Part One: How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One – How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind

Release Date: February 11, 2025
Host: Jim Sterling
Guest: Brandy Posey
Producer: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction

In the inaugural episode of this multipart series titled "How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind," host Jim Sterling delves deep into the murky intersection of government disinformation and UFO conspiracy theories. Sterling brings back Brandy Posey as a guest to explore how one man's genuine pursuit of truth was systematically dismantled by intelligence agencies. The conversation sets the stage for a riveting exploration of governmental manipulation, the birth of UFO culture, and the personal tragedy of Paul Benowitz.

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The Origins of UFO Culture

Project Mogul and Roswell
Sterling begins by tracing the roots of modern UFO mythology to the post-World War II era. He explains how Project Mogul, a secret Air Force initiative aimed at detecting Soviet nuclear tests using high-altitude balloons, inadvertently sowed the seeds for the Roswell incident in 1947. Sterling states:

"[...] Project Mogul was set up to record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials. One of these balloons crashed near Roswell, and due to its classified nature, the Air Force had to cover it up, leading to the infamous UFO claims."
— Jim Sterling [14:50]

Early Government Disinformation
The term "unidentified flying phenomena" (UAP) became the official nomenclature, neither confirming nor denying extraterrestrial involvement. Sterling emphasizes how the government's initial miscommunication fueled public hysteria and skepticism:

"The government initially said it was a weather balloon, but the secrecy behind Project Mogul led investigators to believe they had encountered something extraterrestrial."
— Jim Sterling [15:20]

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The Rise and Fall of UFO Interest

Cattle Mutilations in New Mexico
Moving forward to the 1970s, Sterling discusses the mysterious cattle mutilations near Dulce, New Mexico. Gabe Valdez, a state trooper and ufology figure, uncovers disturbing evidence suggesting these mutilations were tied to Project Gas Buggy, part of the larger Project Plowshare initiative aimed at using nuclear explosions for civil engineering purposes.

"Valdez discovered that the cattle were drugged with atropine and a gas mask was found at the site, pointing towards a government experiment rather than alien involvement."
— Jim Sterling [37:39]

Government Projects and Plans (Project Plowshare, Gas Buggy)
Sterling provides an overview of the Plowshare program, highlighting its ambitious—and ultimately disastrous—attempts to repurpose nuclear technology for peaceful uses, such as creating harbors and extracting natural gas.

"Project Gas Buggy involved detonating a 29-kiloton bomb to fracture rock formations for gas extraction, which contaminated the natural gas with radioactive tritium, rendering it unusable."
— Jim Sterling [49:03]

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The Story of Paul Benowitz

Background and Career
Paul Benowitz, an engineer with a master's degree in physics, founded Thunder Scientific in 1969, supplying measurement instruments to NASA and the Air Force. Sterling portrays him as a dedicated professional whose fascination with UFOs began in the mid-1970s.

"Benowitz was an open-minded seeker, deeply patriotic, and genuinely interested in uncovering the truth behind the UFO phenomena."
— Jim Sterling [33:32]

Involvement in UFO Research
Benowitz's participation in UFO conferences and his collaboration with Gabe Valdez positioned him as a credible figure within the UFO community. Their joint investigations into unexplained aerial phenomena further entangled them in governmental scrutiny.

"Paul installed an arsenal of tracking antennas on his roof to record signals from UFOs, believing these craft posed a national security threat."
— Jim Sterling [62:43]

Government Targeting
As Benowitz's findings garnered attention, the government recognized him as a potential threat to their clandestine projects. Sterling introduces Richard Doty, an Air Force intelligence officer tasked with discrediting Benowitz's claims.

"Doty was brought in to manipulate and undermine Benowitz, effectively destroying his credibility and mental stability to protect classified government operations."
— Jim Sterling [63:31]

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Government Manipulation and Disinformation

Use of Con Men like Silas Newton
Sterling discusses how the government, particularly the CIA and NSA, employed individuals like Silas Newton to spread false UFO narratives, thereby discrediting genuine investigators. Newton's fabricated stories about alien encounters were part of a broader psychological warfare strategy.

"Silas Newton was a con man who sold fake oil leases and spread lies about aliens, likely at the behest of intelligence agencies aiming to muddy the waters of UFO research."
— Jim Sterling [20:06]

Richard Doty's Role
Doty’s involvement in manipulating Benowitz is highlighted as a central theme of the episode. His efforts to gaslight Benowitz exemplify the government's broader strategy to suppress whistleblowers and control the narrative around UFO phenomena.

"Doty's mission was clear: undermine Benowitz's credibility and ensure that his legitimate concerns about classified projects remained buried."
— Jim Sterling [63:31]

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Connections to Modern Conspiracy Theories

Impact on QAnon and X-Files
Sterling draws parallels between historical government disinformation campaigns and contemporary conspiracy theories like QAnon. He suggests that the foundational myths of UFO culture have influenced today's belief systems, perpetuating mistrust in government institutions.

"The disinformation tactics used in the early UFO era laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy theories, making it easier for movements like QAnon to gain traction."
— Jim Sterling [03:46]

Cultural Representation
The influence of these real-world events on popular culture is discussed, notably their impact on iconic shows like The X-Files. Sterling notes how government manipulation feeds into fictional narratives, blurring the lines between reality and entertainment.

"The X-Files drew heavily from actual government disinformation campaigns, encapsulating the paranoia and mistrust that have long surrounded UFO phenomena."
— Jim Sterling [09:08]

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Conclusion and Cliffhanger

As the episode wraps up, Sterling sets the stage for the next installment by highlighting the imminent confrontation between Paul Benowitz and Richard Doty. This cliffhanger promises an in-depth look into the tactics used to dismantle Benowitz's credibility and the broader implications for whistleblowers facing government suppression.

"In Part Two, we'll uncover how Doty systematically destroyed Benowitz's mind, ensuring that his discoveries about secret government projects remained hidden."
— Jim Sterling [65:25]

Brandy Posey enthusiastically teases the continuation, encouraging listeners to stay tuned for an unraveling narrative that not only sheds light on historical injustices but also reflects ongoing struggles between truth-seekers and powerful institutions.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jim Sterling [02:13]: "The Air Force was like, let's convince this guy it's all aliens. And they kind of destroyed his mind."

• Brandy Posey [35:23]: "Somebody's gotta be throwing the after parties. So you have these guys there."

• Jim Sterling [39:03]: "Project Plowshare was named after Isaiah 2, 4 in the Bible. They will beat their swords into plowshares."

• Jim Sterling [63:09]: "Benowitz received what he believed were alien transmissions."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Behind the Bastards masterfully intertwines historical events with personal narratives, offering listeners a compelling examination of how government actions can profoundly impact individual lives and shape cultural myths. Sterling and Posey's dynamic discussion not only entertains but also provokes critical thinking about the nature of truth, power, and the lengths to which authorities will go to maintain control.

Listeners are left eagerly anticipating Part Two, where the full extent of the government's psychological warfare against a truth-seeker will be unveiled.

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For more episodes, visit coolzonemedia.com or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

Transcript

[Jim Sterling]

Jiminy Christmas. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast that for whatever reason is about aliens right now. Look, folks, after three straight weeks of Oprah, I needed something fun. So we did a couple of book episodes on aliens and then I fell down a rabbit hole. And so this week we're bringing back one of our favorite guests, the great Brandy Posey. Brandy, welcome to the show. Do you believe in aliens?

