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AREA 51 again. THE 73 UFO mystery to a participant in the conspiracy, a contributor to the "horrible truth." Is that how the whole machine of myth and fantasy works? I asked myself as I felt bitterness rise in my throat. Have the legends of MJ-12 and Area 51 been created out of whole cloth by a few people like Cooper, taking every word they heard, every shade of meaning, out of context? Or were they driven to such desperation by real events in their lives? I decided that I had gone as far as I was willing to go to answer this question. I called John Lear, for whom I have gained a real measure of respect, and I told him I never wanted to talk to his friend Cooper Yet Cooper, in a sense, was right: my fateful dinner with him on the Queen Mary had indeed brought me back to square one. BENNEWITZ AFFAIR It was in the early 1980s that the story of Paul Bennewitz started circulating, at first as a very confidential matter, among researchers of the UFO phenomenon. Bennewitz is a respected physicist who man- ages a small electronics company close to Kirtland Air Force Base, to which he supplies humidity sensing equipment. An avid UFO re- searcher, he was said to have come into contact with a woman who had had an encounter. Using a highly questionable method, which has unfortunately become one of the standards of UFO research, the wit- ness was hypnotized three times by Dr. Leo Sprinkle in an effort to retrieve "the truth." Bennewitz found that the woman, in the course of her sighting, believed she had been abducted by aliens. She had been taken to an underground base; she had been shown vats of fluid in which pieces of human flesh were floating (presumably awaiting the aliens' dinnertime?). She had been told that the aliens, the Short Grays, were living there, along with American scientists, and that secret experi- ments were in progress right under the surface of New Mexico. The reader should keep in mind that all this emerged under a trance state induced by a hypnotist who believes that he may have been abducted