J.J. Benitez

Juan José Benítez López (Pamplona, September 7, 1946), better known as J. J. Benítez, is a Spanish journalist and writer, known for his works dedicated to ufology. In his saga novel Trojan Horse he recounts a fictitious experiment in the United States.

He has done work for television, conferences, newspaper articles and interviews with witnesses of UFO phenomena. Often, these works have received negative criticism from various sectors, such as skeptics.

Biography

He studied journalism at the University of Navarra and graduated in 1965. He began working for the Murcia newspaper La Verdad in January 1966. Later he moved to the Heraldo de Aragón newspaper. He traveled the world as a special envoy and was a journalist for various Spanish regional newspapers.

Later he moved to Bilbao, where he continued as a journalist for La Gaceta del Norte. Starting in 1974, he specialized in the UFO issue and covered all the news related to this matter for his newspaper, highlighting the first of which were about the Spanish Air Force. In 1975, he carried out research on the Turin shroud, an event that marked his life by giving rise to the series of novels Trojan Horse , about Benítez's vision of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In the epilogue of the first novel, he states that it is the first book where he introduces fiction (referring to time travel) in a work that reflects his research. However, critical voices state that this novel inspires and plagiarizes stories and essays by other authors.

In an interview, Benítez points out that Jesus Christ is "the Great Extraterrestrial". He also states: "Readers are going to find the beginning of his stage as a preacher, but different from the official version. I myself have been surprised. For example, what is known as the baptism ceremony in the Jordan is more fascinating than what we have been told, that it entered the water and a dove appeared. The thing about the dove is an invention of the evangelists.

In 1976, he received from Lieutenant General Felipe Galarza, Chief of the General Staff of the Spanish Air Force, twelve classified UFO files that Benítez would publish in full in his book Ovnis: Official Documents of the Spanish Government (which would later be republished under the title UFO: top secret). It was the first declassification of UFO files in Spain after the UFO issue was declared in December 1969 as "Reserved Matter". In 1979 he left active journalism temporarily.

In 1992 he took part in the summer courses of the Complutense University in El Escorial, in which he lectured on the problem of the UFO issue, which gave rise to unfavorable criticism from the Spanish scientific community. In this same year, the process of the so-called declassification of UFO files collected by the Spanish Air Force began, which lasted until 1999. Benítez always maintained a very critical position towards this declassification, describing it as a "full-fledged manipulation" #3. 4;. He accused a group of civilians, led by the researcher Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, of collaborating with the former MOA, Air Operational Command (currently MAC, Air Combat Command), to discredit the UFO issue, giving, according to Benítez, self-interested rational conclusions. and in many cases with technical errors.

In October 2006, the eighth part of the series Trojan Horse (Jordan) was published. In 2010, and despite the fact that he does not usually preface any book, he wrote the prologue to Ovnis, alto secreto , the first book by his friend Marcelino Requejo. In November 2011, his latest book came to light, Trojan Horse 9: Cana , the last of the "Trojan Horse" saga.

Criticism

J. J. Benítez is accused of conducting less than rigorous research, which ignores the scientific method, making it unreliable or outright erroneous. As he himself admits, "science is very important, but the heart is more. " He has also been criticized because in his research he often does not reveal his source, which leads many to believe that said source is not really exists.

He has been criticized for holding various pseudoscientific positions and conspiracy theories, such as holding that man and dinosaurs coexisted, which he points out in several journalistic notes, that a magical power allowed the statues to be transported from Easter Island to its final location, that the Dogon people had contact with extraterrestrials in the past, that the Ark of the Covenant is a weapon of mass destruction, among others.

He has been accused on several occasions of plagiarism for having copied entire pages of the Urantia Book in several of his books without mentioning the original source, the most famous case being that of his saga Trojan Horse. Benítez has denied these accusations on numerous occasions. The texts of the Urantia Book have been considered in the public domain in the United States since 1983, and internationally since 2006.

Benítez has also been accused of perpetrating fraud, such as in the video he presented in the episode "Mirlo Rojo" from the television series Planeta Encantado, whose source was an alleged CIA spy who never existed according to the journalist Luis Alfonso Gámez. It featured alleged alien constructions on the Moon hidden by NASA, ensuring that the video he owned and that the viewers were watching was top secret. Due to the numerous errors that the video contained, such as the strange physical behavior of the different objects, failures in the astronauts' suits, etc., it was made an investigation of it and it was discovered that it had been an animation company that had created the video, pointing to Benítez as its client. In turn, Benítez defends himself against these accusations, insisting on the veracity of his investigations and that they are not works of fiction, despite not showing valid evidence or confirming his sources. Said documentary also contains errors in the information about almost all the technical aspects of the mission of the lunar program (Apollo 11), highlighting the operation of the Saturn V rocket, escape velocity, location of the moon landing site and biomedical telemetry.

On July 2, 2007, a sentence was handed down condemning one of J. J. Benítez's usual detractors, Luis Alfonso Gámez, to pay him compensation of 6,000 euros for having violated his honor in several of the entries on his blog. Although the ruling was in favor of the plaintiff, it should be noted that Gámez was not required to delete the writings, since what was said there was not questioned, and the judge reduced the compensation to 6,000 euros compared to the minimum of 50,000 euros requested by the plaintiff, since similar rulings in the Supreme Court have involved compensation between 6,000 and 18,000 euros. The sentence is final, since Luis Alfonso Gámez chose not to appeal it.

Awards

• Premio Periodistas de Navarra (2021), awarded by the Association of Journalists of Navarra.

Works

He has published more than fifty books in Spain. This is the list of books and publications that she has made to date: