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Aviary + (Bennewitz * 39) = Heavens Gate?
An Relatively Holy Excerpt from award-winning
investigative journalist Howard Blum’s 1990
Fine Alchemical Worke Out There
Excerptus Caeruleus:
"And for four years Bennewitz never suspected his friend of any sin
worse than skepticism. Moore was the perfect spy. Why? That was the
one question Moore kept asking himself as he, now an insider,
observed the government’s sustained campaign against Bennewitz.
Why
were Doty and the Falcon so intent on discrediting one solitary UFO
crusader?
[...]
"...Moore had no doubts about the effectiveness of the government’s
disinformation program. Moore watched as Bennewitz was driven to the
breaking point. As he was fed stories about evil and threatening
grays, Bennewitz grew more emotional. He kept guns and knives hidden
throughout his house. He had extra locks installed on his doors. He
could not sleep.
He turned his business over to his son. At lunch
with Moore, Bennewitz, his hands shaking, his face as haggard as a
skeleton’s, told his friend that aliens were coming through his
walls at night and injecting him with hideous chemicals. The
chemicals knocked him out; he was very worried about what the aliens
had done to him when he was unconscious. As he spoke, he smoked
constantly.
Moore, whose job was to be observant, counted each of
the twenty eight cigarettes Bennewitz had puffed in the course of
the forty-five-minute meal. It was not long after that lunch that
Bennewitz was hospitalized for exhaustion and fatigue.
[...]
"He [Moore] suppressed all his natural emotions: his anger and
revulsion at Bennewitz’s torture, his impatience with the Falcon’ s
capriciousness, his eagerness to run to the media for help and
protection. He let everything well up inside. He held it back, a
fair trade, he felt, for his chance to ’learn the truth.’
[...]
"He called them, in deference to the Falcon, his first contact and
his first stab at word code, ’the aviary.’ He no longer had any
doubts about their position, their power.
[...]
"And
Moore, how did he feel about his tacit complicity in the
government’s plot against Bennewitz? Did he feel ashamed by his
silence? By his betrayal of his friend? He has yet to comment, and
his reluctance is understandable. Instead, he preferred to describe
his work with Doty as an ’opportunity,’ his spying on Bennewitz as
’the price I had to pay.’
[...]
"Keeping secrets is a habit. It is the way officials
- spies,
generals, and scientists - are taught to behave. Because some
explanations are not simple. All is never explained. Because now
that we are at the end of a politics of global conflict, as men and
states abandon their allegiances to failed ideological gods, all
that is left for a great nation to protect and believe in is its
tattered secrets."
[End Excerptus Caeruleus]
With the sun beginning to set, the humpback Manzano foothills would
cast long, broad shadows across Coyote Canyon.
The sky would slowly
start to bleed, turning from a deep, brilliant desert blue to a
pastel shade, a faded denim color streaked with an irradiating red,
until, at last, it all settled easily into a soft zinc gray. And
then the lights would appear. In these last moments before the New
Mexico night began, coming from somewhere in the west near Kirtland
Air Force Base, the strange craft, their running lights aglow, began
their maneuvers.
They would fly in a circling formation in the dusk
sky above the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility, and next fly
south toward the Coyote Canyon test area. Every evening they came.
Their arrival was as regular as the sunsets, and no less
spectacular.
From the deck of his house perched high in the Four Hills section of
Albuquerque, Paul Bennewitz had a perfect view.
Night after night,
he paced the deck, an eight-millimeter movie camera in his hand, as
he, with considerable anxiety, recorded the erratic, hovering flight
paths of these craft. At the same time, his tracking antennas would
also be at work, sweeping in unison across the sky. With lumbering
deliberativeness, the huge antennas automatically rotated toward the
ships, vectoring in on their flight.
They moved clockwise, their
rotors loudly grinding, until contact was made.
Then banks of
ultra-sensitive receivers - lovingly hand-crafted machines, the
cherished brainchildren of Bennewitz’s own ingenious designs -
would come alive. A steady, low-frequency electromagnetic beep...
beep ... beep would fill his workroom.
