Richard Doty, an Air Force investigator, allegedly orchestrated a disinformation campaign against electrical engineer Paul Benowitz to divert attention from real military testing at Kirtland Air Force Base. By rigging computers to simulate alien communications and fabricating stories about Area 51 and Dulce, New Mexico, Doty manipulated Benowitz into believing in a secret treaty with extraterrestrials, leading to paranoia, hallucinations of "man in black" figures, and eventual institutionalization. This psychological warfare successfully shifted focus from stealth bomber prototypes to enduring conspiracy theories regarding hybrid breeding programs, illustrating how government deception can permanently fracture an individual's mind while seeding lasting cultural myths. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Elbow Pervert Incident00:03:40
Cool zone media.
Oh, man.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
All of you beautiful people and also all of you ugly people.
You know, all people are beautiful, except for I just kind of said that I didn't, that they're not.
That was inside and outside beauty, you know?
No, there's only one kind.
There's only one kind.
I'm not going to say what it is.
I'm not going to say which kind of beauty, but there's only one kind.
That's fair.
Yeah, it's elbows.
I'm an elbow guy.
I'm an elbow guy.
Yeah, I'm starting the wiki feed of elbows.
It's just a bunch of like really blurry cropped photos of like elbows of different celebrities.
Oh my God.
Do you know there's no nerve endings in your elbow skin?
That's the hottest thing about it.
Yeah, I know.
He's an elbow guy.
I had a friend in my comparative religions class that discovered weed and would make everybody bite his elbows the beginning of every class.
Oh, that's a pervert.
That's a pervert.
That's an elbow pervert right there.
Yes, he's a, well, currently he's a born-again meteorologist in North Carolina.
So yes, that is a pervert.
No, I can see why you'd be scared that God is angry at you if you're that kind of pervert because he is.
But that makes it hotter for a lot of us.
Brandy Posey, welcome back to the program.
You want to plug anything at the top before we get too deep into elbows?
Yeah, of course.
Before we get elbow deep into this aliens, Bowen.
Bowen with Robert and Brandy.
Get it down, baby.
Yeah, I run a comedy record that I built.
It's called Burn This Records.
We sequit to create equity between our artists in a way that most comedy labels don't.
I have put out 17 albums last year.
It was our first year.
This year, we have about 15.
It's digital only, and everybody is not only funny, but a good person, which is a Venn diagram that I wish more people in comedy paid attention to.
Yes.
Well, I think that's awesome.
So check that out, everybody.
And let's get, are you ready to get back into this story?
Into these aliens?
Into these aliens and spooks.
Bow deep in aliens.
Let's go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaking of bows, Richard Dodie probably doesn't have nice elbows.
He's our Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
When you said bows, I was like, are we talking for your hair?
Are we talking?
Are we talking speakers?
There's no bow.
There's so many bows.
Does he have no bows?
No, no, no partners.
What are we talking about?
You know what?
Speaking of bows, I will let people, this just add, yesterday I wound up just because of it happened as I was driving, like responding to a three-car crash.
And there was a young woman in the middle car who was the only one who was hurt.
And she was hurt because she had a beret in like the back of her hair.
A claw for the glue.
It was the claw-shaped one.
Yes, which is a no-go.
Anyway, don't wear those in the car.
Don't wear those in a car.
Do your hair.
You can bring your claw clip in the car, but do not wear it while you're in the car because it's bad.
Bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I have a friend that is, her sister's an ER nurse.
And when she gets in her car, her whole backseat is full of those claws because when he gets in her car and she throws it, she just takes it out and throws it in the back seat.
Because the number one thing that she sees in here, her ER room is that in women's skulls from car accidents.
Thankfully, this lady seemed fine.
I do like you saying Barrette, the way you said it.
Barrette.
You said it like so surgical.
I thought that's what it was called.
I thought that's what it was called.
Hair Claws in Cars00:02:57
You're not wrong, but you're also wrong.
Anyway, don't wear those.
And also, if you're ever in a car accident and your head is hurt in any way, shape or form, go get checked out by a professional.
Don't just assume it's okay.
You don't want to wind up like that famous guy's wife.
No.
You got one brain.
I wasn't saying that to be.
Wasn't saying that to be flippant.
It's a real problem.
Yes.
Go to the doctor.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Testing Trust with Aliens00:15:12
So let's talk about fucking UFOs and a guy who didn't go to the doctor maybe enough or maybe went too much.
I don't know.
Richard Doty was born sometime around the immediate post-war period.
He is, I haven't actually run into his exact, that said, I didn't like go super hardcore digging into it.
His father and his uncle Edward were his chief influences growing up and both were military men.
This guy is kind of, you know, an early, I think a late, like mid-boomer, something like that.
And his uncle Edward had been a career officer and meteorologist.
In 1947, he'd been made chief of an Air Force weather research station working on something called the Atmospheric Divergence Project.
Now, decades later, because Richard Doty is not just the guy who's going to like spread a bunch of lies to Paul Benowitz that helps drive him mad.
He also becomes like an alien influencer, claiming that like, oh no, I actually did also see real aliens, guys, and you can totally trust me.
I know that like my whole thing is I lied to a guy about aliens for years, but also you can trust me when I tell you about aliens that I saw.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I lied because I also tell the truth.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Now that I'm out, you can trust me.
So Richard Doty, the spook and liar kind of guy, has in kind of modern interviews tells viewers that the atmospheric divergence project his uncle worked on was an attempt to, quote, change or neutralize gravity around a rocket to aid in space travel.
Now, I haven't found the exact details in the specific project his uncle worked on, but I don't think this is true.
Because while I did not find the reports on that project, I did spend way too much of my research time reading through an Air Force handbook on meteorological techniques.
And atmospheric divergence impacts the growth of storm systems in a bunch of ways that are obviously relevant to an Air Force meteorologist and not at all involved with fucking up gravity for space travel, right?
This sounds like a normal meteorologist thing to do.
Richard is a tall tail spinner, right?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And one of the issues with my sources, because two of the, I've got a bunch of articles in here that you can, you can find.
There's also two books that I read for this.
One is Saucered Spooks and Kooks by Adam Go Reitley, and one is Project Beta by Greg Bishop.
Both of them are very entertaining.
I think Greg's book, Project Beta, is the better book.
Both of these guys also believe in stuff I don't, particularly Bishop.
Well, I think he, because I've caught, there's some stuff in Go Reitley's book that I caught that's just not factually just slips that he slipped up on.
I think Bishop is more familiar with the subculture, but also Bishop definitely believes a bunch of shit I don't.
And he's, you can tell he kind of is excited at like talking with these spooks and spies.
And I think he gives them a lot more credit than he ought to.
Oh, God.
He's caught up in the romance of it all.
I think he is, not in a way that I think makes his basic conclusions wrong or his book not worth reading.
Again, I think this, it's actually quite worth reading.
