UFOs: The Great Gaslighting
The Real Men in Black?
Sometimes the war for the truth has casualties.
Take the strange case of Paul Bennewitz, a New Mexico electronics entrepreneur. In 1979, Bennewitz saw lights in the sky and picked up weird signals via his off-the-shelf equipment.
The fact he lived across the way from Kirtland Air Force Base should have raised red flags, but Bennewitz became convinced the lights and transmissions were extraterrestrial.
What Bennewitz did next is, I suppose, commendable. He alerted the Air Force to his findings. All well and good. Branching off from that admission could have come several happy — or at least neutral — outcomes.
Unfortunately, Kirtland personnel went a different way. They decided to fuck with Paul Bennewitz.
“Within a few years, he was interpreting alien languages, spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were surveilling him surveilling them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that ‘interpreted’ the signals and even dumped fake props for him to discover.”¹
Can you imagine that? Employees of the government behaving like high school pranksters. I almost feel like I don’t need to drop…
