by Mack Maloney
The Air Force overloaded Bennewitz with so much of this disinformation that the physicist was certain he was on the right track. And why wouldn’t he be? He believed what his government was telling him.
But soon enough, the reality of that unreality would get the best of him.
Armed, Then Committed…
Bennewitz became especially involved with the mystery of animal mutilations. He’d met a woman who claimed she and her young son had witnessed a calf being cut up by aliens. When the aliens realized they were being watched, the woman said they performed a procedure on her and her son that caused them to suffer from confusion and lose their memory.
Fascinated by her account, Bennewitz arranged for both the woman and her son to be hypnotized, hoping more of the real story would come out. Indeed, under hypnosis the woman told a graphic tale of being abducted and taken aboard the alien craft, where she saw animal and human body parts stored throughout the UFO.
But Bennewitz grew increasingly paranoid as these hypnosis sessions progressed. He began to suspect the hypnotist was a CIA agent. Finally, he made the hypnotist stop the sessions and forbade him to talk to the woman again. The hypnotist later reported that by this point Bennewitz had armed himself as protection against the aliens.
* * *
Becoming even more irrational, Bennewitz began preaching his theories to anyone who would listen. This was around the same time that he was first institutionalized, one of three such occasions when he was committed. His crazy ideas about Dulce began to spread throughout America’s substantial UFO community, and, as is sometimes the case within that community, the stories grew in complexity and size—and, with each retelling, became more outrageous and bizarre.
* * *
Finally, in 1989, one of the people who’d been funneling the disinformation to Bennewitz admitted his role in the affair. (Surprisingly, it was a fellow ufologist secretly recruited by the AFOSI.) This man confirmed that the government’s goal all along was to push Bennewitz into a mental breakdown by feeding him false information about aliens.
An Air Force sergeant assigned to the AFOSI named Richard Doty was also outed for taking part in the scheme. He and the ufologist turncoat damaged Bennewitz so severely that even when Doty contacted Bennewitz years later to tell him he’d been an unwilling participant in the government-inspired hoax, Bennewitz refused to believe him.
* * *
Was all this necessary? Why didn’t the Air Force simply sit down with Dr. Bennewitz and explain the real situation to him and have him sign a national security document promising never to speak about what he’d stumbled upon? Thousands of ordinary citizens and military personnel have signed similar documents over the years. Why wasn’t Dr. Bennewitz afforded the same opportunity? From the beginning, all he wanted to do was help his government. But in the end, that same government destroyed him.
“It was cruel,” said Jerome Clark of the entire episode. “And it was done by someone who was in a position of power and could do it. So they did.”
But Clark also questions why the U.S. Air Force and others had such an extraordinary interest in this single ufologist in particular and in the UFO phenomenon overall. Indeed, our beer-drinking Spook friend told us that, as described, the whole Bennewitz affair most certainly went higher than just Kirtland’s local AFOSI.
“Something like this would have to have at least several agencies involved,” he said.
So, why would the U.S. government go through all this trouble and expense if there were no real UFO secrets to protect?
The answer to that question remains elusive.
And though Paul Bennewitz died in June 2003, the nonsense about Dulce Base lives on.
6
Tonopah and the Tale of Two Cities
Flying with Ghosts
On the night of May 19, 1900, a prospector named Jim Butler woke up to discover his burro was missing.
Butler was camped out in a rugged, mountainous part of south central Nevada, picking through rocks and looking for fortune. About forty years earlier, the Comstock Lode, one of the largest silver finds ever, had been discovered about two hundred miles to the northwest. But the lode had been stripped clean by 1889, bringing about what some people believed was the end of all mining in Nevada.
A few die-hards like Butler kept at it, though, searching other parts of the state and hoping to find their pot of gold—or silver. Such work required a pack animal to carry around the tools of the trade, so hanging on to one’s burro was important.
The next morning Butler set off in search of the animal. After some hiking and climbing, he finally found it sleeping under a small ledge.
Determined to get the burro’s attention, Butler picked up a rock to throw at it—but the rock seemed unusually heavy. Examining it closer, Butler realized this was no ordinary rock. It was thick with both gold and silver. Though Butler didn’t know it at the time, thanks to his wayward donkey he’d just uncovered the second-richest silver strike in Nevada history.
Butler and others went about claiming stakes in the area, kicking off a spectacular twenty-year mining boom that historians say breathed life into what was at the time a dying state.
Butler himself named the town that sprang up around all this. He called it Tonopah, a Shoshone Indian word meaning “hidden spring.”
* * *
These days Tonopah is a junction town, a place where U.S. Routes 6 and 95 cross, putting it about midway between Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada.
Because the mining business dried up so long ago, the town (population now about 2,500) appears to be little more than a place to gas up and maybe spend the night before moving on to the gambling mecca of your choice. (The iconic Clown Motel is considered one of the top places to stay; one reviewer on tripadvisor.com called it “affordable, funky, with the best shower in six states.”)
Tourist brochures also cite Tonopah as a top stargazing destination, which will be important later on. Plus, the ghost town of Goldfield is just twenty minutes down the road.
