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Dramatization · from the witness's own account · scenes recreated

Devil's Den

Aliens put metal in his leg in 1977. Forty years later, they came back for it.

A giant praying-mantis being in a lab coat looms over a young airman, a grey being in a red headscarf lowering her sunglasses, an older man holding up an X-ray of a metal square in his leg, and a black triangle over the trees. Illustration.

Devil's Den

1977 · Devil's Den State Park, Arkansas · Terry Lovelace

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Witness record

June 1977, three in the morning, on a meadow above Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas. Two young Air Force medics from Whiteman Air Force Base, Terry Lovelace and his partner Toby, had gone camping for the weekend. They woke to a black triangle cut out of the sky, a beam of white light standing in their dead fire pit, and then a craft the size of an office block hanging silent over the meadow while small grey figures strolled underneath it.

What came back to Terry later was worse: a glowing hangar lined with glass tanks of pink water, a seven-foot praying-mantis being in a lab coat, and 124 red spots across his body. Back on base, he says, the Air Force questioned him, drugged him and told him to forget. For thirty-five years he did. He became a lawyer and an assistant attorney general.

In 2012 a veterans hospital X-ray found a square of metal with wires in his leg, right under a spot that had gone numb for twenty-five years, with no scar to show how it got in. In 2017 the woman he remembered from a round room when he was seven came back, in a crooked black wig and sunglasses, and warned him. A month later the metal was gone. Where Terry ended up is the part the film saves for last.