The Bennewitz Affair

The Air Force, TV's Mike Farrell, and the creation of the modern UFO mythology

Dive into the shocking story of Paul Bennewitz, a physicist and military contractor whose innocent observations near Kirtland Air Force Base triggered one of the most elaborate government disinformation campaigns in history.

This episode unravels how Air Force intelligence agents deliberately fed Bennewitz false information about alien bases, cattle mutilations, and government-extraterrestrial treaties—ultimately driving him to mental breakdown, while simultaneously creating the blueprint for modern UFO mythology.

Whether you're a UFO enthusiast or skeptic, this eye-opening investigation reveals the dangerous intersection of government secrecy, psychological manipulation, and belief formation. Discover how the stories first planted in the Bennewitz Affair continue shaping conspiracy culture four decades later—and why we should question even the most compelling "whistleblower" revelations.

Adam Gorightly is an author, researcher, and self-described “crackpot historian.” His book Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius explores how government agencies have manipulated UFO mythology. Gorightly's other works include The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Historia Discordia, and Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation.

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INTRODUCTION

Lenny Flatley: I’m Joseph L. Flatley. And from Amphibian Media, this is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Each week, I explore America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, bringing untold stories to light and challenging what we think we know about our nation’s history.

This episode is called: THE BENNEWITZ AFFAIR.

ARCHIVAL: KOTV UFO Cover-Up? Live promo, 1988

VOICEOVER (clip): “In three days UFO eyewitnesses will talk about their Close Encounters. Friday at 7 pm on Channel 6.”

Lenny Flatley: On October 14, 1988, Americans tuned in to watch something unprecedented: a live TV special promising to blow the lid off the government’s knowledge of UFOs. The show was called UFO COVER-UP LIVE!

The host was Mike Farrell from the TV show M*A*S*H. But the real stars were two mysterious figures who called themselves “Falcon” and “Condor.” They appeared in shadow, voices disguised, claiming to be government insiders with explosive information about crashed alien spacecraft, underground bases, and direct contact between the U.S. government and extraterrestrials. They even shared some oddly specific details about these supposed aliens — like their love of strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music.

But here’s the thing: UFO COVER-UP LIVE! wasn’t exposing a government cover-up. It was the cover-up. The whole show was part of an elaborate deception orchestrated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations — also known as AFOSI.

The story began ten years earlier, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That’s where we meet Paul Bennewitz, a businessman and physicist who started noticing strange lights in the sky near Kirtland Air Force Base. What happened next would end up defining American UFO mythology for decades to come.

His observations set off a chain of events that read like a Hollywood thriller. Government agents began feeding him a carefully crafted mixture of truth and fiction, manipulating him into believing he was witnessing evidence of alien activity.

Today, we’re going to follow this thread of government manipulation from Paul Bennewitz to UFO COVER-UP LIVE! and right up to the UFO headlines we’re seeing today.

PART 1

Lenny Flatley: In 1967, Paul Bennewitz founded Thunder Scientific Corporation, a company that specialized in humidity calibration-and-measurement instruments, with contracts from both the Air Force and NASA.

His house — which happened to be next to Kirtland Air Force Base — doubled as the company headquarters. He had a direct view of sensitive areas of the base. This was during the Cold War, and Kirtland housed nuclear weapons components and ran classified research programs for things like stealth aircraft.

In 1979, Bennewitz began seeing anomalous activity in the sky above the base. He shared this information with UFO researchers as well as base security. This is when the AFOSI got involved. And instead of investigating the lights, they started investigating Bennewitz.

AFOSI assigned Special Agent Richard Doty to the case. But instead of shutting Bennewitz down or telling him to mind his own business, Doty started feeding him disinformation. He cultivated a personal relationship, gained his trust, encouraged his theories.

J. Allen Hynek

Lenny Flatley: In PROJECT BETA: THE STORY OF PAUL BENNEWITZ, NATIONAL SECURITY, AND THE CREATION OF A MODERN UFO MYTH, author Greg Bishop tells a story so good that we have to share it, even if it isn’t verifiable.

In 1981, the Air Force gave Bennewitz a computer, supposedly to help with his research. It was delivered by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the founder of the Center for UFO Studies and a paid Air Force consultant. The computer came pre-installed with software that would take the electronic pulses that Bennewitz was picking up and turn them into words and sentences, making it look like he was decoding alien messages. Hynek even claimed the aliens had modified the program themselves.

The source for this story is a UF-ologist named Bill Moore, who we’ll discuss later in this episode. For now, you just need to know that Bill wasn’t always the most reliable character. Hynek, for his part, denied the event even took place.

