Have you heard about the Dulce Base? If you live in New Mexico, you probably have heard at least a whisper about the strange activities around the mesa – and the dark secrets hidden beneath it. The legend of the Dulce Base has endured for nearly a century, making it one of New Mexico’s most modern folk tales. This is the truth about the elusive top-secret military base near the Colorado state line.
Some Background on the Dulce Base
Dulce, NM. You wouldn’t think there was anything interesting about this town at first glance. With its lone white water tower, bearing the town’s name in large black letters, and a population of 2,477, this unassuming Apache reservation town is a “blink and you miss it” type of place. It’s in a pretty area on the Colorado state line that serves as the headquarters for the Jicarilla Apache reservation. Beyond that, it is the kind of small town most people wouldn’t give too much thought to.
But for UFOlogists and alien conspiracists, the name “Dulce” stirs up unbridled excitement. These people hold onto a conviction that aliens are being housed in a massive secret military base under the town’s looming Archuleta Mesa. How did this conspiracy come about? What keeps it going? Are people just loco, or is there some grain of truth to the hocus?
Before we delve into this bizarre legend, let’s first consider the climate of New Mexico when the Dulce Base legends started. Since the 1940s, lots of extraterrestrial experiences, abductions, and sightings happened in New Mexico. These sightings corresponded with national trends in sightings and widespread UFO paranoia. But the mysteriousness of New Mexico’s wild terrain and seemingly limitless night skies and the plethora of military activity in the state made the legends all the more fascinating. These sightings ultimately fueled a frenzy amongst UFO conspiracy buffs, who seek confirmation of their beliefs in everything and rebuff all negating evidence as part of a government cover-up. As a result, there is now an environment in New Mexico that both fosters and fuels baseless legends as incredible as the Dulce Base.
1947 Roswell Incident
You have probably heard about it – the space craft that crashed near Corona, NM, in 1947. The true story is that a rancher named W.W. “Mac” Brazel found some rubber, tinfoil, and thin wooden beams on his property on July 5, 1947. He brushed the debris under some brush and went about his day. Later, when he went to town in Corona, he learned about the flying saucer craze in the 1940s and the rumors of UFOs that people were talking about. He realized that what he had found may have been debris from a flying saucer crash.
July 7, Brazel brought the debris into the local sheriff’s office. The sheriff contacted the Roswell Army Air Field and a Major Jesse Marcel came out to the ranch in Corona to investigate. He gathered up debris and personally took it to his superior, General Ramey of Fort Worth Army Air Field, for identification.
A few days later, Walter Haut of the public information division of the Army made a press release about a crashed flying disc. Apparently, this press release was bogus. A few days later, in another press release, General Ramey and Major Marcel explained that the debris came from a “ray wind” weather balloon. They claimed that a disc wasn’t found and that was all just a rumor started by Mac Brazel to make his unremarkable find more fascinating.
These balloons were made of tinfoil, rubber, and wood. They would be released into the atmosphere and would expand with altitude, thus unfurling into a star shape. The silver of the tinfoil made these balloons look like flying silver discs when they were way up in the sky. Over eighty weather stations around the US employed them to check atmospheric conditions at the time.
But you already know that this explanation didn’t satisfy a lot of people. People still claim that this was a flying saucer and that the government explanations don’t make sense. People even find evidence to bolster their claims, but this evidence is often flimsy at best.
The incident actually lost popularity until the 1970s, when another UFO craze started and people started to add to the legend of the crashed saucer. Some people invented the story that an alien body had been found at the crash site and autopsied. Fake photos of this autopsy have been circulating for years. Witness accounts of hundreds of people who claim to have been at the scene are often included with these claims as “evidence,” but these are probably just bored people who weren’t even at the rather quiet scene in 1947. The only true witnesses appear to be the Chavez County sheriff, the ranch Brazel, and Jesse Marcel.
Marcel didn’t help things. In 1979, he told a UFO researcher named Stanton Friedman that he had held his tongue during the press release about the felled weather balloon while he let General Ramey do all the talking. He said that in reality, they both knew the object in question was not a weather balloon. He repeated these claims in 1985 on television. So was he telling lies in 1947, or did he decide to make some sensational claims in the 1970s and 1980s to make his life more interesting?