[Brandy Posey]

Well, that's a good question because like, what is an alien? I guess is. How do you want to define it? And also, do you believe in multiple dimensions? Because these are.

[Jim Sterling]

You know what, that's exactly what I hoped for. Kind of not so much the dimension stuff we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about a real act of bastardry that's kind of at the very beginning. Well, not the beginning, kind of the middle point, but it's foundational to the UFO culture that gave us the X Files. Like we are talking about the stuff that became the X Files, which started as a disinformation campaign. And a lot of it can be tied specifically to an Air Force intelligence guy named Richard Doty, who was basically brought in to mentally abuse and, and destroy a basically decent, possibly, definitely too credulous guy who started finding evidence of like recording evidence of like secret Air Force research. And so the Air Force was like, let's convince this guy it's all aliens. And they kind of destroyed his mind. So that's the story we're telling. But this, it's a excellent. Yeah, it's a fascinating tale both because it explains a lot of how we get to Qanon, how we do get stuff like the X Files, a lot of kind of the core myths of UFO conspiracy culture, all that stuff. But it's also just a great story about like the US Intelligence services absolutely destroying a man in order to protect their ability to make engines of death, which is, you know, that's, that's some good stuff. We all love this shit.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, the more examples the better. And there are many. But I don't know any with aliens yet, so. Very exciting.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, this, this will be a lot with aliens. And I'm, you know, I'm, I think where I come down on this, I don't believe I've never seen anything that's made me convinced that there's life outside of this planet. But I'm like open minded to it, like Fox Mulder. I'd like to believe I'm just open minded in the sense that I'm a skeptic. I don't think I get kind of pissed when people look at folks who are kind of genuinely trying to interrogate the information out there and they're like, well, that's just crazy to think about because it's not. And it's not crazy to think that the government would lie about stuff like that. But that said, everything I've ever seen, including like the stuff that came out 2020, 2021, that little pill shaped craft, you know, that's kind of like the most recent big UFO disclosure. And if you watch that audio, because it's all from like, I think F18 pilots, you can hear the pilots are genuinely like, what the fuck is this thing? I have no idea what it is. Right. And I do, I understand why people default to, well, that must mean it's aliens. But like, there's a long history of all sorts of countries, the United States and countries that are geopolitical enemies of the United States, testing all sorts of weird craft that like, people don't like, are capable of doing things people did not know was possible at the time. And that is like the origin of most of our UFO myths is stuff that's completely explicable that you wouldn't let some pilot in on. Right. Because it's too for him.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, well, because like, you could imagine, like also the first time somebody saw an automobile, did they think that was an alien? It's just, you know, human. And as we're building technology in different ways. Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

Or as we'll talk about. Cause this is a lot of the story we're talking about today. The first time people saw drones. Right. Especially at night. You know, you've got this thing that's got a bunch of lights on it that moves in a way that planes certainly don't move like drones, Right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yep.

[Jim Sterling]

You see that shit in 1980, in the dead of night above an Air Force base. It's not necessarily like you're not a crazy person being like, well, I wonder if that's something like fucking not of this Earth. Right. And the Air Force, like the basic story we're telling the day is the Air Force being like, oh, yeah, that's much better than them believing we're working on ways to murder people through robots.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So that's the story we're gonna tell this week. And that's the end of the cold open.

[Brandy Posey]

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[Jim Sterling]

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[Jim Sterling]

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[Jim Sterling]

O On Saturday, February 22nd at 1:30pm.

[Brandy Posey]

Eastern, it's the Pro Volleyball Federation's first All Star match.

[Jim Sterling]

The league's biggest stars will clash in a can't miss event hosting the Indy Metro area home of the indie Ignite. Catch every serve, spike and save live on cbs. Don't miss this historic showdown of volleyball's finest, the Pro Volleyball Federation all star.

[Brandy Posey]

Match on February 27th 2nd at 1:30pm Be there.

[Jim Sterling]

Ah, and we're back. We're starting the episodes. Brandi, it's been a bit since you've been on the show. You are a very busy person and I wanted to before we get into the episode, is there anything you wanted to kind of plug up top?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, definitely. So my podcast lady to lady has been around for 13 years at this point. We're every Wednesday for 13 years. We're an independent show where me and my two co hosts have have a fourth guest on every week who's usually another female identifying person and it's just four women riffing in like a positive way which is something that entertainment doesn't want to show you very often. So they've been around forever. I also have a. An independent comedy record label that I started last year called Burn this Records. You can find us on Instagram atburn this records.com and basically that is like a completely DIY project trying to lift up voices from around the country that other labels aren't dealing with. And I'm off also doing it in a much less predatory way than most comedy labels work. I've always self released all of my own things and I'm just like expanding that information to try to like include more people and kind of keep. Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

As a rule in the industry, the only thing more evil than like the NSA and military intelligence is comedy labels.

[Brandy Posey]

Yes, very. I mean, honestly, you're not wrong.

[Jim Sterling]

No, no. That was only a partial joke we could do.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. I have a couple of bastards for you for later if you ever want to need a couple of pitches.

[Jim Sterling]

It is funny how like horror, horror cinema and whatnot. Nearly all like nice people involved in making it comedy. Real mixed bag. A lot of monsters in comedy. People.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah. I mean the best, the best of people and the worst of people I've met in comedy. And I think comedy is an important thing in our culture because I think it is important to remember that just because someone makes you laugh and is charming, it does not mean they were a good person at all. It is a trick. It's a trick that we are able to do.

[Jim Sterling]

Actually one of the most important things to accept about the world is like, just because somebody's, you know, we. We don't need to get into this right now, but I agree with you entirely. So yeah, yeah, to fucking aliens. Not aliens, fucking aliens. But back to fucking aliens.

[Brandy Posey]

I don't know where this story is going. We'll see.

[Jim Sterling]

Maybe, maybe. I mean it actually always, nearly always doesn't like lead. If you follow like any UFO conspiracy thread, it does eventually like lead to people are breeding with the aliens. I mean that was a big part of the first five seasons of the X Files. Right. But yeah, I started this episode by talking about that Air Force footage actually. Honestly, I forget if they were Air Force or Navy pilots, but it was released 2020, 2021. That like pill shaped weird thing in the sky that those pilots are like, what the fuck is this shit? As I wrote this near the end of January, the most recent kind of big UFO news was that a few days before we recorded this episode, Republican Representative Tim Burchett claimed that he spoke to an admiral who he did not name, who told him that he had seen that there was evidence that the Navy had evidence of an unidentified naval vehicle, quote, moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater that was as large as a football field. Which sounds like he's trying to prepare us for the idea that seaQuest is real. And I hope that means that Roy Scheider has secretly been alive this whole time, because maybe we'll get a chance.

[Brandy Posey]

And Jonathan Brandis.

