--- title: "The Air Force Forged The Dulce Papers. The Floors Are Still There." dek: "In 1980 the Air Force fed a New Mexico engineer forged documents about a base under Archuleta Mesa, and admits it. Nobody has explained why the forgeries size the ventilation correctly to within six per cent." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague and June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-08-09T10:30:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/dulce-level-seven-manifest tags: Dulce, Bennewitz, Archuleta Mesa, disinformation, AFOSI, underground genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Air Force Forged The Dulce Papers. The Floors Are Still There. *In 1980 the Air Force fed a New Mexico engineer forged documents about a base under Archuleta Mesa, and admits it. Nobody has explained why the forgeries size the ventilation correctly to within six per cent.* 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. > **Figure:** The Dulce levels, as described in the 1979–82 material — see https://theyburied.com/article/dulce-level-seven-manifest ## 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." > Whoever wrote this sized it. That tells you the forger was an engineer. It does not tell you the room exists. > > — Hollis Marchetti-Nakamura ## 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." ## Sources (invented) - Jicarilla Apache Nation, office of the president, The land in question is theirs — Written questions; response received (July 2026) - Col. (ret.) Deborah Ruzicka-Aguinaldo, Retired Air Force counter-intelligence officer — Interviewed in person in San Antonio (19 June 2026) - Estate of Paul Bennewitz, Through a family member, named in our notes — Written correspondence; supplied 340 pages (May 2026) - Hollis Marchetti-Nakamura, Mechanical engineer, hired by this newspaper to read the ventilation schedules — Written report; fee $1,850, published (3 July 2026) - Rio Arriba County records office, Public record — Inspected in person (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1930: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1930 - PX-1402: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1402 ## What we could not confirm - Everything the documents say. The Air Force has admitted forging material in this line of work in 1980. We are reporting on a forgery and saying so in the first sentence. - Whether the 340 pages we hold are the same forgeries or a later imitation of them. Two of our sources disagree and we cannot settle it. - What the 18,000 line items in the manifest are. They are numbers. There are no names, no dates and no units anywhere in the document. ## Right of reply **The Jicarilla Apache Nation** (The Nation replied on 21 July and asked that its statement run in full, first, above anything else we had to say. It does.): > Archuleta Mesa is on our land. It has been on our land for a very long time. > > For forty-five years, people have driven onto this reservation to look for a door. They have cut fences. They have flown drones over ceremonial areas. Two of them have had to be recovered by our emergency services at night, at our cost, because they walked into a canyon in the dark looking for a ventilation shaft that does not exist. > > We have never been asked what we think. Your newspaper is the first to write to us in fourteen years of coverage and you did it in your fourth month, which you have at least admitted. > > There is no base. There are two gas wells, a compressor station, a water tank, and a great deal of rock that we know extremely well because we live on it. > > What there is, is a story that brings strangers here every summer. We would like the people who print it to consider that a mesa is not a metaphor. It is a place, and people live under it, on the surface, in houses. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.