in which the spaceship had been
stored and others (Buildings 383 and 1382) in which meetings
between Air Force personnel and the aliens had been conducted
over the next several days. According to his sources, the landing
had taken place at 6 a.m. The extraterrestrials were "doctors,
professional types." Their eyes had vertical slits like a cat's
and their mouths were thin and slitlike, with no chins." All that
Emenegger was told of what occurred in the meetings was a single
stray "fact": that the military people said they were monitoring
signals from an alien group with which they were unfamiliar, and
did their ET guests know anything about them? The ETs said no.
Emenegger's military sources said he would be given 3200 feet of
film taken of the landing. At the last minute, however,
permission was withdrawn, although Emenegger and Sandler were
encouraged to describe the Holloman episode as something
hypothetical, something that could happen or might happen in the
future. Emenegger went to Wright-Patterson AFB, where Project
Blue Book had been located until its closing in 1969, to ask Col.
George Weinbrenner one of his military contacts, what had
happened. According to Emenegger's account, the exchange took
place in Weinbrenner's office. The colonel stood up, walked to a
chalkboard and complained in a loud voice, "That damn MIG 25!
Here we're so public with everything we have. But the Soviets
have all kinds of things we don't know about. We need to know
more about the MIG 25!" Moving to a bookshelf and continuing his
monologue about the Russian jet fighter, he handed Emenegger a
copy of J. Allen Hynek's The UFO Experience (1972), with the
author's signature and dedication to Weinbrenner. "It was like a
scene from a Kafka play," Emenegger would recall , inferring from
the colonel's odd behavior that he was confirming the reality of
the film while making sure that no one overhearing the
conversation realized that was what he was doing.
The documentary film UFO's Past, Present & Future (Sandler
Institutional Films, Inc.) was released in 1974 along with a
paperback book of the same title. The Holloman incident is
recounted in three pages (127-29) of the book's "Future" section.
Elsewhere, in a section of photos and illustrations, is an
artist's conception of what one of the Holloman entities looked
like, though it, along with other alien figures, is described
only as being "based on eyewitness descriptions" (Emenegger,
1974). Emenegger's association with the military and intelligence
he had met while doing the film would continue for years. At one
point in the late 1980s his sources told him that He was about to
be invited to film an interview with a live extraterrestrial in a
Southwestern state, he says, but nothing came of it.
The Suffern Story: On October 7, 1975, a 27-year old carpenter,
Robert Suffern, of Bracebridge, Ontario, got a call from his
sister who had seen a "fiery glow" near his barn and concluded it
was on fire. Suffern drove to the spot and, after determining
that there was no problem, got back on the road. There, he would
testify, he encountered a large disc-shaped object resting in his
path. "I was scared," he said. "It was right there in front of me
with no lights and no sign of life." But even before his car
could come to a complete stop, the object abruptly ascended out
of sight. Suffern turned his car around and decided to head home
rather than to his sister's place, his original intended
destination. At that point a small figure wearing a helmet and a
silver-gray suit stepped in front of the car, causing Suffern to
hit the brakes and skid to a stop. The figure ran into a field.
Then, according to Suffern, "when he got to the fence, he put his
hands on a post and went over it with no effort at all. It was
like he was weightless" (UFOIL, n.d.).
Within two days Suffern's report was on the wire services, and
Suffern was besieged by UFO investigators, journalists,
curiosity-seekers, and others. Suffern, who made no effort to
exploit his story and gave every appearance of believing what he
was saying, soon tired of discussing it. A year later, however,
Suffern and his wife told a Canadian investigator that a month
after the encounter, they were informed that some high-ranking
officials wished to speak with them. Around this time, so they
claimed, they were given thorough examinations by military
doctors. After that an appointment was set up for December 12 and
on that day an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser arrived with
three military officers, one Canadian, two American. They were
carrying books and other documents. In the long conversation that
followed, the officers apologized for the UFO landing, claiming
it was a "mistake" caused by the malfunctioning of an
extraterrestrial spaceship.
The officers produced close-up pictures of UFOs, claiming that
the U.S. and Canadian governments had had intimate knowledge of
aliens since 1943 and were cooperating with them. The officers
even knew the exact dates and times of two previous but
unreported UFO sightings on the Suffern property. The Sufferns
said the officers had answered all their questions fully and
frankly, but they would not elaborate on what they were told.
Reinterviewed about the matter some months later, the couple
stuck by their story but added few further details.
The investigator, Harry Tokarz, would remark, "Robert Suffern
strikes one as an individual who carefully measures his thoughts.
His sincerity comes through clearly as he slowly relates his
concepts and ideas. His wife, a home-bred country girl, is quick
to air her views and state unequivocally what she believes to be
fact" (CUFORN, 1983).
EBEs in South Dakota: On February 9, 1978, a curious document--an
apparent carbon copy of an official U.S. Air Force incident
report-arrived at the office of the National Enquirer in Lantana,
Florida. Accompanying the document was an unsigned letter dated
"29 Jan." It read: "The incident stated in the attached report
actually occurred. The Air Force appointed a special team of
individuals to investigate the incident. I was one of those
individuals. I am still on active duty and so I cannot state my
name at this time. It is not that I do not trust the Enquirer (I
sure [sic] you would treat my name with [sic] confidence but I do
not trust others.) The incident which occurred on 16 Nov. 77, was
classified top secret on 2 Dec 77. At that time I obtained a copy
of the original report. I thought at that time that the Air Force
would probably hush the whole thing up, and they did. The Air
Force ordered the silence on 1 Dec 77, after which, the report
was classified. There were 16 pictures taken at the scene. I do
not have access to the pictures at this time" (Pratt, 1984).
The report, stamped FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, purported to be from
the commander of the 44th Missile Security Squadron at Ellsworth
AFB near Rapid City, South Dakota. The incident was described as
a "Helping Hand (security violation)/Covered Wagon (security
violation) at Lima 9 (68th SMSq Area), 7 miles SW of Nisland, SD,
at 2100 hours on 16 Nov. 77." The recipient of the report was
identified as "Paul D. Hinzman, SSgt, USAF, Comm/Plotter, Wing
Security Control." Two security men, Airmen 1st Class Kenneth
Jenkins and Wayne E. Raeke, experienced and reported the
incident, which was investigated by Capt. Larry D. Stokes and
TSgt. Robert E. Stewart.
The document told an incredible story. At 10:59 on the evening
of November 16 an alarm sounded from the Lima Nine missile site.
Jenkins and Raeke, at tHe Lima Launch Control Facility 35 miles
away, were dispatched to the scene. On their arrival Raeke set
out to check the rear fence line. There he spotted a helmeted
figure in a glowing green metallic suit. The figure pointed a
weapon at Raeke's rifle and caused it to disintegrate, burning
Raeke's hands and arms in the process. Raeke summoned Jenkins,
who carried his companion back to their Security Alert Team
vehicle. When Jenkins went to the rear fence line, he saw two
similarly-garbed figures. He ordered them to halt, but when they
ignored his command, he opened fire. His bullets struck one in
the shoulder and the other in the helmet. The figures ran over a
hill and were briefly lost to view. Jenkins pursued them and when
he next saw them, they were entering a 20-foot-in-diameter
saucer-shaped object, which shot away over the Horizon.
As Raeke was air-evacuated from the scene, investigators
discovered that the missile's nuclear components had been stolen.
Enquirer reporters suspected a hoax but when they called Rapid
City and Ellsworth to check on the names, they were surprised to
learn that such persons did exist. Moreover, all were on active
duty. The Enquirer launched an investigation, sending several
reporters to Rapid City. Over the course of the next few days
they found that although the individuals were real, the document
inaccurately listed their job titles, the geography of the
alleged incident was wrong (there was no nearby hill over which
intruders could have run), Raeke had suffered no injuries, he and
Jenkins did not even know each other, and no one (including Rapid
City civilian residents and area ranchers) had heard anything
about such an encounter. As one of the reporters, Bob Pratt,
wrote in a subsequent account, "We found more than 20
discrepancies or errors in the report -wrong names, numbers,
occupations, physical layouts and so on. Had the Security Option
alert mentioned in the report taken place, it would have involved
all security personnel at the base and everyone at the base and
in Rapid City (Population 45,000 plus) would have known about
it."
The Bennewitz Affair: In the late 1970s Paul Bennewitz, an
Albuquerque businessman trained as a physicist, became convinced
that he was monitoring electromagnetic signals which
extraterrestrials were using to control persons they had
abducted. Bennewitz tried to decode these signals and believed he
was succeeding. At the same time he began to see what he thought
were UFOs maneuvering around the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage
Facility and the Coyote Canyon test area, located near Kirtland
AFB, and he filmed them.
Bennewitz reported all this to the Tucson-based Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO), whose directors were unimpressed,
judging Bennewitz to be deluded. But at Kirtland, Bennewitz's
claims, or at least some of them, were being taken more
seriously. On October 24, 1980, Bennewitz contacted Air Force
Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Sgt. Richard Doty
(whose previous tour of duty had been at Ellsworth) after being
referred to him by Maj. Ernest Edwards, head of base security,
and related that he had evidence that something potentially
threatening was going on in the Manzano Weapons Storage Area. A
"Multipurpose Internal OSI Form," signed by Maj. Thomas A. Cseh
(Commander of the Base Investigative Detachment), dated October
28, 1980, and subsequently released under the Freedom of
Information Act, states:
"On 26 Oct 80, SA [Special Agent] Doty, with the assistance of
JERRY MILLER, GS-15, Chief, Scientific Advisor for Air Force Test
and Evaluation Center, KAFB , interviewed Dr. BENNEWITZ at his
home in the Four Hills section of Albuquerque, which is adjacent
to the northern boundary of Manzano Base. (NOTE: MILLER is a
former Project Blue Book USAF Investigator who was assigned to
Wright-Patterson AFB (W-PAFB), OH, with FTD [Foreign Technology
Division]. Mr. MILLER is one of the most knowledgeable and
impartial investigators of Aerial Objects in the southwest.) Dr.
