I Helped Blow Up An Underground Alien Prison In New Mexico — And We Buried The Truth Alive
On paper, the story starts with something small and harmless: a YouTube intro, a click on a video titled like a cheap conspiracy, a narrator asking where you’re watching from. In reality, my story starts with the dull scrape of a manila folder sliding across a metal table in a windowless room on Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico, September 17th, 1987. I remember the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, the smell of burnt coffee going stale in the corner, the way the air-conditioning seemed too cold for a late desert summer. A red circle was drawn on a printed map of New Mexico — nothing but beige and pale lines, names of small towns, and then that circle: DULCE. I’d only vaguely heard of it, a nowhere place on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, just another dot on a map that meant nothing to most of the world. To me, it would become the point where my life split into a before and an after.
My name is Ethan Ramirez, U.S. Army, former sergeant in a special operations unit that never officially existed. In 1987 I was thirty-two years old, seven years into a career I thought I understood. I’d seen my share of classified sites and ghost installations, the kind the public never hears about—places buried in mountains, bunkers under airfields, ranges where test shots lit up the night with strange colors that disappeared into reports stamped with black bars. So when the briefing officer slid that folder across and said, “Routine structural and security assessment, remote research facility near Dulce, New Mexico,” it should’ve felt familiar. It didn’t. What bothered me wasn’t what was in the folder. It was what wasn’t. No site history, no previous incident logs, no personnel roster, no photographs. Just coordinates, a contact name—Colonel Marcus Hayes—and one thin line of instruction: ASSESS STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY AND REPORT ANOMALIES. That was it. Blankness wrapped in bureaucracy. And I’d worked with secrets long enough to know: the more paper you don’t see, the bigger the thing they’re hiding behind it.
We rolled out of Kirtland before dawn in two unmarked Humvees, engines coughing in the cold morning as we left the familiar glow of base lights behind. The desert at that hour belonged to shadows and silhouettes. The mountains were black teeth on the horizon, the sky just beginning to bleed from midnight blue into pale gray. My team that day was small—four men and the weight of what we didn’t know riding in the back with us. Private Miguel Torres, my logistics and comms guy, sat behind me, tapping his pen against a small notebook, restless even on the quiet days. He was young, sharp, the kind of soldier who noticed everything and logged it twice. Sergeant Javier Luna, ten years in, our security lead, sat to my right—quiet, cautious, eyes always moving, his calm presence like a counterweight to every unknown variable. Our driver was Specialist David Ortega, who’d somehow mastered the art of not asking questions even when everyone else was bursting with them. I rode shotgun, folder open on my lap, staring at that red circle around Dulce like it might blink or change shape if I watched long enough.
The further north we drove, the more the world peeled away. Civilization thinned to isolated houses, then to weathered billboards and rusted cattle fences leaning under their own age. The paved highway narrowed, cutting through stretches of red rock and scrub that glowed faintly as the sun finally cleared the horizon. We passed small signs for the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, lonely markers that felt like the last warnings on a road no one bothered to patrol. I remember looking out the window and getting that strange sensation that someone was looking back, not from the houses or the road, but from the land itself. The fences along the way seemed newer than they should’ve been—fresh barbed wire, clean posts, no ranch logos, no “No Trespassing” signs, just silent, sterile boundaries slicing across old ground. At some point, I realized the chatter in the Humvee had died completely. Even Ortega was driving with his jaw clenched, like he could feel the air getting heavier as we approached something he didn’t have words for.
Dulce itself barely qualified as a town. A few small buildings stitched together by a main street that looked like it had been built once and then forgotten. We passed a gas station with a single pump, a tiny grocery, a diner with a flickering sign, a school, a church. Pickup trucks sat in dusty driveways; laundry hung limp on lines behind modest homes. People watched us as we passed—men in worn jackets, women on porches, kids with bikes paused mid-ride. Not hostile, not welcoming either. Just aware. Strangers in military vehicles don’t go unnoticed in places like that. Beyond the town, the land opened up again, reservation stretching out flat and quiet under a wide sky that made you feel small. Our rendezvous point was at the edge of that quiet—a dirt access road cutting into the hills, where a lone pickup truck waited like an afterthought.
The man leaning against the truck introduced himself as Colonel Marcus Hayes, though you wouldn’t have guessed his rank from his clothes. Civilian jeans, work boots, a plain jacket, but everything about him radiated control. Late forties, graying hair, eyes that barely blinked and never wandered. He didn’t bother with a smile. “The facility is eight miles in,” he said without preamble, as if we’d already been briefed twice. “Once we’re inside, no radio contact except on my channels. No photographs unless authorized. You see something unusual, you note it, and you report it to me directly. Understood?” We all answered yes. Hayes’s gaze moved across us like a scanner, taking our measure, weighing what we might do with things we hadn’t seen yet. Then he got back in his truck and started up the dirt road, expecting us to follow—because of course we would. That’s what we were there for.
The access road climbed steadily, winding through juniper and scrub that clung stubbornly to the rocky soil. Dust kicked up behind the tires and hung in the still air, a pale ribbon trailing us as we went deeper into the hills. The terrain shifted from soft red earth to darker volcanic rock, jagged and broken, as if some ancient violence had frozen mid-eruption. After twenty minutes, the road leveled out and ended at a high chain-link fence, twelve feet tall, topped with razor wire that gleamed like teeth in the sun. A small concrete booth stood beside a gate. Two guards waited there, faces impassive, rifles slung across their chests. They checked our IDs in silence, their eyes lingering on each of us a second longer than necessary, then waved us through. Inside the fence, the road dipped into a shallow canyon half hidden by the natural contours of the rock. That’s where I saw it: the entrance.
It was built into the side of a mesa, a wide concrete face partially swallowed by stone so it almost looked like part of the mountain—almost. A massive steel door sat at its center, sleek and new against older, weather-worn concrete. No sign, no logo, no designation. Just a blank, watchful mouth waiting to swallow us whole. The air there felt cooler, the canyon funneling wind into a low whistle that bounced off the cliffs like a distant warning. Hayes stepped out of his truck, walked up to the panel beside the door, and punched in a code without looking down. The lock clicked with a soft finality, and the metal door swung inward to reveal a narrow, brightly lit corridor sloping downwards, perfectly clean, perfectly silent, like the throat of something that never saw the sun. “This way,” he said, and we went inside.
The temperature dropped a few degrees as soon as we crossed the threshold. The hallway was concrete painted white, the kind of white that always felt clinical, almost aggressive in how it tried to erase imperfections. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, reflecting in the polished floor. The corridor led us to an elevator at the far end that looked unremarkable except for the fact that it existed here at all. Hayes pressed the call button. The doors opened immediately, as if the elevator had been waiting for us. Inside, the panel showed five levels. No labels, just numbers. He hit “2.” As we descended, I watched the indicator lights move slowly: 1… then the gap where the ground should’ve been… then 2. It took longer than it should have. I counted seconds in my head—fifteen, twenty. Even accounting for military-grade installations, we were deeper underground than I liked to be without knowing exactly why.
