Original subtitles

(intense rhythmic music)

- We're not trying to prove anything today.

We're just gonna tell you a story.

- I'm not here to change your mind

or convince you of anything.

I'm here to tell you the truth.

- We experienced things that we could not understand

and believed could occur.

- We witnessed something beyond our comprehension,

something we couldn't explain,

something we couldn't process,

something we couldn't reconcile,

something that caused us to question our values and faith.

It changed our life forever.

- My name's Bruce Leininger.

I'm the co-author of "Soul Survivor",

"The Reincarnation Of A World War II Fighter Pilot."

And the story that we're gonna tell you today

is a story about our son that we witnessed,

things that he said, things that he did,

people that we found, events that we discovered were true

that he articulated or talked to us about,

and it all started when he was two years old.

So everything that we're gonna talk about today,

everything that I'm gonna tell you that he said,

he said between the ages of two and five.

The story started, we were on the way to moving

to Louisiana from Texas,

and I was coming home every two weeks,

and he was always intrigued with airplanes.

Anytime he'd see an airplane,

either in the car or the backyard,

he was just mesmerized by it.

Well, there was a museum in Dallas, Texas,

in Addison, called the Cavanaugh Flight Museum.

I took him there,

and we thought we'd be there for about a half hour.

I actually bribed him to get there

because there was a McDonald's close by

and we're gonna get a sundae.

Well, we got into the museum and we were there

for almost two and a half, maybe three hours.

Every time we got into the area

where the World War II aircraft were,

he just stood there frozen in time,

pointing at the World War II aircraft,

and I couldn't understand it.

I'd try to take him outta there

and go across the tarmac to another hangar,

and all of sudden, where is he?

He's going back toward the World War II hangar.

And every time I tried to get him to stop doing that,

he threw a fit.

So he'd go into that hangar

and he just stood there pointing like a statue,

just turning his head, looking at the airplanes.

That blew me away.

I just couldn't understand it.

So then what wound up happening

is within another two to three weeks after that,

he had just turned two,

and he started to have violent nightmares.

Some people call them night terrors.

So if you have a two-year-old,

they get up every once in a while with a night terror.

When it happens four or five or six nights a week,

and he was thrashing in his bed,

kicking and screaming like he was fighting for his life.

Well, he was just two, and he was not really able

to articulate much about what he was saying.

Well, what wound up happening is as he got a little older,

there were things that he started to say,

things like, "My airplane crashed on fire.

"I couldn't get out."

What happened to your plane?

My wife mostly did that because I was trying to sleep

because the company I was going to work for,

we were going public in the stock market,

and I was working 70, 80 hours a week.

He said, "It got shot in the engine."

Well, one night my wife asked him,

"Well, who shot your plane?"

He said, "The Japanese."

She says, "How do you know it was the Japanese?"

"The big red sun."

So at one point, he articulated

that the kind of airplane he flew was a Corsair.

Well, I knew the name and was aware of what a Corsair was

and that it was a World War II plane, but it wasn't...

Where did that come from?

That's kind of a random thing.

Now, where does a two-year-old hear that?

I don't know, (chuckles) but he said it.

He was in a toy store with my wife

or in a Hobby Lobby and there were a bin of toys,

and she picked up the airplane and said,

"Look it, it has a bomb on it."

He goes, "That's not a bomb, mommy, that's a drop tank."

Now, if you have a two-year-old,

do they run around talking about drop tanks?

(laughing)

I mean, what do you do?

So, again, as he started to get

a little bit more older and more articulate,

by the time it was August, my wife said

he would begin to start talking extemporaneously.

It's like he had a memory.

If you're driving down the road

and you see something it makes you think about

when you were in high school, they were like that.

It was come and gone.

So she said, "He's talking about what happened.

Well, when he said the big red sun and the Japanese,

I asked him one night, "Where did your airplane come from?"

He goes, "A boat,

"just took a flyer."

"Did your boat have a name?"

He said, "Natoma."

I looked at him and I said, "That sounds Japanese to me."

He looked at me like I was the village idiot.

He said, "No, it was an American."

I mean, he was firm.

It was like, you're crazy, I know what I'm talking about.

He was two!

I said, "What am I gonna do, Natoma?"

