Sometimes there are nagging questions that demand an answer. Like an itch that won’t go away on its own – with a thorough scratching – there are questions in this life which just intuitively need to be asked, poked around at, and so forth. And once such “itch” is the area around Dulce (Dull-say) New Mexico.
An article posted Monday over at the UFO Digest website offers a lot of additional information about supposedly goings-on down that way in an article titled “MORE UNSETTLING EVIDENCE OVER DULCE PART IX.”
If this was the only article on the web, it would be easy to dismiss the place as just another artifact of the odd mental aberrations that bubble up to the top of urban legend lists. But this one is special, indeed, because there are so many “pointers” around that suggest maybe there could be something to this talk about Dulce.
The Doc Vega article is a fine starting point because there are many framing references to the story that could be cast as making sense. For example, the notion that the US would have a semi-prepared backup site which could be used for nuclear development work – not terribly far from the Trinity site (near Alamogordo, NM) would certainly make sense.
But still, there are other bits – like the supposed fire-fight between off-worlders and military forces that have been hinted at in relation to other locations.
Still, the supposed tie-in with human abduction cases, cattle mutilations, and much more, is intriguing even if not particularly well-suited to tracking back to first sources.
One little oddity, which is just as likely to occur from my ignorance of how Google searches work than anything else, is what I’d call an anomalous result from Google. As you know, if you put a + sign in from of a search time, the world’s most popular search engine will return [+keyword 1 +keyword 2] all page references on the web which contain both terms.
At least, most of the time, that is. You see, when I casually put in [+Dulce +ufo] I got exactly one result and two ads.
On the other hand, when I put in a different city name and +ufo, I get tons of results.
For example, the small town of Stephenville, TX, where there was a decent UFO sighting a few years back came up with a whopping 105,000 hits.
All of which could be blown off, except that if the search is modified to include the state abbreviation (NM) the results for [+Dulce +NM +ufo] we find 92,000 listing and (without the + operator) we can get for simple [Dulce ufo] more than 1.5 million search returns.
Maybe search operators don’t work like they have previously, or (screams my inquiring mind) maybe the search results are somehow different on this one?
Moving on, we come to the Wikipedia entry on the supposed base which begins…
“Dulce Base is an alleged secret alien underground facility under Archuleta Mesa on the Colorado-New Mexico border near the town of Dulce, New Mexico in the United States. Claims of alien activity there first arose from Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz.
Starting in 1979, Bennewitz became convinced he was intercepting electronic communications from alien spacecraft and installations outside of Albuquerque. By the 1980s he believed he had discovered an underground base near Dulce. The story spread rapidly within the UFO community and by 1990, UFOlogist John Lear claimed he had independent confirmations of the base’s existence. Political scientist Michael Barkun writes that Cold War underground missile installations in the area gave superficial plausibility to the rumors, making the Dulce base story an “attractive legend” within UFOlogy. According to Barkun, claims about experiments on abductees and firefights between aliens and the Delta Force place the Dulce legend “well outside even the most far-fetched reports of secret underground bases.”[
In a further entry about source Paul Bennewitz, Wikipedia’s entry here reveals some interesting additional background about the source of the story.
All of which would put it into the “blow off” pile which wouldn’t be worth our mention, except for an intriguing bit of HUMINT which came my way a couple of years ago from a now retired person who, shall we say, looked at radar for a living. He provided me with some (on background only) information about an object which had come in up over the Montana area, had done an approximate right turn, and had transited the South Dakota/Wyoming area in the Denver ATC airspace on a track down toward fairly empty part of New Mexico.
Interestingly, it wasn’t specifically tracking toward Ducle, but rather some Native American lands which are rugged and remote but a fair distance from Dulce.
Oh, and the speed of whatever it was that tracked was into the thousands of miles per hour.
