Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth

In 1978, Paul Bennewitz, an electrical physicist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, engaged in some aggressive radio monitoring of the nearby Sandia Labs, then managed by the Department of Defense. When he became convinced that the strange lights hovering over the labs and Kirtland Air Force Base signaled the vanguard of an extraterrestrial alien invasion, he began writing TV stations, newspapers, senators -- and even President Reagan -- to alert them.

For the most part Bennewitz received form-letter replies, but Air Force investigators paid him a visit, as did Bill Moore, author of the first book on the Roswell incident. Before long Moore -- then a new force in civilian UFO research -- was tapped by a group of intelligence agents and a deal was struck: Moore was to keep tabs on Bennewitz while the Air Force ran a psychological profile and disinformation campaign on the unsuspecting physicist. In return, Air Force Intelligence would let Moore in on classified UFO material.

This is Bennewitz's harrowing tale, told by fringe-culture historian Greg Bishop. It is the troubling account of the custom-made hall of smoke and mirrors that eventually drove Bennewitz to a mental institution, as well as the story of the explosive propagation of disinformation that began in 1979 and reverberates through the UFO community and pop culture to this day.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Some scenes in particular were hilarious!, 2006-10-12
Project Beta is a book about Paul Bennewitz, a brilliant physicist who during the 1980s became the victim of a disinformation campaign.

At the end of the 1970s Bennewitz, who lived and worked next to Kirtland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque, started picking up strange radio signals and messages that he eventually concluded were extraterrestrial in origin. Around the same time he began capturing odd lights in the sky over the base, both on camera and video, and it didn't take long for him to convince himself that extraterrestrials were abducting people in the area, that they had built underground bases, and also entered into different alliances with not-so friendly representatives of the American government and military. In 1981 Bennewitz finished a report on his findings, which he chose to call Project Beta. This report was sent out in large quantities, not only to various ufologists but also to President Reagan (who didn't show much interest in the matter, though).

But things weren't quite the way Bennewitz thought they were. Much of what he had filmed, taken pictures of, and listened in to was actually top-secret military experiments, and in an attempt to divert his attention from sensitive subjects the ones in charge on the base simply decided to exploit his gullibility by providing him with bogus stories. UFOs, extraterrestrials, alien abductions, and much more were simply very effective tools to divert his attention from the truth, and agents and representatives from the military faked an interest in his extraterrestrial theories and provided him with false ideas in order to be able to keep him under surveillance and point him away from the classified truth.

Does it sound complicated? Well, it is. The book is said to be a true story, but most of the time if feels more like a traditional thriller, albeit a sometimes very entertaining one. It's also very tragic, but Bishop writes with a sense of humor and this accompanied by the high level of skepticism makes the book quite entertaining to read. Especially the sections where Bennewitz and ufologist Leo Sprinkle interviews an alleged abductee in a car covered in aluminum foil, which is supposed to prevent any extraterrestrial tracking signals. Man, those sections were funny indeed.


2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Sanctioned Insanity, 2006-04-09
The title says it all: "The Creation of a Modern UFO Myth". For decades a debate has raged over the existence of aliens and if they do exist, why haven't they made themselves known in a more, how to say this judiciously, public manner? I've had a lifelong fascination with UFOs (what boy did not?) Only lately have I realized that support among other fields, i.e. biology is almost non-existent (the sheer number of accidents required to bring about intelligent life on our planet is astounding). I've become convinced that intelligence is extremely rare and perhaps unique in our galaxy. Scientific American stated that a civilization traveling at only 1/10 c could populate the galaxy in less than ten million years - a dot on the scale of galactic time. The real question is, why haven't they? (Occam's Razor)

Paul Bennewitz was a respected physicist, businessman, family man and citizen who literally went crazy over the subject of UFOs. The author suggests that a large part of his thinking was directed by the government in an effort to conceal super secret weapons at Sandia Labs. The disinformation campaign continued for years complete with "faked" government reports, wiretaps, secret agents, various mysterious agencies and infiltrators who may or may not be double or triple agents, etc. It's hard to decide which is nuttier - government employees creating elaborate schemes designed to convince a group of yahoos that little green men were real, aliens with unbelievable technology worried about our military, testing super-secret weapons where citizens can see or the continued belief in UFOs despite a lack of verifiable evidence. The book is not only a report on this man but a brief history of the UFO "Movement" and it is a social movement in its quasi-religious tenets, its appeal to those who seek simple answers for complex solutions and apostles & holy writ.

I'll go along with the idea that advanced weapons design goes on in secret. Yet where are they when we need them most? Why not send one of the balls of light into the Sunni Triangle & state that it is Allah's angel? Better, why not use the objects that turn on a dime, flight up or out or into the stratosphere to explode buried land mines? The author semi-suggests that UFOs show up at various military bases and laboratories without asking the question - why? How can our study of EMP or anti-gravity theory possible affect them? Indeed, the overall mood at the end is one of great sadness - for Bennewitz, his family, the other players involved in the scam and last but not least, the true believers.



