Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Dulce Base and WeaselMan

I keep thinking that at some point, I'm going to run out of material.  I keep thinking that eventually, I'll have heard about, and written about, every loony conspiracy theory, bizarre cryptid report, alleged UFO sighting, and anecdotal story of a haunted house out there, and then I'll just have to give it up and find something else to talk about.

I keep being wrong.

Today I bumped into a story about a Secret Government Scientific Facility in northern New Mexico, called Dulce Base.  Have you heard of it?  It sounds like a positively charming place.  It has seven underground levels, of increasingly horrific content, rather like Dante's Nine Circles of Hell:

Level 1:  Security & Communications
Level 2:  Housing of Human Staff
Level 3:  Executive Offices and Laboratories
Level 4:  Mind Control Experiments
Level 5:  Housing for Aliens
Level 6:  Laboratories for Genetic Experiments on Humans and Aliens
Level 7:  Cryogenic Storage for Human/Animal/Alien Hybrids

The article, which you can read in its entirety here, gives further descriptions of the lower three levels, to wit:
-5th Level - witnesses have described huge vats with amber liquid with parts of human bodies being stirred inside. Rows and rows of cages holding men, women and children to be used as food. Perhaps thousands.

-6th Level - privately called "Nightmare Hall." It contains the genetic labs. Here are where the crossbreeding experiments of human/animal are done on fish, seals, birds, and mice that are vastly altered from their original forms. There are multi-armed and multi-legged humans and several cages and vats of humanoid bat-like creatures up to 7 feet tall.

-7th Level - Row after row of 1,000s of humans in cold storage including children.
They then insinuate, in all apparent seriousness, that "Mothman" was an escapee from level six.  How he got all the way to West Virginia is still in question.  Perhaps it's through the series of underground tunnels that allegedly connect Dulce Base to other secret bases around the US, including (of course) Area 51.

The whole story apparently originated back in the late 1980s with a guy named Paul Bennewitz, a physicist who "wrote a computer program that could translate alien radio transmissions" and connected with a woman named Myrna Hansen who, under hypnosis, described being held at Dulce Base and implanted with alien mind control devices.  No hard evidence was produced, of course -- just all these anecdotal reports and insinuations.  I find this odd.  You would think that if someone claimed to have an alien implant, it would be simple -- remove, or at least x-ray, the device supposedly in the person's skull, and there you'd have it: hard evidence of alien technology.  The fact that no one did that is suspect in and of itself.  Apparently Bennewitz eventually went completely off the deep end, began to talk about how aliens were coming through his walls to inject him with chemicals, and he was hauled off to the mental hospital.  Or... maybe he knew too much and was silenced.  Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Be that as it may, the Dulce story has grown by accretion, and now there is an elaborate description of its underground facilities, maps of how it is connected to other facilities, and detailed information about the grotesque genetic experiments that go on there.  Pretty super top-secret-highly-classified, isn't it?  And there are, of course, all sorts of stories about people who talked about it getting in trouble -- just like Bennewitz.  The funniest one is that shortly after the series UFO Hunters did a show on Dulce Base, it got cancelled, which makes all the woo-woos wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.  It apparently never occurs to them that a simpler explanation is that UFO Hunters got cancelled because it was a stupid show.

Interestingly, unlike Area 51, where there actually is a military facility of some sort, Dulce Base is believed by most skeptics simply not to exist at all.  The most rational claims are that it was a complete fabrication on the part of Bennewitz and others; but like most conspiracy theories, denial simply made it stronger, and made its adherents more convinced that they'd stumbled on the truth.

In what may or may not be a coincidence (mwa-ha-ha again) I'm heading off to New Mexico in a couple of weeks.  The plan is to visit my favorite cousins and my wife's uncle and aunt.  Of course, that's the story I would tell, right?  No way would I divulge the real reason for my going there, so soon after posting this.  There has to be more to it.  Maybe I'm in league with... them.  After all, I'm a biologist!  Aha!  I'm in on the human/animal hybridization experiments!

Ahem.  "No official comment." 

Off the record, though, all I can say is: if you're ever in northern New Mexico, and you see what appears to be a six-foot-tall weasel with blond hair and a wicked smirk... I had nothing to do with it.

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