Enemy Above

There's in battery and the handle and it fires a small dart so that when it fires, it fires silently, almost silently. Yes, that very little. What range does it have? Hundred meters? I believe about about a hundred yards a hundred about a hundred meters rank and the dark itself when it strikes the the the target. Um does the target know that he's about that he's been hit and about to die? That depends Mr Chairman on the particular dardas there are different kinds of easily. I'm Toby Ball

and this is Strange Arrivals Episode ten. Enemy above Paul Benowitz's suspicions that UFOs were present around Curtland Air Force Space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, began in the late nineties seventies, as he filmed lights and picked up radio signals at his house just outside the gates separating the base from the civilian world. In the decades since the Condon Committee rendered its final word on UFOs and Project Blue Book was subsequently shut down, the American attitude towards the federal

government had changed considerably. In some ways. Many Americans now felt the way UFO proponents had following the Robertson and Condon reports that the government held secrets and was willing to lie to the public in order to keep them. It brought a certain kind of conspiratorial thinking into the zeitgeist, a suspicion that the government was involved in dark things.

In his book The United States of Paranoia, author Jesse Walker describes five archetypal conspiracy stories, the enemy below, the enemy within, the enemy outside, the enemy above, and the benevolent conspiracy. In the nineteen seventies, the enemy above archetype became more prominent. The enemy above is the kind of conspiracy theory that most people have in mind when they

say conspiracy theory. It's the fear of powerful institutions. It's the fear of either the institutions themselves, the government, big business, the idea that the people within these institutions are conspiring against the public, or the idea that some sort of subversive forces trying to take control of those institutions um and use them as a tool to get whatever it wants from the public, which often involves a sort of

a master slave relationship. So in general, you know, if you hear people talking about a c I, a conspiracy

or something like that, that's the enemy above. And by the late nineteen seventies there was no shortage of evidence of real conspiracies coming from inside the government, beginning of course with water Gate, and I think it you're also aware that the President has refused to honor the subpoena issued by this committee for tapes and including specifically uh these two tapes won the September fifteen tape and the Marks Point first tape. I think you're aware of that.

I am aware of that yet, and that his reason for doing so has been on executive privilege and separation of power and reasons. Yes. University of New Hampshire History professor Kirk Dorsey it's not even so much to break in. It's all the revelations that Nixon was not just breaking into trying to find out about the Democratic Party, but that he had the FBI, the I R S, and the c i A all working against his enemies, that he had an enemy's list, and then he had those

agencies actually working domestically. It indicated it wasn't just the president, it wasn't just one bad guy in the White House, but actually that he was able to corrupt all these other institutions. And if all those institutions could be corrupted so easily by Richard Dixon and nobody would have found out. You know, if they had hired good burglars, none of this would have happened. And I think it reinforced people's ideas so you can keep secrets and really big ones too.

Less well known now, but also important were the findings of the Church Committee. We wouldn't have had the Church Commity with that Watergate because part of the reason why Senator Church has decided to run this investigation because the Democrats controlled the Senate is Frank Church from Idaho, was to basically say, we just found out that the president was using the CIA illegally. So we're going to use our new power with the weakening of the presidency to

investigate the executive branch. And the CIA has never come clean to Congress about what it's doing, so we're going to start just piling up all the evidence we can in The Church Committee investigated intelligence abuses by the CIA, the FBI, the n s A, and the I r S.

And it did two things. One is it revealed all these dark secrets that the United States have done overseas and domestically, but then also revealed things that had seemed to be successes that people knew about, like Guatemala and Iran interventions from the mid nineteen fifties, actually were a lot dirtier than they have been portrayed in the American people. Here we are talking about the CIA instigating coups against Jacobo are Bends in Guatemala in nineteen fifty four and

