Dulce Base -- Myrna Hansen: The Abductee Whose Story Started Everything
Dulce Base -- Myrna Hansen: The Abductee Whose Story Started Everything
The May 1980 Incident
On May 5, 1980, a woman using the name "Myrna Hansen" (possibly a pseudonym) was driving with her son near Eagle Nest, New Mexico, when she reportedly witnessed two large, silent objects -- approximately the size of Goodyear blimps -- hovering over a meadow. Shortly after, she reported experiencing a period of missing time and later developed distressing memories of the encounter.
On May 6, 1980, New Mexico State Police in Cimarron received her report. They referred it to their colleague Gabe Valdez in Dulce, knowing his interest in unusual events in the area. Valdez contacted Paul Bennewitz.
The Hypnosis Sessions
Hansen and her son traveled to Albuquerque on May 7, 1980, to meet with Bennewitz. He arranged for hypnotherapy by Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist and tenured professor at the University of Wyoming who had been investigating UFO contact reports. The hypnosis sessions were conducted under unusual conditions:
- Hansen and Bennewitz insisted the sessions be conducted in Bennewitz's Lincoln Town Car
- The car was parked inside Bennewitz's garage
- The car windows were covered with thick aluminum foil during the sessions
Under hypnosis on May 11 and 12, 1980, Hansen reported:
- A recollection of a cow being sucked into a hovering spacecraft by a tractor beam
- Being taken aboard a craft by alien beings
- Being transported to an underground facility
- Witnessing body parts floating in vats inside the underground facility
- Being implanted with a device
The Device Claim
Hansen claimed that the alien beings had implanted a device in her body during the abduction. Bennewitz -- already developing his belief in alien electronic communications -- became intensely interested in this claim. When Hansen was later taken to the hospital for an X-ray, an anomalous shadow was reportedly found in an X-ray, roughly where she had indicated the device was located.
AFOSI agent Richard Doty, to whom Bennewitz reported, confirmed that Hansen's drawings of the underground base (produced during or after the hypnosis sessions) matched some Manzano storage rooms and bunkers at Kirtland. This "confirmation" from an AFOSI agent -- which was probably itself a disinformation move -- gave Bennewitz powerful reinforcement for the underground base theory.
The Birth of the Dulce Base Legend
The specific imagery Hansen produced under hypnosis -- body parts in vats, an underground facility with alien beings, human captives -- became the foundational imagery of the Dulce Base mythology. Her account, combined with Bennewitz's electronic intercept claims and Doty's confirmations and elaborations, crystallized the Dulce Base story in its essential form. The underground facility, the body parts, the alien-human captives, the government complicity -- all appear in Hansen's 1980 hypnotic testimony.
The Hypnosis Problem
The scientific and legal communities have, since the 1980s, developed substantial evidence that hypnotic regression reliably generates confabulation -- the production of vivid false memories that feel completely real to the subject. Subjects under hypnosis tend to produce accounts consistent with the cultural expectations of their hypnotist and their social environment. Hansen's sessions occurred with a hypnotist (Sprinkle) who was predisposed toward ET contact explanations, in the home of a researcher (Bennewitz) who was already developing an alien base theory, in a cultural environment saturated with abduction narratives.
The body parts in vats, the underground facility, the implanted device -- these may reflect Hansen's genuine subjective experience of hypnotic confabulation rather than actual memory, and that subjective experience may itself reflect cultural and social influences rather than genuine alien contact.
