In the late 1960s when Richard Nixon was inaugurated our nation’s chief executive and America was still reeling from massive race riots and the spector of hippies burning their draft cards in the face of the GI generation in protest of the Vietnam War, quiet pockets of our country existed where gentle breezes swept through willow trees in Mayberry fashion and moonlit dirt roads were more than rural legend.
Such is the sleepy small town of Dulce (pronounced Dul-cee) in far northern New Mexico where one morning in 1969 a quite unusual event took place. The account tells that a bus load of native American school children enroute to a parochial school at about 6:30 a.m. was suddenly overcome by a frenzy of excitement when one of the children yelled “it’s a flying saucer!” Overhead, relates one of the bus occupants (now a well-known New Mexico Indian artist named Darren Vigil Gray), flew a metallic-colored disk about 50 feet in the air above and past the bus. The driver, a priest, relates Gray, didn’t stop to investigate and instead stepped on the gas. He furthered that it created chaos on the bus and that the disk (appearing to come from the Archuleta Mesa) continued on for several miles over the low hills south of the highway. Gray has stated that cattle mutilations began being reported in the area and that the mesa was said to be a sort of UFO base. “The experience really changed my whole scope” says Gray who now resides in Santa Fe.
ufo activity … cattle mutilations
For decades hence the San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado and north-central New Mexico, where Dulce is located, has been reported to be a literal hotbed of UFO activity and paranormal phenomena that includes strange lights in the night sky and sporatic rashes of clandestine cattle mutilations done with surgical precision. It’s said that the San Luis Valley area ranks toward the top for U.S. counties per capita for UFO sightings according to a computer UFO network called CUFON.
One person who lives in the valley — Christopher O’Brien author of the book The Mysterious Valley: Astounding True Stories of UFOs, Animal Mutilations, and Unexplained Phenomena — has made a vocation documenting the region’s strange occurrences. O’Brien maintains that such reports date back centuries where American Indians recounted seeing seedpod-like objects and that even their area’s newspapers in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s documented stories of strange nocturnal lights and anomalous aerial craft.
So widespread and increasingly prevalent had the mysterious incidences of cattle mutilations become that in April of 1979 former Apollo moon astronaut and then United States senator Harrison Schmitt organized and convened a conference on the subject in Albuquerque, New Mexico with ranchers, cattle associations, researchers, law enforcement officials and others in attendance. The buzz on the matter became so heightened that the U.S. Justice Department was called in to investigate that same year. Few conclusions were reached and one investigator from Colorado remarked that “The only sense of the mutilations is that they make no sense at all.”
It seems that today the cattle mutes, as they came to be called, are not happening as they were in prior decades in the American west and elsewhere and were left behind with the ’90s Clinton era but do still occur. It’s said that the mutilation rash claimed over 10,000 cattle by 1979 in the United States. Though as late as June 9, 1999 the Albuquerque Journal newspaper featured an article titled DA Investigating Mysterious Cow Deaths In New Mexico. Said one assistant district attorney in New Mexico named John Day in that article: “The 8th Judicial District Attorney’s Office takes cattle mutilations seriously, although no one has ever been charged with a crime.” He was further quoted by the Albuquerque Journal that “If someone up there is killing livestock, that’s a crime” and “Whether cattle mutilations are a secret government project or aliens, that’s out of my realm.”
One law enforcement official in particular that did take it upon himself to make it a special province of his activity, and was on the scene in numerous cattle mutilation incidents in the Dulce area from the late 1970s to the late ’80s, was New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez. Upon his retirement in the 1990s Valdez became a field investigator for the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) — a privately-funded, Las Vegas, Nevada-based science organization engaged in the research of UFOs and related anomalous phenomena.
One of the cases that Valdez was involved with as a NIDS investigator had to do with one calf and two cows on the Tres Ritos Ranch north of Questa, New Mexico in Taos county east of Dulce in 1999. Tom Reed the ranch manager said that he found the deaths unusual. Reed was quoted in the same Albuquerque Journal article as saying “I would lean more to the government or cults or something like that … If the government isn’t involved I think they’re covering it up.” It was noted, as in the case of many cattle mutes, that there were no tracks from either an assailant or the cow struggling and that there was a curious absence of blood. Valdez said he saw flipped cow patties around the third dead cow but didn’t know if it was from the turbulence of an alien spaceship as some had conjectured.
