This is a tale of how ‘Once Upon a Time’ the US government drove an innocent citizen mad with stories of UFOs, malevolent aliens, secret underground bases—and how they slowly dragged the rest of the world into the madness.
Like Game of Thrones, it’s a complex tale with many moving parts and characters—some of them recurring figures along the seasons, while others just had a few moments in the spotlight before they were quickly ‘dispatched’.
Like GoT, some viewers may find themselves too overwhelmed with all the info they need to keep inside their head just to follow the plot. And, just like GoT, many will not be happy with how the tale unfolds towards its finale (or lack thereof) because this particular tale is indeed a hard pill to swallow (take it from one who knows about pills) particularly for people accustomed to the simple narratives found nowadays both in pop culture in general, and modern ufology in particular.
But it is a tale we need to pay attention to sooner or later, lest we risk an endless cycle of sequels, spinoffs and re-adaptations; just like it has been the case in the field of unexplained aerial phenomena for more than forty-five years.
This is the tale of Paul Bennewitz. Now, even in the smallish subculture of ufology, this is not what we would call a ‘household name’—the very mention of it is sometimes interpreted as an act of snobbism to separate the N00bs from the true Cognoscenti. But the saga of Bennewitz, how the US Air Force tried to convince him there was an alien base hidden deep within the Dulce region of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in New Mexico—and more importantly, WHY they chose to do it— has had ramifications which have directly impacted the field and pop culture, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways… whether people interested in the phenomenon are aware of it, or not.
Previous attempts have been made to share this tale with the public: Greg Bishop’s Project Beta; Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men; Chris Lambright’s X Descending. Then in 2021, ‘Crackpot Historian’ Adam Gorightly wrote Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius (published by Daily Grail Publishing, that means Us) to bring his own take into this tale; along with a much-needed update into the state of ufology as a result of it—almost forty years after Bennewitz was committed to a mental facility at the behest of his family, and after UFO researcher Bill Moore (one of the men responsible for making ‘Roswell’ a true household name) chose to say adieu to the field, but not before calling his beloved colleagues ‘useful idiots’ for believing in the disinformation he helped to spread.
In Spanish, ‘Dulce’ means ‘Candy’ (which is something I, a native Spanish speaker, has always found rather curious). Like gullible children who should have known better, ufologists of the eighties were lured to the back of a three-letter-agency van with juicy bits and pieces alluding to recovered spacecraft and secret government groups, by shady men with a counterintelligence agenda that probably had nothing to do with an alien presence in our planet in the first place.
…Surely UFO buffs have learned their lessons by now, right? RIGHT??
To bring this web of lies and deception to a broader audience, Gorightly adapted his critically acclaimed book into a film documentary with the help of Christopher Graybill. The end result is a witty, cheeky (perhaps too cheeky?) light-hearted account of real events, half-truths, and complete fabrications, that were taken so seriously at the time by people like Bennewitz or others, it was almost a failsafe recipe for instant paranoia.
Like the proverbial tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy monger with a constellation of pictures connected by miles of red thread inside his basement office (and BTW, Bennewitz is the source for that tinfoil meme!) Adam weaves this wacky tale for the benefit of the dumbfounded viewers, who may not be accustomed to complex UFO narratives beyond the level of tabloid headlines (“UFOs are real!” “ETs are among us!” “The government knows all about it!”).
“In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” as the saying goes. So perhaps in the age of Gaslighting and Fake News, the weathered crackpot is now the sanest person left…
If Stanger Things has proven something, aside from the fact that Eggos can be enough to sustain a child alone in the woods, is that viewers are hungry for 80’s nostalgia (as an X-Gener I gotta be honest with my younger readers: the music got way better in the 90s). Saucers, Spooks & Kooks takes good note of it by relying on cool synth music, whimsical computer graphics that reminded me of old 16-bit computer games—Chris, the director, told me via Instagram messaging he took a lot of inspiration from the game Out of this World—combined with hand-drawn cartoons reminiscent of the golden age of MTV Animation.
Every documentary needs to have a roster of ‘talking heads’ giving their two cents on both sides of an argument. SS&K brings in a balanced spectrum of ‘Skeptical’ types like Sara Scoles and Mark Pilkington, alongside ‘Pro-UFO’ people like the late David Perkins, Chris Lambright, Greg Bishop—even though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘believers’, because I know their opinions on the topic vastly differ from the views promoted by mainstream ufology.
It is in fact those types of hardcore UFO buffs the ones who would probably find this documentary annoying to watch, as it systematically dismantles all their cherished beliefs about Majestic 12, Bob Lazar, SERPO, or even the more recent stories about Skinwalker ranch, the Nimitz encounter, and the controversial AAWSAP/AATIP program which prompted a new roster of ‘UFO whistleblowers’ parading at Congressional hearings.
Although the folks who subscribe to Skeptical Inquirer, who would gladly invite over their Randi-loving friends to watch this film to make fun of the crazy UFO people, and their silly woo-woo beliefs about abhorrent genetic experiments conducted within the bowels of some hellish abode in the American Southwest, would completely miss the point of the documentary if that is all they get from it.
