Mirage Men is out.

vbstrvct
I think we shouldn't confuse the players with those who created the game...I simply avoid making absolute claims, more so when we are dealing with confusing and often murky information.

I can follow most of that and not disagree, I'm also enjoying your participation and knowledge in this discussion, vbstrvct. You've been a figurative breath of fresh air for me and I appreciate that.

As far as "players" and "the game" goes--as specifically regards the topics in this post--we unfortunately have to start with identifiable players. Ubiquitous players with ufological-mythological staying power. Decades worth. Most with career-long intelligence associations to include the present.

Agreed that motives might be murky, but Kit Green's association with SERPO isn't really up for any challenging debate.

Doty almost certainly has a bit of the amoral about him in the opinion of many. A small-fry cut-out that has taken most of the heat. Moving "up" the ladder of suspects seems to be the "ante" to play poker.

IsaacKoi
How do you know the NSA were doing anything there?

Good point. Doty claims it was NSA after Bennowitz complained to Doty after personally spotting them across the street setting up shop and monitoring him. It could have been any agency, but given Bennowitz's signals gathering and expertise the top agency to deal with what he was doing would be the NSA. Seems reasonable but not 100% no doubt.

vbstrvct
I wish I had more evidence but I certainly don't dismiss the possibility of someone injecting Bennewitz with something. I also agree it doesn't fit the NSA playbook. And if someone did inject Bennewitz with something, it probably wasn't the NSA.

Agreed...no solid info on Bennewitz being injected but for me I'm willing to accept it as reasonable for now. Crazy things happen in mental institutions, but people don't wake up in fields far away. Family and institution staff would know about that and I'd think investigators would try to confirm the claims, thus the statement that the injections marks were real. Of course people in institutions get injections a fair bit too, so it's the waking up somewhere else that needs to be confirmed.

vbstrvct
Doty admits to that himself.

I suggested that the truth my now be so deeply buried that nobody, anywhere has the answer. Rick disagreed; he felt sure that someone has the blueprint - he just didn't know who. It certainly wasn’t him: ‘I'm just a pea in a pod,’ he said. (Mirage Men, p. 340)

Doty admitting he's just a bit player rings true...sounds like everyone agrees.

vbstrvct
My estimation is that Paul got a glimpse of several projects from several agencies. When he saw weird lights/objects over Kirtland his scientific brain started wondering and sprung into action. He built devices to 'detect' these objects, but what he captured, in terms of signals, I suspect, was probably NSA transmissions or - even worse for the NSA - the transmissions/communications were leaking somehow and Paul was getting that.

Seems reasonable that Bennowitz started picking up all sorts of electromagnetic leakage from the base. He was skilled.

vbstrvct
That's probably why they didn't told Paul to drop it. It's a common practice among intelligence agencies: as long as nothing important is being revealed, or as long as the enemy doesn't realize what he has, let him continue operating in order for you to determine where the leak is coming from.

This is where I start wondering. Doty starts to string Bennowitz along. Standard practice to start with...agreed on that. Doty needs to find out everything he knows and how he is getting it all. If Bennowitz only found some secret flying equipment might have ended there but Bennowitz had linked his 'UFO's' to Valdez's cattle mutilations around Dolce. Further investigation around Dolce with Bennowitz and Valdez seems to confirm a secret base (or several) there.

What did Bennowitz find that led some agency to ensure he was mentally ruined instead of simply ordering him to stop snooping? (If you accept the strange injections) Valdez didn't get similar treatment and he claims to have found the base entrance as well as being the cattle mutilation expert. He also saw the craft (but didn't analyze any signals). To me it seems something about the craft Bennowitz recorded details of must have been what forced the unknown agencies hand to silence him. (again, if you accept the strange injections) Lots of people have glimpsed secret aerial projects and they don't get silenced however.

Doty recommended Bennowitz to stop snooping for his health. Doty also clearly states there is truth to the UFO story (of course his statement is worth a hill of beans). Could it be when Bennowitz tells Doty after his confession of the counterintel op that you don't have to lie to me, I know there are aliens....Bennowitz is confirming the craft he witnessed and gathered intel on were in fact extraterrestrial?

