APRO was closely connected to a Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque businessman trained as a physicist, who became convinced in the late 1970s that he was monitoring electromagnetic signals (ELF) that extraterrestrials were using to control persons they had abducted.

Bennewitz had set up equipment tried to decode these signals and he believed he was succeeding. In addition to the signals Bennewitz began to see and film what he thought were UFOs flying in and around the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility and the Coyote Canyon test area, just outside of Kirtland AFB.

Bennewitz reported all this to the Tucson-based Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), and to officers at Kirkland. A couple of the people who became involved with Bennewitz and his claims were Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Sgt. Richard Doty and Maj. Ernest Edwards, head of base security.

APRO is sent a document that became known as the "Wetzel" letter. It is written by Richard Doty and is related to the Bennewitz affair. Bill Moore handles the letter as director of Special Investigations in 1980 at APRO.

APRO was closely connected to a Paul Bennewitz who was claiming he was monitoring UFO activities in and around Kirkland Air Force base in New Mexico.

Moore claimed in a speech that he made in July 1989 that the document was "loosely based upon an actual UFO case." He further maintained that it was sent to APRO by Doty as "bait," to recruit someone inside APRO who could keep USAFOSI informed on what Bennewitz was doing and saying.

As Moore became the Director of Special Investigations, he was the one who took the bait. Shortly after the letter arrived Moore met for the first time with Special Agent Richard Doty at Kirkland AFB.

One of the key things Moore concluded from the Weitzel document is that "as early as 1980 there were at least two individuals involved in officially creating spurious material and providing it to public sources." Moore discovered this by comparing the writing styles of the Weitzel and Ellsworth document. The producers of the material coming to Moore seemed now to be coming from multiple sources.

Following the publication of his book "The Roswell Incident" in the summer of 1980, Moore gets contacted while in Omaha, Nebraska by a Colonel at nearby Offutt AFB offering to meet with him and talk. Later in the same trip while in Albuquerque, New Mexico Moore gets a call from an individual at nearby Kirkland AFB. Moore ties these two individuals into the story of how and why he was contacted by intelligence people related to UFOs.

Moore version of his being contacted (by Falcon) in preparation for being provided with dramatic and conclusive UFO information goes as follows.

"In early September, 1980, I was approached by a well placed individual in the intelligence community who claimed to be directly connected to a high level government project dealing with UFOs. This individual, who subsequently came to be known as" The Falcon", told me that he spoke for a small group of similar individuals who were uncomfortable with the government's continuing cover-up."

Moore is provided the concepts of MJ-12, and Project Aquarius. Moore, Jamie Shandera, and Stanton Friedman promote the ideas widely. The ideas get out. Nothing is confirmed. The cover up is unaffected.

"The Aquarius Document is an actual example of some of the disinformation produced in connection with the Bennewitz case. The document is a retyped version of the real AFOSI message with a few spurious additions. It was apparently created by AFOSI, or at least I assumed it was, and it was handed to me in March 1981, with the intention that I would pass it to Bennewitz."

 

Bob Pratt was asked by Bill Moore to collaborate on a novel with him in Jan. 1982, or January 1981. The basis for the novel was "Project Aquarius, MJ-12, and a lot of other things." The working title was "MAJIK-12." Final title was "Project Aquarius." (Alternate titled was "IAC Conspiracy") Much of the technical proofreading of the 250+ page manuscript was provided through Richard Doty, or at least that was Bob Pratt’s impression.

Pratt had known Moore from his book "The Roswell Incident," and they had considered doing projects together on other things prior to the Aquarius book. They had for example considered doing a project on Abraham Lincoln’s Air Force during the civil war, and the zone of silence in Mexico.

Bob Pratt described the book effort,

"We finally agreed that we couldn’t prove any of this stuff, and write a non-fiction book, so we agreed to write a novel, and put all this crap in there you know and pass it off as fact described as fiction. That kind of idea . . . I wanted to call it MJ-12 or I wanted to call it IAC or something I can’t remember. He wanted to call it Project Aquarius. To me that was kind of hokey. Project Aquarius was an old word by then . . . now it turns out that there was a third silent partner in this book, and he gave me the impression that this was Doty. The manuscript was submitted to him for approval. . The manuscript came back with a lot of interesting technical details put into it such as weaponry and squads and things of that nature. This supposedly came from Doty. Whether it did or not I don’t know.(later Bob mentions that at the bottom of the title page it was written "written with the cooperation and assistance of Donald L. Davis.")

Pratt recalled that the book was ready in late 1983. At that point Moore who had an agent took over. In July Moore phoned Pratt to tell him no one was interested in the book.

1983

During a visit to Kirkland Air force Base to meet with AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty, CAUS Director, attorney Peter Gersten is given the whole range of bizarre UFO stories including:

Moore travels from airport to airport around the country ending up "in a motel on the edge of a mid-sized city in upstate New York." Moore is give 19 minutes to do anything he wants with material he is given in a brown manila envelope." What is in the envelope is the so-called "Aquarius Papers," which were " a transcription of notes either intended for use in preparing a briefing, or taken down during one and typed later."

