Showing posts with label Mark Pilkington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Pilkington. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 08, 2018

UFO Misinformation: Relevant as It Ever Was

Bookmark and Share

UFO Misinformation: Relevant as It Ever Was

Paul Bennewitz
The late Paul Bennewitz
     Paul Bennewitz lived just outside Kirtland Air Force Base, where he became convinced aliens were executing a plan to take over the planet. Air Force personnel contributed to reinforcing and shaping the man's beliefs, according to Greg Bishop's 2005 nonfiction book, Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.
Jack Brewer
By Jack Brewer
The UFO Trail
7-30-18
Bishop was prominently featured in Mirage Men, a 2013 documentary written by Mark Pilkington and directed by John Lundberg and others. The film explores at length thecircumstances of Bennewitz's ill fated association with Richard Doty, who, during the time in question, was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations Special Agent. Bennewitz also became acquainted with UFO researcher William Moore, further sealing the confused Bennewitz's unfortunate fate.

The work of Bishop and Pilkington is essential material in gaining understandings of what's known and speculated about the Bennewitz chain of events, as well as the general intelligence community propagation of UFO-related stories. An abundance of unsubstantiated assumptions about UFOs and their extraterrestrial, underground dwelling, cattle mutilating pilots - which are now commonly yet mistakenly taken for granted as accurate - can be directly traced to events and the cast of characters surrounding Paul Bennewitz. And none of it was true.

Also deserving mention is an article by Alejandro Rojas titled, Open letter to the U.S. Air Force regarding allegations of UFO disinformation. The 2014 piece takes readers through the FOIA efforts of Rojas surrounding the Bennewitz case. The citations contain a wealth of material for potential further FOIA requests. FOIA subject material may also be mined from Project Beta and Mirage Men.


My FOIA efforts include submitting the above material quoted from Project Beta to multiple agencies. Former Special Agent Doty apparently told Bishop about investigations surrounding Bennewitz. I have yet to receive any positive responses but, as often seems to be the case with such matters, my preparation to appeal the unfilled requests presents more circumstances worthy of FOIA submissions.

Take, for example, statements below contained in a letter written by Doty and sent to Jim Moseley, published in Moseley's July 15, 2000 edition of Saucer Smear:

By Richard Doty - Saucer Smear  7-15-2000

I encourage interested parties to cite specific published statements as quoted above and submit FOIA requests for files which may have resulted from the alleged circumstances. In the above example, requests might be sent to AFOSI and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

While I find such circumstances intriguing, their relevance arguably goes much further than how interested we may be. There is actually a very important reason to better inform ourselves of past events: It teaches us better understandings of current events.

Richard Doty
Adam Gorightly has a forthcoming book exploring the cultivation of a great deal of questionable UFO stories. He takes a close look at tales surrounding Dulce, the big reveal that never happened at Holloman AFB, the birth of the infamous Serpo fiasco, and much more. I look forward to the release of the book and resulting discussions.

I contend it is important to be aware of these stories because doing so demonstrates the critical significance of prioritizing established facts over suppositions. It should be understood that statements need not be immediately discounted, nor should we necessarily distrust people with ties to the intelligence community. An important point is that there are extremely well documented instances of individuals going to great lengths to control the UFO narrative for a variety of reasons. That being the conclusively demonstrated case, we should proceed with caution - whether someone with a story worked on the federal payroll or not.

There is no substitute for transparent research practices and making evidence available for public review. We should expect those making claims to understand this as well. As history teaches, beware those who minimize transparency and talk in circles. It doesn't mean every story is not true, but it's not like we don't have valid reasons to suspend judgment until verification comes along. To criticize those who do so is unreasonable.

Monday, September 08, 2014

“’Mirage Men’ Operates on The Premise That UFOs are Hokum”

Bookmark and Share

Mirage Men

A nest of weasels


By Billy Cox
De Void
9-4-14

     If you ever want to dissuade the uninitiated from going near The Great Taboo, show them “Mirage Men,” the 2013 documentary based on Mark Pilkington’s eponymous book. Guaranteed to make an honest broker erupt in hives at the mere thought of parting the veil around the UFO mystery, “Mirage Men’s” anatomy of a government disinformation program is brilliant propaganda, and delivered with the sort of polished confidence that could easily make the “Frontline” rotation.

