March 9, 2026 • 17 mins
Guest Host Richard Syrett and guest Adam Gorightly delves into flying saucer crashes, underground alien bases, and the emergence of a number of modern mythologies since the advent of the UFO era in the 1940s. He'll address how some of these myths may be based in reality, while others are rooted in the imagination or government influence.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Adam go rightly stays with us author filmmaker. The book
and the documentary is Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, And we
were talking about Paul Bennowitz and the benefit of the
Benowitz case. Benowitz saw some strange lights in and around
and above a Kirkland Air Force Base where he had
a home and was videotaping these lights and recording other
(00:31):
things that he had seen and heard. And the Air
Force Intelligence Agency was concerned that he was going to
disseminate this information, so they sought to discredit him. In
order to do that, the theory goes, they used William Moore,
the co author of the Roswell incident, to funnel fake documents,
Aquarius documents, documents that mentioned ets and Majestic twelve and
(00:53):
so forth, hoping Benowitz would disseminate those documents and thereby
discredit himself, and then no one would take anything he
said seriously, or at least to leave Benowitz with the
idea that what he saw were UFOs and not secret
government technology. So the other interesting aspect of the Benowitz
(01:18):
case is his involvement Paul Benowitz with Myrna Hanson, who
claimed that she was abducted. Tell us about Myrna Hanson.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, it was in May of nineteen eighty. Myrna Hanson
showed up at the Highway Patrol office in Cimarron, New Mexico.
She was hysterical. She claimed her and her son had
been abducted by a UFO. The officers there didn't quite
(01:52):
know what to do with this situation, but they knew
of a fellow by the name of Gabe Veldez, a
fellow highway patrolman out of the Dulce area who'd been
investigating UFO sidings related to cattle mutilations during this period,
and so Gabe Valdez trucked on over to Cimarron picked
(02:18):
up this young lady and her son. Valdez was friends
with Paul Benowitz, and he knew Benowitz had his contacts
through the Aerial Phenomena Research Association, that UFO group that
thought they could help this lady by putting her under
(02:41):
hypnotic regression to work out whatever happened to her. That
was the idea. So Valdez drove her to Benowitz's townhouse
there in Albuquerque. He took her in and they called
in this hypno therapist. He was doing a lot of
(03:06):
the abductions during that period for APRO by the name
of Leo Sprinkle. A lot of these are pretty famous
names in euphology, and Sprinkle came in and the first
regression session, Benowitz had concerns that the aliens could read
(03:26):
their minds or somehow. By this time, Benowitz was believing
that what he was seeing at Kurtland Air Force Base,
filming and photographing were ets and they were a national
security threat, and so he the first regression they did
(03:52):
of her they did in his Lincoln Town carn He
covered the whole thing with aluminum foil in his way
of thinking it would deflect the alien's beams, so they
couldn't interfere with that session anyway. What Brna Hanson told
Benowitz and Sprinkle over a period of time, Brna Hanson
(04:17):
and her son, and I believe even Marna Hanson's mother
was involved in this, were staying with Beniwitz over a
period of time, and she claimed that she had been abducted.
Her and her son Sean. They'd first seen this craft
and eagle nests New Mexico, which was near Cimarron. A
(04:39):
beam came down from the sky and picked up a
cow transported into the ship, and then she was her
and her son were beamed up into the ship and
they saw the cow dissected, mutilated. I mean, it's a
wild story. But as these regressions went on, she had
(05:03):
more to tell that she had been taken to an
underground base at one point that had undergone some type
of medical procedure. She had broken free at one point
was running through this underground facility where she was seeing
vats with human body parts floating in an amber liquid.
(05:27):
All this wild stuff, and Benowitz came to believe that
she had also been implanted with some type of device
at the base of her skull, that the aliens etes
could you know, be messages with her manipulate her. On
(05:51):
and on and on. Through this period that Myrna Hanson
was with Benowitz, things really went off the rail. We
in the film The Saucers Spooks and Kook's documentary, we
were able to get a hold of some phone recordings
Benowitz did during this period where he became convinced that
(06:13):
the aliens were shooting beams at him. These beams were
so strong that at one point it knocked down his wife.
