The Air Force Forged The Dulce Papers. The Floors Are Still There.

DULCE, N.M. — Start with the part nobody disputes.

In 1980 the United States Air Force ran a disinformation effort against a private citizen. His name was Paul Bennewitz. He was an electronics engineer in Albuquerque who had begun intercepting signals near a mesa in northern New Mexico and telephoning the government about them.

The government's answer was to feed him forged documents until he could no longer tell what he had found. That is admitted. It is in the record and a retired counter-intelligence colonel confirmed the general practice to this newspaper on the record.

We hold 340 pages of what he was given.

What the papers say

Seven levels under Archuleta Mesa. A rail line. Genetics laboratories on level six, which the documents call Nightmare Hall. Cold storage on level seven with a manifest running to 18,000 lines.

The manifest is real paper. It is 340 pages of numbers in columns, with no names, no dates, and no units. The Hollow Post ran it last month under a headline saying 18,000 people. There is nothing in the document that says what the numbers count. It could be a manifest. It could be a parts list.

We are printing what it is: an unlabelled column of integers in a document the Air Force says it wrote.

The question worth asking

Not "are these real". They are not. The interesting question is narrower, and our correspondent took four months to arrive at it.

What would a forger have had to know?

Because a forgery is made by somebody, and somebody had to fill in the numbers.

The ventilation

Page 61 gives an air-handling schedule. Level two: 42,000 cubic metres per hour, 14 air changes, four intakes.

We paid Hollis Marchetti-Nakamura $1,850 to check it, and told her nothing about where it came from until after she had reported.

It works. For a facility of the stated volume, at the stated occupancy, at that altitude, 42,000 is right — not roughly right, right, to within about six per cent of what she would specify herself.

She was then told what the document was, and did not change her assessment, and did want to say something about it.

"A person who writes a fake ventilation schedule writes a big round number," she said. "They write fifty thousand. Whoever wrote this sized it. That tells you the forger was an engineer, or was copying from something an engineer wrote. It does not tell you the room exists. I want to be very firm about that, because I can feel where this is going."

Level one is a real building

Rio Arriba County holds a 1962 civil-defence plan for a shelter complex in that area. It was never built out past a first phase.

Level one of the Dulce documents — security, garage, motor pool, at 30 metres — matches it closely enough that our correspondent sat in the county records office for an hour comparing them line by line.

That is the most likely explanation of this entire affair and this newspaper puts it in the middle of the story rather than the end: somebody took a real, dull, public 1962 civil-defence drawing, and built six floors of fiction underneath it.

What the colonel said

Col. Deborah Ruzicka-Aguinaldo spent twenty-six years in Air Force counter-intelligence, was not involved in the Bennewitz effort, and agreed to explain why such a thing gets done.

"You have a civilian who has picked up something he should not have picked up," she said. "Maybe it is us. Maybe it is nothing. You cannot tell him either way. So you give him more. You give him so much more that he cannot sort it, and eventually he stops being a problem, and eventually he stops being well."

Asked whether she thought that was justified: "No. I thought it then and I think it now. He was a man with a telescope and a radio and we broke him with paperwork."

The people who live there

Our correspondent asked the Jicarilla Apache Nation, on whose land the mesa sits, what they made of forty-five years of this. Their answer runs in full below and it is the first thing readers should have seen.

They point out that no outlet has asked them in fourteen years of coverage, that we did not ask until our fourth month, and that their emergency services have twice recovered people from canyons at night at their own cost.

There is no base, they say. There are two gas wells, a compressor station, a water tank, and rock they know very well because they live on it.

"A mesa is not a metaphor," their statement ends. "It is a place, and people live under it, on the surface, in houses."