Case · UFO Afrinews No 20, July 1999
William Moore, Paul Bennewitz and the Kirtland disinformation (book review retelling)
1980 ยท Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States
Outside the region. Hind reprinted this case from elsewhere; it has a file here but no place on the map.
What was reported
From Randles' chapter Enforcers of the Cover Up, Wintle relays what he calls the uncomfortably disconcerting case of William Moore. The well-known American ufologist admitted that in the early 1980s intelligence operatives offered him an exchange: they would tell him real secrets if he fed bogus documents to other researchers and reported on their reactions. He passed disinformation to Paul Bennewitz, who had filmed objects flying over a weapons site at Kirtland Air Force Base. Bennewitz was so discredited and destabilised that he needed psychiatric help and was eventually hospitalised, and the operatives never kept their side of the bargain. Wintle takes it as proof that governments will target investigators who get in the way, while insisting the supernatural explanation may be true at the same time.
What Hind made of it
Wintle accepts it as a genuine government cover-up case but argues both the government and supernatural readings of MIB may be correct at once.
Explanation offered
Government disinformation campaign
In their words
-
Bennewitz was discredited and destabilised to such an extent that he had to seek psychiatric help
Cross references
- The Truth Behind the Men in Black, chapter 15