seems to have defanged NICAP, as far as the government was concerned, turning it into a sightings collection group without a trace of its earlier governmentally-critical policy, an approach that eventually drove the organization out of business. Acuff was replaced by Alan Hall, retired from the CIA, with the group eventually being dissolved.
Further investigation of government manipulation of UFO
researchers must include a mention of William Moore, the co-author of The Philadelphia Experiment and The Roswell Incident , as well as editor, until recently, of Far Out magazine, published by Larry Flynt of Hustler fame. Moore, who continues to be a medium weight popstar of the UFO research field, for reasons which remain unclear to me admitted at the 1989 MUFON Symposium that he had functioned as an agent for members of the U.S. military, reporting on at least one UFO group and involved individuals in exchange for
"leaked," allegedly secret government documents about UFOs. To me this is astounding. The only reason I can imagine that Moore might betray his own activities in this way is that he feared that someone else was going to "out" him as working with the government, and he was attempting damage control by his
"voluntary" admission.
Other information on Moore involves the matter of UFO
researcher Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz, a self-employed electronics expert, believed that he had discovered alien technology in action at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, and contacted the military in an attempt to alert them. Bennewitz was apparently fed a series of documents outlining military collaboration with the aliens and other matters that are currently the stock-in-trade of the "Aliens are among us and polluting our vital bodily fluids!" end of the UFO
research spectrum.
According to Moore, "[Bennewitz] was the subject of considerable interest on the part of not one, but several government agencies, and [I discovered] they were actively trying to defuse him by pumping as much disinformation through him as he could possibly absorb..."
Moore admits that he knew that Bennewitz was being disinformed by the government--with evidence suggesting that Special Agent Richard Doty was at least partially responsible--but according to his own admission he took no action to disabuse Bennewitz of the lies that, Moore says, were gradually driving him crazy. Bennewitz got to the point where he believed that aliens were invading his house and poisoning him. He gradually broke down from the disinformational (and perhaps other) attacks, until he was put into a psychiatric hospital.
Sergeant Richard Doty, one of Moore's contacts who was involved in the Bennewitz matter, was a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the course of his employment with AFOSI he invited Linda Moulton Howe--a well-known investigator of cattle mutilations who oddly never seems to bring up the government connection--to visit him at Kirtland. Once Howe had arrived at the Air Force base, Doty showed her alleged secret documents that seemed to reveal information on crashed alien vehicles and their occupants.
According to Howe:
These pages... contained a summary of this government's retrieval of crashed disks and alien bodies, including a live alien from a crash near Roswell in 1949. The paper said that this extraterrestrial had been taken to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it had been kept until it died of unknown causes on June 18, 1952. Then the paper summarized some of the information that had been learned from this distinctly alien life form about our planet and its civilization's involvement with this planet. One of the paragraphs said, "All questions and mysteries about the evolution of Homo Sapiens on this planet have been answered, and this project is closed," ...Further, it stated in the paper that these gray extraterrestrials had been personally involved in the
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