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...yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. _________ Alan Moore

The evil that men do. Too often, too often is it all swallowed in the fog of the years - and how distant they seem, a random assemblage of digits, little else. Take, for instance, the dawn of the 1990s, and the dissolution and collapse of the Soviet Union, and a little later Apartheid South Africa, there erupted into public edification a mess of documents, texts, photographs, dossiers, and files, suddenly declassified or at least made availably public some years before, which taken together, solidifying in the curious mind now freed from the Reaganesque reveries, the Nixonian deliriums, proved once and for all that the United States government had undertaken truly awful esoteric things in the name of winning the Cold War. It was a different time then, some would say - but what is the difference between 1984, the time of trust in the government and only winks and whispers that were always drowned out by the brassy echo chamber of patriotism...and 1994, when the secrets poured out like a broken dam, in an epoch of relief but also profound skepticism? As Time collapses the gap, making the close, distant, and the distant, eternal, the memories become blurred and then sink into a kind of stupor, letting people forget the outrages foisted upon them, the existential horror of their nations' crimes. Perhaps there is only so much that people can handle. It is has been said elsewhere that the inability of the human to collate everything it has observed and absorbed is actually a blessing in disguise...if we knew what we truly were, a whole planet sharing a collective mental horror on the same global scale as Oedipus did, once, as an individual - who can say? Best not to think about it. There are horrors in this world that have no explanation, there are things on our lonesome Earth which have no solution, nothing to answer for. In this particular instance, however, do we glimpse things that are but flashes of light onto a grandly grotesque colossus that spends its life in ever-shifting shadow: Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, Majestic 12, Area 51. To be certain about the state of things in the world is to be led into a fool's paradise. Take, for instance - the suicide of Degory Chandler. Chandler was found at the side of the road a mile or so outside of Vaughan, New Mexico, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, his Beretta pistol still in his hand - because he was mid-ranger Department of Defense employee, his badly decomposed body was taken to a government facility and autopsied before being released to his family in Rockford, Illinois. By all accounts Chandler was an affable and content young man, a freshly earned doctorate from Urbana-Champaign in hand, hired by the government to research biological agents and genetic engineering. He was one of scores of young men recruited after the intelligence assessment known as Team B was promulgated by the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-70s - the Cold War getting hot again meant that new and innovative ideas needed to be explored, as they had been in the first decade or so after the end of World War II, to put the United States back on the same footing as the Soviet Union. What exactly Chandler was researching, was, of course, classified, but that wasn't what made his death so odd - it was where he was found. Officially, Chandler's clearance and employment record was for the White Sands Missile Range, which had biological warfare laboratories on site - why, then, was his body found almost six hours away by car, with no transportation in sight? Because he wasn't working at White Sands. He was working at Dulce Base. The reality of Dulce Base will probably never be acknowledged as real even by the kookiest members of UFO and conspiracy circles, because it has long thought to have been a source of pure disinformation, if not science fiction: a gruesome delirium seething under the Archuleta Mesa, dreamt up by the tragic figure of Paul Bennewitz - who, it is very much on record, was deliberately driven to insane paranoia by none other than the United States Air Force, which fed him what was said to be patent nonsense he was gullible enough to not only dump out for public edification but, worse, actually believe himself. So UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, the average Coast-To-Coast AM listeners...they all approach the topic of Dulce Base with caution, sensitivity, and even a bit of cringe. Nowadays, the town of Dulce is trying to cash in on its supposed notoriety the same way Roswell did, but the memory of Bennewitz himself - dragged to a mental hospital screaming about being injected with strange chemicals in 1988 - hits altogether too close to home for some: after all, there but for a few crazy dreams goes most of the people that would believe Dulce Base exists... ...but it does. Archuleta Mesa, where Dulce Base resides, is an ugly crag that juts out of one of those wild mountain formations that makes the border of Colorado and New Mexico one of those romantic places in North America. Underneath it and inside it are unholy and terrible experiments done in the name of unethical knowledge and national security - another facet of New Mexico's dubious honor of being some modern portal to other worlds and fringe science. New Mexico itself is tormented with strangeness - haunted is the wrong word, as it implies something ancient and settled, like the montane nightmares of West Virginia or the magnolia-choked ghosts away down South...New Mexico is where the Atomic Age began at Trinity, where one can still see the stars as distant human ancestors saw them, and wonder if the same accidental visitors who crashed to Roswell blossomed amongst those same infinite skies. Modern spooks are still spooks, after all - and mystery begets mystery. Degory Chandler, not native to New Mexico in the same way the extraterrestrials that maybe came to Roswell were, met his end sometime the first week of August, 1983, picked apart by turkey vultures along the side of a road, his brains blown out by suicide. Some witnesses reported seeing a disheveled man sobbing to himself, walking along the side of the road, in the area in which Chandler's body was found, whose description later matched Chandler's own, later on. Not one of them stopped to help. His death is one such mystery that begets more mystery, appropriate for haunts the annals of UFOlogy, exquisite for the modern hidden hideousness of the New Mexican desert. Because Degory Chandler was not supposed to have been anywhere near where he was found - because Degory Chandler was not supposed to have had page after page of his government records redacted or in pieces - and Degory Chandler certainly was not supposed to leave behind a chaotic, frantic notebook full of a confession that was so depraved, so nauseating, that if more people had taken it seriously he would have been dwarfed every other conspiracy out there...not even Bob Lazar, with his outlandish claims about the shenanigans at Groom Lake, could have come close to what Degory Chandler knew, what he tried to warn the world about, what drove him to eat his gun after walking for days in a shambling stupor in the desert heat of New Mexico. There are two other pieces to this puzzle: the first is that Chandler's mentor had been Dr. Robert Everett, a paleoentomologist who revolutionized his field by combining it with the then-fledgling genetic research studies Frederick Sanders in the United Kingdom - about a year before the suicide of Degory Chandler, Everett, who had been employed the government to explore the connections between nuclear radiation and cockroaches both extinct and extant, also disappeared, last seen (as Chandler was) in the vicinity of Dulce, New Mexico in 1982. The second piece is that most of Everett's work, disavowed by the United States, would later be unexpectedly published and given credence by Dr. Drake Le Carde the same Drake Le Carde that immigrated to the United States after the fall of South African Apartheid in 1989, and who, working at the University of Florida, was nearly fired after a public crusade by the beloved botanist, Dr. Martin Perry. It seemed that Le Carde wanted to expand and implement the more controversial aspects of Everett's research into the resurrection and rewilding of prehistoric insects - and like Everett, he too, also vanished, although years later, in 2013. Mystery begets mystery. Returning to Degory Chandler: it becomes clear that he is the missing link to these men, their careers, their beliefs - and to Dulce Base, to the wild claims of the conspiracy theorists, and the evil that men do for the sake of state and government. His notebook, found on his corpse, and disseminated only by the most paranoid of people who believe that New Mexico is a is more, far more, than a frenzied suicide note - it is a warning. It is a warning about Dulce Base, and what went on there: what he worked on, what his mentor and hero and sometime-lover Robert Everett worked on - what Robert Everett became, what Degory Chandler himself narrowly missed becoming. Thirty years on, the fog of a comfortable neoliberal existence to ease the shame of the evil that men do, Degory Chandler still speaks to us, if we are willing to listen. His story begins like this.