BENNEWITZ has been conducting independent research into Aerial
Phenomena for the last 15 months. Dr. BENNEWITZ also produced
several electronic recording tapes, allegedly showing high
periods of electrical magnetism being emitted from Manzano/Coyote
Canyon area. Dr. BENNEWITZ also produced several photographs of
flying objects taken over the general Albuquerque area. He has
several pieces of electronic surveillance equipment pointed at
Manzano and is attempting to record high frequency electrical
beam pulses. Dr. BENNEWITZ claims these Aerial Objects produce
these pulses. . . . After analyzing the data collected by Dr.
BENNEWITZ, Mr MILLER related the evidence clearly shows that some
type of unidentified aerial objects were caught on film; however,
no conclusions could be made whether these objects pose a threat
to Manzano/Coyote Canyon areas. Mr MILLER felt the electronical
[sic] recording tapes were inconclusive and could have been
gathered from several conventional sources. No sightings, other
than these, have been reported in the area."
On November 10 Bennewitz was invited to the base to present his
findings to a small group of officers and scientists. Exactly one
week later Doty informed Bennewitz that AFOSI had decided against
further consideration of the matter. Subsequently Doty reported
receiving a call from then-New Mexico Sen. Harrison Schmitt, who
wanted to know what AFOSI was planning to do about Bennewitz's
allegations. When informed that no investigation was planned,
Schmitt spoke with Brig. Gen. William Brooksher of base security.
The following July New Mexico's other senator, Pete Domenici,
looked into the matter, meeting briefly with Doty before dashing
off to talk with Bennewitz personally. Domenici subsequently lost
interest and dropped the issue.
Bennewitz was also aware of supposed cattle mutilations being
reported in the western United States. At one point he met a
young mother who told him that one evening in May 1980, after she
and her six-year-old son saw several UFOs in a field and one
approached them, they suffered confusion and disorientation, then
a period of amnesia which lasted as long as four hours. Bennewitz
brought the two to University of Wyoming psychologist R. Leo
Sprinkle, who hypnotized them and got a detailed abduction story
from the mother and a sketchy one from the little boy. Early in
the course of the abduction they observed aliens take a calf
aboard the UFO and mutilate it while it was still alive, removing
the animal's genitals. At one point during the alleged
experience, the mother said, they were taken via UFO into an
underground area which she believed was in New Mexico. She
briefly escaped her captors and fled into an area where there
were tanks of water. She looked into one of them and saw body
parts such as tongues, hearts and internal organs, apparently
from cattle. But she also observed a human arm with a hand
attached. There was also the "top of a bald head," apparently
from one of the hairless aliens, but before she could find out
for sure, she was dragged away. The objects in the tank, she
said, "horrified me and made me sick and frightened me to death"
(Howe, 1989). Later she wondered about the other tanks and about
their contents.
The William Moore/MJ-12 Maze: Late in the summer of 1979 William
L. Moore had left a teaching job in a small Minnesota town to
relocate in Arizona, where he hoped to pursue a writing career.
Moore was deeply involved in the investigation of an apparent UFO
crash in New Mexico in July 1947, a case he and Charles Berlitz
would recount in their The Roswell Incident the following year.
After his move to the Southwest Moore became close to Coral and
James Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO) and in due course Moore was asked to join the APRO board.
The Lorenzens told him about Bennewitz's claims. Bennewitz, Jim
Lorenzen thought, was "prone to make great leaps of logic on the
basis of incomplete data" (Moore, 1989a).
The Roswell Incident was published in the summer of 1980 and in
September a debate on UFOs at the Smithsonian Institution was
scheduled to take place. Moore set off from his Arizona home to
Washington, D.C., to attend the debate and along the way promoted
his new book on radio and television shows. According to an
account he would give seven years later, an extraordinary series
of events began while he was on this trip.
He had done a radio show in Omaha and was in the station lobby,
suitcase in hand, on his way to catch a plane which was to leave
within the hour when a receptionist asked if he was Mr. Moore. He
had a phone call. The caller was a man who claimed to be a
colonel at nearby Offutt AFB, He said, "We think you're the only
one we've heard who seems to know what he's talking about." He
asked if he and Moore could meet and discuss matters further.
Moore said that since he was leaving town in the next few
minutes, that would not be possible, though he wrote down the
man's phone number.
Moore went on to Washington. On September 8, on his way back, he
did a radio show in Albuquerque. On the way out of the studio the
receptionist told him he had a phone call. The caller, who
identified himself as an individual from nearby Kirtland AFB,
said, "We think you're the only one we've heard about who seems
to know what he's talking about." Moore said, "Where have I heard
that before?"
Soon afterwards Moore and the individual he would call "Falcon"
met at a local restaurant. Falcon, later alleged (though denied
by Moore) to be U.S. Air Force Sgt. Richard Doty, said he would
be wearing a red tie. This first meeting would initiate a long-
running relationship between Moore (and, beginning in 1982,
partner Jaime Shandera) and 10 members of a shadowy group said to
be connected with military intelligence and to be opposed to the
continuation of the UFO cover-up. The story that emerged from
this interaction goes like this:
The first UFO crash, involving bodies of small, gray-skinned
humanoids, occurred near Corona, New Mexico, in 1947 (the
"Roswell incident"). Two years later a humanoid was found alive
and it was housed at Los Alamos until its death in the early
1950s. It was called EBE, after "extraterrestrial biological
entity," and it was the first of three the U.S. government would
have in its custody between then and now. An Air Force captain,
now a retired colonel, was EBE-1's constant companion. At first
communication with it was almost impossible; then a speech device
which enabled the being to speak a sort of English was implanted
in its throat. It turned out that EBE-1, the equivalent of a
mechanic on a spaceship, related what it knew of the nature and
purpose of the visitation.
In response to the Roswell incident, MJ-12-the MJ stands for
"Majestic"--as set up by executive order of President Harry
Truman on September 24, 1947. MJ-12 operates as a policy-making
body. Project Aquarius is an umbrella group in which all the
various compartments dealing with ET-related issues perform their
various functions. Project Sigma conducts electronic
communication with the extraterrestrials, part of an ongoing
contact project run through the National Security Agency since
1964, following a landing at Holloman AFB in late April of that
year.
Nine extraterrestrial races are visiting the earth. One of these
races, little gray-skinned people from the third planet
surrounding Zeta Reticuli, have been here for 25,000 years and
influenced the direction of human evolution. They also help in
the shaping of our religious beliefs. Some important individuals
within the cover-up want it to end and are preparing the American
people for the reality of the alien presence through the vehicle
of popular entertainment, including the films Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, whose climax is a thinly-disguised version of the
Holloman landing, and ET.
At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there is a thick book
called "The Bible," a compilation of all the various project
reports.
According to his own account, which he would not relate until
1989, Moore cooperated with his AFOSI sources-including,
prominently, Richard Doty-and provided them with information.
They informed him that there was considerable interest in
Bennewitz. Moore was made to understand that as his part of the
bargain he was to spy on Bennewitz and also on APRO as well as,
in Moore's words, "to a lesser extent, several other individuals"
(Moore, 1989a). He learned that several government agencies were
interested in Bennewitz's activities and they wanted to inundate
him with false information-disinformation, in intelligence
parlance-to confuse him. Moore says he was not one of those
providing the disinformation, but he knew some of those of who
were, such as Doty.
Bennewitz on his own had already begun to devise a paranoid
interpretation of what he thought he was seeing and hearing, and
the disinformation passed on to him built on that foundation. His
sources told him that the U.S. government and malevolent aliens
are in an uneasy alliance to control the planet, that the aliens
are killing and mutilating not only cattle but human beings,
whose organs they need to lengthen their lives, and that they are
even eating human flesh. In underground bases at government
installations in Nevada and New Mexico human and alien scientists
work together on ghastly experiments, including the creation of
soulless androids out of human and animal body parts. Aliens are
abducting as many as one American in 40 and implanting devices
which control human behavior. ClA brainwashing and other control
techniques are doing the same, turning life on earth into a
nightmare of violence and irrationality. It was, as Moore
remarks, "the wildest science fiction scenario anyone could
possibly imagine."
But Bennewitz believed it. He grew ever more obsessed and tried
to alert prominent persons to the imminent threat, showing
photographs which he held showed human-alien activity in the
Kirtland area but which dispassionate observers thought depicted
natural rock formations and other mundane phenomena. Eventually
Bennewitz was hospitalized, but on his release resumed his
activities, which continue to this day. Soon the ghoulish
scenario would spread into the larger UFO community and beyond
and command a small but committed band of believers. But that
would not happen until the late 1980s and it would not be
Bennewitz who would be responsible for it.
In 1981 the Lorenzens received an anonymous letter from someone
identifying himself as a "USAF Airman assigned to the 1550th
Aircrew Training and Testing Wing at Kirtland AFB." The "airman"
said, "On July 16, 1980, at between 10:30-10:45 A.M., Craig R.
Weitzel. .. a Civil Air Patrol Cadet from Dobbins AFB, Ga.,
visiting Kirtland AFB, NM, observed a dull metallic colored UFO
flying from South to North near Pecos New Mexico. Pecos has a
secret training site for the 1550th Aircrew Training and Testing
Wing, Kirtland AFB, NM. WEITZEL was with ten other individuals,
including USAF active duty airmen, and all witnessed the
sighting. WEITZEL took some pictures of the object. WEITZEL went
closer to the UFO and observed the UFO land in a clearing
approximately 250 yds, NNW of the training area. WEITZEL observed
an individual dressed in a metallic suit depart the craft and
walk a few feet away. The individual was outside the craft for
just a few minutes. When the individual returned the craft took
off towards the NW." The letter writer said he had been with
Weitzel when the UFO flew overhead, but he had not been with him
to observe the landing.
