Plot and Counterplot
Bennewitz gleaned some of his background information, including photographs, from a USAF intelligence operative named Richard Doty, who was probably engaged in a disinformation campaign aimed at Bennewitz, to encourage claims that could be easily refuted. (Doty also led documentary filmmaker Linda Moultin Howe astray in 1983, promising her access to an extraterrestrial . . . but no ET ever materialized. It is alleged that sometime before the 1987 publication of Whitley’s Strieber’s alien-abduction blockbuster Communion, Doty gave Strieber calculatedly false information about aliens.) If Richard Doty deceived Bennewitz, Doty wasn’t alone. In the course of a July 1989 MUFON lecture in Las Vegas, travel writer and UFOlogist William Moore admitted feeding Bennewitz erroneous information, to encourage his activity. Discredited and neutralized, the hoodwinked Bennewitz would fall even further to the margins, allowing reasonable discussion of UFOs to continue without distraction.
We must add that many accounts of Bennewitz-Doty-Moore exist, and they do not always jibe. Character issues are especially variable: some accounts paint Bennewitz as a hopeless paranoiac, and Doty and Moore take roles ranging from deceitful villains to principled activists. The truth of all that cannot be determined here, though Bennewitz’s relative silence after 1988—when he was briefly committed to a mental hospital—suggests that his activities turned out to be, for one reason or another, more dramatic than he could comfortably handle.
Paul Bennewitz died of natural causes in 2003, at age seventy-five.
Others came forward to pick up where Bennewitz left off. A man named Thomas Edwin Castello claimed to have been a Dulce Base security officer— though precisely when he held that job is a little hazy. Castello explained that Dulce began as an ancient network of natural caverns that was later used, for centuries, by white or beige reptilian humanoids Castello called “the Draco.” Much more recently (as Castello explained things), the RAND Corporation supervised a refit and enlargement of the caverns; this work took place early in the RAND Corp’s existence (the think tank was established in 1948), when the only RAND client was the U.S. Air Force. A secret Washington “Black Budget” financed this early work, and funds continue to be drawn from that source today.
Additional aspects of the Dulce tale, invoked by Bennewitz, Castello, and others, include hapless grays in the employ of the Draco; secret bases on the Moon and Mars; the inevitable “world government” hanky-panky perpetrated by Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission et al., and sponsored by aliens; ancillary bases at Los Alamos (where most of the alien and human-alien flying discs are stored), Salt Lake City, and Antarctica (with the familiar Nazi- saucer connection); and secret tunnel egress in states across the West, Great Plains, and Midwest. Dulce is also the focal point of internecine quarrels involving the Draco, reptilians, and aliens from an assortment of star systems across the Milky Way.