It's quite a good book.
And I think he's a good writer.
I just don't, I'm not sympatico with him on all of the conclusions he comes to about these guys.
I don't mean that as an insult to the man.
Because again, I liked his book a lot.
So, but that is an issue when it comes to like trying to figure out shit here, right?
And in Project Beta, Bishop does do about like the best of any of them at kind of questioning Doty by saying, perhaps this had something to do with weather control, or maybe it was something more prosaic.
And like, it didn't, it wasn't rather control or gravity.
It's just studying how this thing that affects meteorological forecasts work.
Very normal thing for a meteorologist to do.
Anyway, Doty joined the Air Force as a young man, just like his paw and uncle.
And per Bishop, he entered in 1968 as a combat security policeman.
Doty would later claim he was, quote, tested and tracked throughout his career to become a base security guard and then a special agent for AFOC, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
Now, that's how Doty tells the story.
And I don't think he's, I don't, I think that's very silly because I'm not an expert on this, but I've known a number of people who were in different military intelligence roles.
And I will tell you one thing that is very consistent.
Base security guard is not a job that you are scouted for your entire career, right?
Like it's kind of a shit gig, actually.
Like nobody likes base security.
And it's not really what most kids join wanting to do with their lives, right?
Oh, no.
It's like a step above base janitor, but like also the same kind of.
Yeah.
Not to besmirch either job necessarily, but also like you're not smashing security.
I'll smirch it some.
I'm smirching a little here.
I'll let you just a scooch of smirch.
We'll take it.
Yeah.
And Doty really wants people to believe that he was like, he was scouted by the Air Force because like we need a guy we can trust to do security for our very secret, very real alien projects.
Like, wow, we noted from the beginning of his time in the Air Force that he had something special, right?
And that's the way he talks about his background.
This is very observant report, but with aliens, it feels like, yes, yes.
And, you know, Afosi is more prestigious than base security.
He eventually does, you know, he's a special agent.
He's a sergeant, but he's also a special agent for this.
And that is like a more prestigious role.
But also, his job within Afosy isn't the most prestigious thing because other members of that agency are literally.
This is like the time that he's in is one of like the high points for like spy shit anywhere in the world, like history, right?
Other guys in Afosy are locked in life and death spy battles with like fucking got some of the best spies on planet Earth, right?
You know, you've got the foreign, you know, Russian and Chinese agents.
Like there's some really interesting shit going on here.
Dodie's job during this like great international game is to lie to people who believe they'd been molested by Martians.
So he doesn't have the sexiest job within this sort of field, right?
Not quite espionage that the captain's right.
He's not James Bond.
You know, there are some guys in Afosi doing some really like you talk about the ethics of it, but like interesting spy shit.
He's, I, I mean, it is interesting, but not in the same way.
I'd like to see his Bond movie, though.
I would like to see that.
Yeah, this low-rent bond is definitely a movie that I'd be into.
Well, that's kind of the premise of the Slow Horses TV show, right?
Which does have what's his name?
Commissioner Gordon's in it, and he's great.
I hate the show.
I have mixed opinions on it, but he's always, always a charm.
The original commission, well, not the original, the one from the Nolan movies.
I forget his name.
Gary Oldman.
So Dodie today claims that right after basic training, and again, this is also bullshit.
He was taken to a room and shown footage of UFOs.
And like, I don't believe that if there are aliens that the government has evidence of, obviously, there's some people that they let into that secret within military intelligence.
It's not going to be anyone who just finished basic because you know who can finish basic training?
Almost anyone.
Like, that's part of the point.
Yeah.
Hey, 18-year-old without a frontal lobe that is fully formed.
Do you want to see aliens right now?
Like, unless it wouldn't fuck with you specifically, maybe, but like, not in like an official constructive capacity for sure.
Yeah.
Hey, guy whose primary hobby is getting blackout drunk every single night of the week.
Let's let's show you an alien video.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, all those push-ups you did.
Guess what?
Here's also aliens.
You passed the test.
Yeah.
Now, this is generally described as a test.
And I think that's how like Bishop describes it in his book: Dodie was being tested to see who, or at least Dodi claims he was being tested to see, you know, if he could be trusted with more detailed info about extraterrestrials.
So I guess there's a possibility that maybe something like this did happen and it wasn't real aliens, but it was just like, let's show a bunch of guys alien footage and like see who leaks it, right?
That they saw something, you know, see who we can trust.
Stuff, I don't think even then, I kind of doubt it because they weren't really doing that to guys who just finished basic.
But shit like that is happening within different kinds of intelligence agencies.
And it's not just aliens.
They lie about disinfo is given out to people during this period of time in different intel roles just to see if they can be trusted, right?
Like that's a thing that happens.
Dodie also claims that he served as a guard at Area 51 where he saw a UFO.
Now, again, Area 51 is a real base.
They are really doing experimental shit with planes there.
This could be true.
And in fact, the story he tells might be true, but not in a way he wants you to think.
Because he claims while he's there, he sees them wheeling out this huge black disc that's some sort of craft that they're trying to get into the atmosphere that they like launch.
And it doesn't look like anything he's ever seen.
And his commanding officer takes him aside, right?
Because he sees Dodie's fascinated in this.
And here's the conversation that is related in the book, Project Beta.
Airman Doty, do you know what that craft was?
Asked the officer.
No, sir.
That's what is generally known as a UFO, and it's not one of ours.
It's on loan.
Yes, sir.
Someday, if you play your cards right, you will learn, know a lot more.
But for now, you are to tell no one about this, and you are not to discuss it with anyone.
Is that clear?
Dodie never talked about it again.
And first off, obviously he did.
Because you're telling us this story.
So like I'm reading it in the book, it's definitely been recounted several times.
But also that could be basically true and have nothing to do with aliens.
He could have been on guard duty, seen a weird craft that maybe like was a fucking French or Canadian thing that like we were doing tests on, right?
So it's on loan.
And his boss is just kind of like, hey, you know, maybe if you play your cards right, you'll, you'll get, we'll trust you with more stuff, right?
And I don't know.
I don't know if Doty actually gets much more trust, but this could be largely accurate, although I don't think that's likely.
Yeah, yeah.
That said, like there's evidence he is working.
He probably, he definitely does see experimental craft through his job for FOC later in his career because he's working at bases where they're doing that.
That doesn't mean that he's told what it all is because they silo that info.
Even if it's your job to stop people from finding out about these programs, you may not be told much about them because it's a need-to-know thing and you don't, right?
You need to stop people from filming the weird craft.
You don't need to know how it works.
You don't need to know what it is, right?
No, They don't want curious people working on like lower levels of this stuff at all.
Like they're not, they want you to just come in and be like, my job is to do this and then have blinders up to everything else.
I didn't see shit.
This is why I've been saying this for years.
The government should have all of its security done by street-level drug dealers.