The letter went on to say that late on the evening of the next
day a tall, dark-featured, black-suited man wearing sunglasses
called on Weitzel at Kirtland. The stranger claimed to be "Mr.
Huck" from Sandia Laboratories, a classified Department of Energy
contractor on the base. Mr. Huck told Weitzel he had seen
something he should not have seen, a secret aircraft from Los
Alamos, and he demanded all of the photographs. Weitzel replied
that he hadn't taken any, that the photographer was an airman
whose name he did not know. "The individual warned Weitzel not to
mention the sighting to anyone or Weitzel would be in serious
trouble," the writer went on. "After the individual left
Weitzel[']s room, Weitzel wondered how the individual knew of the
sighting because Weitzel didn't report the sighting to anyone.
Weitzel became scared after thinking of the threat the individual
made. Weitzel call [sic] the Kirtland AFB Security Police and
reported the incident to them. They referred the incident to the
Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), which
investigates these matters according to the security police. A
Mr. Dody [sic], a special agent with OSI, spoke with Weitzel and
took a report. Mr. Dody [sic] also obtained all the photographs
of the UFO. Dody [sic] told Weitzel he would look into the
matter. That was the last anyone heard of the incident."
But that was not all the correspondent had to say. He added, "I
have every reason to beleive [sic] the USAF is covering up
something. I spent a lot of time looking into this matter and I
know there is more to it than the USAF will say. I have heard
rumors, but serious rumors here at Kirtland that the USAF has a
crashed UFO stored in the Manzano Storage area, which is located
in a remote area of Kirtland AFB. This area is heavily guarded by
USAF Security. I have spoke [sic] with two employees of Sandia
Laboratories, who also store classified objects in Manzano, and
they told me that Sandia has examined several UFO's during the
last 20 years. One that crashed near Roswell NM in the late 50's
was examined by Sandia scientists. That craft is still being
store [sic] in Manzano.
"I have reason to beleive [sic] OSI is conducting a very secret
investigation into UFO sightings. OSI took over when Project Blue
Book was closed. I was told this by my commander, COL Bruce
Purvine. COL Purvine also told me that the investigation was so
secret that most employees of OSI doesn't [sic] even know it. But
COL Purvine told me that Kirtland AFB, AFOSI District 17 has a
special secret detachment that investigates sightings around this
area. They have also investigated the cattle mutilations in New
Mexico."
In 1985 investigator Benton Jamison located Craig Weitzel, who
confirmed that he had indeed seen a UFO in 1980 and reported it
to Sgt. Doty. But his sighting, while interesting, was rather
less dramatic than the CE3 reported in the letter; Weitzel saw a
silver-colored object some 10,000 to 15,000 feet overhead. After
maneuvering for a few minutes, he told Jamison, it "accelerated
like you never saw anything accelerate before" (Hastings, 1985).
He also said he knew nothing of a meeting with anyone identified
as "Mr. Huck."
In December 1982, in response to a Freedom of Information
request from Barry Greenwood of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy
(CAUS), Air Force Office of Special Investigations released a
two page OSI Complaint Form stamped "For Official Use Only."
Dated September 8, 1980, it was titled "Kirtland AFB, NM, 8 Aug-3
Sept 80, Alleged Sightings of Unidentified Aerial Lights in
Restricted Test Range." The document described several sightings
of UFOs in the Manzano Weapons Storage Area, at the Coyote Canyon
section of the Department of Defense Restricted Test Range. One
of the reports cited was a New Mexico State Patrolman's August 10
observation of a UFO landing. (A later check with state police
sources by Larry Fawcett, a Connecticut police officer and UFO
investigator, uncovered no record of such a report. The sources
asserted that the absence of a report could only mean that no
such incident had ever happened.) This intriguing document is
signed by then OSI Special Agent Richard C. Doty.
In 1987, after comparing three documents (the anonymous letter
to APRO, the September 8, 1980, AFOSI Complaint Form, and a
purported AFOSI document dated August 14, 1980, and claiming
"frequency jamming" by UFOs in the Kirtland area), researcher
Brad Sparks concluded that Doty had written all three. In 1989
Moore confirmed that Doty had written the letter to APRO.
"Essentially it was 'bait,'" he says. "AFOSI knew that Bennewitz
had close ties with APRO at the time, and they were interested in
recruiting someone within . . . APRO . . . who would be in a
position to provide them with feedback on Bennewitz'[s]
activities and communications. Since I was the APRO Board member
in charge of Special Investigations in 1980, the Weitzel letter
was passed to me for action shortly after it had been received."
According to Bruce Maccabee, Doty admitted privately that he had
written the Ellsworth AFB document, basing it on a real incident
which he wanted to bring to public attention. Doty has made no
public comment on any of these allegations. Moore says Doty "was
almost certainly a part of [the Ellsworth report], but not in a
capacity where he would have been responsible for creating the
documents involved" (Moore, 1989a).
Doty was also the source of an alleged AFOSI communication dated
November 17, 1980, and destined to become known as the "Aquarius
document." Allegedly sent from AFOSI headquarters at Bolling AFB
in Washington, D.C., to the AFOSI District 17 office at Kirtland,
it mentions, in brief and cryptic form, analyses of negatives
from a UFO film apparently taken the previous month. The version
that circulated through the UFO community states in its
penultimate paragraph: "USAF NO LONGER PUBLICLY ACTIVE IN UFO
RESEARCH, HOWEVER USAF STILL HAS INTEREST IN ALL UFO SIGHTINGS
OVER USAF INSTALLATION/TEST RANGES. SEVERAL OTHER GOVERNMENT
AGENCIES, LED BY NASA, ACTIVELY INVESTIGATES [sic] LEGITIMATE
SIGHTINGS THROUGH COVERT COVER.... ONE SUCH COVER IS UFO
REPORTING CENTER, US COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY, ROCKVILLE, MD
20852, NASA FILTERS RESULTS OF SIGHTINGS TO APPROPRIATE MILITARY
DEPARTMENTS WITH INTEREST IN THAT PARTICULAR SIGHTING. THE
OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT POLICY AND RESULTS OF PROJECT AQUARIUS IS
[sic] STILL CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET WITH NO DISEMINATION [sic]
OUTSIDE OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHANNELS AND WITH RESTRICTED ACCESS
TO 'MJ TWELVE'."
This is the first mention of "MJ-12" in an allegedly official
government document. Moore describes it as an "example of some of
the disinformation produced in connection with the Bennewitz
case. The document is a retyped version of a real AFOSI message
with a few spurious additions." Among the most significant
additions, by Moore's account, are the bogus references to the
U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and to NASA, which he says was NSA
(National Security Agency) in the original.
According to Moore, Doty got the document "right off the
teletype" (Moore, 1990) and showed it to Moore almost
immediately. Later Doty came by with what purported to be a copy
of it, but Moore noticed that it was not exactly the same;
material had been added to it. Doty said he wanted Moore to give
the doctored copy to Bennewitz. Reluctant to involve himself in
the passing of this dubious document, Moore sat on it for a
while, then finally worried that the sources he was developing,
the ones who were telling him about the U.S. government's alleged
interactions with EBEs, would dry up if he did not cooperate. So
eventually he gave the document to Bennewitz but urged him not to
publicize it. Bennewitz agreed and kept his promise.
As of September 1982 Moore knew of three copies of the document:
the one Bennewitz had, one Moore had in safekeeping, and one he
had in his briefcase during a trip he made that month to meet
someone in San Francisco. He met the man in the morning and that
afternoon someone broke into his car and stole his briefcase.
Four months later a copy of the document showed up in the hands
of a New York lawyer interested in UFOs, and soon the document
was circulating widely. Moore himself had little to say on the
subject until he delivered a controversial and explosive speech
to the annual conference of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in Las
Vegas in 1989.
In late 1982, "during," he says, "one of the many friendly
conversations I had with Richard Doty," Moore mentioned that he
was looking into the old (and seemingly discredited) story that a
UFO had crashed in Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. This tale was the
subject of Frank Scully's 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers.
(Moore's long account of his investigation into the affair, which
he found to be an elaborate hoax, would appear in the 1985 MUFON
symposium proceedings.) Doty said he had never heard the story
and asked for details, taking notes as Moore spoke.
On January 10 and 11, 1983, attorney Peter Gersten, director of
CAUS, met with Doty in New Mexico. There were two meetings, the
first of them also attended by Moore and San Francisco television
producer Ron Lakis, the second by Gersten alone. During the first
meeting Doty was guarded in his remarks. But at the second he
spoke openly about what ostensibly were extraordinary secrets. He
said the Ellsworth case was the subject of an investigation by
AFOSI and the FBI; nuclear weapons were involved. The National
Enquirer investigation, which had concluded the story was bogus,
was "amateurish." At least two civilians, a farmer and a deputy
sheriff, had been involved, but were warned not to talk. The
government knows why UFOs appear in certain places, Doty said,
but he would not elaborate. He added, however, that "beyond a
shadow of a doubt they're extraterrestrial" (Greenwood, 1988) and
from 50 light years from the earth. He knew of at least three UFO
crashes, the Roswell incident and two others, one from the 1950s,
the other from the 196Os. Bodies had been recovered. A
spectacular incident, much like the one depicted in the ending of
the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, took place in 1966
The NSA was involved in communications with extraterrestrials;
the effort is called Project Aquarius. Inside the UFO
organizations government moles are collecting information and
spreading disinformation. Doty discussed the Aquarius document
and said the really important documents are impossible to get out
of the appropriate files. Some are protected in such a way that
they will disintegrate within five seconds' exposure to air.
