Greg Bishop - Project Beta

The extremes of wide-eyed belief and closed-minded debunkery has fascinated Greg ever since 1991, when he co-founded a magazine called "The Excluded Middle", which was a journal of UFOs, conspiracy research, psychedelia and new science.
Project Beta - How the US Government Created An Alien Invasion. This is the story of electrical physicist Paul Bennewitz, who thought he had stumbled onto evidence of an alien invasion, but in the process was directing attention to secret projects at Kirkland Air Force Base, New Mexico in the early 1980's.
The Bennewitz episode provided the blueprint for wild UFO conspiracy tales for the next 20 years or more and a warning to researchers not to confuse the authority of the messenger with the truth of the message.
Wild alien stories cooked up by the Air Foce Office of Special Investigations that were fed to Bennewitz and which began as a simple counterintelligence operation, backfired and led to renewed calls for disclosure of government UFO secrecy. The strangest part of the story is that Bennewitz actually had stumbled onto strange lights and signals that were part of the vast black budget projects that were going on at Kirkland - projects sponsored by the Air Force Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
The lecture features personal notes and correspondence, as well as some of the verified disinformation that was fed to him over a period of five years, leading to his eventual breakdown and institutionalisation.