The Dulce Base: A Secret Human-Alien Underground Facility in New Mexico

What the theory claims

According to the legend, beneath Archuleta Mesa on the edge of the town of Dulce, in the Jicarilla Apache Nation of northern New Mexico, lies a vast underground complex jointly built and operated by the U.S. government and a species of extraterrestrials known as the 'Greys.' Tellings vary, but the fullest version describes seven or more subterranean levels, tens of thousands of resident aliens, genetic laboratories where humans and abductees are experimented upon, vats of hybrid and 'batch-produced' creatures on a level nicknamed 'Nightmare Hall,' and a 1979 firefight in which aliens allegedly killed dozens of human security personnel. It is one of the most lurid set-pieces in modern UFO folklore, and—crucially—one whose real-world origins are unusually well documented.

The strongest version of the claim

The honest steelman for Dulce is not that aliens are real, but that the story sits on a foundation of genuinely unsettling, verifiable facts. First, the U.S. government really did conduct secret and alarming activities in and around this remote corner of New Mexico. Roughly 21 miles southwest of Dulce, on December 10, 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 29-kiloton nuclear device thousands of feet underground as part of Project Gasbuggy, an Operation Plowshare experiment in nuclear 'fracking' — an event that literally shook the region and left gas too radioactive to use. The area also saw a wave of unexplained cattle mutilations in the 1970s that drew genuine law-enforcement attention. So the idea that 'the government does secret, disturbing things underground near Dulce' is not paranoid invention — a version of it is history.

Second, and more importantly, there really was a covert government campaign of deception in this exact story. Albuquerque businessman and physicist Paul Bennewitz, whose company sat near Kirtland Air Force Base, began filming strange lights and recording unusual signals over the base around July 1979. That surveillance genuinely alarmed the Air Force — not because of aliens, but because a civilian was monitoring a sensitive military installation. Rather than simply confront him, elements of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), working with UFO researcher William Moore, fed Bennewitz fabricated 'evidence' of aliens and underground bases. On July 1, 1989, Moore publicly admitted at a UFO conference that he had deliberately passed Bennewitz disinformation to destabilize him. AFOSI agent Richard Doty later described, on camera in the documentary Mirage Men, his role in spreading false UFO material. In other words: the claim that intelligence operatives manufactured and planted the seeds of the Dulce story is TRUE. That is a remarkable, discomfiting fact — and it is exactly why the legend feels credible to many people.

What we can confirm

We can confirm that Bennewitz existed, surveilled Kirtland, and came to believe he had discovered an underground alien base near Dulce; that his mental health deteriorated severely (by August 1988 he barricaded himself with sandbags and was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for a month); that a real disinformation operation targeted him; and that the story then spread through the UFO community. We can confirm the town of Dulce is real, that Project Gasbuggy happened nearby, and that Dulce today even hosts a UFO conference and sells alien-themed souvenirs. We can also confirm the human chain of transmission: how the story passed from Bennewitz to Lear to Cooper to LeVesque and into the tabloids, each link adding detail and borrowed authority. What we cannot confirm — at all — is the one thing the entire legend rests on: the base itself. Every element that would make Dulce more than folklore, from the seven levels to Nightmare Hall to the firefight, traces back to either a fabricator, an unnamed source, or a man whose beliefs were deliberately manipulated.

The base claims examined

There is no physical evidence for an underground base at Archuleta Mesa. Skeptical investigators, including Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, note that publicly available satellite imagery of the mesa shows 'nothing there at all,' and that despite decades of the story circulating, no verifiable trace — no excavation spoil, no ventilation infrastructure, no power draw, no leaked authenticated engineering documents — has ever emerged. Building and hiding a seven-level city-sized complex housing tens of thousands of occupants would leave enormous, detectable signatures. None exist.

The geology and history that supposedly support the base actually undercut it. The seismic activity sometimes cited as proof of secret tunneling is better explained by natural earthquakes (a magnitude ~5.1 quake struck Dulce in January 1966) and by Project Gasbuggy's 1967 detonation. Even UFO researcher Norio Hayakawa, who keeps 'an open mind,' rejects the specific claim that RAND Corporation boring machines carved secret tunnels there.

The documentary backbone of the base narrative is admitted fabrication. The influential 1989 text 'The Dulce Base' was written by Thomas Allen LeVesque under the pseudonym 'Jason Bishop III.' It relayed the account of an alleged security guard informant named 'Thomas Edwin Castello.' Near the end of his life, LeVesque confessed that Castello never existed and was 'creative writing' — a fact documented by researcher Adam Gorightly. The equally infamous 'Dulce Papers,' a supposed cache of leaked photos and documents, have no verifiable provenance and are entangled with the same circle of fabulists.

Phil Schneider's 'firefight' story collapses under scrutiny. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Schneider claimed to be a geologist/structural engineer with high security clearance who helped build the Dulce base and survived a 1979 gun battle in which roughly 60 people died and he personally killed aliens. There are no bodies, no shell casings, no missing-persons records, and no unit records for such an event. Critics, including Hayakawa, note that Schneider's own timeline is impossible — his claimed multiple engineering degrees and his stated age would have made him roughly 17 at the time — and that he quoted, nearly verbatim, material already written by earlier researchers. Schneider died in 1996; the Clackamas County Coroner ruled it a suicide.

How the myth formed

The sequence is now well mapped, largely thanks to Greg Bishop's 2005 book Project Beta and the Mirage Men research. A real man (Bennewitz) surveilling a real base (Kirtland) was fed real disinformation by real intelligence operatives (Moore and AFOSI's Doty). As Bennewitz's mental state declined, his beliefs metastasized into an underground-alien-base narrative. That narrative was then picked up and expanded by prominent ufologists: John Lear posted claims of 'independent confirmation' of the base in 1987, including a Dulce incident with '66 human casualties'; William Cooper wove it into his broader Majestic-12 mythology; and LeVesque supplied the fictional Castello and 'The Dulce Base' text. Tabloids like Weekly World News sensationalized it further. Each retelling borrowed authority from the last, and the fact that a genuine government deception sat at the root gave the whole edifice a veneer of plausibility it never earned.

Verdict

The Dulce Base is unsubstantiated and, on the evidence, effectively debunked as a literal claim. What is real — government secrecy, an underground nuclear test, surveillance of a civilian, and an actual disinformation campaign — is genuinely important and worth knowing. But the leap from 'the Air Force lied to a man about aliens' to 'therefore there is an alien base' is precisely the leap the disinformation was designed to encourage. No physical evidence, no authenticated documents, admitted fabrication at the story's core, and a firefight tale that contradicts itself. The base is a myth; the manipulation that created it is the real story.