In Cattle Mutilations, Aliens, and the U.S. Government — the title of a 1998 interview with investigative journalist and emmy-winning film producer Linda Moulton Howe in the Silver City, New Mexico monthly publication Desert Exposure — Ms. Howe explains “What (UFO) abductees have been saying for the last 35 years is that we’re dealing with an extraterrestrial non-human intelligence that is harvesting genetic material from the earth. The harvesting of this material, the abductees say, is being applied to a whole host of technologies, and involves biological androids designed to do work on a variety of planets. For decades, abductees have said that the alleged small grey beings with the large eyes are essentially organic machines.”
Howe, a former Miss Idaho and one-time director of special projects at KMGH-TV in Denver, Colorado, and author of the 1989 documentary book — Alien Harvest – Further Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Life Forms — is said by Desert Exposure to had become a lightning rod for attracting the attention of those wanting to share information on the phenomenon which most often fell into two groups: military and ex-military men. Often, but not always, it’s said that these individuals spoke only on terms of anonymity as fear of interior government and secret military retribution is commonplace. Her collection of accounts includes a 1981 rancher’s story and photo of a bull mutilation where the animal was found on its back and horns embedded in the ground as if it had fallen from the sky upside down and no tracks around it were to be found. She says she ended up with dozens of cases of people recounting to her of seeing, on their own ranches, beams of light coming out of glowing discs in which they saw cows rising up into the ships or being lowered.
It’s said that the television series the X-Files incorporated some of Howe’s research into its scripts. She has also made numerous on-air guest appearances on the paranormal-themed late-night syndicated radio talk show Coast to Coast AM that was started and made famous by Art Bell broadcasting his mega-watts into the late night air and opening with the words “from the high desert and the great America southwest” while most of the country is sleeping soundly and stalking topics that many fear to broach.
Such was a night on November 12, 2003 when Coast to Coast’s Art Bell interviewed John Lear
— son of the creator of the Lear jet and former contract pilot for the CIA and later an avid investigator of extraterrestrial related phenomena. During this episode of Coast to Coast Lear asked Art Bell to pretend the U.S. government had selected him (Art Bell) to make the disclosure decision after being fully briefed on the facts surrounding the extraterrestrial presence. It happened that Bell’s response was in line with the position he has held on disclosure and had repeated on his program over the years: the truth regarding the extraterrestrial presence is too disturbing and too dangerous for public consumption and should be withheld until the government feels the public can deal with the facts. On the show Bell did acknowledge that some would find this conflicting for someone who had devoted years providing a radio program that dedicates itself to providing alternative information in the quest for the truth no matter how unsettling that may be.
In an internet article titled A Shocking Look Inside the Government-Alien
Exchange Program it writes of losing jet aircraft that were sent aloft to
intercept UFOs in the late 1940s and primitive contact with space beings in the
1950s and then an onset of an agreement with aliens in April of 1964. It was at
this time — at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico — that a
meeting with aliens and intelligence officers was alledged to had been held and a compact was made the military would give free reign to this specific group of extraterrestrials to conduct a limited number of abductions of humans as well as experimentation on animals in exchange for exotic technology … as long as the details of the people abducted were given.
Some say such a pact originated a decade before with the signing of a constitutionally unratified agreement between an extraterrestrial race and the Eisenhower administration
called the Greada Treaty on February 21, 1954. Other stories purport such accords took place even earlier than this as negative-oriented aliens began moving their underground bases of operations from Central and South America to areas of the western United States.
Generally the consenus is that alien clandestine activity involving cattle mutilation is done to extract genetic material for breeding purposes to modify their race as well as the worker android hypothesis. It’s said the cattle provide both nutrition and genetic resources for certain species of such malevolent extraterrestrials. Dr. James Womack, an animal geneticist at Texas A&M, has said “We are finding big chunks of cattle chromosomes identical to large regions of human chromosomes.” (unquote) This could explain why that cattle instead of, say, horses have been victimized so pervasively.
The Dulce Base Enigma
Today, Dulce, New Mexico (according to Wikipedia) has a population of 2,623
at the 2000 census, is almost entirely Native American, and is the tribal
headquarters of the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. As writes the web site of the
Jicarilla Apache Nation their area’s landscape offers a diverse scenery of
ponderosa pines in rugged mountainous terrain and pinon pine mesas with sage brush flats ranging in altitude from 6,400 feet to 10,600. It also says their tribal government was established in 1937 with its own constitution and by-laws.
Dulce is not a bustling resort town despite being nestled in beautiful
southern Rocky Mountain scenery and the area’s streams, lakes, and high
semi-desert land being great for fishing, hunting and hiking. The town has a
couple of gas stations, a supermarket, a True Value hardware store and a few
other businesses including a 42-room Best Western motel built in 1984 that
later added a small casino.
