Is Dulce Base the New Area 51?

With a population of under 3,000, the New Mexico border town of Dulce is remarkably unremarkable. Populated almost entirely by Native Americans, it has a Bureau of Indian Affairs office, a couple of churches and a very small airport. But according to some, the town has one more feature you won’t find on Google maps: a massive underground facility where government scientists and aliens work together to carry out horrific experiments in genetic manipulation on other human beings. It supposedly has several official names, but those who have had their eyes opened call it another name: Dulce Base.

On the surface, Dulce Base seems to have a lot in common with the most well-known hive of alien activity and government subterfuge, Area 51. Both are said to be large complexes full of highly classified experimentation and research involving aliens and their technology. Both are in open desert, far from prying eyes. And both seemed to have one origin point. In the case of Area 51, it was Bob Lazar, and with Dulce Base, the story emerged from Albuquerque researcher and electrician Paul Bennewitz.

As the story goes, Bennewitz began intercepting extraterrestrial signals coming from Dulce in the late 1970’s. He knew the Colorado-New Mexico border was a hotbed of supposed UFO activity, including mystery lights and cattle mutilations, and he became suspicious. He investigated Dulce and its surroundings with another UFO enthusiast, New Mexico State Trooper Gabe Valdez. The two tracked the signals Bennewitz had been picking up to a location underneath Archuleta Mesa, just north of the border, in Colorado. Bennewitz believed they were communications between ground controllers and alien ships, confirming his worst fears.

It wasn’t long before the story of what Bennewitz called “Dulce Base” made its way through the UFO community. Within a decade, an incredibly complex mythology had developed around the base, involving a war between the grey and reptilian alien races, thousands of greys held captive on the base’s seven levels, grotesque experiments on animals and kidnapped humans, the New World Order, the Roswell crash and a supposed peace between the Eisenhower Administration and alien races, the so-called Greada (or Grenada) Treaty.

Dulce Base is now seen as the natural successor to Area 51, except much more secret and sinister �" a place of death where humans and aliens work together to starve, torture and dissect their victims in the service of an interstellar war that the US secretly plays a major role in. There are even reports of a shootout between greys and humans taking place there in 1979. But what’s the truth? Is it an underground hall of nightmares or simply a classified military installation with a bad reputation?

Almost all of the available information about Dulce Base and its history comes from two former employees: Phil Schneider, who was directly involved in the engineering and construction of Dulce, and Thomas Castello (or Costello), a security guard who claimed to have direct contact with human and alien captives and intimate knowledge of horrific experiments.

Schneider gave detailed testimony about his work building the seven-level base, which extended two miles underneath the ground and contained space for tens of thousands of human and alien prisoners. He also told of the Dulce firefight for the first time, telling of how his men found an enclave of greys who fought back, leading to the slaughter of 66 Delta Force operators and Secret Service agents. He even said he personally killed two greys before being shot by a “cobalt weapon” that eventually gave him cancer.

Castello added depth and detail to the existing story, telling of underground caves occupied for centuries by reptoids, caves that were taken over by the RAND Corporation for use by the New World Order to create biological weapons. The former guard spoke of fleets of alien ships stored at Los Alamos, human/alien hybrid cloning, his arguments with a cranky reptoid leader named “Khaarshfashst” and a vast system of tunnels running under the entire country.

The problem with stories like Dulce Base is that it’s difficult to sift through the mountains of gibberish written about it to find the nuggets of truth. Unfortunately for Dulce believers, while there is quite a bit of nonsense, there’s very little truth. It might be seen by some as the new Area 51, but there’s one major difference. Area 51 is real, and we know a great deal about the research and development that’s gone on there. But Dulce Base almost certainly isn’t real.

How can we make this determination, given the level of detail in all of the stories? And wouldn’t a secret government base be just that �" secret?

We have to look past the allegations of experiments, shootouts with greys and peace treaties with aliens, because none of it can possibly be proven. We must also discard the numerous photographs said to be of the base or of the creatures there, because they’re all obvious fakes. Instead, let’s examine the “witnesses” with whom the story originated. It’s here that we find the real tragedy lying under the ground of Archuleta Mesa. It seems that Dulce Base is neither a place of death nor a simple government facility performing classified research, but a byproduct of something even more sinister: mental illness.

Phil Schneider became a popular speaker on the UFO circuit in the mid-90’s and made an enormous number of incredibly wild allegations, everything from a trillion dollar US “black project” budget funded by drug money to a massive one world government conspiracy to “eleven distinct races of aliens” all in conflict with each other to his father being involved in the infamous (and debunked) Philadelphia Experiment. It’s all fantastically entertaining, but none of it has the slightest relationship to reality.

Dealing with a diagnosis of cancer (from the 1979 shootout, he claimed), and most likely some form of mental illness, Phil Schneider committed suicide in 1996. As per the usual conspiracy theory narrative, Dulce Base believers insist he was murdered for revealing classified information, along with a number of other “whistle blowers” who all died under “mysterious circumstances.” It’s far more likely, though, that the real tragedy of Schneider’s death was his unchecked paranoia, delusion and physical sickness, not his “murder” by government agents.

As for security guard Thomas Castello, as much as I tried, I couldn’t located any compelling evidence that he ever existed. The information ascribed to him mostly comes from a long, rambling question and answer session on a conspiracy website, and has nothing conclusive to back it up. Castello himself seems to have left no paper trail or signs of life, aside from one picture that could be of anyone. Even some Dulce Base believers doubt the existence of Castello, and it seems quite likely that he’s simply made up by a conspiracy theorist with too much time on their hands.

And what about Paul Bennewitz, the originator of the Dulce Base story? He too appears to have been mentally ill, with a long history of fantastical stories about alien plots, colonization and human experimentation �" as well as several hospitalizations due to extreme, violent paranoia. Bennewitz died of natural causes in 2003 at the age of 76, though like Schneider, conspiracy theorists declare he was murdered or “mentally destroyed” by disinformation.

So what is Dulce Base? Most likely, it’s barren land in the desert. There are no real pictures of it. There is no physical evidence of roads or vents or doors or anything of the sort. Even though tens of thousands of people must have been involved in building, staffing and guarding the base, nobody has ever claimed with any credibility to have worked there or that their family member or friend was killed in a shootout or experimented upon. No “treaty” between President Eisenhower and the grey aliens has ever been discovered, and neither reptoids nor grey aliens have ever been proven to exist. Even the mystery lights that Paul Bennewitz saw are easily attributable to nearby Kirtland Air Force Base. What does that leave us with? Quite literally, nothing.

I can’t conclusively prove Dulce Base doesn’t exist. But nobody can conclusively prove it does. Until that proof emerges from the ground, Dulce will remain a strange story created by troubled dreamers, not a house of alien horrors.