These documents tell of agreements between the U.S. government
and extraterrestrials under which the latter are free to conduct
animal mutilations (especially of cattle) and to land at a
certain base, in exchange for information about advanced UFO
technology. Doty also claimed that via popular entertainment the
American people are being prepared to accept the reality of
visitation by benevolent beings from other worlds.
At one point in the conversation Doty asked Gersten, "How do you
know that I'm not here to either give you misinformation or to
give you information which is part of the programming, knowing
you are going to go out and spread it around?" (Howe, 1989).
In the 1970s, as director of special projects for the Denver
CBS-TV affiliate, Linda Moulton Howe had produced 12
documentaries, most of them dealing with scientific,
environmental and health issues. But the one that attracted the
most attention was Strange Harvest, which dealt with the then-
widespread reports that cattle in Western and Midwestern states
were being killed and mutilated by persons or forces unknown.
Most veterinary pathologists said the animals were dying of
unknown causes. Farmers, ranchers and some law-enforcement
officers thought the deaths were mysterious. Some even speculated
that extraterrestrials were responsible. This possibility
intrigued Howe, who had a lifelong interest in UFOs, and Strange
Harvest argues for a UFO mutilation link.
In the fall of 1982, as Howe was working on a documentary on an
unrelated matter, she got a call from Home Box Office (HBO). The
caller said the HBO people had been impressed with Strange
Harvest and wanted to know if Howe would do a film on UFOs. In
March 1983 she went to New York to sign a contract with HBO for a
show to be titled UFOs-The ET Factor.
The evening before her meeting with the HBO people, Howe had
dinner with Gersten and science writer Patrick Huyghe. Gersten
told Howe that he had met with Sgt. Doty, an AFOSI agent at
Kirtland AFB, and perhaps Doty would be willing to talk on camera
or in some other helpful capacity about the incident at
Ellsworth. Gersten would call him and ask if he would be willing
to meet with Howe.
Subsequently arrangements were made for Howe to fly to
Albuquerque on April 9. Doty would meet her at the airport. But
when she arrived that morning, no one was waiting. She called his
home. A small boy answered and said his father was not there.
Howe then phoned Jerry Miller, Chief of Reality Weapons Testing
at Kirtland and a former Blue Book investigator. (He is mentioned
in the October 28, 1980, "Multipurpose Internal OSI Form"
reporting on Doty and Miller's meeting with Bennewitz.) She knew
Miller from an earlier telephone conversation, when she had
called to ask him about Bennewitz's claims, in which she had a
considerable interest. Miller asked for a copy of Strange
Harvest. Later he had given Howe his home phone number and said
to contact him if she ever found herself in Albuquerque. So she
called and asked if he would pick her up at the airport.
Miller drove Howe to his house. On the way Howe asked him a
number of questions but got little in the way of answers. One
question he did not answer was whether he is the "Miller"
mentioned in the Aquarius document. When they got to Miller's
residence, Miller called Doty at his home, and Doty arrived a few
minutes later, responding aggressively to Howe's question about
where he had been. He claimed to have been at the airport all
along; where had she been? "Perhaps," Howe would write, "he had
decided he didn't want to go through with the meeting, and it was
acceptable in his world to leave me stranded at the airport-until
Jerry Miller called his house" (Howe, 1989).
On the way to Kirtland, Howe asked Doty, whose manner remained
both defiant and nervous, if he knew anything about the Holloman
landing. Doty said it happened but that Robert Emenegger had the
date wrong; it was not May 1971 but April 25, 1964-12 Hours after
a much-publicized CE3 reported by Socorro, New Mexico, policeman
Lonnie Zamora. (Zamora said he had seen an egg-shaped object on
the ground. Standing near it were two child-sized beings in white
suits.) Military and scientific personnel at the base knew a
landing was coming, but "someone blew the time and coordinates"
and an "advance military scout ship" had come down at the wrong
time and place, to be observed by Zamora. When three UFOs
appeared at Holloman at six o'clock the following morning, one
landed while the other two hovered overhead. During the meeting
between the UFO beings and a government party, the preserved
bodies of dead aliens had been given to the aliens , who in turn
had returned something unspecified. Five ground and aerial
cameras recorded this event.
At the Kirtland gate Doty waved to the guard and was let
through. They went to a small white and gray building. Doty took
her to what he described as "my - boss' office." Doty seemed
unwilling to discuss the Ellsworth case, the ostensible reason
for the interview, but had much to say about other matters. First
he asked Howe to move from the chair on which she was sitting to
another in the middle of the room. Howe surmised that this was to
facilitate the surreptitious recording of their conversation, but
Doty said only, "Eyes can see through windows."
"My superiors have asked me to show you this," he said. He
produced a brown envelope he had taken from a drawer in the desk
at which he was sitting and withdrew several sheets of white
paper. As he handed them to Howe, he warned her that they could
not be copied; all she could do was read them in his presence and
ask questions.
The document gave no indication anywhere as to which government,
military or scientific agency (if any) had prepared the report,
titled A Briefing Paper for the President of the United States on
the Subject of Unidentified Flying Vehicles. The title did not
specify which President it had in mind, nor did the document list
a date (so far as Howe recalls today) which would have linked it
to a particular administration.
The first paragraph, written--as was everything that followed--
in what Howe characterizes as "dry bureaucratese," listed dates
and locations of crashes and retrievals of UFOs and their
occupants. The latter were invariably described as 3 1/2 to four
feet tall, gray-skinned and hairless, with oversized heads, large
eyes and no noses. It was now known, the document stated on a
subsequent page, that these beings, from a nearby solar system,
have been here for many thousands of years. Through genetic
manipulation they influenced the course of human evolution and in
a sense created us. They had also helped shape our religious
beliefs.
The July 1947 Roswell crash was mentioned; so, however, was
another one at Roswell in 1949. Investigators at the site found
five bodies and one living alien, who was taken to a safe house
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory north of Albuquerque. The
aliens, small gray-skinned humanoids, were known as
"extraterrestrial biological entities" and the living one was
called "EBE" (ee-buh). EBE was befriended (if that was the word)
by an Air Force officer, but the being died of unknown causes on
June 18, 1952. (EBE's friend, by 1964 a colonel, was among those
who were there to greet the aliens who landed at Holloman.)
Subsequently, it would be referred to as EBE-1, since in later
years another such being, EBE-2, would take up residence in a
safe house. After that, a third, EBE-3, appeared on the scene and
was now living in secret at an American base.
The briefing paper said other crashes had occurred one near
Kingman, Arizona, another just south of Texas in northern Mexico.
It also mentioned the Aztec crash- The wreckage and bodies had
been removed to such facilities as Los Alamos laboratory and
Wright-Patterson AFB. A number of highly classified projects
dealt with these materials. They included Snowbird (research and
development from the study of an intact spacecraft left by the
aliens as a gift) and Aquarius (the umbrella operation under
which the research and contact efforts were coordinated). Project
Sigma was the ongoing electronic communications effort. There was
also a defunct project Garnet, intended to investigate
extraterrestrial influence on human evolution. According to the
document, extraterrestrials have appeared at various intervals in
human history-25,000, 15,000, 5000 and 2500 years ago as well as
now--to manipulate human and other DNA.
One paragraph stated briefly, "Two thousand years ago
extraterrestrials created a being" who was placed here to teach
peace and love. Elsewhere a passing mention was made of another
group of EBEs, called the "Talls."
The paper said Project Blue Book had existed solely to take heat
off the Air Force and to draw attention away from the real
projects. Doty mentioned an "MJ-12," explaining that "MJ" stood
for "Majority." It was a policy-making body whose membership
consisted of 12 very high-ranking government scientists, military
officers and intelligence officials. These were the men who made
the decisions governing the cover-up and the contacts.
Doty said Howe would be given thousands of feet of film of
crashed discs, bodies, EBE-1 and the Holloman landing and
meeting. She could use this material in her documentary to tell
the story of how U.S. officials learned that the earth is being
visited and what they have done about it. "We want you to do the
film," Howe quotes him as saying.
When Howe asked why she, not the New York Times, the Washington
Post or 60 Minutes, was getting this, the story of the
millennium, Doty replied bluntly that an individual media person
is easier to manipulate and discredit than a major organization
with expensive attorneys. He said that another plan to release
the information, through Emenegger and Sandler, had been halted
because political conditions were not right.
Over the next weeks Howe had a number of phone conversations
with Doty, mostly about technical problems related to converting
old film to videotape. She spoke on several occasions with three
other men but did not meet them personally.
Doty suggested that eventually she might be allowed to film an
interview with EBE-3. But the current film project was to have a
historical emphasis; it would deal with events between 1949 and
1964. If at some point she did meet EBE-3, however, there was no
way she could prepare herself for the "shock and fear" of meeting
an alien being.
Howe, of course, had informed her HBO contacts, Jean Abounader
and her superior Bridgett Potter, of these extraordinary
developments. Howe urged them to prepare themselves, legally and
otherwise, for the repercussions that would surely follow the
release of the film. The HBO people told her she would have to
secure a letter of intent from the U.S. government with a
legally-binding commitment to release the promised film footage.
When Howe called Doty about it, he said, "I'll work on it." He
said he would mail the letter directly to HBO.
Then HBO told her it would not authorize funds for the film
production until all the evidence was in hand and, as Potter put
it, Howe had the "President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of
State and Joint Chiefs of Staff to back it up" (Howe, 1989). But
proceed anyway, Howe was told. Now she was furious at both HBO
and Doty.
When she called him at the base, he remarked that he had good
news and bad news. She and a small crew would soon be able to
interview the retired colonel (then a captain) who had spent
three years with EBE-1. The bad news was that it would be three
months before the thousands of feet of film of EBE-1 and the
Holloman landing/contact would be available. Meanwhile, before
she could screen the footage, Howe would have to sign three
security oaths and undergo a background check. She would also
have to supply photographs of all the technical assistants who
would accompany her to the interview.