Level Two smelled like a hospital with a secret—sterile air chased by something sharp and chemical that clung to the back of your throat. The hallways were wider here, lined with doors stamped with codes instead of names. Hayes brought us to a conference room: table, chairs, a wall-mounted monitor, and no windows. He gestured for us to sit, then dimmed the lights and turned on the screen. A schematic of the facility appeared: five levels stacked beneath the desert like buried floors in a building no one knew existed. Level One: Administration. Level Two: Research and Analysis. Level Three and Four: Storage / Containment. Level Five: blank. No label, no description, just a silent, deeper rectangle at the bottom of the diagram, like the bad tooth in an X-ray.
“This facility was built in the early 1960s,” Hayes said, voice even, almost bored. “Originally for geological research. Over time, its mission expanded.” He didn’t look at us when he said that. His eyes stayed on Level Five. “Your assessment will focus on levels Three and Four. We’ve had reports of structural issues—wall cracking, moisture intrusion, temperature variance. You’ll document everything and report anomalies. You are not authorized to access Level Five.” That last sentence landed in the room like a brick. I stared at the blank block at the bottom of the screen and felt an itch I couldn’t scratch. “What’s on Level Five?” I asked, because someone had to. Hayes turned off the monitor, plunging the room into a strange grayness lit only by the emergency exit sign. “Level Five is sealed,” he said. “You won’t be going there.” His tone left no space for follow-up. That was the moment I knew for certain that whatever we’d been told was only a tiny slice of the truth.
He handed each of us an access badge, a radio, and a small black device about the size of a pager that I didn’t recognize. “Environmental monitor,” he explained. “Air quality, radiation, chemical traces. Keep it on you at all times. If it alarms, you leave immediately and report to me.” The way he said “immediately” made my skin prickle. We spent the next hour going through protocols: decontamination procedures, airlocks, emergency routes that felt more theoretical than real. We were shown spray chambers that misted something chlorine-sharp, told which doors would lock in a crisis, reminded that in certain circumstances, saving our own lives would take priority over saving anyone else’s. I’d heard versions of those speeches before, but never with quite the same edge. When someone bothers to tell you exactly which thresholds not to cross, you start to wonder what happens if something pushes you over them anyway.
By 1100 hours, we were suited up—thick coveralls, gloves, respirator masks with heavy filters, environmental monitors clipped to our chests like glowing green badges reminding us how quickly safe can become unsafe. We moved through the decon chamber, waited while a fine mist coated us, listened to the hiss and hum of invisible systems deciding whether we were clean enough to go deeper. The inner door opened onto a metal stairwell. The descent to Level Three felt like walking down the spine of some sleeping animal. Metal grating underfoot, handrails cold to the touch, the air gradually cooling as we left the memory of sunlight behind. My monitor glowed green at first, numbers steady. Torres’s breathing sounded loud through his mask. Luna moved like he always did—slow, controlled, every sense engaged, as if expecting something to jump out of the concrete.
Level Three greeted us with a long corridor flanked by storage units, each door stenciled with a code in white paint. Some doors stood open, revealing shelves stacked with crates, cables, instruments. Others were sealed, banded with yellow tape, warning labels plastered in places that didn’t necessarily line up with the obvious hazards. We moved room by room, the way training had drilled into us. Open, sweep, document, close. Most crates were standard equipment: oscilloscopes, field instruments, circuit boards, tools. But every so often we’d find something different—sealed containers marked with biohazard symbols, canisters with handwritten notes that didn’t match any printed inventory. I logged everything in my notebook, noting dripping pipes, hairline cracks, spots where concrete looked darker, like it had been repaired a dozen times over the years. Halfway down the corridor, I ran my gloved fingers along the wall and felt dampness. When I pulled my hand back, water slicked the material. The environmental monitor flickered, still green, but the readings were climbing in tiny increments.
That’s when we saw the corridor that shouldn’t exist. A narrow passage branched off to the left, subtle enough you might’ve missed it if you weren’t paying attention. On the map Hayes had given us, Level Three was a neat grid: central corridor, listed storage wings, stairwells, nothing more. But this side passage wasn’t there—no line, no label, just blank space where the reality in front of us clearly wasn’t. “Old access route maybe,” Torres said, squinting at the wall, “sealed off on paper, left open down here.” Maybe. But the floor was too clean. No dust, no cobwebs, no signs of disuse. Somebody had been through recently. Maybe a lot of somebodies. I should have radioed Hayes right then, but that itch under my skin flared again, the itch that said if we didn’t take a look now, whatever lay down there would stay hidden forever. “We check it,” I said. No one argued.
The passage curved gently and sloped down at a shallow angle. The walls here were rougher, less finished than the rest of the facility, as if someone had carved this by hand and never bothered to pretty it up. The overhead lights shifted from modern fluorescents to older incandescent bulbs caged in wire, throwing a warmer, dimmer glow that felt wrong in a place like this. After about thirty feet, the corridor opened into a small chamber. No equipment racks, no security cameras, just a single metal table in the center of the room, and on it, a thick folder bulging with paper yellowed by time. My first thought was that it was some kind of test—someone’s idea of a trap for curious soldiers. My second thought drowned the first: whoever had left this here assumed whoever found it would understand what they were looking at.
I approached the folder carefully, half expecting an alarm to shriek when I touched it. Nothing happened. The latch wasn’t locked. Inside, dozens of schematics and diagrams unfolded like a secret map of the underworld. It was the facility, but not the one we’d been shown. The drawings went deeper than Level Five, down into layers of tunnels and chambers that branched out like roots beneath the desert. Pencil marks crowded the margins—dates from the 1970s, small notes about excavation delays, expansion orders, revised containment parameters. Some sections were marked with symbols I didn’t recognize, circles within triangles, strange sigils that didn’t match anything I’d seen in military documentation. I raised the camera Hayes had issued us and started taking careful photos of each page, one by one, the sound of the shutter faint but obscene in the quiet.
While I was photographing, Torres walked the perimeter of the room, running his knuckles along the walls out of habit. When he rapped one section near the far side, the sound came back hollow. “There’s space behind this,” he said. I joined him. The concrete looked solid, seamless, but the echo was wrong. I searched for a seam, a panel, some hidden hinge. Nothing. Then I spotted a small ventilation grate near the floor. I knelt and peered through the slats, straining to see anything beyond the sliver of view. There was another corridor on the other side, just barely visible: dim light, smooth walls, and the sense of emptiness stretching into darkness. It wasn’t on our map either. The environmental monitor on my chest beeped softly. I looked down. The display had shifted to the upper edge of green, flirting with yellow. Not dangerous yet, but the message was clear: whatever we’d wandered near wasn’t part of the “routine assessment” we’d been sold.
“We need to report this,” Luna said, his voice a quiet anchor in the growing unease. I agreed, though some stubborn part of me wanted to push just a little farther, pry off that grate, crawl through, see how deep the rabbit hole went. Before I could decide, the lights overhead flickered once, twice, then cut out entirely. The darkness was absolute, swallowing us like a wave. For three long heartbeats all I could hear was breathing—theirs and mine—and a distant, low hum that might have been machinery or might have been my own blood rushing in my ears. Then the emergency lights snapped on, bathing the room in violent red. The environmental monitor chirped and flashed yellow. “Move,” I said, the word half order, half plea. We retraced our steps up the passage, the red light stretching our shadows into tall, twisted shapes that slid along the walls as though something else was running alongside us.
