Disinformation...

 DISINFORMATION 101

All warfare is based on deception.

—SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR (CA. 500 B.C.)

“Disinformation” is not lying. The Reagan administration adopted the term “misinformation” in the early 1980s to soften the blow when they were caught fibbing about matters of record or abuses of trust or the Constitution. The term “disinformation” was coined by German intelligence in WWI to give a name to their techniques of deliberately leaking real-appearing secrets about troop movements, weapons strength and capabilities, and the like. The KGB (in all likelihood stealing the term from captured German agents) adopted the term dezinformatsiya to describe some of the methods they used to effectively dupe NATO and the United States throughout the Cold War. According to their own definition from a KGB manual, “Strategic information assists in the execution of state tasks and is directed at misleading the enemy concerning questions of state policy.” When asked by his first intelligence chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, what disinformation should be directed at the West, Vladimir Lenin replied, “Tell them what they want to hear.”

To disinform is to give your mark just enough good stuff in a story that a cursory investigation will bolster the whole caboodle. If it is also what he wants and/or expects to hear, then so much the better. Finally, if the target believes the story enough to act on it, your job is considered a success. For example, if a certain intelligence agency is worried about civilians (and by extension, foreign governments) who are asking too many questions about the newest secret weapons research, they could carefully announce to a selected few press outlets that A) They are testing something out in the desert at a certain location; B) It does involve aircraft; C) The aircraft does not take off from a runway; and D) The testing does not involve offensive weapons. That is all, they say, they can reveal. If we go out to this remote desert site and park off the highway we might see lights floating up into the night sky from time to time. Carefully placed foreign agents would be looking into the skies around this area to try to determine what this super new aircraft is capable of doing. The catch is that “B” and “C” are not true. The project might in actuality be a ground-based system that is able to reflect radar waves off the ionosphere to catch incoming aircraft and missiles before they are visible over the horizon or curvature of the Earth. Maybe.

This sort of scenario has been used for centuries to keep people who don’t “need to know” out of the way, and it still works beautifully. In fact, many disinformation schemes have been shut down at the last minute because the “giveaway factor” is too great to have even part of it revealed in order to mislead an enemy. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, described this in detail in his classic treatise on warfare.

If you still think that the Soviet Union wasn’t clever enough to fool the combined resources of the United States and NATO throughout the Cold War, consider this: During the mid-1960s, the KGB repeatedly misled the CIA to convey an impression of weakness in their missile arsenal by deliberately skewing guidance communications during live-fire tests. The ruse worked, mainly because the Russians leaked to the CIA exactly what they were expecting (which of course was the prime directive in Soviet disinfo).

Russian intel operatives worked with rocket scientists to develop guidance telemetry that deliberately sent inaccurate data to U.S. intelligence—who were listening in from stations in Iran and Pakistan. CIA analysts had a preconception that U.S. rocketry was superior (hadn’t we stolen the best scientists and technicians from the Germans?) and the biased data reinforced what they “knew” already—the Communists were failing miserably. Later, U2 and satellite photographs of the craters left after the missiles hit the ground gave the lie to Soviet electronic disinfo, and the Americans had to play “catch-up” after embarrassing proclamations of U.S. superiority were announced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Gen. Jan Sejna, a member of the Czechoslovakian Central Committee, defected in 1968 and during debriefing revealed that the Soviet Politburo approved long-term global plans for disinfo at least fifteen years in advance. Lies told over many years are easier to believe and cover up—just like much of the UFOlore that has entered our collective unconscious.

By the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence had learned their lessons well and began to use the disinfo tool not just on enemies foreign, but domestic “subversives” as well. The history of the CIA’s Operation Garden Plot reveals that undercover agents had infiltrated almost every radical faction in the United States by the late 1960s—including UFO researchers.