1957 Alien Abductions of Lovette and Cunningham
In 1957, Sergeant Johnathon P. Lovette and Major William Cunningham were stationed in Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. They were tasked with searching the nearby desert for debris from a top-secret UFO crash. The two men walked in opposite directions. Major Cunningham heard a scream behind him and turned around to see Sgt. Lovette being elevated from the desert ground by a beam of light. Twenty feet above him, a silver space craft hovered.
Cunningham was paralyzed in terror. Sgt. Lovette was sucked into the craft and it sped away. Major Cunningham became unstuck suddenly and ran to his Jeep and radioed ground control at Holloman about what had just transpired. The ground control confirmed they caught an object on radar that was moving at an incredible rate of speed but they couldn’t figure out what it was.
Three days later, Lovette was found ten miles from the abduction sight, dead. His tongue and genitalia had been surgically removed. His body had been drained of blood, but he didn’t suffer from vascular collapse from bleeding to death. There was also no blood near him. People claim that there were dead animals around him – scavenger animals that had tried to feed on his body before succumbing to some type of poisoning.
There is no confirmation that this even happened. People claim that a CIA investigative committee was formed, called Project Grudge, which later gave rise to the better-known Project Blue Book. They alledge that certain declassified Project Grudge documents acknowledge this weird abduction and mutilation. But no one has actually produced copies of this report; there are only second-hand accounts of it. The declassified Project Grudge documents that are available to the public don’t mention the abduction at all.
You would think that there would be a lot more information out there about an Air Force sergeant being found mutilated in the desert, if it had really happened. There would be family members talking about it and an obituary, at the very least. UFO conspiracists claim the government covered it all up – but that is just a convenient explanation for anything, isn’t it?
1964 Socorro UFO Incident
Everybody has heard about Roswell’s UFO incident. But another UFO crash happened near Socorro, which is a little less well-known. This happened on April 24, 1964. The only witness was Lonnie Zamora, a police officer in the area at the time.
Zamora heard reports about a UFO over the desert near Socorro, so he went out there in his cruiser to investigate. He did see something that he thought was a vehicle so he radioed the Sheriffs that he was investigating an accident. Then he called his buddy, State Police Sergeant Samuel Chavez, to help him investigate. Then he began to approach the object timidly as he realized it wasn’t a car at all.
Zamora claimed that he came over a rise and realized the object was actually an egg-shaped silver craft sitting on legs on the desert floor. Two people stood by it. The craft then elevated on a blue flame tail and whizzed off into the sky.
Locals swarmed the area. They swore there were burn marks on the mesquite and creosote brush and depressions in the dirt from the craft’s legs. Other people later came forward, claiming to have seen the UFO in the desert or in the sky.
How the Dulce Base Legend Started: Gabriel Valdez
The rumors of the Dulce Base in Archuleta Mesa all started in the 1970s. A State Trooper, Gabriel Valdez, received some disturbing calls about mutilated cattle in the area. He found the cows surgically dissected and drained of blood, lying in a field. There were no footsteps left by the perpetrators. Even more oddly, there were gas masks and glow sticks cast down in the dry rabbit’s foot grass near the cattle. The Trooper swore that these cattle were evidence of government – or extraterrestrial – activity.
Valdez wasn’t lying about the cattle mutilations. There are actual photos of the poor cows and Valdez investigating the scenes. In fact, this wasn’t just an isolated incident. Mutilated cows were found all over 17 states in the Western US between 1965 and 1990, and no explanation or culprit has ever been found.
Valdez’s convictions grew when he saw a strange aircraft in the sky: he became convinced the cattle mutilations were the work of something beyond this earth. Valdez became dogged to find out what was going on with the cattle and the aliens, and he developed quite a network of people assisting him in the investigations into cattle mutilations. Many professionals joined him in the quest for the truth – veterinarians, police officers, DA prosecutors, and scientists. Though these professionals were mocked for their interest in the cattle mutilation mystery, they persevered. Even New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmidt got involved in trying to find answers behind the cattle mutilations, at the risk of his reputation. Valdez remained at the center of it all and became quite a celebrity in anomalies circles.
In 1996, Valdez joined the National Institute for Discovery Science. He brought his extensive expertise in law enforcement and the testimonies of a vast network of interested professionals. He also brought the eyewitness testimonies of Jicarilla Apaches, including Raleigh Tafoya, a former Chief of Police and Land Claims Commission member. All of these testimonies included sightings of aliens, massive space craft, and cryptids around Dulce.