We emerged back into the main corridor to find it unchanged: white lights steady, air still, Level Three pretending to be normal. My monitor eased back into green, numbers descending like a held breath finally released. I radioed Hayes with a neutral tone I didn’t feel. “Level Three initial sweep complete,” I said. “Noted structural anomalies including moisture and unlisted passage. Requesting permission to proceed to Level Four.” There was a pause long enough for my skin to crawl. Static crackled, then Hayes’s voice came through, calm and flat. “Continue to Level Four. Document everything. Do not deviate from the marked routes.” He didn’t ask where the unmapped passage was. He didn’t request coordinates or clarification. He wasn’t surprised. That bothered me more than anything we’d just seen.
The descent to Level Four felt longer, like the stairwell was stretching under our weight. Rust lined the edges of the metal steps, small flecks of brown against gray, subtle reminders that even hidden facilities decay. By the time we reached the landing, I could see the vapor of my own breath inside the mask. The corridor here was wider than on Level Three, ceiling higher, air colder. The walls were lined with heavy metal doors, each fitted with an observation window made of thick, reinforced glass crossed by wire mesh. I walked up to the first window and peered inside. The room beyond was stark: white walls, a metal cot bolted to the floor, a stainless-steel sink, a small drain. A cell. Empty. I moved down the hall—second window, third, fourth. All the same. Identical cells. All empty. All recently cleaned. No dust, no scraps, no forgotten items left behind. There’s something unnerving about a cell with no signs of occupancy. It doesn’t look unused. It looks prepared.
“Why build cells down here?” Torres murmured, more to himself than to us. None of us answered, because we all knew the obvious truth: storage levels didn’t need cells. Prisons did. At the far end of the corridor stood a larger door, broader than the others, with a control panel attached—keypad and card reader, small indicator lights blinking on a steady rhythm. I swiped my badge out of habit. ACCESS DENIED blinked back at me. I tried again, even though I knew better. Same result. I radioed Hayes. “We’ve reached a secured door at the end of Level Four. Our badges don’t work.” Static first, then his voice. “Hold position. I’m sending someone down.”
We waited in front of that door, the silence pressing against us. The hum of the ventilation system filled the space, a low constant drone that, once noticed, couldn’t be unheard. Luna paced slowly, checking corners, counting cameras. Torres fiddled with his equipment, maybe to distract himself. I studied the door. No markings, no hints at what lay behind it. Just the sense that whatever it was, we hadn’t been meant to see it. Ten minutes later, the elevator at the far end of the corridor dinged softly. A man stepped out wearing a white lab coat over civilian clothes, mid-thirties, dark hair, glasses, carrying a clipboard. He moved toward us with the easy confidence of someone who belongs in a place other people sneak into. “I’m Dr. Samuel Moreno,” he said, nodding once. “Research division. Colonel Hayes asked me to escort you.” He swiped his own badge at the panel. The lock snapped open, and the door swung inward, not protesting at all.
The room beyond was a laboratory, clean and bright and somehow wrong. Workbenches lined the walls, crowded with equipment: microscopes, centrifuges, sealed containers, computers humming softly, displays showing charts and graphs that shifted too fast to follow. Everything was neat, organized, expensive. The kind of setup you don’t build in a forgotten desert facility unless you’re doing something very important or very forbidden. At the center of the lab stood a large cylindrical glass chamber, eight feet tall and four feet across, surrounded by cables and monitor arrays. Electrodes hung inside, dangling like metal vines. The chamber was empty. It felt less like a relief and more like an insult, somehow, as if the absence itself were classified.
“This is one of our active research labs,” Dr. Moreno said, as if we’d walked into a university science wing. “We study geological samples, atmospheric data, biological specimens from the surrounding area. Multidisciplinary projects.” His tone was smooth, but Luna moved to one of the benches and picked up a piece of equipment, turning it over slowly. “This is medical,” he said. “Not geological.” Moreno adjusted his glasses. “Some of our studies overlap disciplines,” he replied. “The environment, the human body, long-term exposure factors. You understand.” I checked my environmental monitor. Still green, but the values were higher than upstairs—a slow climb. Not dangerous, not yet, but definitely not baseline.
We did what we’d been sent to do: we documented. We photographed every corner, every workstation, every instrument we could identify and plenty we couldn’t. We logged serial numbers, labels, unusual readings. Moreno watched us with an intensity that verged on possessive, as if we were cataloguing pieces of his soul. When we’d finished with the main lab, he led us through a side door into a smaller, refrigerated room. The air there bit through coveralls and mask, cold and clinical. Walls were lined with storage units, small drawers arranged in precise grids. He opened one. Inside lay rows of vials, each filled with clear or faintly tinted liquids, each marked with dates and coordinate codes. “Sample archive,” he said. “Everything we collect is stored here for future analysis.”
I picked up a vial carefully, watching the viscous liquid cling to the glass. The date on its label was three months old. The location code meant nothing to me. “Where’s this from?” I asked. “Local monitoring site,” Moreno said without missing a beat. “We have several collection points in the surrounding hills.” I set the vial back down and logged the label, but a feeling stuck in my throat like a swallowed stone—this sense that we were walking through a curated version of the truth, hand-picked exhibits in a museum built over something much older and more dangerous. When we finished our sweep, Moreno shut the refrigeration unit, scribbled something on his clipboard, and asked if we needed to see anything else on this level. I caught Luna’s eye. That was enough—for now.
As we left the lab, I noticed another door down the hall, different from the others. Heavier, darker metal, a red warning symbol stenciled across it that I didn’t recognize. The keypad beside it glowed a steady green, indicating active status, not storage or disuse. “What’s through there?” I asked. Moreno gave it the briefest glance, like a person pretending not to look at something they’ve been thinking about all day. “Storage. Sealed for maintenance,” he said. His voice didn’t quite carry the confidence his face tried to show. “Not part of your assessment.” I nodded and made a quiet promise to myself that it would be part of my report anyway.
When we returned to Level Two, Hayes was waiting in the conference room with another man I hadn’t seen before—older, thinning hair, suit sharp enough to cut paper. He looked like he belonged in Washington, not underground in the desert. “This is Dr. Alan Cortez,” Hayes said. “He oversees our research operations.” Cortez shook my hand with a practiced smile. “What do you think of the facility, Sergeant?” he asked. I chose my words as carefully as I’d chosen routes through minefields. “Impressive,” I said. “More extensive than we expected from the initial briefing.” Cortez nodded, like he’d been expecting that answer. “It’s grown over the years,” he said. “Our mandate has expanded. What began as basic geological research has become something more comprehensive.” His tone wrapped the word “comprehensive” in velvet and razor blades.
Luna asked what kind of research we were talking about. Cortez’s smile thinned. “That’s classified at a level above your current clearance,” he said. “But I can assure you it’s vital to national security. The work we do here saves lives in ways you’ll never hear about.” It was the kind of line designed to end questions, not answer them. We reported our preliminary findings: moisture seepage on Level Three, temperature anomalies on Level Four, signs of aging infrastructure. Hayes made notes, promised a maintenance team would investigate. Then he dropped the next piece of the trap. “You’ll be staying the night,” he said. “Quarters are ready for you on Level One. Tomorrow you’ll complete your assessment and submit your final report.”
