UFO Disinfo: Part Three - The Bennewitz Deception

In the early 1970s, ranchers across numerous states began to report their concern over a rash of cattle deaths that they believed to be unusual. This wave of mutilation, as it has been called, to use a phrase immortalized in song by the Pixies more than a decade later, came to develop specific indicators. These were not typical cattle deaths due to illness or predation. The cows were often said to have been the most healthy specimens of a herd, found dead overnight, their carcasses drained of blood, soft tissue organs like ears, eyes, udders, genitals and anuses cored from their bodies, with incisions uniformly described as surgically precise, and little sign of the typical scavenging these seasoned ranchers would typically expect to occur. Many believed these mutilations were the work of cultists, sneaking onto their properties at night to make ritual sacrifices and collect blood for their Luciferian ceremonies. Stirrings of the Satanic Panic had already begun to grip the country, and these ranchers had taken to patrolling their properties in armed posses. Blame soon shifted, however, when it was noted that no tracks, from animals, shoes, or tires, tended to ever be present around mutilation sites, and when sightings of strange lights in the sky, sometimes specifically identified as helicopters but described as eerily quiet, began to be associated with mutilation waves. Rather than witches and devil worshipers, the ranchers and local law enforcement investigating the mutilations began to whisper about aliens, or clandestine government experiments. With ranchers now arming themselves against the government and UFOs, and in some cases firing potshots at aircraft that flew over their properties, the story broke across the country through the Associated Press newswire and in pieces printed in major national magazines like Newsweek. No longer able to dismiss the phenomenon, and seeing in it something of the mass hysteria the Robertson Panel had predicted back in the 50s, more than one major investigation was conducted, by various state authorities, Fish and Wildlife, the ATF, and the FBI. These relied on expert analysis by academics of carcasses in necropsies performed at institutes of higher learning, and the consensus emerged that these cattle mutilations were indeed natural and explainable. These animals had died from any number of reasons, such as disease or animal attack, and only appeared to be drained of blood because blood had settled in their carcasses, or pooled on the ground and been consumed by scavengers and insects, as well as dried by the sun. The cored soft organs had been the work of blowflies and vultures, which pecked at the softest parts in order to get at the interior of a carcass. And what appeared to be surgical cuts were simply the splitting that occurs when carcasses stretch as they bloat. But some other investigators believed these official investigations were not examining true cases of cattle mutilation, which they said tended to cease whenever a large-scale investigation began. The findings of private investigations, on the other hand, still tend not to indicate E.T. but rather earthly culprits. Earlier state-level investigations claimed to have found evidence of the cattle having been tranquilized and treated with anti-coagulants. One newspaper reported that a Colorado sheriff had discovered a military style bag containing a scalpel, surgical gloves, and a bull’s penis at one mutilation scene. A New Mexico highway patrolman and a retired scientist claimed to have identified markings on cattle that could only be seen under ultra-violet lights, as well as rope marks and broken bones, indicating they had been marked and airlifted somewhere for experimentation before being dropped back onto their range—using decidedly human technology. One theory that has since been put forth is that these cattle were being covertly studied to determine the spread of radiation from local nuclear test sites, a theory that recalls the Villas Boas incident shared in the last installment, with silent helicopters posing as UFOs and abducting test subjects—remember Villas Boas’s vomiting and lesions, which sound an awful lot like radiation poisoning. Another theory developed by biochemist and paranormal researcher Colm Kelleher suggests that the mutilations may have represented a secret effort to discover how far the unusual pathogens that cause Mad Cow disease might have spread through the country’s beef supply. But still, when one hears cattle mutilation, one tends to think aliens, and perhaps that’s by design. One of the most well-known investigators into the topic is journalist Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary on the subject, A Strange Harvest, won her a regional Emmy. She has since made a career out of insisting that extra-terrestrials are behind not just the cattle mutilation phenomenon, but crop circles, and of course, UFO sightings and abduction claims. Howe’s success earned her a deal with HBO for a UFO documentary, and it also brought her the attention of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. An agent of the AFOSI, Richard Doty, invited her to Kirtland Air Force Base, where he confirmed that, indeed, aliens do exist and that the U.S. government had been in contact with them. He showed her official looking documents that outlined mankind’s contact with aliens at Roswell, the existence of a living extra-terrestrial survivor of the crash there, and the mind-bending revelation that these aliens had genetically engineered humanity and sent spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ to guide us in our evolution. Doty promised her footage of UFO crashes and landings, of aliens both deceased and living, and he suggested he might be able to arrange a meeting between Howe and this extra-terrestrial guest of the government. However, as the government seems to have done in the past to other filmmakers—as detailed in my recent patron exclusive—they never made good on their promises, and HBO canceled Howe’s project. Richard Doty denies that this meeting ever occurred, but if you know anything about Richard Doty, you know not to believe much of what he says. He certainly was an agent of the AFOSI, though, and we know that, at the Air Force’s behest, he had shared the very same falsified documents described by Howe with other UFOlogists, encouraging them to believe the same outlandish and fanciful tales, even if it broke their grip on reality.

Linda Moulton Howe documenting the cattle mutilation phenomenon. Photo by Mark O’Kane. Accessed via IMDb. Image may be subject to copyright.

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In Part One of this series, I spoke about the Roswell incident, and how it did not become a mythical episode in UFO lore until far later. There was some flap about the original Army Air Force intelligence office’s press release stating they had recovered a “flying disk.” It was, after all, the height of the Summer of Saucers, but the retraction that followed hot on the heels of this press release, which included photos of the less-than-impressive debris and identified it as a weather balloon really did settle the matter for more than thirty years. It wasn’t until 1979, when a high school teacher named William Moore made it into the myth it is today. Bill Moore taught French and Russian for more than a decade in Pennsylvania before moving to Minnesota to teach English at a Twin Cities high school. In his spare time, he pursued writing, with a special interest in UFOs. Some initial investigative pieces for the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) led to Moore’s co-authoring of The Philadelphia Experiment in 1978, a poorly supported account of the supposed disappearance of a U.S. Navy destroyer escort. Moore’s book relied entirely on rumor rather than direct eyewitness reports, and came to the dubious conclusion that the ship’s disappearance was the result of experimentation with a top secret cloaking technology, but despite its faults, it earned him a reputation as a spinner of credible-seeming paranormal accounts. Thereafter, while on the book promotion circuit, he met Stanton Friedman, a former nuclear physicist turned professional UFOlogist who over the course of his long career would be both praised for his scientific approach to the investigation of UFOs and criticized for his credulity and his fallacious arguments from ignorance. Moore and Friedman forged the Roswell myth together, and Bill Moore’s reputation as an investigator in the UFOlogist community was established. During his promotional tour for his second book, The Roswell Incident, Moore received a phone call from someone who claimed to be a government intelligence agent who had chosen Moore to receive classified UFO information and disseminate it to the public. Moore would take the bait, meeting with none other than AFOSI agent Rick Doty in Albuquerque, NM. Throughout the 1980s, Doty would offer astounding revelations to Moore and his associates, including earth-shattering evidence in the form of top secret memos, much as he did with Linda Moulton Howe during the same period. While Doty asked Howe only that she include these materials in her film, though, he had a further stipulation for Moore. In order to get his glimpse behind the curtain, Moore would be asked to spy on the investigations of fellow UFOlogists, and even to feed them false information. Moore accepted the arrangement, and during the following years, he collected supposedly genuine evidence of alien contact and government cover-up from Doty while leading his first target, one Paul Bennewitz, down a rabbit hole of disinformation and madness. In the end, when his efforts did real psychological harm to Bennewitz, and the documents Doty had been feeding him began to be uncovered as fakes, Moore came clean in a dramatic keynote speech at the Mutual UFO Network conference in Las Vegas in 1989, confessing to his disinformation activities. “I would play the disinformation game,” he said, despite the interruptions of boos and hisses from the audience, “get my hands dirty just often enough to lead those directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do, and all the while continuing to burrow my way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was directing it and why.” This would be the end of Bill Moore’s UFOlogy career, as his declaration, rather than being seen as an important revelation of the government’s campaign of disinformation against UFOlogists, was instead taken as confession of his betrayal, making him a pariah. Still, for years afterward, Bill Moore would attempt to justify his cooperation with the AFOSI’s disinformation efforts.

The eventual target of Rick Doty’s and Bill Moore’s disinformation campaign, Paul Bennewitz, should not be dismissed as a mere nutcase. In 1969, while pursuing his PhD in Physics, he started a successful tech company in New Mexico, Thunder Scientific, manufacturing instruments for gauging humidity and temperature for the Air Force and NASA. So frequent was his business with the military that he settled down and established his lab right near the borders of Kirtland Air Force Base. As a pilot with a history of service in the Coast Guard, Bennewitz admired the servicemen and officials he dealt with at Kirtland. He was a happy family man, interested mostly in playing his guitar and reading Western novels whenever he found any spare time. But he also had long been interested in UFOs. He was a member of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, or APRO, and sometimes consulted for them as a scientific expert. In 1979, this interest would begin to consume him. That April, a former astronaut turned Senator Harrison Schmitt held a news conference in Albuquerque about a spate of cattle mutilations across New Mexico. In the audience was Paul Bennewitz, who became convinced cattle mutilations were the work of extra-terrestrials and made the acquaintance of some of the phenomenon’s principal investigators. Also present were numerous representatives of interested government groups, like the FBI, and also the AFOSI. In retrospect, this may have been the first time that Bennewitz showed up on their radar, so to speak. Later that year, when Bennewitz was out watching the stars on the second-story deck of his rather posh home, he noticed what appeared to be lights of various colors hovering and swooping around the Manzano mountains within Kirtland Air Force Base. Throughout the rest of the year, Bennewitz went onto his deck nightly, setting up a surveillance platform with telephoto cameras aimed at the military installation in an effort to capture this aerial activity on film. In his mind, he was not spying on secret Air Force activity. These lights appeared to travel great distances almost instantaneously, and he was convinced that they were extra-terrestrial craft. As his investigation developed over the next year, he began aiming other instruments at the base and started detecting electro-magnetic pulses that he believed were signals emitted by the UFOs he was filming. Since in this area was the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, the nation’s largest underground stockpile of nuclear weapons components at the time, Bennewitz felt that he might have uncovered an alien campaign to spy on or even attack a strategic military site, and he had every intention of sharing his evidence with the Air Force.

Paul Bennewitz. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

As his investigation went on, however, he began to show signs of credulity and paranoia that may have served as a warning sign to those who would afterward manipulate and deceive him, suggesting that perhaps his mental stability was not strong enough to withstand the psychological operation that would eventually be conducted on him. In mid-1980, while he was still collecting evidence on the aliens over Manzano from this deck, one of his contacts in the cattle mutilation investigation referred to him a woman named Myrna Hansen, who claimed to have had a close encounter of the fourth kind, otherwise known as an abduction experience. Bennewitz welcomed Hansen and her son into his home, but dissatisfied with her recollection of the event, he called in psychologist and alien contactee researcher Leo Sprinkle to perform a hypnotic regression. The reputation of Sprinkle himself and the problems inherent in the entire practice of hypnotic memory recovery need not be explored in depth here for me to make the point that the man and the memories he supposedly recovered from his patients’ unconscious minds are extremely suspect. In this case, Hansen “recovered” memory of being taken to an underground alien base where she saw human body parts in vats and where she was implanted with a device that would allow the aliens to monitor her thoughts. While Sprinkle probably contributed to the development of this delusion during his hypnosis sessions, even he was disconcerted by Paul Bennewitz’s mental state later that summer, on his second visit to hypnotically regress Hansen. He found Bennewitz toting a gun, agitated by the idea that aliens were monitoring his home and might attack at any moment. Needless to say, it sounds very much like Bennewitz was already descending into mental illness, as though the presence of Myrna Hansen in his home had driven him over the edge into a shared delusional disorder, or folie à deux. That October, 1980, he finally informed Kirtland head of security about his investigation and its supposed findings, prompting the AFOSI to dispatch Rick Doty to his home to interview him. Thereafter, and somewhat curiously considering the nature of his claims, Bennewitz was granted an audience with the heads of every department at Kirtland AFB, to whom he detailed his evidence and his theory. One would think that everyone at this briefing recognized his instability as well as his eagerness to please the U.S. government. It seems officials at Kirtland might have quite handily put an end to the affair simply by discouraging Bennewitz’s surveillance of the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, telling him he was filming classified activities, and suggesting he seek psychiatric help. But instead, Air Force intelligence stationed at Kirtland, and perhaps National Security Agency personnel as well, encouraged him to continue his investigations and continue reporting back to them. It appears the NSA believed Bennewitz had somehow picked up new experimental signals they had been testing in the area and wanted to learn more about how he had managed to do it. As for the interest of the AFOSI, perhaps they believed that he had captured footage of experimental aircraft in filming the moving lights around the base, or perhaps they simply saw in poor Paul Bennewitz an opportunity to launch a broad disinformation campaign, not just against the unstable physicist himself, but against the broader UFOlogical community.

By the time Bennewitz gave his briefing at Kirtland, AFOSI Special Agent Rick Doty, who had been stationed at Kirtland for a year, had already begun an ambitious disinformation campaign. Earlier that summer, he met with Bill Moore. The first piece of documentary evidence given to Moore, not by Doty but by Moore’s anonymous contact, known only as Falcon, had been a document detailing a “Project Silver Sky,” which mentioned the recovery of a UFO. Further investigation had revealed this to be a forgery, and at Moore’s first meeting with Doty in Albuquerque, he confronted his AFOSI contacts about the deception. Stupidly enough, Doty assured him that had only been a test, which Moore had passed. This was when Moore struck his Faustian bargain, agreeing to inform on and feed false information to his fellow UFOlogists in exchange for the real intel on UFOs. In November, just 7 days after Bennewit’z fateful presentation, Moore too was summoned to Kirtland, shown a document marked “Secret” with analysis of Bennewitz’s footage and mention of a “Project Aquarius.” Moore was subsequently tasked with befriending Bennewitz, which with Bill Moore’s UFOlogist clout was a simple task, and early the next year, Doty gave Moore a document similar to the one he had seen months before, instructing him to show it to Bennewitz. There had been, however, some curious additions to the document. It now mentioned an organization or group called “MJ Twelve” that received exclusive access to the results of Project Aquarius. These documents encouraged Bennewitz to fall ever further down his rabbit hole, as they indicated that the Air Force, NASA, and even higher, more secretive authorities were very interested in his findings and took them very seriously. Therefore, Bennewitz went public, informing UFO organizations and UFOlogists of his investigation’s conclusions, and thereby playing right into his manipulators’ plans and spreading misinformation throughout all of UFOlogy generally. But Bennewitz was only one prong of this operation. The other, Bill Moore, proved to be far more discerning and mistrustful, for obvious reasons. Yet he too proved to be a handy tool for the dissemination of the UFO myth in the long run.

