Armed with a $50,000 grant, a three-person team led by Director Kenneth M. Rommel, Jr., who had served with the FBI for 28 years, began investigations. To the surprise of no one who viewed the study as little more than a whitewash, Rommel found very little out of the ordinary. In fact, he found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. By the summer of 1980, he had prepared a final, extensive, bound report entitled “Operation Animal Mutilation,” copies of which were circulated throughout the FBI. The final entry in the FBI’s cattle-mutilation file sums up Rommel’s conclusions: “A perusal of this report reflects it adds nothing new with regard to potential investigation by the Albuquerque FBI of alleged mutilations on Indian lands in New Mexico.”[32] The door on the cattle-mutilations of Dulce was quietly and decisively closed. So we are told, anyway.
Were the cattle killings really due to the regular predations of normal wild predators? Were they the work of military personnel engaged in strange biological warfare experimentation? Or might they have been caused by malevolent aliens, covertly surfacing after sunset from their cavernous underground abode at nearby Dulce, and engaging in a liberal amount of nightmarish genetic experimentation? Was it only a coincidence that, with its Gasbuggy program, the Department of Energy just happened to have been blasting deep underground in the 1960s, in the very same area where it was said the extraterrestrials were hiding out in the 1970s? Was the purpose behind Gasbuggy actually wholly different from what we have been told? Incredibly, might it really have been a Top Secret attempt by an utterly panicked U.S. government to destroy the underground alien base with a powerful nuclear device, before the intruders from the stars became unstoppable in their apocalyptic agenda?
It is precisely these questions that, more than 30 years after Paul Bennewitz began focusing his attentions on Dulce, have kept alive the controversy surrounding the alleged alien installation beneath the little New Mexican town. The controversy shows no signs of stopping either. In fact, the stories concerning Dulce’s underground nightmare have become progressively more and more extreme and outlandish as the years have advanced. Since the mid-1980s — by which time the government’s blackhearted actions had reduced Paul Bennewitz to a shell of his former self — a wealth of outrageous stories have surfaced suggesting that the true nature of the underground alien base at Dulce is far more horrific than had previously been suggested or even imagined.
Nightmare Hall
An author going by the pseudonym of “Branton” wrote of a shadowy individual named Thomas Castello, who claimed to have had access to the Dulce base and to inside information on diabolical medical experiments undertaken by the aliens on both human and animal captives. Branton’s source said that deep inside what was allegedly known as Nightmare Hall, supposedly just one part of a vast, multi-leveled facility under Archuleta Peak: “Experiments [are] done on fish, seals, birds and mice that are vastly altered from their original forms. There are multi-armed and multi-legged humans and several cages of bat-like creatures up to seven feet tall…. I frequently encountered humans in cages, usually dazed or drugged, but sometimes they cried for help.”[33]
Wild and controversial stuff, to be sure; however, the data came from an author using an alias, who in turn secured it from a source that has been unable to offer definitive proof of his testimony, which effectively renders the tale useless in terms of offering us hard evidence in support of the theory that the Dulce base really exists.
Alien Occupation
As the 1980s progressed and ultimately became the 1990s, the stories mutated even more. Suggestions that diminutive aliens with large bald heads and black eyes — the so-called “Grays” of UFO lore and popular culture — in the company of vicious, bipedal, reptilian entities, were entirely running the base with a lethal, iron-grip, took hold within the UFO research arena. As did widely circulated tales to the effect that, in 1979, a veritable infantry of highly trained U.S. military personnel stormed the base, in an effort to try to wipe out the alien hordes once and for all. The story goes that the operation was a catastrophic failure, and what was left of the Delta Force — style team made a hasty retreat after suffering defeat, countless casualties, and a large number of fatalities. Since then, rumors persist that the government has been reluctantly forced to keep a considerable distance, all the while quietly trying to figure out a permanent way to rid the Earth of the alien threat, and destroy its cavernous home far beneath New Mexico.
To what extent any of these admittedly outrageous claims and tales have a basis in fact is anybody’s guess. They may merely be the latest in a series of lies and half-truths spread by the Intelligence community, in a fashion similar to the way Paul Bennewitz was psychologically pummeled in the late 1970s. Whatever the case, the Dulce specter still continues to loom in the 21st century almost as large as Archuleta Mesa itself.
On March 29, 2009, the first Underground Base Conference was held in the area, and it attracted a packed audience, all eager to hear the full scoop on what was really going on deep beneath them. Then, in January 2010, a researcher named Anthony Sanchez spoke with a retired U.S. Air Force operative who confirmed the reality of the Dulce facility. But that was not alclass="underline" Sanchez’s source advised him that rather than there being just one secret base, there were actually three underground facilities in the area: one, as has long been rumored, below Archuleta Mesa, which is said to be code-named TA-D1; a second, two-story complex, dubbed TA-D2, built close to the Colorado state line; and a third base, TA-D3, located in the Leandro Canyon, which, interestingly enough, is very close to the Project Gasbuggy test site of 1967. Sanchez was advised that “T.A.” is an abbreviation for “Technical Area.”
Notably, Sanchez’s (unsurprisingly) unnamed colonel asserted that no one named Thomas Castello had ever been employed in connection with the Dulce facilities, and that the stories of malevolent, reptilian aliens prowling around the depths of New Mexico were utterly bogus. Interestingly, however, the colonel did confirm the reality of the disastrous 1979 altercation between elements of the U.S. military and what he vaguely described as certain other inhabitants of the Dulce base.
Essentially, that is where matters stand to this day. Although many within the UFO research community scoff at what sounds like the script for some mega-scale movie, the story refuses to roll over and die. What is really going on beneath Dulce, New Mexico?
Remote Viewing
The town of Dulce may not be alone when it comes to the controversy of secret alien bases in the United States. The details are unfortunately scant, but a somewhat similar story — also from the 1970s — came from the late Pat Price, who, before his untimely and sudden death in 1974, was one of the U.S. government’s most successful psychic spies. In the early 1970s, elements of the Intelligence community, including the CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, explored such controversial areas as extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychic phenomena, with a specific view to determining if such mental powers could be utilized as a means to spy on the former Soviet Union. The results were decidedly mixed, but Price proved to be a highly successful remote-viewer, as such spies became known.