You know, those guys can keep their fucking mouth shut, you know?
Absolutely.
Ain't no snitches.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Area 51, all security provided by Coke dealers.
Just don't give them any Coke.
Then they talk about everything.
Yeah, yeah.
You got to keep them sober, otherwise it ends very badly.
Ooh, man, what a fun place.
Just a bunch of sober Coke dealers.
Yeah, a bunch of sober Coke dealers in Area 51.
This is going to end well.
So there's evidence that a lot of, you know, Doty is a credulous guy.
He does come to, at least he will claim to believe in this.
He might just be fucking with everybody.
I don't really know.
But a lot of guys in his kind of level in different Intel agencies are believers themselves, right?
So at any rate, Doty claims that his chief mentor in spy shit was a guy named Seeley Howard, a former insurance salesman.
According to Doty, he gave him this sage advice early in his spook career.
There are three sorts of people you will be dealing with.
The first are the ones who will believe anything you say.
The second are those who will, at least at first, refuse to believe you.
The last is the group who won't believe you at first, but might be willing to be convinced.
And what I find interesting about that is those last two groups are the same group of people.
Yes.
The people who don't believe you at first, but you can make them believe you.
I don't see the difference.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's just one is just on a longer timeline and eventually eventually.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
So as soon as Paul Benowitz called the Air Force with results of his surveillance, they knew they might have a problem.
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations very quickly became concerned that Paul Benowitz had stumbled onto a secret laser-based tracking system located in Kirtland.
At least that's one of the things he might have stumbled on.
Greg Bishop, who wrote Project Beta, noted that these transmissions sounded like gibberish language that had been distorted and sped up.
Or to a true believer like Paul, they sounded like alien speech.
Edwards, chief of Kirtland-based security, had previously described Dotie to a friend at the NSA as his drug man.
And so that's less cool than it sounds, as Greg Bishop writes.
The duties simply involved checking for allegations of illegal drug use on the base, but it was only one of Agent Dodie's minor assignments.
The FOC has jurisdiction over all criminal and security investigations at Air Force facilities.
Most FOC agents must carry a high-security clearance.
Agents need to know what they are protecting so that security threats can be recognized quickly.
Benowitz carefully described to Dodie what he had seen and recorded, all while trying to keep what he really thought was going on to himself for the moment.
And this is where I think Bishop is too credulous because, again, think back to Roswell.
The first guy, like, they don't tell the people who are looking and responding to that crashed balloon that Project Mogul exists.
It's very common for these guys not to be in the loop about stuff, right?
Especially since he's just a sergeant, you know, like he's not a super high-level guy here.
That said, Dodie is kind of sent to talk to Benowitz and he's like, Hey, you know, why don't you come to the base and we can talk about your research?
And so Paul heads to the base and he shows Dodie what he's got.
And Dodie is initially kind of, you know, bored.
And then he perks up when Paul starts to show him his radio array.
He returns to the base to talk with some NSA colleagues about being bringing an expert out to Paul's home to see what he'd built.
So he visits Paul at his house, and this time with an actual like scientist in tow, another engineer, a guy named Lou Miles.
And the fact that Paul has now been invited to the base to talk, he's had, you know, a guy come over to his house from Air Force Intelligence.
Paul is like, takes this as evidence that I'm on the right track and the Air Force supports me.
I'm now kind of helping looking, helping the Air Force find evidence that there's aliens.
You know, I kind of got my X-Files job because they think I'm so cool and smart.
I know.
It's really sick because he's just trying to help, you know?
Yeah, no, he is just trying to help.
He just wants to keep his country safe.
They're sizing you up, buddy, to see what kind of a threat you are.
Oh, no, my man.
Sketchy UFO Claims00:07:25
No, not at all.
So the expert Dodie brings to Paul's home is Lou Miles.
Like Valdez, that state trooper, Miles was a guy who wanted to believe.
He had been involved to an extent with Project Blue Book, which was like a multi-year Air Force investigation into UFOs.
It's one of the big seminal moments in early UFO history, right?
Yeah, yeah.
He was also now the chief scientist for Kirtland's test center.
So he knew the reality behind a lot of the strange aerial phenomena that guys like Paul credited to aliens.
So he's both like open to believing, but also like, oh, but I know that I know what you're actually seeing, and it's not aliens.
It's this thing that we're working on.
Nevertheless, he was good at talking to Benowitz while Dodie hung back and took photos with a hidden camera for the NSA.
Who was also involved in this?
It's kind of murky exactly where FOC begins and the NSA ends.
And like there's some evidence the CIA is also gets involved.
There's like a lot of people are kind of interested in what Paul is doing.
But no one's interested in Paul's evidence of alien interference.
They're again worried about like interested as whether or not he's actually like gotten any encrypted shit.
And they also think he might be useful because being an actually brilliant engineer working in the aerospace industry and someone who goes to these UFO conventions, he's kind of trusted within the UFO community.
So if they want to get a lot of people to like pay attention to something other than the real shady shit they're doing at Kirtland, he might be able to convince them, right?
He might be able to distract attention away from the real shit that's being done that they want to hide.
So yeah, for the next year, Paul waits for updates from the military and he continues his special interest exploring extraterrestrial phenomena.
In May of the next year, 1980, a 26-year-old woman named Myrna Hansen called the state police to claim that she and her six-year-old had been accosted by alien visitors near Eagle Nest, New Mexico.
The state troopers basically shrugged and handed the case over to the only cop they knew who dealt with this sort of shit, Gabe Valdez.
Yep.
If I'm remembering correctly, I believe Valdez's attitude is that Myrna was probably a plant.
That's not clear to me.
Again, a lot of sketchy shit's going on here.
Immediately doesn't trust the woman.
Okay, God.
Well, but also, this kind of shit was going on, so I don't know.
Yeah.
And also, he's like, man, the six-year-old fucking with me.
Right, right.
So, Gabe calls our boy Paul and they go off to meet Myrna.
Now, by the start of the 80s, the science of hypnotic regression, which is not really a science, had taken off among people who believed or wanted to believe that they had been abducted by aliens, right?
So, let me turn you into a chicken first and then tell me if you saw the aliens or not.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to hypnotize you and then walk you, like say a bunch of leading things that get you to tell a fun alien story, right?
Yeah.
Um, you know, a lot of this stuff is some similar shit's happening with like the satanic panic.
We're just into the idea.
I mean, there's a lot of this in the X-Files, right?
This idea that people have memories locked away that this psychologist or psychiatrist who definitely doesn't ever wind up fucking his patients can unlock.
Um, yeah, yeah, super cool.
Yeah, people aren't susceptible to being influenced to say things to please somebody either.
Yes, nothing sketchy here whatsoever.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
Speaking of things that aren't sketchy, sponsors of this podcast never, never, they would never do anything illegal.