It is a documented fact that UFO groups, from the serious to the silly, have always been watched and infiltrated by secret agent men. It is easy to figure why this went on from the 1950s to the 1970s: Some of the more way-out groups espoused dangerously communistic ideas and spouted one-world-government rhetoric. The G-men were also worried about any Soviet bloc infiltration and the slim chance that valuable UFO sighting information would fall into the wrong hands. This all seems pretty silly now, but at the time loyal citizens lost their careers and maybe even their lives in the fury of finger-pointing and pervasive paranoia. Anything off-track raised hackles in the establishment, and though no one in the UFO arena was ever sent to jail for studying saucers or claiming to have spoken with the disc jockeys, the potential for poisoning patriotic minds kept the FBI and CIA busy for many years.

Considering the fact that disinfo programs may be planned decades in advance, we may well wonder on what base much of the modern UFOlore rests. Bill Moore, a researcher and writer specializing in the anomalous, had been ruminating on these very ideas for almost a decade when in the late summer of 1980, he was suddenly drawn to the very center of what would become known as the Bennewitz affair.

chapter 8

THE MAVERICK

William Leonard Moore rides a 1000cc Honda motorcycle, can fix just about anything on wheels, and these days, prefers not to talk to any UFO researchers. He still maintains the P.O. box that was the mailing address for the Fair Witness Project, a research organization he formed with a small group of like-minded compatriots in the early 1980s. Although he is now in his late fifties, he still maintains the barrel-chested build author Howard Blum described in his 1990 book Out There. Moore now prefers T-shirts and leather jackets to stuffed-shirt suits, since he has no need for the appearance of respectability he cultivated when he was chasing down witness reports and government leads on UFO cases.

Bill Moore locks on to you with his eyes and probing conversation, and with a few well-placed queries quickly determines if a new visitor is sincere or simply interested in proving their own agenda. He has no time or patience for the latter type, and will let you know this in no uncertain terms. He considers most UFO researchers bumbling, ego-driven showmen, and their catcalls and condemnations purely the product of envy. Moore had never really had any patience with most of them. He left the crowd and was content to stand on his own. History teaches that the loner has a rough road to travel, and Bill Moore figures he was cut in the mold.

He had certainly been around. After graduating with a B.A. from Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania in 1965, he went on to do graduate work at Duquesne University and Moorhead State University—both also in his native Pennsylvania. Later, he taught English, French, and humanities courses in junior and senior high schools in Minnesota, then became a labor-relations expert, before he decided to make writing his vocation. For someone who had always been averse to authority and especially its abuses, the UFO phenomenon offered a unique way to combine the two interests, since the saucers had always befuddled the authorities by pitting them against something over which they had no control. Moore moved his family to Prescott, Arizona in 1979 to pursue writing full-time, and to be closer to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Tucson, where he had accepted a position on its board of directors.

His first book, coauthored with Bermuda Triangle author Charles Berlitz, was The Philadelphia Experiment, published in 1979. In the course of research for the book, he had met and befriended a strange character named Carl Allen. Allen, who also used the alias “Carlos Allende,” had been peppering UFO researchers with strange letters and tall tales for over a decade. He had marked up a copy of M. K. Jessup’s 1956 book The Case for the UFO with comments from three “gypsies” and sent it to the Office of Naval Research. The hoax was so convincing that a few of the junior naval officers contracted the Varo Electronics Company in Texas to produce a limited facsimile print run of the defaced book. The edition, printed in color to distinguish the three colors of ink that were scrawled throughout, included an introduction by two of the naval personnel. In it, they stated, “Because of the importance which we attach to the possibility of discovering clues to the nature of gravity, no possible item, no matter how disreputable from the point of view of classical science, should be overlooked.” Although (or perhaps because) the deception was discovered years ago, the book has achieved mythical status, and surviving copies routinely sell for hundreds of dollars. Author Jessup, for his part, came to attach much significance to the “Varo Edition,” and asked zoologist and anomalies researcher Ivan Sanderson to keep it safe in case anything should happen to him. Six months later, on April 20, 1959, Jessup was found dead in his car, a tube running up from the exhaust to one of the windows.