He set up like a ferty cage type room to
keep away the alien beams and started developing different devices
(06:35):
to counter these beams. Once again, remember Benowitz had some
knowledge in all of this. He had this type of
things he developed for the military and aircraft for the government,
were censors, altimeters, these type of things, and even at
(06:55):
one point he developed some type of instrument that was
on the Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right, So, I mean what becomes clear, uh, having you know,
watched the documentary, is that Benowitz appears to be being
pushed toward paranoia or even psychological collapse. So one it
then has to ask whether Myrna Hanson, the Myrna Hanson abduction,
(07:27):
whether it was a genuine abduct abduction, or whether there
was her story perhaps influenced, manipulated, or created a whole
cloth by some intelligence group. And then again Myrna Hanson
is thrown in Benowitz's direction to further discredit him.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yeah, I interviewed Greg Valdez, who is Gabe Valdez's son. Remember,
Gabe Valdez was the highway patrolman who took Myrna Hanson
to Paul Benowitz and started this whole crazy scenario. Greg Valdez,
Gabe's son, was there for a lot of these events.
(08:13):
He go out with Gabe and investigate cattle mutilations, and
even went with Gabe to Paul Benowitz's house upon occasion.
And when I interviewed Greg a few years back, he
said an interesting thing that, well, perhaps there's a good
chance that Myrna Hanson might have been part of this
(08:37):
operation to disinform Benowitz. She's an interesting person. She pretty
much disappeared after that. I mean, there was one researcher
that said she had contacted her at one point, but
I'm kind of dubious of that. No other research have
(09:00):
been able to track her down. Bill Morrison. She went
to California. If you do a Google search online, you'll
which have come across from Rna Hanson. First off, was
an actress from the forties and fifties, So perhaps Myrna
Hanson was playing a role. I know, the different people
that Leo Sprinkle regressed during that period, they all used
(09:27):
pseudonyms for them, you know, basically to protect the identity.
So we really don't know. There's a lot of questions
there with Myrna Hanson, and nobody really knows what became
of her.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Right, So, and again I mentioned this off the top.
It was my first question out of the shoot, but
it bears repeating. This is not to suggest that all
alien abductions are fabrications, that all UFO sightings are not genuine.
It is we're simply exploring the idea that the various
U S intelligence groups, the the Air Force intelligence and
(10:07):
so forth, at certain points, at a certain point and
at certain times, have have used the UFO e T
phenomenon to their own for their own purposes and and
and have have had times fabricated and manipulated and influenced.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
This this narrative. So I want to get back to Bennington,
because he believed at a certain point, again this is
relating to Kirkland Air Force Base, that he was not
only seeing these UFOs over Kirkland, but he was communicating
with the the occupants of these craft. Yes, and there
(10:50):
is there is a point in time where he is
given a computer or he's given some sort of a
device in order to I guess, listen in on these
conversations with these aliens. And according to one version this
is this is pretty wild that computer was delivered to
him by none other than Jay Allen Heinik a Project
(11:13):
Bluebook fame. Is you know that for sure?
Speaker 3 (11:17):
No, we don't. That's a pretty controversial story. Now according
to Bill Moore. During this period, and all this was
going on, you know, and Moore was interacting with Dodie
and Paul Benowitz, et cetera. Heinek paid a visit or
(11:41):
he met with More. I'm not sure where it was,
but they're out for adult beverages one night, and Heinich
claimed that he had passed along a computer that the
Air Force had developed. He passed this along to Paul Benowitz.
Of course, Heinech, you know, he had a history there.
(12:03):
He's involved with the Project blue Book and he was
a scientific advisor for the Air air Force. So all
of this, you know, is possible. Perhaps he was in
the right place, you know, to make that happen at
that time we have you know, this is just Bill
(12:28):
Moore were relying upon. But you know, that's the basic story.
And so yeah, with this computer, he was supposedly able
to communicate with the ets and also receive different images
different folks. Besides, More visited Benewitz at his place there
(12:51):
in Albuquerque and saw this computer and him interacting with
the computer. In fact, I mentioned Greg Valdez before he
was there one time, and there's a little clip from
the film where Gabe Valdez is talking about it would
print out images kind of what was the technology back then.
(13:14):
It was very early.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Computer printer matrix printer.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, text asks you is what I think it was called.
And you could do those images with the dots, and
so one of them was supposed to eve an alien
that looked like a dinosaur or a reptilian, which plays
into this whole mythos And he'd also get according to Dodie,
(13:41):
of course you got it. That's where he got to take,
what he says, with a grain of salt, you know,
kind of filling your way through all this different information.
