Charlie Davis and Edmund Gomez Discover Ventilation Shaft on Mount Archuleta
In September 1997, rancher Edmund Gomez and local contact Charlie Davis found a concealed ventilation shaft carved into Mount Archuleta near Dulce — a smooth, instrumented opening emitting strong drafts — together with carefully camouflaged campsites suggesting covert activity on the mountain.
Background
The Terrain
Mount Archuleta rises west of Dulce, New Mexico, on the edge of the Jicarilla Apache reservation and has been the focus of decades of speculation about an alleged underground facility — the so-called "Dulce Base." Rancher Edmund Gomez's family land borders the mountain.
The Discovery
In September 1997 Gomez and a local contact, Charlie Davis, were walking the mountain when they came upon what they described as a concealed ventilation shaft cut into the rock: a smooth, machined opening emitting a strong and steady draft of air, fitted with what appeared to be instrumentation. Nearby they found several campsites that had been carefully camouflaged and then broken down, suggesting recent covert human presence.
Interpretation
The pair did not enter the shaft. They photographed what they could and later provided the images and testimony to independent investigators. Coulthart presents their account as the kind of direct physical-trace evidence — an actual engineered structure on the mountain — that moved the Dulce Base question out of pure folklore into a concrete, investigable claim. What the shaft vents, and who maintains it, remains unresolved.