Another of Allen’s “stretchers” involved the U.S. Navy’s supposed use of Einstein’s proposed unified field theory in a 1943 experiment to render a destroyer invisible. Allen alleged that the run-through went awry and caused crew members on the ship to become invisible, go insane, and even cause a few deaths. After some dedicated digging, Moore found that the experiment was conducted to see if the Navy could make its ships invisible to radar or possibly simply to degauss the ship so that mines would not be attracted to the hull. The crewmembers’ sickness and need for a subsequent cover-up were caused by the high voltage/low frequency electromagnetic fields created around the thick cables strung throughout the destroyer’s innards to make the degaussing operation possible. Although Allen had a great story to tell, he was basically a low-level con artist, and Moore followed the story to its more mundane conclusion. The more gullible or conspiratorially-minded came to their own conclusions and a minor industry grew up around the story, which continues to this day.

To put it mildly, a major industry centers around a story that Moore and longtime UFO researcher Stanton Friedman happened to stumble upon while Moore was still publicizing The Philadelphia Experiment. On a visit to Baton Rouge, Louisiana on February 20, 1978, Friedman was waiting for an interview with a local reporter about his UFO research. The appointment was late, so Friedman got to jawing with the station manager. The man happened to know about a retired local Air Force Intelligence officer who claimed to have handled the wreckage of a flying saucer in July of 1947. He urged Friedman to look up a man named Jesse Marcel, who had retired to the Cajun country of Louisiana where he had been born and raised. Friedman found him in the phone book and paid a visit.

Marcel stated that in early July of 1947, as the ranking intelligence officer of the Army Air Force stationed at Roswell, he had been called out to investigate what looked like an airplane crash a number of miles northwest of the town. The story, which he had kept to himself and family members up to that time, would revitalize the sagging UFO research field (at least in the public eye) and give Roswell a most unique place in the history of small-town festival themes. In 1997, at a celebration for the 50th anniversary of the event, the town’s population swelled from about 20,000 to nearly 400,000 inhabitants, and included everything from a golf tournament to a “crash and burn”-themed UFO parade down the main street.

Eventually, Moore and Friedman would interview almost 100 witnesses, most of whom had not talked about, or even thought of, the event for over thirty years. Despite numerous attempts by everyone from groups of scientific skeptics to the Air Force itself to explain it all away as everything from high-altitude radar reflectors to crash-test dummies and Japanese secret weapons, the core of initial witnesses formed the basis of a mystery which has yet to be entirely solved, even if one even partially suspends belief or disbelief.

In 1985, the Roswell book came back to bite Moore in the behind. He was contacted by a lawyer representing Edwin A. “Buzz” Aldrin and told that he was the target of a lawsuit because of something that was apparently thrown into the book at the last minute by Berlitz. The offending passage had to do with Aldrin’s supposed sighting of a UFO while puttering about on the moon. Moore had done most of the research and Berlitz had been the chief writer, but both were named in the lawsuit. Moore recalls Berlitz saying that he would “take care of it,” but due to cold feet or the advice of his lawyer, he eventually hung Moore out to dry and face his part of the suit on his own. Berlitz was independently wealthy from a large inheritance as well as his successful language schools business and he had author’s insurance. With little money to hire a lawyer, Moore fought on, finally forcing Aldrin to withdraw his suit “with prejudice” and was left with $30,000 in legal fees. The episode wrecked his finances and contributed to the breakup of his marriage. Relations between Moore and Berlitz cooled significantly as a result of these events, and eventually Moore broke completely with him over Berlitz’s stated belief that his main purpose in writing books was to make money and that truth necessarily took a backseat in that process. “Tell your readers what they want to hear,” Berlitz once said to Moore over a drink at the Yale Club in New York, “and they will not only love you for it, but they will pay you for it. People want entertainment,” he said, “and I write my books to fill their need.”