So I went into my office in my home, and I googled,

or I don't know what I went on at that point,

but google's the word that we use today.

And about hit 300, I mean, there's a Natoma, Kansas,

there's a Natoma Lake,

there's a Natoma Bay in Alaska or in Canada.

I found about hit 300, a picture came up

of a World War II aircraft carrier called USS Natoma Bay,

CVE-62, an escort carrier.

I printed a three or four-page report.

It had supported the war in the Pacific in World War II.

I get goosebumps right now.

I got them running up and down my spine.

And how in the heck could he know this?

Like I said, he was born in April, this was August.

Well, he continued to have some nightmares.

My wife talked to a counselor and helped him understand

that this wasn't happening to him,

it was happening to someone else,

someone who had done past life service,

which I rejected completely.

I said, "Well, you can do whatever you want,"

blah blah blah.

About a month later, my wife would ask him,

"Who's the man in your dream?"

And he would go, "Me."

Well, when we're dreaming,

we're dreaming about us, but me.

So she came and got me again another night,

and I said, "Well, is there anyone else in your dream?"

And she said, yeah, or he said, "Yes, Jack."

I said, "Did Jack have another name?"

He said, "Larson, Jack Larson."

"Where did you get this name?"

Well, I did the same thing, I went to the internet,

and it took me a few days, I looked at veteran's records

and whatever I could find.

I found the National Archives, and then I found a website

called the American Battle Monuments Commission.

And on that website, I keyed in World War II veterans,

or World War II Memorial,

and I found that there were 170 people

killed in World War II that had the last name Larson.

I printed them out, I started to search for them

to see which made sense,

because you could identify where they were buried

or where they were on a memorial wall,

like if you go to the Punch Bowl Crater in Hawaii,

there's these memorial tablets for people that were missing

and their names are engraved on them,

or they're buried there.

Well, nothing seemed to fit.

There were one or two that did.

I found the National Archives.

I sent a letter off with a request,

but at that point in time, no one would honor a request

unless you were a family member.

So they just wrote me a nice little letter back.

I was stuck, so where was Jack Larson,

and why was my son giving him that name?

My father was a World War II veteran.

The third thing that happened

that kinda sealed my fixation on this

was my father was a World War II veteran

right at the end of the second World War, went to China,

and he went to a reunion in San Antonio

and stopped in our house passing through Louisiana.

I said, well, maybe there's a reunion group.

Well, not so much a reunion group,

but geeze, he's going to a reunion.

I had gotten him a book about the Battle of Iwo Jima

because he was a Marine.

I got the book shortly before Thanksgiving.

So on the day after Thanksgiving,

I was sitting on a stair in my family room

looking at the book.

He came up, got up, we had a routine of watching cartoons.

I said, "You gotta wait for the cartoons to come on,

"I'm looking at this book.

"We're gonna give it to Papi for Christmas."

And I started to page through it,

and when I got to a page three or four through it,

he pointed at a picture of the island of Iwo Jima

and he said, "Daddy, that's when my plane got shot down."

What?

Well, I went back to that little report I'd printed

and found out that the ship had supported

the Battle of Iwo Jima.

So because my father had gone to that reunion,

I had this idea that he would

or that there might be

some information about a reunion group.

I did some research, I found one,

I found that there was a Natoma Bay Association.

I had names and numbers.

I started to call them.

Didn't get anywhere for a couple of weeks.

A couple of their numbers were disconnected.

I finally got a guy on the phone one night named Leo Pyatt,

lived in Columbus, Ohio.

We went through an introduction,

"Who are you, are you a veteran, were you on Natoma Bay?"

I said, "No, a friend of mine has an uncle

"who talks about the ship."

I couldn't tell him the truth.

Well, my two-year-old's talking about your ship.

He would have hung up, (chuckles) click.

I'd be talking to a dial tone.

So we went through a whole bunch of things.

I asked him, "Did a Corsair fly off of Natoma Bay?"

"No."

I said, "Can you tell my anything

"about the Battle of Iwo Jima?"

He said, "Well, sort of."

I said, "What do you mean, sort of?"

"I flew 36 missions there."

All of a sudden, my heart started to race.