[CF.: The silly historical
treatise A Message From Our Space Brothers via Shortwave Radio (ca.
1954) by Adamsky’s friend and carnival barker, occultist George Hunt
Williamson -B:.B:.]
The signal came in modulated pulses, loud and
clear and well-defined like the exultant opening chords of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He never doubted those strange craft
were sending a message.
Each night it was all recorded. There were over 2,600 feet of film.
A locked filing cabinet held the tapes of months of encounters.
These were Paul Bennewitz’s clues and, after much painstaking
analysis, his proof.
They were the irrefutable cornerstones of his great discovery -
Project Beta.
Brother Leo
B:.B:. 7°=4°
Caerulean Adeptus Exemptus
The insights that culminated in
Project Beta, Bennewitz’s grand
theory about UFOs, first surfaced under hypnotic regression.
It was
1979 and Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a New Mexico psychologist, was challenged
by the story a deeply troubled female patient had revealed under
hypnosis. From the very depths of her subconscious, she had purged
herself of a most remarkable tale. She had been abducted by aliens.
Dr. Sprinkle believed her, and he did not believe her. Filled, then,
with a sense of concern and fascination, as well as skepticism, he
decided to consult his friend Dr. Paul Bennewitz. It was his hope
that Bennewitz, an accomplished physicist, a prodigious inventor, a
man of science with a wizard’s mind as well as a soft, sympathetic
spot for all talk about UFOs, might be able to contribute some
insightful analysis. Bennewitz was most definitely interested, and
the woman was eager for whatever help he - or anyone - might
offer.
It was arranged that Bennewitz would be present during her
hypnosis.
The sessions continued for three months. The woman would slip into a
trance easily, her eyes nearly closed, her voice a low monotone; and
then, under Dr. Sprinkle’s prodding, more and more of her repressed
encounter would come forth. Moments before her abduction, she
recalled as the two men listened, she had witnessed a bizarre
ritual. The aliens were killing cattle, draining the beasts of their
blood. She saw it all. That was why they took her.
They took her to
their ship and she was forced to watch as the aliens did strange
things, things she couldn’t quite understand, things she still
didn’t quite recall, with the cattle and with the blood. And then
they did things to her.
As Paul Bennewitz listened over the course of those months to the
woman’s agonized tale, he did not at first know what to make of it.
But the more he mulled it over, he became convinced - absolutely
certain beyond a shadow of a doubt - that she was telling the
truth. No one, he felt, could be that good an actress. Her pain was
genuine.
But there were still crucial pieces missing from her story. It was
necessary, Bennewitz realized, his own fears building, to learn what
the aliens had done to this poor woman. He urged Dr. Sprinkle on.
The facts, however, were buried too deep, were too successfully
repressed. Yet Bennewitz was unyielding. He was convinced those lost
moments aboard the spacecraft were the keys to understanding the
motives of the aliens.
His task was apparent. What the victim
couldn’t remember, the rescuer - and by now he saw himself in that
role - would discover. So piece by piece, part observation, part
scientist’s logic, part instinct, he over many months came to an
understanding about what had happened. The aliens had surgically
implanted mind- control devices in the woman’s skull.
They could see
what she saw. They could hear what she heard. They could control her
every move.
Bennewitz was terrified.
Still, goaded on by what was at stake, in a state of constant alert,
he conceived Project Beta. His careful and documented monitoring of
the alien ships flying over the New Mexico desert, and the messages
they were sending to control their victims, began.
From the start, rumors full of mystery and promise involving Project
Beta swirled through the tightly bonded communities of kindred
thinkers who lived across the Southwest. And so, looking at
subsequent events from this perspective, perhaps it was inevitable
that Bill Moore’s and Paul Bennewitz’s paths should cross.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t until 1981, after Project Beta had been in
operation for nearly two years, that a curious Moore, now a director
at the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), a Tucson-based
group of UFO investigators, drove east from Arizona to the
scientist’s home in Albuquerque. His assignment was to evaluate Bennewitz’s findings.
