Part One: How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind

This week we tell the harrowing story of Paul Bennewitz, a simple nerdy engineer who spotted evidence of covert Air Force weapons programs and was gaslit into believing they were alien spacecraft. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  Jiminy Christmas, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that for whatever reason is about aliens right now. Uh, look, folks, after three straight weeks of Oprah, I needed something fun. Uh, so we, we did a couple of book episodes on aliens and then I fell down a rabbit hole. Uh, and so this week we're bringing back one of our favorite guests, the great Brandy Posey. Brandy, welcome to the show. Do you believe in aliens?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Um, well, that's a good question because like, what is an alien? I guess is, is how do you want to define it? And also, do you believe in multiple dimensions? Because these are-

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  I, you know what? That's exactly the answer I hoped for. Um, kind of not so much the dimension stuff. We're going to be talking about, we're going to be talking about a real act of bastardry that's kind of at the very beginning. Uh, not, well, not the beginning, kind of the middle point, but it's, it's foundational to the UFO culture that gave us the X-Files. Like, we are talking about the, the stuff that became the X-Files, which started as a disinformation campaign, and a lot of it can be tied specifically to an Air Force intelligence guy named Richard Doty, who was basically brought in to mentally abuse and, and destroy, uh, a basically decent, possibly definitely too credulous guy, uh,

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  who started finding evidence of like, uh, recording evidence of like, secret Air Force, uh, research. And so the Air Force was like, let's convince this guy, it's all aliens. And they kind of destroyed his mind. Um, so that's the story we're telling, but this, it's, it's a-

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 1:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It, it's a fascinating tale, both because it explains a lot of how we get to QAnon, how we do get stuff like the X-Files, a lot of kind of the core myths of, of UFO conspiracy culture, all that stuff. But it's also just a great story about like, US intelligence services absolutely destroying a man in order to protect their ability to make engines of death. Um, which is, you know, that's, that's some good stuff. We all love this shit.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. The more examples, the better. And there are many, but I don't know any with aliens yet. So very exciting.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this this will be a lot with aliens and I'm, you know, I I'm, I I think where I come down on this, I don't believe, I've never seen anything that's made me convinced that there's life outside of this planet. But I'm like, open minded to it, like Fox Mulder, I'd like to believe. I'm just open minded in the sense that I'm I'm a skeptic. Like, I don't think, I I get kind of pissed when people look at folks who are kind of genuinely trying to interrogate the information out there and they're like, well, that's just crazy to think about. Because it's not, and it's not crazy to think that the government would lie about stuff like that. But that said, everything I've ever seen, including like the stuff that came out, uh, 2020, 2021, that little pill shaped craft.

• 3:02Robert Evans?

  You know, that's kind of like the most recent big UFO disclosure. And if you watch that audio, because it's it's all from like, I think, F 18 pilots. You can hear the pilots are genuinely like, what the fuck is this thing? I have no idea what it is, right? And I do, I understand why people default to, well, that must mean it's aliens. But like, there's a long history of all sorts of countries, the United States and countries that are geopolitical enemies of the United States. Testing all sorts of weird craft that like, people don't like, are capable of doing things people did not know was possible at the time. And that is like, the origin of most of our UFO myths is stuff that's completely explicable that you wouldn't let some pilot in on, right? Because it's too secret for him.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Well, because like, you could imagine, like, also, the first time somebody saw an automobile, did they think that was an alien? It's just, you know, human, as we're we're building technology in different ways. Yeah.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Or as we'll talk about, because this is a lot of the story we're talking about today, the first time people saw drones, right? Especially at night, you know, you've got this this thing that's got a bunch of lights on it that moves in a way that planes certainly don't move like drones, right?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:13Robert Evans?

  You see that shit in 1980, in the dead of night above an air force base. It's not necessarily like, you're not, you're not a crazy person to be like, well, I wonder if that's something like fucking not of this earth, right? And the air force, like, the basic story we're telling today is the air force being like, oh, yeah, that's much better than them believing we're working on ways to murder people through robots.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  So that's the story we're gonna tell this week. And that's the end of the cold open.

• 4:46Speaker 01

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• 4:50Robert Evans?

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• 5:59Robert Evans?

  Ah, and we're back. We're starting the episode. Brandy, it's been a bit since you've been on the show. You are a very busy person, and I wanted to, before we get into the episode, is there anything you wanted to kind of plug up top?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. So, my podcast, Lady to Lady, has been around for 13 years at this point. We're, every Wednesday for 13 years, we're an independent show where me and my two co-hosts have a fourth guest on every week who's usually another female identifying person, and it's just four women riffing in like, a positive way, which is something that entertainment doesn't want to show you very often. So, they've been around forever. I also have a, an independent comedy record label that I started last year called Burn This Records. You can find us on Instagram at burnthisrecords.com. And, basically, that is like a completely DIY project, trying to lift up voices from around the country that other labels are dealing with.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  And I'm also doing it in a much less predatory way than most comedy labels work. I've always self-released all of my own things, and I'm just like, expanding that information to try to like, include more people, and kind of keep, yeah.

• 7:09Robert Evans?

  As a rule in the industry, the only thing more evil than like the NSA and military intelligence is comedy labels.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yes, very, I mean, honestly, you're not wrong.

• 7:20Robert Evans?

  No, no, that was only a partial joke.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  We could do, yeah, I have a couple of bastards for you for later, if you ever wanna need a couple of pitches.

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  It is funny how like horror, horror cinema and whatnot, nearly all like nice people involved in making it comedy, real mixed bag, lot of monsters in comedy. What a nice people.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the best, the best of people and the worst of people I've met in comedy. And I think comedy is, is an important thing in our culture because I think it's important to remember that just because someone makes you laugh and is charming, it does not mean they were a good person at all. It is a trick, it's a trick that we are able to do, actually.

• 7:58Robert Evans?

  One of the most important things to accept about the world is like, just because somebody's, you know, we, we don't need to get into this right now, but I agree with you entirely. So, back to fucking aliens, not back to fucking aliens, but back to fucking aliens.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I don't know where this story is going, we'll see.

• 8:17Robert Evans?