Not only was I talking to someone who knew about the ship,

but someone that was on the ship at that time.

So we kinda went up and down about a bunch of things,

what kind of aircraft flew off the ship,

FM-2 Wildcat, the TBM Avenger bomber.

So I got around to asking about Jack Larson,

not thinking anything other than I'm gonna ask about Jack.

So I said, "Leo, can you tell me

"anything about Jack Larson?"

He goes, "I remember Jack.

"He flew off one day and I never saw him again."

At that point, I concluded that that meant

that he went missing,

'cause I didn't have any additional information.

And I just went silent.

As a matter of fact, Leo had to bring me back to the phone.

He said, "Are you there?"

'Cause my brain turned into a California raisin.

(laughing)

Just what, how could, who...

So I had these three pieces of information,

the ship, a man, and a location.

What am I gonna find out?

Well, that lit a fuse or hit a switch,

and the only way I can describe my feelings

were if you recall the movie

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind,"

I turned into a maniac about this,

that how can he know this?

I didn't believe this could be true,

and it was right around that time then,

my wife and her family suggested

that this was a past life or reincarnation.

And if you go to the first word in chapter 10 of my book,

it says bullshit.

This is not happening in my house.

I might as well have told the tide not to come in,

because it was happening.

He was talking about things,

saying things that were astounding.

So then knowing that Leo Pyatt was aboard the ship,

he told me there's gonna be a reunion in 2002,

"So maybe if you're interested, maybe we'll contact you."

I said, "Absolutely."

In the meantime, I wanted to find out more

about Jack Larson.

I didn't have any records,

didn't know where to go or what to do or how to look,

but I knew that my faith was being tested

because I didn't believe that this could happen.

Who could I talk to that could confirm anything

that my son said?

What would I find?

Like, I never expected to find Jack Larson

(scoffs)

as far as a real human being

that my son gave us the name of.

Would I get the answers to my questions,

which is that is just some strange set of coincidences

in the wrong direction?

How long would it take?

It didn't matter.

How was I gonna do it?

I didn't know, but I knew one thing,

I was not gonna quit until I got to the answers.

If I have one redeeming quality,

it's I'm as stubborn as a brick.

Once I lock in on something, that's it.

So I started to look.

I found a website that had all the names of all the men

killed on aircraft carriers in World War II.

86 pages, it took me two days of printing

back in the days where the speed of the internet

you kept getting cut off.

And on that list I found the names of 18 men

that had been killed serving aboard the ship,

but no Jack Larson.

Didn't really know what squadrons they had been in,

didn't know much about anything

other than it looked like a lot of them were aviators

based upon the limited knowledge I had at that time.

Shortly thereafter, James started to make drawings

of aircraft being shot down in battle,

and he started to sign some of them James 3.

What's the three?

So one day I asked him.

He said, "I'm the third James."

I don't know what that meant.

We had gotten him a video on the Blue Angels,

and I thought, well, maybe it was related

to the slot pilot which was number three,

based upon his...

He wore two of those tapes out watching it.

He was preoccupied with aircraft,

but "I'm the third James."

Well, I didn't know what to do with it,

other than he started to make these drawings

almost every day.

He'd kinda draw the airplane out,

and then what would wind up happening

is he'd start drawing lines, bullets,

and bombs flying, and flames.

It was like he was playing a tape in his head

and just trying to put it on a piece of paper.

After a while, he started to say things,

and I'm gonna just say that it wasn't a fair fight,

because he knew things or was able to convey information

that just dumbfounded us.

One night, I had come home from a consulting day

that was rather harsh,

and we went for a walk around the block.

And these are just a couple of anecdotal examples

of some of the things he said.

He looked at me and I was kind of commiserating

with a three-year-old, he said, "Well, dad,"

he said, "every day is like a carrier landing.

"If you can walk away from it, you're okay."

Huh? (chuckles)

If you have a three-year-old grandson or child,

is that what they tell you?

And then at one point, he was in a playroom

and he stood up and he just said,

"It can all end so quickly."

Another thing that was kind of humorous that he did

was we were visiting with one of my sister-in-laws

and we were at a community pool,

and they were playing in a little fountain,

and they were, "Shoot the Japanese, shoot the Japanese."

