Dulce: Tunnel to the Stars

Midnight After Dark (s2e1) Dulce: Tunnel to the Stars

Listen in stupefied bewonderment as Midnight After Dark interviews “Jake,” a mild-mannered janitor who works at an infamous underground military installation in Dulce, New Mexico. Midnight After Dark’s James Knox and Cass Spectral dig beneath the surface of this enduring mystery and you will be amazed and alarmed at what they unearth.

Please join us in welcoming Midnight After Dark’s newest sponsor: The Society of Peripheral Studies’ Citizen Scientist Initiative. To get involved, dial 505-395-7799. SoPS: The Only Science that Matters.

Sources for This Episode


Episode Transcript

KNOX:

Good evening, New Mexico. This is James Knox, host of Midnight After Dark.

Before we get into tonight’s episode, a thrilling exposé of greys, subterranean military installations, and vats full of human ooze, I’d like to set aside a moment to remember the Dulce Base Conflict of 1979, America’s “Subterranean War.”

On that northern New Mexico morning, so far below the Earth’s crust, 66 of our best and brightest met eternity at the hands of a life form we’re still struggling to understand.

We can never truly know the sacrifices made by those brave men and women. But we can remember them. And so, on behalf of Midnight After Dark and a grateful humanity we say... thank you.

[ MOMENT OF SILENCE ]

...5 ...6 ... 7. Okay okay! That’s the theme.

And now, seekers, lay your minds bare before the stupefying mystery that is Dulce: Tunnel to the Stars!

ANNOUNCER:

Live! From the haunted catacombs ‘neath dusty Santa Fe, it’s Midnight After Dark with your host James Knox.

KNOX:

Well, it may have ruined the lives of everyone it touched, but tonight’s topic is going to be a banger. Later, we’ll have a caller who claims they are a janitor in an underground military base in Dulce, New Mexico. A secret science installation sunk deep into the roots of Mt. Archuleta. Is our government really working with aliens in tunnels so... far... down? We’ll find out.

First, I want to say how good it is to be back. Thanks for sticking with us after our move from Travis County Community Radio. And welcome New Mexico listeners! We’ve been looking for a new home and I’m pleased to announce that we are now part of a new network. Myself and Producer...

CASS:

“Cass.”

You were about to say “Cassandra.” Only my parents call me that.

Also, it's pronounced "peripheral"..."peripheral".

KNOX:

Myself and Producer Cass Spectral were hired by Santa Fe’s Society of Perhipheraleral... Studies to bring you incredible stories of the arcane and unknowable. Stories collected right here in New Mexico, Land of Enstrangement.

CASS:

Everything you’re hearing goes online at midnightafter.dk. You may ponder our hidden symbols and messages there.

KNOX:

We’re going to be an.. ugh.. podcast now.

CASS:

Classic episodes from the Travis County season are also available online just look for Midnight After Dark on your fav podcatcher.

KNOX:

Tell them about the Citizen Science Initiative, Cass.

CASS:

Join the Society of Peripheral Studies Citizen Scientist Initiative and help solve some of New Mexico's most enduring mysteries. To get involved dial (505) 395-7799. That's (505) 395-7799. The Citizen Scientist Initiative -- Science is Learning.

KNOX:

Our partnership with the Society means we have otherworldly journalism tools at our disposal. The Society connected us with a mild-mannered Janitor who says he can stay silent about Dulce Base no longer. Now, we promise every guest total anonymity, so Cass is going to use her talents to create an untraceable mind-to-cell phone connection.

Cass is contacting him now. Fingertips to her temples. Smells like ozone inside the studio. This is all very exciting to witness though perhaps it’s not great for radio. Any moment now.

CASS:

I’ve made it, but the reception sucks. Get ready to fill time. Ok here he is.

KNOX:

Our whistleblower! Good evening, informant. You’re doing the right thing.

