X Descending

by Christian Lambright

  In the first part of this book I explain what I know of these two films and how they came about. There is a brief section on what the UFO phenomenon is and how it is often mistakenly perceived, including a definition of my own that I believe much more realistically represents the phenomenon. There are also a few examples drawn from my experience.

  The only evidence I ever thought would be worth finding is evidence that is inescapable, evidence that leaves you with the feeling you get when you have been checkmated and you know there is no way out. To be frank, far too much of what is publicized about this phenomenon has been the result of pandering to a paying public. I have never been one to accept what I read or heard at face value, nor do I expect anyone else to. Here is evidence you can check for yourself, though I do not expect you to accept it easily.

  The second part of this book is a more thorough examination of the experiences of Paul Bennewitz, the man who took the first film. Though I met him personally only once, we had several telephone conversations and exchanged many letters in which he explained how he came to take the films that were to cause him so much trouble. My focus is on his experiences between 1979 and 1980, though I also explore the consequences he suffered for having evidence that pointed strongly toward military complicity. This case is a familiar one in some circles but is relatively unknown to the general public, and to my knowledge the truth of its origin has not been widely known, or shown, until now. Beyond the all too human aspects of the Paul Bennewitz story are facts that revealed an extensive operation directed against him, and ultimately against anyone else who became too interested in what he had seen.

  Included in the second part is information relating to military and government efforts to suppress information on this phenomenon. Obtaining any information at all from government and military sources can be a long and frustrating process. Throw in national security concerns and it becomes virtually impossible to know if what you learn from documents is even accurate, let alone the truth. Lying is part of the intelligence game and sometimes the truth can only be pieced together. For my part, I found connections and troubling coincidences involving the Air Force, academia, and others in industry. These issues need to be explored if only to raise awareness of something about which I am convinced the public is being deceived.

  By far the most difficult aspect of presenting a story dealing with unidentified flying objects is dealing with the level of denial that exists when it comes to something so incredible and potentially serious. When something unexpected appears that could have serious implications, a reasonable response would be to demand information so that informed decisions can be made. But with the UFO phenomenon, ridicule, suppression of information, and human nature itself has left the public unaware that there are questions they should be asking, not the least of which is: Who benefits when the public does not ask questions?

  When it comes to the human mind however, the single greatest obstacle to realizing the truth may actually be whether or not someone is psychologically able to believe it. The mind will protect itself when faced with a reality it is not yet able to deal with. The idea is expressed very clearly in a story I was told by a psychology professor years ago:

  A doctor at a psychiatric ward was trying to help a patient who was suffering from a delusion that he was actually dead. After thinking of a creative way to convince the patient he was in fact alive, the doctor finally asked him, “Tell me, do dead people bleed?” The patient immediately replied, “Of course not!” At that the doctor took out a pin and pricked the patient’s finger and sure enough, he began to bleed. The patient was astonished and stared at his finger for a long time before he slowly looked up at the doctor and said, “I guess they do bleed.”

  That said…this story begins on a cold winter night.

  “I don’t give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell.”

  —Harry Truman

  1980 was a strange year in which several of the most incredible and widely publicized UFO encounters on record occurred. Two women and a small boy were injured on a narrow road not far from Houston, Texas; bizarre events were reported near a military base in England; and one lone man in New Mexico placed a call to Air Force Security Police. The first two cases were very compelling, but the New Mexico case was wholly unique.

  As the last days of 1979 headed toward 1980, a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico spent several nights watching glowing objects over one of the United States most sensitive military installations. At the northern boundary of the Sandia Military Reservation, Paul Bennewitz sat on his rooftop deck watching as brilliant disc-shaped vehicles slipped silently in and out of the area between his home and the Manzano Weapons Storage Area (MWSA) (Figure 1). If all he had seen were strange lights, his experiences might have amounted to nothing more than another mysterious sighting. What made his case unique however, was that he saw these vehicles repeatedly, over several nights. Very quickly he made sure he was ready for them. With both still and movie cameras, he caught these vehicles on film.

  The events that came later—after he called the Air Force to report what he had seen—would turn this into one of the most fascinating, troubling, and tragic stories in recent memory. But the most important aspects of it are still virtually unknown. The Air Force, contrary to their own official position on this phenomenon, became seriously involved once they found out what Paul Bennewitz had done. He may have thought he had witnessed alien craft, but the Air Force had certainly heard those kinds of claims before. That alone would never have been enough to draw them out. In the following months, as Paul built electronic equipment capable of detecting the vehicles, the Air Force conveniently discounted the electronic recordings he made. It was easy to dismiss them by saying they could have come from any number of sources in the area. The Air Force could ignore some things and they could discount others…but the films were trouble. There was no way to deny what Paul had on film.

