Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth

PROJECT BETA by Gregory Bishop illuminates our darkest hour in UFOlogy with a spotlight so bright that you can almost read this page-turner in the dark. With a devoted wife and two sons, Paul Bennewitz, then a fiftysomething electrical physicist and accomplished aerobatics pilot, had everything to live for. The company he founded, Thunder Scientific Labs, manufactured specialized instrumentation for high-profile clientele like NASA and the United States Air Force. He even played guitar. Then Bennewitz noticed the UFOs. From the deck of his home perched high in the Four Hills neighborhood of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he photographed and filmed mysterious nocturnal lights cavorting over nearby hush-hush military installations. Soon after, ultrasensitive radio receivers of his own design tracked the luminous phantoms and recorded the covert signals -- modulated pulsed transmissions, loud and clear -- of the UFOs. Clues became proof and Bennewitz became terrified. At times his own worst enemy, the prodigious inventor and electronics wizard went public and contacted newspapers, TV stations, congressmen, UFO researchers and organizations, and even President Ronald Reagan. Certain unelected and non-accountable powers (National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Air Force Office of Special Investigation) decided to discredit and "neutralize" Bennewitz for keeps. Enter William Leonard Moore, primary instigator and once fierce proponent of such trivialities as the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, MJ-12, and the alleged military retrieval of a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico. These three "mysteries" have most unfortunately drained precious time, money and manpower from far more legitimate and rewarding avenues of investigation and research into current unknown and unexplained phenomena and events. By Moore's own admission, representatives of those previously identified unelected and non-accountable powers offered him a Faustian bargain. If he would watch various civilian UFO organizations and researchers in general and Paul Bennewitz in particular as the government disinformation game played itself out in earnest, they would let him in on classified UFO material. Readers must make up their own minds regarding the actions and intentions of the key players in this stranger-than-fiction nightmare about one man's ruin at the hands of a government bent on concealing the truth. Very highly recommended. (Copyright 2005 by Robert A. Goerman)

In 1978 Paul Bennewitz, an electrical physicist in New Mexico, began monitoring the radio transmissions of the nearby Sandia Labs, convinced the strange lights hovering over the labs were evidence of an extraterrestrial alien invasion. His letter-writing campaign to the media and even the President to alert them resulted in an alliance between Air Force investigators and Bill Moore, author of the first Roswell incident book to keep tabs on him. The mystery eventually drove Bennewitz to a mental institution and the alliance prompted the spread of misinformation on the topic which began in 1989 and continues to this day. Project Beta is informative, engaging reading from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, Greg Bishop's book has already been misinterpreted. It has been claimed in other reviews here and indeed elsewhere that the book alleges that the entire UFO story is one that has been made up by various US intelligence agencies. This is quite simply not true and not only does the book state this clearly but quotes the chief protaganist, Richard Doty as saying that he accepted there were real ETs, real UFOs, and that we have been visited. Please read the book carefully. And what you will read, if you do, is a masterful treatise on exactly how the US intelligence agencies have historically used the UFO phenomena for their own advantage in order to plant false information in the minds of those they want to target. And why would they do this? To lead them away from black budget activities that they would rather people didn't look at. It does mean though that as a result of the activities of AFOSI, some of the tennets of modern ufology are false. It is extremely unlikely for example that there ever was an underground base at Dulce and that means no firefight and no large jars of embryonic humans etc.. The book also strongly suggests that cattle mutilations and the way they were carried out are comfortably within the scope of human ability. This isn't a novel, it's a factual account of historical events with the main character already passed on at the time of writing and given these circumstances and the background this all falls into, Greg has done a marvelous job in bringing the personalities to light. Bennewitz is portrayed as brilliant, nay a genius, and yet at the same time deeply flawed by naivete. Bill Moore comes over as much a victim as anyone else and even Richard Doty is portrayed as having some humanity. What may indeed surprise some folk is that Greg does not paint the intelligence agencies as disgustingly evil. He demonstrates how they did their job and what their motivations were. There is an underlying level of respect shown towards them. In the end, it came down to one man's life against the potential loss of a great many other lives and while no normal people like to play god, in this case the choice was clear. There are unintended lighter moments in the book and these can be found in the spying activities of Doty and his colleagues. A picture is painted of Bennewitz stepping out of his front door to go somewhere while almost simultaneously the spooks are stepping in through the back. It comes over as some neo British stage farce and all that appeared to be missing was Brian Rix dropping his trousers. Furthermore, Kirtland AFB seemed at the time to be like a three ringed circus with "dozens" of different intelligence agencies stationed at the base, all carrying out their own black projects with no one knowing what the other was doing. This is a masterful account that needed to be written and the UFO community has nothing to fear from it. It will take one hell of a book to be published this year that betters this f

Sub-Title: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth This is one of those books that I really have to wonder about. It is certainly something that the conspiracy buffs will love. It says that Paul Bennewitz, an electrical physicist living in Albuquerque observed strange lights and detected radio messages from the nearby Kirkland Air Force Base. OK so far. It then says that the Government then planned and executed a deliberate disinformation program to Mr. Bennewitz. The Government program was intended to make him believe that these were extraterrestrial visitors. In fact, the book claims that the whole idea of UFO's came from the Government's furtile imagination. Further, from this start the whole UFO community got its basic set of beliefs defined for them by the Government. One point I definitely don't believe, the author says that pictures taken of a complex of buildings are made to disappear when developed. That one just doesn't ring. In spite of this problem, anyone interested in UFO's should find this book very interesting.

The Excluded Middle editor, radio host, author and lecturer Greg Bishop has provided the field of UFO research with what is without doubt one if its major, published contributions. The subject matter of Project Beta is an unusual one; and were it not for the fact that the story is meticulously detailed, referenced and researched, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled upon a high-tech, X-Files-meets-Robert Ludlum-style thriller. But Project Beta tells a very real story - and one that is as harrowing as it is informative. In essence, the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction book relates the story of physicist Paul Bennewitz, who after stumbling upon Air Force and National Security Agency secrets that he believes are connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials and UFOs, is bombarded by the murky world of officialdom with a mass of disinformation, faked stories and outright lies in order to both divert him from his research and lead to his mental and psychological disintegration. While anyone and everyone with an interest in UFOs should read Greg's book, it is unlikely to please some - particularly the I-want-to-believe crowd that foam at the mouth whenever the words "underground base," "cattle mutilations," and "alien abductions" surface. As Greg shows, many of the cornerstones upon which today's ufological lore are built, had their origins in the fertile minds of military intelligence and the behind-the-scenes spook-brigade. The UFO truth might not be "out there" after all - it may all be one big con behind which a veritable plethora of classified, military projects have been hidden. Hopefully, Project Beta will open the floodgates that lead to questions being asked at a higher, official level about the Bennewitz affair, and those who manipulated the man to the point of collapse will be made to answer for their actions.