The Myrna Hansen Abduction

Northern New Mexico, 1980. In Dulce, New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez had earned a nickname. "The cattle mutilation guy." That spring, a case would reach his desk that ran far beyond dead cattle.

May 5, 1980. Evening. A woman later known by the pseudonym Myrna Hansen was near Eagle Nest, New Mexico, with her young son. Over a meadow she saw two large, silent objects approximately the size of Goodyear Blimps. They were hovering.

The next day she went to the New Mexico State Police at Cimarron. Her report spoke of "interplanetary visitors, bright lights, and herds of cattle." Later retellings add that she and her six-year-old son saw several UFOs in a field and one approached them. Afterwards they suffered confusion and disorientation, then a period of amnesia that lasted as long as four hours.

The Cimarron police passed the case to Valdez. Valdez brought in Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque electronics businessman. On May 7, Hansen and her son went to Albuquerque and stayed in his home. APRO director James Lorenzen suggested a hypnotist. R. Leo Sprinkle, a University of Wyoming psychologist, flew in. The sessions took place somewhere unusual: Bennewitz's Lincoln Town Car, parked in the garage, its windows covered in thick aluminium foil. Hansen and Bennewitz insisted on it.

What surfaced was stranger than lights over a meadow. Two figures in white suits came out of one of the craft. They mutilated a cow in the field, alive, with an 18-inch knife. A cow was drawn up into a hovering craft. Mother and son were captured and taken to separate ships. A tall human interrupted her examination, apologized and ordered the aliens punished. Then she was taken underground, to a place she believed was in New Mexico. There she saw body parts floating in vats. She recalled being given an implant. At one point she exclaimed, "Where's Roswell, New Mexico?" Her son's account under hypnosis was sketchy.

Bennewitz said the sessions pointed to a facility a kilometer underground beneath the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation near Dulce. A letter he wrote in 1981 placed "Alien bases… 4.5 miles northwest of Dulce." Some secondary sources go further. They claim AFOSI agent Richard Doty matched her description to the Manzano Weapons Storage Area at Kirtland. No document supporting that has surfaced.

Greg Valdez, Gabe's son, wrote that "the Myrna Hansen story was probably a well-orchestrated hoax." Listening devices had been found in his father's house, so the government could have heard every call between Valdez and Bennewitz. Yet the Air Force "did not even acknowledge contact with Paul until November of 1980." Gabe Valdez "never believed there was alien activity. He pointed toward the government." Doty later said he had been tasked with feeding false information to researchers, including Bennewitz. On July 1, 1989, William Moore admitted he had helped push Bennewitz toward a breakdown. Whether Doty was involved as early as May 1980 remains uncertain.

Some sceptics blame the hypnosis. Sprinkle had already regressed Judy Doraty, whose calf mutilation story is strikingly similar to Hansen's. Hypnotic regression can produce confabulated memories.

Hansen's real name is believed to be in Sprinkle's redacted files. Her story became the seed of the Dulce Base legend, which John Lear, Bill Cooper and Phil Schneider later spread. It also runs through Greg Bishop's Project Beta, Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men and the 2013 documentary based on that book.