The quarters were functional: small bedrooms with bunks, a shared bathroom, a common area with a table, a few chairs, a TV that probably worked but remained off. No windows—the facility might as well have existed on another planet for all it admitted the outside world. We locked up our gear and sat at the table, the four of us leaning on elbows, trading looks that said more than words. “They’re hiding something big,” Torres said eventually, keeping his voice low even though we knew everything down here was probably being listened to anyway. Luna nodded slowly. “The cells on Four. The equipment in that lab. Nothing they told us matches what this place was built for.” I stared at my hands. “Question is whether it’s our business,” I said. But I already knew the answer: if something down here failed hard enough, it would become everyone’s business, whether we knew the details or not.
I tried to sleep that night, but the facility wouldn’t let me. It hummed and breathed, not like a building but like a living organism whose heartbeat was buried in walls and pipes. Footsteps echoed in hallways at odd hours, doors hissed shut somewhere out of sight, distant machinery kicked on with a low thrum that vibrated through the mattress. Around midnight, I gave up. I pulled on my clothes and stepped into the common area, thinking I might walk the corridor a bit, burn off the restless energy. Torres was already there, sitting in the dark at the table, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. “Can’t sleep either?” I asked. He shook his head. “This place feels wrong,” he said simply. Not sinister, not haunted, just wrong, like a law of physics was being bent somewhere below our feet. I tried to tell him we’d finish our assessment the next day, file the report, and leave this all behind. Even as I said the words, they felt hollow. The story, whatever it was, didn’t feel finished. It felt like the opening beat to something much worse.
At 0300 hours, the facility changed. The rhythm of footsteps in the hall outside shifted from slow and routine to fast and urgent. I woke to that sound, to doors opening and closing down the corridor, to the faint clatter of equipment cases. I opened my door a crack and watched three men in white coats hurry past, carrying heavy cases, faces tight. Two guards followed them, rifles ready, eyes sharp. They turned the corner toward the elevator without a word. I was already pulling on my gear when I went to knock on Luna’s door. He was awake, boots on, watching the hallway through his own cracked door. “You saw them?” he whispered. I nodded. “Get Torres,” I said. “Something’s happening.”
We met in the common area, the air thick with that weird, vibrating tension that comes right before something breaks. The ambient hum we’d grown used to all day had changed—a deeper pulse now, irregular, as if some heavy system had come online. The lights flickered twice, dimmed for a heartbeat, then stabilized. Torres glanced at his watch. “That’s a big power redistribution,” he muttered. “They’ve fired up something heavy.” Before we could speculate further, the door to our quarters slid open. Colonel Hayes stood there, still in his clothes from earlier, but with a new haggardness around his eyes. “Gear up,” he said. “Full protective. We need you for an emergency assessment.”
“Of what?” I asked, though the answer was already forming in the hollow of my gut. Hayes met my gaze. “Level Five,” he said. The level that had been sealed. The level we’d been explicitly told to avoid. He didn’t stay to argue. “Ten minutes. Elevator,” he said, and left.
We dressed like our lives depended on every strap and filter being secure, because suddenly it felt like they did. Same coveralls, same respirators and gloves as before, but with something extra now: radiation badges Hayes had left outside our door, the kind used for areas where exposure is a real possibility, not just an abstract threat. We reached the elevator as a group, the four of us, the black devices on our chests glowing steady green like a lie. Hayes was waiting with Dr. Cortez, two armed guards, and Dr. Moreno, who clutched a heavy equipment case like a lifeline. The elevator doors slid open, revealing a control panel that looked slightly different from what we’d seen before. Beneath the button labeled “5” was another unlabeled, blank circle we hadn’t noticed earlier. Hayes pressed it. “Level Five?” I asked, unable to stop myself. “You’ve only seen the upper section,” he said. “This is the primary access.”
The descent felt endless. Thirty seconds. Forty. Fifty. The numbers in my head climbed with the sense of weight above us. We were going far deeper than Levels Two, Three, or Four. The air cooled further, the pressure of the earth above us pressing in on all sides. My breath fogged the inside of the mask. No one spoke. When the doors finally opened, the first thing I noticed was the sound. Level Five didn’t hum like the others. It rumbled, a low, constant mechanical growl peppered with high-pitched beeps and the occasional thud that you felt rather than heard. The corridor we stepped into was wider and more heavily reinforced, the walls lined with thick steel plating. Massive cables ran along the ceiling, pulsing faintly as if carrying liquid light instead of electricity.
The air tasted metallic even through the respirator, like blood and cold steel. My environmental monitor jumped from green straight into yellow in a single heartbeat. Not a gentle drift—an immediate spike. “Stay close,” Hayes ordered. “Don’t touch anything you’re not told to. Don’t open any doors unless I say so.” We moved in a tight formation, boots clicking against the floor, echoes chasing us. The corridor branched multiple times, but Hayes navigated without consulting a map, his feet tracing paths he’d clearly walked many times. After about a hundred yards, we reached a checkpoint: a heavy blast door fitted with a biometric scanner. Hayes placed his hand on the pad, waited while the device hummed and flashed. The door slid open with a hiss that sounded like exhalation from something sleeping behind walls.
Beyond was a control room that looked like the nervous system of the entire level. One wall was a mosaic of monitors, each screen showing a different camera feed: corridors, labs, cells, large rooms with tanks and equipment. Many of the feeds showed empty hallways or closed doors. But one screen at the center stood out. It displayed a chamber with a cylindrical tank bathed in a soft, unnatural light. Inside, suspended in some kind of fluid, was a shape I couldn’t immediately classify. Roughly humanoid, but elongated, too thin, with limbs that bent slightly wrong. I stared, trying to decide if the distortion was due to the liquid or the thing itself. Then Cortez spoke. “That’s why you’re here,” he said quietly. “Three hours ago, we experienced a containment breach in Section C. Subject in Tank Seven became active and damaged the housing. We’ve reestablished partial containment, but the structural integrity of the entire section is now in question.”
He used the word “subject” the way someone might say “equipment.” Luna asked the question we were all thinking. “Subject?” Cortez clasped his hands behind his back. “We conduct biological research down here,” he said, picking each word with care. “Some of our specimens are… unusual.” I stepped closer to the monitor without realizing it. “What kind of specimens?” I asked. For the first time, Hayes’s voice hardened. “The kind you don’t ask about, Sergeant. Your job is to assess whether Section C is stable enough for us to complete recontainment procedures. That’s all.” But it wasn’t all, not anymore—not after seeing that thing in the tank.
We left the control room and pushed deeper into Level Five. The lighting down here had been shifted to emergency mode in some sections, everything painted in pulsing red. Cracks spiderwebbed along the walls, some small, some wide enough to slide a fingertip into. Fluid—thicker than water, faintly luminous—leaked from a ruptured pipe and pooled along the floor in one corridor, casting ghost light on our boots as we stepped carefully around it. My environmental monitor surged toward orange. We passed sealed chambers with reinforced windows, glimpsing tanks inside. Some sat empty, cables dangling like abandoned restraints. Others held shapes that were no easier to understand than the one on the monitor upstairs—silhouettes in the dim light, some curled in on themselves, others floating inert. None moved, but an ugly certainty settled in my chest that they were not unaware.