The interview was repeatedly set up and canceled. Then in June
Doty called to say he was officially out of the project. This was
a blow because Doty was the only one she could call. She did not
know how to get in touch with the others and always had to wait
for them to contact her.
By October the contacts had decreased. The same month her
contract with HBO expired. All she had was the name of the
Washington contact. In March 1984 this individual called her
office three times, although she was out of town working on a
non-UFO story at the time. "Upon returning home," she writes, "I
learned the man was contacting me to explain there would be
further delays in the film project after the November 1984
election" (Howe, 1989).
For Howe that was the end of the matter, except for a brief
sequel. On March 5, 1988, Doty wrote ufologist Larry W. Bryant,
who had unsuccessfully sought access to Doty's military records
through the Freedom of Information Act, and denied that he had
ever discussed government UFO secrets or promised footage of
crashed discs, bodies and live EBEs. Howe responded by making a
sworn statement about the meeting an producing copies of her
correspondence from the period with both Doty and HBO.
In 1989 Moore said that "in early 1983 I became aware that Rick
[Doty] was involved with a team of several others, including one
fellow from Denver that I knew of and at least one who was
working out of Washington, D.C., in playing an elaborate
disinformation scheme against a prominent UfO researcher who, at
the time, had close connections with a major television film
company interested in doing a UFO documentary." He was referring
to Howe, of course. The episode was a counterintelligence sting
operation, part of the "wall of disinformation" intended to
"confuse" the Bennewitz issue and to "call his credibility into
question." Because of Howe's interest in Bennewitz's work,
according to Moore, "certain elements within the intelligence
community were concerned that the story of his having intercepted
low frequency electromagnetic emissions from the Coyote Canyon
area of the Kirtland/Sandia complex would end up as part of a
feature film. Since this in turn might influence others (possibly
even the Russians) to attempt similar experiments, someone in a
control position apparently felt it had to be stopped before it
got out of hand." In his observation, Moore said, "the government
seemed hell bent on severing the ties that existed between [Howe]
and [HBO]" (Moore, 1989b).
Doty's assertion that Howe had misrepresented their meeting was
not to be taken seriously, according to Moore, since Doty was
bound by a security oath and could not discuss the matter freely
Moore said that the Aztec crash, known beyond reasonable doubt
never to have occurred, was something Doty had added to the
document after learning from Moore of his recent investigation of
the hoax.
In December 1984, in the midst of continuing contact with their
own sources (Doty and a number of others) who claimed to be
leaking the secret of the cover-up, Moore's associate Jaime
Shandera received a roll of 35mm film containing, it turned out
what purported to be a briefing paper dated November 18, 1952,
and intended for president-elect Eisenhower. The purported
author, Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, reported that an "Operation
Majestic-12," consisting of a dozen top scientists, military
officers and intelligence specialists, had been set up by
presidential order on September 24, 1947, to study the Roswell
remains and the four humanoid bodies that had been recovered
nearby. The document report that the team directed by MJ12 member
and physiologist Detlev Bronk "has suggested the term 'Extra-
terrestrial Biological Entities', or 'EBEs', be adopted as the
standard term of reference for these creatures until such time as
a more definitive designation can be agreed upon." Brief mention
is also made of a December 6, 1950, crash along the Texas-Mexico
border. Nothing is said, however, about live aliens or
communications with them.
In July 1985 Moore and Shandera, acting on tips from their
sources, traveled to Washington and spent a few days going
through recently declassified documents in Record Group 341,
including Top Secret Air Force intelligence files from USAF
Headquarters. In the 126th box whose contents they examined, they
found a brief memo dated July 14, 1954, from Robert Cutler,
Special Assistant to the President, to Gen. Nathan Twining. It
says "The president has decided that the MJ-12/SSP [Special
Studies Project] briefing should take place during the already
scheduled White House meeting of July 16 rather than following it
as previously intended. More precise arrangements will be
explained to you upon your arrival. Your concurrence in the above
change of arrangements is assumed" (Friedman, 1987).
The Cutler/Twining memo, as it would be called in the
controversies that erupted after Moore released the MJ-12
document to the world in the spring of 1987, is the only official
document-not to be confused with such disputed ones as the
November 17, 1980, Aquarius document-to mention MJ-12. (Several
critics of the MJ-12 affair have questioned the memo's
authenticity as well, but so far without unambiguous success.)
The memo does not, of course, say what the MJ12 Special Studies
Project was.
MJ-12 Goes Public: Just prior to Moore's release of the MJ-12
briefing paper, another copy was leaked to British ufologist
Timothy Good, who took his copy to the press. The first newspaper
article on it appeared in the London Observer of May 31, 1987,
and soon it was the subject of pieces in the New York Times,
Washington Post and ABC-TV's Nightline. It was also denounced,
not altogether persuasively, both by professional debunkers and
by many ufologists. The dispute would rage without resolution
well into 1989, when critics discovered that President Truman's
signature on the September 24, 1947, executive order (appended to
the briefing paper) was exactly like his signature on an
undisputed, UFO-unrelated October 1, 1947, letter to his science
adviser (and supposed MJ-12 member) Vannevar Bush. To all
appearances a forger had appended a real signature to a fake
letter. The MJ-12 document began to look like another
disinformation scheme.
Although acutely aware of the mass of disinformation circulating
throughout the UFO community, Moore remained convinced that at
least some of the information his own sources were giving him was
authentic. In 1988 he provided two of his sources, "Falcon" (Sgt.
Doty according to some) and "Condor" (later claimed to be former
U.S. Air Force Capt. Robert Collins), to a television production
company. (Moore and Shandera had given them avian names and
called the sources collectively "the birds.") UFO Cover-up . . .
Live, a two-hour program, aired in October 1988, with Falcon and
Condor, their faces shaded, their voices altered, relating the
same tales with which they had regaled Moore and Shandera. The
show, almost universally judged a laughable embarrassment, was
most remembered for the informants' statements that the aliens
favored ancient Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. Critics
found the latter allegation especially hilarious.
Lear's Conspiracy Theory: Events on the UFO scene were taking a
yet more bizarre turn that same year as even wilder tales began
to circulate. The first to tell them was John Lear, a pilot with
a background in the CIA and the estranged son of aviation legend
William P. Lear. Lear had surfaced two or three years earlier,
but aside from his famous father there seemed little to
distinguish him from any of hundreds of other UFO buffs who
subscribe to the field's publications and show up at its
conferences. But then he started claiming that unnamed sources
had told him of extraordinary events which made those told by
Doty and the birds sound like bland and inconsequential
anecdotes.
According to Lear, not just a few but dozens of flying saucers
had crashed over the years. In 1962 the U.S. government started
Project Redlight to find a way to fly the recovered craft, some
relatively intact. A similar project exists even now and is run
out of supersecret military installation; one is Area 51
(specifically at a facility called S4) at the Nevada Test Site
and the other is set up near Dulce, New Mexico. These areas,
unfortunately, may no longer be under the control of the
government or even of the human race. In the late 1960s an
official agency so secret that not even the President may know of
it had made an agreement with the aliens. In exchange for
extraterrestrial technology the secret government would permit
(or at least not interfere with) a limited number of abductions
of human beings; the aliens, however, were to provide a list of
those they planned to kidnap.
All went relatively well for a few years. Then in 1973 the
government discovered that thousands of persons who were not on
the alien's list were being abducted. The resulting tensions led
to an altercation in 1978 or 1979. The aliens held and then
killed 44 top scientists as well as a number of Delta force
troops who had tried to free them. Ever since, frantic efforts,
of which the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is the
most visible manifestation, have been made to develop a defense
against the extraterrestrials, who are busy putting implants into
abductees (as many as one in 10 Americans) to control their
behavior. At some time in the near future these people will be
used for some unknown, apparently sinister, alien purpose. Even
worse than all this, though, is the aliens' interest in Human
flesh. Sex and other organs are taken from both human beings and
cattle and used to create androids in giant vats located in
underground laboratories at Area 51 and Dulce. The
extraterrestrials, from an ancient race near the end of its
evolution, also use materials from human body parts as a method
of biological rejuvenation. ("In order to sustain themselves," he
said, "they use an enzyme or hormonal secretion obtained from the
tissue that they extract from humans and animals. The secretions
are then mixed with hydrogen peroxide and applied on the skin by
spreading or dipping parts of their bodies in the solution. The
body absorbs the solution, then excretes the waste back through
the skin" [Berk and Renzi, 1988].)
One of Lear's major sources was Bennewitz, who had first heard
these scary stories from AFOSI personnel at Kirtland in the early
1980s. By this time Bennewitz had become something of a guru to a
small group of UFO enthusiasts, Linda Howe among them, who
believed extraterrestrials were mutilating cattle and had no
trouble believing they might do the same thing to people. Also
Lear, whose political views are far to the right of center, was
linking his UFO beliefs with conspiracy theories about a
malevolent secret American government which was attempting to use
the aliens for its own purposes, including enslavement of the
world's people through drug addiction. A considerable body of
rightwing conspiracy literature, some with barely-concealed anti-
Semitic overtones, was making similar charges. Lear himself was
not anti-Semitic, but he did share conspiracy beliefs with those
who were.
Another of his claimed sources was an unnamed physicist who,
Lear claimed, had actually worked at S4. To the many ufologists
who rejected Lear's stories as paranoid, lunatic or fabricated
(though not by the patently-sincere Lear), there was widespread
skepticism about this physicist's existence. It turned out that
he did indeed exist. His name is Robert Lazar, who, according to
a story broken by reporter George Knapp on KLAS-TV, the ABC
affiliate in Las Vegas, on November 11 and 13, 1989, claims to
have worked on alien technology projects at Area 51. Lazar, whose
story is being investigated by both ufologists and mainstream
journalists, has not endorsed Lear's claims about human-alien
treaties, man-eating ETs or any of the rest and has distanced
himself from Lear and his associates. His claims, while fantastic
by most standards, are modest next to Lears.
