Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: audio for full exposure, Listen with headphones. In the heart
Speaker 1: of the Great Southwest, between Arizona and Texas and bordering
Speaker 1: on the Republic of Mexico, lies the Sunshine State. In
Speaker 1: this land of ours, the state of New Mexico, one
Speaker 1: of the largest, yet one of the least populated, of
Speaker 1: all of our states. New Mexico was admitted to the
Speaker 1: Union as recently as nineteen twelve. Since Coronado brought the
Speaker 1: first horses and sheep into the territory, the raising of
Speaker 1: live stock has been one of New Mexico's most important industries.
Speaker 1: At one time, sheep dominated the state's agricultural life, leading
Speaker 1: clothing and helping support her people. Today, cattle are perhaps
Speaker 1: of equal importance. The cattle round up is a familiar
Speaker 1: site in the Great Southwest, Cowboys driving the cattle of
Speaker 1: shipping points along the railroad and along the way. A
Speaker 1: man's got to eat. That grub is plenty good too, Hey, partner,
Speaker 1: I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode nine.
Speaker 1: The Land of Enchantment, the beginning of the modern UFO era,
Speaker 1: is generally pegged to Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting around Mount
Speaker 1: Rainier in but arguably the most famous UFO event in history,
Speaker 1: took place less than three weeks later in Roswell, New Mexico.
Speaker 1: I'm sure the story is familiar, at least in its outline,
Speaker 1: but you may have the sense that it has played
Speaker 1: an important part in UFO lore since the wreckage of
Speaker 1: something was found in the scrub on mac Brazil's ranch.
Speaker 1: But that's not the case, retired Air Force pilot James mcgahey,
Speaker 1: The Roswell incident was never in Project Blue Book. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a case in there. It was never investigated by
Speaker 1: the United States Air Force. Earlier this season, we heard
Speaker 1: Joe Nicol talk about his model of the Roswellian syndrome.
Speaker 1: It's a five step process that some UFO stories undergo. First,
Speaker 1: there's a UFO encounter. Second, the encounter is quickly explained. Third,
Speaker 1: the story doesn't really go away, it just goes underground. Fourth,
Speaker 1: While underground, the or is subjected to what Nickel calls
Speaker 1: myth making processes, as some mixture of rumors, changing memories, hoaxing,
Speaker 1: and so on is added to the original story. Finally, five,
Speaker 1: the story resurfaces in a new form that explains away
Speaker 1: the original skeptical explanation. I don't want to spend much
Speaker 1: time on the actual seven Roswell event since many of
Speaker 1: you probably know all about it, so here's a brief recap.
Speaker 1: Skeptical investigator Joe Nicol. The Roswell incident really started on
Speaker 1: July the eights in when a whip behind the years
Speaker 1: press officer put out a press release claiming the recovery
Speaker 1: of a quote unquote flying disc. The local paper, the
Speaker 1: Roswell Daily Record, ran a story about how Mac Brazil
Speaker 1: had come into town on with a collection of wreckage
Speaker 1: that had been strewn over a large area of his ranch.
Speaker 1: This wreckage consisted of sticks, tape, pieces of rubber, and
Speaker 1: foil paper. Were these the remains of a crash flying saucer?
Speaker 1: The newspaper quickly printed an update with an explanation for
Speaker 1: what was the weather boat and the material sticks tape, rubber,
Speaker 1: foiled paper. We're from a weather boat, weather device, and
Speaker 1: that pretty much debunked the whole affair and was basically
Speaker 1: the death knill to that story. From a wo R
Speaker 1: news report else where, the spot of seeing flying sauces
Speaker 1: or disks was left behind. In the excitement over the
Speaker 1: discovery on the ground of a number of objects resembling
Speaker 1: desks or sauces. One object found on the ranch near Roswell,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, turned out to be a battered army weather below.
Speaker 1: But I have to pause here and say that the
Speaker 1: story that it was a weather balloon was not true.