Phil Schneider
Then, in 1979, an engineer named Phil Schneider stepped forward with an unbelievable claim: He said he had helped construct a massive underground military base beneath Archuleta Mesa. This place was apparently seven stories deep. It was designed to house numerous staff, human test subjects, and several species of aliens.
Phile Schneider claimed that the military Black Budget was used to construct these bases – which cost about $17 billion each. Apparently, there are 1500 such bases around the world and magneto-leviton trains connect them.
Schneider also said that the government was involved in building and maintaining underground cities that housed gray aliens. The aliens abducted about 6 or 7 million humans to conduct experiments – which the government allowed per the Grenada Treaty. This treaty is a supposed document signed between the Eisenhower administration and aliens in 1957. It granted aliens the right to experiment on humans and animals in exchange for their advanced technological knowledge.
Schneider worked as an explosives technician for the government. He had one of the highest military security clearances. But after three of his friends died mysterious deaths, which he claimed were actually assassinations by the US government for revealing too many secrets, Schneider decided to start sharing his story. In 1995, he gave a lengthy lecture, in which he described how he had first found out the truth about aliens. The purpose of this lecture was to expose government corruption, the truth about aliens, and the malevolence of the government entities he worked for.
Schneider said in this lecture that he was working in blasting under Archuleta Mesa when he and 60 other soldiers ran into gray aliens. The aliens opened fire with box-shaped weapons that released plasma balls and bathed the men in cancer-causing cobalt radiation. One of these balls hit Schneider and cost him a few fingers. He actually was missing fingers, but I’m sure this story was more interesting than whatever accident actually cost him those digits. During this battle, apparently 60 soldiers lost their lives. None of those soldiers’ deaths were ever confirmed.
After this, the government started working with the aliens. The aliens liked to use human bodily fluids as vitamins. They were determined to merge with humans via gene splicing in order to conquer the earth.
The weird part of this is that Schneider always warned people who attended his lectures, “If I ever commit suicide, you’ll know I was murdered.” Sadly, on January 17, 1996, Schneider strangled himself with a rubber catheter hose in his apartment. This happened just seven months after his huge 1995 lecture. But conspiracy buffs think he was murdered for revealing too much, just as he always said he would be. His ex-wife, Cynthia, says that he didn’t have the dexterity to wrap a rubber hose around his neck three times and hold it until he died, due to his missing fingers and previous shoulder injury. She also said all of his research and notes were missing from his apartment.
He seems like a mentally ill person who took his own life, but his premonitions and warnings about his death certainly add a compelling twist to the story.
Paul Bennewitz’s Interceptions
Paul Bennewitz added fuel to the fire when he claimed he had intercepted strange electronic signals from the mesa. Somehow, he deduced the existence of a vast military base and many gray aliens from this interception. His claims really kicked off the craze about the Dulce Base.
In 1982, he published a paper with evidence supposedly proving that this base existed. He also detailed how to break into the base. Bennewitz asserted that this base spanned at least seven stories deep under Archuleta Mesa. As of today, there are still no credible photos or other proof that this place even exists. So either this base is bogus or he didn’t detail how to infiltrate the base correctly!
Bennewitz was not your typical UFO conspiracy buff. He was actually a respectable businessman in Albuquerque. This made people declare him to be credible. I think he may have just discovered a brilliant marketing scheme to generate attention and interest in his ventures.
John Lear
John Lear worked as a commercial pilot for over 40 years. He had countless FAA licenses in aircraft engineering, piloting, and other related things. By his retirement, he had flown nearly twenty thousand hours. On top of that, he had experience flying over 555 secret combat missions for the CIA in the Vietnam War. This man’s impressive biography makes him a respected authority on UFOs and aliens.
Lear met up with one his esteemed colleagues, Greg Wilson, in 1985. Wilson told him about the Lakenhealth-Bentwaters incident, and claimed that it was not a hoax because he had been there. This sparked Lear’s fascination with UFOs. He began to conduct lots of research into sources like the Grenada Treaty. He claimed that he found four sources proving government knowledge of aliens and the existence of the Dulce Base operation.
Lear’s description of the Dulce Base seems a lot like Dante’s Seven Circle of Hell. He claimed that the base had seven stories, going two miles deep under the Archuleta Mesa. Each descending level contained greater and greater horrors. There were crossbreeding projects, between aliens and humans; brain probes that could program thoughts; and gene splicing experiments that could change humanity forever.