If that wasn’t enough to sour Moore on the UFO subject, what happened in the meantime surely would. It turns out that one of the first baited hooks the AFOSI threw into the UFO community was to become the first snare directed at Moore. When caught, he would be reeled in slowly.

In July of 1980, a letter with no return address arrived at APRO headquarters. Jim Lorenzen read it with some interest, and passed it on to APRO administrator Bill English to send to Moore in Prescott for his reaction. Hundreds of letters from anonymous sources arrived every year, and most were easily discarded into the kook file or the wastebasket. Other than the identity of the sender, which was not mentioned, this one included names and locations that could be easily checked. It described the experience of Craig Weitzel, an eighteen-year-old who was then a member of the Civil Air Patrol, a program for Air Force cadets-in-training. The incident had taken place about twenty miles east of the state capital in the Santa Fe National Forest near the town of Pecos.

The two-page letter stated that the writer had to remain anonymous for his own protection, and told of a spectacular UFO sighting that had occurred on July 16, 1980. Weitzel and “ten other individuals” were on a midmorning training exercise when to their surprise they saw a UFO...

...land in a clearing approximately 250 yards NNW of the training area. Weitzel observed an individual dressed in a metallic suit depart the craft and walk a few feet away. The individual was outside the craft for just a few minutes. When the individual returned, the craft took off toward the SW.

The mystery writer also mentioned that Weitzel had taken pictures of the thing.

When the training group returned to Kirtland, Base Security officers debriefed them. The next day, “a man in a dark suit with black hair and sunglasses,” who said he was from Sandia Labs, visited Weitzel. He said his name was “Mr. Huck.” Weitzel was told to turn over his photographs, but informed the stranger that he had already given them to the Air Force. This dark and menacing figure fitted the classic “Man in Black” profile to a T. Jumbo-budget movies notwithstanding, the figure of the man in black visiting witnesses with threats of dire consequences if they talked has been a mainstay of UFO mythology ever since the 1956 publication of Albert K. Bender’s Flying Saucers and the Three Men, which spun tales of strange men in trenchcoats harassing UFO witnesses.

With the tone of an implied threat, and true to form, Mr. Huck told Weitzel not to mention the sighting or pictures to anyone. The writer concluded his letter by saying that he knew that the Air Force was keeping the remains of a crashed UFO in the Manzano storage complex.

Leonard Stringfield, who specialized in researching stories and reports of crashed UFOs, once called his work “a search for truth in a hall of mirrors.” Rumors, secondhand stories, and lies confronted him constantly, yet he was convinced that the government had indeed retrieved a few downed flying saucers. He was well aware that this may have been just the impression that his contacts in the intelligence world wanted him to have, but the stories were so consistent across a wide range of places and history that he could come to no better conclusion. The Weitzel letter contained all the classic earmarks of a good story that had actually happened, with a wealth of spurious details thrown in that made its funhouse reflection distort in just such a way that the curious would come running.

When Lorenzen sent the “Weitzel letter” to Bill Moore, he was almost convinced that the story was hogwash, but since there were names, places, and dates that could be checked out, he urged Moore to look into it. Moore located Weitzel, and talked to him briefly by phone. The young cadet confirmed that he had indeed sighted a strange, silvery object in the skies, but denied ever having taken any pictures, much less received a menacing visit from someone who told him to shut up about it. He also said that the incident had happened on a military range in the Southeast, not in New Mexico. The “Weitzel letter” was a load of manure with a rhinestone thrown in, and became one of the first lessons in the UFO disinformation game. Moore did not take the bait this time.

A few more details emerged years later when Computer UFO Network contributor Chris Lambright contacted Weitzel, and was told that he and his companions had been waiting for a helicopter to come pick them up at the end of a search and rescue exercise when they spotted an “unusual silvery object hovering high in the sky which left the area,” to use his words, “exponentially.” He reiterated that he had not written the letter.

