Review by: KEN KORCZAK
If this UFO book is not one of the most talked about in recent years, it deserves to be. Despite painfully dodgy editing — it’s written in a compelling, lucid style and delivers hair-raising descriptions of alien abduction phenomena.
Oh yes, and there are intriguing photos and X-rays film sheets of what the author believes are alien implants in his leg.
TERRY LOVELACE comes out of obscurity to plant himself center stage among the likes of other famous abductees, such as Travis Walton, Betty and Barney Hill and the two men who were taken aboard a craft in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1973 – Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson.
Lovelace is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He used the GI bill for law school after an honorable discharge. In addition to private practice, he served as Assistant Attorney General for American Samoa. He kept his UFO story under wraps throughout his professional life, he says, because revealing this information would have been career suicide for a lawyer – which is certainly true. Now that he is retired, he wants his story known.
On the one hand, his details about a lifetime of frightening, intrusive abductions by aliens breaks no new ground – all the familiar elements of what other experiencers have reported for years are here. It’s almost as if he has taken the standard elements of what has become the “UFO abduction genre” and re-told a story deeply familiar to the UFO community.
On the other hand, Mr. Lovelace’s natural talent as a writer and gifted skill for rolling out a compelling narrative will inject a new vividness and feeling of visceral terror for the reader.
In an unexpected way, this latter aspect may unfortunately cut both ways for the author.
What I mean is, this narrative is so well-rendered it will give rise to a higher degree of skepticism among some. Indeed, a negative review on Amazon has already suggested that Mr. Lovelace simply “read a lot of UFO books” and has borrowed all the standard UFO abduction elements to cobble together a riveting fictional tale – which he is passing off as true.
Terry Lovelace
But one would be equally justified in saying that Lovelace is telling the truth because his experience confirms historically well-documented elements of UFO abduction scenarios as reported by thousands of others.
Well, I call myself an “open-minded skeptic” but that does not mean I am a skeptic when it comes to the reality of the UFO phenomena – something is going on that is real, certainly – the evidence is beyond overwhelming.
I take pains to say that because now I want to discuss a central absurdity in the story of Terry Lovelace – not because this makes his tale untrue – but simply because it is absurd – or perhaps suggests a deeper meaning.
I also at this juncture issue a ! SPOILER ALERT ! – I repeat — ! SPOILER ALERT ! – because I want to describe the element of the primary event of his story which was his 1977 abduction experience at Devil’s Den State Park in northwestern Arkansas.
So, if you have not yet read the book – stop reading now. I urge you to go buy the book, read it and come back hear after you have. If you decide to keep reading now – well, I have issued you a fair and unambiguous ! SPOILER ALERT !
THE ABSURDITY
So here is what I find absurd.
Consider: Mr. Lovelace reports that he has been experiencing abductions since childhood. Strange beings which he first perceived as “monkeys” were coming into his bedroom at night. They tormented him with their menacing presence and frightened him to the limit of his ability to withstand the intrusions.
Seeing the cover of Whitley Strieber’s book in a shopping mall sent Terry Lovelace into an unexpected panic. Many others have reported the same mysterious reaction to this book’s cover image.
The “monkeys” are eventually revealed to be the classic Grey aliens. They take him away, bring him back and wipe his memory – except for dreamy trace memories along with lingering fear and a sense of loathing. Later in life he is abducted repeatedly at the whims of his tormentors. They can get him anywhere. They even snatch him once while he’s out riding his motorcycle.
It’s clear the Mr. Lovelace is never safe no matter where he is – be it at home tucked safely in bed, out riding his motorcycle, or anywhere else. Despite this fact the aliens – for some reason — decide to choreograph a fantastically elaborate abduction event in the summer of 1977.
At the time Mr. Lovelace was a young Air Force sergeant serving at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City. The aliens set things in motion weeks before the actual abduction.
They (apparently) telepathically implant a powerful suggestion into the mind of Lovelace and a fellow Airman, Toby, with whom Lovelace serves on an airbase ambulance crew. The aliens want the two men to drive to a remote area in Devil’s Den Park in Arkansas, a six-hour trek from their home base.
The aliens also engineer painstaking details. For example, Lovelace is an avid photographer. He is eager to take spectacular nature photos at Devil’s Den – but he inexplicably forgets his camera on the kitchen table. The suggestion is that the aliens wanted to be sure they were not photographed. A variety of others unusual camping supply snafus occur, as well.
Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas is home to the largest sandstone crevice area in the United States.
The two men make it to Devil’s Den – but strangely again — they decide to basically trespass on federal land. That is, they don’t go through the park gate, register, purchase an entrance ticket — rather, they circumvent a chain barrier to take a back-way into the parkland, drive their car along some primitive path to a secluded high-elevation meadow.
I’ll skip over some events now – including a long hike the two men take during which they inexplicably fall asleep – and pick it up when the men are sitting by their campfire at night and gazing at the stars. In the night sky they espy three strange “stars” in a triangular formation – and they are mesmerized by them as they slowly drift closer to their camp location.