  Maybe, maybe. I mean, it actually always, nearly always doesn't like lead, if you follow like any UFO conspiracy thread, it does eventually like lead to people are breeding with the aliens. I mean, that was a big part of the first five seasons of The X-Files, right? But yeah, the, I started this episode by talking about that Air Force footage, it's, actually, honestly, I forget if they were Air Force or Navy pilots, but it was released 2020, 2021, of that like pill shaped weird thing in the sky that, you know, those pilots were like, what the fuck is this shit? As I wrote this, the, near the end of January 2025, the most recent kind of big UFO news was that a few days before we recorded this episode, Republican Representative Tim Burchett

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  claimed that he spoke to an admiral, who he did not name, who told him that he had seen, that there was evidence, that the Navy had evidence of an unidentified naval vehicle, quote, "moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater that was as large as a football field." Which sounds like he's trying to prepare us for the idea that Seaquest is real, and I hope that means that Roy Scheider has secretly been alive this whole time.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And Jonathan Brandis, let's get him back.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Jonathan Brandis, yes, yes, get them all back, bring them all back.

• 9:33Robert Evans?

  I'm so glad you got my Seaquest joke, Brandy, no one ever does.

• 9:40Robert Evans?

  Prior to this, in November of 2024, the Pentagon had published a report revealing hundreds of previously undocumented UFO sightings. Now, again, UFO, and they use unidentified aerial phenomena, I think is the actual official term they use, but like, this does not mean there are hundreds of cases of, the Pentagon said, yeah, we've seen hundreds of alien sightings. It means we've seen hundreds of things in the sky at various points that like, we don't actually know fully what they are, right? Because a lot of people be flying a lot of weird shit in the sky, right? We just had a mild public hysteria when unidentified drones were spotted flying over cities in the Northeast. People panicked. There was like, reports that, oh, it's Iran has a drone carrier parked off the coast. And like, guys, if you've been like,

• 10:24Robert Evans?

  looking at how fucking Iranian power projection has been working in the areas right next to them, they're not flying drones over DC from a fucking hidden carrier. Panic was stoked by initial claims by government officials that there was no record, the FBI, someone came out and was like, we don't have any record of scheduled drone flights. And people I know freaked out because like, well, the FBI says they don't know what it is. And again, I need you, as I always ask, think back to 9/11, right? Where all of these different federal agencies had pieces of that and none of them talked to each other. The fact that the FBI didn't know about this shit is not weird. Government agencies are dogshit at talking to each other. And in fact, it took several weeks, but in late January, after the transition,

• 11:08Robert Evans?

  the White House made a statement that the drone flights had in fact been approved. This was just everyone kind of fucking up. And the confusion was likely stoked by a confluence of factors. Drone development is advancing rapidly. Different federal agencies are bad at talking to each other. Some of the drones being tested were likely so classified that individuals involved preferred a public panic over UFOs or Iranian drone carriers to actual info about their projects being revealed. And all of these reasons are essentially the same reasons that led to the birth of UFO conspiracy theories in the first place, starting with the supposed crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The OG. Yeah, the OG. And it's, I think there's this attitude that like, we have Roswell,

• 11:52Robert Evans?

  there's this crash in 47, the government initially says, and this is what's really unique about Roswell, the first government reports are, some sort of fucking saucer crashed, right? The only time that's really happened. And then they came out and said, no, it's a weather balloon.

• 12:06Robert Evans?

  But there's this attitude that like, and from that moment, Roswell was like the center of UFO culture. It really wasn't. It actually kind of fell off for like more than a decade before people started like kind of re-centering Roswell in American UFO mythos. And part of why, so first, when we're talking about like what actually happened at Roswell, probably the best non-alien theory is that earlier in 1940, and I think this is pretty credible, earlier in 1947, the US government had launched something called Project Mogul, and the idea was to set up a series of balloon listening stations to receive and record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials. Researchers from the US Army Air Force's secret R and D division

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  tested a cluster of 14 of these balloons, one of which went down near Roswell in July. Just a few weeks earlier, in June, a Republican politician and pilot named Kenneth Arnold had sparked the first great UFO panic in US history by reporting to have seen nine silver discs flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. When the rancher who owned the land in Roswell that one of these balloons crashed onto, a guy named Mac Brazel, went to the nearby airfield and like, went to the air, well, the Army Air Corps and was like, hey, I found like some weird shit on my property, they sent out investigators. Now, due to the secrecy behind Project Mogul, the investigators they sent didn't know about

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  that project. So some of these guys, and in fact, the guy who's kind of first on scene, will claim years later and will be consistent for the rest of his life after that point and believe in saying like, I saw an, like, an craft I can't explain. I believe it was an alien craft, right? Or the remains of an alien craft. Now, again, there was technology in these air balloons that was not widely available or that people, and that people were not widely knowledgeable about, and the guys who responded to this crash didn't fucking know about the program because it was heavily classified. So, you know, you can come out of this either saying like, well, I think that they did find some aliens, or I think probably if we're doing the Occam's razor thing, it's not super weird to assume

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  like, yeah, the government, every, every part of our incredibly paranoid defense industry was lying to every other part and hiding all sorts of shit, and these guys just didn't know what the fuck they saw.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  And I think often, like, we want aliens to be true instead of that. Like, it feels, yeah, it's much more comforting. I mean, yeah, I- I think people are, even with everything, all the little videos and everything that's been coming out in the last few years, people keep being like, yeah, sure. Okay, great. Would love it. Can they, can they take over?

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Sure. An alien is here, that means somebody is actually maybe in charge that isn't us. That would be great.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  It's the, I used to, I definitely had that period where I was more in the like, uh, dark hunter in the forest sort of thing. Like, oh, maybe we don't want aliens, you know, to, no, no, no. At this point, if there's aliens, fuck, they can't be worse than us. They literally can't. Like, we're so bad at running our country and our planet. Like, just bring them on. Let them in.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Please, would love it.

• 15:14Robert Evans?

  Do they want to eat us? Fine. I'm all, we're already all being eaten. We're already being consumed by the guys who own fucking banks and social media companies. We might as well be eaten by aliens who have cool shit.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe plastic has been an alien the entire time.

• 15:27Robert Evans?

  Fuck it, why not?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Taken over everyone's brain.

