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by
Dr Michael E. Salla
Dr Paul Bennewitz is an electronics specialist who in the late 1979 began to film, photograph, and electronically intercept what appeared to be extensive UFO/ET activity and communications that he traced to the vicinity of the Archuletta Mesa on Jicarilla Apache Reservation land near the town of Dulce.
Based on the collected evidence Bennewitz concluded that an underground extraterrestrial (ET) base existed near Dulce that played a role in both cattle mutilations and abduction of civilians. In 1980, the Air Force Office of Special Intelligence (AFOSI) began investigating Bennewitz’s evidence, and this eventually led to its disinformation campaign to discredit Bennewitz.
Bennewitz’s subsequent electronic evidence and field research
alleging extensive human rights abuses were occurring at the
Dulce
underground base
became associated with the AFOSI disinformation campaign.
Most UFO researchers concluded that Bennewitz had been too influenced by
disinformation to be taken seriously
I begin my analysis of whistleblower testimonies by reviewing whistleblower protection laws, and how National Security statutes eliminate this protection for whistleblowers that disclose classified information such as secret underground military installations. I then review various whistleblower testimonies that involved the disclosure of information about the existence of an underground base at Dulce used by ETs.
I subsequently explore whether the evidence for the alleged human rights abuses and a military conflict having occurred at Dulce are persuasive. I then examine criticisms raised against the Dulce underground base hypothesis. Using further whistleblower testimony, I further examine how a secret base at Dulce and other government facilities are funded without US Congressional and Executive Office oversight.
Finally, I make recommendations on how to address the alleged human rights abuses identified in this report, and the political implications of the purported joint government-ET underground base at Dulce.
Bennewitz had earlier researched cattle mutilations in the region and civilians who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials. Based on his film, photographic and electronic evidence, and his field research Bennewitz concluded that an underground extraterrestrial (ET) base existed near Dulce that played a role in both cattle mutilations and abduction of civilians. In 1980, Bennewitz submitted his evidence to the nearby Kirtland Air Force base to alert officials to the possibility that ET races were a threat to the nearby Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Area.
The Air Force Office of Special Intelligence (AFOSI) quickly became involved in investigating Bennewitz’s evidence, and this eventually led to what credible sources conclude was a disinformation campaign to discredit Bennewitz. Bennewitz’s subsequent electronic evidence and field research alleging extensive human rights abuses were occurring at the Dulce underground base became associated with the AFOSI disinformation campaign.
Most UFO
researchers concluded, after Bennewitz had suffered a nervous breakdown in
1987 and the AFOSI disinformation campaign became public knowledge, that Bennewitz had been too influenced by disinformation to be taken seriously.
This seemed to
confirm Bennewitz’s claim of such a military conflict, and raises the
possibility that the conflict’s cause was related to his allegations of
human rights abuses. Furthermore, Bennewitz’s evidence provided an example
of how money illegally siphoned from the US economy into ‘black budget’
programs related to an ET presence, estimated to be as high as 1.1 trillion
dollars annually, was being used.
[2]
The quality of answers has varied greatly since all who have written on Dulce have mixed primary source materials with secondary sources that cross-reference one another without confirming the validity and origins of sources. This has led to much confusion and uncertainty for those seeking clear answers to what was occurring under the ground at Dulce since most of the available Dulce material takes the form of hearsay and speculation.
A
more scholarly effort of analyzing the primary source material available on Dulce is needed to help answer key questions about the alleged base at
Dulce, and the human rights violations that were reported to be occurring
there by ETs with US government complicity. This report is an effort to
fulfill the need for a scholarly analysis of the primary source material on
what has occurred, and may be still occurring, at Dulce and elsewhere in the
US and around the planet.
I subsequently explore whether the evidence for the alleged human rights abuses and a military conflict having occurred at Dulce are persuasive. I then examine criticisms raised against the Dulce underground base hypothesis. Using further whistleblower testimony, I further examine how a secret base at Dulce and other government facilities are funded without US Congressional and Executive Office oversight.
Finally, I make recommendations on how to address the alleged human rights abuses identified in this report, and the political implications of the purported joint government-ET underground base at Dulce.
Bennewitz soon began noticing an unusual amount of UFO activity in the Northern New Mexico area. Using his film and photographic equipment, he began accumulating evidence of what appeared to be UFO’s. [5] He then began intercepting radio and video transmissions that he believed were used by the UFOs and involved different ET races.
He traced these transmissions to a base located under the Archuletta Mesa, near Dulce. Bennewitz believed he had identified the radio and video frequencies used for communications between the ET piloted ships and ground controllers at the underground Dulce base. Bennewitz then created a communication system that he believed enabled him to electronically communicate with what he now was convinced were ET piloted ships flying to and from the base.
