Project Beta The Story Of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, And The Creation Of A Modern UFO Myth

Chapter 1: Kirtland Very few venture outside at night during the New Mexico winter. The bone-chilling cold repels all but the hardiest or the inexperienced visitor. It was the way of this land even before 1630, when Alvaro Nunez Cabeza de Vaca first stumbled onto the bewildered residents of an adobe pueblo hundreds of miles beyond the northernmost outpost of the Spanish empire. Cabeza de Vaca was greeted as a miracle worker, or some sort of god. It was not the first and certainly not the last time that the "Land of Enchantment" would befuddle its inhabitants.Since World War II, this enchanted land has also been home to some of the most secret and sensitive projects that the military and its scientists have dreamed up and produced. The world's first atomic bomb was detonated here in May of 1945, and like many choice areas of stark desolation throughout the Southwest, the test area is owned by the U.S. government and is still off-limits to the public.It was in this setting that Paul Bennewitz, armed with a master's degree in physics, started a small company in 1969 to manufacture specialized temperature and humidity instruments for high-profile clients such as NASA and the U.S. Air Force. He was trying to earn his Ph.D. but his company, Thunder Scientific, became so successful that he had to devote all of his time to the business. The lab was located right on the border of Kirtland Air Force Base, which made his dealings with the military much easier. If he wanted, he could almost reach over his back wall and shake hands with a guard on base. By a strange coincidence, he could also walk across the road bordering his backyard and if there was a hole in the tall, barbed wire-topped fence, shake hands with another guard patrolling the perimeter. Whether he was at home or the office, the Air Force was always his neighbor.With a devoted wife and two sons, Paul Bennewitz looked like he had achieved the dream. There was nowhere to go but up. He had joined the Coast Guard at seventeen during WWII, started Thunder Scientific, and was an accomplished aerobatics pilot and guitarist. The demands of his business now left little time for friends and socializing, but this did not bother him. Thunder Scientific and his family were all that he needed. What little time he had left was devoted to plowing through a small collection of Wild West novels, his only guilty pleasure. But he had a secret interest that would be kindled with a series of strange events that, in retrospect, almost seemed to have picked him out, rather than the other way around.It was on a freezing, windswept night in the winter of 1979 that Bennewitz stepped out on his exposed second-story deck in the exclusive Four Hills neighborhood of Albuquerque for what was quickly becoming a nightly ritual. Ever since September, he and his wife Cindy were seeing multicolored lights floating and swooping about the small mountain range inside the base about a mile from his home. Through telephoto lenses so large that they dwarfed his cameras, Bennewitz compiled hundreds of photographs and shot thousands of feet of 8-millimeter film of these tantalizing objects. At times, the lights streaked away as quickly as a magician's sleight of hand, only to reappear seconds later, apparently miles from where they had just been. To Bennewitz, this was irrefutable proof that something unearthly was playing cat-and-mouse with the human race, daring us to react. In time, the fifty-two-year-old electronics expert would present this mass of data to the authorities, which he thought would waste no time in confronting the threat.They would have no choice. The lights were flying around the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, then the largest underground repository of nuclear weapons components in the Western world. The Manzano Mountains rise abruptly out of the sloping plateau on which the metropolis of Albuquerque lies, honeycombed with tunnels and shBishop-Hurley, Gregory J. is the author of 'Project Beta The Story Of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, And The Creation Of A Modern UFO Myth', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743470926 and ISBN 0743470923.