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, God. I would, I would feel such a sense of peace if the mushroom men at the center of Mount Shasta were proved to be real. Um, but alas. So, initial local reporting on the Roswell crash was pretty good. It described accurately what was found on Max's farm. Uh, to further relay suspicions, the army allowed several journalists to tour the nearby base at Alamagordo, where they were fed a series of lies about the weather balloon. Namely, they were told it was for meteorological purposes, not for spying on Russian nuclear tests, because we really didn't want people to know how well the Russians were doing at some of that stuff, right? Um, but otherwise, they were generally accurately informed about the crash. And that was it for a while. Interest in UFOs flatlined not long after Roswell,

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  thanks to Kenneth Arnold. Now, the whole Pacific Northwest had caught UFO fever after he made public statements about seeing that group of UFOs around Rainier. And on July 1st, people in and around Twin Falls, Idaho, started seeing glowing discs or balls in the sky. So many people saw them in such quick succession that something real had to be going on. This is one of those things where it's like, wow, a shitload of people are seeing something like, this is not just a hysteria. Um, and it was not just- hysteria. One of the discs was recovered and was found to be a 30 inch metal disc with a Plexiglas bubble and some scratch assembled electronic parts, vacuum tubes and shit. The whole thing turned out to have been a prank by some kids with a basic understanding of engineering. They built a fake UFO to fuck with.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Respect.

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  Respect. It's cool. That's pretty cool.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  I'm always supportive of doing that. Why not? Fuck with people at this point.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 17:08Robert Evans?

  That's actually what got us here. So maybe that's not a good idea. Don't listen to me, folks. Don't listen to me. We maybe do if it's funny. So, public interest in UFOs kind of fell off after this. This is sort of what makes people like, because there's this initial surge in interest and belief and like Roswell might have immediately been kind of a big thing, but then there's this very famous hoax that happens within days of Roswell. And suddenly people are like, oh, you know what? Maybe only crazy people in cranks believe in UFOs. Right? And that's kind of what happens after this, right? There's UFO culture continues to evolve, but it's not a thing that the average American feels good. If they take it seriously, you don't want to talk about it, right? Because then you'll get kind of like written off as a kook, you know?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Well, and it ruins their lives. I think everyone that's ever come forward like publicly about, you know, a potential alien encounter, they're not better for it after they've told everybody about that.

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  No, and as again, as we'll talk about, a lot of those people, you know, are we're definitely being federalized by the government because government was like, well, shit, we can distract attention from like the shit that we're doing if we just like fuck with these people. So in 1950, a guy named Frank Scully publishes a book titled Behind the Flying Saucers, based on an article he'd written for Variety. The core of this book and the core of that article was based on a speech by an oil millionaire and alien obsessive named Silas Newton, or at least that's how Silas Newton wanted people to see him as like a guy who'd gotten rich in oil and was also into aliens. Silas Newton was a con man.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  As most siluses are, not to besmirch the siluses of the world, silai?

• 18:51Robert Evans?

  No, I've never met a good silas. Look.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  No, neither have I. A name frankly, thankfully, lost to the ages as well.

• 18:58Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. Don't name your kids Silas. And if you're a Silas, change your name. Right? You know, that's the official stance of this podcast. Sorry, siluses.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No, I agree. I'm gonna put it official stance of lady to lady as well. I speak for my podcast. Several podcasts are against siluses.

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  We're going to get like a whole, a whole, a whole group together here that we're gonna be like the NATO of trying to stop people from being named Silas.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 19:25Robert Evans?

  So author Adam Go-Rightly describes what Newton is saying about aliens in this lecture this way. Newton claimed that a flying saucer piloted by other worldly midgets had crashed, crashed in Aztec, New Mexico in 1948. The source of Newton's saucer revelations was a mysterious Dr. G, who had purportedly examined the remains of these interplanetary travelers and viewed pieces of the saucer debris. So, you know, not the most woke way to describe any of this, but it's the 50s. What do you expect?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  That's interesting too, because like there's those Peruvian quote unquote alien mummies that came out a year or two ago that.

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  Oh, and people can talk about those for a minute too. Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's, I don't know, we seem to be generally believe that aliens are short rather than tall.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, unless you're a tall white, which is its own.

• 20:17Robert Evans?

  You got the Nordics, of course.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Robert Evans?

  So Scully writes this book based on the kind of shit that Silas is saying. And as soon as the book comes out, it is revealed to all be based on a host. Newton had been working with a friend to spread lies about aliens because he was just sort of a general con man. He was probably not a millionaire and he certainly did not have a legitimate oil business. He actually made his money by selling fake leases to supposedly oil-rich land alongside magnetic oil detecting machines. So he will, he will sell you a lease that isn't real to land and bring along a machine that you can lease that will show you that there's oil on that land. And none of it's real. Just a con man, a beautiful con man, one of America's greats, but.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  That's pretty good. Yeah.

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  So he's a scoundrel with an eye for any con that might bring profit. And he was caught quickly, but his work caught the eye of a group of the greatest scoundrels and con men in US history, the Central Intelligence Agency, or some government agency. We actually don't know that it was the CIA. I don't know that any of this is true. As we're going to get to all of the sources on stuff, like, there's definitely, definitely a lot that is verifiable here, but every source who comes forward from inside the government, all of the former intel officers who talk about this stuff, they're all also kind of, not kind of, they're all also extremely fucking shady, and they lie about a ton of shit.

• 21:48Robert Evans?

  So, in his book, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, Adam Go-Rightly notes that a former CIA officer, Carl Flock, claimed to have uncovered records that Silas Newton was visited by shadowy government agents who asked him to keep telling tall tales about flying saucers. Flock mused, "Did the US government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers, so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps? Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers, but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation?" And I believe, I think there's a very good chance that Silas was encouraged to keep doing this because we have good documentation that different intel agencies, including the NSA,

• 22:30Robert Evans?

  encouraged people to tell flying saucer stories, right? The CIA as well did this. I don't think Silas Newton was being, again, I don't think this is like psych warfare or necessarily covering up a real alien thing. The evidence suggests that they're covering up weapons development, right? Yeah. So, like a startling number of foundational UFO culture dudes, Carl was also into right-wing politics. After working at IBM and the CIA, he was hired by the American Enterprise Institute to work as a senior editor. He contributed to the Libertarian Review and Reason magazine, as well as writing short stories about aliens. During the Reagan administration, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Test and Evaluation.

• 23:13Robert Evans?

