X Descending

by Christian Lambright

  His replies now became decidedly more abrasive and defensive. After suggesting that I must have no idea how emails operate (something I do happen to know very well) he proclaimed that in the past he had been a “hacker” and that it was very easy to spoof email addresses (i.e. sending an email that appears to come from someone else’s address or a spurious one). But within a couple of sentences he suddenly acknowledged that the email address was ,in fact, his, though it was not his normal email address. It was only a proxy that he uses to receive and reply (a rather moot point by then since we had been exchanging emails for several days). In responding to his remarks I told him that while it is possible to spoof an outbound email address, it is extremely difficult to see that as a logical explanation for why his email address was attached to so curious a message in such an obscure place as the History Channel site, and several links deep in the Vietnam war forum. He still had not addressed the issue of why his stated dates of service did not include this apparent pre-history in Laos, and he never did. He did not care what I thought, and told me so. Nevertheless, I had found the information, and his reaction to my having found it made me even more suspicious.

  In the summer of 2007, I came across another intriguing bit of information. An acquaintance I have known for several years, who is aware of much of my research, told me that a presentation made at the 2007 MUFON Symposium contained something I would be interested in. Shortly before preparing the presentation and accompanying paper, The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origin of MJ-12, the authors, Brad Sparks and Barry Greenwood, had been given access to some very significant material. In that material was a transcript of a conversation between Bill Moore and author Robert Pratt. Eventually, I was able to obtain a section of this transcript, which contained a description that sounded all too familiar.

  The conversation took place in July of 1982 and was a discussion between Moore and Pratt about a book that they were planning to write. It was to be a fictionalized account of an Air Force OSI Officer and his pursuit of the truth behind the UFO phenomenon. Though the book was never published, it became known in the following years that the manuscript had been finished. In Moore’s own publication, FOCUS (Sept. 30, 1989), he stated that Richard Doty had played a role in the “fiction based on fact” book and, based on accounts by those who have seen the manuscript, it is easy to see the central character as modeled on Doty himself. In 1982, while Moore and Pratt were discussing possible motivations for the central character, Pratt asked Moore some telling questions about the person he refers to as “D”. Within the context of the conversation there can be little doubt that Moore is talking about Richard Doty when he tells Pratt that:

  “Well, he was at a site, which apparently was a listening post that was overrun in either Laos or Cambodia, and he told me the name of the site at one time…but apparently that was one of the kind of things that disillusioned him. I guess some of the people that were there were killed. It could be that they couldn’t leave the place until they had destroyed some of their equipment so that it didn’t fall into the hands of the—it could be that. I don’t know. But it was overrun. Whether they hadn’t provided adequate support or backup or defense for that site or whether they had allowed it to fall for another reason, I don’t know.”

  The clear similarity between the incident Moore described to Bob Pratt in their 1982 conversation and the incident at LS-85 that Doty wrote about on the History Channel web site in January 2005 is undeniable. Moore was told of the incident by “D”, who was later revealed to be Doty himself, and who apparently had been at a site that was overrun in Laos or Cambodia where several men were killed. (Moore could not remember which or the site name). Years later someone named “Rick”, writing from one of Richard Doty’s admitted email addresses, gave an account of having been at a site in Laos (two sites in fact) which were overrun and where several people were killed. The more telling incident, clearly identified in his online posting, took place a good eight months before his supposed August 1968 enlistment in the Air Force.

  Based on Doty’s reaction when I confronted him with his LS-85 claim, it was not hard to draw the conclusion that something in that message posed a risk if someone, like me, began digging into that area of his past. If he had been in the Air Force a year earlier than most people thought, it should not have created any real issue in itself. Was there something else? Was it something he had been doing there or somewhere he had been that posed the problem? If there were any clues to be found they would again have to come from his message on the History Channel web site.

  He wrote that he had been at Lima Site 85 a few weeks before it was attacked. When the site was finally overrun in March of 1968, he claims he was at a second site called Lima Site 20A, also known as 20 Alternate or simply Alternate. LS-20A was a secret CIA air base that served as the headquarters for CIA and US Officers. It was also the Command Post of General Vang Pao for the US "Secret Army" of Hmong tribesman during the Vietnam War.61 Pictures of the site can easily be found on the Internet showing the single narrow runway of the airfield surrounded by scattered low-slung buildings, massive rock outcroppings, and mountains.

  The connection to the CIA—and the air fields frequented by short takeoff and landing aircraft flown by Air America—brought a peculiar sense of déjà vu. John Lear, who became something of a notorious figure in the 1980’s after stepping into the Bennewitz controversy and spreading tales of MJ-12 and underground alien bases, flew for Air America. Lear has often talked of flying for the CIA in Laos. Vientienne, Laos in 1973 is the only location I have seen tied to a specific date, though in one online profile he is said to have flown for the CIA from 1966 to 1983.62 I knew from my own experience with him that he had talked of flying for Air America in Laos, and I recall during a visit to his home that he had an immense map of Laos and Vietnam on one wall. But the actual locations he frequented were not something I thought much about at the time. Others who have visited his home have also seen the mementos he keeps of his days flying in Southeast Asia, in particular a photograph of one base that seems to hold special significance. It is reportedly a wide-angle panorama of the CIA’s secret base at Long Tien.63 Long Tien is sometimes spelled Long Chien or Long Tieng, but it is also known by its CIA designation…Lima Site 20A… the same site where Richard Doty claimed to have been in 1968.