Cooper's Conspiracy Theory: Soon Lear was joined by someone with
an even bigger supply of fabulous yarns: one Milton William
Cooper. Cooper surfaced on December 18, 1988, when his account of
the fantastic secrets he learned while a Naval petty officer
appeared on a computer network subscribed to by ufologists and
others interested in anomalous phenomena. Cooper said that while
working as a quartermaster with an intelligence team for Adm.
Bernard Clarey, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Meet, in the
early 1970s he saw two documents, Project Grudge Special Report
13 and a Majority briefing. (In conventional UFO history, Grudge
was the second public Air Force UFO project, superseding the
original Sign, in early 1949 and lasting until late 1951, when it
was renamed Blue Book. Whereas Sign investigators at one time
concluded UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin--a conclusion the
Air force leadership found unacceptable--Grudge, as its name
suggests coincidentally or otherwise, was known for its hostility
to the idea of UFOs and for its eagerness to assign conventional
explanations, warranted or otherwise, to the sighting reports
that came its way.) Cooper's account of what was in these reports
is much like the by-now familiar story of crashes, bodies,
contacts and projects, with some elaborations. Moreover, he said
the aliens were called "ALFs" (which as any television viewer
knows, stands for Alien Life forms) and the "M" in MJ-12 is for
Majority not Majestic. Later he would say he had seen photographs
of aliens, including a type he called the "big-nosed grays"-like
those that supposedly landed at Holloman in 1964 or 1971. The
U.S. government was in contact with them and alien-technology
projects were going on at Area 51.
If this sounded like a rehash of Moore and Lear, that was only
because Cooper had yet to pull out all the stops. On May 23,
1989, Cooper produced a 25-page document titled The Secret
Government: The Origin, Identity And Purpose of MJ-12. He
presented it as a lecture in Las Vegas a few weeks later. In
Cooper's version of the evolving legend, the "secret government,"
an unscrupulous group of covert CIA and other intelligence
operatives who keep many of their activities sealed from even the
President's knowledge, runs the country. One of its first acts
was to murder one-time Secretary of Defense (and alleged early
MJ-12 member) James Forrestal the death was made to look like
suicide-because he threatened to expose the UFO cover-up.
Nonetheless, President Truman, fearing an invasion from outer
space, kept other nations, including the Soviet Union, abreast of
developments. But keeping all this secret was a real problem, so
an international secret society known as the Bilderbergers,
headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, was formed. Soon it became
a secret world government and "now controls everything," Cooper
said.
All the while flying saucers were dropping like flies out of the
heavens. In 1953 there were 10 crashes in the United States
alone. Also that year, astronomers observed huge spaceships
heading toward the earth and in time entering into orbit around
the equator. Project Plato was established to effect
communication with these new aliens. One of the ships landed and
a face-to-face meeting took place, and plans for diplomatic
relations were laid. Meanwhile a race of human-looking aliens
warned the U.S. government that the new visitors were not to be
trusted and that if the government got rid of its nuclear
weapons, the human aliens would help us in our spiritual
development, which would keep us from destroying ourselves
through wars and environmental pollution. The government rejected
these overtures.
The big-nosed grays, the ones who had been orbiting the equator,
landed again, this time at Holloman AFB, in 1954 and reached an
agreement with the U.S. government. These beings stated that they
were from a dying planet that orbits Betelguese. At some point in
the not too distant future, they said, they would have to leave
there for good. A second meeting took place not long afterwards
at Edwards AFB in California. This time President Eisenhower was
there to sign a formal treaty and to meet the first alien
ambassador, "His Omnipotent Highness Krlll," pronounced Krill.
He, in common with his fellow space travelers, wore a trilateral
insignia on his uniform; the same design appears on all
Betelguese spacecraft.
According to Cooper's account, the treaty's provisions were
these: Neither side would interfere in the affairs of the other.
The aliens would abduct humans from time to time and would return
them unharmed, with no memory of the event. It would provide a
list of names of those it was going to take. The U.S. government
would keep the aliens' presence a secret and it would receive
advanced technology from them. The two sides would exchange 16
individuals each for the purpose of learning from and teaching
each other. The aliens would stay on earth and the humans would
go to the other planet, then return after a specified period of
time. The two sides would jointly occupy huge underground bases
which would be constructed at hidden locations in the Southwest.
(It should be noted that the people listed as members of MJ-12
are largely from the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral Commission. These organizations play a prominent role
in conspiracy theories of the far right. In a book on the subject
George Johnson writes, "After the Holocaust of World War II,
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories became repugnant to all but the
fringe of the American right. Populist fears of the power of the
rich became focused instead on organizations that promote
international capitalism, such as the Trilateral Commission, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers, a group of
world leaders and businesspeople who held one of their early
conferences on international relations at the Bilderberg Hotel in
the Netherlands" [Johnson, 1983]. According to Cooper, the
trilateral emblem is taken directly from the alien flag. He adds
that under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter MJ-12 became known
as the 50 Committee. Under Reagan it was renamed the PI-40
Committee.)
By 1955, during the Eisenhower years, Cooper charged, officials
learned for certain what they had already begun to suspect a year
earlier: that the aliens had broken the treaty before the ink on
it had time to dry. They were killing and mutilating both human
beings and animals, failing to supply a complete list of
abductees, and not returning some of those they had taken. On top
of that, they were conspiring with the Soviets, manipulating
society through occultism, witchcraft, religion and secret
organizations. Eisenhower prepared a secret executive memo, NSC
5411, ordering a study group of 35 top members (the "Jason
Society") associated with the Council on Foreign Relations to
"examine aIl the facts, evidence, lies, and deception and
discover the truth of the alien question" (Cooper, 1989). Because
the resulting meetings were held at Quantico Marine Base, they
were called the Quantico meetings. Those participating included
Edward Teller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Nelson
Rockefeller.
The group decided that the danger to established social,
economic, religious and political institutions was so grave that
no one must know about the aliens, not even Congress. That meant
that alternative sources of funding would have to be found. It
also concluded that the aliens were using human organs and tissue
to replenish their deteriorating genetic structure.
Further, according to Cooper, overtures were made to the Soviet
Union and other nations so that all the earth could join together
to deal with the alien menace. Research into sophisticated new
weapons systems commenced. Intelligence sources penetrated the
Vatican hoping to learn the Fatima prophecy which had been kept
secret ever since 1917. It was suspected that the Fatima,
Portugal, "miracle" was an episode of alien manipulation. As it
turned out, the prophecy stated that in 1992 a child would unite
the world under the banner of a false religion. By 1995 people
would figure out that he was the Anti-Christ. That same year
World War III would begin when an alliance of Arab nations
invaded Israel. This would lead to nuclear war in 1999. The next
four years would see horrible death and suffering all over the
planet. Christ would return in 2011.
When confronted about this, claimed Cooper, the aliens candidly
acknowledged it was true. They knew it because they had traveled
into the future via time machine and observed it with their own
eyes. They added that they created us through genetic
manipulation. Later the Americans and the Soviets also developed
time travel and confirmed the Fatima/ET vision of the future.
In 1957 the Jason group met again, by order of Eisenhower, to
decide what to do. It came up with three alternatives: (l) Use
nuclear bombs to blow holes in the stratosphere so that pollution
could escape into space. (2) Build a huge network of tunnels
under the earth and save enough human beings of varying cultures,
occupations and talents so that the race could reemerge after the
nuclear and environmental catastrophes to come. Everybody else-
i.e., the rest of humanity--would be left on the surface
presumably to die. (3) Employ alien and terrestrial technology to
leave earth and colonize the moon (code name "Adam") and Mars
("Eve"). The first alternative was deemed impractical, so the
Americans and the Soviets started working on the other two.
Meanwhile they decided that the population would have to be
controlled, which could be done most easily by killing off as
many "undesirables" as possible. Thus AIDS and other deadly
diseases were introduced into the population. Another idea to
raise needed funds was quickly acted on: sell drugs on a massive
scale. An ambitious young member of the Council on Foreign
Relations, a Texas oil-company president named George Bush, was
put in charge of the project, with the aid of the CIA. "The plan
worked better than anyone had thought " CooPer said. "The CIA now
controls all the worlds [sic] illegal drug markets" (Cooper,
1989).
Unknown to just about everybody, a secret American/Soviet/alien
space base existed on the dark side of the moon. By the early
1960s human colonies were thriving on the surface of Mars. All
the while the naive people of the earth were led to believe the
Soviets and the Americans were something other than the closest
allies. But Cooper's story got even more bizarre and byzantine.
He claimed that in 1963, when President Kennedy found out some
of what was going on, he gave an ultimatum to MJ-12: get out of
the drug business. He also declared that in 1964 he would tell
the American people about the alien visitation. Agents of MJ-12
ordered his assassination. Kennedy was murdered in full view of
many hundreds of onlookers, none of whom apparently noticed, by
the Secret Service agent driving the President's car in the
motorcade.
In 1969, reported Cooper, a confrontation between human
scientists and aliens at the Dulce laboratory resulted in the
former's being taken hostage by the latter. Soldiers who tried to
free the scientists were killed, unable to overcome the superior
alien weapons. The incident led to a two-year rupture in
relations. The alliance was resumed in 1971 and continues to this
day, even as a vast invisible financial empire run by the CIA,
the NSA and the Council on Foreign Relations runs drugs, launders
money and encourages massive street crime so that Americans will
be susceptible to gun-control legislation. The CIA has gone so
far as to employ drugs and hypnosis to cause mentally-unstable
individuals to commit mass murder of schoolchildren and other
innocents, the point being to encourage anti-gun hysteria. All of
this is part of the plot, aided and abetted by the mass media
(also under the secret government's control), to so scare
Americans that they will soon accept the declaration of martial
law when that happens, people will be rounded up and put in
concentration camps already in place. From there they will be
flown to the moon and Mars to work as slave labor in the space
colonies.