Furthermore, Bennewitz began to track the electronic frequencies ETs used to control individuals who had been abducted and implanted with miniature electronic devices. Bennewitz tracked down some of these individuals and conducted interviews on what they could remember of their ET encounters.
Bennewitz eventually issued a report, Project Beta, in which he summarized the evidence of his filming, photographing, electronic interception, communications and fieldwork:
All of the evidence he gathered pointed to the existence of an underground
base at Dulce used by different ET races. The communications, video images,
and the abductee testimonies he found, provided further information that
Bennewitz used in understanding what was occurring at the base and its
national security implications.
Under hypnosis she claimed to have been abducted
in 1980 along with her son and taken inside the Dulce base. She proceeded to
describe humans placed in cold storage, and large vats filled with the
remains of cattle and human body parts.
[8]
These were the most
controversial aspects of Bennewitz’s activities but combined with his
electronic interceptions, video recordings and communications he became
convinced that they fit an overall pattern of ET deception, responsibility
for cattle mutilations and massive human rights violations of abducted
civilians.
[9]
In an official report signed by Major Thomas Cseh on October 28, 1980 and later released under the Freedom of Information Act, Major Cseh wrote:
When AFOSI took no action, Bennewitz approached the then New Mexico Senator,
Harrison Schmitt, who demanded to know why Bennewitz’s claims were not being
investigated. Frustrated by the lack of official support for his
discoveries, Bennewitz issued a detailed report titled Project Beta and
continued to accumulate data on ET operations in the area.
[12]
Bennewitz’s work had attracted much attention and soon led to a covert effort by AFOSI to discredit him.
In a 1989 Mutual UFO Network conference, a prominent UFO specialist, William Moore, caused an uproar when he openly declared that in 1982 he had been co-opted into this effort, and began passing on information about Bennewitz’s activities to AFOSI and played a role in feeding disinformation to Bennewitz.
Moore described the events as follows:
The public declaration by Moore confirmed that Bennewitz had, at least partially, succeeded in electronic monitoring of ET craft in the area, communicating with ETs at the Dulce base, and monitoring ET control of abductees in the area.
This might help explain why AFOSI began what emerged as an intense covert effort to discredit Bennewitz.
The basic strategy in
the campaign by AFOSI was to suggest that the most egregious aspects of
Bennewitz’s claims - the Dulce base as a site where humans were abducted for
genetic experiments, placed in cold storage and even used as a food source
for ETs - was disinformation rather than accurate reports of the nature of
the ET presence in the Northern New Mexico area. Indeed Moore
argued that by
the time he met him in 1982, the bulk of Bennewitz’s information was already
disinformation fed by AFOSI.
[15]
One UFO researcher claimed that the disinformation was passed on through the intercepted communications:
The intensity of his
investigations and the official response had a heavy personal toll on Bennewitz caused his nervous breakdown. He later withdrew entirely from any
public discussion of the Dulce base and ended his involvement with
UFO
issues.
Before analyzing whistleblower testimony concerning the Dulce underground base, I will point out the legal position of whistleblowers when disclosing classified information since this would help explain why comparatively few individuals have stepped forward to confirm the allegations of massive human rights abuses at Dulce and other joint government-ET underground bases.
Often the short-term result for whistleblowers is the loss of jobs, reputation, economic security, and even life. A whistleblower can be defined as any employee of any branch of government or corporation that publicly discloses unethical or corrupt practices by a government agency/corporation that violate the law and/or damage the public interest.
There are an extensive series of state and federal whistleblower laws for those who come forward to disclose such practices and risk their own careers, reputations and physical safety. [19]
When it comes to employment in government agencies/corporations that involve working in projects with national security implications, whistleblower protection laws have some important qualifications as evidenced by the Basic Federal Whistleblower Statute concerning National Security Whistleblowers (5 USC 2302). [20]
The relevant section of this Statute [5 USC Sec. 2302. (8) (A)] concerns the prohibition of action taken against an employee (whistleblower) because of any disclosure of information that the employee believes is evidence of “a violation of any law, rule or regulation,” or “an abuse of authority, or “substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”
The relevant section then states the critical qualifying condition:
As evident in the qualifying statement, whistleblowers are not permitted to disclose information if such disclosure compromises national security. This means that if one is employed in a government agency and/or corporation working on a classified project with national security implications, such individuals do not receive protection under Federal Whistleblower Statutes for publicly disclosing classified information.