Decades of stories of UFOs and black helicopter sightings as well as curious
and strange activity around the town of Dulce and on the Archuleta Mesa can be
told by virtually every resident old and young alike.
The Archuleta Mesa that backdrops Dulce stands at roughly 9,236 feet in
elevation, rising over the village by more than 2,600 feet. This small town
setting in the northern southwest with it’s swirling rumors of a mysterious
underground base began capturing the attention of serious researchers and
investigators in the field of UFOs and covert military activity over a quarter
century ago.
One individual in particular that came on the Dulce base scene (circa 1980)
was the late Paul Bennewitz — an American businessman and electrical
physicist who played quite a role in fostering UFO conspiracies and uncovering
secret U.S. Airforce intelligence projects. It’s widely acknowledged that he
eventually became subjected to an extended (and some say elaborate) disinformation campaign by Air Force intelligence officers designed to distract him from covert military projects at Kirkland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque and eventually to discredit and disorient him in his Dulce base investigations.
Early in the life of Paul Bennewitz it’s said that he cut his education just short of receiving his Ph.D. in physics in favor of starting Thunder Scientific Corporation of Albuquerque — a company that manufactured high-altitude testing equipment largely for use at the Kirkland base and still sells such sophisticated equipment to arms manufacturers and the military. At some point he became convinced that cattle mutilations really were due to off-planet aliens after he met Myrna Hansen, a 27-year-old bank teller, who was hypnotized by University of Wyoming psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle and spilled a detailed account of being abducted by aliens and taken to an underground base she believed was in a mountainous area. Ms. Hansen was driving with her young son in northeastern New Mexico near the town of Cimarron late at night in May of 1980 when they saw two very large objects silently hovering over a mountain meadow: one of them being tremendously large and round and the other triangular and somewhat smaller. Under hypnosis she said that she saw a struggling cow being taken up into one of the craft’s underside in some sort of “tractor beam.” At this time she recounted somehow being taken onto one of the ships and then into an underground facility where she saw many liquid-filled vats containing portions of cattle and human remains. Arriving home hours later than what they should have, Myrna and her son were, she said, tired and confused and uncertain about what they had seen and what had taken place.
Claiming that UFOs were regularly flying in the vicinity of Kirkland and the
nearby Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility and the Coyote Test Area south
of Albuquerque, it is said that Bennewitz was able to provide UFO photos that
were deemed genuine as cited in an Air Force memorandum released through the
Freedom of Information Act even though the Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization regarded him as a deluded paranoid due to his talk of
capturing electromagnetic transmissions of alien sources. Based on a variety
of evidence Bennewitz thought that aliens were manipulating people,
including military personnel, through electromagnetic mind control technology
that is known to include, but is not limited to, memory erasure and the placement of screen memories as well as subconscious manipulation. His major
piece of evidence for this was the fact that he did produce several electronic
recording tapes from intercepted transmissions coming from
the Manzano/Coyote Canyon area. From this he believed that aliens were
transmitting to tiny mind control devices such as those that Myrna Hansen
purported had been implanted in her and her son. Bennewitz explicitly claimed
that he “interrogated” the alien collective via a computer-radio link with the
alien computer terminal by tapping into their ship-to-base communications
frequency using a hexadecimal mathematical code to break their encryption.
As a pilot Paul Bennewitz made frequent business trips flying from
Albuquerque to Denver and is said to have taken photos out of his plane on his
way over the Archuleta Mesa that showed an alien aircraft that had crashed near
the alleged Dulce base. It is documented right thereafter that investigators
found no crashed vehicle but did find evidence that indeed something had
impacted the ground at the site. Bennewitz had notes attached to the photos in
his handwriting claiming that figures, possibly alien beings, could be seen in
the pictures. This is one of the early affairs that splashed fuel on the lore
of a covert base existing under the Archuleta Mesa.
It’s almost needless to say that the vastness of the internet would contain
stories (some verifiable and some not) of Dulce, New Mexico that would be
befitting of a ’70s Sunday afternoon made-for-television movie. One
such case-in-point can be read on the internet from the author of ETs and
UFOs: They Need Us, We Don’t Need Them by Virgil ‘Posty’ Armstrong who wrote of
his friends Bob and Sharon that stopped for the night in Dulce and went out to
dinner. He says they overheard some local residents openly discussing
extraterrestrial abductions of townspeople for purposes of experimentation and
that the ETs were taking unwilling human guinea pigs from the general populace
of Dulce and implanting devices in their heads and bodies … and that the
townspeople were frightened and angry but didn’t feel they had any recourse
since the ETs had the government’s knowledge and approval.