Although we did just find out that what's that food box company has child labor.
So which one?
I'd be curious.
I don't know.
Sophie, which one was it?
I don't remember.
One of them.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Paul Benowitz Exposed00:15:48
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Sponsors love that sort of thing.
Hey, that's what they, that's their problem for going dynamic.
That's right.
That's right.
So Gabe called our boy Paul and off they went to meet Myrna.
Binowitz, who is working for that civilian organization, not working for, but is like one of the head guys at APRO, that civilian looking into UFO things, and like is also working with this actual sheriff's deputy, partners.
He and Gabe partner with a University of Wyoming professor who's a quote-unquote expert in hypnotic regression.
And this guy's name is literally Dr. Leo Sprinkle.
Fuck yeah.
Great stuff.
What a name.
Great stuff.
Man, good on you, Leo, for making it to adulthood.
Yeah.
That's a real boy named Sue situation.
Leonardo Sprinkle.
Leonardo Sprinkle.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck me.
So in his book, Saucer, Spooks, and Kooks, Adam Go rightly summarizes, Binowitz, by this time, had convinced himself that the ETs were transmitting a mind control beam to repress Myrna Hansen's memories.
Binowitz believed that the ETs were likely beaming him in an attempt to disrupt his ongoing UFO probe.
To thwart this extraterrestrial electronic harassment, Binowitz arranged for Hansen's regression to take place in his 1979 Lincoln town car with multiple sheets of aluminum foil draped over the windows to deflect the dreaded alien beams.
Binowitz connected these perceived beams to cattle mutilations.
It's so cool.
I love this shit.
He's fucking rapping his car in tin foil.
No, he's good.
The aliens are blocking our memory with the beads.
He's married, right?
Is he a young wife?
Oh, yeah.
He's got a wife and she is a long-suffering.
I don't know much about her, but a saint.
I'll say that much.
No, the paper.
He's putting up with a lot.
I know the power of disassociation this woman is capable of.
Man.
Oh, yeah.
He's like, honey, I need the car to go to the grocery store.
No, I have to go interview this woman.
I just got the aluminum cake.
Where's your tinfoil?
Get the tinfoil out.
Babe, we need it for the potatoes tonight.
Absolutely not.
I need it to protect us from aliens.
And again, he's been talking to Dodie for months at this point.
And Dodie is kind of just like every, he's yes-and-ing everything Paul says, right?
Like, oh, yeah, that sounds real, Paul.
Yeah, definitely.
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, aluminum foil.
Great idea, man.
Yeah, absolutely.
So is this where aluminum foil comes from?
Is this like the origin of that?
Like, this will block waves?
Part of it, yeah.
I don't know that Paul is the only guy who starts it, but this is like he is on the ground floor of the aluminum foil will stop the aliens from reading your mind thing.
Yes, that's definitely fair to say.
He's among the, because he's very influential in this culture, too.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So we can see at this point, he's already kind of starting to go over the edge, right?
Yeah.
Paul begins writing analysis of Myrna's hypnotic regression sessions, replete with lines like, the alien does all caps kill with the beam, generally.
Generally, huh?
Kill with the beam, huh?
Yeah, where are those bodies?
Where are those bodies, Polly Roy?
Okay, Paul.
Yeah.
Now, the reality is that Hansen had just brought up a bunch of existent UFO lore during her sessions, right?
She complained about missing time.
She described being picked up in a tractor beam.
She claimed an alien crewman had brandished a silver knife before cutting into a cow's chest.
And she eventually described being taken to an underground base where a metallic device was put inside her brain.
Now, this is part of why there's some theorizing that, like, maybe she was a plant.
Is this when, and Paul is the guy who really does more than anyone to start this?
This is when you start getting these UFO conspiracies about underground bases.
And they're usually either like bases that our military shares with the aliens, or maybe the aliens run the base.
You know, there's some stories about them having fights with the army and whatnot and these bases underground.
But the real thing behind this is that a bunch of people in Albuquerque had watched, and like this is something that Paul would have seen from his house, as the Air Force dug this massive underground nuclear storage space, like the largest weapons, underground weapons storage base ever, or at least at that point in time.
And so people are like wondering, well, what's this really for?
And the answer is pretty evil.
Like it's for nukes, but yeah, yeah, it's the whole full of nukes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of theories as to why.
So Hansen also claimed per Binowitz that she had picked up an STD described as a vaginal disease like Streptocoxybacillus from the aliens.
Paul wrote to his colleagues at the volunteer alien hunting group that, quote, we are trying to culture it.
No luck as yet.
Also, it has evaded all of our known antibiotics with penicillin.
Damn, nobody's doing sex ed on these aliens.
That's the problem.
They got to learn to wrap it up.
Whatever it is, you got to wrap it up, though.
Paul, you are an electrical engineer.
Don't think that you are qualified to say that it's an unlike it can't be like it's it's a it's got to be an alien STD.
Maybe it's a normal one.
Maybe it's just a normal one.
Yeah, exactly.
You're not a doctor, Paul.
You should first off, you should be giving this lady antibiotics, Paul.
You're again not a doctor.
You're really, really not.
So he also revealed that Myrna was being, quote, badly beaten on by the alien with their beams 24 hours a day.
And once Myrna starts talking to him about how she's just constantly being beam attacked, Paul starts to believe that he too is being beaten on with beams.
And he urges his colleagues who plan to do regression work to lock themselves in a car in a garage coated with three layers of aluminum foil to protect themselves from the beams.
He's doing well, is what you'd say at this point.
He's doing great.
Our boy, Paul, very, very healthy, making rational choices.
Oh, Paul.
Paul, you've fallen so far.
You were doing so good, buddy.
So Dodie is occasionally checking in with Paul, but he's also spending the intervening months, you know, 79, early 1980, working on another mark.
And this guy is a journalist or a quote-unquote journalist, depending on how you see it, with a reputation for he is, he is considered to be one of the more rigorous guys within the UFO community by the UFO community.
Take of that what you will.
His name is George Moore.
At least that's how he's described in Project Beta.
But also the author of Project Beta really likes this guy and is like impressed by him.
So I don't feel the same way about Moore.
Go Reitley's narrative makes him out to be like less, more of like one of an interchangeable number of UFO kind of weirdos, although one who is, you know, reached out to by the government to spread disinfo.
And Moore claims that like he's down with this, right?
And the reason we're talking about him is that he is the co-author of that book, that first big book that gets like UFOs back in vogue, right?
He's interviewing that guy from Roswell.
He's one of the guys who helps make Roswell into like the thing that it is in our culture, right?
He's written a bunch of other stuff.
You know, he's a very influential figure within this field.
And that inspires Dodie and a colleague to approach him.
In July of 1980, Jim Lorenzen of Apro receives a letter with no return address claiming to tell the story of an 18-year-old Civil Air Patrol member who had sighted a UFO and then been threatened by a man in black named Mr. Huck.