Speaker 1: And here is a controversy in the whole Roswell story
Speaker 1: whether the people who said it was a weather balloon
Speaker 1: were sincerely mistaken or whether they knew what it really was.
Speaker 1: And we're putting out a false story. But what was
Speaker 1: actually found at mc brazil's ranch instead of a weather balloon,
Speaker 1: and i'll lower my voice, here was a secret United
Speaker 1: States government spy balloon from something called Project mokel James mcgahey.
Speaker 1: So the whole story ended at that point. The Air
Speaker 1: Force put out a statement saying it was just a
Speaker 1: weather balloon. Now it was a bit more than a
Speaker 1: weather a loon in one sense. There was a secret
Speaker 1: classified project going on at Alama Gordo called Project Mogul,
Speaker 1: which was actually top secret a way to release some
Speaker 1: instrumentation in to the high atmosphere at six thousand feet
Speaker 1: carried up by a number of regular weather blooms. In
Speaker 1: this case, it was like twenty three weather balloons connected
Speaker 1: together in a six foot train. And they have been
Speaker 1: doing this for a while, and on one of their
Speaker 1: missions they lost the weather below train when it came down,
Speaker 1: and it just so happened to come down on the
Speaker 1: ranch at which the rancher found this debreeding got drug
Speaker 1: across the desert, and that was sort of the story.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the story was was appropriately deboned, but the
Speaker 1: secrecy of local begins to work its way into the
Speaker 1: story to make more of a conspiracy tale. But what
Speaker 1: happened the whole story went underground, and then there were
Speaker 1: lots of rumors and various things around Roswell, and there's
Speaker 1: some other Air Force tests that happened years later causing
Speaker 1: all kinds of effects of a local population believing this.
Speaker 1: And then finally a UFO believer, Stanton Freedman, found the
Speaker 1: intel officer from the original event. This intel officer was
Speaker 1: Jesse Marcel, who was a major at Roswell Army Air
Speaker 1: Force Base. He was a TV repairman, and he told
Speaker 1: a slightly different story about what had happened those U
Speaker 1: thirty one years before. Here's Jesse Marcel talking about the
Speaker 1: materials he saw from the crash site. It was not
Speaker 1: anything from this earth that I'm quite sure of, because
Speaker 1: I was bigger and tell us almost I was familiar
Speaker 1: just about all of the two he was in aircraft
Speaker 1: and our air travel. And then a number of books
Speaker 1: got written about it, and it became one of the
Speaker 1: most famous UFO cases in history. In Bill Moore and
Speaker 1: Charles Burlitt's published a book called The Roswell Incident, which
Speaker 1: reintroduced the crash story to the public. The book not
Speaker 1: only tells the story, but introduces new elements that are
Speaker 1: now familiar, such as government cover up and alien bodies.
Speaker 1: Though not credited as an author, Stanton Friedman was one
Speaker 1: of the primary researchers. Here he is talking about the
Speaker 1: work he and Moore did. I'm the original civilian investigator
Speaker 1: about the Roswell incidents. Starting in Night Dylan, I located
Speaker 1: sixty two people. Within the next year and a half
Speaker 1: we were connected with the story. The first book came out,
Speaker 1: Crash at Corona, laid out the claim that what was
Speaker 1: found on mac Braswell's ranch was not a top secret balloon,
Speaker 1: but a flying saucerer, and that alien bodies were recovered.
Speaker 1: This was the basis on which the new Roswell mythology
Speaker 1: was formed and from which it grew. Can we get
Speaker 1: this elaborate story of the Christ flying saucer and alien
Speaker 1: bodies and the alien bodies? This was an old done
Speaker 1: in one story. You know, these are handed on and
Speaker 1: the aliens were kept at some secret location, and pretty
Speaker 1: soon there's another Christ site that we've never heard of,
Speaker 1: and so on. This is just what happens over time.