Moore, who prided himself on his ability to size people up, found
much to admire in the scientist. Bennewitz, mesmerizingly
articulate, able to pepper any conversation with seemingly
inexhaustible flourishes of esoteric information, had the confident
manner of a man who had grown up being the smartest boy in the
class.
And yet there was also something disquieting about him. Moore
found his intensity - a trait many would agree Moore could analyze
with considerable authority - especially disconcerting. It was as
if Bennewitz felt his role was to serve as one of history’s not so
silent witnesses; or, perhaps he even saw himself as a prophet, one
of those high- minded souls whose nagging earnestness was meant to
call lesser lives into question [you catchin’ all this, Ed "Make a
Dent in History" Dames? -B:.B:.].
Whatever it was, it rankled Moore.
He preferred to take Bennewitz in small doses.
As for
Project Beta, Moore viewed the footage of the hovering lights
and listened to the tapes of recorded messages. It was undeniable
that Bennewitz had seen and heard something; the films clearly
depicted unusual lights maneuvering near the Sandia National Labs
complex, a classified Department of Energy facility on the Kirtland
base.
And, just as certainly, Bennewitz’s receivers had been
monitoring odd low-frequency electronic signals. But Moore was not
at all convinced that these "discoveries" had anything at all to do
with UFOs.
The strange craft might be, he reasoned, nothing more
ominous than Air Force helicopters or perhaps even some sort of
experimental plane. Similarly, Moore found it difficult to accept
that the signals were alien radio transmissions. Bennewitz’s highly
touted computer-generated decoding program was based, as best Moore
could tell, on the sort of shaky assumptions that would just as
readily have translated the pulses of Morse code into an
extraterrestrial monologue.
Moore returned to Arizona and announced to APRO that as far as he
was concerned Bennewitz was a dedicated researcher who just didn’t
seem to have the emotional objectivity to sort, as he noted with
deadpan candor,
"the shit from the candy."
Still, over the years
Moore remained in touch with Bennewitz and the two men became
friends; after all, they were involved in the same quest.
And it was
with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment that Moore watched as Project Beta evolved into an all-encompassing theory. What had
started with some fragile conjectures about mind-controlling aliens
had, Moore would state with a sigh, "blossomed into a tale which
rivaled the wildest science fiction scenario anyone could possibly
imagine."
According to Bennewitz - and supported, he insisted with unshakable
ferocity, by his research - two opposing forces of aliens had
invaded the United States. The white aliens wanted intergalactic
brotherhood; they came to this planet in peace. However, the
malevolent group, the grays, were in control. It was the grays who
were responsible for the cattle mutilations, the human abductions,
and the implanting of mind-control devices in humans. The government
was not only aware of this, but had also negotiated a secret treaty
with these invaders.
The grays were granted the right to establish
an underground base beneath Archuleta Peak near
Dulce in
northwestern New Mexico, and in return the military had received a
shipment of extraterrestrial weapons.
But then an atomic-powered
alien spaceship crashed on Archuleta Peak. The grays suspected
sabotage. And, Bennewitz was convinced after decoding radio
transmissions, the treaty was about to be broken. The angry grays
were preparing for nothing short of total war.
It was a theory that Bennewitz, in his own mind another Paul Revere,
was devoted to circulating. He attempted to contact not just UFO
researchers like Moore, but also congressmen, military commanders,
members of the scientific establishment, and even the President.
"Instead of withholding judgment until all of the facts were in,
Paul insisted on repeatedly going off half- cocked to anyone who
would listen," Moore complained. The way Moore saw it,
Bennewitz was
"his own worst enemy."
It would not be until months later, after Moore was recruited by the
Falcon and given his assignment by Air Force Office of Special
Investigations agent Richard Doty, that Moore would realize Bennewitz had a more formidable enemy - the government of the
United States.
Disinformation, as the Soviet term desinformatsiya was quickly
anglicized by admiring Western intelligence agencies, is the
propagation of false, incomplete, or misleading information to
targeted individuals. But for a disinformation campaign to be truly
successful, it must accomplish two related goals. One, the target
must act on these new "facts." And two, the target must be
irrevocably diverted from the more fruitful path he had previously
been following.
