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telling him that requests had to be sent, effectively, to Lawrence himself. Since Friedman would never be told if the District offices actually had any information he was after, and since Lawrence’s office at Headquarters never maintained the information to begin with, Lawrence could honestly respond that a search of his files found no information responsive to Friedman’s request. 3
    At its most basic level, this alteration of the FOIA process ensured that no requests sent to District offices by anyone would ever result in local information being released. AFOSI Headquarters would always be alerted to any interesting requests that came in to the various AFOSI District offices...but would never have to reveal anything.
    The proof of Lawrence’s ploy eventually came to light following another FOIA request made to AFOSI Headquarters. In this case the request was for directives that had been sent by Headquarters to the District offices during that time period. These directives were available through FOIA, and Lawrence’s earlier change in procedure was among them. Whether Noah Lawrence took it on himself to implement the scheme may never be known, but hopefully the authority to neutralize public access to information under FOIA is not arbitrarily being left to the whims of FOIA officers themselves. What other instances might have gone unnoticed? AFOSI’s quick change of procedures, while not in itself a blatant breach of the law, was still an obvious attempt to sidestep the law, denying a citizen of the United States access to information that was granted under the Freedom of Information Act.
    Despite the layers of disinformation and confusion that were increasingly prevalent by the mid 1980’s, whatever Paul Bennewitz had seen and filmed had caused grave concern. It generated a meeting on base with high-ranking individuals and it led to a concerted effort to defuse both Paul and the attention he was drawing to himself. Still, there was no denying he had filmed something, something happening very close to the home of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. A few years later, when I found the term “space vehicles” associated with this location, I could not help thinking it was certainly one hell of a coincidence. Or maybe, as some believe, there really are no coincidences.
    Unbeknownst to me at the time, while I was looking into the events surrounding Paul Bennewitz, someone else obtained even stronger evidence for this phenomenon. Again, it was caught on film. This film would lead to the strongest evidence I have ever seen of a kind of technology that known science, or should I say “our science”, has yet to match. When the evidence began to mount and I began to follow the published research, it led to people, places, and troubling connections between science and government. These will be explored in coming chapters because, in a surprising twist, the research led once again back to the Air Force, and to Albuquerque.

 

     
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
—Albert Einstein
 
     
    What is the difference between a highly advanced, previously unreported aircraft, and an unidentified flying object? It became a significant question when I set out to determine what the evidence actually represents. What are the criteria for deciding what is and is not evidence? It may be easier to understand the confusion by starting with the simple question: What is the UFO phenomenon?
    I can almost guarantee that most people will immediately think of flying saucers, and almost as quickly, aliens (typically from space). The truth is that those concepts do underlie what the phenomenon is all about even if those who claim to be studying it try to avoid saying so out loud. Several years ago, in what may have been an attempt to avoid saying anything specific, the public was presented with the amorphous term “Unidentified Flying Object”. It has led to endless