Lear is now a revered authority on the Dulce Base myth, along with Phil Schneider. It is strange that the two men have somewhat similar accounts of the activities of this top-secret military base.
The Popularity of the Legends
Now, there is a yearly convention in Dulce called the Dulce Base UFO Conference. People around the world travel to Dulce to swap tall tales and argue about conspiracies. If you go through their Facebook, you will find rather comical accounts of sightings in the area and people overanalyzing pictures of the Mesa.
Locals and conspiracy buffs alike have many tales to tell about this strange place, ranging from lights in the sky to mild earthquakes. Many people in the Jicarilla tribe agree that they have seen these craft over Dulce as well. There are even outlandish tales of the mesa opening up and the flying saucer landing inside, before the land closed around it. Some people report glows from holes in the Mesa on the Colorado side, giving evidence to the vast city underneath. Valdez was only the start of many wild theories and claims about the area – none of which have been properly substantiated.
UFOlogists have even mapped out the supposed floors of the base, which supposedly stretches down two miles underground. People speak of the base housing different species of aliens and human test subjects. Without evidence, people claim that the government’s “black budget,” classified military spending of $50-80 billion a year, helps fund this base as well as 128 other bases of the kind.
Theories about how this base started differ into two camps. The first camp believes the military planned to install a base here anyway and then encountered unexpected aliens in the bowels of the mesa as they tunneled into it. They had a battle, as Schneider claims, before reaching a peace treaty. Now they work with the aliens and experiment on humans with mind control and other bizarre things. Aliens are also supposedly housed here.
The other camp claims that the base was being used as a nuclear test site and designed to simulate a subterranean cave. It was during this testing that the aliens were encountered. The government decided to turn the place into a massive base to work with these aliens, or else to imprison them and experiment on them.
Explanations
A political scientist named Mark Barkun explained away the myth of a Dulce Base under Archuleta Mesa. He said that many abandoned missile silos had been constructed underground in this region in the Cold War. I can confirm that this is true. Some of these silos can still be visited. There is even an AirBnb in one of the silos near Roswell and if you’re interested, you can book it here.
Barkun believes that people seeing strange lights in the sky (possibly related to military activity in the area) had to come up with explanations. After witnessing the silos being built, rumors started swirling among bored reservation inhabitants. The rumors have just gotten bigger and more preposterous over the years, as myths and legends are wont to do.
Now, the Jicarilla Native American Reservation actively feeds the legend to boost tourism. It is a sound strategy – tourists wouldn’t give Dulce a passing thought otherwise. Ty Vicenti, the Council President in Dulce, admits that he only believes in the secret underground base under the Archuleta Mesa because it helps the town’s revenue.
Conspiracies are also designed to resist contradictory evidence. A government report doesn’t acknowledge the official finding of aliens? The real report was covered up! An abduction victim was never reported missing? The government disappeared the person to cover up his very existence! A UFO sighting is explained as a weather balloon or other mundane object? It’s all lies! It is hard to refute a legend when the idea of a massive government cover-up can explain the absence of evidence.
However, if you strip away the stories and claims and look for hardcore evidence, there is nothing there but talk and air. If so many government people are involved in this cover-up, then more people would be talking about it. People aren’t always the best at keeping secrets. Copies and pictures and screenshots of these “hidden” documents like Project Grudge Report 13 would surely be circulating. People would undoubtedly have seen and felt more activity around the Archuleta Mesa – and they would have pictures and videos as proof. Instead, it’s all just talk about glows and flying saucers and lights and distant hums. Such a massive construction project as a two-mile-deep underground city would surely have generated some seismic activity and the presence of more people in Dulce as they worked on the project. Where did all these people stay if they were in Dulce building a huge underground base? Where did the construction equipment get stored? Oh, right, super advanced alien technology eliminated the need for construction equipment and human labor! After all, the aliens did build the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
Some people believe that Dulce and the surrounding area is home base for skinwalkers. The Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Ute Native Americans all have similar legends of the skinwalkers. Skinwalkers are witches that can shift into different types of animals. Once disguised as animals, they attain the prowess of the animal. They are then able to stalk and attack people and wreak havoc on human lives. They have no purpose beyond committing evil atrocities. Bad things that happen on the reservation are often attributed to Skinwalkers by older generations of Native Americans. Some people also claim that skinwalkers like to drink blood, sort of creating a hybrid myth with the Chupacabra.