Mohammed mosadag in Iran in nineteen fifty three. The free those taken prisoner earlier, and a storm the House of Massartic. The Foreign Minister Fatimi gets through first to books that

he was told to pieces had not been confirmed. Meanwhile, the mob flopped the streets demanding the return of the Shop Masodic and his government has swept from power in favorite of General Zahidi, the man appointed by the Shop in the first place, and assassination attempts against, among others, Patrice La Mumba in the Congo, whose murder was not

conclusively tied to the CIA and Fidel Castro. And you know, one of the particular things in the Church Committee wasn't revealed how the CIA and both the Nixon and Kennedy administrations contracted with mafia killers to get rid of Castro. They couldn't even claim it was, you know, law and order. I think some of those documents from the Church Committee showed that they were giving poison capsules to the mob

to use against Castro. So it's it's revealing a CIA that's just out of control, not very smart, and hardly the best and the brightest, And it just reinforces this notion that the federal government was worse than incompetent. It was corrupt and incompetent, which is a pretty bad combindation. So what happens when you have a whole lot of real life conspiracies revealed is it of course makes people

more willing to imagine further conspiracies. What it was revealed the CIA had been doing a rug experiments, surreptitiously giving LSD to unwitting subjects and recording their reactions and seeing if this could be used, you know, in sort of the circumststances of brainwashing, resisting brainwashing and so on. This is the infamous Project mk Ultra. So once it's revealed that the CIA is doing something like that, it becomes a lot easier for people to imagine, well, maybe they

killed JFK. The imagination takes an extra leap forward. A number of people were already thinking along those lines about JFK, but this made that much more imaginable for other people. This new strain of conspiratorial thinking began to show up in popular culture a decade a decade and a half before all these mid nineteen seventies investigations, Your average Just Spy movie was American Spy was almost certainly going to

be the hero. You're gonna sympathize with him as he struggles against either the Communists or some sort of imaginary terror conspiracy like Specter in the seventies. Of course, you have this big wave of conspiracy thrillers where the U. S. Government is the enemy or is allied with the enemy. Since the assassination, six of these people have died in

some kind of an accident. There is no evidence of a conspiracy, and once that becomes a part of the conversation, that in turn also makes it easier for people to imagine real conspiracies. America has always been a home for conspiratorial thinking, and the nineteen seventies didn't necessarily see an increase in this thought. But instead of change and the focus of these fears, it's that people's conspiracy theories were

more likely to start. Institutions like the CIA, the FBI, of the White House, and if you look at the polls that sort of look at the levels of public trust, you know, the US government itself and in different agencies of the U. S. Government, I mean the CIA and

the FBI, They their numbers took a lunch. So it's important to understand the tenor of the times because when Paul Benowitz was contacted by Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doughty, he wasn't just vulnerable to influence because of his belief in the reality of aliens visiting Earth. He was also vulnerable because he lived in a society that believed that the government did bad things in secret.

On October, Benewitz, acting out of a patriotic sense of duty, called Curtland Air Force Bass head of Security, Major Ernest Edwards and told him about what he had filmed and recorded over the previous months. After this call, Major Edwards got in touch with Richard Doughty, I was a counter intelligence officer for the base. He gave me all the information that Paul had given him. So I said, Wow, that's interesting. So I made an appointment and went out

and talked to Paul. Paul told me the same stories, shared everything that he had done. I immediately sent a message up to headquarters. Headquarters said, started an investigation. Then I got ahold of a man by the name of Jerry Miller. Miller was a scientist and former Project Bluebook investigator. We found that what the signals at Paul was gathering was a very highly classified n S A project that

was occurring on base. It's no longer classified. We were shooting lasers into the air when Soviet satellites were flying over the base, and we were hitting the lens of the Soviet satellites, blinding them, preventing them from taking pictures of the base. Well, somehow Paul tapped into that. Paul also was taking pictures of a highly classified drone project that was being experimented with on the base. Back in drones were highly classified. What they did back in those days.

They would have a controlling aircraft that would launch these drones, and they would control the drones from inside aircraft, so the aircraft was always in close proximity to these drones. So these drones would be flying close around these aircraft, and it looked like there was some maybe danger or hostility of these drones stores that aircraft, but actually that aircraft was a controlling aircraft. This is probably as good a time as any to reiterate my words of caution

about Rick Doughty from last episode. Doty spent years planting disinformation in the UFO community, an effort we are looking at in this episode in the next. It makes sense to believe that anything that he says is in furtherance of this goal, even though he is long retired. I don't know why he would be any more honest with me than anyone else. Some of the things he says, less sensational things are consistent with other accounts of the

same events. Other things, including the more sensational things, should be treated as untrustworthy. With that in mind, here's Doady again. So when we found all this out, the project I was told to do was convinced Paul that what he was seeing was in fact UFOs And it wasn't difficult to do because Paul was a member of MUFON and a pro. MOUFON and APRO were two civilian UFO investigation organizations.

