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. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realised that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin.
In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'" Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. A fellow UFO researcher says: "Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. Mirage Men's chief coup is to land an actual man in black: a former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty, who admits to having infiltrated UFO circles. Having spent too long watching the skies and The X-Files, it's implied, they'll readily swallow whatever snippet of "evidence" suits their grand theory. Not real ones – classic fakes: one was a hub cap, another a bunch of balloons, and one that turned out to be a seagull.ĭevout ufologists might seize upon this as further proof that our governments "know something" about aliens and their transportation methods, but really it suggests the opposite: the UFO community is a textbook case of a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Curiously, sandwiched in the middle of the document are three photographs of UFOs. Images include camouflaged moths, inflatable tanks, women in burqas, and complex diagrams plastered with jargon, buzzwords and slogans: "Disruption Operational Playbook", "Swap the real for the false and vice versa", "People make decisions as part of groups" and, beneath a shot of hands shuffling a deck of cards, "We want to build Cyber Magicians".
H idden among the avalanche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden were images from a Powerpoint presentation by GCHQ, entitled The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.