  And this is a lot, a lot of these guys, like so many, it's again, when people are kind of casually into it, they'll be like, well, now it's pilots saying that there's aliens. And now it's a member of the, the government. And it's like, from the beginning, the two people making the most reports that there were aliens were Republican politicians and pilots. Cause pilots see a lot of weird shit and Republicans believe anything you tell them, you know?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 23:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Flock is an interesting figure in UFO culture because he was both a believer, or at least a quasi believer, and a skeptic, publishing a book that ultimately debunked Roswell and first made public the connection between that event and Project Mogul. As guys in this world go, he's more credible than most. But that comes with a big asterisk, right?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  So for a while, flying saucers are decidedly fringe, although some of the most consistent true believers are former military officers who often had intelligence clearances. In the 1950s, some of the most active UFO research groups by civilians were made by and for former military intelligence guys. And this may have had something to do with the fact that the CIA and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had experimented by this early point in putting out misinformation on UFOs to test subordinates, right? And the logic here is that, okay, you want to know, this guy is kind of like, he's a security guard at a, a facility where we're really doing some shit. And maybe he's someone we're thinking about promoting to be in a more sensitive thing. Tell him that there's aliens. Tell

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  him that we have a flying saucer. If that gets out in the media, you know this guy can't be trusted, right? And if he doesn't say shit, then maybe you tell him the truth, maybe you don't, but like, either way, you know, you can trust him. Cause if he's not going to tell the media that like, there's fucking aliens, maybe he's actually like somebody that we can trust with, with real secrets, you know?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I love that the government runs like Scientology. It's great.

• 25:06Robert Evans?

  Absolutely runs like sci- it's all cults all the way down, baby. That's American culture.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Instead of Xenu, it's, you know, whatever we're calling this one.

• 25:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Flying saucers become sexy again in the late 1970s, when a researcher named Leonard Stringfield makes a public presentation at the 1978 Mutual UFO Network Symposium. MUFON, I think, is what people call it.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  I've been to a MUFON meeting.

• 25:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, I would love to go to a MUFON meeting. That's, it sounds like a hoot.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  It was a blast.

• 25:39Robert Evans?

  He claims that a retired Air Force Colonel had told him that an alien craft had in fact been recovered at Roswell, and this guy was one of the first military responders at Roswell, and died convinced that what he saw was an alien spacecraft. The narrative starts to pick up steam from here, and an NSA memo, revealed as part of a FOIA request, suggests the CIA had something to do with it. Here's Go Rightly's book again. The memo, dated August 29, 1978, was written by an unidentified NSA assignee who commented on what he suspected to be a number of fraudulent CIA memos presented at the symposium. It was later revealed that the assignee in question was a former NSA employee and MUFON board member, Tom DeLuig.

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  And a lot of guys at MUFON have, like, are reached out to by people in intelligence agencies and Fed info. So it's very hard to say what, like, were these CIA memos just something some people made up? Were they memos the CIA faked? Or were they memos the NSA faked, pretending it was the CIA? Right? All of these things are kind of possible, because all of this shit happened to some extent.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And if you want to believe, then you're just like, please, I won't question it. Just give it to me.

• 26:55Robert Evans?

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• 28:04Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 28:11Speaker 04

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• 28:40Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, if you take nothing else from these episodes, it should be that military officers and intelligence agency employees backing up UFO conspiracies or any other kind of conspiracies doesn't mean those conspiracies are likelier to be true because all of these people are professional liars, right? Not only are they professional liars, but there's nothing that means somebody who reached a moderately high level in the CIA or the Special Forces or the DIA is not just as crazy as that guy you met at a bar who claimed the Martian stole his vast deference, right? Like, Michael Flynn is out of his goddamn mind. I had a fully memory hold him. And was legitimately a guy with a lot of, like,

• 29:21Robert Evans?

  who had a very high position in the military establishment. He had a lot to do with intel in specific areas, right? Like, and he's, you know, a nut in a dick and a fascist. Yeah. To your average American with slightly nerdy inclinations, a lot of this UFO stuff is kind of like background noise. Kids love it, you know, there's like an entertainment, a lot of movies and stuff based around this stuff in the 50s and 60s. And so it's not necessarily like taken super seriously by a ton of people. And it probably started as kind of like a lark for a guy that we're going to be talking a lot about in these episodes, who was, I think, I don't know if hero is the right term, but I'm very sympathetic to him, a fellow named Paul

• 30:05Robert Evans?

  Bennewitz. And Paul Bennewitz is the victim of Richard Doty and of the US intelligence establishment during this period. He is an engineer with a master's degree in physics who started his own small business, Thunder Scientific in 1969. People will say that Paul was a genius with electronics. He is very good at what he does. He moved to New Mexico to be closer to the bleeding edge of the experimental aerospace industry, and he dug a niche for himself there, providing different measurement instruments for NASA and the Air Force. He hit the market at a spectacular time when all of these industries were exploding. And his intention was initially to get a PhD, and he has to like shelf that because his company is so successful and it's growing so

• 30:49Robert Evans?

  fast. Thunder Scientific established a lab right outside of Kirtland Air Force Base and had regular dealings with scientists and officers from the newly established Air Force. In the book Project Beta, Greg Bishop writes, "The demands of his business now left little time for friends and socializing, but this did not bother him. Thunder Scientific and his family were all that he needed. What little time he had left was devoted to plowing through a small collection of Wild West novels, his only guilty pleasure." So, pretty nice harmless guy. He's making like altimeters and shit, like for devices for measuring, like, you know, moisture in the air on planes and stuff, like that kind of like nerdy stuff, right?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  No, totally. This is definitely the CIA is going to ruin this man's life.

• 31:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, they're going, yeah. I think it's more the NSA and Air Force Intelligence, but the CIA, like, there's a number of people involved in fucking with Paul.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, poor guy.

• 31:42Robert Evans?

  Paul has hobbies. He's a pilot and he's like an aerobatic pilot. So he likes to do like... Like plane stunts and shit. He's very good. And yeah, starting in the 1970s, he begins paying increasing attention to the UFO movement. He joins the Aerial Phenomenon Research Association, or APRO, which is a civilian UFO research org based out of Tucson. And so that's like somewhere, I think sometime in like the mid 70s is when he joins APRO. And so he's, he's pretty plugged into all this stuff. A year after Leonard Stringfield writes, you know, he co-writes that book that reignites interest in Roswell and flying

• 32:23Robert Evans?

  saucers in April of 1979, Paul attends a big conference on cattle mutilation, which had just started to become a thing that people were talking about. And this is, when I say a conference on cattle mutilation, this is less kooky than a lot of these events are going to sound because in part, there's some actual shit being done to cows. So there's some very, there's some serious people there who actually like, want to know what the fuck is going on. The event itself is hosted by Republican Senator Harrison Schmidt, a former astronaut who'd walked on the moon. Among the attendees were numerous FBI agents, politicians, local law enforcement officers, scientists from Los Alamos, tribal officials, and of course, new age psychics wearing robes alongside disheveled ufologists.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 33:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, they have, they have to be there. I mean, and, and what a party in the parking lot. Somebody's gotta be throwing the after parties. So you have these guys there.