  To say I was surprised to discover this amazing coincidence would be an understatement. I cannot help but wonder what the odds are that Lear and Doty, apparent strangers, would both have a connection to a highly secret CIA air base on the far side of the world, and then both became infamous in the Bennewitz case for elaborate stories and misinformation. (A full and even more revealing discussion of my investigation into Doty’s Laos connection can be found in Appendix A.)

  If Doty has a hidden past that was intentionally removed from his service records, or if he was in Laos but not in the Air Force at the time (which would also explain its absence from his record), then who is he really? It certainly raises the question of whether, during his Bennewitz investigation, he was simply an AFOSI agent, or something more. Similar questions might be asked about the enigmatic Jerry Miller, the only person known to have assisted Doty during the investigation. Was it purely coincidental that Miller, a reputed expert on UFO’s and a former Project Blue Book investigator, happened to be located in Albuquerque right when he would be needed? At the time of his visit to Paul’s home he was reportedly with the Air Force Test & Evaluation Center (AFTEC, since renamed AFOTEC). Could there have been a direct reason to have someone from the “test and evaluation” center go see what Paul had caught on film?

  On what may be a related side note, in the 1985 meeting Ernest Edwards had with Sandia Security representatives Ortega and Stone, Edwards reported that the “briefing” Paul gave on the base in November of 1980 had been presented to “...the heads of AFWL and AFOTEC, and Sandia representatives”. However, in the widely circulated Air Force document written soon after the meeting took place and that also lists t
hose in attendance, AFOTEC (or AFTEC) was not mentioned. It is certainly possible that Edwards’ recollection was faulty, but it is curious that he names an agency that is not named in the earlier document but that just happens to be the agency Jerry Miller was purportedly associated with.

  There is also the issue mentioned earlier of Miller’s involvement and function within the Defense Intelligence Agency. Was he serving a number of different roles, working with both AFTEC and DIA? If he was listed in a DIA telephone directory then it seems safe to presume that the DIA position was legitimate. Even more curious was a comment Doty made to me in an email exchange when he described Jerry Miller “as a senior intelligence manager for the Air Force Test and Evaluation Center”. It adds another perspective to Miller's involvement and raises additional questions about who Miller may have been reporting to.

  These questions are a few among the many that may forever go unanswered unless a full accounting can be demanded. Who is Richard Doty and who did he work for—and with? Who is Jerry Miller, and who is Robert Fugate, that they had secret roles in the operation to discredit Paul Bennewitz? Who was directing the operation and could authorize such actions against an unsuspecting and well-meaning civilian? What, and whose, were the vehicles Paul saw and filmed? Within a year of Paul Bennewitz taking the films from his rooftop, and no later than early 1981, all the disinformation and misinformation that would confuse researchers and the public for many years to come had been planted. Counterintelligence professionals had devised it, and they did their job well. To this day, even fewer people are aware of the real evidence Paul had, evidence that only he would have been fully able to explain.

  “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

  —George Orwell (1984)

  At the beginning of Part II I said that writing about this case can be frustrating because of the amount of material that is in one way or another tied to Paul Bennewitz’s experiences. In fairness, much of that material came from others who may have been actively spreading disinformation like a volley of flares dropped to distract and divert attention. The disinformation and misinformation, intentional or not, continues even to this day. As an example, not long ago, in a popular Internet forum, a well-known researcher familiar with the Kirtland AFB sightings wrote a quick synopsis of the Bennewitz case. He began by saying simply that Paul had recorded ‘frequencies’, and then followed with several comments about Paul having believed he was communicating with aliens. Anyone reading that, with nothing else to go on, might understandably dismiss the issue completely. The synopsis, quick and dismissive as it was, fosters the same disinformation that has been perpetuated for years. I think it is notable that a proclaimed expert on this phenomenon, someone widely seen, read, and heard, would mislead others, if only by omission. I am certain this man knows differently. A skewed presentation of the facts by someone with a semblance of authority can be as effective a bit of disinformation today as bogus documents and false leads were back in the 1980s.

  This chapter looks at some of the topics and questions traceable to the Bennewitz case that still linger today. They may be familiar to some of you and unfamiliar to others, but consider them all in the context of the preceding chapters and the elaborate and contrived effort to mislead us all. Some of these subjects have taken on lives of their own, so it would not be an exaggeration to say the seeds of disinformation planted long ago have grown well. Anyone coming across the information without knowing the origin becomes a potential carrier.