Author Bill Moore. Accessed through UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

Bill Moore first learned about Project Aquarius and the shadowy organization known as MJ-12, later to be revealed as Majestic 12, from the documents that Rick Doty had shown him. The mythos developed by these documents became the subject for a fiction book that Moore had worked on for a number of years. Essentially, Aquarius was thought to be the real UFO program, buried under layers of secrecy so that it could deal with genuine alien contact, unlike the sham public-facing program Blue Book, and the Majestic 12 were the high-level panel of powerful individuals who oversaw the project. This story certainly made for compelling fiction, and in it we see many of the crazier beliefs still cherished by the UFO fringe: UFO crashes at Roswell and Aztec were real, the government had recovered alien corpses but also a living Extra-terrestrial Biological Entity or EBE, with whom we had communicated and learned a great deal. There were three ET species visiting earth, one benevolent, one bent on exploiting our resources, and a third, the greys, who were responsible for mutilating cattle and abducting people as part of a program for the harvesting of genetic material. Mankind’s presence on Earth was a result of such genetic manipulation, and human history had been guided by one or more of these alien species through figures such as Christ, Muhammad, and even Hitler. This is the same mythos, using the same official looking documents, that Doty would present to Linda Moulton-Howe. Indeed, it may be that Doty was encouraging Moore to publish a book with these claims as non-fiction. Moore certainly must have known better than to believe the contents of the Aquarius documents, which Doty openly admitted were disinformation, but Moore reportedly had wanted to present the material as non-fiction before his writing partner insisted it would have to be fictionalized since they had no evidence of the outrageous claims. Thereafter, though, Moore served as the conduit for the dissemination of documents that seemingly confirmed Majestic 12’s existence. I have spoken about this before, in my episode The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12. These documents were slipped through the door of Bill Moore’s TV producer, and afterward, corroborating evidence for the documents was turned up by Moore in the National Archives. The papers have since been roundly debunked as forgeries, based on factual errors in their content, typeface inconsistencies, and indications that the corroborative memo, which lacked an archival register number, may have simply been planted in the National Archives by Moore or someone else. Whether or not Moore was an active participant in every level of this hoax in his role as an AFOSI stooge is difficult to determine. He may have disbelieved most of the contents of the mythos established by the Aquarius documents, and yet believed that some element of truth may have been present in them. Thus, when the Majestic 12 documents appeared, still believing that he would be given the genuine documents promised him, he may have been played for a fool by Doty. Whatever the case, the fact that the MJ-12 hoax as well as most major elements of modern UFO mythology can be traced back to one Air Force intelligence agent tasked with feeding false info to the public should be enough to make a staunch skeptic of any true believer.

To Paul Bennewitz, already teetering on the edge of a paranoid mental break, the slow disclosure of the Aquarius mythos served to reinforce his most nightmarish delusions. They confirmed his assumptions about the malevolent nature of the aliens whom he believed had abducted and tagged his friend Myrna Hansen. These were the same aliens he had been filming from his deck, whose EM pulse transmissions he believed he had been decoding. When they saw their disinformation driving him toward a mental break, Doty and the AFOSI, as well as perhaps the NSA, which had apparently taken an interest in the program he had devised to decipher the signals he was picking up, kicked their PsyOp into high gear, sending him a new computer, reportedly delivered by former Blue Book consulting scientist turned UFOlogist darling J. Allen Hynek, convincing him that the program in this new computer would aid in his decoding of the alien signals. In fact, his torturers had set up in a vacant house across the street to beam signals right into his reception arrays, and suddenly the transmissions of the ETs were crystal clear, confirming all his fears with statements like, “Our race is dying on the home planet,” “women of Earth are needed,” and “military of US delivered embryos.” Bennewitz was in such a state that he doesn’t even seem to have suspected that this mysterious new computer dropped off at his house might be feeding him lies, nor does he seem to have questioned the nature of these decoded messages. He does not seem to have wondered why these aliens would be broadcasting their plans and motives into the aether like some monologuing villain in a bad movie. Instead, he focused on figuring out where their base was, and based on UFO sightings and cattle mutilation activity, he came to the conclusion that the underground base Hansen had described in her hypnotic regressions was beneath Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico, a few hours north of Albuquerque.

Whether his AFOSI handlers led Bennewitz to focus on Archuleta Mesa, wanting his attention turned away from the activities around the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, is uncertain, but Rick Doty has admitted to encouraging his belief in what would come to be known as Dulce Base. The Air Force actually began hauling old equipment out to Archuleta Mesa—derelict vehicles and structures, and even standing vents connected to nothing that made it appear as if some complex had been built into the mountain. Kirtland dispatched Special Forces to stand around like they were guarding something, and the local Army base was incentivized to use the mountain for their training exercises. These military forces cleared brush for helicopter landings, and even set up powerful lights to sweep across the clouds, simulating the strange lights Bennewitz filmed over Manzano. All this, according to Doty, to encourage Bennewitz, who had taken to piloting his own plane over Archuleta Mesa searching for evidence of his theory. It seems a big expenditure of money and manpower just to encourage a nosy UFO theorist, and unsurprisingly, it worked. By the late 1980s, when both Moore and Doty claim their PsyOp against Bennewitz had ceased, Bennewitz spiraled. He couldn’t sleep, believing aliens were creeping into his bedroom and drugging him. He described waking in his car in the middle of nowhere with no memory of how he had gotten there. Eventually, he began accusing his own wife of being under alien control, and after barricading himself into his house, his family finally had him committed. Both Moore and Doty have told interviewers that they considered Bennewitz a friend and had tried to caution him against pursuing his obsessions any further, seeing how it was affecting his mental health, but this sounds an awful lot like someone trying to save face. The fact is that Bill Moore and Rick Doty and whatever other AFOSI officials were involved, as well as any NSA agents who according to Doty had mounted their own PsyOp against him, were all directly responsible for destroying Paul Bennewitz’s life.

AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty. Photo accessed at UFO-Alien Database. Image may be subject to copyright.

It remains unclear whether the NSA really was involved in the operation against Bennewitz. This may have been another obfuscation from Rick Doty. Some have cast doubt on whether Doty even worked for the AFOSI, but his service records are clear: he joined the Air Force in 1968, basic training in Texas at Lackland AFB, then service as security at Sheppard AFB before shipping out to Vietnam. After the war, Doty ended up at McChord air base in Washington state, followed by a stint in West Germany, and then back to the states, to Ellsworth base in South Dakota, during which time a hoax report about a UFO encounter at this base was sent to the National Enquirer, prompting some to suspect Doty got into the AFOSI disinformation game around this time. Then in 1979, at the height of the cattle mutilation wave in the area, Doty was stationed at Kirtland in New Mexico. Any doubt about Doty’s agency affiliation, raised by some who suggest Doty may have been an independent meddler or the agent of some other, unknown group, should have been laid to rest by the 2013 release of AFOSI documents under the Freedom of Information Act that clearly confirm Doty’s role as special agent in charge of investigating Paul Bennewitz. The questions that remain all boil down to one question. Why? The simplest explanation seems to be that Bennewitz had been monitoring classified activities at Kirtland. Certainly we know that the electromagnetic pulses he was detecting came from the nearby Sandia National Laboratories, where they were generating EMPs such as occur in nuclear explosions in order to test how effectively their radiation hardening processes had protected electronic systems in aircraft. As for the strange lights in the sky over Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, FOIA documents indicate that numerous UFO sightings over Kirtland may have been attributable to helicopter activity. Indeed, the cattle mutilation incidents in the area were also sometimes accompanies by reports of silent helicopters. One might think back to Bosco Nedelcovic’s claims about Operation Mirage, in which helicopters were specially equipped with strange lights in order to appear as UFOs, and how his claims accorded well with the account of abductee Villas Boas. The silent chopper has long been a fixture of government conspiracy theory, and as such is dismissed by some as nonsense, but the fact is that the Pentagon began developing stealth helicopters with noise reduction technology back in the late 1960s, and rotor acoustics research has developed steadily ever since. We now know that a quiet helicopter has been flying since as early as 1972. The Hughes500P, which used contra-rotating coaxial rotors as well as an exhaust muffler, was able to reduce noise substantially. And as recently as last year, Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs announced research into electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft, utilizing the kind of technology commonly seen in commercial drones to develop silent and absolutely maneuverable aircraft. If the Army is openly publishing press releases about this research, and the technology itself has been so widely available that civilian hobbyists have been using it for years, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to believe the U.S. government has been using it in secret for far longer.

However, Paul Bennewitz and many other UFO eyewitnesses claim that the lights they have seen in the skies display speed and maneuverability unlike anything a helicopter could possibly match. What other kind of aircraft might the Air Force and the CIA want to obscure with tales of flying saucers? The rather obvious answer would be spy planes, of course. It has been estimated by historians of the CIA like Gerald Haines that most UFO sightings as far back as the 1950s were actually sightings of Top Secret spy planes out on maneuvers, aircraft such as the U-2, the A-12 Oxcart, an the SR-71 Blackbird. And speaking of flying saucers, the government was flying some of those at different points as well! Since before the modern UFO phenomenon erupted in 1947, disc-shaped or “circular wing” aircraft have been developed numerous times. The first, the XF5U-1, warmly referred to as the “Flying Flapjack,” was developed by the US Navy for its short-takeoff-and-landing capabilities. Rumors persist of a more advanced model of the Flying Flapjack, called the Skimmer, which was said to have hovering capabilities, but if the Navy did achieve this technology, they kept it well under wraps. In 1953, the Toronto Star reported that Canadian Aircraft Manufacturer Avro Canada was developing a flying saucer aircraft capable of reaching speeds of 1,500 miles per hour and vertical takeoff and landing, which meant hovering capability. This was indeed a real undertaking, Project Y, the Avro Ace. History tells us the project never got off the ground, so to speak, as the Canadian government didn’t have the budget it would require, but the US Air Force stepped in with all the money the developer would need, resulting in Project Y2, proposing 2 saucer craft, the Silverbug and the Ladybird, interceptors capable of reaching Mach 3.5. These designs further developed into the Avro MX-1794 turbojet flying disc, which underwent wind-tunnel testing at Wright-Patterson and then promptly disappeared after Avro announced a forthcoming prototype in 1957. Of course, it is tempting to believe that this craft went Top Secret once it proved functional, but the fact is that Avro afterward developed a disc-shaped hovercar, the VZ-9AV or Avrocar, for the Army, which turned out to be a rather shaky and unbalanced disappointment. So perhaps all of Avro’s flying saucers were likewise failures, explaining why no one heard much more about them since the early stages of their development. This seems to be a pattern with disc-shaped craft, such as the Convair Lenticular Defense Missile, codenamed the Pye Wacket, which was a radio-controlled missile in the shape of a disc about 5 feet across, that if it hadn’t been officially canceled after wind-tunnel testing was hoped to be capable of achieving Mach 7. Of course, rumors persist about these flying disc programs going dark, funded by black money, and being further tested at the highest security testing grounds like White Sands. Given what we know about the secrecy surrounding the development of other spy planes and even more recently with stealth airstrike drones, it does seem far more rational, if equally speculative, to believe that most UFO eyewitnesses, when they weren’t mistaking natural phenomena for an aircraft, were actually seeing experimental aircraft like these. Perhaps even the strange TicTacs, Gimbals, and Spheres seen in the latest UAP videos may actually represent the next generation of stealth aircraft or drone technology, projects that the US government would prefer the public believe are alien spacecraft in order to preserve for some further years the secrecy of a game changing technology.

Army Avrocars depicted as "flying jeeps" in company literature. Public Domain image.

When one considers the Bennewitz affair in its entirety, one begins to realize that it could not possibly have been about just discrediting Paul Bennewitz. There would have been no need to discredit him, since he came first to the Kirtland head of security and confided everything Only after the AFOSI encouraged his delusions for years did he go public with his evidence and theories. If the AFOSI or the NSA or whoever had wanted to silence him, they could have warned him, or they could have arrested him and seized everything he had collected and all his equipment under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Communications Act of 1934. Instead, they fed him a myth, and it seems clear they hoped he would spread that myth to the larger UFOlogical community, which he eventually did. Bill Moore, too, served this end, as he was instrumental in the dissemination of the Majestic 12 papers and the larger myth of alien contact and government coverup that developed from them. It is all too easy to dismiss UFO sightings with as little evidence as the UFO witnesses themselves present, as we have seen, and likewise, it is a simple matter to suggest that there are no silent choppers or unknown experimental aircraft in the skies being kept secret by our government. It’s even an easy matter to argue that the PsyOp against Paul Bennewitz never took place. Bill Moore is a liar, you might say, and perhaps he anticipated some other result from his confession rather than the ruin of his reputation with his audience and therefore the self-destruction his writing career. Rick Doty too is a liar, even according to his own version of events, which changes from telling to retelling. If documents prove he worked for the AFOSI, they do not prove that he took point in this psychologic operation against Bennewitz, and the Air Force, of course, denies any knowledge of such disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, we know that, even after his retirement, Doty appears to be up to his same old tricks. In 2005, an anonymous source calling himself “Request Anonymous” revealed to UFOlogists via email a UFO myth much like the one Doty is said to have previously passed off on Linda Moulton Howe, Bill Moore, and Paul Bennewitz. After a saucer crash in New Mexico in ’47, an EBE survivor commenced communication between aliens and the US government. In this story, 12 US astronauts left on a spacecraft in 1965, bound for the alien world of Serpo in Zeta Reticuli, much like the iconic ending of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, the physics of the story didn’t add up, and on further investigation into the IP address of “Request Anonymous,” the informant turned out to be none other than Richard Doty, who was active under his own name on the same web forum.

