Dulce Base

Dulce Base is the name for a supposed secret underground facility in or near Dulce, New Mexico, United States. To date, very little evidence confirming the existence of this facility has surfaced, and the tales regarding the Dulce base are widely regarded as urban legend.

Pre-history
Even before the alleged Dulce Base achieved notoriety, many cattle mutilations were said to occur in the Dulce area, and there were also allegations of UFOs visiting the area. In the 1970s, New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez investigated mutilations in the region. 

Paul Bennewitz
Dulce Base conspiracy theories were first circulated in the 1980s. According to researcher Greg Bishop (Bishop, 2005), the claims of Paul Bennewitz are the earliest source for the Dulce Base stories. Bennewitz was a New Mexico businessman and physicist who operated Thunder Scientific Corporation, a company which manufactured high-altitude testing equipment mostly for use at Kirtland Air Force Base.

According to Bishop (Bishop, 2005) and Clark (Clark, 1998), Bennewitz uncovered evidence of a highly secret U.S. Air Force program designed to monitor satellites launched by the Soviet Union. Bennewitz was already interested in reports of UFOs, alien abduction and cattle mutilations, and he interpreted the secret program as evidence of extraterrestrials on earth.

Bennewitz communicated his findings to civilian UFO group APRO, who dismissed him as a deluded crank. In late 1980, Bennewitz contacted Kirtland AFB officials. For most of the 1980s, U.S Air Force Sergeant Doty and/or ufologist William Moore would relate reams of mostly spurious information to Bennewitz as part of a disinformation campaign designed to distract him from secret military projects at Kirtland.

Bennewitz accepted nearly all of the information as reliable, and focused his energies towards writing a document he called "Project Beta," which contains nearly all of the assertions related in the "Post Bennewitz" section below.

Over the years, Bennewitz grew ever more paranoid, and his health deteriorated so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and retired from the UFO research scene before his 2005 death.

Post-Bennewitz
Since Bennewitz introduced the story of the Dulce Base, the conspiracy theories have grown, and have flourished on the World Wide Web.

According to some UFO conspiracy theories, a joint alien/U.S. military underground base exists, perhaps devoted to genetics. The theories regarding Dulce sometimes state that alien technology was traded for permission to engage in human and animal mutilations. A battle was said to have taken place there between aliens and humans, though the time of this alleged encounter varies from the 1970s to the 1980s. Some sources allege that horrific genetic experiments are conducted in lower levels of the facility (usually level 6 or 7, depending on the source); these levels are sometimes referred to as "Nightmare Hall."

According to the legend, Project Aquarius (1966) was a plan for investigation of UFOs, carried out and funded by the CIA. Bishop (Bishop, 2005) notes that Bennewitz is the earliest source for the Project Aquarius tale. This project was slated to begin after December 1969 when Project Grudge and Project Blue Book were closed. In 1969, the base was built northwest of Dulce in joint agreement between CIA and aliens from space. The base is allegedly located on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. The entrance is on Mount Archuleta (or Archuleta Mesa). The base gets water and electricity from the Navajo River, and dumps waste water back into the same river. The U.S. government occupies the upper levels of the underground base, while the aliens control the lower levels.

Vibrations from the ground near the town of Dulce have allegedly caused speculations of an underground facility; however, these are more likely minor earthquakes, which are known to occur in the area. Military helicopters have also been said to be "unusually milling" around the deserted area, although these claims are, at present, unproven.

There is a claim that the area was partially scanned with ground-penetrating radar, producing 'interesting' results, but these results are not currently available.

Some less substantial evidence includes supposed 'leaked documents', videos and witness reports. Allegedly, a collection of security camera tapes and technical documents were stolen from the base by a disgruntled security officer. These were stored in an unknown location along with the officer's 'flash', a weapon, resembling a flashlight, which is claimed to emit some form of directed radiation. The actual documents which were stolen have not been revealed to the public, however a collection of drawings based on the documents and surveillance footage is available. Sometime in the 1990's a Japanese documentary producer had a 1-minute animation produced, based on the alleged contents of the stolen information. This animation is available on the internet and was never claimed by its creators to be actual footage. There are also a small number of black-and-white photographs available, which are signed "TAL". It has been suggested that these photographs are actually from the Cheyenne Mountain facility.

Many people have supposedly witnessed UFOs in the area.

Many details of the lore surrounding the Dulce base&mdash;vast underground bases with many subterranean levels, battles with alien or underground creatures, etc.&mdash;resemble those of the alleged Montauk Project.

In popular media, the computer video game Half-Life appears to be based on the Dulce base lore.