[ STATIC AND UNINTELLIGBLE SPEECH ]

Hello? Caller? You’re on Midnight... After Dark.

[ MORE MUFFLED SPEECH INCLUDING SOMEONE SAYING WHAT SOUNDS LIKE "It's such short notice...that I’m on call 24 hours a day!" ]

KNOX:

Luke? Luke?

CASS:

You mean “Jake.”

KNOX:

Crap! I mean Jake? Jacob? It’s Knox, can you speak up? You’re on the air. And your identity is safe with us. No worries, friend.

[ MORE MUFFLE SPEECH WHICH SOUNDS LIKE "Well then ask the freaking Colonel to sweep Betapod" FOLLOWED BY STATIC ]

KNOX:

One moment, folks. Spec, can you try raising them again? I think it’s a bad connect.

CASS:

Yeah. It was a pocket call. They’ll call back after you say, “slathering wetly in the tunnels below.” In the meantime can you just vamp.

KNOX:

I direct your attention, seekers, to a tiny mountain community on the border with Colorado. Dulce, New Mexico, population 2,700.

CASS:

Two thousand seven hundred and twelve. Oh, are we just talking about humans?

KNOX:

Formerly a 19th Century train depot. Current home of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. Strange since forever. Everyone thinks of Roswell when they think of New Mexico and the paranormal. But paranormal researcher Norio Hayakawa said Dulce, not Roswell, is most emblematic of New Mexico’s connection to the beyond. He says, quote:

“Dulce has the highest percentage per population of UFO sightings. This is a fact. Almost the entire town of Dulce... almost the entire population has experienced a sighting of strange objects in the last 30 years.”

You see, long before underground military bases were a gleam in Uncle Sam’s eye, Dulce was a hotbed for high strangeness. UFOs split the sky above alarmed townspeople. Cigar-shaped crafts cut so close to the material world that in the 1960s one nearly ran a school bus off the road. Those were followed by abattoir heaps of cattle mutilations, inspiring one of the first government investigations into the paranormal.

Maybe that’s what called the G-Men down on this community. So in the 1980s when Paul Bennewitz...

CASS:

Stop. I’m getting some detail you missed. I see a bomb. Some fuel. And a baby carriage.

KNOX:

Project Gasbuggy. Thanks, Cass!

So Washington D.C. after the war was like some spooky adolescent kid shooting roman candles at a gas can. And that gas can? Was New Mexico. White Sands. Los Alamos. Trinity. And Project Gasbuggy.

KNOX:

So, in the 1960's the Atomic Energy Commission teamed up with some demented oilmen from the El Paso Natural Gas Company and together they pioneered a version of fracking that would use nuclear bombs to coax natural gas out of hard to reach places.

In 1967 they set off a nuke 4,000 feet under the ground outside of Dulce. Fracking with a doomsday device in the middle of a national forest. There’s a little marker out there and everything.

CASS:

Yeah. I see a sign. A historical marker. A warning. “Project Gasbuggy, Nuclear Explosive Emplacement/Reentry Well, GB-ER the first site of the United States...”

KNOX:

Conspiracy freaks get mad when you point out Gasbuggy. Like you’re helping the government cover up the scary things they’re doing with aliens.

CASS:

What could be scarier than nuking your own country?

KNOX:

We can talk about that later. I understand its frustrating to UFOlogists, but that just shows how extreme the baseline situation is. The nukes got wrapped into the myth about Dulce Base, later. You have people saying the base was carved out with nuclear bombs.

Things were uneasy, but peaceful until the 1980s when an electrical engineer named Paul Bennewitz and his friend, State Patrolman Gabe Valdez, decoded an encrypted radio signal.

That signal led us to the Dulce Base we know today— a place of genetic experimentation, shady quid pro quo dealings with aliens, a portal in the sky above Mt. Archuleta and unknown monstrosities slathering wetly in the tunnels below.

CASS:

Hold on here he comes again.