Does his responsibility for the Serpo hoax prove that Doty had always acted alone in his disinformation campaign? Or does it reveal that he never truly retired from the intelligence and disinformation game? Or does it just show that old habits die hard? Doty has since made some money from his involvement in the UFO world through books and interviews. Is he peddling his lies now just to make a buck? We may never know. In the late ‘80s, the FBI conducted an investigation into the doctored MJ-12 documents to determine whether they were indeed the leak of Top Secret documents, and who had leaked them. Curiously, the AFOSI asked the FBI to investigate, but during the course of their investigation, the FBI came to suspect the AFOSI themselves, or at least the local Kirtland office. In the end, though, they could determine only that the documents were bogus, not who was responsible for them. Once again, it is easy to say there is nothing here, that if there was a conspiracy against Bennewitz or the larger UFOlogical community, that it was localized, unofficial. However, I saved the story of the Bennewitz Deception for last because, just like my principal source Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, I wanted to show the context of the entire history of the modern UFO phenomenon and other indications that the government encourages belief in extra-terrestrial visitation because I have come to believe it provides a coherent and rational explanation for the entire mystery. And if we accept this, then a further conclusion can be deduced. If the government really were covering up alien contact, they would not encourage the belief that they were covering up alien contact. If UFOs were not of this world and the government didn’t want the public to know this, wouldn’t they instead encourage the belief that these craft are our own? That’s my reasoning anyway, and I’m sure some will think me an agent of disinformation for encouraging this conclusion.

Further Reading

Bishop, Greg. Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. Gallery Books, 2005.

Goleman, Michael J. “Wave of mutilation: the cattle mutilation phenomenon of the 1970s.” Agricultural History, vol. 85, no. 3, 2011, pp. 398-417. National Library of Medicine, doi: 10.3098/ah.2011.85.3.398.

Klass, Philip J. “The MJ-12 Crashed-Saucer Documents.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 12, no. 2, Winer 1987/1988. Skeptical Inquirer, skepticalinquirer.org/1988/01/the-mj-12-crashed-saucer-documents/.

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

UFO Disinfo: Part Two - The Washington Flyovers and the CIA

In April 1952, the most popular magazine in America, LIFE, in a very popular issue featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover, published an article called “Have We Visitors from Space?” In it, the authors asserted that, having spoken to senior Air Force officials, they could confidently declare that the flying saucers frequently witnessed since 1947 were neither a visionary phenomenon nor a natural phenomenon, nor were they balloons or manmade aircraft designed by Americans or Russians, leaving extra-terrestrial visitors as the only reasonable conclusion. This article surprised Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been tasked to run the Air Force’s follow-up UFO investigation after the dissolution of Project Grudge, Project Blue Book. The Air Force had directed Ruppelt to keep something of a lid on UFO theories by identifying mundane explanations for as many reports as possible and not advertising those that proved more difficult to explain away. Therefore, it did not make much sense that the Air Force would then encourage the biggest magazine in America to fuel a resurgence in flying saucer mania, as the Life article certainly did, precipitating an inundation of UFO reports with which Ruppelt and Blue Book had to contend. But perhaps it wasn’t the Air Force at all, for it was well known that Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who pulled the strings at LIFE, was a close friend of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the first director of the CIA. So maybe there was some inter-office chicanery underway about which Ruppelt was uninformed. Suspicions of being out of the loop were confirmed in July that year when, amid the deluge of UFO sightings he was dealing with, Ruppelt, in Washington, DC, on business, picked up the newspaper and discovered that, a couple days earlier, there had been a dramatic UFO incident over the nation’s capital! According to the papers, on July 19th and 20th, numerous objects appeared on air traffic controller radar , none of which were following established flight paths, and some of which appeared to be capable of making radical maneuvers unlike normal aircraft. Some of these radar pips even coincided with visual sightings of what appeared to be fireballs with trailing tails, some of which were taken to be meteors, but which were described by others to hover and change direction. By the time jets had been scrambled to defend the capital from what appeared to be an incursion into our sovereign airspace, the objects were nowhere to be found. Ruppelt writes that he was flabbergasted that no one had bothered to inform him, the head of the Air Force’s UFO investigation project, and as reporters contacted him for comment, he had nothing to offer, prompting further headlines like “Air Force Won’t Talk.” Determined to do his job, Ruppelt requisitioned a staff car to head out and interview radarmen and witnesses, but he was given the runaround, told a car wasn’t available and further informed that he could not expense a rental. Instead, he was directed to take the bus, but Ruppelt was unfamiliar with DC public transit and was left with the option of paying for a cab out of his per diem, which after lodging and meals had run dry. So, foiled in his efforts to investigate further, he ended up departing for Ohio and Blue Book’s headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A few days later, the UFO flyovers began again, with commercial airline pilots and flight attendants, control tower personnel and U.S. Airmen witnessing lights in the sky that corresponded with strange radar blips. Interestingly, witness reports were accompanied by contradictory reports from others on the same aircraft or in the same towers who hadn’t seen a thing. The official Air Force explanation was twofold. The radar blips were simply misidentifications caused by strange weather, as there had been temperature inversions over DC that July. As for the visual sightings, like the Foo fighters before them, they had been stars and city lights that had been misidentified due to aviator’s vertigo. And the sighting from the ground? Well, those were just shooting stars, of course. Many scorned this explanation, which relied on a confluence of numerous errors and was buttressed by the idea that the situation had snowballed due to mass hysteria. Captain Ruppelt, however, disbelieved the Air Force explanation for another reason. According to his memoirs, a few days prior to the Washington flyovers, he had spoken to a scientist from an agency that he refused to identify. This contact supposedly warned him of the forthcoming incident, predicting, “you're going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York…probably Washington.”

*

Shortly before I released part one of this series, the unclassified version of the Pentagon’s UFO report finally dropped, and it was very much what was expected. In fact, it was strikingly similar to General Nathan Twining’s memo of September 1947, when Twining conceded the existence of UFOs, suggested some may actually be natural phenomena like meteors but that others appear to display maneuvering capabilities and to be evasive, and suggested they may be a high security American aircraft, or that an adversary like the Soviet Union had developed an extraordinarily advanced propulsion technology. Here we are 74 years later, and not much has changed, except the fact that we’re getting it released to the public directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In this preliminary report, which it should be noted is only the unclassified version of a report with presumably far more granular detail presented to Congress, five “explanatory categories” are given: “airborne clutter,” such as the “large deflated balloon” that is cited multiple times as an explanation for a certain sighting; “natural atmospheric phenomena,” like the old meteor explanation; “US…developmental programs”; “foreign adversary systems”; and to really stoke the ET hypothesis, an “other” category that might attribute UFO sightings to anything, including aliens. And there appears to be no shortage of these sightings; focusing only on reports from military aviators between 2004 and 2021, they number them 144, stating that 80 of these “registered across multiple sensors”, including radar, infrared, and weapon seekers. 18 of these appeared to display “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics,” though they caution that “[t]hese observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.” The headlines regarding this report have been somewhat misleading, focusing on the fact that it doesn’t rule out an alien origin for the objects, which is technically true but only in that the report did not even explicitly address the possibility, and stating that it asserts they are not American craft, which is not true at all. US government or domestic private industry development programs is one of their explanatory categories, and expanding on this, it states they were unable to confirm this but still explicitly says “UAP observations could be attributable” to such American programs (emphasis added). So what’s happening here? Is the government really so helpless to audit its own programs that in almost 75 years it’s been unable to find out whether one of its own agencies or aerospace companies is secretly flying super-advanced craft? Or is it withholding, or more than that, making deceptive statements by claiming ignorance and inability to confirm the existence of such projects? There does seem to be at least one confirmable lie in the report. In September 1951, a sighting by both radar operators and pilots of an unidentified object over Fort Monmouth Army Base led to the creation of Project Blue Book… and to an Air Force directive, JANAP 146(B), ordering all members of the armed forces to report UFO sightings to the nearest military base, to the Air Defense Command, and to the Secretary of Defense, and further making the leak of these sightings to the press punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a decade in prison. Yet the recent report claims, “No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019” and that the “Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020.” Maybe I’m misreading, and the former reporting protocol had fallen out of use or was never as structured and official as what they recently established, but this sure does seem disingenuous, as if the US government only recently heard about UFOs and didn’t start really looking into them until a couple years ago, when history shows us they have been looking closely at sightings since the very beginning.

The Pentagon UFO report, which can be read here.

Just as this new UFO report suggests, whether sincerely or not, that China or Russia may have developed the unusual craft that have been sighted over the last 16 years, so too in 1952, after the Washington UFO flyovers, Cold War fears led suspicions to naturally fall on the Soviets. The idea that enemy aircraft may have just managed to penetrate air defenses and approach within striking range of the White House immediately led to the CIA launching its own UFO investigation the month after the Washington sightings. Available records of their secret meetings at Wright Patterson Air Force Base with Air Technical Intelligence Center officials indicate they first looked into the possibility that the objects over Washington had been a secret American project, but being themselves privy to some of the most advanced spy planes being developed, like the U-2, they believed the craft were not American. If the Air Force had been developing this above top-secret tech, why would they have taken the risk of flying them over the capital, knowing their own jets would be scrambled to confront them and possibly shoot them out of the sky? The problem was, it didn’t make a lot of sense for Russians to fly such valuable toys right over our capital either. It would have been a risky move, and even if the intelligence such an operation might provide was worth the possibility of losing advanced technology to an adversary who would immediately reverse engineer it, the flight paths of the objects over Washington that July didn’t make any sense as a reconnaissance mission. One suggestion was they had been Russian balloons sent simply to gather info on what kind of Air Force response enemy aircraft could expect, but balloons could not explain the speed and evasive maneuvers reported by some witnesses and radar men. Finally, the CIA’s investigation came to the conclusion that a driving purpose for risking such a flyover with experimental advanced aircraft was to wage psychological warfare. They pointed out how curious it was that Russian media had never once mentioned UFO sightings, not even to mock the American saucer flaps, and suggested that the entire phenomenon might be engineered simply to foster a general panic and mass hysteria, such that, in the case of a genuine attack, air response would be slowed and confused, wary of false alarms.

For this theory to be true, that the Russians had sent UFOs in order to gauge our defenses and/or stoke UFO mania for their own purposes, then they would have needed advanced aerospace technology capable of great speed and maneuverability… or would they? One theory that emerged several years later suggested that the Washington flap was caused by electronic countermeasures, not actual craft. Electronic countermeasures, or ECM, had been used since 1945, in the form of reflective aluminum chaff released to confuse enemy radar with false readings, and progressed from there to actual radar jamming technology. The notion that ECM had resulted in false readings over Washington in July 1952 was spearheaded by Leon Davidson, a figure whose background strengthens his credibility. While completing his doctorate in engineering at Columbia University, he’d been hand-picked to work on the Manhattan Project, and afterward he’d served as a supervising engineer at Los Alamos labs. As Davidson explained in his 1959 essay on the topic, the US Air Force had had the capability of altering enemy radar returns since 1950, through the use of a device that captured, modified, and amplified radar impulses, sending them back to show inaccurate heading, range, and speed. He describes widespread military use of technology that manufactures so-called “galloping ghosts,” or radar blips that don’t correspond with actual aircraft. Just a couple years before Davidson wrote his essay, Aviation Research and Development magazine published a story about just this sort of ECM technology entering the public aviation industry, being sold and used for the training of radar operators. And it has since been declassified that in the early 1960s, under Project Palladium, American pilots purposely penetrated the perimeters of Russian airspace to gather data, much as some believed the Russians had done over the capital in 1952, and they made strategic use of this radar-manipulating ECM technology in the process. Interestingly, the newly released UFO report drops some hints that this may remain a viable explanation for UAP when it concedes that some of the unusual flight characteristics of UAP might be attributable to “spoofing” or “signature management.” But unlike the CIA, Leon Davidson did not attribute these galloping ghosts to Russia. Rather, Davidson concluded, “Since 1951, the CIA has caused or sponsored saucer sightings for its own purposes… [through the] military use of ECM on a classified basis unknown to the radar observers who were involved” (emphasis added).

But why? Why would the CIA want to create UFO sightings? Even if they were withholding information about such operations during their 1952 meetings with ATIC and wanted to deflect suspicion for such a psychological operation onto the Russians, their reasoning seems sound. What purpose would it serve to create a mass hysteria that might weaken our capability to respond to an actual threat? Interestingly, after their investigation, the CIA organized a secret panel of scientists to further weigh in on the topic. This meeting, called the “Robertson Panel” after its presiding expert, the Pentagon’s director of the Weapons Systems Evaluations Group, Dr. Howard Percy Robertson, was composed of astronomers, radar experts, rocket scientists, and nuclear physicists. While they concluded that UFOs were nothing but visual misperceptions and sensor anomalies, they recognized the threat of a UFO panic and recommended training military personnel to recognize phenomena often mistaken for UFOs. Furthermore, they recommended a campaign to debunk as many sightings as possible, a task that fell to Ruppelt’s Project Blue Book. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for our study, they advised that civilian organizations of UFO enthusiasts be closely monitored, as they had the potential to irresponsibly influence public thought on UFOs and could be used “for subversive purposes.” This final recommendation, however, seems to have been anticipated, and a suggestion had been made that perhaps one way to monitor UFO groups was to fake UFO sightings and scrutinize the resulting eyewitness accounts and public reactions. Days before the Robertson Panel, Captain Ruppelt received a memo from a Dr. Howard Cross, a scientist working at a private research institute that had been tasked with analyzing UFO data, under the codename Project Stork. Cook proposed a “controlled experiment” in which “different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposely scheduled” in order to monitor the “steady flow of reports from ordinary civilian observers, in addition to those by military and other official observers,” who would likewise be kept in the dark about the operation. This sounds an awful lot like what Leon Davidson would years later accuse the CIA of perpetrating, and it seems to hint at a motive for doing so, a psychological operation, or PSYOP, with American citizen, both civilian and enlisted, as its subjects.

Captain Edward Ruppelt. Public domain.

This leads to the inevitable question of whether the CIA actually would engage in a psychological experiments on U.S. citizens. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the history of CIA exploits must be aware that not only are they quite capable of such operations, they’ve been caught conducting them! On the same day that President Truman had made the Air Force a separate branch of the armed forces—the day that Kenneth Arnold’s Army Air Force Intelligence contacts Brown and Davidson had died in a fiery plane crash carrying material supposedly ejected from a UFO—he also turned the wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, into the Central Intelligence Agency, thereby consolidating all military intelligence arms into one organization. After that, this powerful government agency operated with carte blanche and no meaningful oversight. Some indication of its strange and illegal practices became public knowledge in the 1970s, when during an investigation of their practices, Congress demanded information on their Project MK-ULTRA. This topic is itself a rabbit hole deserving of its own episode or series, but in short, after the agency attempted to destroy documentation of the project, Congress nevertheless learned that under MK-ULTRA, the CIA conducted extensive mind control experiments using hypnosis and psychoactive narcotics. With what we know the CIA was capable of in MK-ULTRA, faking some UFO flights and encouraging UFOlogists to believe outrageous stories, perhaps in order to gauge how utterly public opinion can be manipulated, certainly no longer seems beyond the pale. And once spoofing radar and using balloons or experimental aircraft to prompt UFO reports became boring, who’s to say they wouldn’t have taken this further and engaged in truly invasive psychological operations on UFO witnesses?

