UFOpedia

project-gasbuggy

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Project Gasbuggy — the 1967 underground nuclear test near Dulce, NM

  • Type: event (US government underground nuclear detonation; Operation Plowshare)
  • Date/place: 10 December 1967; Carson National Forest, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico — ~21 miles (34 km) SW of Dulce, ~54 miles E of Farmington
  • Why it’s in this base: a real, documented nuclear test with a real radioactive-contamination problem, ~21 miles from the Dulce cattle-mutilation hotspot — the leading prosaic candidate for “what was being monitored/hidden near Dulce,” versus the alien framing. See cattle-mutilations and 2026-05-30-why-bennewitz-what-were-they-hiding.
  • Sourced: 2026-05-30

A non-UAP fact that matters to the UAP record only by proximity and timing: it is the kind of genuine, uncomfortable government secret that the “Dulce alien base / alien cattle mutilations” lore could plausibly have been laundering.

What it was

Project Gasbuggy was an underground nuclear detonation carried out by the Atomic Energy Commission on 10 December 1967, part of Operation Plowshare — the program seeking “peaceful” uses for nuclear explosions. Conducted by the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory and the El Paso Natural Gas Company, its purpose was nuclear gas-fracturing: testing whether a nuclear blast could fracture tight rock to release natural gas.

  • A 29-kiloton device was placed at a depth of 4,227 ft (1,288 m) beneath Leandro Canyon and detonated (a crowd watched from a nearby butte). It produced a rubble chimney ~80 ft wide and ~335 ft high.
  • The site sat in the Carson National Forest; a 1978 marker monument warns that no drilling or digging is allowed without government permission.

Why it failed (the relevant part)

The recovered natural gas was too radioactive to be commercially usable. Two follow-up fracturing shots in western Colorado — Project Rulison (1969) and Project Rio Blanco (1973) — hit the same radioactivity problem, and the ~15-year Plowshare program lost funding. (In 2011 the DOE reported that even after 25 years of production only 15–40% of the investment could be recovered.) The technique was later superseded by conventional hydraulic fracturing.

The load-bearing facts for this base: a real nuclear explosion, producing real radioactive contamination, ~21 miles from Dulce, in the years immediately preceding the area’s cattle-mutilation wave.

Relevance to the UAP/disinformation record

Gasbuggy is the documented anchor of the cattle-mutilation radiation-monitoring hypothesis: NM State Police investigator Gabe Valdez (per his son Greg Valdez’s Dulce Base, 2014) concluded the Dulce mutilations were a government program monitoring radiation in livestock from Gasbuggy — “testing the cattle to avoid panicking the public” — and that his father “never believed there was alien activity… He pointed toward the government.” That specific causal link is Valdez’s inference, not documented; but the existence of a real radioactive secret nearby is what makes the prosaic reading credible and the alien reading unnecessary. It fits the recurring pattern (see kirtland-manzano-uap-1980, government-ufo-disinformation): a genuine, nuclear-adjacent government secret, wrapped in manufactured exotic lore.

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