He Said 66 Men Died Under That Mesa. We Found 41 Of The Funerals.

DULCE, N.M. — Phil Schneider spent the last eighteen months of his life telling American audiences that sixty-six men died under Archuleta Mesa in August 1979, and that he was one of the few who came back up. He said it in hotel ballrooms, in half-filled halls, to people who mostly believed him and to some who did not. He gave a figure, and he never changed it.

A figure is checkable. Nobody checked it.

This newspaper has spent fourteen months trying to. We have not found sixty-six. We have found forty-one burials in Rio Arriba, San Juan and Sandoval counties between 2 September and 4 November 1979, all of men aged between 24 and 51, and all of them — on the paperwork that survives — employed by the same three subcontractors.

What he claimed

Schneider's account, as he gave it publicly from 1995 until his death in January 1996, was specific in the way that engineers are specific and storytellers usually are not.

He described four shafts sunk into the mesa, some reaching two and a half miles. He described a drilling rate of roughly two metres a day, and equipment that kept coming back up broken. He described being lowered in a basket to find out why, and finding something alive at the bottom. He said he was hit by a discharge that took his fingers and burned his foot, and that a soldier behind him put him back in the basket and did not come up himself.

He said sixty-six people died. He said the government knew and said nothing.

He was, allegedly, a structural engineer holding a clearance he was not entitled to discuss. The Air Force has said he was a contractor's geologist with no such access. Both things cannot be true, and the paperwork that would settle it is not releasable.

We are not able to confirm what he says he saw at the bottom of that shaft. We have not tried to. What we can do is count.

Forty-one

Ignatius Fairweather-Sunda spent thirty-one years in the Rio Arriba County records office and has spent his retirement indexing burials nobody asked him to index.

He gave us the window without being told what we were looking for. We asked for the autumn of 1979 and he asked which nine weeks.

"There is a bulge," he said. "There is a bulge there and it is not influenza and it is not the highway. I noticed it in 1994 and I have been waiting a long time for somebody to ask."

The forty-one names cluster in a way the surrounding years do not. Constance Achebe-Nordmann, an actuary this newspaper retained, tested the cluster against baseline mortality for men of that age across the three counties for the decade either side.

Her finding is that a cluster of this size and shape occurs by chance about once in every four hundred and ten years.

"That is not proof of anything except that something happened," she told us. "Something happened to a group of men who worked together. An industrial event of some kind is by far the likeliest explanation, and I want to say that plainly. But there is no recorded industrial event."

There is no mine disaster in the state record for that autumn. There is no OSHA file. There is no newspaper report. Forty-one men who worked for the same three companies were buried in nine weeks and nothing in the public record says why.

The pension statement

Odessa Trelawny-Boye's husband was a shaft engineer. He was 38. He was buried on 14 November 1979 and she was told he had a heart attack on site.

She kept his papers for forty-seven years in a biscuit tin.

His final pension statement, which we have examined, records his separation date as 30 August 1979 — eleven weeks before he was buried, and two days after the date Schneider gave for the events in the shaft. The cause is coded. The code is not one of the standard separation codes used by that scheme; it appears on four other statements we have obtained from three other families, and on nothing else we have seen.

"They gave me a folded flag," she said. "He was a civilian. He drilled holes for a living and they gave me a folded flag and nobody has ever explained that to me. I am eighty-one. I would like it explained."

Bartholomew Quist-Ferreira drilled in the San Juan Basin for twenty-six years and refused to speak to us twice before agreeing to.

He did not work the mesa. He knew men who did.

"They went up there in July and a lot of them did not come back and the ones who did would not say," he said. "You learn not to ask. I am old enough now that I would rather say it than take it with me."

What we could not establish

We could not establish that the number is sixty-six. We found forty-one, we believe the true figure is higher because three of the four counties keep incomplete records for that period, and we are not going to round a number up to meet a dead man's claim.

We could not establish what was at the bottom of the shaft.

We could not obtain the separation code's meaning. Four written requests to the scheme's successor administrator have gone unanswered. A fifth was returned marked as undeliverable to an address the administrator still lists as current.

And we could not find the soldier. Schneider said a man behind him pushed him back into the basket and did not survive it. We have not identified him, we have not found a family, and we would like to. Anyone who buried a serviceman in the autumn of 1979 and was not told where he died can write to this newspaper.

Forty-one families were told something in the autumn of 1979. On the evidence above, at least five of them were told something that does not match their own paperwork.