Incident at Devil's Den: The Terry Lovelace Abduction, Arkansas

Terry Lovelace was a medic in the emergency room of the hospital at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. His partner was a fellow EMT and close friend known only as Toby. Lovelace says that in 1975 the two had watched a triangular craft hover above a nuclear missile silo called Kilo-5. Officials called it a new experimental helicopter.

June 1977. The friends drove south for a weekend of camping at Devil's Den State Park, in the Boston Mountains of northwest Arkansas. They pitched their tent in a meadow clearing on a slight plateau.

After sunset, three moving lights appeared low on the horizon, arranged in a triangle. "A triangle made of very bright stars," Lovelace called it. The formation rotated clockwise about 120 degrees. Then it did a complete somersault. Twice.

The lights grew larger and brighter. As they came closer, the men could see that they shone from a black triangular prism. Lovelace has described it as about five stories tall and as wide as two city blocks. It hovered directly over the campsite. "We could hear it humming," he said. A blue beam swept across them, as if scanning. He felt "this feeling of calm wash over me... very close to sedation." Then nothing, and hours of missing time.

Much of what followed came back years later, partly under hypnosis. Lovelace describes a vast interior of white and stainless steel, big enough to hold three parked flying saucers. A child-sized crew. Humanoid forms that spoke by telepathy. Dozens of other humans in tan uniforms with orange or red insignia. And himself, on an examination table, screaming with no sound coming out.

The men woke in their tent, nauseous and "insanely thirsty." At 3 a.m. they ran, leaving their gear behind. Park rangers found it the next day. Their skin was red and sore like a bad sunburn, even on the soles of their feet. Lovelace spent two days in hospital with severe dehydration and a fever of up to 104°F. His burning eyes were diagnosed as flash burns.

He says the Air Force Office of Special Investigations questioned them repeatedly and told them to stay silent. Toby was relocated to Japan and later died young, without ever speaking publicly. Lovelace kept the secret. He became a lawyer and served as Assistant Attorney General of American Samoa.

In 2012 an X-ray taken after a fall showed a square piece of metal the size of a fingernail, with two wires attached, just above his right knee. A petal-shaped object with the density of bone showed in his calf. There was no scar. In 2018 Lovelace published Incident at Devils Den. Luis Elizondo, who spoke of what was studied in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and Tom DeLonge were among those who later contacted him about "this thing in your leg."

No OSI file, hospital record, ranger report or 1977 newspaper story has surfaced. Project Blue Book had closed eight years earlier, and no AARO mention has been found. Everything rests on Lovelace, and his retellings differ on the craft's size and sound. One article claims Roger Leir analysed the implants, but Leir is reported to have died in 2014, years before the object was said to have been removed. Sceptics note that hypnosis can shape or even create memories. Still, the story has travelled far, from Kevin Randle's show and Astonishing Legends to Netflix's Files of the Unexplained.