[Jim Sterling]

Let's get Jonathan Brandis. Yes. Yes. Get them all back. Bring them all back. I'm so glad you got my sequest joke, Brandy. No one ever does. Prior to this, In November of 2024, the Pentagon had published a report revealing hundreds of previously undocumented UFO sightings. Now, again, ufo, and they use unidentified aerial phenomena, I think is the actual official term they use. But like, this does not mean there are hundreds of cases of. The Pentagon said, yeah, we've seen hundreds of alien sightings. It means we've seen hundreds of things in the sky at various points that like, we don't actually know fully what they are. Right, Because a lot of people be flying a lot of weird shit in the sky. Right? We just had a mild public hysteria when unidentified drones were spotted flying over cities in the northeast. People panicked. There was like reports that, oh, it's Iran, has a drone carrier parked off the coast. And like, guys, if you've been like, looking at how fucking Iranian power producers rejection has been working in the areas right next to them, they're not flying drones over D.C. from a fucking hidden carrier. No. Panic was stoked by initial claims by government officials that there was no record. The FBI, someone came out, was like, we don't have any record of scheduled drone flights. And people I know freaked out because they're like, well, the FBI says they don't know what it is. And again, I. I need you, as I always ask, think back to 9 11, right, where all of these different federal agencies had pieces of that and none of them talked to each other. The fact that the FBI didn't know about this shit is not weird. Government agencies are dog shit at talking to each other. And in fact, it took several weeks. But in late January, after the transition, the White House made a statement that the drone flights had in fact been approved. This was just everyone kind of fucking up. And the confusion was likely stoked by a confluence of factors. Drone development is advancing rapidly. Different federal agencies are bad at talking to each other. Some of the drones being tested were likely so classified that individuals involved preferred A public panic over UFOs or Iranian drone carriers to actual info about their projects being revealed. And all of these reasons are essentially the same reasons that led to the birth of UFO conspiracy theories in the first place. Starting with the supposed crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The OG yeah, the OG and it's, I think there's this attitude that like we have Roswell, there's this crash in 47. The government initially says, and this is what's really unique about Roswell. The first government reports are some sort of fucking saucer crashed, right? Yeah, the only time that's really happened. And then they came out and said, no, it's a weather balloon. But there's this attitude that like, and from that moment Roswell was like the center of UFO culture. It really wasn't. It actually kind of fell off for like more than a decade. But before people started like kind of recentering Roswell in American UFO mythos and part of why. So first when we're talking about like what actually happened at Roswell, probably the best non alien theory is that earlier in 1940, and I think this is pretty credible, earlier in 1947, the US government had launched something called Project Mogul. And the idea was to set up a series of balloon listening stations to receive and record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials. Researchers from the U.S. army Air Force's secret R and D division tested a cluster of 14 of these balloons, one of which went down near Roswell in July. Just a few weeks earlier in June, a Republican politician and pilot named Kenneth Arnold had sparked the first great UFO panic in US history by reporting to have seen nine silver discs flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. When the rancher who owned the land in Roswell that one of these balloons crashed onto a guy named Mac Brazil went to the nearby airfield and like went to the air, well, the Army Air Corps and was like, hey, I found like some weird shit on my property. They sent out investigators. Now due to the secrecy behind Project Mogul, the investigators they sent didn't know about that project. So some of these guys, and in fact the guy who's kind of first on scene will claim years later and will be consistent for the rest of his life after that point and believe it in saying like, I, I saw an, like, like a craft, I can't explain, I believe it was an alien craft, right? Or the remains of an alien craft. Now again, there was technology in these air balloons that was not widely available or that people, and that people were not widely knowledgeable about and the guys who responded to this crash didn't fucking know about the program because it was heavily classified. So, you know, you can come out of this either saying like, well, I think that they did find some aliens, or I think probably if we're doing the Occam's Razor thing, it's not super weird to assume like, yeah, the government. Every. Every part of our incredibly paranoid defense was lying to every other part and hiding all sorts of. And these guys just didn't know what the. They saw.

[Brandy Posey]

Well, I think often, like, we want aliens to be true instead of that. Like, it feels. Yeah, it's much more comforting. I mean, yeah, I. I think people are. Even with everything, all the little videos and everything that coming out in the last few years, I think people keep being like, yeah, sure, okay, great. Would love it. Can they. Can they take over? Yeah, sure. An alien is here. That means somebody is actually maybe in charge that isn't us. That would be great.

[Jim Sterling]

It's that I used to. I definitely had that period where I was more in the, like, dark hunter in the forest sort of thing. Like, oh, maybe we don't want aliens, you know? No, no, no. At this point, if there's aliens, they can't be worse than us. They literally can't. Like, we're so bad at running our country and our planet. Like, just bring them on, let them in.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, exactly. Please. Would love it.

[Jim Sterling]

They want to eat us. Fine. I'm all. We're already all being eaten. We're already being consumed by the guys who own fucking bank social media companies. We might as well be eaten by aliens who have. Cool.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, maybe plastic has been an alien the entire time.

[Jim Sterling]

It.

[Brandy Posey]

Why not take it over everyone's brain?

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, God, I would. I would feel such a sense of peace if the mushroom men at the center of Mount Shasta were proved to be real.

[Brandy Posey]

Truly.

[Jim Sterling]

But alas. So initial local reporting on the Roswell crash was pretty good. It described accurately what was found on Max Farm. To further allay suspicions, the army allowed several journalists to tour the nearby base at Alamogordo, where they were fed a series of lies about the weather balloon. Namely, they were told it was for meteorological purposes, not for spying on Russian nuclear tests. Because we really didn't want people to know how well the Russians were doing at some of that stuff. Right. But otherwise, they were generally accurately informed about the crash. And that was it for a while. Interest in UFOs flatlined not long after Roswell, thanks to Kenneth Arnold. Now the whole Pacific Northwest had caught UFO fever after he made public statements about seeing that group of UFOs around Rainier. And on July 1, people in and around Twin Falls, Idaho started seeing glowing discs or balls in the sky. So many people saw them in such quick succession that something real had to be going on. This is one of those things where it's like, wow, a shitload of people are seeing something like this is not just a hysteria. And it was not just a hysteria. One of the discs was recovered and was found to be a 30 inch metal metal disc with a Plexiglas bubble and some scratch assembled electronic parts, vacuum tubes and shit. The whole thing turned out to have been a prank by some kids with a basic understanding of engineering. They built a fake UFO to fuck with respect. Respect. It's cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm always supportive of doing that. Why not fuck with people at this point?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jim Sterling]

That's actually what got us here. So maybe that's not a good idea. Don't listen to me, folks. Don't listen to me. Maybe do if it's funny. So public interest in UFOs kind of fell off after this. This is sort of what makes people like. Because there's this initial surge in interest and belief and like Roswell might have immediately been kind of a big thing, but then there's this very famous hoax that happens within days of Roswell and suddenly people are like, oh, you know what? Maybe only crazy people in cranks believe in UFOs, right? And that's kind of what happens after this, right? There's UFO culture continues to evolve, but it's not a thing that the average American of feels good if they take it seriously. You don't want to talk about it, right? Because then you'll get kind of like written off as a kook, you know?

[Brandy Posey]

Well, and it ruins their lives. I think everyone that's ever come forward like publicly about, you know, a potential alien encounter, they're not better for it after they've told everybody about that.

[Jim Sterling]

No. And as, again, as we'll talk about, a lot of those people, you know, are we're definitely being fed lies by the government because government was like, well shit, we can distract attention from like the shit that we're doing if we just like fuck with these people. So in 1950, a guy named Frank Sculley publishes a book titled behind the Flying Saucers based on an article he'd written for Variety. The core of this book and the core of that article was based on a speech by an oil millionaire and alien obsessive named Silas Newton. Or at least that's how Silas Newton wanted people to see him. As like a guy who'd gotten rich in oil and was also into aliens. Silas Newton was a con man.

