By CIN Newswire Services/Access Media
12-10-08
RIO RANCHO, NEW MEXICO - Norio Hayakawa is a resident of Rio Rancho who believes that wild rumors may not always bring a bad name to a community or hurt it. Sometimes they bring curiosity seekers, and even tourism may flourish. Take, for example, the city of Roswell. "Roswell has raked in quite a lot of tourist dollars all these years, despite the lack of any tangible, solid, irrefutable evidence that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in the desert outside of the city in July of 1947," Hayakawa noted.12-10-08
And when it comes to the subject of UFOs, Hayakawa believes that there is a much more interesting area in New Mexico than Roswell.
According to Hayakawa, Dulce, New Mexico, a sleepy little town of less than 4000 (inhabited by the Jicarilla Apache nation), has attracted quite a number of UFO and conspiracy buffs ever since rumors surfaced in the mid-80s that a U.S./alien joint biological laboratory and base exists a mile under the town's Archuleta Mesa. "This rumor has become so well known among UFO buffs around the world that anyone doing a Yahoo or Google search on Dulce, New Mexico would find the bulk of over 300,000 search results related to the alleged underground base," Hayakawa said.
Skeptical of such claims, Hayakawa, a retired funeral director, visited the town of Dulce in 1990 with the crew of a Japanese television program to attempt to document the existence of such an alien base.
Although he was unsuccessful in locating it, Hayakawa claims that he and the television crew were inexplicably detained by the police chief while interviewing the citizens on the street about UFOs and cattle mutilations.
Now, almost 19 years later, Hayakawa and a few UFO enthusiasts from New Mexico, California and Arizona, would like to clear these unfounded rumors. They are planning to have a one-day public conference in the town of Dulce next March.
It will be appropriately titled: "The Dulce Base: Fact or Fiction?"
Hayakawa likes to separate fact from fiction.
"There has not been any physical evidence whatsoever that there is such a base in or near Dulce," Hayakawa asserted. "However, when it comes to UFOs, many of the residents there are believers, since beginning around the mid-1970s and lasting till the mid-1980s, the entire town of Dulce was buzzed by frequent sightings of strange lights in the sky." This is fact, according to Hayakawa.
Another fact is that many ranchers in the nearby communities began to report mysterious cattle mutilations and frequent sightings of military helicopters during that time.
Some Dulce officials, concerned about these incidents, attended the first Cattle Mutilations conference in Albuquerque in 1979, including Raleigh Tafoya, who was the chief at the time. This also is fact, not fiction.
Hayakawa believes that there could be prosaic explanations to both the UFO sightings and cattle mutilations, although he still doesn't have the answers.
It was during the mid-80s that wild stories of an underground alien base surfaced - and still continue to this day - so much so that the entire town of Dulce has almost become synonymous with the alleged alien underground bio-lab. The fact that Dulce is located only 100 miles northwest of Los Alamos provided additional fuel for the conspiracy buffs. According to Hayakawa, Los Alamos is the leading-edge research laboratory on human genome/DNA research in the U.S.
But again, Hayakawa likes to remain skeptical when it comes to "underground bases."
Although throughout the years the residents of Dulce seem to have taken all these strange rumors about their community with a grain of salt, Hayakawa says that he would like to restore some sense of normalcy to Dulce.
This is the reason why he will host Dulce's first public conference on the topic. Hayakawa is intent on dispelling rumors, once and for all, that there are such bases in or near Dulce.
Will the townsfolk of Dulce speak up at the conference? Will there be some new revelations about Dulce?
"It will be fascinating," said Hayakawa.
One of the speakers at the conference will be Greg Bishop, author of a book entitled PROJECT BETA. Bishop has thoroughly investigated the claims of an Albuquerque scientist by the name of Paul Bennewitz who was one of the initial sources behind the rumors of underground bases at Dulce and other U.S. locations.
The conference, open to the public, will be held on Sunday, March 29, 2009 at the Best Western Jicarilla Inn in Dulce.
Hayakawa can be contacted at noriohayakawa@rocketmail.com
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