The young man had reported this to a Mr. Dobie at Afosci, right?
That's the Air Force.
That's Dodie's agency.
So Lorenzen gets this letter and he thinks it's weird and he sends it to Bill Mitchell, who's the best journalist he knows, or Bill Moore, who's the best journalist he knows.
And Moore is immediately like, oh, this is bullshit.
And he knows it because he does some actual journalism.
Like he reaches out to the named witness and the witness is like, well, yeah, I saw some like weird lights, but I never was, I was never threatened by a man in black.
Like none of the rest of this is real.
The tiniest amount of journalism.
Yeah, it really, that's all it takes in a lot of cases.
Let me just double check this.
Let me literally just ask this guy if this happened.
The letter was actually the creation of Dodie and his colleagues at Afosci.
They were hoping to rope in somebody like Bill, right?
Somebody smart enough to have credibility in the subculture, but also who might fall for a fake, right?
They didn't succeed in tricking him, but they continued fishing.
In September of 1980, Moore finished a blockbuster book, The Roswell Incident, which is, yeah, that's one of the things that really ignites public entrance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So military intelligence gets very interested after this point.
And while he's doing his book tour, he keeps getting calls at radio stations where like guys will be like, hey, do you want to have a meeting?
You know, I'm from a government intel agency and I'd like to talk.
And he is, he eventually agrees and he's met by a man who dresses and acts very much like a spy in the movie.
Now, my opinion on what's happening here is that there's some two-way feedback.
Moore desperately wants to be a journalist working on classified fringe like X-Files kind of stories, right?
And he wants to feel like he's part of this great game of spies and spooks.
Now, the spooks he's talking to, these are real spies, but they're not the high-level operators working to unearth, you know, Russian nuclear secrets or doing the fucking cool shit that they make movies about.
They are some enlisted guys at the Air Force mostly tasked with lying to rubes to cover up flight testing, right?
And they, here's the thing, this is like a two-way street because they also want to feel like they're doing cool spy shit, right?
And so Dodie and George Moore, part of what they're both doing, because they're both much more rational than Paul is at this point, they're kind of LARPing together, in my opinion, you know?
They're kind of like, well, Dodie, I get to play like I'm this very serious man in black.
And Moore is like, and I get to play like I'm fucking Fox Motor almost, right?
You know, the show's not on the air at this point, but that's what they're both getting here, right?
And Moore is offered a deal by Dodie and a colleague.
Help us out with some odd jobs, right?
We need some like deniable work that you can do and we'll pass you some classified UFO information, right?
Oh, I see.
Got it.
That's how that, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And the first dossier that Dodie and his friend hand over is bullshit.
Like George, again, does some minor reporting and is able to figure this out.
From Bishop's book, quote, after a few preliminaries, the question started.
Well, what did you discover?
Moore threw the paper down on the table and trying to sound less annoyed than he actually was, replied, this whole mess is a lie.
None of these people exist.
The agent and Dodie looked at each other and smiled.
What's going on? asked Moore.
You passed the test, said the man, whom he would eventually refer to with the code name Falcon.
Within a few years, Moore and his colleagues would begin to assign code names to their growing coterie of contacts so that they could talk freely about developments without fear of identification if they were overheard.
And, you know, maybe this was a test.
I think it's likelier that they were like, okay, so we figured out this is bullshit.
Let's just tell him that that was a test and then, you know, stroke his ego.
He'll believe the next thing we say, maybe, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We're just going to keep refining from our side until we actually make him a believer and he'll feel great because he's passed all these tests.
So he's going to start looking less and less because of how smart he believes he is too.
Yeah.
Right.
And they hand him some shit and he'll admit like I knew some of what I was putting out into the UFO community was bunk, but I think some of it's real too.
And like he's, he, you know, he's, he's being a shady character here as well.
Now, unlike Paul Binowitz, George is a pretty, I think, a mentally resilient guy.
Like he definitely is a believer to some extent, but I think he also, I don't think he takes it as seriously as Paul does, right?
I don't think this is breaking his brain.
I think he's having a good time, right?
Yeah.
My favorite story from Moore is that Dodie and his partner apparently thought Moore might be gay and decided to test him by like one day when they're hanging out, they like park the car and Moore is like, and a bunch of men start walking past the car wearing tight pants or high heels and dresses that like fit really weird.
And like it doesn't seem like they would like are comfortable in.
And apparently this is a test because they want him to troll the gay bars of Santa Monica looking for a guy that the FOC wants for some reason.
Oh my God.
I don't know.
It was a slow day in the office when they came up with that one.
They're just like, ah, well, we got to do something this weekend, right?
All right.
Dodie and his colleagues, they get some of what they want out of more, right?
He launders some info into the UFO community, some of the disinfo they want to distract from their real programs, but he's also not, he's a little too smart, right?
He's not willing to destroy himself publicly as much as was necessary for the kind of misinformation that they wanted to get out.
And this is where Paul Benowitz re-enters the story.
It is obvious by 80, 81, that this is a guy who is not well, but also he's respected and he is a guy who, because of his tech acumen, might endanger some top secret operations.
So the decision was basically made: hey, let's fuck him up a little, right?
Paul gets invited to give a speech at Kirtland, and most of the attendees leave before he's done.
But like, one of them is like, oh, this is really interesting stuff, Paul.
And that just lights his ego on fire.
Paul, so happy to hear this.
He applies for Air Force grants, which he does not receive, but he apparently gets an NSA grant.
And I think that's maybe the NSA fucking with him because some real fuckery is about to happen here.
Hey, I love an ironic grant.
It's ironic grant money still spends.
It's a little more messed up than even that.
So Dodie is now spending hours with Paul Benowitz, and he claims that they became friends and that he found the orders he received to spread lies to Paul personally distasteful.
If you watch the documentary Mirageman, you'll see a lot of Dodie, and he does express a degree of what kind of feels like real regret over what he did to Paul.
He is also a spy and a professional liar.
So I don't know that I believe he's really, or he just knows that he needs to perform regret, right?
I think that's probably likelier.
Yeah.
Fake Alien Messages00:08:31
So, what's what do you think like the like the internal notes of the person that constantly lies are like?
Is it just like a notebook?
Is it like a series of post-its around their house?
How do you keep that shit straight?
It sounds exhausting.
I, I don't, you know, one of the things that you get when you like read these stories and like the way in which a lot of the writers and quote-unquote journalists who cover this stuff, the degree of credulity they have to these guys' stories.
The thing that becomes clear to me is like, oh, this is your first time being lied to by a weirdo in the desert.
Like I spent a lot of my childhood and like, or not childhood, my young adulthood in like off-grid places, just letting listening to like lies from dudes at bars and stuff.
I've heard a lot of crazy stories that definitely aren't true.
And that's a ton of fun.
