Hill AFB landing claim (1958)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 3
| Date | 1958 |
|---|---|
| People | Richard Doty, William Moore, Linda Moulton Howe, Paul Bennewitz |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 59 |
| Year | 1958 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1958 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 4 |
Hill AFB landing claim (1958) — An anonymous military source claims a UAP deliberately landed at Hill AFB.
This item describes a claim by an anonymous military source that in 1958 a UFO deliberately landed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. It's linked to the "Project Aquarius" papers, documents presented as Top Secret MJ-12 material describing a program to study UFOs and contacts with alien beings.
Project Aquarius material first surfaced in the early 1980s through Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doty, who showed or passed documents to researchers including William Moore and journalist Linda Moulton Howe. Doty later admitted that he had been involved in feeding false information to UFO researchers, especially businessman Paul Bennewitz, as part of a counterintelligence effort. Howe has continued to write about Aquarius, most recently in 2022.
Nothing in official Air Force records supports a deliberate landing at Hill AFB, and the Aquarius documents are widely regarded as disinformation or hoaxes. The claim is included as part of the alleged record, with that context.
People and topics
- Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
- Project Aquarius — Disputed documents describing a secret UFO program, linked to Richard Doty.
- MJ-12 — Disputed documents describing a secret committee managing crashed saucers.
- Air Force Office of Special Investigations — The Air Force's criminal investigation and counterintelligence agency.
- Richard Doty — Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who fed disinformation to UFO researchers in the 1980s.
- William Moore — Researcher who admitted in 1989 that he cooperated with intelligence agents in the Bennewitz affair.
- Linda Moulton Howe — Journalist and filmmaker who runs the Earthfiles website and has reported many crash-retrieval claims.
- Paul Bennewitz — Albuquerque physicist targeted by Air Force disinformation in the Bennewitz affair.
- Disinformation — False information spread deliberately to mislead.
On the Timeline
- Pantex nuclear plant sightings (1957) (7 November 1957) — Guards at the Pantex nuclear plant in Texas report three flashing objects landing nearby.
- Man in Space Soonest (1958) — The Air Force's pre-NASA 'Man-In-Space-Soonest' program funds a Lockheed spacecraft, later cancelled.
See every 1958 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- Project Aquarius and the Hill AFB claim — Earthfiles · earthfiles.com · archived copy
- Linda Moulton Howe — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Earthfiles — Linda Moulton Howe's news site · earthfiles.com · archived copy
- earthfiles.com · earthfiles.com · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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