The conspirators already run the world. As Cooper put it, "Even
a cursory investigation by the most inexperienced researcher will
show that the members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral commission control the major foundations, all of the
major media and publishing interests, the largest banks, all the
major corporations, the - upper echelons of the government, and
many other vital interests."
Reaction to Lear and Cooper: Whereas Lear had felt some
obligation to name a source or two, or at least to mutter
something about "unnamed sources," Cooper told his lurid and
outlandish tale as if it were so self-evidently true that sources
or supporting data were irrelevant. And to the enthusiastic
audiences flocking to Cooper's lectures, no evidence was
necessary. By the fall of the year Cooper was telling his
stories--whose sources were, in fact, flying-saucer folklore,
AFOSI disinformation unleashed during the Bennewitz episode,
conspiracy literature, and outright fiction--to large crowds of
Californians willing to pay $l0 or $15 apiece for the thrill of
being scared silly.
Lear and Cooper soon were joined by two other tellers of tales
of UFO horrors and Trilateral conspiracies, William English and
John Grace (who goes under the pseudonym "Val Valarian" and heads
the Nevada Aerial Research Group in Las Vegas).
Few if any mainstream ufologists took these stories seriously
and at first treated them as something of a bad joke. But when it
became clear that Lear, Cooper and company were commanding
significant media attention and finding a following among the
larger public interested in ufology's fringes, where a claim's
inherent improbability had never been seen as an obstacle to
believe in it, the leaders of the UFO community grew ever more
alarmed.
One leader who was not immediately alarmed was Walter H. Andrus,
Jr., director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the two
largest UFO organizations in the United States (the other being
the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies [CUFOS]). In 1987,
before Lear had proposed what some wags would call the Dark Side
Hypothesis, he had offered to host the 1989 MUFON conference in
Las Vegas. Andrus agreed. But as Lear's true beliefs became
known, leading figures within MUFON expressed concern about
Lear's role in the conference. When Andrus failed to respond
quickly, MUFON officials were infuriated.
Facing a possible palace revolt, Andrus informed Lear that
Cooper, whom Lear had invited to speak at the conference, was not
an acceptable choice. But to the critics on the MUFON board and
elsewhere in the organization, this was hardly enough. One of
them, longtime ufologist Richard Hall, said this was "like
putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage" (Hall, 1989). In a heated
telephone exchange Andrus called Hall's objections to Lear "just
one man's opinion" and claimed support, which turned out not to
exist, from other MUFON notables. In a widely-distributed open
letter to Andrus, Hall wrote, "Having Lear run the symposium and
be a major speaker at it is comparable to NICAP in the 1960's
having George Adamski run a NICAP conference! " (NICAP, the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, of which
Hall was executive secretary in the late 1950s and much of the
1960s, was a conservative UFO-research organization which
attacked as fraudulent the claims of Adamski, who wrote books
about his meetings with Venusians and distributed photographs of
what he said were their spaceships.) Hall went on, "You seem to
be going for the colorful and the spectacular rather than for the
critical-minded approach of science; you even expressed the view-
in effect-that having a panel to question Lear critically would
be good show biz and the 'highlight' of the symposium. Maybe so,
but it obviously would dominate the entire program, grab off all
major news media attention, and put UFO research in the worst
possible light." Hall declared, "I am hereby resigning from the
MUFON Board and I request that my name be removed from all MUFON
publications or papers that indicate me to be a Board Member."
Fearing more resignations, Andrus moved to make Lear barely more
than a guest at his own conference. He was not to lecture there,
as previously planned, and hosting duties would be handled, for
the most part, by others. Lear ended up arranging an "alternative
conference" at which he, Cooper, English and Don Ecker presented
the latest elaborations on the Dark Side Hypothesis.
Meanwhile another storm was brewing. On March 1, 1989, an
Albuquerque ufologist, Robert Hastings, issued a 13-page
statement, with 37 pages of appended documents, and mailed it to
many of ufology's most prominent individuals. Hastings opened
with these remarks:
"First, it has been established that 'Falcon,' one of the
principle [sic] sources of the MJ-12 material, is Richard C.
Doty, formerly attached to District 17 Air Force Office of
Special Investigations (AFOSI) at Kirtland Air Force Base,
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sgt. Doty retired from the U.S. Air
Force on October 1, 1988.
"How do I know that Doty is 'Falcon?' During a recent telephone
conversation, Linda Moulton Howe told me that when Sgt. Doty
invited her to his office at Kirtland AFB in early April 1983,
and showed her a purportedly authentic U.S. government document
on UFOs, he identified himself as code-name 'Falcon' and stated
that it was Bill Moore who had given him that name.
"Also, in early December 1988, a ranking member of the
production team responsible for the 'UFO Cover Up?-Live'
television documentary confirmed that Doty is 'Falcon.' This same
individual also identified the second MJ-12 source who appeared
on the program, 'Condor' as Robert Collins who was, until
recently, a Captain in the U.S. Air Force. Like Doty, he was
stationed at KAFB when he left the service late last year."
(Collins, a scientist, was assigned to the plasma physics group
at Sandia National Laboratories on the Kirtland Air Force Base.
Following his retirement he moved to Indiana and remains actively
interested in UFOs.)
Hastings reviewed evidence of Doty's involvement in the
concoction of various questionable documents and stories,
including the Ellsworth tale and the Weitzel affair. He also
noted important discrepancies between the paper Howe saw and the
MJ-12 briefing document. For example, while the first mentioned
the alleged Aztec crash, the second said nothing about it at all.
Hastings wondered, "[I]f the briefing paper that Sgt. Doty showed
to Linda Howe was genuine, what does that say about the accuracy
(and authenticity) of the Eisenhower document? If, on the other
hand, the former was bogus and was meant to mislead Howe for some
reason, what does that say about Richard 'Falcon' Doty's
reliability as a source for MJ-12 material as a whole?"
(Hastings, 1989). Hastings also had much critical to say about
Moore, especially about an incident in which Moore had flashed a
badge in front of ufologist/cover-up investigator Lee Graham and
indicated he was working with the government on a project to
release UFO information. (Moore would characterize this as a
misguided practical joke.)
Both Moore and Doty denied that the latter was Falcon. They
claimed Doty had been given that pseudonym long after the 1983
meeting with Howe. Howe, however, stuck by her account. Moore and
Doty said the real Falcon, an older man than Doty had been in the
studio audience as the video of his interview was being broadcast
on UFO Cover-up. . . Live. Doty himself was in New Mexico
training with the state police.
Moore's Confession: By mid-1989 the two most controversial
figures in ufology were Moore and Lear. Moore's MUFON lecture on
July 1 did nothing to quiet his legion of critics. On his arrival
in Las Vegas, Moore checked into a different hotel from the one
at which the conference was being held. He already had refused to
submit his paper for publication in the symposium proceedings, so
no one knew what he would say. He had also stipulated that he
would accept no questions from the floor.
Moore's speech stunned and angered much of the audience. At one
point the shouts and jeers of Lear's partisans brought
proceedings to a halt until order was restored. Moore finished
and exited immediately. He left Las Vegas not long afterwards.
In his lecture Moore spoke candidly, for the first time, of his
part in the counterintelligence operation against Bennewitz. "My
role in the affair," he said, "was largely that of a freelancer
providing information on Paul's current thinking and activities."
Doty, "faithfully carrying out orders which he personally found
distasteful," was one of those involved in the effort to confuse
and discredit Bennewitz. Because of his success at this effort,
Moore suggested, Doty was chosen by the real "Falcon" as "liaison
person, although I really don't know. Frankly, I don't believe
that Doty does either. In my opinion he was simply a pawn in a
much larger game, just as I was."
From disinformation passed on by AFOSI sources, and his own
observations and guesses, according to Moore, "by mid-1982"
Bennewitz had put together a story that "contained virtually all
of the elements found in the current crop of rumors being
circulated around the UFO community." Moore was referring to the
outlandish tales Lear and Cooper were telling. Moore said that
"when I first ran into the disinformation operation . . . being
run on Bennewitz . . . [i)t seemed to me . . . I was in a rather
unique position. There I was with my foot . . . in the door of a
secret counterintelligence game that gave every appearance of
being somehow directly connected to a high-level government UFO
project, and, judging by the positions of the people I knew to be
directly involved with it, definitely had something to do with
national security! There was no way I was going to allow the
opportunity to pass me by without learning at least something
about what was going on. . . . I would play the disinformation
game, get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those
directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly
what they wanted me to do, and all the while continue to burrow
my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about
who was directing it and why." Some of the same people who were
passing alleged UFO secrets on to Moore were also involved in the
operation against Bennewitz. Moore knew that some of the material
he was getting--essentially a mild version of the Bennewitz
scenario, without the horror, paranoia and conspiracy--was false,
but he (along with Jaime Shandera and Stanton Friedman, to whom
he confided the cover-up story in June 1982; Friedman, however,
would not learn of Moore's role in the Bennewitz episode until
seven years later) felt that some of it was probably true, since
an invariable characteristic of disinformation is that it
contains some facts. Moore also said that Linda Howe had been the
victim of one of Doty's disinformation operations.
Before he stopped cooperating with such schemes in 1984, Moore
said, he had given "routine information" to AFOSI about certain
other individuals in the UFO community. Subsequently he claimed
that during this period this emphasis) "three other members of
the UFO community . . . were actively doing the same thing. I
have since learned of a fourth. . . . All four are prominent
individuals whose identities, if disclosed, would cause
considerable controversy in the UFO community and bring serious
embarrassment to two of its major organizations. To the best of
my knowledge, at least two of these people are still actively
involved" (Moore, 1989b).