Speaker 1: I got my doctorate in English literature and folklore. Folk
Speaker 1: Ors know that given enough time, stories proliferate and told
Speaker 1: and retold and retold, and you will get these very
Speaker 1: different versions of a story that you can recognize though
Speaker 1: that's the same story, but it's now a very different
Speaker 1: version of the same story. The Roswell Crash dates back
Speaker 1: almost seventy five years. It has been in the public
Speaker 1: eye for about forty. It is the most famous UFO
Speaker 1: case in history. As David Clark said earlier in this season,
Speaker 1: really what can you say about wasn't being said, But
Speaker 1: it turns out that people still have plenty to say
Speaker 1: about Roswell and it fits with the dynamic that we
Speaker 1: looked at in the Ryndolshom Forest incident. There remains no
Speaker 1: public insensus for what happened at Roswell, whether the debris
Speaker 1: found there was from a secret balloon program or a
Speaker 1: crash flying saucer, and that leaves room for stories to
Speaker 1: be proffered, evaluated, and neither absorbed into the folklore or forgotten.
Speaker 1: I talked to Ryan Sprague, the host of the Somewhere
Speaker 1: in the Skies podcast, about a number of topics for
Speaker 1: this season, and he told me about some work he
Speaker 1: had done for a television show about Roswell, and without
Speaker 1: trying to evaluate the merits of the evidence he saw
Speaker 1: and stories he heard, his experience shows how the Roswell's
Speaker 1: story remains dynamic. I had the opportunity to do an
Speaker 1: independent investigation on Roosvelt, and this is for a television network,
Speaker 1: and I told them off the bat, I said, look,
Speaker 1: if there's nothing new that you've discovered or you want
Speaker 1: me to look into, I don't want to be a
Speaker 1: part of this because it's Roswell. People know this, they've
Speaker 1: seen it a million times, and I don't want to
Speaker 1: be connected to it. If we're just rehashing the same
Speaker 1: stuff over and over. And to their credit, the rees
Speaker 1: archers on this television program, working in conjunction with me
Speaker 1: and my co investigator, a private investigator and Navy veteran,
Speaker 1: we found new evidence. We flew to Roswell. We met
Speaker 1: with a geologist who claimed to have debris from a
Speaker 1: possible crash of a craft and that was it for me.
Speaker 1: Man the minute this guy said he had physical evidence
Speaker 1: that he found, presumably at the Roswey UFO crash site,
Speaker 1: I needed to see it. The guy with the evidence
Speaker 1: was Frank Kimbler, an associate professor of Earth science at
Speaker 1: New Mexico Military Institute. He has appeared in a number
Speaker 1: of UFO documentaries and television shows. We went right to
Speaker 1: the military institute where this geologist taught, and he showed
Speaker 1: us exactly how he found the location where the crash happened.
Speaker 1: Kimbler claimed that he had found metals a couple of
Speaker 1: feet beneath the surface of the crowd our site. He
Speaker 1: also said he had found buttons consistent with army uniforms
Speaker 1: at the same time at the same site, and then
Speaker 1: he showed us the medals at first glance, it looked
Speaker 1: like any other metal out there, so that was, you know,
Speaker 1: a little I guess deflating for me. We brought it
Speaker 1: to a prominent aerospace lab in California and had attested
Speaker 1: and that's where things got really interesting. We got the
Speaker 1: results back and while the result didn't scream alien, what
Speaker 1: you found is alien or extraterrestrial. The composition and the
Speaker 1: makeup of the medal that he claims is what he
Speaker 1: found in this desert. It was manufactured, and the alloys
Speaker 1: within this medal where things we can only dream of
Speaker 1: our aerospace flabs using right now. So again, if this
Speaker 1: was found in the desert in nineteen or had been
Speaker 1: underground for fifty something years, it was what is being
Speaker 1: used on our most sophisticated aerospace technology and shuttles right now.
Speaker 1: So that begs the question. Was this some highly secretive
Speaker 1: advanced spacecraft that America was working on at the time,
Speaker 1: It had a crash, they needed to clean it up.
