Behind the Bastards
Part One: How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind
Tue, 11 Feb 2025
This week we tell the harrowing story of Paul Bennewitz, a simple nerdy engineer who spotted evidence of covert Air Force weapons programs and was gaslit into believing they were alien spacecraft.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Not so much the dimension stuff. We're going to be talking about a real act of bastardry that's kind of at the very beginning. Well, not the beginning, kind of the middle point, but it's foundational to the UFO culture that gave us the X-Files. We are talking about...
The stuff that became the X-Files, which started as a disinformation campaign, and a lot of it can be tied specifically to an Air Force intelligence guy named Richard Doty, who was basically brought in to mentally abuse and destroy a basically decent, definitely too credulous guy who started finding evidence of like... recording evidence of like secret air force research.
And so the air force was like, let's convince this guy. It's all aliens. And they kind of destroyed his mind. So that's the story we're telling, but this it's, it's a excellent. Yeah. It's a fascinating tale, both because it explains a lot of how we get to Q and on how we do get stuff like the X files, a lot of kind of the core myths of, of UFO events.
conspiracy culture all that stuff but it's also just a great story about like US intelligence services absolutely destroying a man in order to protect their ability to make engines of death which is you know that's that's some good stuff we all love this shit
Yeah, the more examples, the better. And there are many, but I don't know any with aliens yet. So very exciting.
Yeah, this this will be a lot with aliens. And I'm you know, I'm I think where I come down on this, I don't believe I've never seen anything that's made me convinced that there's life outside of this planet yet. But I'm like open minded to it, like Fox Mulder. I'd like to believe I'm just open minded in the sense that I'm I'm a skeptic.
Like, I don't think I get kind of pissed when people look at folks who are kind of genuinely trying to interrogate the information out there. And they're like, well, that's just crazy to think about because it's not. And it's not crazy to think that the government would lie about stuff like that.
But that said, everything I've ever seen, including like the stuff that came out 2020, 2021, that little pill shaped craft. Um, you know, that's kind of like the most recent big UFO disclosure. And if you watch that audio, cause it's, it's all from like, I think F 18 pilots, you can hear the pilots are genuinely like, what the fuck is this thing? I have no idea what it is. Right.
And I do, I understand why people default to, well, that must mean it's aliens, but like, there's a long history of all sorts of countries, the United States and countries that are geopolitical enemies of the United States testing all sorts of weird craft that like,
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Chapter 2: How did the Air Force use Paul Bennewitz's beliefs?
Chapter 3: What was the role of Richard Doty in the UFO disinformation campaign?
But there's this attitude that like – and from that moment, Roswell was like the center of UFO culture. It really wasn't. It actually kind of fell off for like more than a decade before people started like kind of re-centering Roswell in American UFO mythos.
And part of why – so first, when we're talking about like what actually happened at Roswell, probably the best non-alien theory is that earlier in 1940 – and I think this is pretty credible. Earlier in 1947, the US government had launched something called Project Mogul. And the idea was to set up a series of balloon listening stations to receive and record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials.
Researchers from the US Army Air Force's secret R&D division tested a cluster of 14 of these balloons – one of which went down near Roswell in July. Just a few weeks earlier in June, a Republican politician and pilot named Kenneth Arnold had sparked the first great UFO panic in U.S. history by reporting to have seen nine silver discs flying near Mount Rainier, Washington.
When the rancher who owned the land in Roswell that one of these balloons crashed onto, a guy named Mack Brazel, went to the nearby airfield and like – went to the – well, the Army Air Corps and was like, hey, I found like some weird shit on my property. They sent out investigators. Yeah. Now, due to the secrecy behind Project Mogul, the investigators they sent didn't know about that project.
So some of these guys – and in fact, the guy who's kind of first on scene will claim years later and will be consistent for the rest of his life after that point and believe in saying like, I saw like a craft I can't explain. I believe it was an alien craft, right? Or the remains of an alien craft. Yeah.
Now, again, there was technology in these air balloons that was not widely available or that people and that people were not widely knowledgeable about. And the guys who responded to this crash didn't fucking know about the program because it was heavily classified.
So, you know, you can come out of this either saying like, well, I think that they did find some aliens or I think probably if we're doing the Occam's razor thing, it's not super weird to assume like, yeah, the government, every every part of our incredibly paranoid defense industry was lying to every other part and hiding all sorts of shit. And these guys just didn't know what the fuck they saw.
And I think often like we want aliens to be true instead of that. Like it feels much more comforting. I mean, yeah, I, I, I think people are, even with everything, all the little videos and everything that's been coming out in the last few years, people keep being like, yeah, sure. Okay, great. Would love it. Can they take over? Yeah. Sure.
An alien is here, that means somebody is actually maybe in charge that isn't us. That would be great.
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