• 33:19Robert Evans?

  No, and acid, I think is still legal at this point. Maybe they banned it by then. But man, the good coke is out there. People have Quaaludes. I bet the parties were wild.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Comic Con, eat your heart out. I want to know what the swag is for the, the free swag for the cattle mutilation convention. What do they, what's in the go away bag?

• 33:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Robert Evans?

  Lymph nodes.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:43Robert Evans?

  So a reporter for the New Mexico Independent described the conference as a farce featuring the strangest collection of weirdos ever assembled in New Mexico. And I will tell you right now, that is no longer an accurate statement. I've spent too much time in New Mexico to believe that. A lot of like.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  Mega for nuts.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  That bar is an alien.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  One of my favorite states. Yeah, I love it. So said weirdos were united by their interest in a real phenomenon. This is not fake. The fact that cattle are being found dead and surgically mutilated is not fake. This is a thing that is happening, right? There's a lot of theories as to why. There's one that is almost certainly the actual truth here that we're going to talk about. But this is a real thing that is happening and people are rightfully like, what the fuck is going on? Right? This starts when a decent number of cattle are found dead and surgically mutilated in the Dulce area, like near Dulce, New Mexico, which itself is near the Hicarilla Reservation. One of the first investigators is a state trooper named Gabe Valdez,

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  who's a very like a kind of a titan in the ufology figure field. And again, one of the guys who's more credible, you know, kind of within this community, which is not to say does not believe some stuff that can't be proven, but just is one of the guys who is attempting to actually go about some of this like scientifically. And Gabe, as he's looking, because people, you know, he's getting calls from like ranchers, like, I've got cows like fucking cut up, man. This is fucking weird. He finds tripod prints near several of the corpses. And he initially theorizes that there's an, this is evidence that an alien craft had landed nearby, which it is not, but Valdez keeps digging. And he eventually uncovers evidence that that makes it very clear this is human beings did this, right?

• 35:26Robert Evans?

  And the specific evidence is that several cows were found to have been drugged with atropine and a gas mask had been found at one site, right?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  God damn, what's the, what's the matter with people?

• 35:38Robert Evans?

  I'll tell you what's the matter.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  This is like a student film gone wrong.

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  Brandy, this is so much more fucked up than you're, than you're. Yeah, this is so, so fucking crazy. What the reason why this is happening? The likely reason, again, this isn't, I can't tell you exactly. This is definitely what happened. But the theory Valdez and his son come up with, I think is very. Credible.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  So Valdez starts to suspect that the government is secretly killing and studying the corpses of cattle. He found that most of the deceased animals had their tongues and lymph nodes, specifically their lymph nodes, removed, which is the organ you would take if you wanted to do tests for cancers, right?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 36:16Robert Evans?

  So there is good reason now to suspect that these mutilations were tied not to aliens, but to a secret government project called Project Gas Buggy, which had been launched in 1967 as part of the Plowshare Program. Do you have you heard of the Plowshare Program?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  No, I don't know about the Plowshare Program. It hasn't come up in my searches.

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. One of my favorite things the government ever did, and by that I mean like one of the funniest things. This is like fucked up and horrible, but it's extremely funny. And it's also kind of soothing because if the government did this, what I'm about to explain to you, and didn't get us all killed, I think we've got a pretty good shot of surviving the next few years.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Great. Love that. I love some hope.

• 37:00Robert Evans?

  We'll try to be hopeful here. So Project Plowshare was named after Isaiah 2:4 in the Bible. They will beat their swords into plowshares, right? And that means like, we're gonna take these weapons and turn them into a tool that we use to get food, right?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:15Robert Evans?

  The project was established as a way for Dwight Eisenhower to feel less bad about presiding over the birth of a planet-killing arsenal. In 1953, he gave his famous "atoms for peace" speech at the UN and promised that the United States would, quote, "devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." And sort of the, the less kind of shiny, you know, beautiful thing going on here is that like, we're making so many goddamn nukes, like by this point, by like the 60s, 70s, we have the 60s, especially like, we've got enough nukes to kill everything, right? And the Russians have the same number, basically, you know?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:58Robert Evans?

  And other people are starting to get, and like, some, some of the folks making the, doing this feel kind of bad and are like, I kind of want my life to be a little bit more than just building the, a death machine for the entire species. Maybe there's a way to use all of these nightmare weapons.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 38:16Robert Evans?

  To, to, to do good shit, right?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wishful thinking. That's adorable.

• 38:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not responsible for the, this world becoming a barren wasteland someday. Absolutely not. No, no.

• 38:29Robert Evans?

  So the idea here is let's figure out if there's a way to use nuclear explosions to speed and assist government civil works projects, right? Different construction projects. And specifically, one of the big initial things, so in 1956, there's this thing called the Suez Crisis, right? The Suez Canal, you remember when that big boat got stuck and it like?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:49Robert Evans?

  It was very funny, but also shit got like really expensive for a while because it, a lot of trade goes through the Suez Canal in Egypt. It's very important. Well, in 1956, the Suez Canal Company, which had been owned by Britain and France, gets nationalized by the Egyptian president. And there's like a crisis over like whether or not Europeans are going to be able to use the Suez Canal. And like this, by the way, is still a major factor in geopolitics, like particularly liberals in the US like to act like France and whatnot is like so much less fucked up of a country. But look, look at the kind of weapons France sells the Egyptians, no matter who's in charge, no matter what they do to their people, no matter how violent an asshole they are, France

• 39:31Robert Evans?

  is always willing to sell the Egyptians any kind of fucked up weapons they want because there's this canal and it's kind of a big deal, right?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:39Robert Evans?

  So 56, the Suez Canal gets shut down and people are like, people in our government and people in, you know, our allied governments are like, fuck, we gotta figure out something. And what's the most logical thing to do if you need to replace the Suez Canal, Brandy?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Oh, um, make it bigger, blow it up.

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, no, that's crazy talk. No, the most logical thing to do is to detonate 520 thermonuclear weapons in a line across the Holy Land through the Negev Desert to the Mediterranean Sea.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I know about this. I've read about this.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  Just nuke the whole Holy Land, 500 nukes.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so fun. That's, this is also a recent theory that's come up in the last, oh, say, year and a half or so, we've been hearing about. Okay, interesting, great.