“How long has this level been active?” I asked, more to fill the space than anything else. “Completed in 1979,” Cortez replied. “Research has been ongoing here for eight years.” “What kind of research needs tanks like that and doors like these?” Luna muttered. Cortez stopped walking, turned, and for the first time the carefully controlled mask slipped a fraction. “In 1947,” he said slowly, “something happened in Roswell, as I’m sure you’re aware. Most of what you’ve heard about it is nonsense. Not all of it.” The air seemed to thin around us. “We recovered materials,” he continued. “Technology we did not understand. And biological samples. Most were dead. Some were not. Some… led to discoveries that exceeded our existing frameworks.”
“So you have aliens down here,” I said flatly, because sometimes you have to just say the insane thing to make it real. Cortez’s mouth tightened. “We have biological specimens of unknown origin,” he corrected. “Whether they are extraterrestrial or something else entirely is a classification above your clearance.” But we all knew the word he wasn’t saying. You could dress it up in bureaucratic language, wrap it in secrecy; it still had the same shape in the mind. Whatever they were, they weren’t from around here.
Section C bore its injuries openly. One wall had partially collapsed, exposing twisted metal supports that groaned occasionally as if remembering the impact. That same luminescent fluid seeped from cracks and pooled near our boots. The air vibrated in that way it does when systems are running beyond their intended thresholds. My monitor beeped and flashed orange. “Cooling system breach,” Moreno said after taking a quick reading near a ruptured pipe. “Temperature inside Tank Seven is rising. If it hits forty degrees Celsius, we’ll lose containment entirely.” Hayes’s voice cut in sharp. “How long?” “Two hours,” Moreno said, then amended, “Maybe less.”
Hayes turned to me like someone snapping a puzzle piece into place. “Can we stabilize this section long enough to transfer the specimen?” he asked. Torres ran his structural scanner along the damaged wall, watching numbers roll across the display. “Short-term reinforcement is possible,” he said. “But this whole section needs reconstruction. Supports are compromised across load-bearing points. It’s not designed for whatever stress it’s under now.” “Short-term is all we need,” Hayes said. He keyed his radio to a secure channel. “Bring in the transfer team. We’re moving Tank Seven to isolation.”
While they mobilized, I found myself drawn toward the observation window into Section C, toward the damaged tank that had started all this. The cylindrical chamber was cracked, its field of restraint flickering with intermittent sparks that made the fluid shimmer in strange waves. Through the distortions, I saw the occupant clearly for the first time. Humanoid, yes, but only in broad strokes. Roughly four feet tall, limbs long and thin like someone had stretched a human template out of proportion, fingers tapering too far. The head was larger than it should’ve been, the neck too slender to support it by the rules of our anatomy. The skin—what I could see of it—was grayish, almost translucent, veins like faint threads under the surface. It moved slowly inside the tank, not thrashing, but testing, pressing against the weakening field like a prisoner checking every bar in a cell.
Then it turned. And it looked at me.
I can’t explain how I knew, through cracked glass, rippling fluid, and faltering electricity, that its gaze locked onto mine. But I knew. Its eyes were large, black, depthless, reflecting nothing. Yet something behind them churned with an intensity that made my heartbeat stutter. There was no animal panic in that stare, no dumb confusion. There was intelligence. Awareness. And something else—an emotion I couldn’t name, somewhere between recognition, accusation, and a kind of exhausted curiosity. It tilted its head the slightest bit, like a person trying to make sense of a stranger. For one surreal instant, the entire facility, the soldiers, the scientists, the walls, the codes, all fell away. It was just me and that impossibly alien gaze, locked across a barrier that felt far thinner than the glass suggested.
“Ramirez.” Hayes’s voice cut through the moment like a blade. “Step away from the window.” I obeyed, but even as I retreated, I felt that stare clinging to my back like static. Whatever was in that tank knew I’d seen it. It had seen me. And there was meaning in that exchange, some message humans weren’t equipped to decode.
The transfer team arrived in full containment suits that made ours look like cheap raincoats. Six people, faces hidden behind mirrored visors, moved with the efficiency of a practiced drill. They positioned a mobile containment unit outside Section C, cables snaking from it to the damaged tank. The operation was both technical and ritualistic, every step double-checked, every reading called out. Inside the tank, the specimen reacted, pressing harder against the failing field, movements growing more urgent as if it understood what they were doing. Sparks intensified around its limbs, lighting up the fluid like lightning in a storm cloud. For one terrible moment, the field flickered almost entirely out, and the thing pressed full-body against the inner glass, so close that I could see fine details of its skin, the subtle patterning around its eyes, the faint tremor in its extended fingers.
Then the transfer unit fully engaged, field strength stabilized, and the specimen went suddenly still, as though it had realized that struggling only accelerated something it couldn’t stop. The process took twenty minutes. My environmental monitor inched closer and closer to the critical threshold, numbers climbing while droplets of luminescent fluid crawled down shattered concrete like living things. Finally, they secured the specimen in the mobile chamber, sealed it, and began wheeling it toward an isolation wing deeper in the facility. As it rolled past us, I caught a last look through the reinforced viewing window. The being was pressed against the inner surface, one too-long hand splayed wide, those dark eyes focused directly on me again. Five slender fingers, jointed like ours but wrong somehow in their proportions, spread as if in greeting or accusation. Then it was gone, wheeled away, swallowed by corridors I’d never see.
“Section’s yours,” Hayes said gruffly. “Document everything. Full structural report by oh-eight hundred.” He left with the transfer team, Dr. Cortez, and the guards, leaving us alone with Dr. Moreno, the damaged chamber, and the uneasy awareness that we were standing in a place where the universe’s rules had already been broken.
We fell into the motions of our work because sometimes that’s all there is between you and panic. Torres scanned walls and supports, frowning at crack patterns and muttering about stress loads. Luna photographed every fracture, every leaking joint, every warped beam. I logged observations, noting that the physical instability of the facility seemed to mirror an emotional one that no one wanted to acknowledge. Moreno watched us with a haunted look, his tablet clutched like a shield. After a while, he spoke, voice low. “You think we’re monsters for keeping them here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I kept writing for a moment, then set down my pen. “I think you’re doing something most people would refuse to believe even if you showed them proof,” I said. “And I think you’re doing it in secret, without any kind of oversight we’d normally demand for experiments on anything intelligent.” Moreno rubbed his forehead. “We didn’t ask for this,” he said. “When the first specimens were brought here in ’79, I was a junior researcher. Soil samples and air quality surveys—that’s what I expected. Then they flew in sealed crates at three in the morning, guarded by men who didn’t have names on their uniforms. They opened them in a lab not unlike the one you saw. Inside…” He gestured vaguely toward the damaged tank, then let his hand fall. “Inside were the future or the end of us, depending on how you look at it.”
“Instead of scientists, you became zookeepers,” Luna said. The word hung heavy. Moreno flinched. “We call ourselves containment specialists,” he muttered. “But yes. That’s essentially our job.” I asked how many specimens were down here, really. He hesitated, eyes flicking toward a security camera in the corner. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “Can’t or won’t?” I pushed. “Both.”