Speaker 1: Let's use this alien thing as a cover story possibly?
Speaker 1: Or what is it? Or it could be from an
Speaker 1: alien spacecraft or it could be an advanced modern alloy.
Speaker 1: The Kimbler only says he found in the desert. There
Speaker 1: was one other experience that I've never really shared with anyone.
Speaker 1: My investigative partner Jennifer Marshall and I we were unbreak
Speaker 1: during filming for this television show and we're covering was
Speaker 1: it Aliens? Was it? This a guy in the town
Speaker 1: of Roswell. He comes up to us, he sees in
Speaker 1: our camera crew, and he starts asking questions, as anyone
Speaker 1: in a small town would when outsiders come in and
Speaker 1: you seek cameras and all of this. This guy asked
Speaker 1: what Ryan's angle on the show is going to be.
Speaker 1: Is he going to claim it was an extraterrestrial craft?
Speaker 1: Ryan says, not necessarily, and he's like, well, I could
Speaker 1: tell you this it was an aliens and that perked
Speaker 1: our interest and they're like, okay, well what do you
Speaker 1: think it was? And he said, look, everyone in this
Speaker 1: town knows everybody. We all had a friend or a
Speaker 1: family member who was directly involved with that incident. He said,
Speaker 1: for me, it was my great grandfather, and I can
Speaker 1: tell you right now it was not aliens. So of
Speaker 1: course we're going to press him on that. We're like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: what was it? What was it? And he went into
Speaker 1: this story that I'd heard in the past, but I
Speaker 1: didn't put much credence into it. This was a very early,
Speaker 1: top secret program for spaceflight. I mean we're talking the
Speaker 1: early early days of high altitude tests and whatnot. So
Speaker 1: this guy told us that the American government, we're using individuals,
Speaker 1: children to be specific, who were runaways or who were
Speaker 1: um left to the corners of society, whether they were
Speaker 1: mentally disabled or physically disabful, and they would use these kids,
Speaker 1: put them in these high altitude balloons or or craft
Speaker 1: of some sort, and send them up to see how
Speaker 1: far they could survive in the atmosphere. And one of
Speaker 1: these things came down and that's what they found on
Speaker 1: the ranch and Roswell. This is a pretty dark story, obviously,
Speaker 1: and as Ryan says, it's a variation on an existing
Speaker 1: story about test flights and crashes and government cover up
Speaker 1: of advanced weapons systems. And that's why so many military
Speaker 1: officials claimed we've seen bodies at the time, and that
Speaker 1: they were they didn't look human. If we're going to
Speaker 1: go back to this idea that they could have been children,
Speaker 1: they were very small, some of them had physical disabilities.
Speaker 1: So these are two stories from one person who is
Speaker 1: actively involved in looking at the UFO phenomenon. You'll notice
Speaker 1: that the stories point to different explanations for the crash,
Speaker 1: use different methods of authentication, and are mutually exclusive. One
Speaker 1: explanation points to either an advanced military craft of some
Speaker 1: sort or an alien vehicle, and supports this story with
Speaker 1: a piece of alleged physical evidence. The other story takes
Speaker 1: the evidence that the wreckage was from a high altitude
Speaker 1: balloon and adds the part about children being victimized in
Speaker 1: a terrible experiment. These explanations cannot both be true, but
Speaker 1: these are the kind of stories that keep the Roswell
Speaker 1: legend going, creating new narratives or adding twists to old narratives.
Speaker 1: My sense is that there's no pulling the Roswell incident
Speaker 1: back to the original story that was reported in the
Speaker 1: legend is too deeply ingrained in our culture at this point.
Speaker 1: There are innumerable books and episodes of television programs about Roswell.