KNOX:

"Jake!” Are you with us?

JANITOR:

Yeah. Hi. Sorry about the butt-dial earlier.

KNOX:

No apologies necessary. Are you safe?

JANITOR:

Yeah my supervisor was being real precious. My backup called off with some disease that hasn’t been classified yet. So guess who gets to spend their 3-day weekend cleaning itty bitty hairs out of the gene splicer.

KNOX:

I'm real sorry to hear that. Say, are you standing next to a microwave or something? What’s with the noise? Are you in a safe place?

JANITOR:

Oh, I'm in an elevator. I ride it when I need to cry or make a phone call, or smoke.

KNOX:

You’re calling from inside Dulce Base?

JANITOR

Yeah, It’s fine. It’s a long way down. Every ride is 15 minutes I don’t have to see my coworkers

KNOX:

Or come face to face with putrid spacefaring mutations with hearts that kill!

JANITOR:

What? Oh. Aliens.

KNOX:

So “Jake,” you’re a janitor at Dulce Base. Spilling secrets about the most nefarious installation in the paranormal world. Why are you risking so much to speak with us tonight?

JANITOR:

I guess I’m just... Over it? I ran up six figures of debt from engineering school. They offered me loan forgiveness if I put in two years down here and promised to never tell people what I know.

KNOX:

But little did you know, you’d be splicing together horrible genetic anomolies that never see the sun, all for the profits of the sinister [ BLEEP ] Corporation.

Cass did you just beep me? You stepped on my dramatic pause!

Cass:

Yeah, just don't say the corporation's name. I don't want to get us killed or sued.

KNOX:

[ BLEEP ] Corporation. [ BLEEP ] [ BLEEP ] . How are you even doing this?

CASS:

I could do this all day. It'll happen at least twice more.

KNOX:

Anyway where was I, hello, oh yeah Dulce... Splicing together horrible genetic anomalies that never see the sun! Talk about that a little?

JANITOR:

Dude, if you could see this place you wouldn’t be talking like that. It looks like an empty mall down here.

I was promised a career sending astronauts to other dimensions through the gate above Mt. Archuleta. I have a degree in aeronautics. But that program I was in got shut down. This place is a ghost town now. I’m running out the clock doing custodial work.

KNOX:

That sounds... disarmingly conventional.

[ AUDIBLE YAWN ]

CASS:

Excuse me.

[ ELEVATOR SOUNDS ]

ELEVATOR:

Door opening. Stand clear.

JANITOR:

Hey, Jules.

JULES:

SSSHHHYEAARAGHHHHH.

KNOX:

What? Who’s that? Who’s Jules? Is it one of them

JULES:

Shhraaaa?

JANITOR:

Yeah. A radio show. Nah. Like ten minutes?

[ MORE ELEVATOR SOUNDS ]

KNOX:

Oh my god! Is that what I think it is? Put them on the line!

JANITOR:

Sorry Jules got off on the last floor. It’s lunch time. Ugh. They’re having orgone again.

Hey can we wrap this up soon? They’re already on my case.

KNOX:

The history of Dulce Base is exceedingly dark, not in the conspiracy theory itself, but in the personalities who are attached to it. What can you tell us about Paul Bennewitz? The electrical engineer who discovered Dulce Base and Richard Doty, the deceiver.

JANITOR:

Everyone down here gets briefed on that. Basically you have Richard Doty, a government agent who looks like someone’s vice principal and Paul, who was convinced the Air Force was hiding aliens at Kirtland Air Base. Doty teamed up with William Moore, who wrote the Roswell Incident, and together they tried to break Paul by telling him a bunch of boogeymen tales about Dulce.

KNOX:

Why?

JANITOR:

To discredit him, I guess. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

KNOX:

They told him stories that weren’t true?

JANITOR:

Not stories that weren’t true, but stories that became true. Something in the base reflects what you expect to find here. The Abyss staring back or whatever. And Paul was a paranoid guy. So he got the deep science lab of his nightmares.