Torres finished his scan of the main wall and recommended we inspect adjacent sections. “If this much stress is visible here, neighboring corridors might be failing too,” he said. Moreno nodded and led us through a side door into a connecting passage: slightly better condition, fewer fractures, but the same underlying strain etched into concrete. We walked past more reinforced doors with small windows. Most were dark, tanks within unlit. In one, though, I saw movement. Something large shifted in the shadows, a bulk that was not human, not humanoid. Only when it passed near the faint light did I glimpse a hint of its form: too many jointed segments, like muscle wrapped around machinery, moving in slow coils. “What’s in there?” I asked. Moreno checked the door number. “Tank Twelve,” he said. “Subject is currently dormant.” He paused. “Not all specimens share the same morphology as Subject Seven. Some are… different.”
Before I could dig into what “different” meant, an alarm exploded through the corridor—sharp, repeating pulses that reverberated through bone as much as air. Red lights strobed, turning the world into jagged snapshots. Moreno grabbed his radio. “Control, this is Dr. Moreno. What’s happening?” Static spluttered, then a strained voice answered. “Breach in Tank Four. Subject is loose in corridor. Lockdown initiated.”
“Which corridor?” Moreno demanded. “Section B,” came the reply. “Near junction with Section A.” Moreno went pale. That put the breach maybe a hundred yards from where we stood. “We need to move. Now,” he said.
We ran, boots pounding metal and concrete. Behind us, heavy security doors slammed shut in a chain reaction, automatically sealing off compromised sections. The vibrations under our feet grew stronger, resolving into something like heavy footsteps—but not quite. There was a sound of metal tearing, a horrible moan of stressed bolts and giving steel, and beneath it all, a tone I still can’t categorize. Not an animal roar, not a mechanical screech, but some unsettling hybrid of the two. The main security door ahead of us began to descend, lockdown protocols kicking the final barrier into place. Moreno dove through first. Torres and Luna followed. I barely made it, sliding under with inches to spare, the door slamming shut behind my boots with a final, echoing crash.
On the other side, the alarm was slightly muffled. The corridor here was cleaner, more “finished,” signs labeling it as Section D. “Safe zone,” Moreno said between breaths. “Lockdown should contain the breach.” Luna asked what happens to a specimen that gets loose. Moreno swallowed. “Security teams engage according to protocol,” he said. “They’re trained for it.” “Protocols for what?” I pressed. He met my eyes, and for the first time I saw honest fear there. “The specimen in Tank Four is hostile,” he said quietly. “Extremely. That’s why its containment measures are… excessive.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
We waited in Section D for half an hour that felt like a day. The alarm eventually cut off, replaced by patchy radio updates. Breach contained. Specimen recaptured. Two security personnel injured but alive. No fatalities—this time. When we finally returned to Section C, the air felt more brittle, every creak of stressed metal louder than before. Nothing visible had changed in the damage, but everything felt worse. We finished our assessment and returned to Level Two at 0645 hours, exhausted and vibrating with a kind of internal tremor adrenaline leaves behind.
In the conference room, the atmosphere had shifted. Hayes and Cortez were there, joined by several high-ranking officers whose uniforms were heavy with stars and ribbons. I recognized one from training manuals—a three-star general whose name was whispered with a mixture of respect and discomfort. I delivered our conclusions: Section C was structurally compromised. Evacuation and reinforcement needed within forty-eight hours or the risk of catastrophic collapse was significant. I added that similar stress patterns suggested other sections on Level Five could be unstable as well. The general’s jaw tightened. “Your assessment is that Level Five as a whole is unstable,” he said. “Section C specifically,” I clarified. “But ignoring the rest would be negligent.”
“That’s problematic,” the general said, as if we’d told him lunch would be late, not that his secret alien prison was rotting from the inside out. Luna bristled. “With respect, sir, that level is a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “Whatever you’re keeping down there, it’s not safe—for anyone.” “Safety is relative, Sergeant,” the general replied. “The work we do here is critical to the survival of this country, perhaps the species. Sometimes we accept localized risk to prevent larger catastrophes.”
“Then maybe you ought to move whatever you’re storing,” I said, struggling to keep my tone neutral. “Build a new facility somewhere that isn’t about to crush itself.” Cortez shook his head. “Relocation isn’t an option,” he said. “The specimens are too dangerous to transport, and there’s nowhere else with containment systems of this sophistication. Level Five is unique.” Torres spoke up quietly, but the words landed hard. “Then you’re sitting on a time bomb,” he said. No one contradicted him.
The meeting ended with orders: we were to perform a comprehensive structural assessment of all levels over the next forty-eight hours, compile a full engineering report, and then submit to debriefing. We’d sign fresh non-disclosure agreements and be reassigned. On the surface, it sounded like just another bizarre job in a series of missions no one at home would ever hear about. But as we left the room, my mind kept circling back to that image from Section C—Subject Seven’s hand splayed against glass, those dark eyes fixed on me with an understanding that felt uncomfortably close to human. Whatever was down in Level Five, it wasn’t just “research material.” It was alive. Imprisoned. And it wasn’t going to stay contained forever.
That night, sleep refused to come. I lay in my bunk listening to the facility groan and sigh, thinking about cracks that weren’t just in concrete but in ethics, in reason itself. We’d built a cage around things that didn’t fit our world and told ourselves it was for security, for knowledge, for the greater good. But cages fail. Systems fail. People fail. Somewhere beneath my mattress, beneath metal, beneath earth, Level Five waited, full of beings who had never volunteered to be studied. The longer I stared at the dark ceiling, the more certain I became that we were past the point of controlling the story. We were just trying to delay the ending.
The next morning, at 0800 hours, the comprehensive assessment began. Luna and Torres joined a fresh team of engineers flown in overnight to re-examine Levels Three and Four, armed with more sophisticated instruments and the unpleasant knowledge that any anomaly might be the first domino. I was assigned to accompany Dr. Moreno back down to Level Five alongside a specialized group of technicians and guards. As the elevator descended once more into the depths, the tension was thick enough to taste. When the doors opened, that sense of wrongness hit harder than before. More guards lined the corridors, weapons drawn and ready. Scientists hurried past us, pushing carts loaded with equipment and sealed containers. The low rumble of machines had shifted from steady hum to frantic growl.
We started in Section A, one of the older wings. The tanks there were smaller and cruder versions of the one I’d seen in Section C, glass cylinders wrapped in retro-looking metal frameworks. Some were empty. Several were not. In one, I saw a specimen similar to Subject Seven but smaller, maybe three feet tall, limbs thinner, frame more fragile. Its skin bore scars—thin, pale lines crisscrossing its torso. One arm ended in a stump; the hand was gone. Tubes and sensors cradled its body like a tangle of mechanical vines. Its eyes were open, staring listlessly at nothing, lids barely blinking. “What happened?” I asked, unable to keep my voice entirely flat.
