Nearly three weeks and counting

Is the Pentagon concealing sources and methods -- or something worse?

USAF veteran Terry Lovelace suspects a UFO photobombed this helicopter as he tried to document evidence of aerial harassment of his home in Texas. [CREDIT: Terry Lovelace]

Nothing dropped at 5 p.m. Friday, so the congressional UFO report allegedly being compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has blown its deadline by nearly three (3) weeks now. Nobody explains. When nobody explains, we infer a screwup, a spit up or a coverup. From the vacuum of silence roar rumors that can bend legitimate and rational explanations into endlessly morphing, addicting & potentially lucrative conspiracy dreck. And, as Americans, we could sure use some more of that shit right now.

Well, if this drop-watch were a spectator sport, Terry Lovelace would rate a courtside seat. Because if what he says is true, it requires you to believe the book he published four years ago was so problematic, it invited a year’s worth of broad-daylight helicopter harassment over his home outside Dallas. Immediately after the publicity splash, he says drab-olive military two-and four-seaters, plus law enforcement-grade Airbus 350s, all without aircraft registration “N” numbers, buzzed his house. He says they made no less than two flyovers a week, but “usually every single day.” He took a lot of photos, too. One even purports to show a UFO in the same picture with one of the interlopers.

The extravagance of the alleged intimidation campaign defies logic. The scriptures teach us that, if you want to scare the snot out of somebody, you leave a dead fish wrapped in newspaper on your mark’s front step. Or maybe a hog’s head spiked into the lamppost, or a pit viper rattling in the mailbox. Messages like that, delivered in stealth, with zero fanfare, are targeted and bloodcurdling. Making a clatter like loud brass balls over someone’s house isn’t just a dick move on unsuspecting neighbors, it signals a misuse of funds. Isn’t it, like, way cheaper to buy dead fish than to fuel up helo? Spend it or lose it — could that racket be in play here?

On the other hand, when it comes to UFOs, logic is usually junk currency.

What we do know is this: If TL’s story about aerial harassment is true, taxpayers should get a refund. Lovelace, undeterred, responded by writing a followup to Incident at Devil’s Den, the book that got him so much attention in 2018. His second accounting, Devil’s Den: The Reckoning, went to press in 2019. And like so many UFO abduction stories, absurdity has a field day.

At age 8, for instance, the visitors materialized in his bedroom as four “grinning monkeys”; a daylight disc directly overhead, he wrote, “was shiny and gorgeous in the way a brand-new sports car is gorgeous.” More recently, a diminutive, mind-reading suspected-hybrid telepath he dubbed “Betty Rubble” for her Flintstone-like black wig surprised him at home in the middle of the night, her sunglasses shielding large black almond-shaped eyes. She told him the UFO confessional he was thinking about writing could endanger his personal safety. And the threat wasn’t from space aliens.

‘Hi, Terry, it’s Tom DeLonge’

Lovelace first spoke publicly in September 2017, three months before the NY Times’ barrier-busting expose on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon’s secret UFO project. But when Devil’s Den came out the following year, a few key players reached out to him, and maybe the draw was as much about his resume as his message.

Lovelace spent six years in the Air Force as a medic/EMT before earning degrees in law and psychology. In private practice, he specialized in health care risk management. He was an assistant state attorney for American Samoa before becoming a prosecutor in the same capacity in Vermont, where he retired in 2012. Fearing professional ruin, he had clammed up for 40 years about what happened to him and a buddy while stationed at a Strategic Air Command base in Missouri. But when he finally put it all out there in Devil’s Den, the phone started ringing, probably because of the X-rays.

“I got a call from LA, and when I picked it up, the voice said ‘Hi, Terry, it’s Tom DeLonge.’ Well,” Lovelace recalls, “I knew of him because my daughter had organized some of his music for her wedding, so I said ‘How are ya,’ and he said ‘Fine.’ Then he said look, I’m here with General (Neil) McCasland and Lue (Elizondo), and we want to talk to you about this thing in your leg.’”

DeLonge was the Blink 182 rocker whose UFO email inquiries with Washington rainmaker John Podesta got firehosed onto the Internet by WikiLeaks in 2016; in 2017, DeLonge formed To The Stars Academy (TTSA) to raise venture capital for related UFO projects. Retired in 2013, McCasland’s last post was at Wright-Patterson AFB, where he ran the USAF’s Research Laboratory. Elizondo had just resigned from the Defense Department after managing to secure the release of three now-famous Navy F-18 UFO videos for the media.

And “this thing” in Lovelace’s leg they wanted to talk about? Long story. He has no idea when or how it got there. The setup goes like this:

He joins the military out of high school in 1973, and winds up with the 351st Missile Wing as a young sergeant attached to Whiteman AFB east of Kansas City. Armed with an array of Minuteman II nukes, WAFB is better known as the current home of the 509th Bomb Wing, which achieved notoriety in 1947 for its location at Roswell, N.M., the cradle of the modern UFO mystery.

Black diamond over Kilo-5

In the winter of 1975, working the graveyard shift as an ambulance driver, he and a colleague named Toby are dispatched to retrieve a missile mechanic injured during routine maintenance at a silo code-named Kilo-5. They’re met by a roadblock and the flashing lights of a dozen other MP vehicles. The two get out and hoof it over to K-5, where he, Toby and a small crowd of military first-responders gape as a large, silent “black diamond” craft parks itself 50 feet in mid-air above the underground launch facility. They watch for 10 minutes before the thing zips off without a trace. After a debriefing, their CO informs them what they’d seen was a new experimental helicopter wink-wink.