But I think some of these, these people just like decide they want to live as if that's real.
You know, that's fair.
Yeah.
God, how many times?
How many times do you think they own?
It feels like oh my God.
These guys are these guys are very, very vulnerable to timeshares.
So on some of his early visits to hang with Paul, he's shown a complex computer system, Doty is, that Benowitz had constructed and had his employees help him build to translate these encrypted messages, right?
It's unclear what's actually happening.
Is he just getting random static and then like running it through an algorithm to like create text based on that?
And then kind of going through it almost like it's one of those like word puzzles and just like picking up words out of a feed of words that like, and then saying like, oh, this is, you know, a message from the aliens, right?
Because some people will say, like, it looked like gibberish to me, but he would pull out, you know, five or six words from this like paragraph of nonsense and say like, this is the real message, right?
Yeah.
And this is a quote from Dodie.
Benowitz had the computer rigged up to antennas on his roof that included a small microwave dish.
And he would look at the screen and there would be images on the screen that certainly wasn't an alien, but he was convinced that it was.
I would actually tell him, I don't see anything.
And he said, I see it and I can hear them.
And he had these earphones that he would put on.
And he said, I can hear them talking.
And I asked Paul, what language are they speaking?
He said, they're speaking their language.
And he wrote a hundred-page document about the alien language.
When he went out to Kirtland to give his presentation to all these generals, he presented them with that information.
So the NSA, and this is probably where the NSA gets heavily involved and maybe why they give him that grant, because a plan gets hatched to gift Paul with a new computer, right?
That he's told is a gift from Afosi.
Some accounts, maybe Dodi offered him the machine.
Other, the story you'll hear more often is that an Air Force consultant named Dr. J. Alan Hynek, who's a former scientific advisor for Project Blue Book and a big guy in the alien community now.
I think he denies this, but you'll hear that too.
We don't really know exactly what happened here because I've also heard like the NSA did it.
I've heard that the Air Force did it.
I don't know.
Adam Go rightly notes, this computer had been provided at the behest of the U.S. Air Force, and embedded in the software was a code that generated an alien language.
With the aid of the Air Force computer, Benowitz claimed he established constant direct communications with the alien using a form of hex decimal code with graphics and printout.
Now, man.
So what's happening here probably is that because some versions of the story say that the NSA was literally set up across the street in a rented house sending messages directly to Paul's computer.
I think it was maybe a little less direct than that, but basically he's got this machine that's probably programmed to allow them to send him fake messages from aliens.
And so he starts getting messages like this.
Ground, ground, women of earth are needed.
Flexible.
The next just charges.
Our ship.
Women do not command.
The north among us.
You have many friends.
Water, very short.
Resist all attempts at alteration.
Listen, Orange, make peace.
And Paul doesn't know what to make of this.
He becomes convinced actually that this is the aliens trying to trick him into thinking that they're peaceful, but he knows they're really dangerous.
He's so close.
He's getting there.
Yeah, he's getting there.
Yeah.
Greg Valdez, who's Gabe's son, visited Benowitz during this period and he described seeing the computer in use.
He would type a question into the computer in a very complex for the time period form of a computer program, much like a current email.
Much to everyone's surprise, he would get an answer to the questions he was asking.
Sometimes he would get an immediate response and sometimes it would take several minutes.
He would even receive very crude and basic pictures or graphics on his computer of these aliens.
Some of these pictures resembled birds with reptile features and some resembled reptiles with bird features.
During this question and answer session, Gabe instructed Paul to ask the simple question, where are you from?
Paul already knew the answer to the question because he had already asked the question and he answered it verbally when a response came back on the computer.
It simply said the Zetta Reticuli star system.
So they're now really fucking with this guy in a way that's very irresponsible.
I mean, who is, I want to know who's writing this stuff because that's the best job on the base.
Right.
Maybe Dodie.
It's probably a team of guys, right?
Because Dodie, there's, there's, you know, some evidence he was working with the NSA.
So maybe it's multiple, it's almost certainly multiple people feeding him bullshit.
Yeah.
But yeah, the result is that Paul grows convinced that the U.S. government has signed a treaty with aliens, perhaps to breed some sort of hybrids, and they've been given real estate in an underground base near Dulce, New Mexico.
This played the happy dual role of covering up ongoing weird experiments around Dulce.
You know, there's that poison gas fucking hole and diverting the attention of Paul and others away from Kirtland Air Force base and towards somewhere less harmful, right?
For their ends.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
Now, during his communications with the ETs, Paul became convinced that there was a secret war going on.
Dozens of base security in Dulce had been murdered by the aliens in a gunfight.
He wrote up plans to lay siege to Dulce base and began working to develop a sort of beam weapon that could kill aliens.
Now, oh, Paul, wow, okay.
Yeah, now we're making beam weapons, huh, buddy?
Oh, yeah.
He was like, I better hope the aliens don't have aluminum foil.
Listen, folks, if you have a friend who's making beam weapons to fight the underground aliens, I actually don't know how you should handle that situation, but probably don't give him a computer that lies to him.
I think you got to sign him up for bowling league or something.
I think bowling.
Yeah, let's get some more social contact happening, maybe.
Fill out that social schedule a little bit.
You know what?
Let's see if he wants to play DD.
Maybe his imagination needs a little bit of a workout, you know?
That might be great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, if a lot of this sounds like the overarching conspiracy plot for the first like five seasons of the X-Files, that's because this is almost certainly the direct inspiration for a lot of the X-Files, right?
Like this is in fact, because this is all happening in the 80s, not long before the X-Files starts, right?
So Benowitz, as he's communicating with these aliens, he's gathering information on this secret underground base and this war he believes is going on underneath everyone's noses.
He's sending back everything he's getting to special agent Dodie, his good friend.
And Doty dutifully forwards this up the chain and encourages Paul, keep digging.
You know, you're getting close.
He's doing the deep throat thing, right?
He's like, keep digging, Agent Boulder, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You're so close.
You're going to get there.
Yeah, yeah.
He's telling him that the aliens at Dulce Base had been responsible for what he'd seen over Kirtland.
And he does this because he's like, oh, yeah, man, you know what?
I ran it up the flagpole and those that underground base, that's why you were seeing those weird lights.
Don't look near the Air Force base.
Keep hanging out around Dulce.
You know, that's where the shit's going on, right?
Yeah.
Go rightly claims the ultimate intent of stringing Benowitz along, according to researchers like Greg Bishop and Christian Lambright, was to shift Benowitz's attention away from Kirtland to a remote area like the Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, where Afosai could ramp up their disinformation operation and more easily stage UFO events.
Staged Reliability at Dulce00:02:39
Speaking of staged, you know what's not staged is the reliability of our sponsors.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Losing His Mind Over Aliens00:16:47
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, what did I love you?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Okay, so near the end of 1981, Richard Doty convinces his superiors to let him take Paul on a special helicopter flight around the Archuleda Mesa.