• 40:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is, I, I, it's fascinating to think of how different everything going on there would be if like in addition to all of the awful stuff happening, everyone had fucking radiation poisoning because we set off 520 nuclear explosions.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Jesus, that's.

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  Probably wouldn't have gone well.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  That's my theory.

• 40:45Robert Evans?

  Probably bad.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  In the initial pitch of this, just somebody's like, all right, hear me out. I know this bomb can destroy anything. What if?

• 40:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  500.

• 40:56Robert Evans?

  PowerPoint slides?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's get through it. Okay. All right. Here's, yeah. What do you think?

• 41:00Robert Evans?

  Picture of a shovel. We all hate digging, right? What do we love? Nukes.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  We just want to see what it looks like to do that.

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  It's gonna be fun.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Split the earth in half or anything.

• 41:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, I can't think of any downsides to setting off 520 nukes in the Holy Land. Seems like a good call.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  What Jesus is, really what he died on the cross for was this.

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he would have loved nukes. Oh, my God.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of, it's, it's, it's from the book of Silas, which is a horrible book that was, we have never, you know, published.

• 41:33Robert Evans?

  Yep, that's why we hate Silas's. Yeah. So the idea of repurposing, this doesn't catch on. People, thank, thank God. Enough people are like, are you, are you out of your fucking mind?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  You can't do that.

• 41:47Robert Evans?

  So we don't do this, but the idea of repurposing nukes for civil use lingered on. And in 1957, Project Plowshare is established. And I want to quote from a write-up from the Science History Institute. Plowshare scientists looked at the natural world as if it were a piece of clay waiting to be sculpted by nuclear tools. As the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller remarked, "If your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card." And I do love that, like, atomic era mad scientist shit.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The swagger is real.

• 42:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That, that, that is kinda, that's kinda cool.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:27Robert Evans?

  In 1960, Popular Mechanics devoted an article to the idea. With Edward Teller, Sophie will pull up the, the, the thing on the screen here, but like, the, it's the cover of Popular Mechanics, March 1960. There's a picture of Teller sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers. "We're going to work miracles. The atom's power is ready to unlock a treasure chest of Arctic oil. Dig open an Alaskan harbor, open the spigot for Colorado shale." And this article is by Edward Teller. I'm gonna read a little bit of that opening. "When you look at a map of Alaska, you will observe that Point Hope at the northwest corner, projecting out into the Arctic Ocean. Above Point Hope, the shore is exposed to

• 43:09Robert Evans?

  the polar ice pack, which even in the summer is never far offshore. Ships can travel north of this point only one month and 12. But below Point Hope, the shore swings to the southeast and the sea is free of ice for three months of the year. Nearby are coal deposits and somewhat farther, oil that might attract commerce, except for one vital lack. There is no harbor, no good anchorage for seagoing ships." So they theorize a number of things, but one of them is to literally melt big chunks of the ice caps with nukes so that we can get it like coal and oil more effectively?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  I like that they just did the slow version of it by just never moving away from oil.

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns out we got there anyway, guys. Good news.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  I guess better than nuking it, probably.

• 43:53Robert Evans?

  So Teller's got a problem, which is, we know at this point, radiation, bad. And thankfully, like hydrogen bombs, less radiation, but like, not no radiation. And so there's a very good question here, which is like, hey, if we detonate like a nuke underground, won't it like, could it, could that be bad? Could it like, cause real problems? And so Teller has to direct the first underground test of a thermonuclear weapon to gather data for busybodies who kept asking questions like that.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  So annoying of them.

• 44:23Robert Evans?

  So annoying. And the initial data seems to be good. They detonate a 1.7 kiloton nuke in Nevada, and I'm using nuke interchangeably here for all atomic weapons. Obviously, a hydrogen bomb is a very different thing from like the kind of bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these are, they are mostly using like hydrogen bombs. Like, that is the idea for plowshare after a point, because it's just like a better tool. And the initial data seems to suggest that like, oh, actually, like, this might be pretty safe, right? That's the initial data. "This ignites a spree of dangerously insane plans, like Project Gnome, which suggested nuking a massive underground salt deposit in Alaska in order to create

• 45:07Robert Evans?

  heat and steam to run a turbine, providing power for a nearby city." And Sophie's gonna pull up like a diagram explaining this, where it's just like, generator, turbine, condenser, and then molten salt for nuclear explosion.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  It's for sure gonna work, definitely.

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  Totally will be safe. It's not crazy at all. Like, obviously molten salt from a nuclear explosion, there's no possible downside to doing, creating that.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  No, no, never.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  The good news is that local indigenous leaders find out that, like, Teller's like, "What if we just nuke huge chunks of, like, Inuit territory and shit to see if that does something?" And they're like, "Uh, this seems bad." And they're particularly concerned because Teller had just carried out an H-bomb test a couple of years earlier in the Marshall Islands that had gone bad and caused the highest recorded levels of nuclear fallout in history. They had destroyed several item, uh, islands and like, that people lived on. Like, it's a real problem. We've done episodes of it could happen here on the Marshalls and how much the US fucks them over, but Teller's a big part of that. Um, so, you know, he doesn't get to nuke Alaska to the extent that he wants to nuke Alaska. Uh, and again

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  and again, his high hopes are dashed by the fact that everything he suggests and does is completely out of its mind. By 1967, Plauschere had moved on to a new idea. Deposits of natural gas could be extracted if nukes were used to break up dense rock formations that kept them trapped. This is the origins, like, some of the origins of hydraulic fracking, right?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:43Robert Evans?

  Initially, they want to do hydraulic fracking with nukes.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 46:47Robert Evans?

  Great stuff, guys. Yeah! Let's do it. Fuck it. Fuck this planet. Nuke it all.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  No, no, it exists to be broken. It's the whole point of living.

• 46:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. These, these guy, it's amazing, because like, you can get over the counter, like, just incredibly potent barbiturates at this point, and everybody's drunk and on barbiturates the whole time this is going on. And when you understand that, it really does explain a lot of the decisions being made.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  No, yeah, these are not sober decisions at all. These are not.

• 47:18Robert Evans?

  These people are eating what is effectively Xanax like candy bars.