But sleepy little Tonopah is not what it appears. Strange things have happened there in more recent years.
Very strange and very secret things.
The Most Mysterious Place Ever?
Thirty miles southeast of Tonopah there’s a highly classified military base few people have ever heard of.
Known as the Tonopah Test Range, or TTR, this base is so secret that if one of the ground vehicles used there breaks down, the person hired to fix it must have the highest government security clearance possible. In fact, driving from the base into the town of Tonopah without special permission is prohibited. The TTR’s on-base security is among the most stringent of any U.S. installation around the world.
For years, personnel assigned here lived like vampires, staying hidden during the day and venturing out only at night. There was a good reason for this. Hidden at the base for nearly a decade was a flying machine of incredible capabilities. A machine so hush-hush it had to be concealed inside a slew of secretly built hangars whose doors, by the strictest orders, could not be opened until one hour after sunset and had to be closed one hour before sunrise. A machine so remarkable that, by presidential order, it only flew at night.
Had any civilian aircraft strayed too close to the TTR while this machine was airborne, there was a good chance they’d have been chased off by patrolling Air Force fighters. Though it wouldn’t have made much difference. Because to the pilot of any accidental intruder flying at night, Tonopah’s secret aircraft would have been invisible.
At the same time, though, if some plucky soul climbed one of the high mountains that surround the TTR and looked out on the base through night-vision goggles, they might have caught a lucky glimpse of this mysterious flying machine.
How could it be seen and yet not seen?
This seemingly otherworldly aircraft was not a reengineered UFO or something built with the help of aliens, though it did have capabilities many people have seen in UFOs: Here one moment, g
one the next. A very bizarre, unearthly shape. The aforementioned ability to disappear.
Officially this flying machine was called the F-117 Nighthawk.
To most of us, it was better known as the Stealth Fighter.
An Early Triumph
The Nighthawk was basically an F-15 Eagle fighter with a different body. The secret was that body wore highly classified radar-absorbing paint, had no right angles and had many of its heat sources shielded or deflected—plus a number of other things that reduced its radar signature to the size of a pea.
Back in the early 1980s, during one of the plane’s first trial flights, a radar station was set up in the middle of the desert as a test of sorts. The idea was, if the Stealth Fighter were a “ghost” then it would not show up on the radar as it approached. At the appointed time, though, the plane’s designers were crushed when a blip did pop up on their screen. But a few seconds later, that disappointment turned to triumph when they realized what they were looking at was the radar signature not of the Stealth but of its chase plane.
So, the Stealth itself was indeed “invisible,” as would be every major U.S. warplane to follow.
Reds in the Desert
The F-117 secretly flew out of the TTR for almost ten years. Yet the place was highly mysterious even before the Stealth’s arrival.
Again, had someone managed to climb up one of the surrounding mountains in the 1970s or early 1980s, day or night, and done so at just the right time, they would have seen a very different aircraft flying above Tonopah.
They might have been confused at first, though, as if what they were seeing was something from an alternate universe. Because in those days, the skies over the TTR were filled with Soviet MiGs.
What was the Russian Air Force doing at Tonopah?
In the days before the Stealth Fighters arrived, the U.S. Air Force had managed to secure a number of Russian fighter aircraft, MiG-17s and MiG-23s mostly, and bring them to America. Just how they did this is still a secret, though at least a few of the foreign airplanes came by way of defectors—lured by a reward of a million dollars or more—flying in from North Korea or other Soviet client states.
These Russian airplanes, laid out in full markings and wearing Soviet camouflage paint, became part of a MiG air-combat training program. Flown by highly trained American pilots, the Russian planes took to the air as adversary aircraft, giving other U.S. fighter pilots a chance to practice dogfighting techniques against the top-line aircraft of their main Cold War rivals.
Fans of the movie Top Gun will remember Tom Cruise and his Navy buds also flew against adversary planes—but those were U.S.-made aircraft painted to look like Soviet aircraft. Up in Tonopah, away from Hollywood’s klieg lights, the U.S. Air Force was doing it for real.
The New, Expensive Occupant
When the Soviet threat began to change somewhat in the early eighties, the Russian jets moved out and the Stealth program moved in.
In 1982, the Tonopah base was modernized to accommodate the invisible jets. An enormous complex, including seventy-two specially built hangars, was constructed to house and hide the remarkable F-117s in the daytime.
But strict procedures were still needed to keep the secret planes secret whenever they were flying at night. To that end, before each mission, there would be a mass briefing of all Stealth pilots. Again, Tonopah’s hangar doors could not be opened until one hour after sunset. This meant the first takeoff could not be made until about seven p.m. in winter or nine p.m. in the summer. At the end of the night, the planes had to be in their hangars and the doors closed one hour before daylight.
Moreover, a surrogate aircraft was needed to provide cover for the Stealths. This role fell to the A-7 Corsair, a Vietnam-era attack plane that was approaching the end of its service life. Operating from Tonopah throughout the F-117 program, Corsairs were intentionally left outside their hangars in the daytime so that Russian satellites looking down on the TTR would detect nothing but the antiquated airplanes during their photo passes. Whenever the Stealths flew off range (mostly over other parts of Nevada and California), conversations between the F-117 pilots and the Tonopah control tower were doctored to make it seem to anyone listening in that they were all about flying and controlling an A-7. Each F-117 aircraft also carried a radar transponder that mimicked that of an A-7.