This briefing was later rumored to be the one given Pres. Carter. (A briefing which supposedly took place on June 14, 1977) The Aquarius Papers contained essentially the identical information that Linda Howe says Doty conveyed to her in their April 1983 meeting.

Linda Moulton Howe, who had just finished producing an award-winning documentary of cattle mutilations called Strange Harvest, is told an almost identical story to the one being told to Bill Moore. While preparing to make a UFO documentary for HBO, Howe is informed by Richard Doty, a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. Doty claims that higher ups are willing to release special confirming UFO information for her documentary. She was sworn to secrecy about the offer until the film’s eventual release. Howe described the offer:

"The government intended to release to me several thousand feet of color and black and white film taken between 1947 and 1964 showing crashed UFO discs and extraterrestrial bodies in historic footage to be included in the HBO documentary supported with official government confirmation."

Howe’s meeting occurred on 4/9/83 at Kirtland Air Force base. She was taken to a room going through doors with number pads on the door. Doty appeared to know all the codes needed.

Linda was shown a paper titled, "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States." Doty said, ""My superiors have asked me to show you this." The paper described the government’s efforts from the 1940s on to ascertain the origin and motives of the E.T.s. This was done through Projects described in the paper and given names such as Sign, Grudge, Gleem, Pounce, Blue Book, Sigma, Snowbird, and Aquarius. The paper also mentioned MJ-12.

When Linda asked Doty if he knew about the Holloman film, Doty said he did but Emenegger had gotten the date wrong. The date he provided for the Holloman landing film was April 26, 1964 [which was a day after the nearby Lonnie Zamora Socorro landing and which Doty said was a screw up to a preplanned Holloman landing]

Doty then gave his version of the Holloman landing. When three UFOs appeared at Holloman at six o'clock the following morning, one landed while the other two hovered overhead. During the meeting between the UFO-beings and a Government party, the preserved bodies of dead aliens had been given to the E.T.s who, in turn, had returned something unspecified. Five ground and aerial cameras recorded this event.

Doty also described a 1949 Roswell crash and the 1948 Aztec, N.M., (which Bill Moore stated Doty had brought up because of a discussion with him days before) 1953 Kingman, AZ, and 1950 Mexico saucer crashes, gave a description of the alien bodies identical to Leonard Stringfield's witnesses, described a second, taller alien race. He described good and bad alien but had the greys as good and the blonds as the bad guys.

Doty told Linda about a live alien that had been recovered in a second Roswell crash in 1949. He stated that it had lived till 1952 when it died of unknown causes. During its captivity it had telepathically told military officers that the aliens had long been manipulating human biology and history.

Doty further talked about Nordic-type aliens called "highs" and conflicting alien factions. As with many of Doty’s stories he appeared to take a common story and twist the facts around. In the case of the blonds and greys, Doty told Howe that the blonds were the troublemakers and the greys were the good guys. Anyone else who has ever told the story tells it exactly the opposite.

Despite Doty’s claim that the government had authorized the release of film showing crashed saucers and alien bodies for use in the HBO documentary, it never materialized due to "political delays." When the alleged historical film footage didn’t materialized, HBO canceled the documentary.

Linda told her story widely. Concepts such as the live alien and the concept of various alien species visiting earth become widely known. Much of the story seemed to have some basis in fact. Nothing at all is confirmable. The ideas get out, and the cover up is unaffected.

After Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman decided to track documents from the various agencies involved in the New Mexico green-fireball incidents in the late 1940s. "Falcon" told Moore on October 25, 1982 that if they looked in the right places they could get more documents than they had already obtained in the search.

In May 1983, during a meeting with Falcon, Moore was handed a manila envelope with a one-page letter dated January 13, 1949, from Col. E.L. Poland, HQ, 4^th Army, to the Director of Army Intelligence in D.C.

The letter was headed "452.1 AKADB, SUBJECT: UNCONVENTIONAL AIRCRAFT (Control No. A-1917)" Moore was told to Request that file from the Department of the Army in the Pentagon and you will find something you have been looking for."

On May 10, 1983 Moore filed an FOIA and received more than 900 pages. They involved early CIRVIS reports (filed under JANAP 146) several dozen early Air Intelligence Reports, a large number of green fireball documents, and many miscellaneous items. Many of the items had been "electronically transmitted’ to the CIA and new National security Agency. Also found were references to 44 other files accumulated by the Directorate for Intelligence in the Pentagon, and on loan for 30 days.

Moore receives a message stating, "A package is ready for delivery." Moore sends Nic Magnuson as a cutout on a specific date to the Sea-Tac International Airport in Seattle, Washington.

