In 1954, or so the legend goes, a meeting took place at Holloman Air Force Base between U.S. government officials and an extraterrestrial race known as the "Tall Greys." The agreement was simple: the Greys could establish a base on Earth—specifically at Dulce—in exchange for sharing advanced technology. The catch? They could conduct their own research, but with limits. Limits, the whistleblowers claim, that were soon ignored. Abductions increased. Livestock turned up mutilated. And beneath Dulce, a war began.

According to "Gorman," a pseudonymous whistleblower who claimed to have worked security at Dulce in the late 1970s, Level 3 is where human and non-human biology intersect. He described rows of cylindrical tanks filled with a viscous, amber fluid. Inside floated beings: tall, pale, with large black eyes and slender limbs. But also humans—some alive, some not, kept in a state between waking and dreaming. The official story would later call this "biogenetic experimentation." The unofficial story simply called it horror.

Level 1, they say, is a parking garage for military vehicles and black helicopters. Level 2 is storage—crates of unknown origin, humming with a low, subsonic thrum. Level 3 is the laboratory. And it’s on Level 3 where the story turns cold.

Today, Dulce remains. Satellite images show nothing but scrubland and the occasional government vehicle on County Road 145. The Jicarilla Apache, who know this land as sacred, have their own stories: of a hole in the earth that leads to a place where the stars are born, and where creatures without faces steal sleepers from their beds.

Bennewitz contacted Kirtland Air Force Base. They sent men in dark sunglasses who nodded, took his data, and politely asked him to stop digging. He didn’t. What he found instead became the cornerstone of modern ufology: a labyrinth of tunnels, seven levels deep, carved into the rock and lined with a metal that seemed to drink the light.