[Brandy Posey]

Man, as most Silas are not to berch the Silases of the world. Silai, I don't know how I've never.

[Jim Sterling]

Met a good Silas look.

[Brandy Posey]

No, neither have I. A name, frankly, thankfully lost to the ages as well.

[Jim Sterling]

That's right. That's right. Don't name your kids Silas. And if you're a Silas, change your name. Right.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

You know, that's the official stance of this podcast. Sorry, Sil.

[Brandy Posey]

No, I agreed.

[Jim Sterling]

I'm not gonna lie.

[Brandy Posey]

Official stance of lady to lady as well. I speak for my podcast. Several podcasts are against Silas.

[Jim Sterling]

We're going to get like a whole group together here that we're going to be like the NATO of trying to stop people from being named Silas.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jim Sterling]

So author Adam Go rightly describes what Newton is saying about aliens in this lecture. This way. Newton claimed that a flying saucer piloted by otherworldly midgets had crashed in Aztec, New Mexico in 1948. The source of Newton's saucer revelations was a mysterious Dr. G who had purportedly examined the remains of these interplanetary trappers. Travelers, and viewed pieces of the saucer debris. So, you know, not the most woke way to describe any of this, but it's the 50s. What do you expect?

[Brandy Posey]

That's interesting too, because, like, there's those Peruvian quote unquote, alien mummies that came out a year or two ago that.

[Jim Sterling]

Those people have been talking about those for a minute too.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

And that. That's. That's a. I don't know that we seem to be generally believe that aliens are short rather than tall.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Unless you're a tall white, which is its own.

[Jim Sterling]

Unless you're a tall white. You got the Nordics. Of course.

[Brandy Posey]

Yes.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah. So Scully writes this book based on the kind of shit that Silas is saying. And as soon as the book comes out, it is revealed to all be based on a host. Newton had been working with a friend to spread lies about aliens because he was just sort of a general con man. He was probably not a millionaire, and he certainly did not have a legitimate oil business. He actually made his money by selling fake leases to supposedly oil rich land alongside magnetic oil detecting machines. So he will. He will sell you a lease that isn't real to land and bring along a machine that you can lease that will show you that there's oil on that land and none of it's real. Just a con man, a beautiful con man, one of America's greats, but that's pretty good.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. So he's a scoundrel with an eye for any con that might bring profit. And he was caught quickly. But his work caught the eye of a group of the greatest scoundrels and con men in U.S. history. The Central Intelligence Agency or some government agency. We actually don't know that it was the CIA. I don't know that any of this is true. As we're going to get to all of the sources on stuff like there's definitely, definitely a lot that is verifiable here. But every source who comes forward from inside the government, all of the former intel officers who talk about this stuff, they're all also kind of. Not kind of. They're all also extremely fucking shady and they lie about a ton of shit. So. In his book Saucer Spooks and Kooks, Adam Go rightly notes that a former CIA officer, Carl Flock, claimed to have uncovered records that Silas Newton was visited by shadowy government agents who asked him to keep telling tall tales about flying saucers. Flock mused, did the US government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps? Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation? And I believe, I think there's a very good chance that Silas was encouraged to keep doing this because we have good documentation that different intel agencies, including the nsa, encouraged people to tell flying saucer stories. Right. The CIA as well did this. I don't think Silas Newton was being, again, I don't think this is like psych warfare or necessarily covering up a real alien thing. The evidence suggests that they're covering up weapons development. Right? Yeah. So like a startling number of foundational UFO culture dudes, Carl was also into right wing politics. After working at IBM and the CIA, he was hired by the American Enterprise Institute to work as a senior editor. He could contributed to the Libertarian Review and Reason magazine as well as writing short stories about aliens. During the Reagan administration, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for operational test and evaluation. And this is a lot of, a lot of these guys, like so many. It's again, when people are kind of casually into it, they'll be like, well, now it's pilots saying that there's aliens and now it's a member of the government. And it's like from the beginning, the two people making the most reports that there were aliens were Republican politicians and pilots, because pilots see a lot of weird shit and Republicans believe anything you tell them, you know?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, no, exactly.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. So Flock is an interesting figure in UFO culture because he was both a believer, or at least a quasi believer, and a skeptic, publishing a book that ultimately debunked Roswell and first made public the connection between that event and Project Mogul. As guys in this world go, he's more credible than most. But that comes with a big asterisk, right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. So for a while, flying saucers are decidedly fringe, although some of the most consistent true believers are former military officers who often had intelligence clearances. In the 1950s, some of the most active UFO research groups by civilians were made by and for former military intelligence guys. And this may have had something to do with the fact that the CIA and the dia, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had experimented by this early point in putting out misinformation on UFOs to test subordinates. Right. And the logic here is that, okay, you want to know, this guy is kind of like he's a security guard at a facility where we're really doing some shit, and maybe he's someone we're thinking about promoting to be in a more sensitive thing. Tell him that there's aliens. Tell him that we have a flying saucer. If that gets out in the media, you know, this guy can't be trusted. Right. And if he doesn't say shit, then maybe you tell him the truth, maybe you don't. But, like, either way, you know, you can trust him. Because if he's not going to tell the media that, like, there's fucking aliens, maybe he's actually like somebody that we can trust with. With real secrets, you know?

[Brandy Posey]

I love that the government runs like Scientology. It's absolutely.

[Jim Sterling]

Runs like science. It's all cults all the way down, baby. That's American culture.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Instead of Xenu, it's, you know, whatever we're calling this one.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. Flying saucers become sexy again in the late 1970s when a researcher named Leonard Stringfield makes a public presentation at the 1978 Mutual UFO Network Symposium. MUFON, I think, is what people call it.

[Brandy Posey]

I've been to a MUFON meeting.

[Jim Sterling]

I would love to go to a MU meeting. That sounds like a hoot.

[Brandy Posey]

It was a blast.

[Jim Sterling]

He claims that a retired Air Force colonel had told him that an alien craft had, in fact been recovered at Roswell. And this guy was one of the first military responders at Roswell. Roswell and died convinced that what he saw was an alien spacecraft. The narrative starts to pick up steam from here. And an NSA memo revealed as part of a FOIA request suggests the CIA had something to do with it. Here's Go Rightley's book Again. Again. The memo, dated August 29, 1978, was written by an unidentified NSA assignee who commented on what he suspected to be a number of fraudulent CIA memos presented at the symposium. It was later revealed that the assignee in question was a former NSA employee and MUFON board member Tom Dalouy. And a lot of guys at MUFON have like, like are reached out to by people in intelligence agencies and fed info. So it's, it's, it's very, very hard to say what, like, were these CIA memos just something some people made up? Were they memos the CIA faked or were they memos the NSA faked pretending it was the CIA? Right. All of these things are kind of possible because all of this happened it to some extent.

[Brandy Posey]

And if you want to believe, then you're just like, please, I won't question it. Just give it to me.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just give me the good stuff. Yeah. Speaking of the good stuff, that's the sponsors of our podcast. Wow. This show is sponsored by Better Help. We talk a lot about red flags in relationships when you're looking for someone to date or for a friend or just people in general. But what about green flags? Things that let you know that somebody's a person you might want to be more involved with? Well, if you're not sure what a green flag looks like for you, therapy can help you identify green flags and actively practice them in your relationship. So you can embody green flag energy yourself. Whether you're dating, married, building a friendship, or just working on you, it's time to form relationships that love you back. And therapy can help with that. It can help you learn positive coping skills and how to set boundaries. And that empowers you to be the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of therapy, BetterHelp might be a great option. It's fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide. Access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties, and easily switch therapists anytime at no additional costs. So discover your relationship green flags with better help. Visit betterhelp.com behind to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H E-L-P.com behind hi, I'm.