Take UFO nut George Adamski as a possible subject for such an operation. In 1952, Adamski, a Californian restaurant proprietor who used to hold forth on mysticism and UFOs in informal lectures at his café, claimed to have been taken aboard a spacecraft in the desert, learning that UFOs were piloted by peace-loving ETs from Venus. In retrospect, Adamski appears to be a hoaxer with a penchant for incorporating the politics of his associates into his contact stories. For example, he was involved with treasonous Nazi sympathizer William Pelley, and in a curious coincidence, his Venusians are described as blond Nordic-looking fellows whose shoes leave the swastika symbol in their footprints. But as my principal source Mirage Men by Mark Pilkinton points out, Adamski’s contact story appeared and was widely circulated only months after the Washington flyovers, just when records show the CIA was thinking about how to defuse UFO panic. Suddenly Adamski comes along saying don’t worry, the ETs are friendly and neutral, and his story becomes so widely known that he was fielding meetings with royalty and the Pope. Leon Davidson believed that Adamski was a CIA tool, and Adamski’s later stories seem to betray what might have really happened to him in the desert. As Adamski described his subsequent encounters, his Venusian friends picked him up and drove him out to the desert in black Pontiacs, where they served him mysterious beverages and showed him images on a screen. These descriptions sound an awful lot like Adamski, the impressionable friend of a convicted seditionist, may have been an early subject of CIA drugging and brainwashing a year before MK-ULTRA’s official sanctioning.

George Adamski with a famous photo he took of a UFO…which turned out to be a lamp.

One further possible example may serve to illustrate the feasibility that the CIA could have gone much further than just faking UFO sightings in their creation of the UFO myth. In 1958, a few years before the first widely publicized alien abduction story told by Betty and Barney Hill in the U.S., a Brazilian farmer named Villas Boas disclosed to a UFO investigator that in October the previous year, he had been abducted by a UFO. He and his brother had seen a mysterious flying red light over their fields, and later, when he was working the soil alone at night to avoid the heat, it had returned, shaped like an egg, with something spinning at great speed atop it, fluorescent red light emitting from all over the craft. He tried to flee, but men in unusual clothing that sound suspiciously like protective suits, complete with fabric head coverings and stiff gloves, sprang out and seized him, carrying him within, where they stripped him, wiped some kind of fluid over him with sponges, gassed him with some kind of fog, and then forced him to have sex with a beautiful woman. After being deposited back on the field, Boas returned home, where his sister noticed severe bruising around his chin. He vomited a yellow fluid and afterward suffered a days-long illness consisting of lesions, body aches, and eye irritation. It would be very easy to dismiss this as a tall tale told to a UFOlogist, perhaps even with some coaxing, but 20 years later, in 1978, a former CIA operative, Bosco Nedelcovic, who had served the agency in Latin America from 1956 to 1963, revealed to another UFOlogist that he had been a part of a Project Mirage that had purposely faked UFO encounters all over the world. Nedelcovic confirms the Villas Boas abduction from the abductors’ point of view, explaining that they had made Boas the subject of a hallucinogenic drug test as part of an experiment in psychological warfare. By Nedelcovic’s telling, the craft was a helicopter fitted with unusual lights and other equipment, which accords well with Boas’s description. Detecting Boas alone in his field with heat-sensors, they sprayed him with an aerosol drug and descended, accidentally striking his chin against the helicopter deck as they hauled him aboard to conduct some other, undisclosed experiments on him. This story, while entirely uncorroborated and unconfirmed, does cause one to wonder how widespread the CIA’s MK-ULTRA operations ranged, and how entangled they might have been in UFO disinformation.

On further consideration of all this, of course, it’s rather easy to discount everything. The Washington flyovers were a combination of weather causing radar errors and meteors being mistaken for aircraft. There is no irrefutable evidence that the CIA ever used ECM to manufacture UFO sightings, or that their MK-ULTRA operations were ever applied toward convincing people they had been abducted by aliens. Adamski was a loony, or a liar, or both. Villas Boas had been terribly ill and hallucinated his entire ordeal. Nedelcovic had given a UFOlogist exactly what he wanted, a humdinger of a government cover-up story for which there is no proof. At the same time, though, these don’t seem impossible. Might the US government or an adversary undertake to purposely create UFO reports? Yes. One example of this strategy was a proposed approach to toppling the Gaddafi regime in Libya in the 1980s, when the US considered manipulating radar to create aircraft sightings in order to sow paranoia and plant the idea that US forces were commencing an invasion. Would the CIA really go so far as to drug and brainwash people into believing they’d been abducted by UFOs just as an experiment in psychological warfare, or for some other purpose? MK-ULTRA shows us they were absolutely capable of the drugging and brainwashing. And other American military PSYOPs cement the willingness of the US government to leverage superstition and fantasy to achieve their ends. In the early 1950s, the Air Force projected a recording from a plane hidden in the clouds above the Philippines, convincing villagers that the voice of god was threatening to curse them if they aided communist insurgents. In a further operation against these same insurgents, they made them believe that their territories were haunted by an aswang, a kind of vampire legend, by planting corpses that they’d left puncture marks on and drained of blood. So, this UFO conspiracy theory, when one analyzes it closely, starts to seem plausible, and far easier to believe than the theory that extra-terrestrials have regularly visited our world for decades, having somehow still not learned whatever it was they were trying to learn, and that it is this the government is hiding from us. But for the theory that the UFO myth is actually the product of longstanding PSYOPs and disinformation operations to be believable, what it needs is some kind of evidence, perhaps in the form of a confession by a former government disinformation agent. Well… as you’ll hear in the conclusion of this series, such confessions exist. It only remains to be decided whether they can be trusted.

Images of Villas Boas and the story he told. Note the protective suits of his abductors, and the resemblance of the vehicle to a helicopter (with the revolving “cupola” atop it).

Further Reading

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

UFO Disinfo: Part One - Roswell, Maury Island, and Beyond.

Something fell from the skies into onto the desert in June of 1947. Roswell, New Mexico, rancher Mac Brazel and his son Vernon discovered its debris field, which according to them included “rubber strips, tinfoil, [and] a rather tough paper and sticks.” Later that month, Mac read about the “flying saucer” sighting by Kenneth Arnold above Washington state, the incident that really kicked off the modern UFO era. Thinking this debris might possibly be the remains of such a saucer, Mac stored it and contacted the sheriff, who in turn contacted the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at Roswell Army Air Field. In early June, the story hit the press when an official release from the Roswell Army Air Field stated that the “many rumors of flying discs became a reality” because the Bomb Group’s intelligence office had been “fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.” Flying saucer mania went wild again for a brief time, but before long, higher authorities retracted the “flying disc” press release and asserted that the debris had only been the remains of a fallen weather balloon equipped with a radar reflector. The conspiracy theories and grand myth about the Roswell Incident did not spring up immediately. Far from it, in fact, it seems that most accepted the retraction and thought little more of it for more than thirty years. In the 1980s, of course, UFOlogists, eagerly seeking evidence of government cover-ups, latched on to the Roswell report and made of it a grand affair, with not only recovered alien spacecraft but also recovered aliens. In the 1990s, the official US Air Force explanation emerged, and it did indeed indicate some cover-up, clarifying that the radar-reflecting weather balloon recovered was actually part of the secret and sensitive Project Mogul, an attempt to gather data on Soviet nuclear bomb tests with equipment carried aloft by weather balloons, a kind of early form of reconnaissance drone. This version of events seems to explain much: Mac Brazel’s description accords well with the debris a Project Mogul balloon would leave behind, and any secrecy surrounding the debris can easily be understood. In fact, there appears to be corroboration from records showing a Mogul balloon had been launched on June 4th from Alamogordo and subsequently lost. But even if this itself was a cover story, there is no shortage of other, terrestrial candidates for what might have crashed that the government would have wanted hushed up. It was near enough to the White Sands test range that any Top Secret experimental rocket or aircraft may have crashed in the Roswell desert. If that were the case, though, why would the government still be keeping it a secret today? An even more curious question is why on earth the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group, an elite squadron that was no stranger to keeping classified information secure, having dropped the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan in 1945, would issue a press release declaring that this was a downed flying saucer, thereby attracting attention to the crash rather than covering it up. Is it possible that the story had been purposely planted for some other reason besides the concealment of what crashed in the desert? There were significant fears among some in the military that Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers were some kind of advanced Soviet aircraft. Could the story have been intended to convince Soviets that we had captured one of their strange craft or that we had developed one of our own, or might it simply have been a lure for spies? One thing is for certain, this has become a definite pattern for the U.S. government: discouraging belief in UFOs with one wagging finger while they encourage UFOlogists to believe with another beckoning hand.

As I write this, I am still awaiting the release of the Pentagon UFO report that inspired me to tackle this topic. For some time, I have been curious about whether some other purpose is being served by the recent release of classified information about UFOs. In December of 2017, back when the New York Times reported on the existence of the Pentagon’s black-money funded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and spread leaked video of Naval UFO encounters all over the media, I could buy that the story was a genuine piece of investigative journalism, prompted by a whistleblower, revealing information the government had not wanted revealed. Yet last year, when the Pentagon officially acknowledged the authenticity of the leaked videos, and when the existence of their active UAP Task Force was revealed by being openly mentioned in a Senate committee report, I began to wonder if something else might not be going on. Now, after the Coronavirus relief package included a requirement that the Pentagon disclose what it knows about UFOs, I find myself even more suspicious. The Pentagon has already briefed the House Intelligence Committee, and we may never know if what they told Congress was significantly more than what they end up revealing publicly in the report due before the end of June. However, simple logic and familiarity with the government’s handling of the UFO topic in the past tells us that we should not take what they have to say at face value. Early in June, the Times published a leak of the forthcoming UAP report’s contents, indicating that it will offer no evidence that UFOs encountered in the last couple decades are extra-terrestrial or that they are not, but that it will disavow the notion that they represent classified American technology, suggesting that Russia or China may have outpaced us scientifically when it comes to hypersonic technology, developing aircraft or drones capable of greater acceleration and maneuverability, and even trans-medium capabilities, flying and then submerging into the ocean, all without any discernible exhaust plumes. The problem with this is that the U.S. government does not typically want to show its hand so blatantly to the rest of the world. How does it help our standing on the world’s stage, our image of military primacy, to announce to the world that we’ve fallen behind? How does it help us to learn more about a rival’s technology to indicate that we are actively investigating it? The Times article states that some elements of their report will remain classified, which they acknowledge will continue to fuel UFO conspiracy theories, but this begs the question, why is our utter befuddlement at this technology being declassified? Unless we are not so clueless when it comes to this technology as the Pentagon is making out. Unless, as we have seen time and time again in the history of the intelligence world’s disinformation games surrounding the topic of UFOs, they are merely manipulating public perceptions to sow doubt and confusion. I know some of you may be thinking, this sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense… how unlike this podcast! But my principal source is an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, which views the UFO phenomenon and the US government’s disinformation related to it through a critical and rationalist lens. I hope you’ll see by the end of this series that, when it comes to government disinformation for espionage and national security purposes, conspiracy is the name of the game, and despite some reliance on conspiracy theory, this serves as a far more rational explanation for UFOs than visitation by Little Grey Men.

Maj. Jesse A. Marcel holding pieces of foil lined material related to the Roswell incident. Courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas. - https://library.uta.edu/roswell/images

Certainly U.S. military intelligence did not invent the core elements of the UFO myth. Even before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, science-fiction was planting those seeds. In one 1946 issue, for example, the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories featured a piece on mysterious “circle-winged” aircraft appearing over San Francisco along with a horror story depicting alien abduction long before the first recorded claims of such experiences. And the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, would himself be drawn into the flying saucer excitement of 1947. Just days after Kenneth Arnold’s much publicized saucer sighting, Palmer received a letter from one Harold Dahl, a harbor patrolman in Washington State’s Puget Sound, which described his boat being buzzed by balloonish, doughnut-like UFOs near Maury Island. The account described how five of these craft were circling a sixth that appeared to be failing and about to crash before it ejected some molten rock material, some of which struck Dahl’s son, burning his arm, and killed his dog. According to his account, after Dahl told his harbor patrol superior about the incident, a mysterious man in a black suit came to see him and warned him against spreading the story, an early example of the “Men in Black” stories about government men or eerie human-like entities mimicking men that would often accompany UFO accounts in later years. Dahl disregarded this figure’s warning, though, and wrote to Palmer, enclosing a piece of the slag-like material released by his UFO. Palmer then contacted pilot Kenneth Arnold, the original saucer-sighter, who was familiar with Washington state, and offered him $200 to investigate the Maury Island Incident. Arnold himself was visited by some government types after his first sighting, although these identified themselves by name as Brown and Davidson, representatives of Army Air Force Intelligence, questioning Arnold about the aircraft he had seen over Mt. Rainier, as well as about the Maury Island Incident Ray Palmer had asked him to investigate. His interest piqued, Arnold flew out to Tacoma to begin his investigation, but he found Dahl rather dim-witted, and thought the material Dahl showed him, which supposedly had been dropped from a UFO, was regular old lava rock. But when Arnold met Dahl’s supposed “superior,” Fred Crisman, things began to get stranger.

Crisman was an altogether more suave and convincing figure, to whom Dahl deferred even though it wasn’t Crisman who had witnessed the flying doughnuts. Crisman spoke confidently to Arnold, asserting that these aircraft could not possibly have been American, and suggesting they might represent the development of captured Nazi technology. Kenneth Arnold began to get paranoid. He already thought it strange that his lodgings had been arranged for him anonymously, and after a journalist called him saying there had been a tip about his saucer investigation, he began to think his hotel room was bugged. He then called his Air Force Intelligence contact, Brown, who strangely refused to take his first call and called him back from a pay phone. Brown said he and Davidson would fly right out, and thereafter, Arnold received another phone call from a journalist saying he’d received another tip about an Air Force investigation. Arnold searched his room for listening devices but found none, leading him to suspect that perhaps, inexplicably, Brown and Davidson had been leaking info about the Maury Island investigation to the press. Counterintuitively, though, if these Air Force Intelligence agents wanted a saucer flap in the news, they arrived and insisted the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Dahl and Crisman. Taking the samples of UFO-discharged rocks, Brown and Davidson boarded a military plane bound for California, but the plane crashed, killing both Air Force Intelligence agents on August 1st, 1947, the very day that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thereafter, as a disturbed Kenneth Arnold wrestled with the notion that Brown and Davidson had been killed for their involvement with the Maury Island investigation, another Air Force representative arrived, one Major George Sander, who took Arnold out to an industrial smelting site near Maury Island, where piles of rocks identical to those Dahl had shown him could be found, making an effort to assure Arnold, once again, that the whole thing had been a hoax. But Arnold remained leery. According to him, he went back to Dahl’s house, but to his astonishment, he found it completely deserted: “there wasn’t a stick of furniture inside.” Deeply troubled, Arnold flew home, making only a brief a stop to refuel. Upon taking off again, though, his engine failed, necessitating an emergency landing that damaged his landing gear. Investigating after the fact, he said he discovered his fuel valve had been cut, leading him to suspect that he, perhaps like Brown and Davidson, had been a target of government assassination.

