Original subtitles

[narrator] Ever since humankind first looked to the heavens,

we have asked the question,

"Are we alone?"

Tales of otherworldly beings...

ancient prophecies and predictions...

and sightings here on Earth...

have heightened our sense of anticipation.

But in recent years, these claims have become

more frequent.

Do you believe our government has made contact

with intelligent extraterrestrials?

Something I can't discuss in a public setting.

[narrator] More insistent.

Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah.

[narrator] And ever more dramatic.

In 1978, one man claimed to have intercepted and decoded

extraterrestrial messages being transmitted from deep within

a U.S. Air Force base.

Classified intelligence operations were launched,

explanations given, but the truth remained elusive.

Recent claims from former military personnel that

extraterrestrial communication has not only happened, but is

commonplace, has stunned lawmakers.

You believe UAPs pose a potential threat to

our national security? -Yes.

-Yes. -Yes.

[narrator] What are we not being told?

Our team of experts reopen the files.

They'll analyze the intelligence,

investigate the science,

and reveal the truth.

[slides clicking]

In the late 1970s, Paul Bennewitz owned a small

but successful business in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He was also a committed UFO enthusiast who had spent nearly

two decades looking for UFOs when, in his own garage,

he stumbled upon a huge discovery.

Within 10 years, he would lose everything.

It all began in 1978.

Paul Bennewitz owned a private company outside

Kirtland Air Force Base, Thunder Scientific Laboratories.

[narrator] Thunder Scientific's biggest client was

the U.S. Navy, specifically their nuclear weapons storage

facility at Manzano Base, located inside

the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

Kirtland is one of the U.S. Air Force's

biggest and busiest bases, with over 20,000 people

stationed there.

Living near the base piqued Paul's curiosity.

He would often see strange colored lights flying around

the base at night.

And as a committed member of APRO, Aerial Phenomena

Research Organization, he couldn't ignore them.

Bennewitz had been a pilot and knew that what he was

seeing didn't come from any known aircraft.

Enthusiasts have long claimed that New Mexico and Colorado are

a hotbed of alien activity.

New Mexico and Colorado also happen to be home to

11 significant military bases.

[narrator] And in the 1970s, some significantly weird things

occurred there, things like cattle mutilations.

Farmers would find cows that had organs removed with

surgical precision and no sign of blood.

In several cases, no tire tracks were found

near the carcass.

And and locals had reported seeing spotlights from

unidentified helicopters.

Thousands of cattle mutilations have been reported,

and there are many different theories about what might have caused them.

[narrator] In one incident, a New Mexico state trooper, Gabe Valdez,

claimed to have looked inside a mutilated cow and found

a creature that resembled a small hybrid human.

He also claimed to find gas masks nearby.

Bennewitz began to ask questions.

Could the cattle mutilations be the work of aliens?

Or were the military testing secret weapons?

He became obsessed with finding out.

Paul Bennewitz was an expert in electronics.

He was able to build electronics and scan

for radio frequencies and other type of radio signals.

[narrator] And he quickly discovers that he is onto something.

[birds cawing]

Paul had made, in his laboratory, this device

that collected electromagnetic emissions.

He started collecting them, and he realized that one of

the frequencies was a very high frequency in a gigahertz range.

He knew that that particular frequency wasn't in use by

anybody, at least he didn't think so.

So he started more collection projects on his own,

bringing in different equipment.

[narrator] The signals are subtle,

no discernible words or messages.

[Dr. Aderin-Pocock] He recognized these as data bursts.

He quickly put them inside his computer, but what came out

was nonsense.

[narrator] He writes a program to try to decode the data bursts.

Soon, he deciphers his first message.

"Ground, ground, women of Earth are needed.

"Flexible the next discharges. Our ship, all women.

"Do not command the north among us.

"You have many friends. Water very short.

"Resist all attempts at alteration.

"Listen. Orange.

Make peace." Alarmed but intrigued,

Bennewitz continues decoding the burst and then does

something daring.

He replies on the same frequency and receives

a shocking response.

"Take vast portion universe against our aggression.

"The number of our crashed saucers is eight.

"Alien forces mean no help to you.

"Metal, we come invisible.