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[Jim Sterling]

And we're back. So if you take nothing else from these episodes, it should be that military officers and intelligence agency employees backing up UFO conspiracies or any other kind of conspiracies doesn't mean those conspiracies are likelier to be true. Because all of these people are professional liars, right? Not only are they professional liars, but there's nothing that means somebody who reached a moderately high level in the CIA or the Special Forces or the DIA is not just as crazy as that guy you met at a bar who claimed the Martians stole his vas deference, right? Like, Michael Flynn is out of his goddamn mind. He was legitimately a guy with a lot of like, who had a very high position in the military establishment. He had a lot to do with intel in specific areas, right? Like, and he's, you know, a nut and a dick and a fascist. Now, to your average American with slightly nerdy inclinations, a lot of this UFO stuff is kind of like background noise. Kids love it. You know, there's like an entertainment. A lot of movies and stuff based around this stuff in the 50s and 60s. And so it's. It's not necessarily, like, taken super seriously by a ton of people. And it probably started as kind of like a lark for a guy that we're going to be talking a lot about in these episodes who is, I think, think. I don't know if hero is the right term, but I'm very sympathetic to him. A fellow named Paul Benowitz. And Paul Benowitz is the victim of. Of Richard Doty and of the US Intelligence establishment during this period. He is an engineer with a master's degree in physics who started his own small business, Thunder Scientific, in 1969. People will say that Paul was a genius with electronics. He is very good at what he does. He'd moved to New Mexico to be closer to the bleeding edge of the experimental aerospace industry and a niche for himself there, providing different measurement instruments for NASA and the Air Force. He hit the market at a spectacular time when all of these industries were exploding. And his intention was initially to get a PhD and he has to, like, shelf that because his company is so successful and it's growing so fast. Thunder Scientific established a lab right outside of Kirtland Air Force Base and had regular dealings with scientists and officers from the newly established Air Force Force. In the book Project Beta, Greg Bishop writes, 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. So pretty nice, harmless guy. He's making, like, altimeters and shit, like, for devices for measuring, like, you know, moisture in the air on planes and stuff like that. Kind of like nerdy stuff, right?

[Brandy Posey]

No, total. This is definitely. The CIA is going to ruin this man's life.

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, they're going. Yeah, it's more the NSA and Air Force Intelligence, but the CIA, like, there's a number of people involved in fucking with Paul.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Oh, poor guy.

[Jim Sterling]

Paul has hobbies. He's a pilot, and he's like an aerobatic pilot. So he likes to do like. Like plane stunts and shit. He's very good. And, yeah, Starting in the 1970s, he begins paying increasing attention to the UFO movement. He joins the Aerial Phenomenon Research association, or which is a civilian UFO research org based out of Tucson. And so that's like, somewhere I think sometime in, like, the mid-70s is when he joins apro and so he's pretty plugged into all this stuff. A year after Leonard Stringfield writes, you know, he co writes that book that reignites interest in Roswell and flying saucers. In April of 1979, Paul attends a big conference on cattle mutilation, which had just started to become a thing that people were talking about. And this is. When I say a conference on cattle mutilation, this is less kooky than a lot of these events are going to sound because in part, there's some actual shit being done to cow. So there's some very. There's some serious people there who actually, like, want to know what the fuck is going on. The event itself is hosted by Republican Senator Harrison Schmidt, a former astronaut who'd walked on the moon. Among the attendees were numerous FBI agents, politicians, local law enforcement officers, scientists from Los Alam House, tribal officials, and of course, New age psychics wearing robes alongside disheveled ufologists. Of course. Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Brandy Posey]

I mean, they have. They have to be there. I mean, and what a party in the parking lot. Somebody's gotta be throwing the after parties. So you have these guys there.

[Jim Sterling]

No. An acid, I think is still legal at this point. Maybe they banned it by then. But, man, the good coke is out there. People have quaaludes. I bet the parties were wild. Wild, absolutely.

[Brandy Posey]

Comic con eats your heart. I want to know what the swag is for the. The free swag for the cattle mutilation convention. What are they? What's in the. Go, go away bag.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. Lymph nodes.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So a reporter for the New Mexico Independent described the conference as a farce featuring the strangest collection of weirdos ever assembled in New Mexico. And I will tell you right now, that is no longer an accurate statement. I've spent too much time in New Mexico to believe that. Like, yeah, Mecca.

[Brandy Posey]

That bar is an alien.

[Jim Sterling]

One of my favorite states.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, I love it.

[Jim Sterling]

So said weirdos were united by their interest in a real phenomenon. This is not fake. The fact that cattle are being found dead and surgically mutilated is not fake. This is a thing that is happening, right? There's a lot of theories as to why. There's one that is almost certainly the actual true truth here that we're going to talk about. But this is a real thing that is happening, and people are rightfully like, what the fuck is going on? Right? This starts when a decent number of cattle are found dead and surgically mutilated in the Dulce area. Like in near Dulce, New Mexico, which Itself is near the Jicarilla reservation. One of the first investigators is a state trooper named Gabe Valdez, who's a very. Like a kind of a titan in the ufology figure field. And again, one of the guys who's more credible, you know, kind of within this community, which, not to say, does not believe some stuff that can't be proven, but just is one of the guys who is attempting to actually go about some of this, like, scientifically. And Gabe, as he's looking. Cause people, you know, he's getting calls from, like, ranchers, like, I've got this. Cows, like, fucking cut up, man. This is fucking weird. He finds tripod prints near several of the corpses. And he initially theorizes that there's an. This is evidence that an alien craft had landed nearby, which it is not. But Valdes keeps digging and he eventually uncovers evidence, evidence that. That makes it very clear. This is human beings did this. Right. And the specific evidence is that several cows were found to have been drugged with atropine and a gas mask had been found at one site. Right.

[Brandy Posey]

God damn. What's the matter with people?

[Jim Sterling]

This tells you what's the matter.

[Brandy Posey]

This sounds like a student film gone wrong.

[Jim Sterling]

Brandy, this is so much more fucked up than you're. Yeah. This is so, so fucking crazy. What? The reason why this is happening. The likely reason. Again, again, this isn't. I can't tell you exactly. This is definitely what happened. But the theory Valdez and his son come up with, I think is very credible. So Valdez starts to suspect that the government is secretly killing and studying the corpses of cattle. He found that most of the deceased animals had their tongues and lymph nodes, specifically their lymph nodes removed, which is the organ you would take if you wanted to do tests for cancers, Right?

[Brandy Posey]

Okay. Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So there is good reason now to suspect that these mutilations were tied not to aliens, but to a secret government project called Project Gas Buggy, which had been launched in 1967 as part of the Plowshare program. Do you. Have you heard of the Plowshare program?

[Brandy Posey]

No, I don't know about the Plowshare program. It hasn't come up in my searches.

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, man. One of my favorite things the government ever did. And by that, I mean, like, one of the funniest things. This is, like, fucked up and horrible, but it's extremely funny. And it's also kind of soothing because. Because if the government did this, what I'm about to explain to you and didn't get us all killed. I think we've got a pretty good shot of surviving the next few years. Great.