It gets a bit far out on a thin branch...but if you accept that Bennowitz was silenced via chemical injection then the reason is the elephant in the room. Others involved in the case did fine but only Bennowitz recorded those flying crafts in detail.

reply to post by The GUT

My knowledge of SERPO is about skin deep, so this may be a dumb question. But first, some background. Some reliable sources claim that Bill Moore & Doty started the MJ-12 bit as a novel, the fictionalized adventures of Doty. Somewhere along the line, the idea was discussed to release fake documents (about things they thought were real) in order to force some kind of response from the US government. Sometime after this, the MJ-12 documents started surfacing. That's a long intro for my question:

Could SERPO have been a ploy to provoke some real information being released or leaked?

The GUT

If Kit Green was attempting to find out the "truth"--to force a disclosure as it were--do you really think he would be given continued high-security clearances? He's a game player all right. A lifetime team player. An intelligence professional who relies on his own trustworthiness and loyalty to factions within the USG.

Was he involved in SERPO? That answer is fairly easy to discern for oneself. Is that assertion new to you?

I tend to think Green is significantly higher up on the food chain than Doty hoped to be. How high Green is up is really the only debate. Being a lifelong player involved in multiple different situations supports a very high status to me. Personally I don't know much about him.

Can you say Mirage Men 2 - Mr. Green....

noeltrotsky
Agreed...no solid info on Bennewitz being injected but for me I'm willing to accept it as reasonable for now. Crazy things happen in mental institutions, but people don't wake up in fields far away. Family and institution staff would know about that and I'd think investigators would try to confirm the claims, thus the statement that the injections marks were real. Of course people in institutions get injections a fair bit too, so it's the waking up somewhere else that needs to be confirmed.

I'm pretty sure these episodes - having needle marks on his arm and waking up in the middle of nowhere - happened prior to his family taking him to a mental institution. If I remember correctly, his family took him to Anna Kaseman Mental Health Facility in Albuquerque in August of 1988. He was there for a month and then returned to his family. I think nothing weird, or at least as weird, ever happened after that. His family actively discouraged him from pursuing his UFO research from then on, and I don't think he pressed the issue much further after that.

What did Bennowitz find that led some agency to ensure he was mentally ruined instead of simply ordering him to stop snooping? ... Valdez didn't get similar treatment and he claims to have found the base entrance as well as being the cattle mutilation expert.

I don't think mentally ruining him was the objective. I think that tragically happened due to several factors and as a consequence of the intensity of the operations that were targeting him.

Paul was probably an obsessive person, that's usually a common trait among scientists. And they never did things to Gabe that they did to Paul, like breaking into his house and re-arranging his furniture, for example. (Although - and this is not an unimportant point - someone had installed a bug on Gabe Valdez's phone. And I'm not inclined to believe that it was OSI that planted it, but rather the NSA or the CIA, most likely the latter.)

Also, I think it's quite probable that Paul already believed in aliens prior to seeing the weird lights/objects over Kirtland and Gabe Valdez probably never did. Gabe always suspected there were human perpetrators behind the mutilations (based on Greg Valdez's accounts).

What Paul found exactly I don't think we'll ever know, but I'm inclined to believe whatever he photographed in the air in Dulce was the primary reason they did what they did to him, and because out of all those people he was essentially the only person who could technically figure it out. The primary reason, but not the only one.

CardDown
reply to post by The GUT

 

My knowledge of SERPO is about skin deep, so this may be a dumb question. But first, some background. Some reliable sources claim that Bill Moore & Doty started the MJ-12 bit as a novel, the fictionalized adventures of Doty. Somewhere along the line, the idea was discussed to release fake documents (about things they thought were real) in order to force some kind of response from the US government. Sometime after this, the MJ-12 documents started surfacing. That's a long intro for my question:

Could SERPO have been a ploy to provoke some real information being released or leaked?

My hunch is that the ultimate goal was a little weirder. Jacque Vallee and Kit Green were talking about moving upstream in the topography and 'attacking' the control system in the 1970's. I think SERPO (if not some of the Bennewitz/DarkSide stuff that got worked into the popular narrative) might have been some kind of meme-experiment aimed at doing this.