For the past three years, since 1980, Bill Moore learned from
AFOSI
agent Doty, counterintelligence officers from a variety of agencies
had been running a disinformation campaign against Paul Bennewitz.
The purpose of the exercise - or so Moore would remember being told
by a gloating Doty - was systematically to confuse, discourage, and
discredit Bennewitz.
Their work had been remarkably successful. It was government agents,
pretending to be friendly co-conspirators or using other, more
convoluted covers, who had first passed on to a gullible Bennewitz
"official" documents and stories detailing the secret treaty between
the U.S. government and evil aliens, the existence of underground
alien bases, the exchanges of technology, the wave of brain
implants, and even the tale about the spaceship that had crashed
into Archuleta Peak.
These "facts" became the linchpins of his
grand theory; and, fulfilling all the government’s hopes, Project
Beta - the filming of airship maneuvers in the vicinity of nuclear
bases and the monitoring of the unusual signals emanating from these
craft - had been now relegated to a secondary concern.
And now agent Doty wanted Moore to join the government’s team. He
assigned Moore to spy on Bennewitz. Moore’s job was to report on a
regular basis to Doty about the effectiveness of the government’s
disinformation campaign. Did Bennewitz still believe all the wild
tales that had been passed on to him?
For four years Moore kept a careful watch on his friend. For four
years he listened mutely as Bennewitz complained that his phone was
tapped, that his office had been broken into. Moore, the dutiful
recruit, even passed on to Bennewitz the "Aquarius Document," an
actual classified AFOSI message that had been skillfully doctored - by Doty? the Falcon? Moore never asked
- to prove that an alien
invasion was at hand.
And for four years Bennewitz never suspected his friend of any sin
worse than skepticism. Moore was the perfect spy.
Why? That was the one question Moore kept asking himself as he, now
an insider, observed the government’s sustained campaign against
Bennewitz. Why were Doty and the Falcon so intent on discrediting
one solitary UFO crusader?
The truth was never explained to Moore. He wondered if AFOSI had
simply picked Bennewitz at random, that he was an unlucky target of
an ongoing counterintelligence teaching exercise.
Or, perhaps Bennewitz had actually been filming UFOs from his sun deck; the
government’s long cover-up was jeopardized and, therefore, Bennewitz
- and his film and tapes - must be discredited at all costs. Or,
equally plausible, it was possible that Project Beta had been
monitoring a top-secret military training program, and a plan to
discourage anyone else - foreign spies as well as believers in UFOs
- from paying too much attention to these maneuvers was quickly
conceived. Moore would never know.
But whatever the reasons behind it, Moore had no doubts about
the
effectiveness of the government’s disinformation program. Moore
watched as Bennewitz was driven to the breaking point.
As he was fed
stories about evil and threatening grays, Bennewitz grew more
emotional. He kept guns and knives hidden throughout his house. He
had extra locks installed on his doors. He could not sleep. He
turned his business over to his son. At lunch with Moore, Bennewitz,
his hands shaking, his face as haggard as a skeleton’s, told his
friend that aliens were coming through his walls at night and
injecting him with hideous chemicals.
The chemicals knocked him out;
he was very worried about what the aliens had done to him when he
was unconscious. As he spoke, he smoked constantly. Moore, whose job
was to be observant, counted each of the twenty-eight cigarettes Bennewitz had puffed in the course of the forty-five-minute meal. It
was not long after that lunch that Bennewitz was hospitalized for
exhaustion and fatigue.
And Moore, how did he feel about his tacit complicity in the
government’s plot against Bennewitz? Did he feel ashamed by his
silence? By his betrayal of his friend?
He has yet to comment, and his reluctance is understandable.
Instead, he preferred to describe his work with Doty as an
"opportunity," his spying on Bennewitz as "the price I had to pay."
And, if one looked at it in such hard, pragmatic terms, it was a
moment of high achievement.
Moore had penetrated a cadre of
top-level U.S. intelligence agents who were involved with UFOs. His
course was set:
"I would play the disinformation game, get my hands
dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into
believing that I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do, and
all the while continue to burrow my way into the matrix so as to
learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why."
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