"We will not join sides with anyone.

Our race is dying on the home planet."

He comes to an ominous conclusion.

Paul was thoroughly convinced he was exchanging messages

with extraterrestrials.

According to Paul, the aliens' planet was dying,

and they came here to Earth to live with other

extraterrestrials who were already here.

[narrator] So Bennewitz took to his Cessna to revisit

the area around the Air Force Base.

He suspected that extraterrestrials were beaming

radio bursts from a secret underground base.

And they had something to do with the cattle mutilations.

But he needed proof.

As he flew over Dulce, New Mexico,

he discovered a large alloy dome over 11.6 meters across

and noticed metal debris and wreckage,

like a battlefield in a remote area.

Whatever happened out there, Bennewitz felt he'd seen enough.

Paul believed that an invasion was imminent and the public

must be warned.

So Paul Bennewitz did the right thing, the patriotic thing,

and he brought this information to the military.

[narrator] Paul Bennewitz gathers all he's learned and delivers a detailed

dossier to U.S. Air Force headquarters.

Paul claimed he had evidence of electromagnetic emissions

coming from inside the base.

[narrator] The U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations receives

hundreds of these claims every year, but Paul's is different.

Paul is highly skilled and has access to a secure

military base -- they take him seriously.

[Doty] He was receiving the laser signals and was able to

determine what frequencies they were coming in.

And so the United States Air Force Research Laboratory said,

"We're gonna fund you,

and you're gonna show us how to do it."

[narrator] The government assigns Richard Doty to the case.

Overnight, Bennewitz goes from being just another

UFO enthusiast to an asset of the U.S. government.

He is to keep working and send his findings directly to Doty.

He would call me and explain that he had this data.

It was my job to go pick up this data and transport it to

Kirtland and turn that over to them.

One day in 1981, Paul receives a call from Bill Moore.

Bill Moore is very well known in the UFO community.

He is one of the authors of "The Roswell Incident."

[narrator] Moore wants to meet.

He has information Bennewitz has to see.

[McDonald] Bill handed Paul a file with a warning.

And the file was Project Aquarius.

And he told him to keep the information in this

to himself.

The information in this file indicated that there was

an extraterrestrial presence on the planet Earth.

[narrator] It's the mid-1970s,

and electronics engineer Paul Bennewitz believes

he's uncovered evidence of extraterrestrial messages being

beamed to Earth by an alien race in difficulty.

Having reported these contacts, he is handed a file from none

other than the author of the acclaimed book,

"The Roswell Incident," ufologist Bill Moore.

The file was revelatory.

It mentioned the Majestic 12, an unconfirmed elite group of

U.S. leaders who have jurisdiction over

extraterrestrial activity.

Paul most certainly thought that he had been validated

and that whatever communication was happening,

the military understood it.

[narrator] The Project Aquarius document

confirms Bennewitz's fears,

drawing him deeper into his investigation.

Paul now believes that the U.S. government reached an accord

with extraterrestrials, who were being accommodated in

New Mexico.

And he writes Project Beta, a detailed plan to defeat

the aliens living in our midst.

[Doty] It was a project that he developed and that dealt

with his understanding of what the extraterrestrials wanted

and what they were going to do as far as

the invasion, the contacts the extraterrestrials wanted

with certain people on Earth,

and then what their final goal was.

[narrator] In his plan, Bennewitz makes some extreme claims.

[McDonald] Paul Bennewitz did believe that hundreds of thousands of

Americans were implanted with some type of listening

or monitoring device.

He might have come to the belief that these implants

could control them and take over them.

[narrator] Worried that the U.S. Air Force Base isn't acting

on his information, he sends Project Beta to

senators and even the President of the United States.

Paul Bennewitz's UFO research is becoming

an all-consuming obsession.

He feels alone in his beliefs, becomes increasingly paranoid,

and longs for some form of affirmation.

[Doty] One night, Bill Moore and I went out to Paul's house.

Paul was...

quite despondent.

We asked Paul what was the problem.

Paul says, "I'm really worried about the aliens.

"They're gonna try to take over Earth.

They're gonna invade Earth."

Then he took us into his -- a room next to his bedroom

and showed us these rifles he had on a bed.