Things like that happen all the time down here. It’s called a “synchronal entanglement.” Reality changes the closer you get to the truth. I think there’s something in the lowest floor here that causes it. But what do I know?

CASS:

Makes sense.

KNOX:

Whoa...

JANITOR:

All that Paul stuff set off a massive intel leak. Like, were our activities at Dulce authoring the leaks or were the leaks authoring reality? That’s why we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut. Loose lips... Um.... mutate ships, or something.

KNOX:

What kind of mutations did the leaks cause?

JANITOR:

The vats of bio-engineered body parts. The hybridization programs. The miles of tunnels down here. The Sky-gate that used to be above Mt. Archuleta. He even got the famous Battle of Dulce, years before the rest of the UFO nuts picked up on it.

KNOX:

Stop there. There's a quote from a man named Phil Schneider, who claimed to have been in that fight. Phil's a geologist who talked about drilling open one of the tunnels and coming face-to- face with a 7-foot tall grey. Cass do you remember that quote?

CASS:

Yeah I do:

“The stench was worse than the worst garbage can. The entity was horrible. The next thing I know this blue beam hit me and literally opened me up like a fish. There’s a war under there, and it’s been going on since that time.”

JANITOR:

Yeah... In 1979. Phil would have been... ten when that went down. But something happened. There’s a marker for it and everything down here. I don’t think it was a war between different species or anything. I always heard one of the guards...ours, not theirs... thought a grey insulted him. He came back with an intensely rude gesture from outer space and the grey lit him up.

They make us do training so we don’t even make that gesture by accident. I’d describe it, but that feels wrong. Insensitivity hurts.

KNOX:

“Jake,” are you trying to discredit me? Are you a disinformation agent?

JANITOR:

What? No, dude. Think about how this would play out above ground. It’s not that different here. Guards... they’re great but... they can have toxic attitudes. You get our toxic guys and put them in a hole with their toxic guys and fights are inevitable. Someone says something. The other’s too macho or whatever to let it go and pew pew.

KNOX:

It’s just all. I feel...

CASS:

Disappointed?

KNOX:

No! Disinformed.

CASS:

Yeah... ok.

KNOX:

I’m sorry, did you say there wasn’t even a sky gate any more?

JANITOR:

One of our investors crashed a ship into it at a Christmas party. Everyone tells me this place used to be cooler in the 90s. Now it’s... Cuts. Empty pods. It’s just me and Jules most nights.

KNOX:

You said something is on the lowest floor. Something with the power to change things?

JANITOR:

All research has gone “underground.” After the Christmas party the [ BEEPED ] group came back with this claim that they discovered something even better in the tunnels. And that’s where this elevator’s going.

CASS:

You’re not supposed to be there!

JANITOR:

That’s right. I’m not. I crossed that line floors and floors ago. But it’s cool. If I had money to bet, I’d tell you the vault is just a hole where investment capital goes to die.

KNOX:

I’m sorry. I have to call out this flippant attitude. How can you work for the most evil place in New Mexico and not care? Don’t you have any pride?

JANITOR:

I don’t know. I got a black envelope in the mail the day I graduated college. It was the happiest day of my life. It was my assignment. I was going to an underground base with a legit star portal in the sky.

You know, Secrecy. Forbidden Tech. A shot at becoming one of the Illuminated. Jim, I graduated college with the grandson of the guy who built HARP!

And yet here I am. Budget cuts. I have a degree that’s used to scrub slime vats. Six bosses yelling at me about the correct way to incinerate lizard skin. A corporate partnership with people who are too dull to appreciate this pitch black miracle they built down here. Who’s yelling about that conspiracy?

I guess I am. Ah. This is my floor.

[ ELEVATOR SOUNDS ]

ELEVATOR:

Basement Floor. Restricted Access. Submit [ BLEEP ] Telepass ID now.

