A veritable army of evil alien intruders have, for decades, made their home within a vast, futuristic underworld deep below Archuleta Mesa — a huge peak that extends 9,078 feet above sea level in Rio Arriba County. Most ominous of alclass="underline" the expected warning to Keep Out! extends not only to the general public and eagle-eyed UFO sleuths, but to the entire U.S. government as well. That’s right: the aliens have complete control of the base, and anyone who dares to trespass upon their dark abode, from the president down, will receive nothing less than swift and fatal justice — and they may even become the victims of unspeakable genetic experimentation too.
At least, that is the incredible legend that has come to be believed by whole swathes of the UFO research community. But sorting fact from fiction in this infinitely weird and convoluted affair is no easy task.
The Facts
The saga of the Dulce base began in the late 1970s with a physicist named Paul Bennewitz, who, after digging into Air Force and National Security Agency (NSA) secret projects at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, came to believe that those projects were connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials and UFOs. It became all too easy for Bennewitz to focus his attention on such operations: Rather conveniently — much to the concern of the Air Force — his company, Thunder Scientific Labs, actually bordered on the perimeter of Kirtland itself.
It seems, however, that what Bennewitz had really tapped into was a wealth of classified projects connected to (a) NSA communications systems, (b) test flights, and maybe even crashes, of early prototype Stealth aircraft, and (c) Air Force technologies designed to secretly track the movements of spy satellites launched into Earth orbit by the former Soviet Union.
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Intelligence community was far less worried by Bennewitz’s UFO beliefs than it was concerned about his digging into their actual secret programs. There was a very real concern on the part of officialdom that in seeking to penetrate the covert operations of Kirtland in search of UFOs, Bennewitz would inadvertently reveal to the Russians information and technology that had to be kept hidden at all costs — even if those costs were destined to include Bennewitz’s own sanity and health.
So, members of the Air Force broke into Bennewitz’s home while he was out, and carefully read his computer files and research notes. They learned the essential parts of his theories: that aliens were mutilating cattle as part of some weird medical experiment; that aliens were abducting American citizens and implanting them with bizarre devices for purposes disturbingly unknown; that aliens were living deep underground in a secure fortress at Dulce; and that the entire human race was very soon going to be in deep and dire trouble as a direct result of the presence of an intergalactic threat. Then, the Air Force gave Bennewitz precisely what he was looking for: conjured-up confirmation that his theories were all terrifyingly true.
Bennewitz was duly bombarded with a mass of alien-themed disinformation, faked official documents, fictitious stories of cosmic horror, rumors of nightmarish underground facilities, and outright lies. This was, basically, a carefully planned ruse. Its goal was to swamp Bennewitz with so much bogus UFO data that it would steer him away from the conventional, classified military projects of a strictly non-UFO nature that he had uncovered at Kirtland Air Force Base. It worked. In fact, it all worked rather too well, and it led to the catastrophic mental, psychological, and physical disintegration of the physicist.
When Bennewitz received confirmation (albeit carefully controlled and utterly fabricated confirmation) that he had stumbled upon the horrible truth and that there really was an alien base deep below Dulce where imprisoned people were being experimented on in horrific fashion by cold-hearted aliens, he became increasingly disturbed, paranoid, and unstable. But he began looking away from Kirtland (the hub of the genuine military secrets that had to be kept secure, no matter what) and towards the vicinity of Dulce, where his actions, research, and theories could be carefully controlled and coldly manipulated by government agents.
Researcher Greg Bishop, who has studied the Bennewitz/Dulce controversy very deeply, has been careful to stress one particularly important factor on this matter: The Air Force’s bone-chilling manipulation of Bennewitz doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of a real underground installation existing somewhere in the region of Dulce. Instead, it means only that we should be extremely careful with the way we analyze and interpret the story and all its many attendant controversies. The tale of the underground base at Dulce is most certainly one that many within the UFO research community wish to hear — after all, it is filled with excitement, alien intrigue, and outrageous, possibly even manifestly illegal government shenanigans. But does that mean the entire story of the underground alien installation at Dulce is bogus? Were the stories of the base simply born out of the fertile imaginations of government agents, as a means to destabilize and frighten Paul Bennewitz to the point where he gave up — or was forced to give up — his research at Kirtland? Many actually believe not. One of the prime reasons for that is simple: For decades, Dulce and its surrounding areas have been a hotbed of very strange activity.
On December 10, 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) detonated a 29-kiloton-yield nuclear device 4,240 feet below ground level, in an attempt to provoke the release and also production of natural gas. Thus was born Gasbuggy, part of an overall project known as Operation Plowshare, which, ostensibly, was designed to explore the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Notably, the location of the Gasbuggy test — which covered an area of 640 acres — was New Mexico’s Carson National Forest, which just happens to be situated only 12 miles from the town of Dulce.
For nine years, gas-production tests and project evaluation activities were conducted; the AEC finally decommissioned and closed the site in 1978. Equipment and structures utilized in the operation were then duly decontaminated, taken apart, and moved to the ultra-secret Department of Energy’s (DoE) Nevada Test Site, which today is known as the Nevada National Security Site. Meanwhile, liquid-form, radioactive waste was dumped into the sizeable cavity that had been created by the nuclear blast, and test-wells were scrupulously sealed. Until 2002, diligent, periodic soil-sampling of the immediate area and its surroundings was undertaken by DoE personnel. And the Environmental Protection Agency has, since 1972, annually monitored water supplies in the area, specifically to ensure there has been no local contamination — which, we are assured with confidence, there has not been.
Rather interestingly, strict laws exist in the vicinity of the Gasbuggy explosion, specifically warning against any and all extensive underground digging. In fact, a plaque at the site makes it very clear that there must be no subsurface intrusion, whatsoever, within a radius of 600 feet from surface to ground zero to a vertical depth of between 1,500 and 4,500 feet without the specific permission of the U.S. government. Inevitably, and perhaps even understandably, this has led to suspicions that the real reason why the world of officialdom does not want people digging deep in and around the area is in case they stumble upon evidence of — or even entrance points to — the legendary underground alien base.