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curious, though I did not think much about it when I first read about this meeting, was the fact that the Director of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory had shown particular interest in Paul Bennewitz’s research. The Weapons Lab was a connection that would reappear years later.
    Despite all the disinformation and misinformation that would surround this case in later years, what appeared in those original nighttime films has never been refuted. The Air Force did not address it and to this day has never offered any explanation for, or investigation of, the vehicles Paul Bennewitz filmed. It has always been my contention that those films are the crux of the matter. If you approach this case the way an arson investigator would approach a suspicious fire, and you begin by looking for the point of origin, it was Paul approaching the Air Force and revealing what he had filmed over the MWSA that set things in motion. While the events that came later are now legend in the annals of Ufology (see Greg Bishop’s Project Beta for an intriguing account), the films in question had been taken before anyone, including the Air Force, knew Paul Bennewitz was stationed on his rooftop filming it all.
    The more I looked into this case the more it became clear to me that there were things going on behind the scenes that I, a civilian, had little chance of ever finding out. I wanted to know, but I had reached the edge of a dark abyss, that shadowy rabbit hole that virtually all researchers come to when confronting government secrecy. You reach a point where any questions you have may never be satisfactorily answered. Often you have virtually no chance of getting answers at all. Add to that the fact that lying is permitted in the interest of national security (though it is more politically correct to call it misinformation or disinformation) and you can never be sure if what you learn—or think you have learned—is the truth, or the real truth, or the whole real truth, as some put it. Consider the following stark example of an attempt to withhold information from the public
    In 1981, well-known researcher and author Stanton Friedman had been using the Freedom of Information Act to request UFO related information from AFOSI headquarters in Washington, D.C. After dealing with Noah Lawrence, the AFOSI FOIA officer at the time, and getting nowhere, Friedman learned that such reports were usually kept only at the District offices level. Headquarters was a central hub that information passed through on its way to and from various agencies or locations, but no records were actually maintained at Headquarters itself. So Friedman then wrote to Lawrence asking for a list of the addresses of all the local District offices so that he could write to them directly—effectively warning Lawrence of what he intended to do.
    Up to that time, whenever a District office received a request for information the standard procedure had been for the local office to locate any responsive material and forward it AFOSI Headquarters for review and declassification. The requester was also advised that the information was being sent for review and would be forwarded to him if it was deemed releasable. The problem with this, at least from AFOSI’s perspective, was that it alerted the requester to the fact that information had been found, even if it was not ultimately released.
    In this instance, as soon as Lawrence realized what Friedman was planning to do he took steps to block the possibility of Friedman learning anything at all.
     
    Lawrence stalled in sending back the list of District office addresses that Friedman has requested. In the meantime he issued a revision to the existing procedures that the local offices followed. He warned them that they might receive a request from Friedman, and instructed them to simply advise any requester that all requests had to be processed by AFOSI Headquarters. The District offices were not to respond to Friedman in any way other than