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

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... You know what? That's exactly the answer I hoped for. Yeah.

Not so much the dimension stuff. 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 destroy a basically decent, 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 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 U.S. 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.

Yeah. The more examples, the better. And there are many, but I don't know any with aliens yet. So very exciting. 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 alive.

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. Like, 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, yeah.

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, F-18 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, you

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 secret for him. Well,

Well, because like you can imagine, like also the first time somebody saw an automobile, did they think that was an alien? It's just, you know, human as we're building technology in different ways. Yeah. Or as we'll talk about, because 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 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. Right.

Yep. You see that shit in 1980 in the dead of night above an Air Force base. It's not necessarily like you're not you're not a crazy person to be 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 today 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. Yeah, yeah. So that's the story we're going to tell this week.

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Ah, and we're back. We're starting the episodes. Brandy, 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?

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 a fourth guest on every week who's usually another female identifying person. And it's just four women riffing and 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 at burnthisrecords.com. And yeah,

Basically, that is like a completely DIY project trying to lift up voices from around the country that other labels are dealing with. And I'm 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...

As a rule in the industry, the only thing more evil than like the NSA and military intelligence is comedy labels. Yes. I mean, honestly, you're not wrong. No, no, that was only a partial joke. We could do. I have a couple of bastards for you for later if you ever want to need a couple of pitches.

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. A lot of nice people. Yeah. I mean, the best, the best of people and the worst of people I've met in comedy. And I think comedy is, is an important,

thing in our culture because I think it's 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're able to do, 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 back to fucking aliens. Aliens! Not back to fucking aliens, but back to fucking aliens. I don't know where this story is going. We'll see. Maybe, maybe. I mean, it actually nearly always doesn't, like...

lead any if you follow like any UFO conspiracy threat, 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, the I started this episode by talking about that Air Force footage. It's 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 like what the fuck is this shit?

As I wrote this, near the end of January 2025, 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 Sequest is real. And I hope that means that Roy Scheider has secretly been alive this whole time. And Jonathan Brandis. Let's get him back. And Jonathan Brandis. Yes, yes. Get them all back. Bring them all back. I'm so glad you got my Sequest joke, Brandi. No one ever does. Um,

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 UFOs.

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 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 projection 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 and 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 need you, as I always ask, think back to 9-11, right? Yeah. 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 at all.

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. Yeah. That's really happened. And they came out and said, no, it's a weather balloon. Yeah.

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 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 U.S. 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&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 U.S. history by reporting to have seen nine silver disks flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. When

When the rancher who owned the land in Roswell that one of these balloons crashed onto, a guy named Mack Brazel, 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 in saying like I I saw 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 industry was lying to every other part and hiding all sorts of shit. And these guys just didn't know what the fuck they saw. And I think often like we want aliens to be true instead of that. Like it feels much more comforting. I mean, yeah, I, I,

I think people are, even with everything, all the little videos and everything that's been coming out in the last few years, people keep being like, yeah, sure. Okay, great. Would love it. Can they, can they take over? Yeah.

Yeah, sure. An alien is here. That means somebody is actually maybe in charge that isn't us. It would be great. It's the 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, to 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. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Please would love it. 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 banks and social media companies. We might as well be eaten by aliens who have cool shit. Yeah. Maybe plastic has been an alien the entire time. Fuck it. Why not take it over everyone's brain? 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.

Truly. But alas. So initial local reporting on the Roswell crash was pretty good. It described accurately what was found on Mack's 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 1st, 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 disks was recovered and was found to be a 30-inch metal disk with a plexiglass 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. Respect. Respect. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I'm always supportive of doing that. Why not? Fuck with people at this point. Yeah, absolutely. 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. We maybe do if it's funny.

So public interest in UFOs kind of fell off after this. This is sort of what makes people – 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 and cranks believe in UFOs, right? Yeah.

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 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. 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. No, and again, as we'll talk about, a lot of those people were definitely being fed lies by the government because the government was like, well, shit, we can distract attention from the shit that we're doing if we just fuck with these people.

So in 1950, a guy named Frank Scully 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. Yeah.