Since Paul is a pilot and they see some stuff, you know, there's some, and apparently, Doty claims that he and other agents put out props, right, to look like air vents for the secret underground base and other evidence, right?
This is so crazy.
Now there's an art director involved.
Yeah, there's an art director there.
There's a whole production.
There's production meetings about like what to do to this poor man.
Like, yeah, they're having pitches and stuff.
They've got like pitch meetings on fucking with this guy.
There's a prop team now.
Oh, no.
So, because Paul's a pilot, after this first trip, he follows this by doing his own recon flights over the area, and he gets very obsessed with this.
And I have some questions.
I don't know if I believe Dodie entirely, that like he's being handed all of the men and equipment necessary to carry out a staged operation on the scale he describes.
But also, it's possible, and in fact, maybe likely, Paul is sometimes seeing some real stuff.
Like, he reports seeing what he describes as a crashed Delta Wing aircraft.
And in this area at this time, they're working on prototypes of the stealth bomber, which is a looks like that.
And in fact, Greg Bishop's Project Beta, like that's his basic conclusion, is that like Paul might have seen like some of the testing stages of the prototype of like the stealth bomber, right?
And maybe that was like part of what Dodie was doing: if we get this guy to talk about if we, if we show, if we get, if we let this guy see a little bit of the real stealth bomber program, but convince him it's aliens, then anybody who's talking about like a Delta Wing aircraft, right, will be like, oh, you're just talking about a UFO, not this actual thing that we're working on, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Let's get everybody off the scent once again.
So maybe that's what's happening, or maybe it was just an easy thing to make look like a plane from the air.
Shit like this, they do this in World War II a bunch.
We do it and actually the Nazis do it too, where you'll like make basically fake out of like wood and shit and spray paint tanks and stuff.
So people think there's an army where it isn't, right?
So it's not.
Yeah.
Where I'm from in Maryland, there's a there's a fake cop car on like one of the highways that is up just to slow you down.
Yeah, love that shit.
Now, there are other claims about what happened to Paul and his wife during this period that are more questionable.
One write-up I found by the Cyberthetic Project claims that Paul and his wife developed red sores or perhaps some sort of rashes on their body.
I've seen that a few times.
The Cyberthetic Project describes itself as a token project with a mission to unite holders so that they can communicate in an open forum on the blockchain without fear of being judged or censored.
So you'd be right about questioning it as a source.
That said, this is all a lot of fun.
So I'm going to quote from it anyway.
Just, you know, a lot of salt here.
It has since been revealed that the NSA was in possession of sensitive documents concerning advanced technologies such as active denial systems and active denial technology.
These technologies were apparently being developed by Sandia Labs and Kirkland Air Force Base with the aim of producing a non-lethal weapon that could be used against enemies.
Were they using this technology on the Benowitz family?
The answer to that is also unclear.
What is clear is that Paul and his wife were being physically impacted by his research into UFOs.
And that's maybe not like I don't, I think probably likelier than some sort of weird beam weapon is that Paul is losing his mind and he and his wife are both very stressed out by this and convinced that they're being targeted by aliens.
And they have like shingles, a stress rash, like all sorts of shit, you know?
Oh, yeah.
It feels like they probably would have like broken out in some sort of like stress rash of some kind.
Like, yes, that's very, I have several friends from the California fires that had them a week ago.
Right, right.
Imagine prolonged experience to potential aliens for years.
Yeah.
You have rashes too.
Right.
I don't think that that's it.
It's at all unlikely that something like that is the case here.
And yeah.
So as he grew more obsessed with seeking out the truth, Paul's business declined, which is another reason why maybe he's dealing with some stress-related problems in 1970.
Oh my God.
I just need you to sign off on this.
Paul, we just really need to make this censor, man.
Can we?
Okay, you've got the whole team working on translating alien speech.
All right.
Well, I'm going to maybe print out some resumes.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
In 1978, Thunder Scientific had 30 employees.
By 1981, the number was down by almost half.
He starts hiding like guns and knives around his home as the 1980s wore on because he's just incredibly paranoid now.
And he continues to attend UFO events throughout the mid to late 1980s.
His yarn about Dulce Base, which was almost certainly invented or at least heavily egged on by Richard Dodie, had been a magnificent success.
In 1987, John Lear, a prominent UFO logist, stated that he had independently confirmed elements of Benowitz's story, right?
That there's this underground base at a Dulce.
Several books in the late 1980s published their own variants of the story, which helped to spark a paranoid belief in secret underground alien bases that is still a significant part of QAnon today.
Like a lot of QAnon guys believe that there's a base under the Getty in Los Angeles.
That's why I didn't burn.
That's why I didn't burn.
They kept it safe.
That's where they keep the kids.
Yeah, exactly.
Center or villa?
I think it's the center.
Either way, do a pizza gate at both places, Sophie.
You know what?
No, that didn't end well for that guy.
There's a lot that's sad about this, but one of the worst things is that Paul had almost certainly stumbled upon a very real and very important conspiracy at Kirtland.
See, today, Kirtland Air Force Base is a major testing site for advanced drone technology, including weapon systems to defeat drone swarms and other experimental tech.
We know that in 1980, a black mystery vehicle was spotted at the base.
This is right around the same time Paul is making his initial reports.
Sophie's going to show you a picture of this mystery vehicle that is being tested at Kirtland Air Force Base when Paul is observing shit, right?
It looks kind of like an SR-71, but it's like a drone version almost.
This was apparently what's now we know this was called at the time TD, a TDUX tow target.
A write-up in the war zone describes it as a high-speed towed aerial target to support the testing of infrared and electronic countermeasures, or IRCM and ECM, respectively.
Something like this would both look very weird in the sky and also might put off some of the signals that Paul was, you know, receiving, right?
Now, I don't know if this is what he saw was other stuff because other shit is being tested at Kirtland, including precursors to our modern drone program, right?
Paul very likely came across evidence of the development of unmanned weapon systems that have gone on to kill huge numbers of people.
No aliens need to be involved at all for this to both make sense and be a real conspiracy theory.
It's also very likely Dodie wasn't fully in the loop as to what was being developed there because he wouldn't need to be.
And in fact, the more he believed the bullshit he was pushing on Paul, the safer the real secrets were.
In 1988.
Yep, yep.
Cool stuff.
The drone program.
It always comes back to that.
Hooray.
So exciting.
But they make pretty firework alternatives.
It's fine.
Yeah, it's all good stuff.
Yeah, don't worry.
They can form Steve Harvey in the sky.
Yeah, they can make Steve.
It's fine.
They should have done that.
What if they aliens love Steve Harvey?
Don't they?
Yeah, Paul Benowitz went to the Air Force.
I keep seeing Steve Harvey's face in the night sky.
I don't know what's going on.