Another story on the internet of unknown authorship writes that “generations
of frozen agents are occupied in suspect positions (in Dulce) who may work in
the gas station, bar, restaurant, etc. … They’re there to listen and report
anything which might violate security … Always in the town of Dulce, you never
know who is who.” Maybe it is best not to veer too far off Route 66.
One post on the internet discussion board community of
www.abovetopsecret.com, with the title of My Dulce New Mexico Story, wrote
that while on the course of a road trip he stopped by the town and queried
convenience store cashiers, city workers, a lady at a liquor store and a young
man working the desk of the Best Western, and for the most part only got the
run-around. He said he was looked at by his male counterparts like he had just
had sex with their wife. Only the motel worker, he wrote, opened up to him
who told that indeed the townspeople had stories to tell of huge crafts going
in and out of the top of the mountains, a military presence, and rumors of the
base itself.
This small, dusty town scenario of Dulce is complete with stories and
alledged first-hand accounts of mysterious black Lincoln Town Cars with dark
tinted windows of CIA origins and vans marked McDonnell Douglas tranversing the
area’s most sparsely populated rural backroads. Forbidden one-on-one
conversations of a Dulce base with a local and an outsider with an inquiring
mind have been known to be abruptly interrupted by a sudden phone call of a
cease and desist nature, or so it is said.
Surely the most amazing and sensational Dulce base story of all has to do with a true, embellished, or completely made up event referred to as the Dulce Firefight — a battle that is said to have taken place beneath the Archuleta Mesa between a secret resistance group formed within the military and other intelligence agencies of the U.S. government who did not approve of the deals that had been made with malevolent aliens and the horrors taking place with human subjects in this deep underground complex — atrocities that included missing persons, impregnation of female subjects, human cloning, and medical culling of body parts. In an interview called A Dulce Base Security Officer Speaks Out an inside informer tells of lower levels of this installation that some employees referred to as Nightmare Hall — a place of unfathomable grotesqueness filled with cages and vats that were populated with multi-legged creatures that looked half-human/half-octopus and isles of furry creatures that had hands like humans and cried like a baby. Fish, seals, birds and mice were said to be viewed that could barely be considered those species.
According to a technical brief by the Earth Defense Headquarters
[www.edhca.org], beneath the Archuleta Mesa on Jicarilla Apache tribal
land lies an installation that’s classified so secret its existence would
become one of the most protected realities in the world — one where elite
government scientists have purportedly labored alongside an alien force. This,
says their report, was the Earth’s first main, joint United States
government/alien biogenetics laboratory with others existing in Colorado,
Nevada, and Arizona as well as a number of other locations around the world like
Afghanistan and Russia with Dulce being the largest and connected by an
underground tube-train to the world’s most advanced bio-genetic facility: Los
Alamos National Laboratory.
The Dulce Firefight (actually one of two aledged to had taken place) is said
to have originally become a rescue cause due to a former United States
President who was told of the underground Dulce base by his principal foreign
policy adviser when being briefed on a number of top secret programs. The above
report said that this presidential adviser (who backed the alien liaison) never
guessed that the President would react the way he did and turn to his military
advisers in the military intelligence community to stop the Dulce operation.
Under secret Presidential order, continues the EDH report, a Delta Force
operation was promptly created from a select group of United States Air Force
Special Operations Command, Navy Seals, and Army Rangers who were brought
together for a mission so secret that not even command officers were told what
it was until the night of the attack … an attack that took place without the
knowledge of the President or his Joint Chief of Staffs. Delta Force, writes
Wikipedia, is an extremely versatile group capable of assuming covert missions
such as rescuing hostages, raids, and eliminating covert enemy forces.
A quick summary of the battle (as per the EDH papers) goes as follows: The
attack plan centered on crippling the main generator then doing as much damage
as possible while freeing as many of the victims as the situation would allow. A
well-known brigadier general was brought in to head the assault on the Dulce
facility. Flight teams were organized by a very accomplished former Ph.D. NASA
astronaut and acclaimed missions specialist. The Delta Force had their own fleet
of helicopters painted in civilian colors with fake registration numbers that
delivered combatants to select locations on the mesa for forced entry into the
facility. Stealthy attack by motorcycle and ATV was involved. Air Force operators were to turn hostile terrain into a fully functional airfield. On the ground sensors were known to exist that sets off an alarm if anything were to come too close to the doors of the subterranean base. Holographic image projector systems were known to camouflage the alien entrances and entry ports and had to be disabled for maximum exposure for the foray of the groundwar. Rushing in to smash the gates of hell involved Bell X-22 helicopters racing over the desert at speeds of over 250 miles-per-hour with the bottom of its rotor tubes