Newspaper headline reporting the plane crash that killed Brown and Davidson. Public Domain.

Certainly it can be argued that Arnold might have been imagining things. Was it so strange that a hotel room had been arranged for him? And is it such a mystery that the press had gotten wind of his UFO investigation? He was, after all, a very public figure since his own rather famous UFO encounter. And isn’t it possible that some elements of this story were exaggerated when Arnold wrote about them after the fact. For example, Kenneth Arnold claims to have had yet another UFO sighting during his flight to Tacoma to investigate Dahl’s claims, which during the Summer of Saucers in 1947 probably seemed reasonable, as it was suspected these mystery aircraft might become more and more commonplace, but in retrospect seems a bit hard to believe and smacks of embellishment. If Arnold took liberties with his story, perhaps we can disregard his claims of Dahl’s house being vacated, or of his own plane being sabotaged. What we cannot dismiss is the plane crash that killed Air Force Intelligence men and UFO investigators Brown and Davidson, as that is a matter of record. However, the engine fire that caused their B-25 to crash may indeed have been an accident. Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe in coincidence, though, so it is all too easy to presume that the crash was intentional and related to their investigation. Had Brown and Davidson gone rogue, leaking info to the press? And if so, would that have represented such a national security threat that the two had to be killed? Why not simply arrest them for treason if they were releasing classified information? One possible explanation is that these Air Force Intelligence men were believed to be Soviet moles. Less than a year earlier, the top secret Venona counter-intelligence project had uncovered through the decryption of some 3,000 messages the existence of Soviet moles embedded at every level of the U.S. government, even among presidential administrators and on the staff of the Manhattan Project, as well as in the Army Air Force. Considering this context, it’s feasible that Brown and Davidson’s seemingly odd insistence on communicating with Arnold via pay phone can be explained by their being spies looking for intel on America’s secret atomic aircraft. It may then also be suggested that the entire Maury Island sighting had been a honeypot, a false story planted as a lure meant to draw out Soviet moles intent on sniffing out secret U.S. technology, and that it worked. Supporting this notion is the surprising background of Fred Crisman, who formerly flew with the Army Air Force in the Pacific Theater and who didn’t actually seem to be Harold Dahl’s “superior” at all. Further rumor had it that Crisman had also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, before popping up at Maury Island, and his connections to the intelligence world would years later lead to his being named by District Attorney Jim Garrison as possibly being involved in JFK’s assassination. But of course, this is speculation. By the cold light of skepticism, Crisman was just a hoaxer, and Kenneth Arnold a storyteller with a taste for fame, and Brown and Davidson’s fiery death a tragic accident that had nothing to do with their investigation of the Maury Island Incident.

A month after the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Air Force Intelligence agents Brown and Davidson, General Nathan Twining penned an internal Air Force memo indicating that the flying saucer phenomenon was “real and not visionary,” but undermining the Roswell myth, he lamented a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crashed recovered exhibits.” Twining suggested two possibilities: that the saucers were a top-secret American project about which the newly formed Air Force was kept ignorant, or that they represented some advanced technology developed by a foreign nation. The fears that Soviets had reverse-engineered secret Nazi technology were palpable, prompting the launch of Project Sign, whose remit was to investigate the nature and origin of flying saucers. Based in Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the hope of the project was clearly to obtain some of this supposed flight technology for the U.S., for right there on base was the Air Technical Intelligence Center, America’s own apparatus for reverse-engineering captured German aircraft. The next year, Project Sign issued its report, Estimate of the Situation. Legend has it this report declared that saucer sightings did not match anything in the German blueprints they had, and that all evidence pointed to some non-human technology. But we don’t actually know what Project Sign’s report concluded, because its contents upset the Air Force Chief of Staff so much that he ordered all copies destroyed. In the early days of the summer of 1947, as the Air Force came to be an independent service branch of the armed forces, saucer panic may have seemed a boon, ensuring ample budget apportionment to the branch of the military tasked with protecting our skies. But after a year of being constantly bombarded by mistaken sightings, along with, we might assume, sightings of some of our own aircraft that we didn’t want people talking about, the U.S. Air Force had had enough of flying saucers and seemed to want to extricate themselves from the whole phenomenon. To this end, and perhaps partly as a backlash against the supposed Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis in Project Sign’s report, the Air Force launched a new UFO investigation, Project Grudge, this one operating under the assumption that flying saucers could not possibly be real, seeking to debunk all saucer sightings, and generating a public relations campaign intended to convince the world that flying saucers are nonsense. The fruit of their campaign, an article in the Saturday Evening Post, convincingly attributes all saucer sightings to Aviator’s Vertigo, balloons, and the reflection of light on clouds and aircraft canopies. The article went a long way toward laying the flying saucer excitement to bed.

Project Grudge's report of August 1949. Public Domain.

In December 1949, though, flying saucer mania returned. True, a popular magazine for men, featured an article by one Donald Keyhoe entitled “Flying Saucers Are Real,” in which it was alleged that flying saucers were indeed genuine aircraft, were alien in origin, and were being actively hushed up by the government. It is true that Keyhoe was a writer of pulp fiction, but his authority on this topic derived from his background as a Marine aviator, and he claimed to have reached his conclusions after interviewing numerous officials who had stonewalled his investigation. Thereafter, Commander Robert McLaughlin, Officer-in-charge of the Naval Unit at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo wrote a follow-up for True magazine detailing a saucer sighting by five Navy scientists while observing a weather balloon. These articles served to refute the Saturday Evening Post article and paint it as part of the cover-up. But might there be more to these competing articles than meets the eye? Mark Pilkington, author of my principal source Mirage Men, points out that in 1949, the Navy and the Air Force were locked in a bitter rivalry. Supporters of the newly formed Air Force had begun to spread the idea that the Navy was obsolete, as future wars would be won exclusively through strategic intercontinental bombing. When the new Secretary of State, himself a proponent of this idea of Air Force supremacy, cancelled a Navy supercarrier project in favor of an Air Force bomber project, it meant war. Officials in the Navy command structure struck back by leaking evidence that Air Force generals had dealt fraudulently with certain military contractors in building their bombers. The entire affair got so out of hand that House Armed Services Committee hearing had to be convened to squash their beef. Thus, later that year, when two Navy men stoked the flying saucer fires after the Air Force had expended so much energy to dampen them, it is perhaps not so great a leap to suggest that it was just another barrage in their internecine conflict rather than a genuine disclosure of UFO activity. But this remains, as with almost all aspects of this topic, conjecture.

We begin to see a pattern here. As at Roswell, we see different people or different forces, within the military pushing and pulling, denying the existence of flying saucers while simultaneously insisting on it. One further story illustrates this yet again, if it can be believed. In March 1950, the same month that True magazine ran its second piece on flying saucers, a mystery lecturer presented to science students at University of Denver about flying saucers landing near Aztec, New Mexico, not far from Roswell, and that the military found several dead extra-terrestrials within, which they had since been studying, along with their recovered craft. The Denver Post later outed the lecturer as an oil man named Silas Newton, and further investigation showed that Newton had gotten his information from a nutty Nazi sympathizer, Leo Gebauer, who despite his eccentricities had at one time worked for Air Research Company in Pheonix, Arizona. But rather than some state secrets to which Gebauer had become privy, the Aztec story turned out to have been taken from a hoax published in the Aztec Independent Review a couple years earlier. Nothing to see here… except that Silas Newton, in his personal journals, wrote about two men from a “highly secret US government entity” approaching him, informing him that they knew his story was a hoax but encouraging him to continue telling it nonetheless, promising to provide protection to both him and Gebauer if they did so. It’s easy to dismiss this as BS from a BS artist, but interestingly, two years after this, when Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for selling people mining gear they claimed was reverse-engineered from extra-terrestrial tech, their sentences were suspended. Had they finally called in a favor from the government men whose purposes their outrageous tales somehow served? And why were these shadowy figures, if they existed, so interested in the spreading of a flying saucer hoax among university students? Interestingly, Newton’s lecture concluded with a questionnaire to determine how believable these educated young people found the story. And there were further reports of follow-up surveys among the students conducted by none other than Air Force Intelligence. Having been foiled in their attempts to suppress flying saucer excitement, had the Air Force then decided to conduct some market research to see how they might use flying saucer tales to their own advantage?

Front page Denver Post story about fraudsters Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. Public Domain.

Interestingly, major elements of this story about the recovery of alien spacecraft and corpses in the desert at Aztec, although a known hoax, would decades later show up as part of the resurgent myth of the Roswell UFO crash. And promised proof of this story would be used as a carrot by Air Force Intelligence on numerous occasions, coaxing UFO investigators to inform on their fellow UFOlogists and convincing them to seed disinformation into the growing community of UFO investigators. Things were going to get a whole lot crazier from there, and people were going to be driven a whole lot crazier, as you will see in the continuation of this series on UFO Disinfo. In the meanwhile, I await the release of the Pentagon UFO report with bated breath, certain that nothing of real interest will be contained therein and at the same time hopeful there may be something of interest to our topic. However, as I further unravel the Gordian knot of US counter-intelligence and perception management that has been all bound up with UFO sightings from the very beginning, I begin to doubt that this is anything more than stagecraft. Some in the upper echelons of the American intelligence and security apparatus seem to have concluded that it may benefit us to acknowledge recent sightings (and only the recent ones) and to admit or feign ignorance about them. And come to think of it in those terms, this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The only real difference seems to be that, because of advances in technology, it’s no longer possible to blame these sightings on vertigo and optical illusion.

Further Reading

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

The Beautiful Corpse of Helen Jewett

The New York City police force did not come to be until 1844, after a surge in population and poverty resulted in a significant increase in vice and crime. Before that, the city had employed a corps of 80 civilian patrolmen, the Nightwatch, who stood sentry on street corners every evening. One early Sunday morning in April, 1836, two of these watchmen, Dennis Brink and George Noble, had the final few quiet hours of their shift in lower Manhattan shattered by a sudden alarm being raised from a nearby brothel on Thomas Street. “Fire!” cried a woman from its doorway, prompting Brink and Noble to investigate. The woman, one Rosina Townsend, madam of the establishment, led the watchmen to the room of one resident, a prostitute named Helen Jewett, who was found murdered in her bed, three deep and bloody wounds on her head, and her bedclothes still smoldering from a fire that had presumably been set to conceal the crime. Brink and Noble questioned the madam and the other ladies in residence at the brothel. They discovered that the last visitor Helen Jewett had seen was a young regular of Jewett’s who went by the name Frank Rivers at the brothel. The madam indicated that she had seen Rivers in Jewett’s room late Saturday evening and did not believe he had left, and that shortly before discovering the fire in Jewett’s room, she had been awakened when someone left the house by its back door. Investigating the yard, the watchmen discovered a hatchet, and in an adjacent yard, they found a discarded cloak with a fringe that witnesses insisted belonged to the young man Frank Rivers. After some further investigation, the watchmen learned that Rivers’s real name was Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old son of a landed Connecticut state legislator. Robinson had been living in a boardinghouse and clerking for a local mercantile establishment. When it was suggested that the hatchet the watchmen had discovered belonged to the store where Robinson clerked, the watchmen determined to track down their young suspect and haul him back to the scene of the crime. The watchmen found Robinson still asleep; Robinson’s roommate, James Tew, answered and confirmed that he and Robinson had visited the brothel the night before, though Tew had departed earlier than his roommate. Rousing Robinson from his sleep, the watchmen accompanied the young men back to the Thomas Street brothel and confronted them with the crime. In their estimation, Richard Robinson was all too composed when receiving the news, denying his guilt in the murder but also not appearing surprised or upset. As was the custom at the time, a coroner’s jury was convened, composed of numerous random people who who happened to be present to weigh the facts as they were known and determine on the spot whether anyone should be accused. The jury declared that the deceased had come to her end by the hand of Richard Robinson, and the youth was immediately taken to jail to await a trial that would turn out to be one of the most notorious and sensational in American history.

In my last post, I mentioned in passing that James Gordon Bennett, the enterprising editor of the New York Herald penny paper, made something of a name for himself with his sensational coverage of the infamous Robinson-Jewett murder trial, actually pioneering the printing of extra editions in his zeal to publish more and more material about this scandalous crime. While this crime might not be so well known today, it was the most notorious criminal case of its time, perhaps only rivaled by the trial of Levi Weeks for the murder of Elma Sands, which I focused an episode on some years ago. In my discussion of Levi Weeks’s murder trial, I presented the notion of that trial and the many popular narrative accounts of its court proceedings representing the dawn of the popular true crime genre in America. If that is so, then this case, less than 40 years later, which was even more heavily written and read about, not just in published court records as in the Weeks trial but also in the cheap penny papers that were then becoming more and more popular, represents the full realization of the public’s thirst for salacious tales of sex and murder. This case has been written about in much detail in intersectional studies of gender and class in early 19th century America, and it has been picked apart as a seminal moment in the history of American journalism. But in these academic analyses, the tragic narratives of the victim and the accused and the newspaperman for whom the case became an obsession tend to get lost. Therefore, in retelling this legendary historical true crime tale, I hope to better emphasize the real human stories at its center as I further explore the mystery of this unsolved crime. And at the core of this mystery is a forgotten woman, remembered to posterity by an alias, which newspapers at the time didn’t even print correctly. The Helen Jewett of public imagination was the creation of an infatuated newspaperman, a fictional character constructed more to sell newspapers than to provide any real insight into the life taken that spring night.

James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, who turned the Helen Jewett murder into a sensational press phenomenon. Public Domain image.