And on a shelf above where the rifles were laying

were knives, a whole series of knives,

different types of knives.

And I asked Paul, I said, "What are these knives

for, Paul?"

He says, "If the bullets don't kill them, the knives will.

Because I think they're just biological, just like we are."

[narrator] Bennewitz is convinced that all humans are being watched

and scanned by alien life forms.

He produces a wildly spiking seismograph as proof.

When Moore feels a hot flash, Paul insists that he's being

remotely scanned.

Paul even shows the marks on his arms where he claims he was

injected while he slept.

As his paranoia grows, he begins to trust no one.

Paul did believe that nowhere was safe, and he was having

difficulty trusting people.

[narrator] Even as his life is falling apart around him,

Paul ignores all pleas to stop.

It did get to a point where Paul was so afraid,

terrified, and suffering from paranoia, he felt so unsafe,

that he did barricade himself in his home by putting sandbags

in front of the doors and windows.

[narrator] This was the final straw.

His family has him committed.

He would spend the next 20 years in mental agony

because nobody would believe him.

And even though some of Paul Bennewitz's claims were extreme,

Richard Doty, a counterintelligence officer

with the United States Air Force Office of Special

Investigations and respected UFO investigator, and author

Bill Moore have now confirmed that others were true.

On July 1st, 1989, at the annual MUFON convention

in Las Vegas, Nevada, Bill Moore, at one time

Bennewitz's trusted friend and collaborator, took to

the stage and confessed to a stunned audience that he had

been part of a government plan to exploit Paul Bennewitz.

The plot had started from the very first contact Bennewitz

made with the U.S. Air Force Office of

Special Investigations.

Project Seven Lambs

was a counterintelligence operation.

We used deception to try to convince Paul that what he was

seeing was actually extraterrestrials

and not some classified program.

Paul Bennewitz had tapped into something that was highly

classified at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Kirtland contained a starlight laser system.

The laser was directed into the air and could blind

passing satellites, primarily the Soviet satellites,

to prevent the satellites from taking pictures of the base

and all the classified areas of Kirtland.

Paul was able to tap into the signal that was used to

transmit that laser from ground base up in the air.

The second thing was he was photographing these objects

that were flying around Kirtland Air Force Base.

But these objects were the United States Air Force

experimental drone program, the very, very first

experimental drone program the Air Force

or the military had.

[narrator] The deeper Bennewitz got into it,

the deeper his convictions

about UFO contacts became, and the more he became a person

of interest to other intelligence agencies.

Without us knowing it, National Security Agency

started a clandestine operation against Paul Bennewitz.

[narrator] The NSA established a surveillance post across

the street, further feeding Bennewitz's paranoia.

And then there was Bill Moore's role in the operation.

Doty claims he recruited Bill Moore as an asset in 1980

as part of an operation that had nothing to do with UFOs.

Later, when he learned that Moore had access to many UFO

groups, Doty decided to use him to penetrate those groups.

[narrator] And Bennewitz was one of those whom Doty believed

Moore could usefully keep tabs on for the government.

Bill Moore was an asset for U.S. intelligence.

What we wanted to do in the Paul Bennewitz operation

is use Bill Moore as a person

outside U.S. intelligence to get closer to Paul.

[narrator] Doty and an agent referred to only as Falcon approached Moore

and offered to tell him the truth about UFOs

and extraterrestrials in exchange for information

about the UFO community.

To win his trust, they took him to classified areas

and revealed documentation about the crashed spacecraft.

Then they showed him the Silver Sky Memo.

[Doty] It was a summary of events from the Roswell crash

and other crashes up to

the U.S. government's involvement with

the research and development of extraterrestrial crafts.

That document was, I would say, 80% real.

[narrator] Having won his trust, Moore took the deal.

He would receive secret UFO documents and would report

on his community.

He would also disseminate any fake stories

that Doty brought to him.

This diet of disinformation fed Bennewitz's obsession.

His claims grew increasingly outrageous,

and his actions more erratic,

until he finally met someone who had firsthand experience of

what he'd suspected all along.

Bennewitz met with a woman named Myrna Hansen, who claimed that

she had witnessed UFOs lifting cows with tractor beams.