MOUFON is still active today. Paul had been a field investigator for MUFON and APRO for a number of years. Paul was already a believer in UFOs, so it wasn't difficult for us to convince Paul that what he was seeing with UFO, and that's what we wanted him to think, to prevent him from maybe disclosing the fact that we

were testing classified drones or classified leisure project. In fact, in addition to his documenting the Curtland Lights, he was also focusing attention on a place called the Archiletta Mesa, which rises up to over nine thousand feet in altitude in northern New Mexico. Paul was a pilot. He had

a plane and he would fly all over. He flew a person up to Dulcie, New Mexico once and and when he was coming back, he saw some strange things occurring in Archiletta Peak, which is east of Dulcie, very strange things, and he flew up there a number of times, photographing a lot of these strange occurrences. Paul was told within the UFO community that there was an underground UFO based up there, and so Paul was convinced it was

UFO related. I went up there with Paul once and we saw some strange things happening up on top of the Archiletta Peak, and I didn't know what it was. So I started checking within the intelligence community, and I found out there was a special unit at Fort Carson, Colorado, near four Collins that was using that area. What Doughty says he learned was that it was a Special Forces training area and the lights have been planted in the

ground to guide incoming helicopters. Now, if you're standing below down on the ground, several thousand feet down from the top of the Archipelata Peak, you saw these lights turn on, they look like especially if if they were hitting the cloud, they looked like UFOs flying up there. So what Paul was seeing wasn't actually just just lights that were built into the MESA up there, and and and it had

nothing to do with the UFOs. Doty says that he couldn't tell Bennewit's the truth about the area because the project was classified. Whether that was the reason or not, Doty used the lights to reinforce Bennewitz's suspicions about the MESA. So that was another maybe disinformation statement I gave to Paul. Now, remember Doughty was tasked with sewing disinformation, and I have no reason to believe he didn't use our interview to continue that work. With that in mind, he told me

this strange story. Now, another interesting thing occurred a couple of years later. Paul was flying up to Dolcie and he had a one of his employees seated with him and and they had a camera. As they were coming back about over where red Rivers located, baub Bennouits encounter the UFO, a huge UFO that he took pictures of, and he saw into the UFO he saw a little creatures inside through the window of portals. When Paul got back, he called me and said, you're not gonna believe what

I got. I said, what do you have? He said, I got pictures of a real UFO, A big UFO, huge UFO that I almost collided with over Red River in New Mexico. Paul had his own photo lap so I said, yeah, I'll come over and let me come over and look at these pictures. I went over there. I looked at these pictures. That was astounded. I mean, you know, I know of what I've seen in classified documents, and this object was huge. And I said, well, gosh, you you photographed are real and you all a huge one.

He said, that's a mother ship. I know it's a mothership. So I sent those pictures up the headquarters and they were astounded by it, but they didn't have an answer what they were. Where this scraft came from. Duty says. He asked ben a Witz if he'd shared them with the UFO community. He said, no, no, no, no, no, no no no. I'm afraid it's too hostile. I don't

want anybody else to know about it. And I took his pictures and I also took his negatives and we sent him up to why Shehington of the chain And of course people ask me today where are they? Where are they? Well, they're up there someplace. Do you think the government's going to release that stuff? No, they're not going to release it. During this time, Bennowitz also took photos of a crashed craft of some sort on the mesa maybe an early version of the Stealth Fighter or

a drone author Greg Bishop. So nobody knows exactly what he took pictures of because all the pictures of an actual crash were stolen out of his house, and Doty said either he or somebody in the Air Force did it because they didn't find him to have for his pictures, So they would break into his house and like go through it stuff and sometimes move furniture around just to mess with him, which none of this is ethical or proper,

but that's what they did. I think they thought, especially somebody like Dotie, thinks, you know, if I can accomplish the mission, that you know, I can pretty much do what I want. This effort came to include more direct methods to amplify Bennewood his paranoia, which took a very dark turn. After the break, as the Air Force continued its disinformation campaign against Paul Benowitz, they allegedly gave him some new computer software that they said would help in