It’s here that being a journalist has some of its most difficult decisions. We have on the one hand an intriguing story (based largely on a single source, now dead) but we have some totally unrelated anomalous data from a super high creds source who shared some track info, not unlike the data what shows up on Flight Aware, except that our old plane moseys along at 1/300th of the speed of the anomalous craft.
The odds of doing any breakthrough research at Ducle seems mighty slim. But, since the other source allows us the luxury of some very rough triangulation, we can speculate all day long on what might be out there.
As a result, every time we’re in a position to to come through that part of the country, as we will be Saturday, or so, we wonder about staying up last on a high mountain peak or a mesa down south a ways, and just keeping our eyes open for the next “Fire in the Sky” kind of event.
If we apply the same kind of stringent math and analytic techniques that serve us so well in electronics and analysis of markets, you can quickly see how such investigations are almost certain to be unsuccessful to something like four (or more) places to the right of the decimal point (i.e. odds of success about –.000003 percent).
Still, the way of the Law of Large Numbers work, it’s kind of like buying a Lotto ticket. Oh, sure, the odds may be one in 8-million (or higher) but if you don’t at least buy one lotto ticket, your chances of winning become a certain zero percent chance of winning. Or, as an ex Los Alamos fellow told me once: The odds between one lotto ticket and buying 10 is small, but the certainty of no chance without buying a ticket is what you need to consider.
As indeed we do, as hints and snips have us wondering about disappearing civilizations (like Chaco Canyon/Anasazi) and what may be out there waiting to be discovered on, in, around, or between some of the mesas and mountains in America’s real outback country.
Reader first-hand information (particularly sightings and directions in this area) are always welcome, as well as a track intersection analysis of UFO databases. We can always look at data, but like finding the next Microsoft in a “pink sheet” stock, we recognize the odds of success are low. But like buying a lotto ticket once in a while, I might be convinced.
Thinking Points: Change versus Revolution
As I expected would happen, by exactly non-violent peaceful change, “let’s invent ourselves into a better future and skip the barricades and guillotines” attitude didn’t sit with with a lot of readers. Like this feller, for example:
I’m sure you are aware that there are many forms of revolutions other than blood and gore tho there is nothing that the powers fear more than a little unrest from the sheep and a tax revolution would fit the bill very nicely.WE CAN SET AND MUMBLE FOREVER ABOUT THE ROTTEN CORRUPT GOVERNMENT IF ONE WHISH’S TO CALL IT THAT BUT WITHOUT A FLAT OUT TAX REVOLUTION NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING WILL CHANGE AND IF IT SHOULD CAUSE PUBLIC UNREST SO BE IT.!!!
Another wrote:
Come on!
Pelosi went to Soros’ wedding! As did Bono.The kleptocracy will not be fixed except by force.
If you mean “force” as in economic means, or in the proposed national trucker’s strike in a few weeks, then sure…I’m all in. But, if you’re talking force of a harder form, count me out.
And, come to think of it, the truckers planning for a shutdown about October 11-13th, which is the date clicking about, might just be setting themselves up to be patsies for the failing economy imploding.
I can think of nothing more Machiavellian than having the debt-logged system beginning to implode only to have a group like truckers have an unfortunately-timed event so that the MSM could be easily “flipped” into casting the trucker strike as the cause rather than the result of unjust economic conditions.
I mean, it’s not like stranger stuff hasn’t happened in the past, right?
Reader Advisory
If you have tried to send in a news tip in the past couple of days and got a “this script disabled” note, we’re working on it. The momentary (!) malfunction is because we run such a tight server backplane and all the patches to keep security knock-kneed tight have turned this one off, so we will do some retuning as time permits…
Off the Ranch: Homes for All Ages
We take off this morning in an hour, or two, as soon as we wolf down some chow and get packed, for Grants Pass, Oregon, where we will see some friends before going on to do a day of consulting in the Bay area before heading to the outback again.
On our multi-purpose visit up here, we’ve gotten all kinds of things done, including looking at a house which is very close to the kids.