Moreno checked his tablet. “Subject Three,” he said. “Recovered in 1980 in Nevada. Injured during retrieval. We tried to treat it, but our medical knowledge…” He trailed off, gesturing helplessly. The emptiness in the specimen’s gaze gutted me in a way I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t fear I saw there. It was resignation. At some point, this being had understood that escape wasn’t coming. That realization had hollowed it out from the inside. It watched nothing and everything all at once. I felt an unexpected swell of pity—deep, humbling, and entirely out of place in a military operation that had started as a structural survey.
While we logged structural data—beam deflections, wall microfractures, temperature gradients—the facility made its decision. It didn’t announce it. The first sign was subtle: a slight vibration underfoot, too rhythmic to be random. Then Section A’s door to B refused Moreno’s badge. He tried twice. Nothing. He radioed control. They told him to stay where he was. Before he could argue, the faint vibration intensified, rattling equipment on counters. The alarm tore through Level Five again, louder this time, angrier. “Status?” Moreno shouted into his radio. The response chilled me. “Multiple containment failures,” the voice said. “Section B compromised. Evacuating non-essential personnel. Facility-wide lockdown imminent.”
My environmental monitor exploded from green to yellow to orange in seconds. Numbers spiked as if some invisible line had been crossed. “Move!” I said. We ran for the elevator, Moreno shouting into his radio, technicians scrambling behind us. The ground shook from distant impacts—metal meeting something much stronger than it was built to handle. A sound like tortured steel rippled down the corridor. The lights flickered and died. For a few suffocating heartbeats, we were in total blackness, alone in the bowels of the earth with things we couldn’t see. Then emergency red lights flared, bathing everything in blood.
The elevator wasn’t responding. “It’s locked down,” one of the techs said, voice rising in panic. “We’re sealed in.” “There are no emergency stairs from Level Five,” Moreno said, breathless. “Elevator’s the only way out.” My radio crackled. “Ramirez, this is Hayes,” came the colonel’s strained voice. “We’re working to override lockdown. Hold position.” “We don’t have a position,” I snapped. “Something from Section B is coming through.”
The thick security door at the end of the corridor bowed inward with an awful, screeching whine. Metal deformed like clay under pressure from the other side. Through the widening gap, I saw movement—multiple silhouettes, no two identical. The door gave with a final shriek, ripped clean from its frame and thrown aside like a toy. Three specimens emerged. Two were the standard gray type, similar to Subject Seven but smaller and moving faster than any human at that height should. The third was different—taller, nearly six feet, frame more angular, joints sharper. Its head shape diverged from the others, elongated backward like a teardrop. Where the smaller ones’ movements seemed reactive, this one moved with deliberate purpose. It felt like command embodied.
It turned its head toward us. Even at that distance, even through the haze, I felt that gaze lock onto me specifically, like a spotlight. There was a spark of recognition there, echoing the moment in Section C, as if some shared awareness bridged our worlds. Then it raised one long arm and pointed directly at me. The two smaller specimens bolted forward at the gesture.
One of the technicians, Rodriguez, drew his sidearm and fired on instinct. Three shots, center mass. The first specimen staggered as the rounds hit. The wounds didn’t bleed—not in any way that looked natural. Instead, the impact points glowed faintly, like embers pressed into wet clay. The being didn’t fall. It kept coming. “Head!” I shouted. “Aim for the head!” Rodriguez adjusted and fired again. A round tore through the side of the specimen’s skull. It dropped instantly, limbs going slack, sliding across the floor. The second was nearly on him when the elevator behind us dinged softly, absurdly normal in the chaos. The doors snapped open to reveal Hayes and four guards carrying weapons I’d never seen before—sleek rifles with cables and emitters instead of conventional barrels.
“Get in!” Hayes barked. We dove for the elevator. The guards fanned out at the threshold and fired. Instead of muzzle flash, forks of blue-white energy arced down the corridor, slamming into the advancing specimen and hurling it backwards. The tall one didn’t charge. It stood watching, inscrutable. For a moment, our eyes locked again. Then, with a calmness that felt more chilling than any roar, it turned and disappeared back into the darkness of Section B. The elevator doors slid shut, cutting off the view. We shot upward, the air in the small space thick with the smell of ozone and fear.
Level Two was chaos. People ran in organized panic, arms full of cases, clipboards, hard drives. Guards shouted orders. Alarms blared so loud they seemed to shake the air. We were hustled into the conference room again, this time not as assessors but as witnesses caught in someone else’s catastrophe. The general stood at the head of the table, radio pressed to his ear. “Status,” he demanded. Hayes reported in: Level Five completely compromised. Fourteen specimens uncontained. Main elevator sealed, but some were accessing service shafts not originally designed for them. The words “service shafts” made my stomach twist. They were crawling through the facility’s veins.
“Recommendations,” the general said. Hayes hesitated for the first time since I’d met him. Then he said the words that turned everything from horror story to execution order. “Full evacuation and facility destruction,” he said. “It’s the only way to guarantee containment.” The general was silent for three seconds that stretched into forever. Then he nodded. “Authorization granted,” he said. “Begin evacuation. Set charges on Levels Four and Five. We bury it all.”
“What about the specimens?” Moreno asked, voice hollow. No one answered.
Evacuation was fast but not rushed—this was not the first time they’d drilled for this scenario. Scientists grabbed only what they absolutely needed. Guards hustled people to elevators in staggered waves. We were assigned to the second wave, given a narrow window to collect our gear, our notebooks—though I suspected anything too sensitive would be confiscated before it ever left the base. In the decon area, as the mist washed over us one last time, Luna found me. “We’re really going to blow the whole place?” he asked quietly. “With them still down there?” I nodded. “The order’s given.”
“They’re alive, Ethan,” he said. “And intelligent. We both know it. This isn’t just destroying a building. It’s executing prisoners whose only crime was existing where we could reach them.” I didn’t have a response that didn’t sound like cowardice or complicity. Outside, the desert sun hit us like a physical blow after so long under artificial light. Military trucks lined the access road, engines idling. Helicopters beat the air overhead. We drove to a ridge overlooking the facility entrance, now just a concrete mouth across the canyon, quiet in a way that felt deeply wrong. Officers stood with binoculars and radios, voices clipped as they checked and re-checked the countdown.
“Charges set,” someone reported. “All personnel accounted for.” The general checked his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he said. I stared at the facility. From this distance, it looked small, peaceful, just another anonymous piece of government infrastructure. But I knew what steeped beneath—that impossibly deep level, rows of tanks, scarred beings with empty eyes, a tall figure who had pointed at me as if selecting a witness. “Ten seconds,” someone called. My mouth went dry. I couldn’t help but imagine Subject Three staring at nothing in its tank, or Subject Seven pressing its hand against the glass, waiting for a universe that would never see it as anything but a threat. “Five,” came the final call. I wondered whether the tall specimen had understood what was coming. Whether death was better than endless imprisonment. Whether their motives, whatever they were, were any worse than ours.
Detonation.
For a moment, nothing. Then the ground shuddered under our boots, a low rumble rolling across the desert. The concrete face of the facility crumpled inward as if an invisible fist had punched the earth. Dust erupted skyward, a thick gray plume spreading like a bruise across the sky. A second explosion boomed from deeper underground, followed by a drawn-out groan as levels collapsed onto each other. The entrance sank, then the area around it, soil and rock dropping into a widening crater. It took less than a minute for an entire hidden world to be crushed, buried, and erased. When the dust began to settle, what remained was a jagged hole in the ground, slowly filling with rubble and silence.