deciphering the signals he was picking up from Kurtland. The translated messages were intended to further trigger his paranoia. Bennewitz considered his work to be a kind of scientific study, and he produced a report summarizing his conclusions, titled Project Beta. It is, to say the least, a troubling document. In it, Benewitz details his certain of a hostile, devious alien presence and the existential threat that they presented. Here are a few excerpts that give you an idea of the sense

of dread that pervades his writings. It is important to note at the outset the alien is devious employees deception, has no intent of any apparent peace making process, and obviously does not adhere to any prior arranged agreement. In truth, they tend to lie. However, their memory for line is not long, and direct comparative computer print out analysis reveals this fact. They are picking up and cutting, as the alien calls it, many people every night. Each implanted individual

is apparently ready for the pull of their switch. Whether all implants are totally effective I cannot predict, but conservatively I would estimate at least three thousand or more in the US and at least two hundred million, if not more, worldwide. They appear to be totally death oriented, and because of this, absolutely death fear oriented. This is a psychological advantage. No negotiation, agreement, nor peaceful compromise can be settled upon in any way.

No agreement signed by both parties will ever be adhered to, nor recognized and respected by the alien, though they may attempt to make us believe otherwise. This analysis has entered the wilder realms of UFO folklore. Greg Bishop. The aftermath of this is, you know, adulcie underground based rumors those got started then, like aliens are here have making deals with the United States government in exchange for who knows what,

you know, abduction rights or some thing like that. I've seen a letter where somebody wrote to him and told him that all spiritual teachers throughout history where either aliens or influenced by them or whatever. All these things that were floating around in the late eighties and early nineties being told to Paul Benewits. A lot of them ended up in the UFO mythos, and it's still there a lot of them. And I don't think there's any underground

basis with aliens in them. There's certainly our underground basis. There's tons of them, there's tons of underground facilities. But as far as having anything to do with extraterrestrials, I seriously got that. If you search, they'll say aliens on Google. You can read all kinds of wild stories about secret treaties, reptilian aliens, and battles between humans and extraterrestrials and underground bases,

like I said, the fringes of UFO folklore. Eventually, Benewit's got more and more paranoid, And there's a dispute as to whether he was already sort of paranoid before he talked to the Airforce or not. I still think he was, and that this episode just made it worse, and the Air Force and the various intelligence agencies just made it worse by encouraging him and occasionally by feeding him disinformation. Another story that comes out of the Benewit's affair involves

the passing of an altered document. According to this story, Doughty used a man named Bill Moore as an intermediary to Benewitz. You might remember Bill Moore from the previous episode. He was one of the authors of the book that brought Roswell back to public attention. Anyway, Doughty again allegedly gave more a document to pass to his friend Benowitz.

Bill Moore was told to give him a teletype that mentioned UFO activity and interest around UFO activity, and actually mentioned one of the sightings that he had or a document. And so Bill was told to give this document to Beneuits. And what Bill told me is he took it to him. He said, this is the only thing he ever gave to him. I trust him because Bill has never lied to me. He said, he took this document down there, and at night, after his company was closed, benewits his company,

he said, I have to talk to you. We have to go in the supply closet. He went in the supply closet, turned the radio out, and gave him the document and yelled in his ear. I was told to give this to you. Take it with a grain assault.

The document, which was made to appear as an official government teletype, essentially said that while the Air Force was no longer officially investigating UFOs, IT and other government agencies led by NASA, we're continuing to investigate legitimate sightings in secret. It also includes these two sentences. The official US REMNT policy and results of Project Aquarius is still classified top secret, with no dissemination outside official intelligence channels, and with restricted

access to m J twelve. Cason Benewitz is being monitored by NASA I N S who requests all future evidence to be forwarded to them through a f O S I I v O E. There are two interesting things here. One is that last sentence that indicates continued federal interest in Benowitz's work. It must be there to further convince Benowits that he is on the right track regarding UFOs.