As most Silas's are not to besmirch the Silas's of the world. Silai. I don't know. I've never met a good Silas. Look. No, neither have I. A name, frankly, thankfully lost to the ages as well. That's right. That's right. Don't name your kids Silas. And if you're a Silas, change your name. Right. Yeah. You know, that's the official stance of this podcast. Sorry, Silas's. No, I agree. Silai.

Official stance of Lady to Lady as well. I speak for my podcast. Several podcasts are against Silas. We're going to get like a whole group together here. We're going to be like the NATO of trying to stop people from being named Silas. Yeah, absolutely. So author Adam Gowrightly 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 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? That's interesting, too, because there's those Peruvian, quote unquote, alien mummies that came out a year or two ago. People talk about those for a minute, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And that's that's a I don't know that we seem to be generally believe that aliens are short rather than tall. Yeah. Unless you're a tall white, which is it's got the Nordics, of course. Yeah. 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 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. That's pretty good, 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 conmen in US 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 Gowrightly notes that a former CIA officer, Carl Pflock, 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. Pflock mused, did the U.S. 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 wrap?

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. Um,

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 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 these guys, like so many. 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? Yeah, no, exactly. 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. Yeah.

But that comes with a big asterisk, right? Yeah, 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 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, I love that the government runs like Scientology. It's great. Absolutely. Runs like science. Oh, cults all the way down, baby. That's American culture. Yeah. Instead of Xenu, it's whatever we're calling this one. Yeah. 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. I've been to a MUFON meeting. Oh, I would love to go to a MUFON meeting. That sounds like a hoot. It was a blast. Yeah.

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 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 Rightly's book again.

The memo, dated August 29th, 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 DeLuey. And a lot of guys at MUFON have, like, are reached out to by people in intelligence agencies and fed info.

So it's 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 shit happened to some extent. And if you want to believe, then you're just like, please, I won't question it. Just give it to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just give me the good stuff. Yeah. Speaking of the good stuff.

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I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old. Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit. And that was my mission, to snuff the f***ing life out of this guy. He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department. I had a wife and I had two children. Nobody knew anything. People are dying. Is he doing this every night? Torn between two worlds. I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 BFU

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 best deference, right? Like Michael Flynn is out of his goddamn mind. It was legitimately a guy with a lot of like, who had a very high position in

in the military establishment. He had a lot to do with intel in specific areas, right? And he's 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. There's like an entertainment, a lot of movies and stuff based around this stuff in the 50s and 60s. And so 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, I don't know if hero's the right term, but I'm very sympathetic to him, a fella named Paul Benowitz.

And Paul Benowitz is the victim of Richard Doty and of the U.S. 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 he dug 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 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. 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? No, totally. This is definitely the CIA is going to ruin this man's life. Yeah, I think it's more the NSA and Air Force intelligence, but the CIA like.

There's a number of people involved in fucking with Paul. Yeah. Oh, poor guy. 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 starting in the 1970s, he begins paying increasing attention to the UFO movement.

He joins the Aerial Phenomenon Research Association, or APRO, which is a civilian UFO research org based out of Tucson. Okay.

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 Alamos, tribal officials, and, of course, New Age psychics wearing robes alongside disheveled ufologists. Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Of course. I mean, they have they have to be there. I mean, right. And what a party in the parking lot. Somebody's got to be throwing the after parties. So you know, there. No, an asset, I think, is still legal at this point. Maybe they banned it by. Oh, yeah, man. The good coke is out there. People have Quaaludes. I bet the parties were wild.

Absolutely. Comic-Con eats your heart out. I want to know what the swag is for the free swag for the cattle mutilation convention. What's in the go-away bag? Yeah. Lymph nodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. A lot of... Yeah.

Mecca for nuts. That bar is an alien. One of my favorite states. Yeah, I love it. 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 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, 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 kind of a titan in the ufology field. And again, one of the guys who's more credible kind of within this community, which is 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 because people, you know, he's getting calls from like ranchers like I've got this cow is 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 Valdez keeps digging and he eventually uncovers 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?

God damn. What's the matter with people? I'll tell you what's the matter. This is a student film gone wrong. 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, 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 crazy.

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? Right.

Okay. Yeah. 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. Have you heard of the Plowshare program?