But he claimed that Benwitz was getting different beeps and
he'd ask question, get a beep or some type of
(14:02):
thing that would be yes or no to a question
from the aliens. Dody felt that it didn't make any
sense to him that Benowitz was reading into whatever information
he was getting. You know, this was very talking nineteen
eighty eighty one. So to be able to use a
(14:24):
computer to talk to somebody, But there was a lot
going on a Sandy E Labs at Kirtland Air Force Base,
so maybe they had a hand the.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Point, Sorry Adam, excuse me, but it isn't the point
here that the computer that was given to Benowitz and
whether it was given to Benwitz by Jay Allen Heinek,
which is what William Morris claims, but the computer was
actually feeding Benowitz's fabricated messages. In other words, it was
the Air Force that they were pretending to be the aliens,
(14:56):
and they were feeding Benowitz's information again as part of
this campaign to discredit him and perhaps even drive him mad.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Well, yeah, and there's different agencies involved too. There was
a story that the NSA had bought a townhouse right
across from Benowitz and was beaming messages at him. Maybe
that was what he was getting over his computer. Of
course the NSA. You know, when I first heard that
(15:28):
little twist to the story, you know, what was the
NSA doing there? But I think it's from what I've learned,
it's pretty common that there's NSA agents many times at a
lot of these secretive or you know, high security air
Force bases that are doing counterintelligence and monitoring what's going on.
(15:52):
So it could you know, be a number of different
agencies alphabet soups, spooks that had their hands in this operation.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And whatever happened to Benowitz ultimately did he did he
go mad? Did he did he stick to his guns
and continue to believe that what he saw at Kirkland
Air Force Base wasn't were you know, aliens? Or did
he ever? I don't know what happened.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
At some point his family who helps run the business,
encouraged him to seek some mental health because he did
have a bit of a meltdown over all of this.
I mean, he was totally convinced that the aliens were
attacking us. You know, they were beaming him. I mentioned before,
(16:48):
is he felt his wife had got knocked down by
an alien beam. Eventually, yeah, it came to a head
and he was spent some time in a mental facility
and he got out. I'm not sure how long the
period was. He basically left the UFO scene, so to speak,
(17:12):
bye by the late By the late nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Adam go rightly stays with us author filmmaker. The book
and the documentary is Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, And we
were talking about Paul Bennowitz and the benefit of the
Benowitz case. Benowitz saw some strange lights in and around
and above a Kirkland Air Force Base where he had
a home and was videotaping these lights and recording other
(00:31):
things that he had seen and heard. And the Air
Force Intelligence Agency was concerned that he was going to
disseminate this information, so they sought to discredit him. In
order to do that, the theory goes, they used William Moore,
the co author of the Roswell incident, to funnel fake documents,
Aquarius documents, documents that mentioned ets and Majestic twelve and
(00:53):
so forth, hoping Benowitz would disseminate those documents and thereby
discredit himself, and then no one would take anything he
said seriously, or at least to leave Benowitz with the
idea that what he saw were UFOs and not secret
government technology. So the other interesting aspect of the Benowitz
(01:18):
case is his involvement Paul Benowitz with Myrna Hanson, who
claimed that she was abducted. Tell us about Myrna Hanson.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, it was in May of nineteen eighty. Myrna Hanson
showed up at the Highway Patrol office in Cimarron, New Mexico.
She was hysterical. She claimed her and her son had
been abducted by a UFO. The officers there didn't quite
(01:52):
know what to do with this situation, but they knew
of a fellow by the name of Gabe Veldez, a
fellow highway patrolman out of the Dulce area who'd been
investigating UFO sidings related to cattle mutilations during this period,
and so Gabe Valdez trucked on over to Cimarron picked
(02:18):
up this young lady and her son. Valdez was friends
with Paul Benowitz, and he knew Benowitz had his contacts
through the Aerial Phenomena Research Association, that UFO group that
thought they could help this lady by putting her under
(02:41):
hypnotic regression to work out whatever happened to her. That
was the idea. So Valdez drove her to Benowitz's townhouse
there in Albuquerque. He took her in and they called
in this hypno therapist. He was doing a lot of
(03:06):
the abductions during that period for APRO by the name
of Leo Sprinkle. A lot of these are pretty famous
names in euphology, and Sprinkle came in and the first
regression session, Benowitz had concerns that the aliens could read
(03:26):
their minds or somehow. By this time, Benowitz was believing
that what he was seeing at Kurtland Air Force Base,
filming and photographing were ets and they were a national
security threat, and so he the first regression they did
(03:52):
of her they did in his Lincoln Town carn He
covered the whole thing with aluminum foil in his way
of thinking it would deflect the alien's beams, so they
couldn't interfere with that session anyway. What Brna Hanson told
Benowitz and Sprinkle over a period of time, Brna Hanson
(04:17):
and her son, and I believe even Marna Hanson's mother
was involved in this, were staying with Beniwitz over a
period of time, and she claimed that she had been abducted.