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  So Project Gas Buggy follows, right? That's the idea. We're gonna frac with nukes. And they'd set off a bomb equivalent to 29 kilotons of TNT in northwest New Mexico, near Dulce, from that article by the Science History Institute. "The detonation on December 10, 1967 blasted open an underground chamber 335 feet high and almost 165 feet in diameter, and successfully fractured the rock, spurring a vast increase in gas production rates at the site. Unfortunately, the blast also contaminated the gas with radioactive tritium, making it unsellable to consumers." So it does work. It just makes poison radioactive natural gas.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Love it. Where do we put that? When we make that, what do we do with that? I'm just curious. What happens?

• 48:09Robert Evans?

  God willing, now that RFK's gonna be in there, you know, I think we can, I'm hopeful that we can just make that legal to use in homes. And we can all have all the radioactive tritium gas in our living rooms that we need.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I choose for my kids what they get.

• 48:24Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Maybe it's good for them, you know? Maybe it, maybe it counteracts the vaccines.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, eat your radioactive gas, kid. Come on.

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Plowshare scientists wouldn't see real success on the fracking front until 1969, when a nuke set off under the Colorado River released $1.5 million in natural gas that was usable for the mere cost of $11 million. Also, the gas was still of very poor quality. Eventually, Plowshare was shuttered, but the radioactive tritium gas under New Mexico, near Dulce, remained, right? So now we've got this big fucking hole underground filled with poison.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Great. That's fun. That's just fun to know that's out there. I love a ticking time bomb.

• 49:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So we've, we've got this like death thing out in the middle of New Mexico. And we don't really know what the fuck to do with it, right? Now, what I'm gonna say is not confirmed, but I consider it quite likely. Gabe Valdez eventually comes to the conclusion that the cattle mutilation- Around Dulcey were carried out by government scientists studying the level of environmental contamination caused by the plowshare tests. If this is the case, it's something that is still somewhat under wraps and military spooks would have put overtime work in to hide it back in the 1970s. But it makes a lot of sense. They're clearly like studying animals around there to see like if they are developing cancers and they don't want people to know about it.

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  I think this is actually a very, very likely explanation for at least a good chunk of the cattle mutilations that are kind of found.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Oh God, it is worse. It is. You were right.

• 49:58Robert Evans?

  It's so much worse.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And it paid off. Yeah.

• 50:00Robert Evans?

  Just like curious alien bot or a fucking not bot, scientist or whatever. Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  No, yeah, you did not disappoint. You did not disappoint. That makes total sense. I want to know which scientist was like, but make sure you get the asshole.

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you gotta get into that asshole.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Is that part of the experiment, sir?

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  Ah, fuck it. Why not?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  It's for the, there's a showmanship of what we're doing here.

• 50:24Robert Evans?

  We gotta get weird with it, people.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:28Robert Evans?

  So this brings us back to Paul Bennewitz because he meets Gabe Valdez at that cattle mutilation conference and he actually approaches Valdez. And Valdez, who is like both an active state trooper, who kind of becomes like in his area that whenever there's like weird alien shit. His colleagues are like, hey, Valdez, go look into this. Like you're the, you're the, you're the crazy guy, right? Go check this out.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Like, man, I just wanted to plant drugs on minorities.

• 50:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Bullshit.

• 50:59Robert Evans?

  I think Valdez really does want to be doing this because this kind of becomes his whole life.

• 51:06Robert Evans?

  And he, he's like, as soon as this random like engineer is like, hey, can I like ride along with you to like, look at weird alien stuff? Valdez is like, absolutely, man. Come on, let's, let's go trace down some fucking lights. And that's exactly what they do. They do a lot of ride alongs together and they, they become fast friends. Bennewitz is a believer and Valdez is an open minded seeker, right? You know, that, that's kind of the, the, the, the minimum of what I'd say he is.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  What is their sexual tension like? And is this the exact thing that X-Files is based on?

• 51:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, they're fucking. Yeah, absolutely. This is what Moly- no, no, they're not. I have no evidence of that. But it would be funny if this is like the, the fucking, yeah, the Mulder and Scully. Yeah. Origin.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the sexual tension you can cut with a knife. Also, Valdez does in fact get pregnant with an alien baby. That's very much confirmed.

• 52:02Robert Evans?

  His dad's an admiral. I think Scully's dad was an admiral. Maybe he was a captain. I know he called her Starbuck. I just watched that episode the other night. So, speaking of Dana Scully, boy, she looked good in a suit. Anyway, here's some ads.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

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• 53:20Robert Evans?

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• 54:00Robert Evans?

  We're back. Everyone in that show looked goodness fucking Skinner. Oh, my God, like he was poured into that uniform.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Looked amazing.

• 54:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  No one talks about the fashion on the X-Files.

• 54:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, those, uh, those, those real pencil ties, fucking molder. Oh, my God. Beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff. So, uh, in the winter of 1979, Bennewitz and his wife experienced, well, not a close encounter, but like an intermediate distance encounter at his Albuquerque home. So his, his house is like right up to the edge of the Kirtland Base, right? So he can see like the base itself. And there's this mountain that they have like hollowed out and filled with nukes. Like he's, he's looking at, at all of that from his fucking porch, right? And he and his wife start to notice at night blinking lights that are floating and moving independently in the air over the base. And he is, as a pilot, he's like, this does not look like any kind of aircraft I've ever seen.

• 54:54Robert Evans?

  And in fact, it is not. Now, again, not aliens. This is like drone projects and what becomes the stealth bomber is like, this is all the kind of shit they're testing out at Kirtland. He is seeing things and he is seeing things that there is no, he does not have any kind of good explanation for, right? Because some of the things he's seeing are, are, are crap, experimental craft that are capable of things that the broader populace did not know we could do with aerial craft at this point in time. Now, because he's rich and because he is a professional engineer, he has a lot of equipment. He's got telephoto lenses. He's got a Super 8 camera and he's got a lot of like different advanced antenna that

• 55:35Robert Evans?

  are capable of taking data on the stuff that he's seeing, particularly the signals that these different craft are putting out, right? Cause they're all putting out radio signals. They've got transponders and shit, right? You want that on there, especially with an experimental craft. You never know if one of those is gonna like wind up crashing into the ground. You want to be able to like grab it and shit. So he, he starts training this whole, not just his cameras, but all of these different info, these, all these different electronic tools he has on the base while this is happening. And he's getting real data on something that is actually happening, right? Now, the thing is, and this is, there's an interesting documentary about this called, um, Mirage Men. And it'll point out that Bennewitz is a World War II era veteran. He is a genuinely patriotic, helpful guy.

• 56:19Robert Evans?