(NOTE: Just like in the 1976 Allagash abduction of Jim and Jack Weiner in a remote wilderness area of Maine, Lovelace’s buddy Toby “signals” to the UFO with a flashlight as it approaches).
This gradual advance of the strange three stars takes maybe two or three hours. The “stars” turn out to be lights on the corners of a monstrously gigantic triangle-shaped UFO. It’s bigger than a five-story building. It comes to a stop and hovers about 30 feet above the ground near the tent of our campers.
The men are then abducted inside the giant UFO where they are subjected to the usual medical-testing procedures common to abduction stories. They also see 50 to 60 other human beings waiting around to be “processed” or undergoing intrusive exams. They see a lot of other stuff inside the UFO as well, such as fish tanks with bizarre living creatures floating in pink liquid.
Okay – I’ll stop there, and ask this question:
If the aliens have already been abducting Mr. Lovelace at will for his entire life and from any location – right inside his home and often under the noses of his unsuspecting parents, sisters and later his wife – why then the need to lure him out to a remote corner of the wilderness for a clandestine abduction?
Why also bring a behemoth, five-story UFO for Mr. Lovelace when at all other times in his life they have been able to show up in smaller craft and zip him away with ease?
And get this: Lovelace says the aliens made sure that the two men parked their car near the treeline at the edge of the meadow to ensure there would be enough room to land the giant UFO – even though the object never landed, but hovered 30 feet above the ground. An average car is only about 5-feet high. It wouldn’t have been in the way any more than their tent was in the way.
Now here’s another thing: There were 50 or 60 other abducted human beings aboard the UFO. Does that mean all those people also went through the same elaborate pre-abduction ritual of watching three mysterious “stars” in the sky approach them for three hours while they became gradually passive? If they did this for all 50-60 people, the process would have taken days to get all captives aboard.
But if the three-hour pre-abduction ritual was done exclusively for Lovelace and Toby – then why?
I don’t lay out all this information to show that I’m a skeptic – although typical skeptical louts will pounce on the fundamental absurdities of the Devil’s Den abduction to argue that it’s all too preposterous to be true.
A MUFON photo of an anomalous object — “implant” — removed from the body of an alien abduction experiencer.
I am inclined to suggest something else – that because the intensely elaborate choreography of the abduction was unnecessary – it was all theater. And I’m not saying it was a theater production with Terry Lovelace as director – but it was the aliens who put on the show.
For some reason (I keep saying that!) the aliens wanted Mr. Lovelace and his friend to experience a sort of cosmic passion play, complete with George-Lucas-worthy giant spaceships, hordes of fellow frightened abductees and B-movie sci-fi monsters swimming in pink fish tanks.
One must also consider that wiping the memory of Lovelace (conveniently?) failed in the long run. Sinister special agent creeps from the government drugged him and forced him through an ostentatious hypnosis session in which he coughed up the whole event – the aliens, who so carefully choreographed everything else, failed to anticipate or have a contingency plan for this.
Of course, the government agents tried to make him forget everything as well. Like the aliens, they failed too. So now Lovelace has shared everything in a tell-all book – even though a hybrid human-alien paid him a recent visit and warned him that if he blabbed too much – his own government might kill him.
What are we to make of it?
Paranoid conspiracy theorists will offer that all of Lovelace’s experiences were implanted in his head during the monstrous drug-infused hypnosis session he was subjected to several months after returning from Devil’s Den. They’ll say he may have never been visited by aliens at all – but the government wants him to believe that it did happen — and then tell all of us ordinary citizens in a book so that we might believe it too.
But why?
I bet Lovelace would contend that his X-ray sheets of weird implants in his leg are his ace in the hole. If none of this happened to him, then how do you explain the reality that he harbored strange objects in his leg? As a lawyer, Lovelace understands the value of hard physical evidence when making a case to a jury. But that’s no problem for the skeptics — they’ll just say he faked the X-rays,
As for me, I am going to say that Mr. Lovelace’s story is true — I can be skeptical, yes — but in this case, despite all, I believe Terry Lovelace.
This is not fiction. I don’t think he is trying to pull one over on us. I’ll say no more as to why I conclude this, but leave you with this reminder:
The world of ufology is our culture’s most confounding, bottomless rabbit hole – a labyrinth within a labyrinth — a mystery wrapped inside an enigma tied with a conundrum — a universe where the only certainty is uncertainty.
NOTE: BELOW ARE JUST A FEW OF THE OTHER UFO BOOKS I REVIEW HERE ON TOP 10 BOOK REVIEWS:
MANAGING MAGIC By Grant Cameron
EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY By Roger “Rocky” Kvande
HOW TO TALK TO AN ALIEN By Nancy DuTertre
ALIENS IN THE BACKYARD By Trish and Rob MacGregor
ALIENS IN THE FORREST by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte
SEARCHERS by Ron Felber
Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS
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