[Brandy Posey]

Love that. I love some hope.

[Jim Sterling]

We'll try to be hopeful here. So Project Plowshare was named after Isaiah 2, 4 in the Bible. They will beat their swords into plowshares. Right. And that means like we're gonna take these weapons and turn them into a tool that we use to get food. Right. Okay. The project was established as a way for Dwight Eisenhower to feel less bad. Presiding over the birth of a planet killing Arsenal in 1953, he gave his famous Atoms for Peace speech at the UN and promised that the United States would quote, devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life. And sort of the, the less kind of shiny, you know, beautiful thing going on here is that like we. We're making so many goddamn nukes. Like by this point, by like the 60s, 70s, we have a. The six. Like we've got enough nukes to kill everything. Right. And the Russians have the same number basically. You know, and other people are starting to get up and like some. Some of the folks making the. Doing this feel kind of bad and are like, I kind of want my life to be a little bit more than just building the. A death machine for the entire species. Maybe there's a way to use all of these nightmare weapons to do good shit. Right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. What wishful thinking. That's adorable.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. I'm not responsible for this world becoming a baron wasteland someday. Absolutely not. No, no.

[Jim Sterling]

So the idea here is let's figure out if there's a way to use nuclear explosions to speed and assist government civil works projects. Right. Different construction projects and specifically one of the big initial things. So in 1956, there's this thing called the Suez Crisis. Right? The Suez Canal. You remember when that big boat got stuck and it like y. It was very funny. But also shit got like really expensive for a while because it. Yeah, a lot of trade goes through the Suez Canal in Egypt. It's very important. Well, in 1956, the Suez Canal Company, which had been owned by Britain and France, gets nationalized by the Egyptian president. And there's like a crisis over, like whether or not Europeans are going to be able to use the Suez Canal. And like this by the way, is still a major factor in geopolitics. Like particularly liberals in the US like to act like France and whatnot is like so much less fucked up. Of a country. But look, look at the kind of weapons France sells the Egyptians. No matter who's in charge, no matter what they do to their people, no matter how violent an asshole they are, France is always willing to sell the Egyptians any kind of fucked up weapons they want because there's this canal and it's kind of a big deal, right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So 56, the Suez Canal gets shut down, and people are, are like, people in our government and people in, you know, our allied governments are like, fuck, we gotta figure out something. And what's the most logical thing to do if you need to replace the Suez Canal, Brandi?

[Brandy Posey]

Oh, make it bigger? Blow it up.

[Jim Sterling]

No, no, no, no, no, no. That's crazy talk. No, the most logical thing to DO is to detonate 520 thermonuclear weapons in a line across the Holy Land through the Negev desert to the Mediterranean. See?

[Brandy Posey]

Oh, I know about this.

[Jim Sterling]

I, I read about the whole Holy land. 500 nukes.

[Brandy Posey]

Oh, that's so fun. That's. This is also a recent theory that's come up in the last year and a half or so we've been hearing about. Okay, interesting. Great.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, it is. I, I, it's fascinating to think of how different everything going on there would be if, like, in addition to all of the awful stuff happening, everyone had fucking radiation poisoning because we set off 520 nuclear explosions, emotions. Jesus, that's probably wouldn't have gone well.

[Brandy Posey]

That'S my favorite in the initial pitch of this. Just somebody's like, all right, hear me out. I know this bomb can destroy anything. What if.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Brandy Posey]

Let's get through it. Okay. All right, here's.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah.

[Brandy Posey]

What do you think?

[Jim Sterling]

Picture of a shovel. We all hate digging, right? What do. We love nukes?

[Brandy Posey]

We just want to see what it.

[Jim Sterling]

Looks like to do it Wasn't gonna.

[Brandy Posey]

Be the earth in half or anything.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, no. I can't think of any downsides to setting off 520 nukes in the Holy Land. Seems like a good call.

[Brandy Posey]

What Jesus is really what he died on the cross for was this, like.

[Jim Sterling]

He would have loved nukes. Oh, my God.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, it's one of. It's, it's, it's from the book of Silas, which is a horrible book. That was. We have never, you know, published.

[Jim Sterling]

Yep. That's why we hate silver Silas's. So the idea of repurposing this doesn't catch on people. Thank God enough. People are like, are you out of your fucking mind?

[Brandy Posey]

You can't do that.

[Jim Sterling]

So we don't do this. But the idea of repurposing nukes for civil use lingered on. And in 1957, Project Plowshare is established. And I want to quote from a write up from the Science, History and Institute. Plowshare scientists looked at the natural world as if it were a piece of clay waiting to be sculpted by nuclear tools. As the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, remarked, if your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card. And I do love that, like, atomic era, mad scientist shit.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The swagger is real.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, that. That. That is kind of. That's kind of cool.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

In 1960, Popular Mechanics devoted an article to the idea with Edward Teller. Sophie will pull up the thing on the screen here, but, like, it's the COVID of Popular Mechanics. March 1960, there's a picture of Teller sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers. We're going to work miracles. The atom's power is ready to unlock a treasure chest of Arctic oil. Dig open an Alaskan harbor, open the spigot for Colorado's shale. And this article is by Edward Teller. I'm going to read a little bit of that opening. When you look at a map of Alaska, you will observe that Point Hope at the northwest corner projecting out into the Arctic Ocean. Above Point Hope, the shore is exposed to the polar ice pack, which even in the summer is never far. Offshore ships can travel north of this point only 1 month and 12. But below point Hope, the shore swings to the southeast and the sea is free of ice for three months of the year. Year. Nearby are coal deposits and somewhat farther, oil that might attract commerce, except for one vital lack. There is no harbor, no good anchorage for seagoing ships. So they theorize a number of things, but one of them is to literally melt big chunks of the ice caps with nukes so that we can get it, like coal and oil more effectively.

[Brandy Posey]

I like that they just did the slow version of it by just never moving away from oil.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns out we got there. Anyway, guys, good news.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, I mean, I guess better than nuking it, probably.

[Jim Sterling]

So Teller's got a problem, which is, we know at this point, radiation bad. And thankfully, like, hydrogen bombs, less radiation, but, like, not no radiation. And so there's. There's a very good question here, which is like, hey, if we detonate, like, a nuke underground, won't it, like, could it. Could that be bad? Could it, like, cause real problems? And so Teller has to direct the first underground test of a thermonuclear weapon to gather data for busy bodies who kept asking questions like. Like that.

[Brandy Posey]

So annoying.

[Jim Sterling]

So annoying. And the initial data seems to be good. They detonate a 1.7 kiloton nuke in Nevada. And I'm using nuke interchangeably here for all atomic weapons. Obviously, a hydrogen bomb is a very different thing from, like, the kind of bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these are. They are mostly using, like, hydrogen bombs. Like, that is the idea for Plowshare after a point, because it's just like, a better tool. And the initial data seems to suggest that, like, oh, actually, like, this might be pretty safe. Right? That's the initial data. This ignites a spree of dangerously insane plans, like project Gnome, which suggested nuking a massive underground salt deposit in Alaska in order to create heat and steam to run a turbine providing power for a nearby city. And Sophie's gonna pull up, like, a diagram explaining this where it's just like, like, generator, turbine, condenser, and then molten salt for nuclear explosion.