  And a lot of kind of early UFO dudes are like this. So their, his, his instinct is not, the government is hiding something fucked up from me. His instinct is, I wonder if the government knows something clearly alien or otherworldly is happening above this base, above this very secure institution. I need to tell them what I found, right? He is deeply patriotic and this country is going to fuck him so hard. Like it does everyone who's deeply patriotic.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no, babe. They're the bad guy. Don't do that.

• 56:54Robert Evans?

  Oh, Paul.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  It's like watching, oh, it's watching somebody walk upstairs in a horror movie.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Well, and, and Doty, who's like going to be fucking with him for years over this is like, you know, World War II era veterans, you just tell them, hey, we need you to like, help us with this, but you can't talk, you gotta keep it quiet. This is national security. Of course, of course. The, I trust the government, right? Like I'm a child of the New Deal. I, I fought for this country against the Nazis, you know?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  We are the heroes?

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And that, that's where Paul's head is, right? In addition to literally believing in a lot of, you know, kooky alien. He is, he, the government doesn't start that in him, right? He is down that road to an extent.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:34Robert Evans?

  So the reality of the situation is that he and his wife had documented evidence of some kind of experimental plane, drone, or other electronic gizmo. There were a number of, of different things at the, the, cause part of like this whole Kirtland base is like, one of the things that's kind of in this whole area is Sandia National Laboratories, which at the time is the number one weapons development facility in the United States, at least probably on the planet as a result of that. And like, one of the things they're working on is early laser guided missiles, you know? In addition to other different kinds of projects. One possibility for some of what Paul saw is there's this massive, it's actually the largest freestanding wooden structure on earth. Like even all of the bolts are wood.

• 58:14Robert Evans?

  It's this massive tower that they were setting off like EMP blasts in order to test the resilience of planes to nuclear explosives. So because of that, you couldn't have any metal in the actual like thing itself. I don't understand the science, but that's just what people say. And that's apparent, this, this was a thing that we did. Apparently it wasn't very effective because we weren't like the simulated blasts were not anywhere close to what a nuke would have done, but this is a thing that they were working on. There were lights on this thing. It looked weird and it gives off, you're getting some weird fucking signals from this. If you've got like different antennas and stuff in addition to the other shit that they're fucking around with there.

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  So I, I think somebody who was less inclined towards belief in, you know, aliens in the paranormal than Paul might've been like, yeah, there's probably some sort of weird Cold War weapon system being developed there or whatever. Paul does not make that leap. He captures grainy footage of lights with his eight millimeter camera and he uses his engineering knowledge to design and construct a tracking antenna array on his roof. Adam Go-Rightly notes, quote, "Bennewitz installed an arsenal of tracking antenna on his roof to record signals apparently emanating from these UFOs, which he claimed could DF direction find at distances of up to 60 miles. Alarmed that these craft posed a national security threat, Bennewitz alerted Kirtland Base officials of his findings. Not long after, Bennewitz received what he believed were alien transmissions."

• 59:35Robert Evans?

  Now, the reality of the situation, and again, this is not entirely clear, but what's very likely happening is that being a good engineer, Paul has built an array that is actually receiving encrypted transmissions because the air force is experimenting with classified broadcast technology to send out coded messages and Paul is picking this shit up, right? Some of it's probably interference from the EMP setup, but he's actually almost certainly getting some actual encrypted stuff, right?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:05Robert Evans?

  So he goes to the air force and he's like, hey, man, I've been like listening and taking footage and there's like aliens and they're like, yeah, okay, another alien guy. And then he's like, and I pointed my incredibly advanced antenna array at your base of secret military bullshit and look at these coded transmissions. And they're like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. This guy, this guy might actually have something that could be a problem. We really don't want him doing this. Fuck.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Please don't. No, no, no.

• 1:00:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. So the head of base security spends about a minute on the phone with Paul and decides he's probably a crank, but his status as the president of this legitimate lab and the fact that he's getting something and this is potentially a risk to, you know, this could expose some of the projects they're working on, right? And maybe Paul wouldn't even, if Paul just publishes this stuff being like, "Look, this is evidence of aliens and it's actual encrypted transmissions." Well, Paul is gonna publish that somewhere. It wouldn't be hard at all for some sort of like Russian agent to get that and then maybe the Soviets crack this thing and like, right? There's a number of ways this could be a problem, right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they could decide to dig a ditch with a nuke, so.

• 1:01:10Robert Evans?

  Right. Well, in fact, they do. I didn't bring this up, but the Soviets have their own plowshare program that also causes mass, massively poisons the planet. Everybody's doing it.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  In Soviet Russia, do you cut out the bear's assholes? Is that what's happening in their fields instead?

• 1:01:29Robert Evans?

  You just poison the largest freshwater body on the, or one of the largest freshwater bodies on the planet and then we're good.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

  Everything's fine. So, yeah, and it's also, maybe it's not the transmissions that freak him out, maybe it's that he's getting documentation about some of the craft. We don't know exactly what it is, but like, the Air Force doesn't just say, "Okay, you know, tell this guy we're making a note of it." They're like, "We should keep talking to this dude. We need to get one of our guys, an agent from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, to befriend Paul Bennewitz and see what he knows." And so the head of base security, Colonel Ernest Edwards, picks an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty to do just that. And we will be talking about Doty and what happens next to our friend Paul in part deux.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Ooh, cliffhanger.

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  That's it? Anything you wanna plug, Brandy?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, thank you. This was awesome. I'm excited to hear part two. Um, for the listener, you guys can find me, uh, on every social media app at this point at Brand Dazzle. Uh, I got the Blue Sky, I got the Threads, I got the X still formerly known as Twitter. I've got Red Note, I'm on there now, who cares, whatever. TikTok, eh, it's deleted from my phone, but my account exists. Uh, Instagram, Facebook, wherever. Brand Dazzle, uh, brandyposey.com is my website for a bunch of stuff. I have an album coming out in March, um, that actually recorded in Portland, uh, yeah, last year. And, um, yeah, Burn This Records, uh, on Instagram and Lady Ladies is my podcast. Um, yeah, thanks, guys.

• 1:03:05Robert Evans?

  Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, until next time, you know, go force your way into an Air Force base and just start taking photos, you know?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Or don't.

• 1:03:16Robert Evans?

  What's the worst that could happen?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Or don't. Naruto run, right on in.

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Naruto run, right into area 51. They love it when people do that. It's a lot of fun for them.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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