CardDown
reply to post by The GUT

 

My knowledge of SERPO is about skin deep, so this may be a dumb question. But first, some background. Some reliable sources claim that Bill Moore & Doty started the MJ-12 bit as a novel, the fictionalized adventures of Doty. Somewhere along the line, the idea was discussed to release fake documents (about things they thought were real) in order to force some kind of response from the US government. Sometime after this, the MJ-12 documents started surfacing. That's a long intro for my question:

There are various rumors based on variations of that theme. Most came from some of the players themselves I believe, leaving us with the ever-conflicting tales of the mirage men. Kind of sanitizes their reputations, eh? I kept the basic concept near the top of my list for awhile, but for me it started to fall apart the more I dug in.

There's another forum that some of the SERPO players were involved with. Some of the folk still there that interact(ed) with Aviary members during the ramp-up to SERPO have basically stated that these players told them they were "white hat" gubmint boys trying to force the "black hat" gubmint boys hand. Which brings us to your question:

Could SERPO have been a ploy to provoke some real information being released or leaked?

One of the main (but not only) reasons I don't think it fits is because of something I stated earlier: Kit Green--for one--ain't likely to poo where he eats. He's a dyed-in-the-wool--and decorated--part of the USG Intelligence culture. If he were a part of trying to force top top top secret extraterrestrial information from the gubmint, it's a pretty good bet his security clearance status and further contractual work would suffer. It certainly didn't after SERPO.

noeltrotsky

What did Bennowitz find that led some agency to ensure he was mentally ruined instead of simply ordering him to stop snooping? (If you accept the strange injections) Valdez didn't get similar treatment and he claims to have found the base entrance as well as being the cattle mutilation expert. He also saw the craft (but didn't analyze any signals). To me it seems something about the craft Bennowitz recorded details of must have been what forced the unknown agencies hand to silence him. (again, if you accept the strange injections) Lots of people have glimpsed secret aerial projects and they don't get silenced however.

What exactly was Bennewitz observing? The stuff I've seen suggests that he was seeing balls of light (which also apparently were observed at his house by the three letter agency people watching him. So if he saw something REALLY weird (ie high powered lasers and possibly space-time stuff), they might have tried to turn it into an opportunity for running a perception management campaign and turning Bennewitz into a meme-vector for infecting UFOlogy.

Or maybe it was just lasers making plasmas or something.

vbstrvct
I'm pretty sure these episodes - having needle marks on his arm and waking up in the middle of nowhere - happened prior to his family taking him to a mental institution. If I remember correctly, his family took him to Anna Kaseman Mental Health Facility in Albuquerque in August of 1988. He was there for a month and then returned to his family. I think nothing weird, or at least as weird, ever happened after that. His family actively discouraged him from pursuing his UFO research from then on, and I don't think he pressed the issue much further after that.

Ah...that fits. If the are injecting him prior to the institution then it's probably being done to get a longer look at his equipment and gathered info. No effort to ruin him with that timeline either...which makes better sense too.

That branch I walked out on just snapped...ignore that speculation I posted! Hell of a movie hey!

reply to post by noeltrotsky

I don't think you should give up on the line of inquiry you were on. I think the questions you posed still make sense to ask. Why would they do the things they did to Paul?

I think some answers can be found in my response to 1ofthe9's questions that I'm going to address below.

reply to post by 1ofthe9

1ofthe9
What exactly was Bennewitz observing? The stuff I've seen suggests that he was seeing balls of light (which also apparently were observed at his house by the three letter agency people watching him. So if he saw something REALLY weird (ie high powered lasers and possibly space-time stuff), they might have tried to turn it into an opportunity for running a perception management campaign and turning Bennewitz into a meme-vector for infecting UFOlogy. Or maybe it was just lasers making plasmas or something.

I believe Paul observed several different projects. I think it's pretty safe to assume that he saw some Starfire/laser experiments in Kirtland. There might have been some kind of experimental craft flying over Kirtland as well, but I can't be certain it wasn't 'just' some light phenomena related to Starfire or lasers. Whatever it was, although secret in nature, it wasn't sensitive enough for them to care that basically every civilian that lived near or next to Paul could witness it on any given night.