[Brandy Posey]

It's for sure gonna work.

[Jim Sterling]

Definitely, totally will be safe. It's not crazy at all. Like, obviously, molten salt from a nuclear explosion. There's no possible downside to doing creating that. No.

[Brandy Posey]

No, never.

[Jim Sterling]

The good news is that local indigenous leaders find out that, like, Tellers, like, what if we just knew huge chunks of. Of like, Inuit territory and shit to see if that does something. And they're like, this seems bad. And they're particularly concerned because Teller had just carried out an H bomb test a couple of years earlier in the Marshall Islands that had gone bad and caused the highest recorded levels of nuclear fallout in history. They had destroyed several item islands and, like, that people lived on. Like, it's a real problem. We've done episodes of it could happen here on the Marshalls and how much the US Fucks them over. But Teller's a big part of that. Um, so, you know, he doesn't get to nuke Alaska to the extent that he wants to nuke Alaska. And again and again, his high hopes are dashed by the fact that everything he suggests and does is completely out of its mind. By 1967, Plowshare had moved on to a new idea. Deposits of natural gas could be extracted if nukes were used to break up dense rock formations that kept them trapped. This is the origins, like, some of the origins of hydraulic fracking. Right. Initially, they want to do hydraulic fracking with nukes.

[Brandy Posey]

Oh, my God.

[Jim Sterling]

Great stuff, guys. Yeah, let's do it. Fuck it. Fuck this planet nuke it all.

[Brandy Posey]

No, no. It exists to be broken. It's the whole point of living.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah. These, these guys, it's amazing because, like, you can get over the counter, like just incredibly potent barbiturates at this point, and everybody is drunk and on barbiturates the whole time this is going on. And when you understand that, it really, really does explain a lot of the decisions being made.

[Brandy Posey]

No, yeah. These are not sober decisions at all. These are not.

[Jim Sterling]

These people are eating what is effectively Xanax, like candy bars. So Project Gas Buggy follows. Right, that's the idea. We're gonna frack with nukes. And they'd set off a bomb equivalent to 29 kilotons of TNT in northwest New Mexico near Dulce. From that article by the Science Industry History Institute. The detonation on December 10, 1967, blasted open an underground chamber 335ft high and almost 165ft in diameter, and successfully fractured the rock, spurring a vast increase in gas production rates at the site. Unfortunately, the blast also contaminated the gas with radioactive tritium, making it unsellable to consumers. So it does work. It just makes poison radioactive. Get natural gas gas. Love it.

[Brandy Posey]

Where people, when we make that, what do we do with that? I'm just curious.

[Jim Sterling]

God willing, now that RFK is going to be in there, you know, I think we can. I'm hopeful that we can just make that legal to use in homes and we can all have all the radioactive tritium gas in our living rooms that we need.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, absolutely. I. I choose for my kids what they get.

[Jim Sterling]

Exactly, exactly. Maybe it's good for them, you know, maybe it, maybe it counteracts the vaccines.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Eat your radioactive gas, kid. Come on.

[Jim Sterling]

Absolutely, absolutely. Plowshare scientists wouldn't see real success on the fracking front until 1969, when a nuke set off under the Colorado river released $1.5 million in natural gas that was usable for the mere cost of $11 million. Also, the gas was still very poor quality. Eventually, Plowshare was shuttered, but the radioactive tritium gas under New Mexico near Dulce remained. Right. So now we've got this big fucking hole underground filled with boiling. Great. That's fun.

[Brandy Posey]

That's just fun to know that's out there. I love a ticking time bomb.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah. So we've got this like, death thing out in the middle of New Mexico and we don't really know what the fuck to do with it right now. What I'm going to say Is not confirmed, but I consider it quite likely Gabe Valdez eventually comes to the conclusion that the cattle mutilations around DOY were carried out by government scientists studying the level of environmental contamination caused by the plowshare tests. If this is the case, it's something that is still somewhat under wraps. And military spooks would have put overtime work in to hide it back in the 1970s. But it makes a lot of sense. They're clearly like studying animals around there to see like if they are developing cancers and they don't want people to know about it. I think this is actually a very, very likely explanation for at least a good chunk of the cattle mutilations that are kind of found.

[Brandy Posey]

Oh God. It is worse. It is worse. And it paid off.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, just like curious alien bot or not bot scientists or whatever.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, no, yeah. You did not disappoint. You did not disappoint. That makes total sense. I want to know which scientist was like. But make sure you get the.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, we got to get into that.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, exactly. Is that part of the experiment, sir?

[Jim Sterling]

It. Why don't not.

[Brandy Posey]

It's for the. There's a showmanship of what we're doing here.

[Jim Sterling]

We gotta get weird with it, people.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So this brings us back to Paul Benowitz because he meets Gabe Valdez at that cattle mutilation conference. And he actually approaches Valdez and Valdez, who is like both an active state trooper who kind of becomes like in his area that whenever there's like weird alien shit, his colleagues are like, hey, Valdez, go look into this. Like, you're the, you're the, you're the crazy guy, right? Go check this out.

[Brandy Posey]

Like, man, I just wanted to plant drugs and minorities, right? Bullshit.

[Jim Sterling]

I think Valdez really does want to be doing this because this kind of becomes his whole life. And he, he's like, as soon as this random like engineer is like, hey, can I like ride along with you to like look at weird alien stuff? Valdes is like, absolutely, man. Come on, let's, let's go TR some lights. And that's exactly what they do. They do a lot of ride alongs together and they, they become fast friends. Benowitz is a believer and Valdez is an open minded seeker. Right. You know that that's kind of the, the, the, the minimum of what I'd say he is.

[Brandy Posey]

What is their sexual tension like? And is this the exact thing that X Files is based on?

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, they're fucking. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, this is what Molly. No, no, they're not. I have no evidence of that. But it would be funny if this is like the. The. Yeah, the molder and Scully origin. Yeah, the sexual tension you could cut with a knife. Also, Valdez does in fact get pregnant with an alien baby. That's. That's very much confirmed. His dad's an admiral. I think his Scully's dad was an animal. Maybe he was a captain. I know he called her Starbuck. I just watched that episode the other night. So, speaking of Dana Scully, boy, she looked good in a suit. Anyway, here's some ads.

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[Brandy Posey]

Looked amazing.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah.

[Brandy Posey]

No one talks about the fashion on the X Files.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah, those, those, those real pencil ties. Fucking molder. Oh my God. Beautiful stuff. Beautiful stuff. So in the winter of 1979, Benowitz and his wife experienced, well, not a close encounter, but like an intermediate distance encounter at his Albuquerque home. So his. His house is like, right up to the edge of the Kirtland base, right? So he can see like the base itself and there's this mountain that they had like, hollowed out and filled with n. He's looking at all that from his fucking porch, right? And he and his wife start to notice at night, blinking lights that are floating and moving independently in the air over the base. And he is, as a pilot, he's like, this does not look like any kind of aircraft I've ever seen. And in fact, it is not. Now again, not aliens. This is like drone projects. And what becomes the stealth bomber is like, this is all the kind of shit they're testing out at Kirtland. He is seeing things, and he is seeing things that there is no. He does not have any kind of good explanation, right? Because some of the things he's seeing are experimental craft that are capable of things that the broader populace did not know we could do with aerial craft at this point in time. Now, because he's rich and because he is a professional engineer, he has a lot of equipment. He's got telephoto lenses, he's got a Super 8 camera, and he's got a lot of, like, different advanced antenna that are capable of taking data on the stuff that he's saying, particularly the signals that these different craft are putting out, right? Because they're all putting out radio signals. They've got transponders and shit, right? You want that on there. Especially with an experimental craft, you never know if one of those is gonna, like, wind up crashing into the ground. You wanna be able to like, grab it and shit. So he starts training this whole. Not just his cameras, but all of these different info, these, all of these different electronic tools he has on the base while this is happening. And he's getting real data on something that is actually happening right now. The thing is, and this is, there's an interesting documentary about this called Mirage Myth in and it'll point out that Benowitz is a World War II era veteran. He is a genuinely patriotic, helpful guy. And a lot of kind of early UFO dudes are like this. So they're his. His instinct is not the government is hiding something fucked up from me. His instinct is, I wonder if the government knows something clearly alien or otherworldly is happening above this base, this very secure institution. I need to tell them what I found. Right. He is deeply patriotic and this country is going to him so hard like it does everyone who's deeply patriotic.