There were three of them, my niece, nephew, and him.

I said, "James, come on over here.

"There's other people around the pool.

"Let's just stop that."

And then my wife said, "And James, it doesn't matter,

"we won the war."

You would have thought Vitamin D-J Day broke out

right there on the deck.

You know that little happy dance that you see Snoopy do?

(chuckles)

That's what he was doing.

It was incredible.

Over a period of time, there were things that occurred,

and at one point he received an artifact from a veteran

that was a Bakelite model of a Corsair.

And when we opened up the box, because it was sent to him,

he lifted it up to his nose and he goes,

"This smells like an aircraft carrier."

Huh? An aircraft carrier?

Does anybody know what an aircraft carrier smells like?

(laughing)

Where'd this come from?

It was an olfactory memory,

not just a sight or sound or whatever.

So then I wound up getting the information

about the Natoma Bay reunion 2002 in San Diego.

And I said, "I'm going, I don't care what happens,

"I'm going, I gotta talk to these people."

I got to the reunion and I felt like I was walking

into the Knights of the Round Table.

These veterans sitting around the table, all old men,

and I just felt like I had got into sacred ground.

So I got introduced to the ship historian,

a gentleman named John Dewitt, and I started to ask him

about the names of the men that I had,

but there were some things that I wasn't sure of.

I said, "Well, these are all the men that were killed

"that I have a roster of."

He said, "Well, I have some information about that."

He recognized the names.

And I looked at him, I just took a flyer,

'cause I had not been able to find anything

about Jack Larson.

I said, "Can you tell me anything about Jack Larson?"

And he looked at me like...

I said, "Is Jack dead?"

"What do you mean, is Jack dead?"

He says, "He's on our Natoma Bay reunion roster."

"Is he here?"

He said, "No," but he gave me the thing,

he gave me the roster.

Jack lived in Springdale, Arkansas.

Not only was Jack real, but Jack was alive.

So that whole thing about flying off one day

just meant Jack had left that aircraft carrier

for another assignment.

I called Jack that night and said, "Jack, you don't know me.

"I'm at your reunion.

"I'm very interested in talking to you,"

because I couldn't figure out why there was a connection.

Why did my son give us, give him that name?

Well, I found out, one, that he was in the same squadron

that Leo was in, but when I was at the reunion,

I discovered that there was one man killed

during the battle of Iwo Jima.

It was during an attack on Chichi Jima,

and that man's name was James M. Huston, Jr., bing.

My son was signing his name, "I'm James 3."

Is this it?

It all matched, killed during the Battle of Iwo Jima,

shot down by the Japanese.

Wow.

I called my wife, she said, "That's gotta be the person."

Well, I wasn't sure because of the way

the record had been written.

I then discovered that there were pictures of the squadron.

For instance, there's one picture

that was taken in February 1945

of the pilots for the squadron,

and in the picture is James M. Huston, Jr. and Jack Larson,

sitting within six persons of each other.

Along the way, I got to meet a lot of those other guys

because they had not passed away.

Most of them are all gone now.

And it just blew me away.

Here's Larson and Huston in the same place.

And I had to start reconciling what was going on.

I had hung my hat on the nail of there was no Corsair,

so where did fit in?

And I was saying that's gotta be the thing

that is confirm my skepticism, 'cause I was still skeptical.

I thought I'd find stuff

that would help me prove I was right.

You ever have a theory that's all wrong?

(laughing)

Well, I was about as wrong as one could be

as we went through this.

I came back from the reunion and Hurricane Lili

hit the town I lived in and did a fair amount of damage.

I was out in the backyard cleaning up.

As I was raking the leaves and the branches up,

he was jumping into the branches scattering them about.

So I said, "Come on over here and sit on my lap."

He came over, hopped up on my lap,

and I said, "James, you're such a sweet little boy.

"I love you very much."

I said, "I'm glad your my son."

He looked at me and said,

"I knew you'd be a good daddy when I picked you."

By this time, when he started to talk,

you'd kinda go silent, like what am I gonna get next?

And I'd better be sitting down.

I said, "What do you mean, picked us?"

He said, "Well, when I found you and mommy,

"I knew you would be good parents, and I picked you."