When the apparently brief event was over, she realized that

a significant amount of time had actually passed.

[narrator] Myrna Hansen believed she and her son

may have been abducted by aliens.

It was the opening Bennewitz was looking for.

All he needed now was corroboration.

And that came via two men who had significant experience

in studying those who claimed to have had contact with

extraterrestrials, Dr. Allen Hynek

and Dr. Leo Sprinkle.

Dr. Allen Hynek was a physicist.

He worked for the United States Air Force

on Project Blue Book from

1963 to 1969.

Dr. Hynek and Dr. Sprinkle brought Myrna Hansen to Paul,

because they wanted to

confirm some of the things she was saying with some of

the things Paul was saying.

[narrator] Dr. Sprinkle specialized in hypnotic regression therapy

and had a session with Myrna Hansen.

The story that emerged was fantastical.

[Bader] She apparently told him that she was transported onto one of

the ships, examined by gray-type aliens,

and even witnessed a cow mutilation.

[narrator] According to Richard Doty, the Air Force Office of

Strategic Intelligence put her under hypnosis as well.

[Doty] She told us a story about waking up and seeing these vats

with human beings inside of them.

Then she tells us about an underground facility

she went to.

And what shocked us was she was describing a classified bunker

on Kirtland Air Force Base out in an area

called Coyote Canyon.

Inside was all concrete.

There was an elevator.

She described that bunker.

She described the elevator going down.

She described a panel on the bottom.

She described this round circle door that the aliens

would come out of.

[narrator] She claimed that they had inserted several devices into

her body, then attempted to wipe her and her son

Shawn's memories.

Myrna Hansen's revelations served only to drive Bennewitz

further into paranoia.

This was the last hypnosis Dr. Sprinkle would undertake.

Undeterred, Bennewitz turned to James Harder to

continue the regressions.

Paul sought out to get a second regression session for

Myrna Hansen.

They were concerned that they were being listened

into by the aliens.

They ended up doing the session in a garage, in a car,

with the windows being covered in tinfoil.

[narrator] He claimed this was the only way to block the alien beams

that were controlling Myrna's memory.

He wrote to APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research

Organization based in Tucson, Arizona, to appraise them

of the situation.

"The situation here is serious," he wrote.

"She is getting the best treatment.

"She's also being badly beaten on by the aliens

with their beams."

This all took place while he was first receiving

the alien messages.

For Paul Bennewitz, the picture was clear.

Aliens were here, and they were a threat.

[narrator] From his home near Kirtland U.S. Air Force Base,

New Mexico, electrical engineer

Paul Bennewitz has become increasingly convinced that

extraterrestrials are closely monitoring human activity in

preparation to colonize planet Earth.

The smoking gun, as far as he was concerned,

was his discovery of what he believes was their hidden

base in the hills of Agua Dulce in the Arizona desert.

[Doty] Paul had a private pilot's license.

He had a plane, a Cessna, I believe it was a 180,

and Paul flew a lot.

In fact, he took me up to around Dulce and showed me

things that he thought might be connected to UFOs.

Paul took a lot of pictures of Dulce from the air,

or actually Archuleta Peak, which is next to Dulce.

He would see things on the ground.

He started asking me about different things that

he was photographing.

[narrator] Bennewitz is not alone in believing that there was

a secret underground base at Dulce that housed aliens.

Even bolder claims were made by Phillip Schneider,

an engineer who said he built deep underground military bases

for the U.S.

He claimed that there are 192 of these bases in the USA,

all interconnected, and 1,400 dotted

around the planet.

None of Schneider's claims were substantiated before his death

by suicide in 1996.

And none of it explains why Doty and the Office of

Special Investigations encouraged Bennewitz's

more extreme beliefs. -[knocking noises]

[Haseltine] The suggestion is that

they deceived Bennewitz because they wanted to shift

his attention away from something

they didn't want publicized,

off to something else that would be harmless.

Kirtland is about directed energy mainly.

It's about their laser and microwave weapons

and communication system.

[narrator] It seems like an elaborate operation just to neutralize

one man's unusual ideas.

If you've got a good asset,

you don't burn it unless you have to.

