Dulce Base
The underground base was invented, and the people who invented it worked for the U.S. Air Force. A counterintelligence officer at Kirtland fed forged documents to an Albuquerque businessman to steer his attention away from the base he was filming, and years later said so publicly.
Field Guide Entry
The businessman
Paul Bennewitz ran an electronics company in Albuquerque, next to Kirtland Air Force Base. From 1979 he filmed lights over the base and the Manzano weapons storage area behind it, and picked up transmissions he could not identify. He concluded he was intercepting alien communications, and he took his findings to the Air Force.
He was right that something classified was happening at Kirtland. He was wrong about what.
The operation
Richard Doty, a counterintelligence officer with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland, became Bennewitz's contact. Rather than turn him away, Doty and others fed him fabricated material, including forged documents describing a program called Project Aquarius and an underground facility staffed jointly by humans and aliens.
When Bennewitz settled on Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, hundreds of miles from Kirtland, that suited the purpose exactly. Accounts of the operation describe equipment moved onto the mesa, vents installed that connected to nothing, personnel positioned to look like guards, and lights played across cloud to match what he had been filming.
What it cost
Bennewitz's mental health broke down under the material he was being given, and he was hospitalized. Doty has since acknowledged in public interviews that he ran disinformation inside the UFO community. Greg Bishop's Project Beta, published in 2005, reconstructs the campaign from interviews and records, Doty's among them.
What is under the mesa
Nothing has ever been shown. No excavation, no survey, no photograph, no document that survives checking.
The base is a fiction with a documented author, which is a rarer thing than a base.
Visiting Information
Dulce is the seat of government of the Jicarilla Apache Nation and a working town on U.S. 64, with a hotel, a casino, fuel, and food.
Archuleta Mesa stands north of town on Jicarilla Apache land. It is not a public site, and access is the Nation's to grant, so anyone with a reason to go there asks at the tribal offices rather than driving up to find out.
There is nothing on the ground connected to the base story, because there is no base. This is high country, and arriving from much lower ground and walking the same day is felt.
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