Furthermore, if government/corporate employees sign contracts that permit severe penalties for disclosing classified information, such individuals essentially sign away their constitutional rights since they have no legal recourse to prevent the imposition of even the most draconian penalties. Consequently, if employees witness, for instance, egregious human rights abuses committed in the operation of classified projects, they have no legal protection if they choose to disclose this to the general public.
One individual who
apparently risked disclosing egregious human rights violations while working
on a highly classified project is Thomas Castello.
The collection came to be called the ‘Dulce Papers’ and provided graphic evidence of the operations of this secret underground facility and appeared to provide powerful support to Bennewitz’s conclusions regarding activities at the underground base. [21]
The Dulce Papers described genetic experimentation, development of human-extraterrestrial hybrids, use of mind control through advanced computers, cold storage of humans in liquid filled vats, and even the use of human body parts as a nutritional source for extraterrestrial (ET) races.
The papers provided possible evidence that humans were used as
little more than laboratory animals by ET races working directly with
different US government agencies and US corporations fulfilling ‘black
budget’ military contracts in a joint base. If the papers were genuine,
experiments and projects were being conducted that involved human rights
violations on a scale that exceeded even the darkest chapters of recent
human history.
In the time since he claims he left his Dulce employers in 1979, and
subsequent release of the Dulce Papers in 1986, Castello gave a number of
interviews and corresponded with UFO researchers before eventually vanishing
from the scene. The transcripts of these interviews and correspondence
provide further ‘whistleblower’ testimony of events at the purported Dulce
facility, and the secret ‘war’ that occurred there.
His background has been summarized as follows:
It is the extensive video monitoring that occurred at Dulce that apparently provided Castello the bird’s eye information he needed to learn what was occurring at the base, and the human rights abuses that eventually led to his departure from the base and distribution of classified material.
Castello’s claims are outlined in two sources, first are the Dulce papers
themselves that presumably involved classified material taken from the base;
and second, the interviews/correspondence Castello had with a number of UFO
researchers. Much of Castello’s material has since been circulated on the
Internet and has been incorporated in a book titled The Dulce Wars that was
authored by a UFO researcher who uses the name ‘Branton’.
[24]
This is possibly due to a practice that has been claimed to be standard for civilians who work under contract to corporations and/or military/intelligence agencies on classified projects involving ETs: the official removal of all public records of contracted employees as a security precaution in the event they intentionally or unintentionally publicly disclose what is occurring in such projects.
For example, Dr Michael Wolf claims to have been a former scientist and policy maker on ET affairs that began to serve from 1979 on the coordinating policy group for ET affairs, the Special Studies Group (PI-40) in the National Security Council. [25]
In a series of interviews with the prominent UFO researcher, Dr Richard Boylan, Wolf claimed that he was being directed by his superiors to participate in a controlled leak of information to the UFO community while providing a fall back of ‘plausible deniability’ for the government. [26]
All public records of Wolf’s advanced university degrees and contractual services to different military/intelligence/national security branches of government were eliminated making it very difficult if not impossible to confirm his background and substantiate the startling information he was releasing. He claimed that this removal of public records was ‘standard practice’ for all civilians employed by either corporations and/or the US military in clandestine projects involving ETs. [27]
A further source confirming Wolf’s
description of the existence of such a ‘standard practice’ was
Bob Lazar, a
physicist who found that after leaving in 1988 the secret S-4 facility
(Dreamland) in Nevada where his job was to reverse engineer the propulsion
and power system of recovered ET craft, his birth certificate was no longer
available at the hospital he was born at, along with the disappearance of
his school, college and all employment records – he simply ceased to
officially exist!
[28]
This means that confirming Castello’s employment background and therefore his credibility, as a whistleblower is very difficult if possible at all.
There are three possibilities for Castello’s true identity and credibility as a whistleblower.
A number of UFO researchers were apparently able to get in contact with Castello before his eventual ‘disappearance’ in the late 1980s and were able to get answers to a series of questions. [29]
According to both Branton and William Hamilton, fellow UFO researchers had personally met with Castello and could vouch for his existence and credibility. [30]
While the list of contacts and personal interviews with Castello are not extensive, it does appear that he exists while casting doubt on, without eliminating, the third possibility that his identity was concocted by intelligence officers. It is this uncertainty that led to most UFO researchers not taking seriously Castello’s claims that supported much of what Bennewitz had been earlier arguing and was now associated with a disinformation campaign led by Air Force Intelligence (AFOSI).
In a later
section, other whistleblowers will be cited who confirm many aspects of both
Bennewitz’s and Castello’s claims indicating that the third possibility can
be dismissed as the least likely possibility concerning Castello’s identity.