Directed by British crop-circle debunker John Lundberg, “Mirage Men” focuses largely on the activities of Richard Doty, the now-retired USAF Office of Special Investigations agent who screwed several UFO researchers with phony conspiracy yarns and created enough paranoia to put one of them in a psychiatric ward.

Like the book, “Mirage Men”operates on the premise that UFOs are hokum, and inflated by a counterintelligence network determined to conceal its black projects behind a smokescreen of imaginary space aliens. As Pilkington asserts in the documentary, “The UFO mythology develops of its own accord, and the mirage men will just drop a new piece of data, a new meme, some new fake documents into the mix as and when it is expedient for them to do so. And there’s no real need for a sustained UFO deception campaign because the folklore is just perfectly capable of sustaining itself.”

Embroidering its narrative with snippets of ancient Hollywood flying saucer flicks, the doc does a clever job of presenting UFOs as an exclusively pop-cultural phenomenon, circa 1952. No mention, of course, of the scientists and Air Force officials who established the independent reality of UFOs in 1948’s Project Sign because that would've complicated Pilkington's premise. But no matter. The real value of “Mirage Men” is watching a hack like Doty justify his mission on camera.

Doty, who has the bland countenance of Kevin Spacey’s office manager in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” was working OSI at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico in the late 1970s when he was assigned to neutralize an electronics entrepreneur named Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz, described as a flag-waving WWII veteran, recorded strange lights, and other things, near Kirtland and alerted military authorities to what he claimed were UFOs. The "Mirage" storyline is that Bennewitz was unwittingly monitoring classified earthly technology, and that somewhere in the chain of command, it was decided the best way to work this thing was to encourage Bennewitz to believe he’d actually stumbled onto ET. Spoonfeeding him loads of steaming crap, the ruse went on for years and provoked Bennewitz into sharing his increasingly fantastic “discoveries” with politicians and news media, which wrote him off as a kook. Bennewitz eventually lost his business and submitted to psychiatric evaluation before his death in 2003.

Listening to Doty’s spin, years later, is to behold the very portrait of epic gall: “I actually sat down with Paul and said to Paul, ‘Listen Paul, I think you oughtta stop doing this. I think you’ve gone as far as you can go, and this is a friend, this is Richard Doty, a friend,’ it wasn’t Richard Doty, a special agent with OSI talking to him. I said ‘This is a friend talking to you, Paul,’ because I became a friend with him because he was a very wonderful person, and I didn’t want to see him harmed, and I said ‘Paul, stop it, listen to your son, listen to your wife, end it.’”

A friend? Holy *@!#, this guy Doty is a reptile. But at that point in the psyops campaign, nothing Doty could do or say could derail Bennewitz from his sacred destiny to find the space aliens. But Doty didn't stop there; his BS would go on to burn researchers Bill Moore and Linda Howe, whose stories are well documented. What lingers now are the echoes of this blithe functionary’s twisted reasons for cooperating with the documentary in the first place. Doty, the admitted liar, now insists 20 percent of the UFO coverup stuff he was putting out there — he never gets specific — is actually true. So open wide, kids, here's another meaningless mouthful:

“There are so many people, so many people within government, who have come forth with information saying it did happen, it’s real. The reason I’m doing it is because I asked the government a long time ago, hey, what am I supposed to say? And they’re gonna say you stick to the fact that it’s not real. But when the government tried to discredit me on something, then I went to them and said ‘Listen, you’re telling everybody that it’s not real and I know it’s real. And you know it’s real, and all these other people know it’s real. So I’m gonna tell the public what I know about it and the government said basically, ‘Do what you’ve gotta do.’”

Doty is a radioactive specimen you wouldn’t trust if he pointed out that your own hair was on fire. “You’re looking at Richard Doty,” concludes another researcher, “and by looking at him, you’re taking a glimpse into a whole machine that now has a life of its own.” Maybe that's true. And if Doty's self-serving confessional is what passes for contrition these days, shoot me your email and I'll forward you a Nigerian cash transfer proposition you're gonna love. Yep, "Mirage Men" wants you to walk away from this whole UFO scene in disgust. To that end, it's an incredibly effective piece of work.