7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

IS THIS THE BEST UFO BOOK OF 2005?, 2005-08-27
PROJECT BETA by Gregory Bishop illuminates our darkest hour in UFOlogy with a spotlight so bright that you can almost read this page-turner in the dark.

With a devoted wife and two sons, Paul Bennewitz, then a fiftysomething electrical physicist and accomplished aerobatics pilot, had everything to live for. The company he founded, Thunder Scientific Labs, manufactured specialized instrumentation for high-profile clientele like NASA and the United States Air Force. He even played guitar.

Then Bennewitz noticed the UFOs. From the deck of his home perched high in the Four Hills neighborhood of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he photographed and filmed mysterious nocturnal lights cavorting over nearby hush-hush military installations. Soon after, ultrasensitive radio receivers of his own design tracked the luminous phantoms and recorded the covert signals -- modulated pulsed transmissions, loud and clear -- of the UFOs. Clues became proof and Bennewitz became terrified. At times his own worst enemy, the prodigious inventor and electronics wizard went public and contacted newspapers, TV stations, congressmen, UFO researchers and organizations, and even President Ronald Reagan.

Certain unelected and non-accountable powers (National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Air Force Office of Special Investigation) decided to discredit and "neutralize" Bennewitz for keeps.

Enter William Leonard Moore, primary instigator and once fierce proponent of such trivialities as the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, MJ-12, and the alleged military retrieval of a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico. These three "mysteries" have most unfortunately drained precious time, money and manpower from far more legitimate and rewarding avenues of investigation and research into current unknown and unexplained phenomena and events.
By Moore's own admission, representatives of those previously identified unelected and non-accountable powers offered him a Faustian bargain. If he would watch various civilian UFO organizations and researchers in general and Paul Bennewitz in particular as the government disinformation game played itself out in earnest, they would let him in on classified UFO material.

Readers must make up their own minds regarding the actions and intentions of the key players in this stranger-than-fiction nightmare about one man's ruin at the hands of a government bent on concealing the truth. Very highly recommended.
(Copyright 2005 by Robert A. Goerman)


5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Disinformation Continued?, 2005-08-15
It's difficult to reach any profound conclusion about the volume of events discussed in PROJECT BETA: THE STORY OF PAUL BENNEWITZ, NATIONAL SECURITY, AND THE CREATION OF A MODERN UFO MYTH; much like the title alone, the information presented isn't necesssarily additive to any other result but "don't believe what you were just told."

Of course, this fact goes hand-in-hand with the book's subject: Bennewitz, an inventor and businessman, discovers possibly 'irrefutable' scientific evidence that something 'alien' is taking place involving the DOD's Sandia Labs. Monitored and decoded radio transmissions give the appearance that the Earth is being considered ripe for invasion by an unseen alien force. Rather than find his efforts stymied by the military, Bennewitz finds himself a sort of confidante by a plethora of insiders, all whom poke and prod the man to continue his work in possibly fradulent avenues. For the next decade, he finds himself pushed to his psychological limit, believing that he has somehow been placed in a clandestine race to save mankind partnered with Air Force investigators unwilling to do anything about it.

Of course, the principle problem with constructing an account about disinformation is that the author is showing you his cards at the poker table. Greg Bishop knows that the reader will understand the nature of disinformation as he's stripped the theory naked as part of the story he's telling. However, what he doesn't do very well is 'reconstruct' these events to any ultimate conclusion, despite Bennewitz's obvious mental abuse. Few of the details Bishop discusses can be substantiated because of the massive disinformation campaign, and any reasonably intelligent person can probably reach the midpoint of PROJECT BETA and have the revelation, "How am I to know for certain that I'm not the one being misinformed here?"

Still, author Bishop manages to craft a novel that is equal parts intriguing, frustrating, and confusing. The reader cares for Bennewitz -- despite some reservations about the man's stability -- and any reader would genuinely hope that some of these players who confess to be 'good friends' with the man would break their patterns of deceit long enough to help the inventor keep his fragile sanity. Bishop appears to justify their continued abuse of Bennewitz by routinely underscoring how much these men and women cared about the kindly inventor, but that becomes an increasingly difficult 'reality' to accept given Bennewitz's eventual destination.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Informative, engaging reading from cover to cover, 2005-06-10
In 1978 Paul Bennewitz, an electrical physicist in New Mexico, began monitoring the radio transmissions of the nearby Sandia Labs, convinced the strange lights hovering over the labs were evidence of an extraterrestrial alien invasion. His letter-writing campaign to the media and even the President to alert them resulted in an alliance between Air Force investigators and Bill Moore, author of the first Roswell incident book to keep tabs on him. The mystery eventually drove Bennewitz to a mental institution and the alliance prompted the spread of misinformation on the topic which began in 1989 and continues to this day. Project Beta is informative, engaging reading from cover to cover.

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