[narrator] And Paul Bennewitz was a good asset, a key and trusted part

of the UFO community, unknowingly disseminating

disinformation about what was going on in Kirtland

and diverting attention away from its real Cold War purpose.

The truth is Paul was highly likable,

and people did like him.

Paul Bennewitz was a good guy, and he was a good husband,

and he was smart, and he was patriotic, and he did do

the right thing, and he brought the information

to the military.

They misled him, misinformed him, turned him

into an asset, pushed him to the point that he could not

handle it, ending him in a psych ward.

[McDonald] Bennewitz being committed to a psychiatric hospital was

the final straw for Bill Moore.

His fateful speech at the MUFON convention in July 1989,

in which he admitted that he had encouraged Bennewitz's

obsession with UFOs at the behest of the Air Force's

Office of Special Investigations, cost him

the respect of his peers and his career as

a UFO researcher.

Richard Doty's plan had worked.

Between Bennewitz, Moore, and a handful of other

high-profile UFO personalities, OSI had managed to control

the extraterrestrial narrative.

If you can sufficiently marginalize a group,

then no one will believe them,

even if they are telling the truth.

[narrator] For his work on Project Seven Lambs, Richard Doty received

an award from General John Vessey,

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Despite Doty's success, he left his position in OSI,

and years later, his past caught up with him

in a surprising way.

Doty has now come out and said that

extraterrestrials are real.

Doty says that one of the key aspects of counterintelligence

is mixing facts with falsehoods, so that no one will

believe the facts when presented with them.

[narrator] So how can we trust the story that Doty is telling us now?

The United States government does, or at least did,

have extraterrestrials contained

inside Area 51 at a place called S2 Annex.

It existed during my time at Area 51,

which was in the middle '80s.

And we used it to house extraterrestrials.

I'm not sure if it exists today.

[narrator] He even claims that an ET had been held in New Mexico.

After the Roswell crash in New Mexico in 1947,

we recovered a craft in Corona, New Mexico.

And we also recovered one live ET.

And he was in captivity from 1947 to 1952.

He provided us information regarding a communications

device that was aboard the craft that we recovered.

He explained how it worked, and he actually was able to

operate the craft to send messages back to

his home planet.

I don't know that we knew how that occurred, but we were able

to obtain that communications device and look into it

and try to duplicate it.

[narrator] Was Kirtland Air Force Base housing aliens that helped

the government make technological advances,

as Doty now claims?

Were the transmissions Paul Bennewitz intercepted

new military technology, or in fact,

unexplained signals from outer space?

To try and find out, it's necessary to go back to

the very start of Paul Bennewitz's obsession with

Kirtland Air Force Base, and how it was triggered by

the spate of inexplicable cattle mutilations across

New Mexico in the late 1970s, rumored to be caused by

space aliens.

There has been no concrete evidence that cattle

mutilations are linked to extraterrestrials.

[narrator] Now, over 40 years later, Richard Doty is claiming

there may be something in Bennewitz's claims.

I think that the ETs are taking substances from cattle.

There must be a reason why they're taking blood,

urine, body parts from cattle

and using 'em in some manner, and I believe that they're

using 'em for experimental reasons.

[narrator] It was during this widely reported and macabre phenomenon

that Bennewitz discovered data bursts being transmitted

from Kirtland.

He stumbled onto something the government

didn't want him to know about.

[Dr. Aderin-Pocock] Data bursts are a great military tool.

Data is sent at high speed in very short bursts of time.

It can be easily mistaken for static or lightning,

so less likely to be intersected.

Usually, a data burst is digitized and compressed.

It's also encoded, and there's many different ways

of doing that.

Bennewitz will not only have to receive and store the data,

but you also have to demodulate it, decompress it,

and decrypt it too.

The likelihood he could do all that

was vanishingly close to zero.

[narrator] Which suggests that the only way Bennewitz could have

done it is if somebody wanted him to.

Had Bennewitz been sent messages that

the National Security Agency knew he would be able to decode?

One of the things one of our technical advisors says

was, "You know what? NSA is doing this.

They're sending him signals."

So we went to talk to NSA and NSA says, "No,

"we don't -- we didn't do that.

We don't have the ability to do that."