The sensational news coverage of the Helen Jewett murder began the very next morning, when James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the penny paper the New York Herald gained entrance to Jewett’s room and viewed her body. With him was an artist who would create lithographs of the scene for his newspaper, but the first-person account Bennett afterward wrote and published describing what he saw in her room gave a rather more vivid impression than could any illustration. It should be said that Bennett was something of an odd character, rather a joke to many in New York City. He had formerly been the editor of a partisan newspaper but had broken away to start a penny paper because he chafed under the editorial constraints of political subsidization and wanted independence. However, in order to break into the penny paper field, he found he could not focus on the kind of credible banking and political news on which he wanted to report, for the readers of the new penny papers wanted reports on robberies and murders. Nevertheless, he tried to have it both ways, reporting on crime as well as on Wall Street and printing political attacks on the editors of rival newspapers. These takedown pieces, criticizing the political affiliations and views of competitors, led to a series of physical assaults, when newspaper editors he had criticized actually beat him with their canes in the middle of Wall Street. It got to the point that one rival penny paper declared Bennett to be “[c]ommon flogging property.” It was at this low point in his career and life that Bennett entered Helen Jewett’s room and seemed to see in her some reflection of himself. He saw her expensive clothing and jewelry, so out of place in her brothel room, and he understood she was a high-priced prostitute who made a successful living. He saw that she was literate, with editions of several periodicals and volumes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron on her shelves, and even a portrait of Byron upon her wall. To Bennett, she may have seemed like someone who was struggling for upward mobility in the rigid class structure of New York, much like himself, and also like him, she had been struck down for her audacity in trying to make something of herself. One volume among her books especially seemed to confirm this characterization: Flowers of Loveliness by Lady Blessington, about the author’s rise from a poor background and promiscuous lifestyle to become a countess through marriage to a nobleman. When the watchman at the scene removed the covering and showed her body to Bennett, he became oddly smitten. In his editorial, he made of it a strange Gothic scene, like a scene from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which he found her “beautiful female corpse” strikingly attractive. “’My God!’” he claims to have cried out. “’How like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.’” Three times in the article he compares her body to a polished marble statue, claiming he was “lost in admiration of this extraordinary sight.” The description seems less than forthright. It makes no mention of the blood from her wounds and describes the damage by the fire as providing only a bronzing effect to one side of this otherwise white marble sculpture. Whether or not his description was accurate or his reaction to the sight genuine, Bennett’s coverage of the murder resulted in a great increase in sales for his newspaper. Bennett’s tasteless exhibition of Jewett’s beautiful corpse turned out to be his path to success, and he had no intention of letting it go.

During the ensuing months before the trial began in June, Bennett published article after article about Jewett’s murder, and other papers, seeing his success, followed suit, although sometimes taking an alternative view of the crime. While Bennett would go on to raise a variety of alternative suspects to Robinson, even endorsing a widespread conspiracy theory that Robinson had been framed in order to protect the real killer, a more wealthy and powerful client of Jewett, other papers tended to favor Robinson’s guilt. While Bennett portrayed Jewett as a glamorous figure of great beauty who had often been seen on New York streets in her silk green dress and fine jewelry, others suggested she was actually rather ugly and overweight. Bennett portrayed her as a confident and intelligent young woman who had rejected a domestic life in favor of freedom both financial and sexual, but others described her as a depraved and manipulative harlot who had rejected morality and paid the price. One thing that most coverage agreed upon, though, was that Helen Jewett, whom many newspapers called Ellen through some error, had previously been on a more traditional path in life, with more socially acceptable opportunities, but had been seduced away into a life of vice, making the story of her murder a powerful cautionary tale. Among the numerous versions of her life appearing in newspapers and afterward in pamphlets sold on the streets, some sense of her true biography can be discerned. One version had it that her real name was Maria Benson, an orphan of Boston with a kind guardian who had sent her away to a boarding school where a lustful merchant’s son had taken her innocence. Rather than bring shame to her guardian, she left for New York, hoping to find work, but was taken advantage of again by a man who ended up installing her in a brothel. This story, though, turns out to have been a lie that Helen herself invented a couple years before her murder and told in court to elicit sympathy when pressing charges against a young man who had assaulted her. Nevertheless, there appear to have been some element of truth in it. Alternative accounts also tell us she was orphaned and raised in the family of a guardian before her unfortunate seduction while away at boarding school, but rather than being from Boston, she was from Maine, and her guardian was a Judge named Western. One of these accounts suggest her seducer had actually drugged her to take her innocence, and that she ran away to Boston thinking herself too befouled to remain a part of Judge Western’s family, though the good judge was said to have searched for her. Another claims she was engaged to be married, but when her betrothed left town, a young rake forged letters claiming her fiancée had died and, under the pretense of accompanying her to some distant family, abducted her, took her innocence, and left her in a brothel. In yet another version, she was not trafficked as a prostitute but rather sought out the vocation herself with enthusiasm and succeeded in establishing herself among a clientele of young men from wealthy families who became enamored of not only her beauty but also her wit and intelligence.

A salacious depiction of Jewett’s exposed body in her burned bed. Public Domain image.

So obsessed with her was Bennett that it was he who ended up discovering the closest thing to the truth about Helen Jewett. Through one of her confidants, he learned that she was named Dorcas Dorrance, and she was from Augusta, Maine, where her parents had died when she was a baby. She had indeed been raised by a Judge Western like a sister to his daughters, and was thus well-educated. When she was sixteen, while on a trip to visit some distant family, she fell in love with a young bank cashier and gave up her innocence in a moment of passion. After the Judge’s family learned she had lost her virginity, she left in shame and became a prostitute, first in Portland, then Boston, and finally in New York. Bennett’s account was widely reprinted, and as it spread, so too did a rumor that the young man who took Helen’s, or rather Dorcas’s, virginity was actually one of Judge Western’s sons. This finally caused the true judge, Chief Justice Nathan Weston of the Maine State Supreme Court, to issue a statement, declaring he was the Judge Western of newspaper reports, and that his family had been slandered. Helen Jewett’s true name was Dorcas Doyen, he said, and after her mother died, he had not adopted her but rather taken her on as a servant, for her own father was a drunk. She had not been seduced, said Chief Justice Weston, but had chosen herself at age 17 to pursue a life of vice. But even this revelation does not make for a certain understanding of Jewett’s character, for others have suggested the judge chose to impugn her character in order to save face for his own family. It turns out that in 1830, the same year that the judge said Dorcas left them, one of his daughters discovered that her husband had been having an affair, a discovery that would later be used as grounds for their divorce. Was it possible that young Jewett’s seducer had been a son of the judge after all, a son-in-law? Had she been forced out of the household and driven into a life of prostitution at the insistence of the judge’s daughter, or by the judge himself, holding her to blame for the son-in-law’s infidelity? Or had she in fact seduced the husband of her employer’s daughter? What we find is that Helen Jewett, sometimes called Ellen Jewett, formerly alias Maria Benson, once an orphan named Dorcas Dorrance, or rather Dorcas Doyen, could be made into whatever the public wanted her to be: a hapless victim of male depravity, an intelligent woman who liberated herself from society’s expectations, or a wanton seductress who met an unsurprisingly grisly end as a result of the vicious life she had chosen. In this way, Helen Jewett became more legend than woman, and as typically happens with legends, she was scorned by many and revered by some.

The attention of the penny press to the Robinson-Jewett case and the crafting of a legendary Helen Jewett resulted in an early form of street demonstration and a kind of protest movement. Every day, crowds gathered at Bellevue jail, where Robinson was held, and at the Thomas Street brothel where Helen had been murdered and where, according to one of Bennett’s reports, her ghost could sometimes be glimpsed in a window. These crowds were divided into two groups, which could be discerned by their attire. Those who revered Jewett and wanted to see justice for her murder began wearing white fur hats with ribbons of black crepe, a style of headwear that came to be called a “Helen Jewett mourner.” Meanwhile, the young working-class men who believed Robinson was innocent and that, as Bennett’s Herald was known to suggest, the authorities were engaged in covering up for some more privileged and wealthy murderer, wore another style of hat called Robinson caps, as well as cloaks with a fringe like that which was being used as evidence against the young man they believed was innocent. Both of these were largely gangs of young men, just the sort that were blamed by moral reform societies, many of them female societies, for the kind of vice and violence that was corrupting the city and had led to the crime. In those years, many teen boys were sent to live without supervision in cities while they learned the ins and outs of some business as a clerk, just as young Richard Robinson had been. These numerous young men were often blamed for the vice and disorder in the city, whereas young women, who typically lived under supervision, were not. However, it was not just young men who were influenced by the story of Helen Jewett. Her story had been so sensationalized, her lifestyle so glorified as an alternative to domestic pursuits and factory work, that there were reports of girls running away from home at 15 years old and attempting to enter brothels, believing it was their ticket to a “fancy life.” In fact, so venerated had Helen Jewett become among some women that when her partially burned bedstead was finally hauled out of the Thomas Street brothel and left at the curb for junk, a mob of young women fell upon it, prizing away pieces of it to carry with them as if it were the True Cross.

A depiction of a guilty Robinson fleeing the scene of the murder. Public Domain image.

The wearers of Robinson caps and cloaks showed themselves to be a true menace, proving the moral reform societies right about the dangers of lawless young men running amok in the city. While some ministers in the city preaching about the evils of prostitution suggested that Robinson had performed a public service by ridding the world of Jewett, the young Robinson-supporters on the street took that awful sentiment further and acted on it. During the months before the trial, violent assaults by young clerks on prostitutes and other young women increased sharply, and afterward, numerous copycat crimes were perpetrated, perhaps by young men who wanted to be like Robinson or who hoped to convince the public that he had been innocent all along, since the real killer was still out there murdering. To that end, an anonymous letter taking credit for the crime was sent to Bennett, who promptly published it in the Herald. According to this letter, the murderer was another young clerk who had been rejected by Jewett and made an enemy of Robinson, giving him motive both to murder her and frame him. Rival newspapers accused Bennett of forging the letter, which may have been the case, but Robinson supporters were writing letters a lot those days. They sent letters, for example, to Rosina Townsend, the brothel madam, threatening harm to her if she testified, for they believed she had been paid off by the conspiracy to frame Robinson. And they certainly weren’t all talk, either. They broke up a meeting of the New York Moral Reform Society that was convened to discuss the Robinson-Jewett case by throwing stones at the women who had gathered there. And on May 24th, a mob of several hundred young Robinson supporters attacked a group of prostitutes as they left the courthouse in an attempt to intimidate them so that they would not testify at trial. Even during the trial itself, young clerks wearing Robinson cloaks and caps filled the courtroom, making lewd comments about prostitutes who approached the bar to testify, booing and hissing any witnesses against Robinson, and cheering for any testimony that helped to exonerate him. It seems altogether to have been a circus of a trial, resulting in Richard Robinson’s acquittal. However, this disturbance by his rowdy young supporters was not the only reason that Robinson would be acquitted.

The case against Robinson was circumstantial. The madam, Rosina Townsend, testified that Robinson had arrived at the brothel before 9pm, and the roommate, James Tew, testified that he had returned home before 1am. To my mind, there is a problem with this timeline, though, since the fire was discovered by Townsend around 3am, and it had not consumed much of Jewett’s bed or done much damage to her corpse, suggesting it had only recently been set. If Robinson had indeed set the fire before returning home at 1am, it would have had to be a very slow smoldering one not to be detected for two whole hours. However, this does not seem to have been Robinson’s line of defense. Rather, his attorney concentrated on establishing a more ironclad but apparently bogus alibi. They were able to get a respected store owner, one Mr. Furlong, to swear that Robinson had been at his store downtown at around 10:30pm, which if true would disprove the testimony of the brothel madam that he was in Helen Jewett’s room at that time. In truth, Mr. Furlong’s testimony not only contradicted Rosina Townsend’s testimony but also the statements of James Tew to the nightwatchmen the morning after the murder, when he said they had indeed visited the brothel together the night before. However, the judge instructed the jury to base their decision on the fact that either Mr. Furlong or Ms. Townsend were lying and implored them to consider the reputation of each witness in their decision. As a result, the jury predictably chose to believe the upstanding store owner over the brothel madam and took only 15 minutes to acquit Robinson. After the trial, though, one Mr. Wilson published a letter swearing that he had been present in Furlong’s store that Saturday night when Robinson was present, and it had not been any later than 8pm, which made it no alibi at all since the timing would no longer contradict Madame Townsend’s testimony. So Robinson was acquitted on what appears to have been dubious testimony, and thus was believed by many to have gotten away with the murder.

A depiction of Robinson looming over Jewett with the murder weapon. Public Domain image.

The fact is, though, that even without this false alibi on which Robinson’s lawyer had staked his fate, the case against Robinson was weak. The motive attributed to him was borne out of nothing but public rumor that Robinson was engaged to marry and had murdered Jewett because she had threatened to expose their relationship to embarrass him. Other, better corroborated rumors of how Robinson explained the entire scenario to close friends casts the entire affair in a different light. Robinson supposedly told confidants that he had resolved to stop visiting her, but Jewett, who had become enamored of him, begged him to visit her at least once more, on that Saturday, to which he agreed. A couple of days before their final assignation, Robinson had been working at the store where he clerked, opening boxes with the hatchet in question, which he remarked to a porter at the time was too dull to cut. He took the blunted hatchet with him, keeping it inside his cloak, meaning to have it sharpened that Saturday night, and on the way, he stopped at the brothel to keep his date with Helen Jewett. According to this story attributed to Robinson, he stayed with Helen until it was too late to get the hatchet sharpened. Helen begged him to come back for one more visit, pointing out a tear in his cloak that she said she could mend for him. Eventually, he acquiesced, leaving the cloak with her and the hatchet as well so that he would not have to carry it home and back again. Of course, this elaborate story, which his lawyer never had him tell in court and which appeared in a letter of uncertain authorship, could merely be a complex lie to allay the suspicions of those closest to him, if it were written by him at all, but according to a later New York Times article about the case, the porter at his store confirmed that he had indeed taken the hatchet to have it sharpened. Still, this may have been Robinson’s cover story for getting his hands on a weapon with which he could do away with Helen Jewett, but Robinson’s character and demeanor were a constant testament to his innocence. According to the nightwatchmen, he was emotionless upon seeing her body, yes, but also according to them, he appeared entirely unworried and when they came to his apartment that morning, appeared to have been sleeping soundly, coming with them without any apparent anxiety, seemingly entirely ignorant of the crime for which later that morning he would be arrested. Moreover, for the rest of his life, he consistently contended his innocence, even coming back to New York some twenty years after the trial and visiting the lawyer who had gotten him acquitted in order to reaffirm to his former counsel that he had indeed been innocent, though he said he did not expect to change the attorney’s opinion of him, whatever it might be. I’m no abnormal psychologist, but this doesn’t strike me as the behavior of a killer who narrowly escaped justice but rather as the behavior of an innocent man whose name had been permanently and unfairly maligned.