But the book draws its title from what happened in June 1977, at an Arkansas state park, Devil’s Den, just across the Missouri border. Lovelace and Toby knock off work, pile into the car, take a long hike, pitch tent in a meadow, kindle a firepit – and get subjected to an extended UFO abduction event after nightfall. Recollections include a massive triangular craft that throws blue and white light beams onto the ground, occupants bustling outside their tent getting literally beamed back up, white or stainless steel interiors inside a space so vast and surreal it includes “three parked flying saucers,” and 50 to 60 humans decked out in “tan uniforms with red or orange insignias,” operating alongside the child-sized crew.

Sick, nauseous and “insanely thirsty” upon awakening in their tent, the two off-duty airmen flee in the dark “like scared little boys,” abandoning their gear for discovery by park rangers the next day. Lovelace’s “eyes stung as if I’d stared at the sun.” “Angry red sores” erupt from head to toe, and his body turns “beet red,” as if sunburned, even his armpits. Suffering from a 104-degree fever, Lovelace is hospitalized, as is Toby, whose symptoms are similar.

The ordeal concludes with an exhaustive grilling by the USAF Office of Special Investigation. Its lead agent injects him with an unknown drug, leads him through hypnotic regression, and orders him to shut up about everything. Toby is promptly reassigned to another base. The two never see each other again and, according to Lovelace, Toby eventually “succumbed to alcoholism.” Residual trauma revisits Lovelace in nightmares, and even in the bedroom he shares with his wife of 46 years.

Lovelace took up jogging and awoke one morning in 2012 unable to stand the pain in his right leg. X-rays appeared to show a fingernail-sized metallic square extruding two tiny wires embedded in his thigh just above the knee. But there is no trace of an entry scar. The pain was diagnosed as an unrelated and common Baker cyst, but lateral X-rays picked up yet another anomaly. A bone-dense flower-shaped mass – located in the middle of his calf muscle – bloomed onto the film as well.

Located in 2012, the square object sprouting two fine vertical wires in the extreme upper right disappeared during photos taken five years later. But the wires are still in there. [CREDIT: Terry Lovelace]

Lovelace wanted the object removed in accordance with chain-of-custody protocols, in order to produce a formal analysis ready for peer review. But, given his history of heart disease (bypass surgery, a pacemaker, a stint, strokes), “No surgeon I talked to in this country would remove it.” A Veterans Administration radiologist offered broader context. “I’ve got 5,000 veterans just in this Dallas area here who have pieces of metal in their bodies from Afghanistan to World War II and they want that stuff out of their bodies, too. Sometimes,” she told him, “it’s better to let it lie.”

Convinced there were countless others like him who had been tagged and stigmatized by “ugly praying mantis creatures,” Lovelace went public with a lecture in Houston in 2017. Shortly thereafter, he says he was confronted late one night, inside his home, by the “Betty Rubble” character who had at least one thing in common with the Air Force OSI: She also warned him not to talk about it. She then informed him he actually had implants in both legs, and that they would all be removed as a precaution.

Lovelace awoke on November 16, 2017, with pain between the crotch and knees of both legs. Circular bruises blossomed on both sides of his groin, but the right-side contusion, shaped like flower petals, had a hole in the center. Subsequent X-rays revealed the metallic object had vanished from his right thigh, but two tiny lengths of wire remain in his muscle mass. No extraction incisions were evident. The puzzling bony matter in his calf is still there. (More info at his website.)

Since the publication of his books, Lovelace says he’s been contacted by more than 4,000 largely empathetic people eager to share their own tales of high strangeness. During the coronavirus lockdown, he says he had a Zoom chat with a Department of Homeland Security official (unnamed) on the subject of criminal liability.

“I kinda laughed at the question,” Lovelace recalls. “I said I think you’re gonna have a big problem with service of process. How do you go about that without an embassy to locate the responsible parties to hold them accountable? But in the back of my mind I thought there might be a human element involved in the scenario that could also be subject to prosecution.”

Which brings us, again, to Section 1683 of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. Amid its itemized demands from the ODNI, lawmakers pointedly require a review of “adverse physiological effects.” Could stories like these from military veterans lurk at the core of the Pentagon’s obstinance?

Little faith in the ODNI report

“I can attest to the fact that TTSA was interested in speaking with Terry regarding possible biological effects that he may have suffered,” states former AATIP manager Elizondo in an email. “Biological effects (are) a potential serious aspect of what we studied in AATIP and we now know that certain elements with the U.S. Government are equally concerned as we were. If Terry is suffering any medical consequences as a result of an alleged encounter with a UAP while serving in the military, then he deserves medical care.

“It is my experience that helicopters of unknown utility have been reported by certain individuals. It is not yet known if this is some sort of intentional harassment or simply a matter of being near a congested flight corridor. Obviously, flying a helicopter is expensive and logistically intense if this were some sort of campaign to intimidate individuals on a regular basis. We would need to do additional research to better determine the nature of these incidents,” he added, “before making any sort of proclamation.

“Terry is a good person who is also credible. I believe Terry and others are convinced their experiences are legitimate.”

Lovelace has low expectations of ODNI’s ability to herd the Pentagon cats into producing anything meaningful on UFOs. How many veterans, how many people, how many Terry Lovelaces are out there? And let’s have a show of hands to see who wants the responsibility of managing that data.

Short of the implausible scenario of an active-duty Pentagon insider spilling the beans with incontrovertible smoking-gun documentation, Lovelace can imagine only one possibility for inducing an authentic emetic on The Great Taboo. “A big event,” says the retired prosecutor, “like maybe a saucer crashes into a residential area.”

But maybe there’s a contingency for that option, too.