Allegedly, There Is a Secret Underground Alien Base in Dulce, New Mexico

On the surface, Dulce, New Mexico is just a small southwestern town. It doesn't even have a traffic light. But according to the most bizarre rumors, this little town is just a cap on a gargantuan underground facility that is home to unimaginable experiments and technologies. For the tinfoil hat-wearers, there's a whole world underneath Dulce — a secret, high-tech one filled with aliens.

I Want to Believe

According to conspiracy theorists, the Dulce subterranean base is a seven-story compound beneath Dulce, New Mexico that houses human-animal hybrids, human-alien hybrids, and extremely advanced technologies. They say even been the site of alien wars. You know, the usual. It hasn't been called the Roswell of Northern New Mexico for nothing.

The first claims of the base's existence, according to HowStuffWorks, date all the way back to the 1930s. But the rumors of alien intervention in the area began to gain traction in the 1970s, when a former New Mexico State Police trooper named Gabe Valdez documented unexplained cattle mutilations in the area, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. In a radio interview, Valdez said, "The evidence that was left there, you know, predators don't leave gas masks, glow sticks, radar chaff. They don't leave that stuff."

Valdez made more wild claims in other interviews, including sightings of black, silent "sophisticated spacecraft" and the discovery of a fetus inside a dead cow — but not a calf fetus. "It looked like a human, a monkey and a frog," Valdez told the History Channel's "UFO Hunters." "It didn't have any bones in the head. It was all full of water." Valdez thought — what else? — the cows were incubating alien babies.

Tim Anderson, a former police officer in Dulce, claimed to have seen a UFO in the town in the late 1990s. "It lit up the whole valley and just disappeared into the rocks," he told the Santa Fe New Mexican. "I just rubbed my eyes. 'Did I really see that?'" For good measure, Anderson also believes Bigfoot resides in or near the town.

Rumor Takes Flight

The colorful claims of the paranormal have come from many different times and people in Dulce. Never mind all that cattle stuff: Philip Schneider, a former explosive engineer employed by the U.S. government, introduced the idea of Dulce as a site of a brutal human-alien war. Schneider, who had high-level security clearance, claimed that he helped construct a "secret underground base" in Dulce in 1979. There, he says, he witnessed a battle with subterranean aliens that left 60 humans dead. The alien war wages on to this day, Schneider tells the Epoch Times.

Another key player in the Dulce base conspiracy theory is a man named Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz, who earned a Ph.D. in physics, became convinced that cattle mutilations around the area were the result of extraterrestrial intervention, according to HowStuffWorks. He then allegedly began picking up intercepted electronic signals near Dulce, a town too small to receive such messages. Bennewitz theorized that these signals were coming from underground and going toward a target high in the sky. By the '80s, he was actively spreading the rumors of an underground alien facility in Dulce, New Mexico.

This article first appeared on Curiosity.com.