So the question must inevitably be addressed: if not Robinson, who had killed Helen Jewett and why? I won’t entertain the conspiracy theories that James Gordon Bennett printed about police coverups and witnesses being paid off to pin the crime on Robinson in order to protect another patron of Jewett’s, but I will consider the notion that Jewett received another visitor after Robinson had departed, a visitor of whose arrival Madame Townsend was perhaps not aware. As it turns out, another young clerk had also been investigated in the early morning hours after Jewett’s corpse had been discovered. This young man, whose false name at the brothel was Bill Easy, was the son of a Massachusetts judge. His name was George Marston, and he had a standing appointment with Helen Jewett on Saturday nights. However, it appears that Jewett had spurned him that Saturday night in favor of receiving Richard Robinson, whom she had begged to come see her on a night when perhaps they did not usually rendezvous, if his story was to be believed. Learning that Robinson had been the last to see her, the investigators Brink and Noble had focused on him, but what of Bill Easy? Is it not possible he had been angered by Jewett’s refusal to keep their appointment, that he may have come to see her later that evening, found in her room a cloak and hatchet belonging to a rival for her affections, and then committed the crime in a fit of jealous rage? It certainly seems feasible, and perhaps if more time had been spent looking into George Marston, aka Bill Easy, as a suspect, we would know better how believable it is. But the evidence at the scene led the watchmen to Robinson, perhaps purposely.

Another depiction of the murderer leaving Jewett’s bed ablaze. Public Domain image.

If we are to consider the possibility of a frame job, the suspect Rosina Townsend, madam of the brothel, comes better into focus. Bennett sometimes cast suspicion on Townsend in the New York Herald, suggesting Jewett owed her money. Putting aside the logic of murdering someone who owes you money and therefore never getting your money, and ignoring the lack of motive for framing Robinson beyond simply throwing suspicion away from herself, there is some reason to suspect Madame Townsend. According to her testimony, she woke around 3am and noticed light emanating from her back parlor, where she found a lamp near the back door, which was open. Recognizing the lamp as one of a pair kept in the adjoining rooms of Helen Jewett and another prostitute, Maria Stevens, she closed the door and went upstairs to return the lamp. Maria’s door was locked, so she tried Helen’s and found the room full of smoke, whereupon she shut the door, pounded on Maria’s door to rouse her, and went to the street door to call for help, her cries summoning the nightwatchmen Brink and Noble. However, according to the New-York Daily Times, she told the first watchman to arrive that there was “a girl murdered up stairs,” even though later her story was that she had only opened the door and seen the smoke inside. It was also she who led the watchmen to the back yard, she who pointed out the hatchet to investigators, and she who first looked over the fence and spied the discarded cloak. If there was any person on the scene trying to make sure Robinson was framed for the crime, the brothel madam certainly fits the bill.

Lastly, there is the other prostitute whose room adjoined Helen Jewett’s, Maria Stevens. It must be remembered that, according to Townsend, a lamp belonging either to Helen or Maria was found by the open back door, prompting Townsend to go up to their rooms. It is unclear whether Maria’s lamp was still in her room, or whether Helen’s was missing from hers, or whether this was ever investigated. It is somewhat suspicious, perhaps, that upon seeing the smoke in Helen’s room, when Madame Townsend knocked on Maria Stevens’s door, she apparently emerged immediately, as if she were not actually sleeping at all. According to the New York Times, Maria Stevens even had something of a motive. Richard Robinson had been a regular visitor of Maria’s before the enchanting Helen Jewett had arrived. According to this narrative, Richard Robinson was just an all-around heartbreaker, causing Maria Stevens to fall in love with him before he spurned her for Jewett and captured her heart as well. By this telling, Maria Stevens crept into Helen’s room late at night, butchered her where she lay with Robinson’s blunt hatchet, set her bed on fire, and then crept by lamplight downstairs to discard Robinson’s things in the back yard. Granted, it seems odd to then return back upstairs in the dark without the lamp and lie in wait next door to the fire she had set, hoping someone would notice the blaze and wake her. Then again, perhaps she did not start the fire until after she had gone downstairs to toss the hatchet and cloak. Either way, though, the end of Maria’s story does indeed make her a strong suspect. While Richard Robinson moved to Texas and became a successful business owner, and Rosina Townsend closed the brothel and retired to a small village near Albany for a quiet life with a carpenter husband and an active role in her local church, Maria Stevens committed suicide two weeks before the Robinson-Jewett murder trial began.

A depiction of Helen Jewett’s beauty published after she had become a legend in the public imagination. Public Domain image.

Among all these twisting intrigues and competing theories floats the apparition of Helen Jewett, looking down on all the ruckus in the New York City streets just as her ghost was said to peer from the brothel windows on the crowds below. And she remains to us today no less spectral than to the rowdy crowds that gathered in the summer of 1836 in their Jewett mourners and Robinson caps. She was variously idolized as a heroine, scorned as a Jezebel, and mourned as a martyr, but who was she really? The newspapers that mythologized her weren’t writing about the real her. They competed with each other to uncover her birth name, but they couldn’t even be bothered to get her chosen name right, calling her Ellen instead of what records show she called herself, Helen. We do know she was young, around 23 at the time of her murder. We know she had gone from living in the home of a Supreme Court Judge in Augusta, Maine, to living in a brothel in New York City. And we know that she had not only inspired desire in numerous young clerks working in the city, but also that she aroused a violent anger, for during the trial, the prosecution revealed the existence of some letters to Helen Jewett that explicitly threatened to murder her. The prosecutor failed to prove the handwriting was Robinson’s, and so was forbidden to read the letters aloud to the jury, but this fact paints a further picture of Helen Jewett’s life. Of modest birth, she had had a taste of comfort and wealth. Thereafter finding herself on the street, and whether forced into it or seeking it out, she saw a path up from the gutter through the sex trade. She navigated the class structures of New York City society by leveraging her body and exploiting the lust of unsupervised young men with money in their pockets, but along the way, she made enemies, perhaps because she inspired jealousy in those who wanted to keep her from rising above their level, or in those who resented her freedom and wanted her all to themselves. But now I am speculating, much as Bennet and other newspaper editors did in 1836. The beautiful corpse of Helen Jewett still seems to stir the imagination 185 years later. 

Further Reading

Anthony, David. “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 3, 1997, pp. 487–514. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928212.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. “The Helen Jewett Murder: Violence, Gender, and Sexual Licentiousness in Antebellum America.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 1990, pp. 374–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4316044.

“The Ellen Jewett Tragedy: Death of Richard P. Robinson—Reminiscences of the Ellen Jewett Murder.” The New-York Daily Times, vol. 4, no. 1231, 29 Aug. 1855, p. 1. The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1855/08/29/archives/the-ellen-jewett-tragedy-death-of-richard-p-robinsonromints-the.html.

Unfit to Print; or A History of Bad News: the Party Press, Penny Papers, and Yellow Journalism

The epithet “fake news” is a curious thing. In its truest sense, it refers to media hoaxes, false stories formatted to look like they originated from legitimate news sources that are then widely spread online. These media hoaxes can best be compared to the hoaxes of 19th century- newspapers that I have previously spoken about in great detail. Many of these online news hoaxes, like the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon Hoax and the New York Zoo Hoax, are perpetrated in order to earn the hoaxer money. In the 19th-century press, this was achieved through increased circulation, but online news hoaxes earn money through clicks and ad revenue. They are also comparable to the many fake news stories by Joseph Mulhatton which I have written about in that they may be small in scale and anonymous and could be perpetrated just for a laugh. But the online news hoaxes of today may also be used as disinformation and propaganda by a foreign power or political campaigns. Still, this too may not be so very different from newspaper practices in the past. The thing is that this term, “fake news,” has often been lobbed at reputable, legacy news organizations simply because their news coverage is inconvenient or unflattering. It is a mark of the post-truth era that politicians can have their corruption exposed by investigative journalists but can save face simply by calling the news reports “fake.” Meanwhile, some of the most outrageously false and dangerous news reporting doesn’t typically get called “fake news.” I am thinking here of the various platforms of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. Murdoch’s sensational publications in the UK are not called “fake news,” but rather tabloids, and here in America, they masquerade as a “fair and balanced” alternative to the “mainstream media” that they try to undermine by calling fake. Their stock in trade is projection and gaslighting. They are pissing on their viewer’s mouths and telling them it’s drinking water, while screaming that they cannot trust what comes out of their tap. As I write this, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been actively discouraging COVID vaccination with blatantly false claims about widespread deaths being attributed to them. Fox News pundits Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs were instrumental in spreading baseless election fraud conspiracy claims that incited insurrection and murder on January 6th. And it’s not limited to the sensational cable news channel. During the election, the Murdoch-owned New York Post was instrumental in promoting the false October Surprise story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing only Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani as their sources. While conservative personalities decry “biased journalism” as “fake news,” they prop up the most biased and fake journalistic outlets active today. Ironically, though, all complaints about bias and fake news, whether in the mainstream media or in alternative media, seems implicitly nostalgic, looking back mournfully on some vague former time when the press is supposed to have been a paragon of fairness and objectivity. But did that lost golden age of journalistic integrity exist? And can the history of American journalism put the exploits of Murdoch’s News Corp in context?

In order to trace the evolution of the news industry, we must first understand its beginnings. The origins of newspapers can be found in England, in the 17th century, when wealthy country gentlemen who wished to stay informed as to the goings-on at the royal court were obliged to hire correspondents who would write them letters with the latest gossip. These were correspondents in the oldest sense of the term, in that they corresponded with their employers through the Royal Mail service, sending “news-letters.” Here in America, our first news service evolved from this tradition in the very early 18th century, with the Boston News-Letter. These gossip publications were typically published by a postmaster and consumed right there in the post office, the hub of each village’s communication with the world. By the time that newsletters began to be circulated here in the U.S., though, they began to evolve back in England. The news that people wanted was political, coming out of parliament, which convened secretly, so that only certain invited visitors could observe the proceedings in the “Stranger’s Gallery.” Some visitors saw an opportunity and would write reports from memory of what was said and done, or would even furtively try to take down notes while in attendance. Gradually, these political news-letters moved from simply reporting parliamentary gossip and began publishing opinions. Formerly, political opinions were printed and disseminated as broadsides and pamphlets, but that role was taken over by newspaper editors in the early 18th century, and from there, it did not take long for newspapers to become the mouth-pieces of certain political parties. This is the dawn of the “party press” age of journalism, both in England and America, when newspapers reported facts and opinions with a view toward benefiting the image of a certain political party and winning readers to that party’s side. And which party a newspaper supported was not dependent on the editor’s view. Rather, politicians and parties subsidized newspapers, making them official organs. One misconception about news publications today and a principal criticism of the “mainstream media,” is that it is a cardinal sin for a journalist to express an opinion or take a side, but opinion has been a major element journalism going all the way back to its beginnings. In later years, it’s true, ideas of journalistic integrity demanded that editorial opinion be clearly labeled and separated from “news,” but even so, some leaning toward and favoring of a certain viewpoint even in reportage has always been acceptable and even encouraged. It’s what is called “editorial direction,” and it is a major draw for a paper. If one doesn’t like a paper’s views, one can find another paper that better suits them. In fact, when we talk about “freedom of the press,” it is precisely the freedom to express opinions that is protected, not the freedom to report facts.

First issue of the Boston News-Letter, regarded as the first continuously published newspaper in British North America. Published April 24, 1704. Public Domain.

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp represent a return to the age of the party press. Interestingly, his newspaper, The New York Post, started out as an organ of the Federalist Party, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton after the election of Thomas Jefferson, about which I spoke a great deal in more than one episode last autumn. Hamilton wanted a mouth-piece to compete with Thomas Jefferson’s National Intelligencer, which had begun publication the year before. And it should be said that the party press era was not entirely negative. Indeed, partisan journalism has been credited by James Baughman of the Center for Journalism Ethics with greatly increasing democratic participation and voter turnout, and with 2020’s spike in voter participation, we may be seeing the same effect today. But let me qualify. In the party press era, as today, newspapers colored the facts, gave one-sided versions of events, and ignored or chose not to emphasize stories that made political rivals look good. This is certainly something that we observe today, on both sides, even if more so on one side than the other. That kind of bias is one thing, but making up the news, misrepresenting or inventing events, or purposely misreporting in order to make one party look good or another party look bad is something else entirely. One egregious example of such manufacturing of the news during the party press era occurred when Samuel Johnson, reporting on parliamentary proceedings for Cave’s magazine, apparently made up an entire speech that he wasn’t present in the Stranger’s Gallery to hear, basing his remarks on a second-hand description of the speech. This is certainly deceptive, but the fact that Johnson was widely praised for his seeming neutrality, despite Johnson himself confessing that he always did what he could to make the Whigs look bad in his reporting, demonstrates that the kind of brazenly false news leveraged as propaganda that we see today may not have shown up until later. Here in America, in the 19th century, the party press gave us lurid personal scandals, like the competing newspaper coverage of Andrew Jackson’s marriage—some characterizing him as having seduced a wife away from her husband and marrying her before her divorce was final, and others depicting him as an innocent victim of character assassination, asserting her marriage had been abusive and that Jackson did not know the divorce was not yet final—but these are instances of gossip that are hard to characterize as purposeful disinformation. I struggle to find instances of outright deception in the party press era, so let us move on.

In 1833, a new age of journalism commenced with the so-called Penny Press era, when Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun. What made the Sun and other penny papers different was its price, first of all—one cent compared to the 6 cents that most other papers cost—but also its intended audience. Using the steam press, they were able to mass produce the paper cheaply, which meant, in order to make money, they needed the masses to take up reading the news, many of whom were not interested in the politics peddled by partisan papers. So they changed their approach, writing shorter, more easily digestible pieces using simpler language, and focusing on practical and relevant news over politics, as well as on more human stories. In this way, penny papers appealed to the common folk and immigrants, or as Day put it, “mechanics and the masses generally.” With this wider readership also came better advertising revenue, and thus the business model of newspapers would be changed forever, relying more on wide circulation than on political subsidization for profit. And of course, the Penny Press era gave us the first dramatic examples of really fake news, the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon-Hoax, which I have previously discussed in some detail. It is tempting to suggest, then, that whenever there is a sea change in the accessibility of news and the medium by which it is delivered, fake news flourishes. It began with the Penny Press, and continued with the advent of radio broadcast and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, and then reached its height with the Internet, the ultimate democratization of information access.