MYRNA HANSEN

Lenny Flatley: In 1980, something happened that would send this whole situation spiraling into even stranger territory. A woman named Myrna Hansen came forward with a story about being abducted by aliens. Now, timing is everything here — this happened right when AFOSI was looking for ways to push Bennewitz deeper down the rabbit hole.

Adam Gorightly is an author and investigator specializing in fringe topics and conspiracy theories. His numerous books include SAUCERS, SPOOKS, AND KOOKS: UFO DISINFORMATION IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS.

He recently told me the Myrna Hansen story over the phone.

Adam Gorightly: Around this time, there was a lady in her mid-20s or so who had a quote-unquote E.T., UFO encounter near Eagle’s Nest in which was near the Dulce area. And she claimed that she was with her son, and she saw a cow sucked up — you know, like on a Star Trek tractor beam into a UFO. And then she was transported up there. And she witnessed a mutilation on the ship.

Lenny Flatley: According to UFO lore, Dulce, New Mexico is the site of an underground extraterrestrial base.

Adam Gorightly: And then she was taken to an underground facility, where she saw the whole hybrid babies in vats and that whole, you know, paradigm we later saw in THE X-FILES and all that. [...] She had missing time, all the classic, you know, things that later popped up in abduction, in UFO lore. This was, once again, this was around ‘79 or so, very early on.”

Lenny Flatley: Unsure what to do about her experiences, Hansen contacted local police — and of course, they didn’t have a clue either. Eventually she was introduced to Paul Bennewitz. In turn, Bennewitz introduced her to Leo Sprinkle, a University of Wyoming psychologist studying UFO abductees.

Adam Gorightly: And so Bennewitz invited Myrna Hansen [...] to his home, and they flew in Leo Sprinkle to do these hypnosis regressions. And by this time Bennewitz [...] fully believed now that it was ETs behind all this, and that Hanson had been implanted with some type of device where [...] the ETS were talking to her. And so part of the thing that Benowitz was dealing with [...] is trying to block the aliens interfering with her regression session so he could get to the truth. And he went to very extreme measures. He had a Lincoln Town Car. They put Myrna Hansen inside the car, and he wrapped it with several rolls of foil to block the alien beams, you know. So this was like a very extreme early version of the tinfoil hat.

Lenny Flatley: Hansen claimed she’d witnessed cattle mutilations, and said she’d been taken to an underground facility in the mountains.

And again, it’s worth noting that Hansen might have been working for AFOSI, to gather intel, to redirect Bennewitz’s attention, or both. Or Neither.

Either way, his attention was taken away from whatever he might have been seeing at Kirtland.

Bennewitz claimed that the underground alien base in Dulce served as the command center for an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. The facility was referred to as a DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASE — often shortened to its acronym, DUMB. This was said to be a multi-level complex where aliens conducted surveillance operations, human abductions, and cattle mutilations throughout the region.

The story grew darker as Bennewitz theorized that these aliens had initially formed an alliance with the U.S. government. This partnership collapsed when the aliens betrayed their human counterparts, seizing control of the Dulce facility and beginning a systematic infiltration of military and government institutions.

His claims evolved into a cornerstone of modern UFO mythology. Meanwhile, the actual activities at Kirtland Air Force Base became obscured beneath layers of increasingly elaborate alien conspiracy theories.

BREAKDOWN

Lenny Flatley: In August 1988, Bennewitz had a complete mental breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric facility.

Mark Pilkington documents this in a book called MIRAGE MEN, where he writes, quote — “Bennewitz, aged sixty-one, was barely functioning. His business … was being run by his two adult sons. Back at home, he was accusing his wife Cindy of being in the control of the extraterrestrials. The final straw came when he barricaded himself into their home with sandbags.”

Bennewitz was admitted to a mental hospital, where he was held under observation for a month.

In October that same year, UFO COVER-UP? LIVE! Aired.

Coming up: The Bennewitz affair goes national as the Air Force expands its web of deception. A journalist gets pulled into the conspiracy. Plus, the mysterious "MJ-12" documents appear, hinting at a decades-long government cover-up reaching all the way to the President. The conspiracy is about to reach a whole new level. Stay with us.

PART 2

ARCHIVAL: “Linda Moulton Howe in 1990 on cattle mutilations”

HOWE: “When this phenomenon, the mutilation started uh back in the late 60s, I know that there were people who in the beginning they took it seriously, even though the rest of the world was saying it might be predator and satanic cult. I guess I find myself in that unusual and unique position of also being one of those people who took the mutilation seriously enough to stick with it long enough that I have found myself becoming an authority in an area that I never would have suspected — the mutilation of animals worldwide. But the carcasses themselves are one of the biggest single bodies of evidence that something highly unusual is taking place on this planet.”