  MJ Twelve and Project Aquarius are two topics that sparked a great deal of interest beginning in the early 1980’s. Both went on to become major topics of the last thirty years in Ufology; MJ Twelve in particular is still discussed fairly regularly in online forums. Regrettably, all the information in the world does not make for solid evidence, and over time it became clear that what at first looked like clues to bigger secrets, in reality, led nowhere. My reason for discussing them here is only to show how they originated from matters relating to Paul Bennewitz, and how they effectively drew attention away from the real evidence he had. But, along with these two topics are others that deserve a full accounting—an underground base at Dulce, Bill Moore’s involvement, and more.

  Time is the enemy of justice unless we do something to keep the issues alive. With no one demanding a formal investigation into the events, the only remaining option may be to try and learn from what happened and keep searching for those who took part in keeping the truth from the rest of us. Perhaps by understanding how the disinformation was released and used to draw attention away from Paul’s initial evidence, we may come away with a clearer understanding of how significant his original films were. We may also discover how precarious our own positions can be.

  A Word About Due Diligence

  Before looking at some of the curious sub-plots that played out during the 1980s, there is an issue that I feel needs to be addressed. It is something that anyone with an interest in the phenomenon, and especially anyone serious about getting to the truth, needs to think very carefully about. Any question of whether the government or military will act to suppress information about this phenomenon is moot after the case of Paul Bennewitz. If the military, or the government, or some other group, is willing to go to this extreme to suppress the evidence, civilian researchers need to be less naïve about what they are up against.

  In my years working with computer networks, often responsible for network security, I came to the sobering realization that there is no real security at all. Security is an ongoing process. For all the firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and with most people expecting threats to come from the outside, the biggest surprises often come from someone already inside the network—someone presumed trustworthy but in a position to have access to significant information.

  With most UFO reports now referred to civilian organizations, how would agents of the government or military position themselves to hear of anything significant? Beyond purely technical means, it would be reasonable to expect that they would want sources inside such organizations, preferably someone in a position to manage or control information. I have had my suspicions about this, as I am sure many others have, and I have come across several individuals over the years that I am convinced were not what they seemed. Nevertheless, with only one or two primary reporting sites in the U.S., and only one major UFO organization remaining, there would be few better places to monitor incoming information, and bury what might be problematic.

  Consider this example of how easy it can be to keep the membership of an organization, and by inference, the public, in the dark. In the early 1980s Tommy Blann and I were present at a meeting in which the local Dallas MUFON leadership were discussing their decision to separate from the national organization. The decision came about in large part after learning from the international director himself that the best cases MUFON received were never reported in the MUFON journal. The Dallas group was so shocked to hear him say it that they eventually questioned their own association with the overall organization. I never heard if they knew what his reasons were for keeping the best cases out of the MUFON Journal, but it was definitely a troubling discovery for the members in Dallas. If the members never heard of the best reports, and they were never published in the MUFON Journal, then what did happen to them—and why?

  It would only be prudent for an intelligence or counterintelligence agency hoping to keep a lid on troublesome reports and potential whistleblowers to maintain connections within the major civilian organizations. For years, questions have remained about CIA connections to the leadership of the original NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena), once the most respected civilian organization in the world. More recently, the Fund For UFO Research has also come under fire for connections to the CIA, principally through one of its founding members, Bruce Maccabee (coincidentally a former NICAP member). Maccabee, who worked for years with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, has rep
ortedly admitted to giving several briefings to the CIA on aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Simply giving a briefing might not justify real concern, but in a conversation with Todd Zechel, a founder of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), when Maccabee was asked directly if he worked for the CIA, he reportedly answered, “You might say that.”64 With an acknowledgement like that, could anyone not be concerned that the Fund For UFO Research may effectively be a funnel for information, via Maccabee, to the CIA? The question of where his loyalty may lie is troubling to say the least. How comfortable would the CIA be if they were to learn that one of their agents had been giving briefings to another agency with potentially conflicting interests? Though he is considered by many to be an expert in image analysis, Maccabee’s application of that expertise to validate ‘genuine’ UFO photographs has also raised questions of credibility at times. He received widespread criticism for his support of photographs in the infamous Gulf Breeze (Florida) case, a case now widely considered something of a fiasco by most serious researchers.

  After Bill Moore’s public admission of his role in the Bennewitz affair (discussed more completely below), the entire UFO community seemed to fall in behind those who castigated him for taking part in an operation against Paul Bennewitz. I was as shocked as anyone that he had deceived Paul (not to mention some of his own friends) for what seemed to be his own self-interests. He claimed he had his reasons, and he did offer a plausible rationale for his actions, but it was a betrayal nonetheless, and certainly a tragic one for Paul Bennewitz. Now, years later, I believe there are reasons to wonder if Moore's role was much more calculated than anyone realized, even with his apparent confession. Still, knowledge of what Moore had done might have been used in a number of ways to further the cause of Ufology. The leadership of the major public organizations might have pressed for inquiries and demanded a full accounting of the military's involvement. But nothing happened. They had an opportunity to demonstrate the significance of the UFO phenomenon and expose a case of the Air Force working to undermine a civilian, but instead of grasping the opportunity, they did nothing. Why?