No, I don't know about the Plowshare program. It hasn't come up in my searches. 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 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. Um, great. I love that. I love some hope. We'll try to be hopeful here. So project plowshare was named after Isaiah, Isaiah two, four in the Bible, they will beat their swords into plowshares. Right. And that means like, we're going to take these weapons and turn them into a tool that we use to, to get food. Right. Um,

The project was established as a way for Dwight Eisenhower to feel less bad about presiding over the birth of a planet-killing arsenal. In 1953, he gave his famous Adams 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 less kind of shiny, beautiful thing going on here is that we're making so many goddamn nukes. By this point, by the 60s, 70s, we have a... The 60s, especially, we've got enough nukes to kill everything, right? And the Russians have the same number, basically, you know? Yeah, yeah. And other people are starting to get them. And some of the folks making these, doing this feel kind of bad and are like...

I kind of want my life to be a little bit more than just building a death machine for the entire species. Maybe there's a way to use all of these nightmare weapons to do good shit, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Wishful thinking. That's adorable. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not responsible for this world becoming a barren wasteland someday. Absolutely not. No, no. 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 in it? Yeah. It was very funny, but it also shit got like really expensive for a while because 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.

And it's kind of a big deal, right? Yeah. So 56, the Suez Canal gets shut down and people are like people in our government and people in our allied governments are like, fuck, we got to figure out something. And what's the most logical thing to do if you need to replace the Suez Canal, Brandy?

Oh, make it bigger. Blow it up. 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 Sea. Oh, I know about this. I read about this. Holy Land, 500 nukes.

Oh, that's so fun. This is also a recent theory that's come up in the last, say, year and a half or so we've been hearing about. Okay, interesting. Great. Yeah. 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. Jesus. Probably wouldn't have gone well.

That's my theory. Probably bad. I would have loved to have been in the initial pitch of this. Just somebody's like, all right, hear me out. I know this bomb can destroy anything. What if? Yeah. PowerPoint slides.

Yeah, let's get through it. Okay. All right. Here's. Yeah. What do you think? Picture of a shovel. We all hate digging, right? What do we love? Nukes. We just want to see what it looks like to do that. It wouldn't split the earth in half or anything. Yeah. No, I can't think of any downsides to setting off 520 nukes in the Holy Land. Seems like a good call. Well,

What Jesus was really what he died on the cross for was this. Like, actually, he would have loved nukes. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's it's it's it's from the book of Silas, which is a horrible book that was I've never published. Yeah. That's why we hate Silas's. So the idea of repurposing this doesn't catch on people. Thank thank God. And I think like, are you are you out of your fucking mind? Yeah.

You can't do that. 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 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The swagger is real. Yeah. That is kind of, that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah.

In 1960, Popular Mechanics devoted an article to the idea with Edward Teller. Sophie will pull up the thing on the screen here, but it's the cover 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 one 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 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 sea-going 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. I like that they just did the slow version of it by just never moving away from oil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns out we got there anyway, guys. Good news. I guess better than nuking it, probably. 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 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 that.

So annoying of them.

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 going to pull up like a diagram explaining this where it's just like generator, turbine, condenser, and then molten salt for nuclear explosion. Yeah.

It's for sure going to work. 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 creating that. No, no, never. The good news is that local indigenous leaders find out that, like, tellers, like, what if we just nuke huge chunks 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 items, islands and like that people lived on like it's a real problem. We've done episodes of it could happen here on the marshals and how much the US fucks them over. But Teller's a big part of that. 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. Oh, my God.

Oh my God. Great stuff, guys. Yeah. Let's do it. Fuck it. Fuck this planet. Nuke it all. No, no. It exists to be broken. It's the whole point of living. Yeah. These guys, it's amazing. Because you can get over the counter 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 does explain a lot of the decisions being made. Right.

No. Yeah, these are not sober decisions at all. These are not. These people are eating what is effectively Xanax like candy bars. So Project Gas Buggy follows. Right. That's the idea. We're going to 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 History Institute.