You wouldn't have to use someone as sophisticated as NSA

to do that.

Having been at NSA and being one of their senior leaders,

I find that highly unlikely.

[narrator] But Doty now claims they found listening devices planted by

another intelligence agency in Bennewitz's house.

Although surprisingly, there was nothing on

his computer to suggest it had been tampered with.

We went into the residence, and we found every one of

those bugs, and we removed them.

But none of those bugs were on his computer.

None of them.

We got a computer expert, one of ours.

She took that computer apart, examined every single piece of

that computer in there, and found it.

There's nothing in there that would cause these messages.

And so we were confused.

We couldn't figure out why he was receiving

these messages.

Now you ask, maybe they were really coming from ETs.

[narrator] Or there could be a simpler explanation.

Paul was either doing it, literally doing it, or he was

just making it up, but we couldn't determine that.

[narrator] Either way, Paul Bennewitz was right about one thing.

If ETs were going to contact us,

current belief is they'd use radio waves.

Radio waves are considered the most likely method of

interstellar communication.

[narrator] It's one of the ways that SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial

Life program, which began years after the Paul Bennewitz

incident, scans the skies.

Organizations like SETI search for radio signals transmitted

by extraterrestrial civilizations.

SETI looks for radio transmissions because these are

the easiest to send and receive over wide areas.

Only when they've eliminated all spurious noise

do they start to suspect an alien signal.

But the efforts to communicate are currently speculative,

and success is uncertain.

The vastness of space and the limit of technology

means communicating with anything out there

is challenging.

The only documented signal that I know about is the "Wow!" signal,

collected by Ohio State radio astronomers in 1977.

This famous signal has never been explained as a human-made

or celestial phenomena,

and it could have even been from an ET.

[narrator] Meanwhile, to try and make contact from Earth,

we have sent a calling card hurtling through space at

48,000 kilometers per hour.

[Dr. Aderin-Pocock] Yes, the Voyager Golden Disk.

It describes humanity to anyone out there

that might run into it.

So far, it's traveled nearly 24 billion kilometers.

[narrator] Our closest star, Proxima Centauri,

is over 40 trillion kilometers away.

Voyager is six ten-thousandths of the way there.

It's highly unlikely that these types of signals will ever be

received, as our attempts at interstellar communication rely

on certain assumptions and bases for our calculations.

[Haseltine] The value of pi is an example.

The speed of light, the spectrum of light that

comes out of excited hydrogen.

Those things are true everywhere.

Those are the things we put in our message to show

extraterrestrial civilizations that we understand basic

elements of the universe.

[narrator] The presumption is that any other intelligent civilization

will also be wondering if they're alone.

And so far, after more than half a century of listening,

only the "Wow!" signal is considered a candidate.

And even receiving that is bordering on the miraculous

when you consider Milky Way galaxy is a thousand trillion

kilometers in diameter.

And that represents just one millionth of one percent

of the whole of the universe.

The distances are staggering.

[narrator] Even though the chance of alien contact is vanishingly small,

many people believe it has already happened.

How else to explain so many UFO sightings, they argue,

and the government's fervent denials?

Conspiracy theories are very common in the UFO community.

The longer that community goes without definitive proof,

the more convinced it becomes that the government is

hiding evidence.

[narrator] The campaign of denial has lasted for decades.

[Bader] As early as 1949, Marine Corps aviator and UFO author

Donald Keyhoe was claiming that the Air Force

was hiding information about UFOs.

In 1962, UFO author Albert Bender claimed that three men

in black came to his home and frightened him from

revealing the truth about UFOs.

[narrator] By the time Paul Bennewitz discovered the radio bursts

from Kirtland, he was already displaying some signs of

paranoia and anxiety.

But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean

they're not after you.

It's hard to know if people become conspiracy theorists

because they are anxious, or if they become anxious

because they believe people are after them.

[narrator] The intelligence community effectively exploited

Bennewitz's anxiety to discredit him,

which suggests that Paul Bennewitz had stumbled onto

something the government absolutely did not want him

to know.

So they took him apart, piece by piece.

Everything I did regarding the Paul Bennewitz case,

Project Seven Lambs, was controlled by headquarters,

AFOSI, or Headquarters Defense Intelligence Agency.