Speaker 1: A series of young adult books about human looking alien
Speaker 1: teenagers at Roswell High School that was turned into a
Speaker 1: TV show, The Alien Autopsy Special of Fox Television, The
Speaker 1: Alien Autopsy version of The Child's Game Operation, an annual
Speaker 1: UFO Festival and on and on. It is the foundational
Speaker 1: event from which our perception of the government and UFOs sprang.
Speaker 1: And it's a special interesting that when the story reserviced
Speaker 1: in it was brought back by civilian researchers. When Project
Speaker 1: Bluebook closed and with it the official government inquiry into UFOs,
Speaker 1: the impetus for investigation fell on people outside the government,
Speaker 1: and while civilians took the lead in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties, the Air Force was not content to leave
Speaker 1: them to their own devices, and the efforts undertaken by
Speaker 1: the Air Force to undermine this civilian research has played
Speaker 1: a role in shaping our understanding of UFOs today after
Speaker 1: the break. One of the stranger aspects of the developing
Speaker 1: folklore was the part that the US government and in
Speaker 1: particularly the Air Force, played in advancing disinformation about UFOs.
Speaker 1: We're going to look at some of the alleged instances
Speaker 1: of this disinformation campaign in the next few episodes. A
Speaker 1: lot of the insight we have into this effort comes
Speaker 1: from the tricky figure of Richard Doughty. I'm Richard Doughty.
Speaker 1: I'm a former intelligence officer with the Air Force Office
Speaker 1: Special Investigations. I worked in intelligence from nine seventy eight
Speaker 1: to nine. I was in the regular Air Force for
Speaker 1: four years. I went to college. After college, I was
Speaker 1: recruited in the Intelligence Service and I worked at Curtland
Speaker 1: Air Force Base here now Buquerque. I worked at DEBT
Speaker 1: three Flight Test Center and what you call what they
Speaker 1: call Area fifty one in Nevada. The Air Force often
Speaker 1: Special Investigations is the criminal investigative arm of the United
Speaker 1: States airf Force. They investigate criminal activities, fraud activities, and
Speaker 1: counter intelligence counter espionage. And that's what I did. I
Speaker 1: did exclusively just counterintelligence and counter espionage for a FOS I.
Speaker 1: Richard Doughty is an important figure in our story because
Speaker 1: he admittedly passed disinformation to the UFO community in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, and this disinformation became part of the greater
Speaker 1: UFO narrative. But when listening to him, it's very important
Speaker 1: to remember that his job was to lie to people
Speaker 1: about UFOs, and there's no reason to believe that he's
Speaker 1: telling the truth now. I interviewed him over the course
Speaker 1: of about two hours about a number of subjects and
Speaker 1: found that when he was talking about people that he
Speaker 1: knew and operations he was involved in. What he said
Speaker 1: often lined up what others involved in these incidents have
Speaker 1: written or said. When the conversation strayed into the subject
Speaker 1: of actual UFOs and alien contact, I definitely felt that
Speaker 1: he was promoting the same false stories that he has
Speaker 1: for decades. So as we look at some of these intrigues,
Speaker 1: particularly in the nineteen eighties, I want to be very
Speaker 1: clear that many of the claims that he makes are
Speaker 1: in keeping with his past as an agent of disinformation,
Speaker 1: and as we talked about earlier in the season, whether
Speaker 1: the story he is telling is factual or not is
Speaker 1: less important than the story itself, but don't take his
Speaker 1: claims about aliens as factual. With that said, I didn't
Speaker 1: ask Rick specifically about Roswell, but it came up when
Speaker 1: I asked him about how he was oriented to his
Speaker 1: job infiltrating the UFO community. At the time, he was
Speaker 1: stationed at Curland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: an enormous facilit of the encompassing about eighties square miles.
Speaker 1: While stationed at Curtland, there was an incident that occurred
Speaker 1: in a remote secretive area of the base, and it
Speaker 1: fell within my purview of counterintelligence operation, so I didn't
Speaker 1: have a proper clearance to access to certain information pertaining
Speaker 1: to this. So I was then briefed into the program.