  Paul Bennewitz once wrote that he had studied the UFO phenomenon since 1948. Most of that time he had remained neutral, with no real conviction one way or the other whether there was anything to it. But then, during the 1970s, a wave of cattle mutilations moved through New Mexico and with it came stories of strange lights being seen, sometimes in very remote areas. This seems to have sparked Paul’s interest, enough so that his name appears on a list of attendees to the April 1979 cattle mutilation conference held in Albuquerque by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Still, it wasn’t until July of that year that he took an active interest in the strange events happening in northern New Mexico. During the summer and fall of 1979 he made several trips north to an area that overlooked the Archuleta Mesa near the town of Dulce, New Mexico (Figure 2).

  After accompanying State Patrol officer Gabe Valdez on one wild and memorable night ride in July, Paul went back over the next few months and photographed a number of strange things in the area. The first time he went with his son, on his last trip he went alone, but it was all merely a precursor to what would come. Something happened when he returned from his last trip that riveted his attention on the area around his home in Albuquerque.

  Sometime in either late November or early December of 1979, after returning from his last trip to the Dulce area, his wife told him of a strange incident. Early one morning, in the pre-dawn hours, their small dog had suddenly begun barking and growling. When his wife woke she heard a high-pitched buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from directly overhead, above their Albuquerque home. She could not account for it, and so she told Paul about it when he returned. Paul would later say that he asked a few questions and then dropped the subject, apparently not wanting to cause her any concern. He had not wanted to make an issue of it specifically because a strange thought had occurred to him. After his recent excursions near the Archuleta Mesa, was it possible that whoever or whatever he had been watching up there was now watching him?

  By anyone’s account it was a stretch of the imagination. But to him, at that time, there was some ca
utious reasoning to it. What he did next was obvious. If (and it was a big if) “they” had followed him and somehow located his home, then there was every reason to keep an eye on the area near his home in Albuquerque. This chain of events is what led him to begin a nightly watch over the expansive area visible from his rooftop. As strange as the circumstance and logic was that brought him to that decision, it was a decision that forever changed his life.

  The second floor of his house has a large observation deck that provides a considerable view. Moving ten feet higher to the flat rooftop deck gave him a far wider view extending 360-degrees. On some nights he would start after sundown and keep watch virtually all night, braving sub-freezing temperatures and strong winds. From his vantage point in the Four Hills community east of Albuquerque he had a clear view looking southeast across a grassy plain stretching toward the Manzano Weapons Storage Area (Figure 3). Whether events began to unfold on the first night or the second is unclear, but soon after he began his nightly watch something strange caught his eye.

  Shortly before midnight, as he looked southeast from his deck, his attention was drawn to strange pulses of light in the darkness towards the base of the weapons storage area. He had never seen anything like this before and so his attention was immediately focused on it. A few minutes later, four simultaneous pulses of light appeared, each lasting ten to twenty seconds before quickly fading away. From his roof he could only sit patiently and wait, but with binoculars in hand he watched intently as things happened.

  When the pulses occurred it was clear that whatever he was seeing was on or very near the ground. Realizing he was seeing something very unusual, he called his wife to come out. It was now almost 12:30 a.m., and they would both end up watching for some time. At one point, the headlights of what they assumed to be a security patrol vehicle passed very close to where the strange glowing objects seemed to be. Neither Paul nor his wife could understand how a guard in a patrol vehicle could pass so close to the objects and not notice them. Eventually, unable to understand what these objects were and why they would be there, his wife went back into the house. This sequence, brightning for several seconds and then fading back into darkness, continued for some time as Paul watched and took note of where the objects were and their position in relation to each other. Four objects were visible—one of them considerably larger than the others.

  Late into the night, after what must have been several hours, the sequence suddenly changed. After the objects had been dark for several minutes, there was a sudden intense flash that seemed to come from underneath one or more of the objects. This quick flash, a prelude to departure, would become an identifying part of the routine in the nights to come.

  Seconds later, bluish halos formed around each object and instantly all four burst into brilliant balls of light and streaked into the air.Reaching an altitude he estimated to be 300 to 400 feet, the objects hovered for a moment and then quickly shot off to the south, disappearing from sight around the end of the mountains. The burst of light at the moment the vehicles left the ground was so intense that Paul would later write that he almost expected to hear an explosion come rolling across the desert plain…but there was no sound at all (Figure 4).

  Based on everything I have seen and learned in the past three decades, the “high strangeness” of the vehicles Paul saw on those late nights—combined with the staggering evidence he got on film—is the cause of everything that was directed at him later by the Air Force (or whoever was actually behind the operation against him). On seeing the images from his films it was very clear that, contrary to what I had once heard, these were not simply “little lights”.

  Paul was adamant that while the brightness of the vehicles might have obscured some of their shape, they were definitely saucers or elliptical vehicles, a shape easily visible in the frames from the film. Even more compelling, but rarely mentioned, was the fact that Paul was not the only witness. His wife also witnessed the vehicles on more than just that first night, though she may not have stayed out all night as Paul was driven to do. Eventually, catching on to the routine of pulses followed by a bright pre-launch flash, Paul was even able to tell her when to watch and what to expect.