The mysterious writer said that Weitzel had reported the Man in Black incident to a “Mr. Dody” who was apparently a Kirtland Air Base security officer. Whoever had written the letter had the wherewithal to know details of the incident and use them to titillate someone at APRO. The idea, as it turns out, was to put out feelers to see who could be used by the AFOSI as an “insider asset.” At this point, Moore had no idea that he was on the wish list. And Moore’s involvement with Bennewitz was still in the future.

An Air Force physicist who met with Bennewitz on a few occasions expressed impatience with his fellow scientists when confronted with anomalous data. “If you find one white crow, it means that all crows are not black. A lot of scientists intentionally ignore this.” In the rush to certitude, the white crow in the midst of a murder of his black fellows is routinely ignored. What would you do if a skyful of white crows was scolding and pecking at you? Paul Bennewitz had to decide, and perhaps his quixotic adventure may be considered in this way. The problem was that most of the crows were only dipped in white paint.

Moore could see some of the painted crows, but he would also come to believe that his cooperation with those who were doing the painting might give him an advantage.

chapter 9

SILVER SKIES

By late 1979, Moore and Berlitz had finished the manuscript for The Roswell Incident and mailed it off to the publisher. The Moore family began their move to Arizona and Moore waited for word to start a promotional tour. He had been in contact with APRO while he was working on the Roswell book, and Jim and Coral Lorenzen were so impressed with his work that they asked if he was interested in joining the board of directors. Moore quickly accepted.

The book arrived in stores in September of 1980. That same month, it happened that a debate on the UFO subject was scheduled by the Smithsonian Institution, so Moore set off from Arizona and conducted his own promotional tour along the way. After a radio interview (at station WOW, no less) in Omaha, Nebraska, a secretary stopped him in the lobby and said that there was a call for him. The voice on the other end identified himself as a colonel at nearby Orfutt Air Force Base and then said, “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” The colonel asked if Moore could meet for coffee and a chat. Since he was leaving for the next stop on the book tour in less than an hour, Moore took his number and said he would get back to him.

On the return trip, after another interview at Albuquerque’s KOB radio, Moore was again requested at the switchboard. He picked up the phone and identified himself. “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” This got Moore’s attention, and this time he had a couple of days open. A meeting was set up at a local restaurant. The enigmatic voice refused to identify itself, melodramatically instructing that he should look for a man who would be wearing a red tie.

Moore arrived about fifteen minutes before the appointment and parked across the street to keep an eye on things. He scoped out the area to see if the situation was some sort of trap. Just as he had satisfied himself that everything was kosher, a commanding tap came from the passenger window. All Moore could see from the driver’s seat was a bright red tie set against a crisp white shirt. Not knowing what to expect next, he carefully got out and faced his visitor, who smiled and in a voice tinged with the hint of an Eastern European accent said, “Don’t we have an appointment?” Moore followed the gaunt, besuited man inside. They took a booth in a quiet corner. (The isolated restaurant booth seems to be a favorite meeting place among spooks.)

“What makes you people think that I ‘know what I’m talking about’?” Moore asked. The rest of the conversation was primarily a monologue in which his new acquaintance told Moore that he represented a group of intelligence agents in the U.S. government who were tired of the secrecy surrounding the UFO subject and were eager to release more accurate information to the public. They wanted to do this through a reputable researcher. He would be given small bites of the story over time, and could do with it as he wished. Would Moore be interested in participating in such a program?

There was a catch. “Good deals” always have a catch, especially in the espionage world. To get at the UFO info, he would have to agree to give the government people something in return. The legal tender of intelligence and counterintelligence is information, and Moore would have to provide the kind that they couldn’t get on their own. He was not immediately told exactly what this involved, but after years of probing and guessing at what the U.S. government knew about UFOs, he knew at least this much: He was being offered a researcher’s dream—a pass through the closely guarded gate of intrigue and programmed confusion that had dogged the best minds on the subject since retired Marine Corps major Donald Keyhoe and his civilian UFO group, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, had raised the UFO secrecy banner in the 1950s. With nary a qualm, or much time to think it over, Moore agreed to the Faustian bargain.