All of this was necessary to keep the existence of the Stealths secret.
But it was a very expensive cover story.
Where Are the Little Green Men?
So what does all this have to do with UFOs?
Very little, as it turns out.
Though the TTR does raise a few eyebrows among the conspiracy community simply because classified aircraft are known to fly from there, it’s not really considered a hot spot for UFOs.
Proof of this comes from the previously mentioned tourist brochures: In fact, Tonopah claims to be the “stargazing capital” of the United States. In other words, unlike Groom Lake and other secret bases around the world, people come here to look at the stars and not for UFOs, which means there can’t be many of them flying around, or any at all.
But… this is where it gets weird.
Because, as it turns out, people do see UFOs over Tonopah. Lots of them.
Not Tonopah, Nevada, though, but Tonopah, Arizona.
Same Name, Different Place
Located five hundred miles southeast of Nevada’s Tonopah, Arizona’s Tonopah can be found along Interstate 10 about an hour west of Phoenix.
This Tonopah is so tiny, though, it barely qualifies as a town. At last count, fewer than one hundred people lived there. It’s located in the desert and sits on top of a huge underground aquifer that dispenses well water as hot as 120 degrees.
But this place, and the surrounding area, is brimming with something else: UFO activity.
Tonopah, Arizona, has no secret air base close by, but it does have something UFOs are known to take an interest in. This Tonopah is near the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the largest nuclear power plant in the United States.
And not only have there been many UFO sightings here, but there has also been at least one CE3 (as in, close encounter of the third kind) event reported in the area—that is, an actual meeting between humans and the occupants of a UFO.
Many of these UFO sightings have taken place along the notorious Interstate 10. The road is typical of Arizona desert highways. For the most part it’s straight as an arrow with only an occasional rise or hill. The desert is vast on either side, with hundreds of square miles of sagebrush and sand, the only break being a sign reminding you just how far away you are from anywhere else.
Isolated, flat and lonely, it’s the perfect place to encounter a UFO.
Courtesy of MUFON.com, NUFORC.com, www.forteanswest.com and wwwufospottings.com, the incidents below are just a small sampling of some of the strangest UFO reports from the “other” Tonopah.
UFO ROAD RAGE
On July 7, 1989, a man was traveling east on Interstate 10. It was about one thirty a.m. and he was going approximately seventy miles per hour. Suddenly he became aware of something in the fast lane traveling alongside him. It startled him so much he nearly went off the road. He thought it was a truck cab driving with no headlights. But he could see no mud flaps or reflector lights.
The man quickly realized that whatever this was, it had no discernible shape. Nor did it have any wheels. Rather it was flying alongside him, just a few feet off the ground.
After a few terrifying seconds the object accelerated, pulled ahead of his car and began to climb. The astonished driver found himself leaning forward in his seat and looking straight up through his windshield. While this helped him get a better look at the object, he still had no idea what it was—other than it was not a plane or helicopter or ultralight aircraft.
The object accelerated further and finally flew off into the night. The driver skidded to a stop and jumped out of his car just in time to see it go up and over a nearby mountainto
p.
THE JET FIGHTER AND THE UFO
On the night of March 14, 1997, a man was driving west on Interstate 10 when he noticed an unusually bright light directly in front of him. It was brighter than any star or planet and it was moving toward him at high speed, revealing its enormous size. When the object suddenly changed direction, the witness realized that within it was a cluster of three separate bright objects. Even more astonishing, a jet fighter was circling these objects, as if examining them.
Asked to make a comparison, the witness said if the three bright lights were the size of golf balls then the jet aircraft would have been about the size of the head of a tack. In other words, the three objects were huge.
Suddenly, the bright lights disappeared and the only thing left in the sky was the jet fighter. The witness watched the jet make one more long arc around the area and then fly off to the south. The witness checked the time and realized he’d been watching this drama for at least twenty minutes. He later said it was only after the sky was empty that the reality of what had happened finally hit him.
The witness later told UFO investigators that the sighting had been the most thought-provoking and unexplainable incident of his life.
THE PERFECT V
On the night of November 16, 2011, a witness was walking outside his home near Tonopah, Arizona, when he noticed strange lights in the sky off to the northwest. There were five of them and they were brighter than any star or planet. Glowing all white, they were evenly spaced about forty degrees above the horizon. As the witness watched, the lights suddenly blinked off but just as quickly came back on again in sequence, from top to bottom. The lights went off a second time, but when they blinked back on again, an identical line of lights had appeared next to the first. The witness was astonished to see both lines move to form a perfect V in the sky.
The entire event lasted less than a minute before blinking out for good. The witness later stated that he had graduate degrees in geology and geography and, while he was definitely not a UFO enthusiast, he had come forward simply because he wanted to tell someone of his strange experience.