KNOX:

Why even show up? Why have you given up?

ELEVATOR:

Pass card Accepted. Welcome: Shraagaa, Codename: Jules. Vault Door opening.

JANITOR

Nah. I haven’t given up. I’m just a little low right now.

KNOX:

Wait, did you steal your friend’s access card?

JANITOR:

It’s kinda corny but, I still believe in this place. I ride elevators that still have this gross tan paint job from the 70's and I think:

“Wow! Some psycho defied a whole busload of gods to build this place!”

Someone is responsible for keeping this place cheap and boring. Someone really dull must have triggered the portal in the basement. Someone made this place boring and I’m going to fix it. Tonight. And I guess you’re going to witness me.

KNOX:

Luke!

CASS:

Jake.

KNOX:

Jake! God. Listen, I think that’s a bad idea. Dulce Base has never really been a force for good... Maybe its better this way.

JANITOR:

What even is a portal? Is it like a doorway or is it like a crossroads? Do I go through the portal or does the Multiverse kind of pivot around me?

KNOX:

Jake.

JANITOR:

I know the secret of this place. Dulce Base needs people like me. Only people with vision can trigger the portal and remake the world. All the stories confirm that. Before it sucked is a hybrid snake laboratory. Before that it was nuclear bomb gas well. And now...?

KNOX:

Luke...Jake please. Cass, is he telling the truth?

CASS:

Ooo he definitely thinks he is. Do you see a portal? Is it awesome?

JANITOR:

I’d like to promise you that I’m going to make everything better. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what will happen when I activate the Base. I’d like to say that I’d put a seed vault down here or the world’s largest fire pole. But the only promise is that each time the hole gets a little deeper. That’s the only promise. A Multiverse pivoting around me. Drilling down into the dirt.

Your listeners are going to witness me. And in witnessing they will make it so. Did you know I’m an amateur photographer? I enrolled at the community college. My portfolio is really coming along. I put everything into a locker.

It’s not what I thought I’d be doing with my weekend but... whatever...

[ MAJOR STATIC ]

CASS:

He’s breaking up. I can try holding him. It’s too late.

JANITOR:

Whoa! I’ve never seen a nexus of timelines before. Wow, it is all about me. Wow.

CASS:

What does it look like?!

JANITOR:

Hold on, I'll send you a pic.

[ TRANSMISSION GOES DEAD ]

KNOX:

Sorry for the technical snafu, everyone. Are we back?

CASS:

Yeah. We’re up. We lost the janitor, though.

KNOX:

Did you get the picture? Did it come through?

CASS:

Kind of. It like...ok so it like smells kind of like blue...

KNOX:

What? Did he make it? Did he activate the base?

CASS:

The world doesn’t feel much different than it used to.

KNOX:

Someone pulled a fast one on us and we helped him.

CASS:

Jim. It’s the Multiverse. Some versions of him were successful. Some weren’t. Just like every action that happens in the Multiverse. Listen, it’s late. I’m bored. Let’s wrap it up.

KNOX:

“What is a portal?” Is it like a doorway or do they, once activated, spiral down, down, into the soil of a lonely forest. Can we, tracing our pasts backwards, encounter a time when it was nothing more than a shallow depression? But our histories, our interior selves, listeners, drill through miles of rock and stone ahead of us. And who may say what they’ll encounter in the ancient tunnels below.

CASS:

It’s "Cass."

KNOX:

For Midnight After Dark we have been Cassandra... Spectral and James Knox. For episodes and a list of sources for tonight’s research, visit midnightAfter.dk.

CASS:

To get involved with the Citizen Scientist Initiative dial (505) 395-7799.

KNOX:

Next Time: The desert holds many secrets close to its chest, but one mysterious stone keeps changing its story. What are these strange letters and do they lead the way to a tomb of giants? Exolinguists, divergent texts and drifters from beyond the veil. Join us! And may you always find the answers you seek.