The second interesting thing is the allusion to Project Aquarius and m J twelve, which is the first mention of what would become a major part of modern UFO folklore, with Bill Moore right in the middle. We will look at this in the next episode. Doughty more or less denies being behind the passing of this document to Benewitz. Well number one, I never passed anything to Paul Benowitz. That had anything new with him J twelve. I never

passed Paul Benowitz any classified documents. That's absolutely maloney. You can parse this statement and note that he doesn't rule out giving something to more to pass to Benewits that involved MJ twelve, or that the memo might not have been classified, and therefore he's not ruling it out for that reason. But regardless of whether Doughty was behind it

or not, Benewitz received the document. I'll also note that another reason for considering the possibility that Doughty didn't pass on the memo is that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was not the only federal agency with interest in Paul Benowitz. Myself, another agent and Jerry May were at Paul's house one night, the rainy night now Abuquerque. His wife comes in and said there's a red light in the house across the street. And we looked at

her like, okay, what does that mean? And Paul says, the house is vacant. So when we went out and looked out his window, we could see a red light and it's more or less like a camera light or something. Paul says, they're keeping track of me, and well, I knew we weren't doing it, and I knew the FBI wasn't doing it because we were FBI was closely involved in this. I thought, hmm, well who's doing it? So myself and this other agent go down and we were got guns, were federal agents. We go down and we

walked over there. About that time we got there, these two men were walking out of the house and we confronted them. We identified ourselves and we said, who are you guys? Well, they identified themselves too, as agents with a national security agency. According to Doughty, there follows a classic scene where each group tries to assert their claim

to priority in the case. So the next day I went out and I knew the supervisor n s A on the base as a highly classified location, and I was I had a pass to give them as as what the heck are you guys doing investigating Paul Benowitz? Oh that's classified? I said, I'll give a crap what classification is. You're gonna brief me right now because that's our operation. You're interfering with our operation. And I just sent a message up the headquarters. Oh let me get

you cleared. Let me get you cleared. Doughty was allegedly cleared to be given information about the n s AS interests in Benewitz, and this is where he says he learned about the laser program to foil the Soviet satellites. And about ten days later they sent me down and said, you continue what you're doing. You are the lead agency, not n s A, not the FBI. Paul Benewitz was the subject of operations involving at least three government agencies, and the pressure that this exerted on him led to

a deteriorating mental state. So anyway, eventually ben Benewitz gets more and more scared, He gets more and more paranoid, to the point at which he has to be His family's fears for his health and puts him in a mental health facility for a couple of months. People have this idea that, oh, he was in he was in the balloon, even for the rest of his life. Like now. He went to a place for maybe a month or two, he came out, and then he pretty much stopped the

level activity that he had. He was still interested in the subject, but he realized if he got too close he would probably fall over that cliff again, and him and his family didn't want that anymore. And this is the final part of the Benewitz legend, that he was

intentionally driven crazy by the government. And while you can argue about whether he was already paranoid and all the disinformation campaign did was to give him the final nudge, there's really no disputing the reality that in order to preserve some military secrets, government agents prayed on his mental health.

Author of the Unidentified Mythical Monsters Alien Encounters in Our Obsession with the Unexplained, Colin Dickey, and then I came across the story Paul Benewitz, and I was frankly flabbergasted by the depths of cynicism and uh sort of disdain with which a you know, a government operation would treat not just an American citizen, but a veteran and someone who worked for the government and deeply loved his government.

The Air Force could have called in Paul Benewits and said, you know, look what you saw was classified, and you, being a good patriot, we're just going to ask you to just stop sending up those images. And I have no reason to think that Paul Benowitz, who's not only was a patriot, but his livelihood he worked. His company was Air Force Contractors, so there's no reason he would

have sacrificed his livelihood. But they don't do that. Instead, they say, we are going to pump this guy with an elaborate campaign of disinformation, this very bizarre and elaborate, sustained campaign to take a you know, a law abiding and patriotic American citizen and basically more or less drive him crazy, to like push him to the point where nobody would take him seriously because he was advancing these wild and unverifiable theories about aliens. It's a really sad

and tragic story. I mean, there's there's so much like pathos involved in there, and also I think it does speak to a kind of weird cynicism that seems to drive some levels of the U. S. Government and among the people in the UFO community who knew the story. It made the case that the enemy above thread of conspiracy theory wasn't just something they'd see on the news or in the movies. It was something that could be

directed towards them. And they weren't wrong. You see, Paul Benewitz wasn't the only person who Richard Dody in the Air Force Office of special investigations targeted. One operation in particular would change the face of the UFO mythos and lead to a public repudiation of the disinformation campaign Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of i Heeart, three D Audio and Grimm and Mild from

Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related to audio on archive dot org.

Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mile dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.