Consequently, it is worth exploring in some depth what Castello claimed to
have experienced in the Ducle underground base since he provides the most
extensive testimony of what may have occurred there.
There were four extraterrestrial races he claimed worked at Dulce:
Castello claims that the earth based Reptilians, who he described as the ‘working caste’, were led by a winged Reptilian species he described as the Draco (ETs from Orion). [32]
He said that the short grays (depicted in movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind) are subservient to the Draco Reptilians. Castello says he was employed as a ‘Senior Security Technician’ at the Dulce facility and that his primary job function was to sort out any security issues between the resident ET races and the human employees at the base.
He described some of his job functions and the ET hierarchy in response to a question by Branton about how often he communicated with the different ET species:
Castello claimed that the different projects at Dulce involved:
Similar
projects have been conducted at
Montauk, Long Island and Brookhaven
laboratories
[34]
and been the subject of a number of other whistleblower
testimonies.
[35]
In describing the way command was shared at the joint base between the US government and the ET races, Castello said:
Castello says that he directly witnessed the products of the trans-species genetic experiments in the sixth level of the facility.
Most disturbing was his discovery that humans were used as a kind of laboratory animal in the lowest level where they were placed in cold storage, used as test subjects in mind-control programs, and even used in genetic experiments.
Castello wrote:
Castello claims he was told in his initial briefing that the humans suffered
different forms of insanity and were being subjected to a range of high-risk
medical procedures and mind control experiments designed to treat insanity.
He claims that he and other human workers were exposed daily to signs that
said: “this site does high risk advanced medical and drug testing to cure
insanity, please, never speak to the inmates, it can destroy years of work."
[39]
It was the realization that the humans were ordinary civilians abducted from that led to Castello’s decision to join a small number of other base personnel in helping free the trapped humans.
Castello describes how the small band of human workers began to cooperate with some Reptilians from the worker caste who also had an interest in freeing the abducted humans in the deep levels.
Eventually, Castello described how the an elite Delta force contingent attempted to destroy the ‘resistance movement’:
Castello quit the facility, he took along with him photos and a video
recording eventually distributed to the general public as the Dulce Papers.
There is significant whistleblower testimony that a treaty was signed between the Eisenhower administration and Grays from Zeta Reticulum as early as 1954.
According to Dr Wolf the Eisenhower administration entered into the treaty with the so-called Grey extraterrestrials from the fourth planet of the star system Zeta Reticulum, but this treaty was never ratified as Constitutionally required. [43]
Alluding to the same treaty signed by the Eisenhower administration, Col Phillip Corso, a highly decorated officer that served in Eisenhower’s National Security Council wrote:
The secret Treaty signed in 1954 between the Eisenhower administration and an ET race has been disclosed by a number of other ‘whistleblowers’ claiming former access to secret documents disclosing the existence of such a treaty. [45]
Phil Schneider, a former geological engineer that was employed by corporations contracted to build underground bases wrote:
The treaty has been argued to essentially lead to technology transfers between ET races and the US government in exchange for certain basing rights, and monitoring of ET abductions of US civilians.
Col Phillip Corso believed that this treaty was essentially something that was imposed on the Eisenhower administration suggesting that the technology transfer would be exchange for the ET harvesting the diverse genetic material available in the US.
This genetic diversity was something that made the US a much more attractive treaty signatory than the more racially homogenous major powers of Russia and China.
It is likely that the administration reasoned that
since the Grays had been abducting US civilians anyway, that the Treaty
would provide them with a means of monitoring the abductions, and observing
at close range what happened with the civilians who were part of the genetic
experiments pursued by the Grays. The Grays were obliged to provide lists of
abducted civilians, something that apparently did not occur and later became
a source of friction between the Grays and US authorities.
The existence of both the Treaty and the joint base(s) with the Grays would have received the highest possible classification levels and would only have been known by a limited number of elected and appointed public officials.
Consequently, whistleblower testimony supporting
the existence of a secret treaty negotiated by the Eisenhower administration
for technology transfers with an ET race suggest the possible construction
of underground facilities where this could be done without public,
congressional or foreign national scrutiny. Having laid the possible ‘legal’
foundation for a joint US government-ET underground facility, I now move to
analyzing evidence supporting the existence of such a base.
Keeping these three possibilities in mind, I now examine whistleblower testimonies concerning an apparent military conflict that occurred at the Dulce base in order to determine which of these three possibilities is more accurate.
It is likely that one or more of these projects became an area of dispute between ET races and clandestine government organizations.
This dispute led to military hostilities that
became known as the ‘Dulce War’. The precise cause of this confrontation
remains unclear, however what does emerge from the various testimonies is
that it did occur and involved significant number of fatalities involving US
military personnel, Dulce security guards, and ET races.