I'm convinced that what was going on in Dulce was another project. And one that required even more discretion than those going on in Kirtland. And I think that is fundamentally what they desperately tried to obscure. Although this doesn't seem compatible with the belief that they wanted Paul looking in Dulce so that he wouldn't look in Kirtland.

What some people don't know, or didn't realize, is that Paul was already interested in Dulce and had already photographed something in Dulce, months before he ever contacted the Air Force. This is one of the reasons why it's not an easy story to understand; this apparent contradiction on the Air Force's part.

My estimation is that once they found out Paul had already seen something in Dulce, and was already interested in the area, all they could do was damage control. So they convinced him that whatever he saw was alien, since he already thought everything he had seen - including the things over Kirtland - was alien in nature.

Your point about them seeing Paul as an opportunity is actually the second reason I believe they targeted him with that disinformation campaign. Paul had contracts with the Air Force and he was a patriot. Such a patriot, in fact, that he compiled all his evidence and briefed the Air Force on what he had, out of his own free will. Even if whatever Paul photographed or recorded was so sensitive, so classified, I'm almost certain he would have dropped it had they asked him to. But instead they made him believe aliens were really behind it all.

So I think poor Bennewitz was a victim of a series of unfortunate coincidences.

And perhaps even more than those I've alluded to in this post, especially when you take into consideration where Bill Moore fits in all this. And another coincidence that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, but that might be relevant: the Ellsworth Air Force Base UFO hoax. And who was at Ellsworth from 1976 to 78? None other than Richard Doty.

Mirage Men the book naturally goes into greater detail and addresses the broader issue of ufological disinformation. Seriously a must read as far as I'm concerned. I'm going to read it again after I finish the John Keel collection suggested by 1ofthe9.

The following quote from the book might be of interest to those who lean towards the theory that members of the Aviary--and their associates--are all about some ufological disclosure. Could be. Could be mirage and misdirection.

The following portion of Mark and John's interview with Kit Green apparently shook them both up a little.

I myself find it both fascinating and revealing, but for reasons other than the overt message being proffered by Kit. I dissect it somewhat in the following thread:

The Men In Black(OPs) The Aviary & UFOs

Here we go:

Dr Green - "In a country that has a large, educated population there is a large subset of individuals who suffer from what's called paraphrenia. Paraphrenia is a form of mental illness that doesn't interfere with your everyday life. It means that you can have a delusion and not be crazy, a delusion that you can confine and control. Many of us have one corner of the mind that is delusional - I bet you that I do.

'I might, for example, be religious - I'm an Episcopalian, though as such, I am protected from diagnosis, as are all the UFO buffs, because a large social structure of shared beliefs, like a religion, cannot be a delusion. So all those people who believe that they are being beamed at by the government can no longer be diagnosed as crazy - there are just too many of them.

'But, if there is a condition that is threatening to the social structure - like the idea that the aliens are here and they are taking our babies, or that God hates people of a certain creed or colour - and if people who believe in that kind of delusion band together, they can end up encouraging each other to get a lot sicker, or they strap on belts and make themselves human bombs. So we have to know how to deal with these people and how to prevent them from being dangerous to others.

'This applies to the UFO problem. If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we consider what may be the basic facts: maybe there are civilised lifeforms elsewhere in the universe; maybe they visited us in their spaceships a couple of times and then went back home; perhaps they left a vehicle or some technology behind and we've spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to use it. And there may be people in the government who believe that this did happen, and believe that the information needs to be public knowledge, because perhaps someone outside of the government will be able to make sense of their technology. But there's another group of people in power who say, "No, it will make them sick to know all this, we can't let the story out, it's too dangerous." '

John and I glanced at each other. My mouth was dry...Things were getting strange again. Did Kit just tell us that these things happened? Was that a hypothetical scenario he had just presented us with, or one that he believed to be real? Kit continued.

'So, what do we do? There are studies on both sides of the problem. Some show that people will go crazy and jump of bridges when they're presented with this information. Others, however, say that if you don't want them to go crazy, what you do is systematically desensitize their fears.