  They both saw them again several nights later. Once again the vehicles were already on or near the ground, but this time they each seemed to radiate faint light that made them easier to locate. Even so, distant headlights would occasionally go by in the weapons storage area as if whoever was driving was totally unaware that the mysterious vehicles were there. Finally, in the early hours of the morning and just minutes before the vehicles took off, the glow faded away to total darkness. When the sudden pre-launch flash appeared beneath the vehicles, Paul manned his 8mm movie camera and toldhis wife to be ready. A few minutes passed by before suddenly, as if on cue, all four objects burst into balls of light and leapt from the ground. Just as before, at approximately four hundred feet they leveled off, made a ninety-degree turn, and streaked off to the south. Paul also had an expensive Hasselblad camera that he used to take time-lapse photographs of the entire sequence. From his description of those still images, the vehicles were clearly visible over a wide area, lined up, and showing a distinctive glow (a glow he theorized must have been some type of force field.) (See Figures 4 - 8).

  On the first few nights he had not seen the vehicles when they arrived. By the time he got out on his deck to begin watching, they were already there, down in the darkness at the foot of the weapons storage area. In order to catch them coming into the area, he decided to start observing earlier and stay for as long as it took. And so, the next night he began his watch just after 9:00 p.m., again from the upper rooftop deck of his home.

  At close to 11:00 p.m. he saw a vehicle “burst from around the hill”. He only mentioned one vehicle in this instance, so it is possible that on that evening only one came in. As if on a preplanned flight path, it moved very quickly into the area with no hesitation at all. Then, reaching what again appeared to be a preplanned point, it immediately dropped straight down toward the ground and went dark.

  The entire process took less than five seconds. Paul was adamant that the vehicle did not fly into the area and then maneuver toward a landing spot the way a helicopter would. The vehicle’s path and its maneuvers could only be interpreted as purposeful—getting into the area and getting the light out as quickly as possible.

  Several aspects of what Paul saw and filmed are extremely suggestive. What possible rationale could there be for the vehicles to be entering such a highly secured area? The Manzano Weapons Storage Area was one of the most sensitive military facilities in the nation at that time; surrounded by an electrified fence and patrolled by Air Force Security Police. Outside the fence, Sandia Security patrolled the grounds of the broader Kirtland Air Force Base/Sandia Military Reservation. Projects are conducted in this area by a number of military organizations and the Department of Energy. How could these vehicles not have been seen by any of the guards and other personnel that worked on the mountains or in the surrounding areas?

  Paul speculated that the vehicles might have been able to divert light in a way that would render them invisible. It is difficult to imagine that as a workable concept considering that Paul himself saw the vehicles and was able to film them. Even if they could have remained invisible to anyone known to be present (though not to someone unexpected—like Paul), the requirement of knowing and accounting for every possible witness on the mountain ahead of time, and adjusting for every possible scenario, is almost beyond comprehension. If that had been possible, then what was the reason for: A) entering low and fast around the far end of the weapons storage area, and B) conducting operations on moonless nights at a time of year that virtually guaranteed working in ice cold temperatures (more on this in Chapter 15)?

  Even if it had been possible to divert the light away from the mountain, there is still the matter of an intense blue-white burst of energy when the vehicles left the ground. As the vehicles raced upward they produced
a bolt of energy that appears on film looking very much like an electrical or plasma discharge. This bright burst, stretching upward from the ground, can be clearly seen in one image. A similar blue-white burst appears on film close to one vehicle during a mid-air maneuver. It is inconceivable that this intense light would not have been easily visible, unless of course, the departures were planned for times when no one was expected to be outside watching.

  Whether the vehicles were seen by the security personnel or not, the light from those brilliant vehicles left permanent images on the film Paul took those cold nights in the winter of 1979.

  The Air Force and Sandia Security guards were expected to make occasional rounds, which Paul and his wife presumed were the headlights they had seen. The Air Force Security Police was the organization responsible for the area of the mountain complex itself and its guards patrolled inside the electrified perimeter fence.Looking at topographical maps, it is clear that the base of the hills two miles to the southeast is about two hundred feet higher in altitude than Paul’s home (Figure 10). From the roof of his house he would have been looking slightly above eye level. With the difficulty of judging distances at night, the strange vehicles he was watching could easily have been nearer or farther than headlights he observed. Even so, it is hard to imagine that they could have been missed by someone looking in the right direction at the right moment. Another curious observation Paul made was that when the strange vehicles were on (or near) the ground they appeared to be in a rough line and spaced about 250 feet apart. The separation of nearly 750 feet between the first and last vehicles does raise questions about the need for them to come down so far apart. Nevertheless, perhaps the trees, brush, and broken terrain had helped to obscure them from someone driving along the perimeter fence, presuming of course that the headlights were patrol vehicles.