Magnuson flies to Seattle waits at a specific gate for 20 minutes. When no one shows up he moves to a second gate after leaving the area for one hour. At this gate a "short, elderly, balding man" offs him a newspaper. In the newspaper was a manila envelope "securely sealed with brown wrapping tape."

Inside a second envelope are found eight "single page documents dated from June 24, 1978 and December 28, 1982, all on CIA letterhead and all copied on pale, blue-colored paper. They purported to be copies of internal communications between various members of MJ-12.

The now famous MJ-12 documents (reported to be a Briefing for President Eisenhower) are mailed to William Moore’s research associate and Los Angeles film producer Jamie Shandera.

The film arrives in an envelope that "was protected by a border of brown tape that ran along its seams." Anyone who has received FOIA documents from the CIA will recognize this taping pattern.

Colonel Bill Coleman, now retired and living in Florida, contacts Emenegger about doing another documentary on UFOs. Coleman indicates the time is again right, the government might be willing to release key confirming information of the extraterrestrial presence on earth. He tells Emenegger that Coleman tells Emenegger "Allen Hynek might be willing to participate again." Hynek, therefore, has already been approached. His involvement with the proposed 1985 documentary is independent of Vallee. Vallee is the final player asked to play. Hynek appeared to have been consulted with even before Emenegger.

A key to getting the information promised by the government is that the film had to be "professional enough and interesting enough to reopen the whole subject before the American people." After hearing Coleman’s pitch, Emenegger was convinced the government was about to provide the "final" evidence.

Vallee was "negative and skeptical" about the offer being made by Emenegger’s military contacts. He felt that if the government wanted to release the information they could simply go to someone like the national Academy of Sciences and announce the discovery of the alien presence. Coleman was saying the information had to be "leaked carefully, as part of something else."

For the second time Emenegger is getting claims that he will be given sensational evidence of the reality of UFOs. He contacts Hynek and Vallee about being part of the documentary to lend it credibility. He tells the two men he will not go it alone. Suggestions are even made that Senator Barry Goldwater, and former President Jimmy Carter "would help."

Both Vallee and Hynek feel the Air Force is again playing games and are trying to use them to deliberately mislead the public. Between themselves they conclude that they cannot support Emenegger’s plan, but "if there is any chance of uncovering genuine evidence" they would pursue it "behind the scenes."

Hynek and his assistants go to Norton Air Force Base to the Defense Audiovisual Agency (DAVA) to meet with Dr. Glenn Edward Miller and his boss General Robert Scott, the Director of DAVA. Both men turn out to be "outright contactees." Vallee and Hynek hold against the Generals the fact that they believe the accounts of Swiss contactee Billy Meier.

On March 27, 1985 Vallee traveled out himself to Norton to meet with Dr. Miller and his assistant Mr. Atkins. Miller, a man with two doctorates, described three sighting he had experienced including one that involved going on a landed spaceship, and ‘further communication with the entity" afterwards.

General Miller told Vallee that he "felt strongly that such data existed," although he did not indicate to Vallee that he knew what "the alleged evidence was, or where it was located."

General Scott was added to the discussion and he let Vallee know that DAVA was under the control of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Relations where not surprisingly Col. Coleman worked.

Scott told Vallee that he thought there were many "classes of beings" visiting earth and hinted that they weren’t all good. They are here to warn us against destroying ourselves. (Classic contactee message)

This whole incident started when Moore received a postcard addressed to his former mailbox – P.O. Box 189, Dewey, Arizona. It had been mailed from New Zealand. Its message read,

Moore and Shandera discover an unsigned carbon copy of a brief memo, dated July 14, 1954 from Robert Cutler, special assistant to President Eisenhower to General Nathan Twinning. Its subject - "NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project." The memo simply rescheduled the MJ-12/SSP briefing to take place during "the already scheduled White house meeting of July 16 rather than following it.

The document was found in the just declassified USAF Intelligence records from Record Group 341. The document is discovered at the Suitland, Maryland satellite station of the National archives.

Important to the story is the fact that Friedman had intended to review the Air Force Record Group 341 files for three months. This was before the postcard arrived, and because Friedman had been phoning often about the documents, who ever planted the document in the T4-1846 file, Box 189, knew that Friedman (a member of the team investigating the MJ-12 document) would eventually review the files.

Friedman had been phoning the National Archives every week for those three months asking if the 64-man Air Force Declassification team had finished the review of the files. When the files were finally read, Friedman realized that he had to go on a UFO lecture tour, and couldn’t go.

Moore didn’t want to go either. He had already been worn down by the many dead ends of the intelligence game. Only when Friedman said that the records were not at the National Archives, but at Suitland Maryland, and that to get them the researcher had to go through the military archivist in charge Edward Reese, did the last pieces of the puzzle come together. At that point Shandera and Moore figured there would be enough chance of success to make the trip across the country.

Like the MJ-12 documents, the discovered document comes under heavy attacks from skeptics and critics. Many start to point at Moore as a possible author.