In 1988, Paul published plans for an assault on Dulce Base, which he'd become convinced was the nexus of an alien plan to control the world.
That same year, he became convinced that his wife was working with the aliens or perhaps in control of the entire alien conspiracy.
Go rightly.
Wife.
Yeah, she's really putting, she's really going through it here.
And in this passage from Go Reightley's book, which is based on interviews with Bill Moore and Richard Dodie, he describes a profoundly ill man.
Both Bill Moore and Richard Doty on separate occasions witnessed firsthand Benowitz's mounting paranoia, describing him as spun out and barricaded inside his homes, chain-smoking cigarettes, waiting in fevered anticipation for the final E.T. showdown.
In Project Beta, Greg Bishop recounted: Benowitz told Moore that after the aliens injected him, they would make him drive his car into the desert in the middle of the night, but he couldn't remember what he did after he got there.
Around this time, Benowitz's family committed him to a mental health facility for nervous exhaustion.
Oh, man.
And you will sometimes hear it errantly stated that he commits suicide as a result of this.
He does not.
This thankfully doesn't have as sad a story as it might.
Paul gets out after about a month, and he seems to have pulled himself out of the UFO community after this point.
He and his wife stay together.
They're married more than 50 years, and he lives until 2003.
So, you know, kind of a happy ending, but boy, it didn't, it almost wasn't.
Yeah, for real.
Man, also, shout out to the place he was committed, apparently.
Apparently, they did the job.
Yeah.
That's serious deprogramming.
Paul, Paul, man, you got to stop.
You got to stop using the computer the NSA gave you.
Yeah, we have a computer, man.
Man, some poor doctor just cracked all of their knuckles and said, all right, let's get into it.
Paul, we need to have a long conversation about things that are real and things that aren't.
So Richard Doty would eventually retire from the Air Force and spend much of his retirement and golden years doing the UFO convention circuit.
He came, he will say that he was hired to consult on two seasons of the X-Files and that he wrote the screenplay for an episode.
He's not credited as the writer for that episode, but, you know, his stuff definitely helps inspire the X-Files, right?
Like he is, he is for sure involved in what becomes the X-Files purely because of his role in UFO culture.
I'm sure he wrote a script, but I'm sure he wrote a script.
Yeah.
A lot of people have written scripts.
And he is, he's a member of a couple of different organizations now.
He's a very controversial figure within the UFO community because he both definitely worked for Air Force intelligence and tells a lot of stories about seeing aliens.
He claims to have literally seen them and also admits that he lied about aliens for years to a guy who nearly lost his mind forever.
I wouldn't trust him.
But for an idea of how Richard Doty presents himself now, here's a clip from him on the New Realities YouTube channel, being interviewed by a UFO ology author named Alan Steinfield.
I mean, you're no longer working for the Air Force Intelligence, right?
But that's right.
I don't work for Air Force Intelligence.
Well, don't be offended by this question, but how do we know you're still not working for them and you're just saying you're not working for them?
Well, there's a lot of controversy over that.
But number one, I wouldn't have any reason to.
I left the agency, left the intelligence agency back in 1988.
Although people bring up the fact that I was brought back to active service in 91 and 93, but that had nothing to do with UFOs or disinformation.
It had to do with what I did in Europe when after the wall fell.
So I work as a private investigator.
I have no connections, official connections with the United States government or intelligence community.
I do have a lot of friends that still work within the intelligence community, and they feed me a lot of information that I share with you.
I mean, I shared it with you at the UFO mega con.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, I think he's still, and they, I even found an interview where he's like talked about, like, he's asked about like, because Tom DeLong of Blink182 is a big guy and is involved with Dodie and one of the organizations he's in.
And one of the interviews is like, are you doing a Paul Benowitz to Tom DeLong?
He's like, of course not.
I would never.
I absolutely would never do that.
I think he might be doing a Paul Benowitz on a couple of guys.
Maybe that's just fun for him.
Yeah.
It reminds me of what's the in the Tanya Hardy in the assault of Nancy Kerrigan, Tanya Hardy.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Galooley and his idiot friend, the amount of bullshit that they just believe about themselves and talk about.
Like, yeah, like the other guy, Eckert, he like talked about how he like was a special forces guy and had all this shit made up.
You're like, damn, you believe this, though.
I've heard so many fun lies about being special forces from dudes.
Like, especially out in like the mountains, like every old man you meet who like will tell you about all of the crazy shit he did in Vietnam.
And it's, it's just always, it's always nonsense.
Like, yeah, I know a guy who's out where in the little mountain town where I used to live who was a SEAL team member during Vietnam.
And his reaction is very different, which was like he handed me a book that was written about like him and his colleagues.
I was like, you want to know anything?
Just read that.
I don't like talking about it.
Yeah.
If you've actually done any of this stuff, you're like, it's not, it's not what it's, it's not the movies, buddy.
It's kind of a bad time.
Yeah, yeah.
I have a lot to answer for and process.
Didn't like it.
Not happy with how that all went.
No, no, not worth the free beer to talk about it jovially.
The Nonsense of It All00:05:22
No.
Yeah.
Anyway, well, that's the aliens.
Or not, but maybe there's aliens.
I don't know.
This is not conclusive on that matter one way or the other.
But there's definitely a bunch of spy agencies who will lie to you and destroy your brain if they think it will help them hide a fact that they're making some fucked up shit to kill people in other countries.
Of course.
Maybe the alien was inside of you, listener, the entire time.
The real alien was always the military-industrial complex.
Yeah, exactly.
Because, you know, define what an alien is.
It's something that works against the good of humanity.
Then in that case, the government is run by aliens.
I don't know.
Who knows?
Who knows what's out there?
Or in here, apparently.
But what is out there and what is in here are your pluggables, Brandy.
Bam.
What transitions work.
Thanks, Sophie.
Yeah, you can find me online at Brand Dazzle on all of the platforms, including the new ones and the old ones.
My podcast is called Lady to Lady, comes out every Wednesday and has been around for 13 years.
Burn This Records is my comedy label that I run where I put out amazing comedy albums on people all over the country that are very funny and also good people.
And then I have my own album coming out on that label in the middle of March.
And I would love for you to buy it.
That'd be amazing.
So yeah, BrandyPosey.com has all the information for all of the things.
But yeah, come say hi.
If you're a fan of the show, you'll like me, I promise.
So come on over.
All right, everybody.
Well, that's the episode.
Until next time, again, folks, I say this every time.
Head to Kirkland Air Force Base, get a camera out, and just start filming and go slowly insane.
Get a pilot's license, fly over some random mesa.
Just do some shit, you know?
Why not?
Nothing bad can happen.
Or the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
You might as well lose your mind about some alien shit.
If you want to test your relationship, go down an alien hole.
See if your wife really loves you.
You know, this is the only way to know.
It's the only way to know.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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