Her and her son Sean. They'd first seen this craft
and eagle nests New Mexico, which was near Cimarron. A
(04:39):
beam came down from the sky and picked up a
cow transported into the ship, and then she was her
and her son were beamed up into the ship and
they saw the cow dissected, mutilated. I mean, it's a
wild story. But as these regressions went on, she had
(05:03):
more to tell that she had been taken to an
underground base at one point that had undergone some type
of medical procedure. She had broken free at one point
was running through this underground facility where she was seeing
vats with human body parts floating in an amber liquid.
(05:27):
All this wild stuff, and Benowitz came to believe that
she had also been implanted with some type of device
at the base of her skull, that the aliens etes
could you know, be messages with her manipulate her. On
(05:51):
and on and on. Through this period that Myrna Hanson
was with Benowitz, things really went off the rail. We
in the film The Saucers Spooks and Kook's documentary, we
were able to get a hold of some phone recordings
Benowitz did during this period where he became convinced that
(06:13):
the aliens were shooting beams at him. These beams were
so strong that at one point it knocked down his wife.
He set up like a ferty cage type room to
keep away the alien beams and started developing different devices
(06:35):
to counter these beams. Once again, remember Benowitz had some
knowledge in all of this. He had this type of
things he developed for the military and aircraft for the government,
were censors, altimeters, these type of things, and even at
(06:55):
one point he developed some type of instrument that was
on the Space Shuttle.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right, So, I mean what becomes clear, uh, having you know,
watched the documentary, is that Benowitz appears to be being
pushed toward paranoia or even psychological collapse. So one it
then has to ask whether Myrna Hanson, the Myrna Hanson abduction,
(07:27):
whether it was a genuine abduct abduction, or whether there
was her story perhaps influenced, manipulated, or created a whole
cloth by some intelligence group. And then again Myrna Hanson
is thrown in Benowitz's direction to further discredit him.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yeah, I interviewed Greg Valdez, who is Gabe Valdez's son. Remember,
Gabe Valdez was the highway patrolman who took Myrna Hanson
to Paul Benowitz and started this whole crazy scenario. Greg Valdez,
Gabe's son, was there for a lot of these events.
(08:13):
He go out with Gabe and investigate cattle mutilations, and
even went with Gabe to Paul Benowitz's house upon occasion.
And when I interviewed Greg a few years back, he
said an interesting thing that, well, perhaps there's a good
chance that Myrna Hanson might have been part of this
(08:37):
operation to disinform Benowitz. She's an interesting person. She pretty
much disappeared after that. I mean, there was one researcher
that said she had contacted her at one point, but
I'm kind of dubious of that. No other research have
(09:00):
been able to track her down. Bill Morrison. She went
to California. If you do a Google search online, you'll
which have come across from Rna Hanson. First off, was
an actress from the forties and fifties, So perhaps Myrna
Hanson was playing a role. I know, the different people
that Leo Sprinkle regressed during that period, they all used
(09:27):
pseudonyms for them, you know, basically to protect the identity.
So we really don't know. There's a lot of questions
there with Myrna Hanson, and nobody really knows what became
of her.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Right, So, and again I mentioned this off the top.
It was my first question out of the shoot, but
it bears repeating. This is not to suggest that all
alien abductions are fabrications, that all UFO sightings are not genuine.