Samuel Johnson, an early manufacturer of partisan news. Public Domain.

But that would be an oversimplification. First of all, as I recently discussed, the fake news related to the War of the Worlds broadcast was not on the radio but rather in the papers, which exaggerated the panic it had caused. And furthermore, the era of the penny press also led us to the highest ideals of journalistic integrity. This was the era in which the independent press emerged. Benjamin Day’s rival, James Gordon Bennett, expressed these ideals clearly when he founded his competing penny paper, the New York Herald: “We shall support no party—be the agent of no faction or coterie, and we care nothing for any election, or any candidate from president down to constable.” It was a declaration of the press as an autonomous and objective force that could act as a check on political power. The Herald itself may not have lived up to the ideals Bennett espoused. It would go on to engage in the very kind of hoaxing it criticized the Sun for perpetrating, like their New York Zoo hoax about escaped animals, and it would by no means remain carefully neutral in politics, in fact favoring the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. And as a penny paper, their coverage tended to the sensational, especially in the scandalous Robinson-Jewett case, a notorious sex and murder scandal, during which Bennett was the first to issue extra editions. But Bennett pioneered journalistic practices like reportage based on the observations of correspondents and interviews. His paper was one of the first to uncover local corruption, as well, a practice of investigative journalism that would go on to inspire some of the greatest work of the independent press in the 19th century, when the New York Times’ coverage of Boss Tweed became instrumental in taking down the Tammany Hall political machine in the 1870s. The development of the penny press is therefore clearly related to the development of both news hoaxes and to our highest journalistic standards. Still, the kind of hoaxes and sensationalism that came out of the penny press was not the kind of disinformation and propaganda we see from partisan news outlets today. Perhaps, then, we can find a forerunner of this kind of fake news in the so-called “yellow press.”

In many ways, the era of Yellow Journalism also evolved from the practices of the Penny Press and independent journalism. What Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the two eventual magnates of the yellow press, had learned from their predecessors was that news was best told as a “story.” They took to heart what James Gordon Bennett once asserted, that the purpose of news “is not to instruct but to startle and amuse.” For Pulitzer, in his St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and later in his New York paper, the World, this meant investigative watchdog journalism such as what the independent press had pioneered in the 19th century. Pulitzer likewise crusaded against corruption, but often as a way of courting poor immigrant readers, for example focusing on exposing conditions in the tenements where these prospective readers lived. Since his crusading was in some cases a matter of business, Pulitzer has been credited with inventing muckraking, the kind of journalism that seeks to cause outrage and scandal even when it may not be warranted. On the other hand, William Randolph Hearst, who got his start in San Francisco with his paper the Examiner, courted female readers with human interest stories and a certain brand of muckraking story that came to be known as a “sob story.” It began with rumors of a poorly managed hospital. The paper chose a female cub reporter to investigate, which she did by pretending to faint on the street in order to be admitted. This reporter, Winifred Black, wrote a story about women’s treatment in the hospital that was said to have made women sob with every line, earning her the nickname “sob sister,” and launching her career as a muckraker with a dedicated audience of women readers. Other newspapers even tried to recreate this success, building whole teams, or “sob squads,” to churn out similar stories. These two newspaper empires, that of Pulitzer and that of Hearst, with their comparable approaches to muckraking and sensational reporting may have come closest to the kind of political engineering that we see from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp today, for they are widely credited with having led the U.S. into war with Spain. But how accurate is that characterization?

Hearst’s self-congratulatory newspaper coverage of his own jailbreak exploit in Cuba. Public Domain.

Since the mid-19th century, there had been more than one armed rebellion in Cuba against their Spanish colonial rulers. In 1895, rumblings of revolution began again, organized by Cuban exiles in the U.S. and Latin America and commenced as a series of simultaneous uprisings against colonial authority. In the U.S., Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s newspapers favored the cause of the rebels and vilified the Spanish. Hearst especially seems to have put the entire weight of his editorial influence into convincing the American public that they should cheer on the rebels, and eventually, that the U.S. must itself become involved. Hearst’s motivations are a matter of some dispute. Humanitarian concern and democratic ideals may indeed have played a substantial role, making the yellow press’s focus on the rebellion less selfish and unsavory than it is typically portrayed. But it is clear that Hearst, even then, had political ambitions, and to be seen as bolstering the cause of democracy would certainly burnish his reputation. Then there is the distinct possibility that he believed war with Spain would be good for business. Indeed, it would turn out to be a massive boon to his newspapers’ circulation, so perhaps, as has been his usual characterization, Hearst did after all have his eye on the bottom line, though it was more likely a combination of these motivations. But Hearst’s desire for the U.S. to go to war with Spain and his willingness to foment it by manipulating public opinion has certainly been exaggerated, to the point that it has become a myth. The favorite anecdote of those who promote this view is that Hearst sent an illustrator to Cuba in January 1897, and when the illustrator wrote him saying, “There is no trouble here. There will be no war,” Hearst replied, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” However, media historian W. Joseph Campbell has proven through meticulous research that this exchange never took place. First of all, there is no evidence for the existence of these telegrams, and the anecdote first appeared in a memoir by a correspondent of Hearst’s who was not involved at all and was actually in Europe at the time, who used the anecdote not to disparage the yellow press, but to praise their foresight. Second, in 1897, there was already war in Cuba, and that was Hearst’s whole reason for sending the illustrator there. Moreover, Hearst’s editorial position in January of 1897 was that the rebels would succeed in throwing off the colonial yoke; his campaign for U.S. military intervention would not begin for some time. While this exchange is certainly a myth, though, it should not be thought that Hearst did not overstep in his newspaper coverage of the situation in Cuba.

Since the “sob story” had served him so well, Hearst cast about searching for the story of a mistreated woman. Such a story would appeal emotionally to both female readers who imagined what they would do if they ever found themselves in such distress and to male readers who fancied themselves chivalrous. He found just the story he needed in Evangelina Cosío Y Cisneros. This 18-year-old woman had visited the Isle of Pines in Cuba with some companions in 1896, intending to visit with her father, a rebel who was confined to the island. According to later accounts, a Spanish colonel one night came to her room and made unwanted sexual advances on her, but her companions came to her aid upon hearing her cries. Pulling the rapist off of her, they tied him to a chair, but a patrol of other Spanish officers happened upon the scene and arrested them. Evangelina Cisneros was charged with luring the colonel into a trap and thrown into a jail for prostitutes. Hearst’s flagship paper, the New York Journal-American, turned Cisneros into a paragon of feminine purity who was being brutalized, kept among fallen women, and regularly subjected to abuse. She became in his newspaper columns a symbol of all the innocent Cuban women that the Spanish were ravishing and debasing, making of the rebels who fought to protect these damsels in distress heroes firmly planted on the moral high ground. In fact, there is evidence that Cisneros was more of a pants-wearing, cigar-chomping rebel herself, and that she may in fact have been enacting some rebel plan at the time of her arrest, but otherwise, much of Hearst’s portrayal of her situation seems accurate. This “Flower of Cuba,” as the Hearst papers called her, was to be shipped overseas to a Spanish penal colony in North Africa. But Hearst had other plans. In one of the most astonishing instances of manufacturing the news in American history, he sent a rough-and-tumble correspondent, Karl Decker, to Havana to break her out of jail, and they succeeded. Exactly how this daring escape was effected remains unclear—there are stories of a file being smuggled in to her, or drugged bonbons that she used to put her cellmates to sleep. Regardless of how it was accomplished, we know that she was successfully sprung from the jail, hidden, and then put secretly aboard a ship back to America, where Hearst had her paraded around the country to tell Americans about the cruelties of the Spanish in Cuba. Rather than causing a scandal over the legality of such an unsanctioned action overseas or the role of the press in making news, Hearst’s exploit was widely praised, of course in Hearst’s papers but in others as well. Pulitzer, though, was quick to suggest that the jailbreak was a hoax, insisting that the Spanish authorities must have allowed it to happen, and this has been an enduring characterization of the affair. However, W. Joseph Campbell has uncovered through an examination of contemporary diplomatic correspondence that certain U.S. diplomats were involved with the jailbreak, and that they faced considerable risks in being involved. Moreover, the Spanish authorities ordered a search for Cisneros after her disappearance, showing that they had not winked at her escape. So while some myths certainly surround the level of involvement of the yellow press in Cuba in 1897, this was not one of them. William Randolph Hearst did indeed orchestrate the liberation of a Cuban prisoner of war.  

While the “Cisneros Affair” certainly galvanized the American public to espouse the cause of the Cuban rebels, it was another dramatic event that is usually identified as the tipping point for American military intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. This event is not disputed as a myth, but it has turned out to be an enduring mystery. In January of 1898, U.S. President William McKinley had the battleship USS Maine anchored in Havana Harbor as a demonstration of US power and determination to protect U.S. citizens in the war-torn country. On February 15th, while the crew slept in their quarters on the forward end of the vessel, an explosion occurred. There had been 354 men aboard the ship, and 266 of them perished in the explosion and the resulting fires as the ship sank into the harbor. Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World both put this tragedy on the front page every day afterward, of course, asserting that the explosion had been an attack, an act of war. Hearst even offered a $50,000 reward for evidence of who was responsible. The U.S. Navy wasted no time in launching an inquiry, which determined within a month that an underwater mine had detonated, in turn igniting the ship’s forward magazine. However, some of the experts consulted in the inquiry came to a different conclusion, suggesting instead that coal in the bunker adjacent to the magazine had spontaneously combusted. This scenario would have been more consistent with the findings of a Spanish inquiry, which argued that it is unusual for a ship’s munitions to explode when it is sunk by an underwater mine. Moreover, a spout of water would typically be seen when a mine detonates, and dead fish would afterward be found, neither of which was the case in Havana Harbor that evening. Numerous investigations have failed to resolve this mystery. Perhaps the Spanish inquiry’s conclusions are less than trustworthy because they surely were seeking to absolve themselves. And there is just as little evidence for an internal explosion as there is for an external one. In fact, the spontaneous combustion of coal appears to be just as uncommon as a ship’s magazine detonating after being struck by a mine. But none of this mattered to the yellow press, which ignored the Spanish inquiry and the dissenting expert opinions and declared to the world that the Spanish had murdered U.S. navy men in a brazen act of war. In less than a month, Congress declared war, and many an American sailor was heard to repeat the headlines of the yellow press in their war cries: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”

Hearst’s inflammatory newspaper coverage of the USS Maine explosion. Public Domain.

In considering the yellow press as a possible precursor of today’s disinformation outlets, we must reconsider what we presume to be true about yellow journalism. Historians have shown the “I’ll furnish the war” quote to have been a myth, so the truth about the complex myriad of factors that led to U.S. involvement in the Cuban War of Independence has likely been obscured by this appealing fiction. It is not as though the American public would not have learned of the events without the yellow press or would not otherwise have come to favor U.S. involvement. There were other, more respectable newspapers also reporting on the Cuban rebellion then, just as today there are many more scrupulous news outlets that consumers of Rupert Murdoch’s brand of news could seek out instead. And yellow journalism and public opinion alone did not sway President McKinley to pursue war. There had been jingoists in Congress pushing the same war agenda every step of the way. In the same way, today, Fox News and conservative media generally may not be inventing the talking points and leading this disinformation war so much as following the lead of the GOP, recognizing their niche market and continually pursuing their audience down whatever fringe path they’ve been led. Notwithstanding these parallels, though, I still find no examples from the history of American journalism that match the brazen manipulation, the invention of false narratives, the shameless promotion of disinformation regardless of potential public harms that we see in the media produced by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, especially Fox News Channel. They seem to represent the worst of every era, seemingly beholden to a political party as in the party press era, trading in oversimplified sensationalism in order to appeal to the everyman as in the penny paper era, and willing to manufacture news as in the age of yellow journalism. But Hearst and his empire were not really anything like Murdoch and News Corp. First of all, Hearst was driven by political ambitions, trying to parlay his newspaper platform into a Democratic presidential nomination. Murdoch appears to be motivated by the pursuit of wealth and a sinister ideology. Hearst envisioned a kind of “journalism of action” that would engage in democratic and humanitarian activism, certainly for the purposes of self-promotion but never seeking to do harm. But just this year, Fox News has been promoting conspiracy theories that encouraged the overturning of a free and fair election and engaging in anti-vaxxer science denial that will result in lost lives; they are attacking democracy and public health. To me, this seems like a new and unprecedented form of flawed journalism. We find ourselves in the era of the propaganda press. And what’s truly scary is that Fox News and the other outlets within Murdoch’s News Corp are no longer even the worst offenders, having shown clear signs of tempering their rhetoric in at least some of their programs—typically the ones that they would have a hard time claiming are for entertainment purposes only. Disinformation purveyors have grown in the last couple decades, with NewsMax, Breitbart, and One America News Network becoming the worst offenders. But credible news reporting and reliable outlets remain, the most impartial and conscientious being Associated Press and Reuters reportage. As for major legacy newspapers and other big cable news channels, yes, bias and the favoring of viewpoints is present, as it always has been. American consumers of news need to stop expecting anything different, learn to read laterally across platforms for a wider variety of editorial slants, and concentrate, most importantly, on rooting out barefaced propaganda.

Further Reading

Borch, Fred L., and Robert F. Dorr. "Maine's sinking still a mystery, 110 years later." Navy Times, sec. Transitions, 21 Jan. 2008, p. 36. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/11E7C6BBE345B960.

Campbell, W. Joseph. “‘I’ll Furnish the War: The Making of a Media Myth.” Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, University of California Press, 2010, pp. 9-25.

———. “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros.” American Journalism, vol. 19, no. 4, 2002, pp. 67-94. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/nothoax.htm.

———. “Not Likely Sent: the Remington-Hearst ‘Telegrams.’” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 2, 2000, pp. 405-422. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/documents/Article_NotLikelySent.pdf.

———. “William Randolph Hearst: Mythical Media Bogeyman.” BBC News, 14 Aug. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14512411

Lowry, Elizabeth. “The Flower of Cuba: Rhetoric, Representation, and Circulation at the Outbreak of the Spanish-American War.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 174–190. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42003444.

Park, Robert E. “The Natural History of the Newspaper.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, 1923, pp. 273–289. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2764232.

Pérez, Louis A. “The Meaning of the Maine: Causation and the Historiography of the Spanish-American War.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1989, pp. 293–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3640268.

Taylor, WIlliam. “USS Maine Explosion.” Disasters and Tragic Events: An Encyclopedia of Catastrophes in American History [2 Volumes], vol. 1, 2014, pp. 164-166. ABC-CLIO, 2014. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=781660&site=ehost-live&scope=site.