Lenny Flatley: That is Regional Emmy Award-winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe.

By 1983, the Bennewitz Affair was expanding way beyond Albuquerque. The Air Force started pulling more people into their web of deception, and that’s when RIchard Doty reached out to Howe about her upcoming HBO documentary called UFOS: THE E.T. FACTOR.

What Doty does with Howe is fascinating because it shows just how sophisticated the manipulation had become. He gets her onto Kirtland Air Force Base and shows her some documents — including a supposed briefing paper for President Eisenhower revealing crashed spacecraft. Doty promises Howe footage of UFOs landing at an Air Force base, interviews with Air Force colonels who’d met aliens, even a chance to meet “EBE-3” — a living alien under government protection.

The whole point of this was to kill Howe’s documentary. And it worked. After Doty’s leads failed to materialize, HBO pulled the funding.

BILL MOORE

Lenny Flatley: Enter Bill Moore, a respected researcher Doty recruited by promising access to government UFO documents.

Moore thought of himself as some kind of double agent — working with AFOSI while still serving the UFO research community. He believed he could, quote-unquote, “separate the shit from the candy” and figure out what was really going on. But in reality, he was just another tool in their disinformation campaign.

The government started giving Moore fake documents, sending him on wild goose chases, testing his loyalty. He ended up working directly with Doty, spreading disinformation to other researchers. Moore was even doing odd jobs for them — using his Russian language skills to decode messages hidden in postcards from Soviet assets.

Then in 1984, Jaime Shandera — a tv producer and colleague of Moore's — found a manilla envelope at his doorstep. Inside was a roll of 35mm film containing photographs of the same presidential briefing papers Doty had shown to Linda Moulton Howe.

They purported to detail the activities of a secret government group known as "Operation Majestic-12" or "MJ-12." This group was allegedly formed in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman to manage the retrieval and analysis of crashed flying saucers, as well as the bodies of extraterrestrial beings. The group comprised 12 high-ranking scientists, military leaders, and intelligence officials tasked with investigating and covering up the truth about extraterrestrial contact.

Moore and Shandera started digging, and they came up with something that seemed to add credibility to the whole thing: the so-called Cutler-Twining memo in the National Archives. It referenced an MJ-12 briefing for Eisenhower. The only problem was that the memo didn't have a catalogue number, which was unusual for a National Archives document. Indeed, it looked like someone had snuck the document into the archives just to bolster the claims made by the MJ-12 papers.

Meanwhile, Richard Doty kept feeding Moore information that seemed to back up the MJ-12 story. The documents became this framework for a much larger narrative involving alien colonization and government cover-ups.

UFO COVER-UP LIVE!

ARCHIVAL: “UFO Cover up LIVE”

HOST: “Welcome to the TV-43 Sunday Showcase feature at 4. Today a special program about the existence of alien spacecraft and what the government has been hiding, in UFO Cover-Up Live.”

Lenny Flatley: By 1988, when UFO COVER-UP LIVE aired on television, many of the stories first planted during the Bennewitz affair had taken on lives of their own. Tales of underground bases, alien-government treaties, and secret programs had spread far beyond New Mexico. The movement had grown beyond AFOSI’s ability to control it.

ARCHIVAL: “UFO Cover up LIVE”

HOST: “Tonight for the first time in history, men and women from all over the world come together via satellite to share their experiences about Unidentified Flying Objects.”

Lenny Flatley: The broadcast marked a turning point. What had begun as a localized operation to protect sensitive military installations in New Mexico had evolved into something far more complex. UFO beliefs, once dismissed as fringe fantasies, were now being discussed on prime-time television. The very stories that AFOSI had helped create were now being debated by millions of viewers across America.

The program centered on several major allegations: first, that the 1947 Roswell incident was indeed a genuine UFO crash, complete with recovered alien bodies. Researchers Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman appeared on the show, claiming they had found definitive proof of the crash.

The show also introduced viewers to "Falcon," a mysterious government insider who spoke of a classified document called "The Red Book" that detailed alien technology recovered from crashed UFOs. Falcon went further, describing a secret treaty between the U.S. government and extraterrestrial beings that permitted human abductions in exchange for advanced technology.

ARCHIVAL: “UFO Cover up LIVE”

ANNOUNCER: “An astonishing account of alien corpses found in the desert. Next, on ufo cover-up live.”

Lenny Flatley: UFO COVERUP LIVE is this perfect mix of verifiable facts and complete fabrication. They’re talking about aliens loving strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music, but they’re presenting it alongside real, documented UFO cases. It’s as if the crazier stuff was included to discredit the very idea of unidentified flying objects — which might be from another planet, but also might be experimental craft that the Air Force wants to keep secret.