It is we're simply exploring the idea that the various
U S intelligence groups, the the Air Force intelligence and
(10:07):
so forth, at certain points, at a certain point and
at certain times, have have used the UFO e T
phenomenon to their own for their own purposes and and
and have have had times fabricated and manipulated and influenced.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
This this narrative. So I want to get back to Bennington,
because he believed at a certain point, again this is
relating to Kirkland Air Force Base, that he was not
only seeing these UFOs over Kirkland, but he was communicating
with the the occupants of these craft. Yes, and there
(10:50):
is there is a point in time where he is
given a computer or he's given some sort of a
device in order to I guess, listen in on these
conversations with these aliens. And according to one version this
is this is pretty wild that computer was delivered to
him by none other than Jay Allen Heinik a Project
(11:13):
Bluebook fame. Is you know that for sure?
Speaker 3 (11:17):
No, we don't. That's a pretty controversial story. Now according
to Bill Moore. During this period, and all this was
going on, you know, and Moore was interacting with Dodie
and Paul Benowitz, et cetera. Heinek paid a visit or
(11:41):
he met with More. I'm not sure where it was,
but they're out for adult beverages one night, and Heinich
claimed that he had passed along a computer that the
Air Force had developed. He passed this along to Paul Benowitz.
Of course, Heinech, you know, he had a history there.
(12:03):
He's involved with the Project blue Book and he was
a scientific advisor for the Air air Force. So all
of this, you know, is possible. Perhaps he was in
the right place, you know, to make that happen at
that time we have you know, this is just Bill
(12:28):
Moore were relying upon. But you know, that's the basic story.
And so yeah, with this computer, he was supposedly able
to communicate with the ets and also receive different images
different folks. Besides, More visited Benewitz at his place there
(12:51):
in Albuquerque and saw this computer and him interacting with
the computer. In fact, I mentioned Greg Valdez before he
was there one time, and there's a little clip from
the film where Gabe Valdez is talking about it would
print out images kind of what was the technology back then.
(13:14):
It was very early.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Computer printer matrix printer.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, text asks you is what I think it was called.
And you could do those images with the dots, and
so one of them was supposed to eve an alien
that looked like a dinosaur or a reptilian, which plays
into this whole mythos And he'd also get according to Dodie,
(13:41):
of course you got it. That's where he got to take,
what he says, with a grain of salt, you know,
kind of filling your way through all this different information.
But he claimed that Benwitz was getting different beeps and
he'd ask question, get a beep or some type of
(14:02):
thing that would be yes or no to a question
from the aliens. Dody felt that it didn't make any
sense to him that Benowitz was reading into whatever information
he was getting. You know, this was very talking nineteen
eighty eighty one. So to be able to use a
(14:24):
computer to talk to somebody, But there was a lot
going on a Sandy E Labs at Kirtland Air Force Base,
so maybe they had a hand the.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Point, Sorry Adam, excuse me, but it isn't the point
here that the computer that was given to Benowitz and
whether it was given to Benwitz by Jay Allen Heinek,
which is what William Morris claims, but the computer was
actually feeding Benowitz's fabricated messages. In other words, it was
the Air Force that they were pretending to be the aliens,
(14:56):
and they were feeding Benowitz's information again as part of
this campaign to discredit him and perhaps even drive him mad.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Well, yeah, and there's different agencies involved too. There was
a story that the NSA had bought a townhouse right
across from Benowitz and was beaming messages at him. Maybe
that was what he was getting over his computer. Of
course the NSA. You know, when I first heard that
(15:28):
little twist to the story, you know, what was the
NSA doing there? But I think it's from what I've learned,
it's pretty common that there's NSA agents many times at a
lot of these secretive or you know, high security air
Force bases that are doing counterintelligence and monitoring what's going on.
(15:52):
So it could you know, be a number of different
agencies alphabet soups, spooks that had their hands in this operation.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
And whatever happened to Benowitz ultimately did he did he
go mad? Did he did he stick to his guns
and continue to believe that what he saw at Kirkland
Air Force Base wasn't were you know, aliens? Or did
he ever? I don't know what happened.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
At some point his family who helps run the business,
encouraged him to seek some mental health because he did
have a bit of a meltdown over all of this.
I mean, he was totally convinced that the aliens were
attacking us. You know, they were beaming him. I mentioned before,
(16:48):
is he felt his wife had got knocked down by
an alien beam. Eventually, yeah, it came to a head
and he was spent some time in a mental facility
and he got out. I'm not sure how long the
period was. He basically left the UFO scene, so to speak,
(17:12):
bye by the late By the late nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
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