I was called in to investigate to see if something had actually landed. It wasn’t on base radar… the first thing I did was check with FAA. At that time we had a pretty secretive unit that scanned every single radio frequency that could possibly be generated in and around the base. I obtained the printouts and asked if any strange frequencies were detected in this particular time frame―but again found nothing. I interviewed the security police inside Manzano separately, but they repeated the exact same story.
Shortly after that, Major Ernie Edwards, who was the commander of the 1608 Security Police Squadron which guarded Manzano came to me and said, “I received a phone call from a guy by the name of Paul Bennewitz. He lives right outside the base in Four Hills (a housing community just on the other side of the base perimeter). He claims to have seen all sorts of strange lights from Manzano.” [See Appendix 12 for supporting document.]
I found out Paul Bennewitz owned a business―Thunder Scientific Laboratories―located right outside Kirtland’s main gate. They made humidity sensors for submarines. So he had a government contract and security clearance.
I paid him a visit. His house was literally just a few feet from the base perimeter, his backyard butted right up to the fence. He was a physicist and had all this sophisticated equipment on his patio and his upper bedroom patio faced the base. I asked him what he saw, and he started telling me all sorts of UFO stories. We decided to conduct an investigation on him; not only us, but the NSA because he seemed to know about a National Security Agency project that was going on at the base, which he shouldn’t have been able to figure out, but he did… very smart guy.
One night Jerry Miller (a scientist on the intelligence staff at Kirtland), Steve Atza (another agent) and I were invited over to Paul Bennewitz’s home for dinner. We were having coffee when suddenly I saw this orb appear in the corner of the room. I elbowed Jerry as this orb started flying around the room. When Paul saw it he matter-of-factly said, “Well, there it is.”
At first, Jerry thought Paul had generated it―it was a ball of light with little sparkles around it. But Jerry checked all around, with Paul’s permission, and could not figure out a way Paul could have generated it. Paul said, “Those are the aliens. That’s their reconnaissance. That’s how they keep an eye on me.”
[CSETI has had many similar orb events occur. ―SG]
A few weeks later, we were in Paul’s house alone. This was not a forced entry; Paul had given me the key. We went inside and witnessed a small orb burn a hole through one wall to enter another room. When we returned a few weeks later, the burn hole was still there.
Paul was actually photographing extraterrestrials―I don’t remember how many―but he had a whole group of pictures. He had a Canon 35mm, and I told him, “If you ever take any pictures of UFOs, don’t develop them; let us do it.”
One day he called me and said he had a whole roll of photographs of these UFOs that he took over the base. So I went out, picked them up, took them over to our secure photo lab and gave them to one of our developers to process. An hour later he comes out with the photos and says, “What the hell are these things?”
Albuquerque International Airport shares a landing field with Kirtland Air Force Base; the photos showed oval-shaped crafts flying above the planes that were landing. So these commercial planes were coming in while these ET craft would fly right over top of them and then veer off.
We had the images enlarged. The craft were structured and seamless and as big as the Corona craft. A blue trail was coming out of the bottom of the craft―probably the energy device. We sent the photos to headquarters; I don’t know what ever happened to them. I became friends with Paul. He eventually went crazy and he died some years later.
One time, we had a video brought to the base by a guy who lived in Placitas, which is north of Albuquerque in the mountains. He was retired Air Force; I believe he was a pilot. He lived in a remote area; deer would come up to his backyard where he had a video camera set up; he was an amateur wildlife photographer.
One night he heard a noise and went out and this craft was hovering right over his backyard. And he took video of that. It was about twenty-eight seconds or something like that before the craft took off. We took the video and the camera and sent it to the Air Force Office of Special Investigation headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base, and they would send it to the NSA.
They sent him a check to cover the cost of the camera; they classified the video and he never got it back.
Years later, after I retired, I joined a close-knit group of former intelligence officers. We’d get together every year for reunions. Some of these Intel guys were DIA; quite a few members of our group were former CIA. They didn’t do any field work because the CIA couldn’t do that. But they were relying on a lot of information that we were feeding them, and they were doing analytical studies of what they had. The FBI, of course, was involved in it.
The most convincing case that I’ve ever been involved with has never, ever been made public and that was the incident up in Utah.
Years ago there was a guy that lived in a remote trailer just outside of Dugway Proving Grounds. He had worked in the army as a photographer. After he got out of the army he went and worked for Dugway Proving Grounds as a photographer. He was never married; he was an orphan. He lived by himself in this single-wide 14-by-80-foot trailer. He had built some sheds and stuff around it.
OSI Hill Air Force Base called me in late 1984 or early-1985 and said, “We got this guy that lives in this remote area by Dugway that sent us all these photographs of UFOs. And we don’t really have a 9Q up here that can talk intelligently to this guy. [A 9Q is an OSI designation for somebody that investigates UFOs.]
I went up there and visited this guy. He had a lot of common sense, but was not well-educated, having left school in the eighth or ninth grade. But there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about cameras or photography.
For years he took pictures of things out at Dugway. He showed us a book of all these photographs, and these creatures. When I asked where he got these, he replied, “They land out here.”
He told me they had left a long time ago, but for years they came here and landed.
It began in the fall of 1968. He came home from work, made his meal, and suddenly heard some noises. His cat ran around crazy. Looking outside, he sees that a craft has landed in his backyard. He went back inside, got his camera and took pictures. The ETs came out and he took pictures of them.
They were EBENs. He told me, “They didn’t speak to me with words, but they talked to me in my head [telepathically]. I could understand them, but they were having problems understanding me.”
The contact lasted from the late-sixties until about 1975 or 1976 when they told him they were leaving. And they gave him these gifts. Some were star-shaped, others were like bronze statues. There were little models of things.
At first I thought this was all just a set up. Honest to God, when I first got there, I thought, “This can’t be real.” I told the OSI agent from Hill, I said, “Is this a set up? Are these movie props?”
I asked the man―his name was James Sodawski or Sadorski… something like that―why he was contacting us now? He informed me that he was dying and that he needed to do something with all this stuff… that he figured the Air Force might as well have it.
So we sent the flag up and the next you know there are truckloads of people coming from the NSA and CIA to review all this stuff. We actually contracted a company with a moving van to move all this stuff―packaging it in a unique manner―because they don’t know if this stuff was setting off a signal. I had never thought of that until one of the technical people up in headquarters in Washington said, “You know what, these things might be bugged or even radioactive.”