I'm going, oh, okay.

"Where were we?"

He said, "You were in Hawaii at a big pink hotel."

I said, "No, we had just gone to Hawaii."

The company I worked for, we sold and we took a vacation

with some of my severance,

and we went to the big island of Hawaii.

We did go through Honolulu, Oahu.

But I said, "No, we just went to Hawaii."

He said, "No, it was just you and mommy,"

and all of a sudden, my brain started to melt again.

I said, "Well, where were we?"

He says, "You were at a big pink hotel."

"What were we doing?"

He said, "You were having dinner at night on the beach.

"That's when I found you."

Well, my wife and I had gone to Hawaii

to celebrate our fifth anniversary

in late May or early June 1997,

and we stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.

It's pink, and we had dinner that night,

one of the nights we were there for a romantic celebration.

He gave us facts about something

that we never, ever talked to him about.

You ever talk to your three-year-old

about where you went on your, celebrate your anniversary?

(laughing)

What, are you kidding?

And I went in and talked to my wife and said,

"How could he know these things?

"Where did these things come from?"

He was conceived about five or six weeks

after we went to Hawaii,

'cause he was born in April of 1998.

Go figure.

So the things about not being a fair fight,

things that he would talk about.

He gave the flight characteristics of a Corsair.

It always wanted to turn to the left when it took off,

and the tires would break when you landed.

That's common knowledge

among three or four-year-olds, right?

(laughing)

Oh, yeah, (grimacing).

I talked to people that flew Corsairs.

Jack Larson was a Corsair pilot at one point.

A guy named Bob Greenwalt

that you're gonna hear about later, same thing.

They had to redesign it so that it would counteract

the torque by a small design on the wing.

So then another day, he was playing with a toy plane

that he scores of them by this time,

and I said, "Well, that's a drop tank on that plane."

He goes, "Well, it was napalm bomb."

"What do you mean it was a napalm bomb?"

He said, "Well, they would fill the gas tank up,

"dump a powder in it, and it would turn into a gelatin,

"and then if you dropped it, it would blow up

"and go off on the ground."

Again, it was common knowledge for four-year-olds, right?

(chuckles)

Where are you coming from this from?

And then there was another program,

this was after we had gotten more exposure to things,

and we were watching a program about the Corsair.

I was trying to still link this Corsair thing.

And it was about how the Corsair

was shooting down Japanese Zeros and this and that,

and there was this little piece of film

that was a gun camera that showed a plane getting shot down.

And he just kinda casually looks up, he goes,

"That's not a Zero, it's a Tony."

What, a Tony, what's a Tony?

Well, by this time, I had met Jack Larson

and a gentleman named Bob Greenwalt

that you're gonna hear about here in a second,

I called them and I said, "Bob, can you tell me anything

"about a Tony?"

He said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

And James also gave us that detail.

Why were some Japanese planes called men and others women?

The fighters were called men

and the bombers were called women.

Again, common knowledge for a four-year-old.

I called Jack, I said, "Jack, can you tell me

"about the Tony?"

He said, "Well, yeah."

He said, "There was a small Japanese airplane,

"it was kind of a knockoff I think of a German plane."

So I went back and looked at some of the materials

I had accumulated by then,

and I found a description of the Tony.

Well, in addition to that,

I had gotten the war diary

and action reports from the squadrons.

I had gotten nine rolls of microfilm

from the Natoma Bay Association.

I spent three weeks in a library

copying nine rolls of microfilm one page at a time.

It's about 5,000 pages.

Focusing it, printing it, there was a place there

where you could do it.

It was some foundation supported it.

Just where'd this come from?

Well, there was a record in that of planes

that each squadron shot down,

and in that record, VC-81 which was the squadron

that this guy James M. Huston, Jr. flew out of,

they shot down a Tony.

Guess who was the person that first spotted it

and shot at it?

James M. Huston, Jr.

So my son was spot on, he knew what one looked like,

because in the other life,

and by this time I'd kinda given it up.

Okay, no way.

There was no other explanation.

So then there were some things that I started to try to do

to kinda trick him into saying something.

And I had noticed that James M. Huston, Jr.

had been killed on March 3, 1945,

and I noticed for a couple of years that he had nightmares,

after they had stopped, they'd gone away,

he had nightmares right around that time.

