Paul Bennewitz (1927–2003) was an American businessman and amateur UFO investigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1979 he filmed lights and recorded radio signals near Kirtland Air Force Base that he believed came from alien craft. Air Force counterintelligence officers who learned of his work encouraged his beliefs and fed him false material, according to later accounts by people involved, and his case became the best-known example of officials deliberately shaping a private citizen's UFO convictions.

In 1966 Bennewitz acquired the rights to a humidity sensor from Sandia National Laboratories and founded Thunder Scientific, a small family company in Albuquerque. In the 1970s he was a member of the civilian group APRO. In April 1979 he attended a public meeting on New Mexico cattle mutilations, where he met state police officer Gabe Valdez. By his own account his personally funded study of UFOs began that July, and he reported objects regularly flying near Kirtland, the Manzano nuclear weapons storage area and the Coyote Canyon test area.

Bennewitz contacted Kirtland in October 1980 and briefed officials there that November. Former AFOSI special agent Richard Doty has said he was tasked with giving fabricated information to UFO researchers, Bennewitz among them. Mark Pilkington's book Mirage Men (2010) and its 2013 film describe officers who, rather than telling Bennewitz he was picking up signals from activity at the base, expressed interest in his findings, supplied software that "interpreted" the signals and left props for him to find. Hypnosis sessions in 1980 with a woman known as Myrna Hansen fed his belief in an alien base near Dulce, which he described in a December 1981 letter to Senator Pete Domenici, and the Dulce story was later repeated by John Lear and Bill Cooper.

In July 1989 the researcher Bill Moore told a MUFON conference that he had passed information about Bennewitz to the agents while false material was fed to him. Bennewitz passed away in 2003. Greg Bishop's 2005 book Project Beta, named after a 1988 paper Bennewitz wrote about the supposed base, and Pilkington's work became the main published accounts of his story.

The affair returned to view in 2026. In April the documentary Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, directed by Christopher Graybill from Adam Gorightly's 2021 book, was reviewed by The Debrief and discussed on the podcast Somewhere in the Skies. In August the YouTuber Chris Ramsay pressed Doty on the Bennewitz operation during a four-hour interview for the 100th episode of Area52. Bennewitz's case remains the clearest documented instance of U.S. officials cultivating one man's UFO beliefs, and the Dulce base legend that grew from it still circulates decades after he passed away.