When we come back, everything comes crashing down at a UFO conference in 1989. Bill Moore takes the stage to make a shocking confession about his role in spreading disinformation, his work with AFOSI, and how the entire UFO research community got played. And we'll look at how the legacy of this elaborate operation is still shaping UFO mythology today — including some eerily familiar patterns emerging in our current UFO headlines. Stay with us.

CONCLUSION

ARCHIVAL: “Bill Moore’s 1989 MUFON Speech

MOORE: “In early September 1980, I was approached by a well-placed individual within the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high-level government project dealing with UFOs. I knew I was being recruited but at that point I had no idea for what.”

Lenny Flatley: That’s Bill Moore, speaking at a conference held by MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, in 1989.

This event is legendary in UFO lore. Moore steps up to the podium and stuns everyone with his confession. He admits that he’d been working with AFOSI this whole time, feeding disinformation to UFO researchers, including Paul Bennewitz.

I asked Adam Gorightly what he knew about Bill Moore.

Adam Gorightly: Moore was a high school teacher, but he also had a background in Russian, and he could speak fluent Russian, which is kind of interesting.

During Moore’s UFO research, he was contacting these different Russian scientists who were looking into UFOs. And you’ll see that in UFO COVERUP LIVE, just to go off on a little bit of a tangent here. It was like a joint with the Soviet Union, right? This was in late ‘87 before the Cold War had ended. So it was kind of an odd thing. And they have a couple of Russian scientists, journalists on there talking about UFOs. And looking back on that now, those are probably Bill Moore's contacts.

Doty, you know, he says a lot of things, but that was his interest in Bill Moore—not so much the UFOs, but those Russian connections, you know, from a counterintelligence standpoint.

Lenny Flatley: On stage that night, Moore confesses to monitoring other UFO researchers, keeping tabs on who they’re talking to and what they’re investigating. At the same time, he spread Doty’s misinformation as if these were legitimate government leaks.

Moore tries to justify it. He tells the audience he saw himself as this double agent, thinking he could play both sides and get to the real truth about UFOs. He describes how AFOSI tested his loyalty by giving him fake documents, sending him on wild goose chases, seeing if he’d play ball. Richard Doty was his handler, feeding him information and assignments.

The backlash was intense. The UFO research community trusted him, built on his research, and accepted the MJ-12 documents because he vouched for them.

After his very public confession, Moore is driven out of the UFO field.

Legacy

Lenny Flatley: So here we are, 35 years after Bill Moore’s confession, and what are we left with? A story that’s about way more than just UFOs. It’s about how belief systems can be manipulated, how truth gets twisted, and how easy it is to lose your way when you’re desperately searching for answers.

The Air Force took a military contractor who spotted something near their base, and instead of just telling him to mind his own business, they orchestrated this elaborate deception. They fed him fake documents, gave him a rigged computer, encouraged his paranoid theories, and ultimately drove him to a mental breakdown. And they didn’t just stop with Bennewitz — they pulled in respected researchers like Bill Moore, journalists like Linda Moulton Howe, created this whole mythology about underground alien bases and government conspiracies.

ARCHIVAL: “The Daily Show: Luis Elizondo—Imminent”

ELIZONDO: “Yeah, so after college, I spent some time, went into the United States Army, spent some time in military intelligence. And then from there, I was recruited into some special activity programs where I became a special agent in counterintelligence, investigating terrorism and espionage. And in 2009, early 2009, I was brought in to run counterintelligence for that program, what is now known as AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.”

Lenny Flatley: This is Lue Elizondo, the modern UFO “whistleblower” who sparked the recent round of UFO hysteria when the NEW YORK TIMES published a story about a Pentagon program called AATIP — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The story was published in 2017.

The parallels to the Bennewitz affair are pretty striking.

We’ve got someone with government intelligence connections stepping out of the shadows, presenting themselves as a whistleblower with inside knowledge about UFOs — or, as they’re currently known, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. UAPs.

Elizondo, like Doty before him, comes offering intriguing details about these phenomena. But there’s a key difference here: while Doty was fabricating documents and staging events, Elizondo’s been releasing actual military videos of UAP encounters.

In effect, the process has been streamlined: instead of spreading misinformation through a UFO researcher, Lue Elizondo — with his background in counterintelligence — is spreading the misinformation directly. And the UFO crowd — not to mention the mainstream media — is eating it up.

The legacy of the Bennewitz affair isn’t just about UFOs. It’s about how vulnerable we all are to manipulation, especially when it comes to subjects that tap into our deepest hopes and fears. Whether you’re talking about UFOs, politics, or any other controversial topic, the lesson is the same: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and sometimes the most dangerous deception is the one that tells you exactly what you want to hear.