Because the point of Saucers, Spooks & Kooks is not just that some people want to believe in flying saucers and aliens; but that Intelligence agencies are more than willing to exploit that belief for their own obscure agendas.
And it’s not just a matter of letting some dumbstruck person think they saw a UFO, when in reality it was a classified spy plane like the U2 or some other undisclosed technology (like the drones that buzzed around New Jersey early last year). Perhaps the actual reason Paul Bennewitz remains an obscure figure in the annals of ufology, is because the government doesn’t want you to know they have NO moral qualms whatsoever to not only gaslight and deceive a hapless, decent American citizen—who was only trying to do the right thing by alerting the authorities about what he thought was a genuine threat—but also to disseminate urban legends for counter-intelligence; or even draw a blanket of discredit when innocent civilians are willing or unwillingly harmed by black projects (Havana syndrome anyone?).
Taking that into account, and considering how the professional skeptics are now switching roles into disregarding the “UFOs are a threat” narrative that the US government has been trying to push since 2017—whereas the true believers are NOW the biggest cheerleaders for the government and the military. Welcome to the Upside Down! — one is forced to ask: Why then repeat the official conclusions of Blue Book, the Air Force’s report(s) on Roswell, and the Condon Committee as if they were God’s given truths? Why assume that the same government shenanigans we’re seeing being played out right now, were not being applied back then?
Where does one draw the line? It is a very difficult question to answer, and I was rather glad to watch my friend and colleague Greg Bishop remind the viewers of this film how it would be a terrible mistake to assume (like skeptics do) that every single UFO report is either a mundane misidentification, a hoax, or a concealment of a black government program.
There is a larger, weirder mystery out there, and people in the US government may know more about it than we mere mortals do. Or, they may just pretend to know; whichever the case, that doesn’t stop them from using the UFO mystery as one more tool in their toolbox of social engineering and perception management.
The reasons behind these counter-intelligence games may be forever beyond our grasp: protection of sensitive assets, flushing out moles, hazing rituals, psyops experimentation, or coaxing US adversaries to devote valuable resources to fruitless pursuits of anti-gravity technologies and zero-point energy. Red tape, plausible deniability, coupled with the eventual retirement and deaths of key players will probably keep us from ever learning the truth about the real WHYs behind these projects.
As for the HOWs, SS&K offers a glimpse into how easily and organically you can infiltrate the UFO database and ‘spike’ it with disinfo. An intelligent pest controller knows the best way to deal with a bug infestation is to apply a poison that would lure the insects to it (like a fistful of sugar tossed next to an ant colony). But the most effective pest control systems are designed to coax the bugs to bring in the poison into the hive, so that you can infect the whole colony instead of just a few specimens.
One of the bigger questions unanswered by the documentary (because it IS unanswerable) is how many of the UFO personalities involved in both the Bennewitz affair and the MJ-12 papers were acting out due to ulterior motives, like Bill Moore—the only one who admitted to make that Faustian deal to spy and disinform his colleagues, in exchange for a promise of ‘real’ UFO evidence—how many were mere opportunists trying to win a few bucks and a few moments in the spotlight by attaching themselves to the story, and how many were simply lured in by the sweet scent of Disclosure promises.
As said before in the beginning of this review, several key players in this convoluted tale are now dead: Bennewitz, who was in the vortex of this disinformation storm; Stanton Friedman, who sat there in the front row of the hotel auditorium at the MUFON conference in 1989, when he listened to his fellow researcher and partner (Moore) deliver the most arrogant Mea Culpa in the history of the field, by admitting he had duped him along with everyone else; J. Allen Hynek, who may or may not have agreed to help the Air Force in deceiving Bennewitz; Gabe Valdez and David Perkins, who became peripherally involved in the affair by their interest in cattle mutilations; and John Lear, who wanted to hijack the Bennewitz’s story so he could disseminate it to a wider audience with a new disinformation tool called ‘the Internet’.
Other figures are still around (sort of): Bill Moore, who has remained in self-imposed exile from the public spotlight, and may still have more valuable info to confess about his role in all of this, before it’s too late; Rick Doty, who’s the biggest beneficiary in ufology’s short-term memory and is still regarded (God and SERPO only know) as a ‘reliable’ source of information by many new players in the field; and Linda Moulton Howe, who despite having being subjected to a disinfo operation by Doty, is still happily disseminating unverified UFO legends on the web—some people can’t resist their sweet tooth, I guess…
But nature abhors a vacuum, and the recycled, revised, and re-annotated versions of the Bennewitz story have found new ‘disseminators’ (a.k.a. ‘whistleblowers’) to spread the message: Tom DeLonge, Lue Elizondo, Dave Grusch, Eric Davis, Hal Puthoff, and a long list of newcomers eager to win their fifteen minutes of fame to sell this rotten candy with a shiny wrapper that reads “UFO Disclosure is just around the corner!”
Adam Gorightly and Chris Graybill have done an outstanding job in warning the public how it’s just the same old show, but with just different puppets—will they ever listen this time?
It almost seems as if no matter what we do, Winter is forever coming…
Saucers, Spooks & Kooks is a film documentary now available for rent at VHX. Follow their Substack or Instagram for further updates.