[Brandy Posey]

Oh, no, babe, they're the bad guy. Don't do that.

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, God.

[Brandy Posey]

It's like watching. Oh, it's watching somebody walk upstairs in a horror movie.

[Jim Sterling]

Well, and Dodie, who's like going to be fucking with him for years over this is like, you know, World War II era veterans. You just tell them, hey, we need you to like, help us with this. But you can't talk. You got to keep it quiet. This is national security. Of course, of course I trust the government.

[Brandy Posey]

Right.

[Jim Sterling]

Like, I'm a child of the New Deal. I, I fought for this country against the Nazis. You know, we are the heroes.

[Brandy Posey]

Absolutely right.

[Jim Sterling]

And that, that's where Paul's head is. Right. In addition to literally believing in a lot of, you know, kooky alien, he, he is. He, yeah. The government doesn't start that in him. Right? He is down that road to an extent.

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So the reality of the situation is that he and his wife had documented evidence of some kind of experimental plane, drone or other electronic gizmo. There were a number of. Of different things at the. The. Because part of like this whole Kirtland base is like one of the things that's kind of in this whole area is Sandia National Laboratories, which at the time is the number one weapons development facility in the United States, at least probably on the planet, as a result of that. And like, one of the things they're working on is early laser guided missiles, you know, in addition to other different kinds of projects. One possibility for some of what Paul saw is there's this massive. It's actually the largest freestanding wooden structure on Earth, like even all of the bolts are wood. It's this massive tower that they were setting off like EMP blasts in order to test the resilience of planes to nuclear explosions. So because of that, you couldn't have any metal in the actual, like, thing itself. I don't understand science, but that's just what people say. And that's apparent this, this was a thing that we did, and apparent it wasn't very effective because we weren't like. The simulated blasts were not anywhere close to what a nuke would have done. But this is a thing that they were working on. There were lights on this thing. It looked weird and it gives off. You're getting some weird signals from this if you've got like different antennas and stuff in addition to the other shit that they're fucking around with there. So I think somebody who was less inclined towards belief in, you know, aliens in the paranormal than Paul might have been like, yeah, there's probably some sort of weird Cold war weapon system being developed there or whatever. Paul does not make that leap. He captures grainy footage of lights with his 8 millimeter camera, and he uses his engineering knowledge to design and construct a tracking antenna array on his roof. Adam, Go rightly notes quote, Benowitz installed an arsenal of tracking antenna on his roof to record signals apparently emanating from these UFOs, which he claimed could DF direction find at distances of up to 60 miles. Alarmed that these craft posed a national security threat, Benowitz alerted Kirtland base officials of his findings. Not long after, Benowitz received what he believed were alien transmissions. Now, the reality of the situation, and again, this is not entirely clear, but what's very likely happening is that being a good engineer, Paul has built an array that is actually receiving encrypted transmissions because the Air Force is experimenting with classified broadcast technology to send out coded messages. And Paul is picking this shit up, right? Some of it's probably interference from the EMP set up, but he's actually almost certainly getting some actual encrypted stuff, right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim Sterling]

So he goes to the air and he's like, hey, man, I've been like, listening and taking footage and there's like, aliens. And they're like, yeah, okay, another alien guy. And then he's like, and I pointed my incredibly advanced antenna array at your base of secret military bullshit, and look at these coded transmissions and they're like, oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. This guy. This guy might actually have something that could be a problem. We really don't want him Doing this?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Please don't. No.

[Jim Sterling]

Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. So the head of base security spends about a minute on the phone with Paul and decides he's probably a crank, but his status as the president of this legitimate lab and the fact that he's getting something and this is potentially a risk to, you know, this could expose some of the projects they're working on. Right. And maybe Paul wouldn't even. If Paul just publishes this stuff being like, look, this is evidence of aliens, and it's actual encrypted transmissions. Well, Paul is going to publish that somewhere. It wouldn't be hard at all for some sort of, like, Russian agent to get that. And then maybe the Soviets crack this thing and, like. Right. There's a number of ways this could be a problem, right?

[Brandy Posey]

Yeah. Yeah. They could decide to dig a ditch with a nuke, so.

[Jim Sterling]

Right. Well, in fact, they do. I didn't bring this up, but the Soviets have their own plowshare program that also causes mass, massively poisons the planet.

[Brandy Posey]

Everybody's doing it in Soviet Russia. Do you cut out the bears, assholes? Is that what's happening in their fields?

[Jim Sterling]

Instead, you just poisoned the largest freshwater body on the or one of the largest freshw bodies on the planet. And then we're good. Everything's fine. So. Yeah, and it's also, maybe it's not the transmissions that freak him out. Maybe it's that he's getting documentation about some of the craft. We don't know exactly what it is, but, like, the Air Force doesn't just say, okay, tell this guy we're making a note of it. They're like, we should keep talking to this dude. We need to get one of our guys, an agent from the Air Force Office of Special Investigation to befriend Paul Benowitz and see what he knows. And so the head of base security, Colonel Ernest Edwards, picks an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty to do just that. And we will be talking about Doty and what happens next to our friend Paul in Part Du.

[Brandy Posey]

Ooh, Cliffhanger. That's it.

[Jim Sterling]

Anything you want to plug?

[Brandy Posey]

Brandy? Yeah. Thank you. This was awesome. I'm excited to hear part two for the listener. You guys can find me on. On every social media app at this point. At Brandazzle. I got the blue sky. I got the threads. I got the X still formerly known as Twitter. I've got Red Note. I'm on there now. Who cares? Whatever. Tik Tok. It's deleted from my phone, but my account exists. Instagram, Facebook, whatever brand. Dazzle, Brandy posy.com is my website for a bunch of stuff. I have an album coming out in March that actually recorded in Portland last year and yeah, burn this records on Instagram and lady Del podcast. Yeah. Thanks, guys.

[Jim Sterling]

Excellent. All right, everybody, well, until next time, you know, go force your way into an air force base and just start taking photos, you know, or what's the worst that could happen?

[Brandy Posey]

Or don't Naruto run right on in.

[Jim Sterling]

Yeah, yeah, Naruto run right into Area 51. They love it when people do that, that it's a lot of fun for them.

[Brandy Posey]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Jim Sterling]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us.

[Brandy Posey]

Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jim Sterling]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.

[Brandy Posey]

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards this.

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