Speaker 1: And the program involved the United States government's knowledge in
Speaker 1: contacts with extra trustrials, the investigation of UFO activities on
Speaker 1: or near a base or all all over the United States.
Speaker 1: It was a highly classified program. I had to get
Speaker 1: a special clearance for it. The films and the briefings
Speaker 1: that we obtained, it was just wasn't just me. There
Speaker 1: were some others in the room and we were being
Speaker 1: briefed pertained to the United States involvement with E T
Speaker 1: S and UFOs from on and this was in Vight.
Speaker 1: So the briefing brought us right up to the current
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight at that point, and that um explained
Speaker 1: to us that Roswell happened. Incident Roswell happened. There are
Speaker 1: two crashes, one at cronin New Mexico, which was north
Speaker 1: of Roswell in the second one out west of Magdalena
Speaker 1: Polona's Peak, which was south of horse Mesa. The Roswell
Speaker 1: of the Corona crash was found almost immediately in July
Speaker 1: of n but the other crash in uh western part
Speaker 1: of New Mexico wasn't found until nine. The UFO crashed
Speaker 1: in a very very remote area of New Mexico and
Speaker 1: no one really had access to that area. In and
Speaker 1: rancher was taken his cows to a higher pasture and
Speaker 1: he located it. In seven we the Army was involved
Speaker 1: in recovering a craft that crashed Necrona, New Mexico with
Speaker 1: four bodies for dead bodies of E. T s and
Speaker 1: one live body that live creature found in the craft.
Speaker 1: It was later called by the government an extra trustrial
Speaker 1: biological entity or EBA, and he remained into captivity at
Speaker 1: Los Alamos until two when he died. So this will
Speaker 1: be the beginning of a pattern. Doughty takes ideas that
Speaker 1: are already out there in the UFO culture, the Roswell crash,
Speaker 1: the recovery of bodies, even the existence of a live et,
Speaker 1: and puts them in an official context, in this case
Speaker 1: a top secret Air Force briefing. Doughty says he was
Speaker 1: briefed at Kirtland Air Force Base in about the government's
Speaker 1: involvement with UFOs in seven or seventy eight. A man
Speaker 1: who lived just out side the base named Paul Benowitz
Speaker 1: started seeing some strange lights in the night sky. Author
Speaker 1: of the two thousand and five book Project Beta, Greg Bishop.
Speaker 1: Paul benn and Witz was an electrical physicist. He had
Speaker 1: his own business in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It still exists.
Speaker 1: He's deceased now. The business is called Thunder Scientific and
Speaker 1: it is located just outside Curtland Air Force Base. He
Speaker 1: had a government contract. He made censors and humidity sensors
Speaker 1: and other types of sensors. Paul lived in the Four
Speaker 1: Hills area of Albuquerque, which is right outside Curland Air
Speaker 1: Force Base. His backyard butted up against the perimeter of
Speaker 1: the base. You can see the most of the north
Speaker 1: part of the Curtland Air Force Space from his house.
Speaker 1: From his his top deck porch in Albuquerque, he'd go
Speaker 1: out on his porch at night near the Air Force
Speaker 1: space and he can see lights flying around. So he
Speaker 1: started making films of these and I think some video,
Speaker 1: but this was nine when they started or so. Most
Speaker 1: things were done on film. So I had eight millimeter
Speaker 1: film mostly of these lights lifting up off the ground
Speaker 1: and then taking off and going behind this mountain now
Speaker 1: not far from where the perimeter is located is a
Speaker 1: place called Manzano Storage Area. It was one of the
Speaker 1: largest nuclear weapons storage areas in the United States, probably
Speaker 1: in a free world. And there were other classified things
Speaker 1: at Manzano and this isn't classified anymore. Paul placed some
Speaker 1: electronic sensors outside on his patio facing Manzano and he
Speaker 1: was picking up strange signals. He was also photographing airplanes
Speaker 1: flying military airplanes taking off from Curlin Air Force Base.