As he sized up this figure with the piercing eyes and began to absorb what was being offered, Moore was thinking (as he would later explain, repeatedly) that he would play the disinformation game and get his hands dirty just enough to lead those directing the process into believing that he was doing exactly what they wanted him to do. All the while he would continue to burrow his way into the defense and intelligence matrix to learn who was directing it and why. By the time the game was over, Moore would need more than a hand-washing to clear himself of vicious charges from other researchers and the conflicting and often false evidence that was passed to him over the next decade.

The two shook on the deal. Moore was told that he would be asked to appear at another clandestine meeting soon. Just before they parted company, a manila envelope was pushed across the stained red tablecloth at Moore, with the understated remark, “Here’s something you might be interested in.” As soon as he was safely outside, Moore carefully opened the envelope. A single sheet of paper fell into his hands. It described a project called “Silver Sky,” which appeared to have something to do with Air Force UFO investigations and reports back to the Pentagon regarding sightings and encounters.

The partially redacted report named names, dates, and places associated with a spectacular UFO landing in southern New Mexico that had occurred in 1969. Headed by the ubiquitous “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY,” “RESTRICTED,” and punctuated with “SECRET” caveats, the meat of the message said:

COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS FOR PROJECT

“SILVER SKY”

(S) OL1702A IS TASKED WITH CR FOR SILVER SKY. ALL REPORTING UNITS WILL PROVIDE OL1702A WITH DATA THAT WILL BE INCORPORATED INTO CR REPORT 19107 DUE BY 31 DEC 69 THIS HQ’S.

(S) 1703 WILL CONDUCT 168 INTERVIEWS OF FOLLOWING PEOPLE PER MSG 012700Z SEP 69. A) MICHAEL STEVERS, ROSWELL NM B) DOROTHY ADAMS, SUNSET NM, C) EVELYN FUHRER, SOCORRO NM, D) MERRITT WINSLOW, HONDO NM. IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO OBTAIN PRECISE DETAILS AS TO THE OBJECT THESE PEOPLE ALLEGEDLY SIGHTED. ALSO PERSUADE THESE PEOPLE TO SIGN SECURITY PLEDGE (DD FORM 1420) IAW NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1950.

(S) FOR DET 1700: YOUR QUESTIONS REGARDING RECOVERED SPIKE CRAFT CANNOT BE ANSWERED BY THIS HQ’S DUE TO SECURITY RESTRICTIONS. QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN ADDRESSED TO CIA/INO. DO NOT PROCEED WITH ANY OTHER SECURITY PROGRAM PROCEDURES UNTIL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FURTHER GUIDANCE FROM THIS HQ’S.

(S) 1158 TECH OPS SQ HOLLOMAN AFB NM WILL BE USED TO REPORT ALL DATA TO THIS HQ. DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT UTILIZE BASE COMM CENTER TO TRANSMIT SILVER SKY INFORMATION.

(S) CAPT. WRIGHT IS PROJECT OFFICER, PLEASE DIRECT ALL FURTHER INQUIRIES TO HIM.

The witnesses named in the document all lived within fifty miles of Roswell, in towns with names like Hondo, Socorro (famous for a 1964 UFO landing), and Sunset. (“168 INTERVIEWS” referred to the type of interrogation, not the amount.) Perhaps this man and his intel colleagues thought of this exercise as some kind of inside joke, or they wanted to start their new recruit in an area that he knew fairly well. Moore has never found out what the precise reasons were, but within a month he paid a visit to these bumps on the road map to try to put faces to the names in the report. He stopped in at rural post offices and started to reel off his list of witnesses. Not one name matched the residents on file, or anyone that the postal employees knew of. They either didn’t exist, or had moved away or died since the Air Force had talked to them. (Moore eventually found out that the Air Force had spoken to the witnesses, but in connection with other sightings.) The Silver Sky document was a fake. Project Silver Sky itself may have never existed either. Moore was surprised and not a little annoyed that he had traveled the 500 miles or so from Prescott to a dead end, which had been deliberate from the get-go.

