Issue date: 11/2/06 Section: Culture

by Mike Smith

Daily Lobo



Dulce is almost in the center of the northern edge of the state, on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. Dulce is a small town, yet it looms large in the minds of conspiracy theorists worldwide, who believe it's the home of an underground government base - Earth's primary site for alien-human collaboration.

The base - according to The Dulce Book, by a man known only as Branton - lies deep beneath the desert mesas near Dulce, inside levels of countless miles of tunnels and rooms, in which aliens and humans work together on projects ranging from strange meddlings of technology and the occult to the dissection and genetic alteration of captive human beings.

"I frequently encountered humans in cages, usually dazed or drugged, but sometimes they cried and begged for help," said an alleged former base employee interviewed in The Dulce Book. "We were told they were hopelessly insane and involved in high-risk drug tests to cure insanity. We were told never to speak to them at all."

Until 1977, such stories - justified perhaps in part by the UFOs often glimpsed by Dulce residents, or the cows occasionally found surgically dismantled on area ranches - were quickly dismissed, if for no other reason than the unlikelihood of the government putting such a clandestine base right underneath a town of almost 3,000 people.

There were many strange occurrences, sure, but there was little, if any, evidence of the base's existence.

"(There) are experiments done on fish, seals, birds and mice that are vastly altered from their original forms," said The Dulce Book's interviewee. "There are multi-armed and multi-legged humans and several cages of humanoid bat-like creatures up to seven feet tall. The aliens have taught the humans a lot about genetics, things both useful and dangerous."

In 1977, though, something turned up around Dulce that - to many people - seemed to add a bit of credence to the stories of the Dulce base and the base's genetic tampering: a cabbit.

Said to be the offspring of cats and rabbits, rumors of cabbits have been around since at least 1845, when Joseph Train mistook a Manx cat - a tailless breed of cat with unusually long hind legs - for the offspring of a cottontail and a house cat and wrote about it in An Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man. In modern times, however, cabbits have generally been considered a scientific impossibility, because cats and rabbits are just too genetically dissimilar.

"A cat is a carnivore, with its whole body adapted to hunting and meat-eating," wrote cryptozoology researcher Sarah Hartwell in a 1999 online article. "A rabbit is an herbivore with its whole body adapted to eating plants."

Yet, according to Hartwell, somehow in 1977, a man named Val Chapman, walking in the desert near Dulce, captured what he insisted was a cabbit. Its front half looked like the front half of a normal cat, but its back half lacked a tail and featured long legs almost identical to those of a jackrabbit. Chapman took the cabbit on tour, featuring it prominently in a Los Angeles exhibit, on TV and in supermarket tabloids.

"It is believed to have escaped from Dulce's laboratory years ago," wrote Theresa Morgan in a February 2004 New Mexico magazine article. "Rumor has it that heavily armed men in black fatigues, flying unmarked black helicopters, were responsible for hunting down the unnatural cabbit creation."

And maybe they were - but maybe not.

Occam's razor is a principle rooted in the writings of the early English philospher William of Ockham. It states, more or less, that "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

Using that principle, it may be worth asking what was more likely: that Chapman found a half-cat, half-rabbit hybrid created in a top-secret underground labyrinth by aliens and humans using extraterrestrial technology - or that Chapman found a deformed cat.

Courtesy of Robert David
An alleged cabbit - half cat, half rabbit.

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