'If you are a psychiatrist with a patient you can do that in a very methodical way. If you are a sociologist working with a group of students at a university you can do this in a very structured and experimental way. But if you are a government with a population it's a lot more complicated. Sure, there are those who are just going to shrug and say, "I always knew the aliens were real, it's no big deal." But you also know that some of them are nuttier than a fruitcake and could cause a lot of trouble. So we have to ask ourselves how we can tell people what they deserve to know and, maybe, what they need to know?

'The way to do it is to construct a framework whereby they can parse out the things that they've heard that are not true, and you whittle it down to a manageable story. A story like this: "There were three spaceships that came here over thirty years, and we've got one of them. We can't figure out how it works, we've crashed it because there's a lot of physics that we've still got to learn. We do have something that's like a magnethydrodynamic toroid, and it really did get a craft of the ground, but it smelled bad and it killed a couple of pilots. And we're really sorry about that, but we did it because we've got this machine that came from another planet, and we need to know how it works." '

Oh god, he just did it again. I tried to slow my breathing to prevent the giddiness from becoming a full-on panic attack.

Kit carried on, oblivious to my inner struggle. I was glad not to be inside one of his MRI machines.

'How do you tell people that story? If it's true?' he added, almost parenthetically.

"If you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they'd get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years.You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about reptilian aliens eating our children, about all the crazy stuff that we've seen recently in Serpo. Then one day you say, "Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it's not that bad, you don't have to worry, the reality is this..." - and then you give them the real story."

Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington

Interesting, imo, that Dr. Green should mention Serpo in the manner he does.

BTW: Thanks for the vid link CardDown!

The Abuses of Enchantment: Folklore and Deception in the Disinformation Age - Mark Pilkington

vbstrvct
reply to post by noeltrotsky

 

I don't think you should give up on the line of inquiry you were on. I think the questions you posed still make sense to ask. Why would they do the things they did to Paul?

I think some answers can be found in my response to 1ofthe9's questions that I'm going to address below.

reply to post by 1ofthe9

 

1ofthe9
What exactly was Bennewitz observing? The stuff I've seen suggests that he was seeing balls of light (which also apparently were observed at his house by the three letter agency people watching him. So if he saw something REALLY weird (ie high powered lasers and possibly space-time stuff), they might have tried to turn it into an opportunity for running a perception management campaign and turning Bennewitz into a meme-vector for infecting UFOlogy. Or maybe it was just lasers making plasmas or something.

I believe Paul observed several different projects. I think it's pretty safe to assume that he saw some Starfire/laser experiments in Kirtland. There might have been some kind of experimental craft flying over Kirtland as well, but I can't be certain it wasn't 'just' some light phenomena related to Starfire or lasers. Whatever it was, although secret in nature, it wasn't sensitive enough for them to care that basically every civilian that lived near or next to Paul could witness it on any given night.

I'm convinced that what was going on in Dulce was another project. And one that required even more discretion than those going on in Kirtland. And I think that is fundamentally what they desperately tried to obscure. Although this doesn't seem compatible with the belief that they wanted Paul looking in Dulce so that he wouldn't look in Kirtland.

What some people don't know, or didn't realize, is that Paul was already interested in Dulce and had already photographed something in Dulce, months before he ever contacted the Air Force. This is one of the reasons why it's not an easy story to understand; this apparent contradiction on the Air Force's part.

My estimation is that once they found out Paul had already seen something in Dulce, and was already interested in the area, all they could do was damage control. So they convinced him that whatever he saw was alien, since he already thought everything he had seen - including the things over Kirtland - was alien in nature.

Your point about them seeing Paul as an opportunity is actually the second reason I believe they targeted him with that disinformation campaign. Paul had contracts with the Air Force and he was a patriot. Such a patriot, in fact, that he compiled all his evidence and briefed the Air Force on what he had, out of his own free will. Even if whatever Paul photographed or recorded was so sensitive, so classified, I'm almost certain he would have dropped it had they asked him to. But instead they made him believe aliens were really behind it all.

So I think poor Bennewitz was a victim of a series of unfortunate coincidences.