It was with a mix of confusion and anger that Moore arrived for his next encounter with the mysterious counterintelligence man in late October of 1980. In yet another Albuquerque eatery, they sat down with an AFOSI agent whom Moore had not seen before. The man was introduced as Special Agent Richard Doty from Kirtland AFB. After a few preliminaries, the questions 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 Doty 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. All were given the names of birds, and were collectively referred to as the “Aviary.”

Many investigators would have immediately trumpeted their new find on an obscure but dramatic UFO landing case, but Moore had been careful. “We wanted to know that we could trust you,” said Falcon, “and you did exactly what we wanted you to do.” The intelligence people had even checked with the Hondo post office to see if Moore had shown up. The “spooks” knew that if they were going to recruit someone to cooperate with their schemes, they needed someone on the “inside” of the UFO community who would not only follow instructions, but could be trusted to keep things to himself while doing it.

The meat of the deal was finally laid on the table: Moore would keep an eye on selected UFO researchers and report on their opinions and feelings about rumors and cases making the rounds in their small community. The Falcon also revealed that he held a high position in the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is basically the military’s very own CIA. Elaborating on the offer from the previous meeting, he said that he represented a group of highly placed people who were unhappy with the secrecy surrounding the UFO subject, and wanted someone they could trust in order to release information to the public in a controlled way.

Falcon told Moore that Richard Doty would be his main counterintel contact. Moore remembered the Weitzel letter reference to a “Mr. Dody,” and things started to fall into place. The letter had contained not only references to an internal Air Force matter, but the misspelled name of the man on the inside who was going to be working with Moore to find out what was going through the minds of prominent UFO researchers. Many months later, Moore was talking to Doty in one of their many informal conversations and found out that “Huck” was one of the many aliases used by Kirtland AFOSI agents. (For his part, Moore says that one of the secretaries in the AFOSI office was named Mrs. Huck.) Doty told Moore that he had composed the Weitzel letter on orders, “as bait.” Years later, in the course of an interagency investigation, he maintained under questioning that Craig Weitzel had written the letter under orders, but had “kind of screwed it up.” The multiple stories were vintage Doty.

Falcon was a bird of a different feather. His misdirections always served a purpose and seemed to closely follow a master script. He would become Moore’s mentor of sorts over the next decade, providing information (or disinformation as he saw fit) and guiding Moore and his partners through the maze of U.S. government and UFO knowledge. They would be led down many passageways that came to dead ends or turned away from the secrets at the center, but as Moore began to negotiate the twists and turns, perhaps he could begin to map the territory and follow things as close to the center as he could. Falcon and his colleagues were happy to let out bits and pieces of the UFO puzzle (at least as they knew it) so long as sensitive defense projects like the ones going on at Kirtland were kept out of sight and mind of the public, and any other uncomfortably interested parties. At the same time, they could see what Moore did with the information, and how it flowed through the tributaries of the UFO rumor river. Moore was well aware that much of the material he would be seeing and hearing about would consist of lies upon lies, covering a smidgen of truth. He hoped that he would be able to “separate the shit from the candy,” as he put it.

“Falcon was truly an enigmatic person,” Moore recalled. “He hardly smiled, didn’t tell jokes, and there was no small talk. For instance, if you asked about his family, he would give a blank stare, and quickly move on to the subject at hand.” For the Falcon, time and words were valuable commodities, and neither were wasted. Moore was an asset, and nothing more. He was just another game piece on Falcon’s board.

If spies have a dictionary, the Falcon probably wrote the entry on “spooks,” and his backlit profile is next to it.

Project Betta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security State And The Creation Of Modern UFO Myth 

Greg Bishop