The detonation on December 10, 1967 blasted open an underground chamber 335 feet high and almost 165 feet 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 natural gas. Love it. Where do we put that? When we make that, what do we do with that? I'm just curious. 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. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I choose for my kids what they get. Exactly. Exactly. Maybe it's good for them. You know, maybe it maybe it counteracts the vaccines. Yeah. Eat your radioactive gas, kid. Come on. Absolutely. Plowshare scientists wouldn't see real success on the fracking front until 1969 when a nuke set off under the Colorado River released one point five million dollars in natural gas that was usable for the mere cost of eleven million dollars. 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 poison. Great. That's fun. That's just fun to know that's out there. I love a ticking time bomb. 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 Dulce 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 studying animals around there to see 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. Oh, God, it is worse. It is.

where you were right and it paid off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like curious alien bot or a fucking, not bot, scientist or whatever. 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 asshole. Yeah, you gotta get into that asshole. Yeah, exactly. Is that part of the experiment, sir? Ah,

Fuck it. Why not? It's for the showmanship of what we're doing here. We got to get weird with it, people. 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

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. Man, I just wanted to plant drugs on minorities. Right. I think Valdez really does want to be doing this because this kind of becomes his whole life. Um,

And 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? Valdez is like, absolutely, man. Come on. Let's go trace down some fucking lights. And that's exactly what they do. They do a lot of ride alongs together and they become fast friends. Benowitz is a believer and Valdez is a

An open-minded seeker, right? You know, that's kind of the minimum of what I'd say he is. What is their sexual tension like? And is this the exact thing that X-Files is based on? Oh, they're fucking. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, great. This is what Mully. No, no, they're not. I have no evidence. But it would be funny if this is like the fucking, yeah, the Mulder and Scully origin. Yeah.

Yeah, the sexual tension you can cut with a knife. Also, Valdez does, in fact, get pregnant with an alien baby. That's very much confirmed. His dad's an admiral. I think Scully's dad was an admiral. 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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Everyone in that show looked good in this fucking Skinner. Oh, my God. Like he was pouring into that uniform or that amazing. Yeah. No one talks about the fashion on the X-Files. Yeah. Yeah. Those those those real pencil ties fucking Mulder. 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 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 have like hollowed out and filled with nukes like 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 for. Right. Because some of the things he's seeing are are 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 different advanced antenna that are capable of taking data on the stuff that he's in, 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 going to wind up crashing into the ground. You want to be able to grab it and shit. Right.

So he starts training this whole, not just his cameras, but 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 Men.

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 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 fuck him so hard. Like it does everyone who's deeply patriotic. Oh, no, babe. They're the bad guy. Don't do that. Oh, it's like watching. Oh, it's watching somebody walk upstairs in a horror movie. And Dodie, who's like going to be fucking with him for years over this is like, you know, World War Two era veterans. You just tell them, hey, we

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. Yeah, of course. I trust the government. Like I'm a child of the New Deal. I fought for this country against the Nazis, you know, the heroes. Absolutely. Right. And that that's where Paul's head is. Right. In addition to literally believing in a lot of kooky. He is. Yeah. The government doesn't start that in him. Right. He is down that road to an extent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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 different things at the... Because part of 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 the science, but that's just what people say. And that's apparent. This was a thing that we did. And apparently 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 fucking 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 aliens and 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 eight millimeter camera, and he uses his engineering knowledge to design and construct a tracking antenna array on his roof.

Adam Gowrightly notes, quote,

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 setup, but he's actually almost certainly getting some actual encrypted stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he goes to the Air Force and he's like, hey, man, I've been like listening and taking footage and there's like aliens. And they're like, yeah, OK, 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. Fuck!

Please don't. No, no, no. 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. Yeah. Yeah. They could decide to dig a ditch with a nuke. So. Right. Well, in fact, they do. I didn't bring this up, but the Soviets have their own plowshare program that also causes massive, massively poisons the planet. Everybody's doing it. Yeah.

In Soviet Russia, do you cut out the bears assholes? Is that what's happening in their fields instead? You just poison the largest freshwater body on the or one of the largest freshwater bodies on the planet. And then we're good. Great. 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, OK, you know, 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 Investigations to befriend Polk.

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 due. Oh, cliffhanger. That's it. Anything you want to plug, Brandy?

Yeah. Thank you. This was awesome. I'm excited to hear part two. For the listener, you guys can find me 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. TikTok. It's deleted from my phone, but my account exists. Instagram, Facebook, wherever. Brandazzle. BrandyPosey.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 to Ladies on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks, guys. 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 don't. What's the worst that could happen? Or don't.

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

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Until now.

Crook County is available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father, but he was leading a double life. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.

Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, B.T.K., through the voices of the people who know him best. Listen to Monster B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women, full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.