Turns out, that because of the economy, we can get a modest (four bedroom) home on a golf course for under $300K. Not that we’re jumping to buy real estate yet, since I’m convinced there is another leg down in the economy to come, and a further collapse of housing prices.
Still, with my 65th birthday ahead, and having spent a few minutes on our local chiropractor’s drop table for various pains and ouchies, I’m reluctantly developing a theory that suggests that a person over the course of life needs to live in three or four places, depending on stage of life.
When young, an apartment or condo works because the main function of the housing unit is to provide cheap digs while doubling as a “spouse trap.”
The next level of housing would be the “young family” house which is where grades K-8 happen.
Then comes the pioneering home…where everyone gets involved in building a serious, highly independent lifestyle.
All of which has been going along fine for us, even with kids now in their 40s.
But at some point, falling off decks, jumping off tractors, working on roofs, slinging sheetrock and all that kind of thing (plus furniture making in the shop) will become a someone more challenging lifestyle than what makes good sense. Maybe somewhere north of 70- which until recently sounded like a hell of a long ways off.
Here lately, though, it hasn’t been. And since one of our missions here was to spend time with family which has a member on the way out (mid 90s) the importance of “right home, near kids” has certainly reared up again.
As always, we are furiously making notes on what ideal senior housing would be, should we transit into that age group. My shopping list is pretty simple, but worth thinking about:
- The home could be mostly lived in as a single level. The one we looked at has a master bedroom and home office on the first floor along with a rec room, living room, and updated kitchen.
- It would be close to some kind of physical activity. Living on a golf course, although it’s a short course and all walking, no carts, seems as good a physical activity as any.,
- Level walking distance to stores is important, and this one fit that bill.
- Ditto walking to basic healthcare including a pharmacy (8 blocks) and even
- Bus service.
- Big one: Emergency medical response time of 4-minutes, or less. When you mature (*lol) you think more about these kinds of things.
There are lots of other items that would go onto such a list (property tax exemption for 65+ for example) and lots of others, too.
We’ll be having a 2-thousand mile discussion about this house and my issues with it: No regular fireplace or insert, all gas fired pretend fireplaces, for example, and only a 20-foot trip where gardening could happen – violating one of my self-sufficiency rules.
My EMT son counseled me that I could solve the emergency medical response time by putting a helo pad on the western 10 acres of our place, as well as buying a $15K multifunction medical monitor that is an automatic external defibrillator, pacer, BP monitor, 12 lead EEG, plus it slices, dices and makes soup, if I followed his description of things.
Being back on Puget Sound this week (or more specifically over it in our hotel) we were reminded about how bloody awful cold it is. So much so, that I did a reading of Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” since 57 and rain is about as near the Arctic Circle as a sensible southerner (or, in our case, convert) will venture after August.
Other than finding out what our place appraises for, when we get back, something we’ve kicked around for a couple of years, just to see, I don’t know where this leads. But airplane hangars up here are in the $300/month range, about double what they are back home.
It’s adventures like the one we’re on now, though, that keep a couple looking ahead, kicking around the shared future, and trying to figure out just precisely what the perfect “bank shots” in life (which only makes sense if you’re a pool player, I suppose) would consist of.
One things certain, though. The more memories you pack away now, the more raw material you’ll be able to sneak out of Life with, and that in itself it a kind of ultimate cheating The System. (It’s what you can take with you…)
Oh, and one other item about this trip. We got some interesting perspective on how people in Washington State sort of screwed themselves with the passage of the “looser” marijuana laws up here, from a grower friend. I’ll explain that in Peoplenomics tomorrow morning, but damn interesting information.
So off to pack, our week of playing grandparently and the other (more somber) family duties is now wrapped up and since people are always referring to the southern part of the US as “down there” we’ll be playing close attention to our mileage on the way home. I figure if Texas is really down from here, our gas mileage ought to be better going home, right? lol…
Peoplenomics tomorrow morning and write when you break even
George george@ure.net