The general lowered his binoculars. “Secure the perimeter,” he ordered. “No unauthorized personnel within a mile. This location is now off the record.” Luna stood beside me, eyes fixed on the crater. “It’s still down there,” he said quietly. “Some of them might survive. Buried. Trapped.” The wind picked up then, carrying dust across our boots, across the flattened dirt. I had the sudden, unnerving sensation that the desert itself was listening.
We returned to Kirtland the next day. The debriefing lasted six hours. We recounted events in excruciating detail for a panel of officers and suits who took notes and asked surgical questions but never betrayed what they already knew. We signed non-disclosure agreements with penalties that might as well have been threats for life. We were told, on record, that the facility had been a geological research station that suffered catastrophic structural failure due to seismic activity. No specimens. No alien anything. No breaches, no executions, no moral agony. Everything else—our notes, photographs, sensor readings—were classified, confiscated, and locked away. Our unit was quietly disbanded. Luna got sent to Germany. Torres was rotated to Japan. I was offered a comfortable promotion and a Pentagon desk, a way to tuck me somewhere safe and monitored. I declined. I requested discharge. They gave it to me with a handshake, a Good Conduct Medal, and a reminder that if I ever broke my NDA, my freedom would end where the nearest cell door began.
I left the Army in November 1987. I got a civilian job, eventually built a life—marriage, kids, bills, small domestic worries that felt, at times, like another kind of cover. On good days, Dulce was just a bad dream I’d woken up from. On bad nights, it came back in vivid snapshots: red siren light strobing off metal, the sound of metal tearing like the earth itself was screaming, the feeling of a gaze that didn’t belong to any creature I’d ever been taught existed. I’d find myself standing at my kitchen window, staring out at some innocuous suburban street, wondering how many secrets like Dulce were buried under land that looked just as harmless.
People talk about aliens like they’re punchlines or terrors, either little green men in cheap cartoons or unstoppable invaders in blockbuster movies. The truth is messier. If you asked me whether the beings at Dulce were aliens, I’d have to say probably. Unless there’s some hidden branch of evolution on Earth that produces gray-skinned, large-eyed, four-foot-tall humanoids who can survive in containment tanks for decades. But the label felt suddenly less important the more I thought about it with distance. The real question isn’t “What were they?” It’s “What did it say about us that we caged them in the dark, experimented on them, and then buried them alive when we lost control?”
We told ourselves it was about security. That whatever knowledge we extracted would keep humanity safer. But what I saw in those tanks wasn’t a threat in motion—it was a threat we created by forcing beings we didn’t understand into captivity. We decided that because we could build a prison under the desert, we had the right to fill it with anything we could drag in. And when it all began to fall apart, we didn’t admit failure. We detonated explosives, erased physical evidence, rewrote the narrative. The official story said nothing happened. But something did. I was there. Torres was there. Luna was there. Moreno? Cortez? Hayes? I don’t know where they all ended up. Maybe they buried their consciences with the facility. Maybe they wake up at 3 AM staring at ceilings, same as me, hearing alarms that are no longer sounding.
Years have taught me that secrets behave like pressure underground. You can pile dirt and steel on top of them, but they don’t disappear. They compress. They concentrate. They wait. Somewhere under the New Mexico desert, beneath tons of rock, there are twisted beams and shattered tanks and bones that aren’t strictly human. Maybe every specimen died in that collapse. Maybe not. Those things survived crashes, retrievals, decades in captivity. I have a hard time believing a single round of shaped charges wiped out every trace of them. Even if the beings themselves didn’t make it, there’s still tissue, tech, data drives, pages of notes, fragments of a story we decided we weren’t ready to know.
Most days, I don’t talk about Dulce. I don’t talk about the moment Subject Seven’s hand pressed to the glass, about Subject Three’s empty eyes, about the tall specimen raising its arm and singling me out in a motion that felt too intentional to dismiss. Instead, I buy groceries, mow the lawn, watch my kids grow up into a world shaped by a thousand decisions they’ll never hear the real reasons for. Sometimes, though, late at night, when the house is quiet and the old ache in my knees flares up, I remember the descent into Level Five, the feel of going past a point where sunlight existed only as an idea. And I wonder whether we did the right thing burying that place—or whether all we did was delay a reckoning.
Because here’s the part that keeps me up: if they survived—if even one being down there lived through the collapse—what would they think of us now? Would they see us as monsters who captured and dissected them, then panicked and blew up the cage? Or would they see us as desperate animals, terrified of the unknown, flailing in self-defense with tools we didn’t fully understand? We talk about “the secret of Dulce” like it’s about aliens, as if the shocking part is that we found life we didn’t expect. To me, the real secret is how quickly we assumed we had the right to contain that life. To own it. To decide whether it lived or died based on structural integrity reports and risk calculations.
So I live my quiet civilian life and carry this story like a loaded weapon I’m not allowed to fire. I watch documentaries about Roswell that get it all wrong and skip through interviews with “experts” who build careers on half-truths and speculation. I see conspiracy theorists talk about underground bases near Dulce, mixing lies with accidental fragments of real events, and I feel that familiar pressure behind my teeth—the urge to shout, You have no idea. But I don’t. Because somewhere, there’s still a file with my name on it, still a signature on a document that says my freedom is conditional on my silence.
And yet, silence doesn’t erase truth. It only delays whoever finds it next. One day, someone will dig in the wrong—or right—place in that desert. Maybe they’ll be part of a new classified project. Maybe they’ll be archaeologists chasing some unrelated mystery. Maybe they’ll be a kid with a metal detector and too much patience. Whoever it is, someday steel will clink against something that doesn’t belong in the natural strata. They’ll pull up fragments of reinforced glass that don’t match any known design, twisted metal beams fused with traces of elements that shouldn’t be there. Maybe they’ll find bone. Maybe they’ll find more than bone.
When that day comes, I hope they’re more prepared than we were—not just with better weapons or stronger walls, but with better questions. Questions about consent. About what intelligence means. About whether surviving a crash on our world gives us the right to chain you in a tank and poke at you for decades. The universe is bigger than we let ourselves imagine, and we are not alone in it. That’s not the scary part. The scary part is that, when we finally got undeniable proof, our first response was to drag it underground and lock it away. Then, when it frightened us enough, we blew it all to hell rather than face what it meant.
That’s the real story of Dulce—not that we found alien life, but that we were arrogant enough to believe we could contain it, dissect it, classify it, own it. And when it pushed back, we hit the reset button with explosives, pretending that rubble is the same as resolution. If you’re hearing this now—if somehow this account, stripped of names and redactions, has slipped through the cracks our keepers missed—remember this much: the facility is gone. The truth isn’t. It’s still out there, under the desert, in classified archives, in the nightmares of the people who survived it. Waiting for someone to dig it up.
If you ever go looking for it, be careful what you unbury. Some truths don’t just change what you know. They change what you are. And some prisons were never meant to hold forever—not because the walls aren’t strong enough, but because nothing that thinks and feels willingly accepts a cage. We learned that under Dulce at a cost we still haven’t fully counted. The bill, I think, is still coming due.