Speaker 1: He was taking all sorts of pictures. Paul was a
Speaker 1: Navy Vorlo two veteran, highly decorated. He felt that there
Speaker 1: was some danger to the base. Benewitz became convinced that
Speaker 1: these lights that he was filming were in fact advanced
Speaker 1: vehicles being piloted by extraterrestrials. In worried that these UFOs
Speaker 1: posed a serious threat to the base. Benewitz got in
Speaker 1: touch with Kurtland security. So they said, well, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: So they called him in and said, so what are
Speaker 1: you saying? And he stood there in front of a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of based security people at Colonel's and the
Speaker 1: guy that ran the base and told him what he
Speaker 1: was seeing. You know, because they knew what it was,
Speaker 1: but they wanted to know what he knew, one because
Speaker 1: they didn't think anybody's watching, and too because if he's
Speaker 1: talking to anybody, they wanted to know who those people were,
Speaker 1: and he possibly foreign nationals or somebody that just wasn't
Speaker 1: supposed to be seeing that stuff. So they listened to
Speaker 1: his report. As his report went on, security staff would
Speaker 1: leave the room as they realized that what Benewitz was
Speaker 1: talking about was not under their purview. So the two
Speaker 1: or three people that were left that had something to
Speaker 1: worry about about what he was seeing told him, this
Speaker 1: is very interesting, Paul. Why didn't you keep telling us
Speaker 1: what's going on. We want to keep in touch with you.
Speaker 1: This is important to national security, etcetera. What they did
Speaker 1: not say was don't worry about it. We know what
Speaker 1: you're seeing and they are not a threat. Just go
Speaker 1: on about your life and don't worry about it anymore.
Speaker 1: So Bennewitz kept at it. So he continued to film
Speaker 1: these things, and he also built a radio receiver and
Speaker 1: was starting to pick up signals which he thought were
Speaker 1: where UFO or alien transmissions, but apparently what they really
Speaker 1: were were coded transmissions being used to either control weapons
Speaker 1: or who knows what. It's basically electronically coded and this
Speaker 1: is before there was digital encoding decoding all that. They
Speaker 1: spent tons of money to developed this, and he just
Speaker 1: can get up and started to figure out what the
Speaker 1: messages were saying. But he didn't interpret them in the
Speaker 1: way that that that made sense as weapons systems. He
Speaker 1: interpreted them as as alien transmissions. Kirtland Security eventually decided
Speaker 1: that Bennewitz needed to be more carefully monitored. They assigned
Speaker 1: a security person from the Air Force Office of Special
Speaker 1: Investigations to basically, I guess his contact or case officer
Speaker 1: or whatever, and that was Richard Doughty. So Doughty not
Speaker 1: only listened to what he said, he also encouraged his
Speaker 1: his reporting and encouraged I think some of his delusions
Speaker 1: about being alien because they wanted him to stay interested,
Speaker 1: but they didn't want him to know what was going on.
Speaker 1: If he wants to think it's aliens, that's fine. And
Speaker 1: so as far Paul Benowitz goes, that was a a
Speaker 1: super operation by the government and that wasn't just my operation.
Speaker 1: It was the government had planned that operation. And if
Speaker 1: you look back at what Paul did and what Paul
Speaker 1: found out in the entire history of the Paul Bennewitz's
Speaker 1: incident and look at it at a rational with an
Speaker 1: open mind. Most patriotic Americans would say, you did what
Speaker 1: you had to do, and I did what I had
Speaker 1: to do. The government did what we had to do
Speaker 1: to prevent Paul from delving into something that was highly,
Speaker 1: highly classified at that point. Next time on Strange Arrivals.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart, three D
Speaker 1: Audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode
Speaker 1: was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by
Speaker 1: Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors,
Speaker 1: creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio
Speaker 1: on archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over
Speaker 1: at Grimm and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my Heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: H