Although he would not reveal the identities of the government
informants within ufology, Moore gave the names of several
persons "who were the subject of intelligence community interest
between 1980 and 1984." They were:
(1) Len Stringfield, a ufologist known for his interest in
crashed-disc stories; in 1980 he had been set up by a
counterintelligence operative who gave him phony pictures of what
purported to be humanoids in cold storage.
(2) The late Pete Mazzola, whose knowledge of film footage from
a never-publicized Florida UFO case was of great interest to
counterintelligence types. Moore was directed to urge Mazzola to
send the footage to ufologist Kal Korff (who knew nothing of the
scheme) for analysis; then Moore would make a copy and pass it on
to Doty. But Mazzola never got the film, despite promises, and
the incident came to nothing. "I was left with the impression,"
Moore wrote, "that the file had been intercepted and the
witnesses somehow persuaded to cease communication with Mazzola."
(3) Peter Gersten, legal counsel for Citizens Against UFO
Secrecy (CAUS), who had spearheaded a (largely unsuccessful)
legal suit against the NSA seeking UFO information.
(4) Larry Fawcett, an official of CAUS and coauthor of a book on
the cover-up, Clear Intent (1984).
(5) James and Coral Lorenzen, the directors of the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) periodically "subjects of
on-again, off again interest . . . mostly passive monitoring
rather than active meddling," according to Moore. Between 1980
and 1982 APRO employed a "cooperative" secretary who passed on
confidential material to counterintelligence personnel.
(6) Larry W. Bryant, who was battling without success in the
courts to have UFO secrets revealed. Moore said, "His name came
up often in discussions but I never had any direct involvement in
whatever activities revolved around him."
These revelations sent shock waves through the UFO community. In
September CAUS devoted virtually all of an issue of its magazine
Just Cause to a harshly critical review of Moore's activities.
Barry Greenwood declared that the "outrageousness" of Moore's
conduct "cannot be described. Moore, one of the major critics of
government secrecy on UFOs, had covertly informed on people who
thought he was their friend and colleague. Knowing full well that
the government people with whom he was dealing were active
disinformants, Moore pursued a relationship with them and
observed the deterioration of Paul Bennewitz'[s] physical and
mental health. . . . Moore reported the effects of the false
information regularly to some of the very same people who were
'doing it' to Paul. And Moore boasted in his speech as to how
effective it was" (Greenwood, 1989). Greenwood complained further
about Moore's admission that on the disastrous Cover-up . . .
Live show Falcon and Condor had said things that they knew were
untrue. "In the rare situation where two hours of prime time
television are given over to a favorable presentation of UFOs,
here we have a fair portion of the last hour wasted in presenting
what Moore admits to be false data. . . . Yet he saw fit to go
ahead and carry on a charade, making UFO research look ridiculous
in the process. Remarks by Falcon and Condor about the aliens'
lifestyle and preference for Tibetan music and strawberry ice
cream were laughable." So far as Greenwood and CAUS, skeptical of
the MJ-12 briefing document from the first, were concerned, "July
1, 1989, may well be remembered in the history of UFO research as
the day when the 'Majestic 12' story came crashing to Earth in a
heap of rubble. Cause of death: Suicide!"
Nonetheless it seemed unlikely that MJ-12, EBEs, and other
cover-up matters would pass away soon. The Dark Siders appeared
well on their way to starting a new occult movement in America
and elsewhere. Among movie conservative ufologists many
legitimate questions about conceivably more substantive matters
remained to be answered. A reinvestigation of the Roswell
incident by Don Schmitt and Kevin D. Randle of CUFOS produced
what appeared to be solid new evidence of a UFO crash and cover
up. The emergence of Robert Lazar, who even a mainstream
journalist such as television reporter George Knapp concluded is
telling the truth as he knows it possibly suggested a degree of
substance to recurrent rumors about developments in Area 51 and
S4. Even Moore's critics were puzzled by the extraordinary
interest of intelligence operatives in ufologists and the UFO
phenomenon, going back in time long before Bennewitz's
interception of low-frequency signals at Kirtland and ahead to
the present. Why go to all this trouble and expense, with so many
persons over such a period of time, if there are no real UFO
secrets to protect?
Moore says he is still working with the "birds," who are as
active as ever. The birds tell him, he says, that disinformation
is used not only against ufologists but even against those
insiders like themselves who are privy to the cover-up. Those in
charge are "going to great lengths to mislead their own people."
At one point the birds were told that there is no substance to
abduction reports, only to learn later, by accident, that a major
high-level study had been done. "Even people with a need to know
didn't know about it," he says. "The abduction mess caused a lot
of trouble. There may have been an official admission of the
cover-up by now if the abductions had not come into prominence in
the 1980s."
As for the stories of ongoing contact between the U.S.
government and extraterrestrial biological entities, he says
there is, in his observation, a "pretty good possibility, better
than three to one," that such a thing is happening. "But I don't
think we can communicate with them. Perhaps we only intercept
their communications. Or maybe they communicate with us."
He thinks he has found MJ-12. "It's not in a place anybody
looked," he says. "Not an agency one would have expected. But
when you think about it, it fits there" (Moore, 1990).
Doty, now a New Mexico State Police officer, was decertified as
an AFOSI agent on July 15, 1986, for "misconduct" related to an
incident (not concerned with UFOs) that occurred while he was
stationed in West Germany. In August Doty requested a discharge
from the Air Force and was sent to New Jersey to be separated
from the service. But then, Doty says, the Senior Enlisted
Advisor for AFOSI made a trip to the Military Personnel Center at
Randolph AFB, Texas, and asked that Doty be reassigned to
Kirtland, where his son lived. In September Col. Richard Law,
Commander of AFOSI District 70, rescinded Doty's decertification
and assigned him to Kirtland as a services career specialist
(i.e., an Air Force recruiter). When he left the Air Force in
October 1988, he was superintendent of the 1606 Services
Squadron. Doty remains close to Moore and uncommunicative with
nearly everyone else. All he will say is that one day a book will
tell his side of the story and back it up with "Official
Government Documents" (Doty, 1989).
Sources:
Berk, Lynn, and David Renzi. "Former CIA
Pilot, Others Say Aliens Are Among Us." Las Vegas Sun (May 22,
1988).
Cannon, Martin. "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers: THe Amazing
Story of John Lear." UFO Universe 9 (MarcH 1990): 8-12.
Clark, Jerome. "Editorial: Flying Saucer Fascism." International
UFO Reporter 14, 4 (July/August 1989): 3, 22-23.
Cooper, Milton William. The Secret Government: The Origin,
Identity, and Purpose of MJ-12. Fullerton, CA: The Author, May
23, 1989.
Doty, RicHard. Letter to Philip J. Klass (May 24, 1989).
Emenegger, Robert. UFO's Past, Present and Future. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1974.
Friedman, Stanton T. "MJ-12: THe Evidence So Far." International
UFO Reporter 12, 5 (September/October 1987): 13-20.
Govt. -Alien Liaison? Top-Secret Documents. New Brunswick, NJ:
UFO Investigators League, D.d.
Greenwood, Barry. "A Majestic Deception." Just Cause 20
(September 1989): 1-14.
Greenwood, Barry. "Notes on Peter Gersten's Meeting witH SA
RicHard Doty, 1/83." Just Cause 16 (June 1988): 7.
Hall, RicHard H. Letter to Walter H. Andrus, Jr. (MarcH 18,
1989).
Hastings, Robert. The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments.
Albuquerque: THe Author, March 1, 1989.
Howe, Linda Moulton. An Alien Harvest: Further Evidence Linking
Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms.
Littleton, CO: Linda Moulton Howe Productions, 1989.
Information Originally Intended for Those in the Intelligence
Community Who Have a "Need to Know" Clearance Status. Canadian
U.F.O. Research Network: Toronto, n.d.
Johnson, George. Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and
Paranoia in American Politics. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher,
Inc., 1983.
Maccabee, Bruce, ed. Documents and Supporting Information
Related to Crashed Flying Saucers and Operation Majestic Twelve.
Mount Rainer, MD: Fund for UFO Research, 1987.
Moore, William L. "Crashed Saucers: Evidence in Search of
Proof." In Walter H. Andrus, Jr., and Richard H. Hall, eds. MUFON
1985 UFO Symposium Proceedings, 130-79. Seguin, TX: Mutual UfO
Network, Inc., 1985. Rept.: Burbank: The Author, 1985.
Moore, William L. Interview with Jerome Clark (January 5, 1990).
Moore, William L. The Roswell Investigation: Update and
Conclusions 1981. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1981. Rev. ed.: The
Roswell Investigation: New Evidence in the Search for a crashed
UFO. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1982.
Moore, William L. "UfOs and the U S Government, Part 1." Focus
4, 4-5-6 (June 30
1989a): 1-18. '
Moore, William L. "UfOs and the U S Government, part 11." Focus
4, 7-8-9 (September 30, 1989b): 1-3.
Pratt, Bob. "The Truth About the 'Ellsworth Case.'" MUFON UFO
Journal 191 (January 1984) 6-9. '
Scully, Frank. Behind the Flying Saucers. New York: Henry Holt,
1950,
Scully, Frank. "What I've Learned Since Writing 'Behind the
Flying Saucers.'" Pageant 6 (February 1951): 76-81.
Steinman, William S., with Wendelle C. Stevens. UFO Crash at
Aztec: A Well Kept Secret. Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives, 1986.
Stringfield, Leonard H. "Status Report on Alleged Alien Cadaver
Photos." MUFON UFO Journal 154 (December 1980): 11-16.
Todd, Robert G. "MJ-12 Rebuttal." MUFON UFO Journal 261 (January
1990): 17-20.
END
FILE NAME: EBE.DOC
--- FD 1.99c
* Origin: ParaNet Information Service -- Leading UFO Research Network
(1:310/9
----- EOF -----
Comments
Post a Comment