I never worked independently. I never worked as a maverick.

I did everything

dictated by headquarters.

All I had to do is say, "You know what, Paul?

I think you're right." That's all I had to do.

We'd never drug Paul.

We never gave him any kind of psychotropic drugs.

We never did any of that.

We just had to reinforce what Paul was already believing in.

Whether it was morally right is another thing.

It's not clear how common it was for U.S. government agents

to exploit the mental illness of their targets.

But to me, it seems highly unethical,

and I would have thought illegal.

[narrator] At the very least, it's no way to treat a friend.

I became friends with Paul.

I would go over to his house for dinner.

His wife would invite me over and some other agents.

[narrator] But Doty had a job to do.

There were many times during this operation,

Project Seven Lambs, that I questioned what headquarters

wanted me to do.

I had this...

suspicion that, at some point,

what the headquarters wanted us to do would come back to haunt

the United States government.

I think, in some respects, it has.

Mr. Grusch, do you believe that our government is in possession

of UAPs? -[Grusch] Absolutely.

I know the exact locations.

[narrator] In the late 1970s, Paul Bennewitz claimed to have

intercepted signals to and from outer space from

the Kirtland U.S. Air Force Base in New Mexico.

His beliefs in extraterrestrial activity were encouraged by

government agent Richard Doty,

who subsequently revealed that Paul, in common with many

UFO watchers, was encouraged in his speculations to divert

attention from top-secret Cold War programs in

a disinformation campaign known as Project Seven Lambs.

Now, however, Doty has further revealed that Bennewitz

may well have hit upon genuine unexplained UFO activity,

which the U.S. intelligence community was desperately

trying to cover up.

Either way, Bennewitz was ultimately committed to

a psychiatric facility.

Such personal betrayals are seen as serving

the greater good.

As a senior intelligence officer,

I can say that human intelligence

is absolutely essential to our national security.

And so it's the cost of doing business if we want to remain

safe in an unsafe world.

During the time that I was running Project Seven Lambs,

I considered it a very valid counterintelligence operation

that was protecting national security.

But years later, in present time,

I don't think it did.

[Haseltine] If the government is concealing information related

to the UAP sightings,

then my guess would be, it's not about whether

they're aliens or not, it would be about the sources

and methods that were involved in collecting the data.

So if they gather that information from sensitive

classified instruments, they're not gonna tell

anyone about that aspect of it.

[narrator] Even now, as rumors swirl

and more alleged facts surface,

can we trust them?

We still don't know if the data bursts were top secret

military tech, ET communications,

or some combination.

There is no basis here to conclude that there's one shred

of evidence of alien involvement.

What we have is admitted deception on the one hand,

and the imaginings of someone who's acknowledged to have

mental illness on the other.

I don't think that the Air Force was concerned

that he was a foreign spy, necessarily.

I think it was simpler than that.

They just didn't like people listening to

their data transmissions.

And so they were gonna investigate it, and then if

possible, they were gonna assess the damage that had been

done, and then ultimately bring it to a stop.

[narrator] It would appear that the case is closed.

Bennewitz did uncover secret transmissions.

A multi-agency operation was launched to

undermine his credibility and successfully forced people

to question his sanity.

And there the story would rest, until the man responsible for

the operation against Bennewitz broke cover to suggest there is

far more truth in the UFO stories he spent

his intelligence career derailing than the government

wants you to know.

I retired from U.S. intelligence or U.S. government in 1988.

But after my NDA expired in 2002, I decided to come forth

with the real information about what I knew regarding UFOs

and extraterrestrial contacts.

I want the real truth to come out.

I don't want this made up truth where the falsehoods are being

presented by the UFO community. I want the real truth.

I have the real truth.

That's why I started to present the truth.

[narrator] And even if, in light of his past activities,

we might find it hard to believe Doty's revised claims,

they are strikingly similar to those made by former Air Force

intelligence officer David Grusch in a public

congressional hearing in July 2023.

If you believe we have crashed craft as stated earlier,

do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?

As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview,

biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah.

Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?

Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with

direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently

still on the program.

[narrator] Maybe Bennewitz wasn't so crazy after all.