Skinwalkers are believed to inhabit New Mexico, especially the Dulce region. There have been alleged sightings and hoax photos of skinwalkers near Dulce. Some people claim that skinwalkers were responsible for the cattle mutilations in the region.
Are We Alone?
As you can tell, I’m a huge skeptic of the Dulce Base legend. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think something else is out there in our universe. I don’t like the idea of being all alone in the vast universe, that’s for certain. The thought of being alone, to me, is much scarier than the thought of alien lifeforms existing out there.
I don’t necessarily think aliens have visited us on Earth, though I’m open to the possibility that they have. I think it’s human ego that makes us think aliens would want to observe us, abduct us, and carry on secretly with our government. If I had the technology to traverse the vastness of space within my lifetime, then I wouldn’t waste my time observing and working with a less-advanced species. I would spend more time exploring the entire universe, which might include a brief fly-by of Earth and little more. I’m also open to the possibility that alien life is not as sophisticated and advanced technologically as we tend to think. Alien life forms may be just like us, clever but still technologically confined to their planets, or they could simple be unicellular life forms in extraterrestrial oceans, waiting to evolve.
I certainly don’t understand why aliens would be hiding out under a mesa on the Apache reservation in northern New Mexico. I also think that signs of the base being built and sensations of a humming, bustling military installation underground would be experienced by residents at a far more documentable scale. There would be pictures, videos, and actual electronic and magnetic activity indicating their presence, beyond the rumors posted on Facebook and discussed at the Dulce UFO Conference. So I’m confident this theory is bullshit.
I can’t call bullshit on the things people see in the sky here, however. There are so many reports of weird stuff in Dulce that maybe something is going on. Something we don’t know about, something spiritual, maybe even something extraterrestrial. I have lived in New Mexico for most of my life. I have undoubtedly seen strange things in the sky at night. Often, these things don’t ever come with an explanation. I chalk them up to activity related to Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands, but maybe something else is going on. I don’t know so I can’t accurately speculate. There have been many convincing government reports of UFOs and many convincing witness accounts of strange things in the sky, like the Phoenix Lights seen and recorded by thousands of people in 1997. I don’t doubt strange things really do exist in our universe, beyond our realm of existence. But who knows whether the unidentified flying objects we see on Earth are truly extraterrestrial or simply spy craft, planes and weather balloons distorted by the atmosphere, or military technology test flights?
I also don’t think the US government is capable of the massive-scale cover-up operation that people think they are. They can barely pass social policy or manage federal agencies or uphold the Constitution. The amount of manpower and organization that such a massive cover-up operation would require seems ludicrous and impossible. More people would probably be talking, too, rather than a small handful of people with dubious mental health. That said, many people in the Air Force and other government or military installations do say that aliens are real and the government knows about them. That I am willing to believe. This knowledge and cover-up probably isn’t at the depth most people think it is, but the government could very well know about aliens and they could have evidence that they are withholding from us to prevent mass panic.
Part of why I think this is my grandpa. My grandpa served in the Air Force during World War II. There is even a picture of him in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where he is standing in a hole bombed into the wing of his airplane. He successfully piloted that plane for seven miles with the hole in the wing and landed it safely, the entire crew inside surviving to tell the tale. Following the war, he continued to work for the Air Force as a civil engineer, moving around California and Oregon before finally retiring in Alamogordo, NM.
After he died, my grandmother found his massive collection of clippings from newspapers and magazines about UFOs, aliens, and unexplained lights in the sky. My family always wondered if he had seen something that made him believe in that stuff. After all, he was a rational, well-educated engineer who surely would not go chasing after conspiracy theories – not without some type of reason to believe in such things.
Sources
https://allthatsinteresting.com/dulce-base
https://www.hunttheskinwalker.com/all-news/2016/1/7/the-thing
https://ufoholic.com/whistleblower-phil-schneider-and-the-dulce-new-mexico-fire-fight/
https://contactinthedesert.com/speaker/john-lear
https://www.history.com/news/ufos-aliens-animal-human-mutilation-lovette-cunningham
https://universe-inside-you.com/underground-alien-bases
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/21774751/the-santa-fe-new-mexican/
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3880681/dulce-ufo-base-new-mexico-aliens-2/
https://www.newmexicoexplorer.com/native-american-skinwalkers/
https://www.mysterywire.com/mysteries/skinwalker-scare-of-2014-in-albuquerque-new-mexico/