This force suffered a number of fatalities and inflicted heavy casualties upon both resident ETs and base security personnel. The military confrontation at Dulce has been reported by other whistleblowers including Phil Schneider who worked as a geological engineer in the construction of the Dulce base, another underground base in the US, and other underground bases around the globe.
Schneider gave the following details of his background and the existence of a military confrontation in 1995:
Schneider described the cause of the 1979 military confrontation as little more than an ‘accident’ that arose from drilling for a planned extension of the Dulce base:
An important difference between Schneider’s and Castello’s versions is that Schneider did not refer to the underground base as a joint facility.
He described it as a seven level US military facility that had ‘accidentally’ been built on top of an ancient ET base. He believed that his job was to simply extend the existing base rather than attacking ET races for an undisclosed purpose.
The unlikelihood that the Dulce facility was
‘accidentally’ built on an ancient ET base suggests that Schneider
was only
partly informed of the true nature of his mission and what was occurring on
the lower levels. The more likely scenario was that Schneider had to assist
US military forces to access the innermost layers of the Dulce facility,
level 7, that had been closed off and where the true cause of the dispute
lay.
He subsequently began a series of public lectures revealing the activities at the underground bases he helped construct and the role of extraterrestrial races in infiltrating national governments and being the true architects of a New World Order. Schneider gave a keynote lecture at a MUFON conference in May 1995, and was found dead in his apartment seven months later in January 1996. [50]
Circumstances
surrounding the death of Schneider and his autopsy report led many to
declare that Schneider had been murdered for going public with his knowledge
of ETs and the secret underground base.
[51]
Schneider’s testimony, his
clear knowledge of geological engineering, and mysterious death all support
his central thesis that an underground base exists at Dulce, and a military
confrontation between ETs and elite US military forces occurred at the
lowest level of this underground facility.
Wolf’s book Catcher’s of Heaven described a firefight between ETs and elite US military forces that had occurred in 1975 at the Groom Lake, Nevada facility that may have been related to what occurred later at the nearby Dulce:
There are important parallels with the ‘Dulce war’ in the description of the ‘Nevada’ confrontation described by Wolf, with that described by Castello and Schneider.
In both cases, a significant number of US military personnel are killed after a confrontation with ETs.
These parallels suggest either that Wolf was narrating an entirely different conflict, or the same conflict but with some inaccuracies intended to hide the true nature and location of the conflict between the US military and ET races. Some notable differences in the accounts are that Wolfe said that the ETs were ‘prisoner’ guests rather than sharing joint base facilities with the US.
It is unlikely that ETs as ‘prisoner guests’ would participate in the kind of significant technology exchange described by Wolf. It is likely that Wolf’s reference to the ETs as ‘prisoner guests’ was intended to hide the true extent of the cooperation between US military and ET races in a shared base that might lead to a connection being made with Bennewitz claims regarding Dulce.
This also casts doubt on whether the conflict did occur in Nevada in 1975 as Wolf writes, or whether he was alluding to the 1979 military conflict at Dulce, New Mexico. If the latter is the case, then Wolf was instructed by his superiors in the ‘controlled release of information’ to sow some inaccuracies (disinformation) into the information he was releasing that a firefight had indeed occurred at a shared Government-ET facility and the US had taken heavy casualties.
Such a disinformation strategy would strengthen
any fall back position of ‘plausibility deniability’ that the government
could choose to take over the sensitive information released by Wolf. Wolf
further disclosed in an interview that he had worked at the Dulce
laboratory, thereby providing more confirmation for the existence of this
secret underground base that is the key claim made by Bennewitz.
[53]
In an interview he described his background as follows:
Lazar revealed that in his briefing prior to working on the ET craft he was required to read 200 pages of briefing documents in preparation for his job. [55] He recalled that the briefing document mentioned a battle between ETs and humans at a secret base in 1979.
He said the conflict was caused by a
security guard that tried to take a weapon in the ET area and resulted in
fatal wounds to security personnel. Lazar’s recollection of the briefing
document he read in 1988 is very likely referring to the 1979 Dulce
firefight.
Furthermore, the disinformation campaign instigated against Bennewitz,
and the mysterious death of Schneider after his going public on
the existence of secret underground facilities, both lend circumstantial
support to the view that there was sufficient basis to whistleblower claims
concerning the existence of the Dulce underground facility, and possible
gross human rights abuses occurring there.
In order to determine which possibility is most plausible, I will now consider some of the criticisms made of Bennewitz’s and others claims surrounding the Dulce base.
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