And perhaps even more than those I've alluded to in this post, especially when you take into consideration where Bill Moore fits in all this. And another coincidence that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, but that might be relevant: the Ellsworth Air Force Base UFO hoax. And who was at Ellsworth from 1976 to 78? None other than Richard Doty.

edit on 8-1-2014 by vbstrvct because: (no reason given)

I've read Valdez's book. I believe I have a candidate for the program that was going on there. Tacit Blue. The strange towers that Valdez found were probably related to testing the radar on the plane.

Have Bluemight fit too.

1ofthe9
Have Bluemight fit too.

I was looking at Project Beta by Greg Bishop today, the drawings Paul Bennewitz made of a crashed craft he saw is said to be most likely an experimental F-117 Stealth Fighter. The craft he drew looks pretty strange, and doesn't look much like a F-117, but it does look a bit like the Have Blue, which happens to be a prototype for the F-117.





According to this page, it says only 2 Have Blue prototypes were built and both crashed, but neither of them crashed near Dulce. Would a different experimental stealth fighter have been flying over Dulce around that time? (The Groom Lake testing site is about 700 miles away)

The mirage men is out can someone tell me what is this and what is admin say us.. but i can say one thing this site is very interesting i like this site.
Matrimonial sites Punjab
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reply to post by shaddisi23


Uh oh, I think we've triggered some sort of NSA spam bot defense mechanism.

www.stopforumspam.com...

reply to post by freelance_zenarchist

Looks a lot like the drawing indeed. Especially if that needle of a nose broke off. Even if it wasn't Have Blue, the computer-aided design to create superior radar deflection might have been used in other prototypes?

As far as the goes, Free-Zen...maybe it's a clue, ahem. Maybe the Punjabs were in cahoots with the reptilians at Dulce. Just for fun I search termed "punjab + reptilian." I found out that Sikhism originated in Punjab and this:

...The reptilians/Freemasons/Illuminati have been and still are behind all the riots, wars, uprisings and terrorism in the world, including the ‘Khalistan movement’ which aims to establish a Sikh state on a part of Indian land...

link

reply to post by The GUT


Did you have any spam posts like that in your Aviary thread?

I honestly find it odd he would pick this thread, out of all the threads on ATS, to post his spam in.

freelance_zenarchist
Did you have any spam posts like that in your Aviary thread?

I honestly find it odd he would pick this thread, out of all the threads on ATS, to post his spam in.

Funny, I almost asked the same basic question. Why here? Your NSA Bot comment made me chuckle & go hmmmmm at the same time!

MIB(OPs) certainly got mega-trolled and there were some bot suspicions as well. It might be of note that these particular topics on ATS do seem to catch more than their fair share of flak at times. Take a read through this one:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

There's at least one more like that somewhere.

The GUT
Interesting, imo, that Dr. Green should mention Serpo in the manner he does.

That was one hell of an interview, I hope there's more stuff like that on the DVD extra's.

My memory about Serpo is kinda fuzzy, but wasn't Dr. Green supporting it at the time, and isn't there a quote on the internet from Dr. Green saying he trusts Rick Doty? I can't seem to find the quote I'm thinking of, does that sound familiar to you?

reply to post by freelance_zenarchist


Yep. Good call. Kit spoke very highly of Rick Doty in rather glowing terms about his character, competency, and trustworthiness! I'll post some of that tomorrow when I'm fresh enough to find and collate it. For now, here's a quote from Ryan Dube of Reality Uncovered from the thread I linked above:

...Rick did not drag Hal or Kit into Serpo. I'm pretty certain Kit would not have presented it that way to you either. According to Dr. Green, he took a proactive approach himself at the beginning, and was the driving force in putting together the "team of 5" for analysis of the Serpo releases. This answer came when I asked Kit, early on, who brought him into the Serpo analysis. Because my suspicion was much as yours is - that Rick "sucked" him into it. He has denied this to be the case. You may want to ask him about that directly. If he requests it, I'd be glad to get together and compare notes with you and him regarding his memory of events...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Edit to Add: The "Shawnna" in that thread, btw, is the same one IsaacKoi gave search terms for earlier in this thread as relates to the Serpo saga.