And I extrapolated out the timing

of where Chichi Jima was versus where we were,

and it was right around the same time

that that mission occurred

and that plane would have been shot down.

So I started to build him models,

and I figured, well, I'd give this one model,

it was a model of an FM-2 Wildcat right for his birthday,

or right for this date.

So I handed the toy to him

and then I let him play with it, break something off,

and I'd glue it back on, and hang it up.

He looked at it and he goes, "It's missing an antenna."

I said, "What do you mean, it's missing an antenna?"

He said, "Well, when you go to climb on the airplane,

"there was a little antenna and you'd bang into it

"going up on the wing."

I said, "What?"

He said, "Yeah."

Well, by then I had identified some books about aircraft

because he liked to...

He couldn't read them, but just all kinds of stuff

that he accumulated.

So I had found this one, it was called the "Walk Around."

I went and looked at it, and what wound up happening

is there was a little antenna

sticking out of the side of the aircraft

on the side where you'd get up and climb up on it.

It was the identify friendly or foe antenna

for transmission back to the ship,

and it was right in a place that you would bang into it.

Are you kidding me?

After the reunion that we went to,

one of the things that disappointed me

was I wasn't able to find a lot of information

about all the men had been killed,

and if you weren't on the ship when they were on the ship

or you weren't in the squadron,

you wouldn't find out about it.

Things were very compartmentalized.

A squadron would come and leave and go.

But what we did start to do, I said,

well, maybe we can find some of the families.

So one of the things that we did,

one of the very first families we found out about

was James M. Huston, Jr.'s family.

And we were very lucky, again, we got ahold of Anne Barron

who was James M. Huston's older sister.

Matter of fact, that's another thing

James said, my son said.

He said, "Well, I had two sisters.

"One was Annie, she was four years older than me,

"and then the other one was Ruth,

"and she was another four years older than Annie,"

which was exactly true.

When we found the family, that's exactly what happened.

It was Ruth, Annie, and James.

Well, they sent us a bunch of pictures, artifacts.

I'd sent them information about what happened

because no one really knew in these families,

ll these 21 families of the men that were killed

serving aboard Natoma Bay, knew anything about what happened

to their loved ones, other than they got an ugly telegram.

So in there, there was this small watercolor painting

of James M. Huston, Jr. when he was two,

a little blond-haired boy, blue eyes.

Well, about two years later, I had come home from work,

and there was a little FedEx envelope sitting on my door.

I opened it up and pulled it out,

and there was this 8-1/2 by 11 portrait

of a small child looking at a flower,

and along with it there was a note from Anne to my son,

'cause by this time they had become...

We were talking to each other, become family friends.

And the little note said, "James, I'm sorry

"that it took me so long to send you this."

It was around Christmas.

She said, "But this is the only painting

"my mother ever did of me,

"like the one of you that you asked about."

Now, she lived in Los Gatos, California.

That painting was in her attic,

and he asked about something that only three or four people

on the planet Earth even knew about.

How could he know that?

How could he be that specific?

This is what you asked me about, this is what I found.

Then at a certain point, he started to do things

because of his interest in the military,

he started to get dolls, G.I. Joe dolls

The first one he got, he named it Billie.

No big deal, Billie's kind of a common name, had brown hair.

We have a picture of him sleeping with Billie.

He then got a second doll some months later

for maybe Christmas or his birthday,

I can't remember what the event was,

and it had blond hair, and he named it Leon.

Leon, that's an odd name.

I know two people with the name Leon,

Leon Panetta and Leon Spinks.

Where did he get the name Leon?

Leon had blond hair.

I though that was crazy.

Now by this time, I had done enough research on the men

because I'm working on a second book,

called "The Navy of Angels,"

about the men who served aboard Natoma Bay that were killed.

So that name Leon meant something.

I didn't think about it.

So did the name Billie, didn't think about it

really that much until he got the third doll,

and it was for Christmas and it was a doll

that had red hair, and he named it Walter.

At that point, I freaked,

because Billie, Walter, and Leon were names I knew.

So I screwed up my courage at the end of the day

before we went to sleep, before he went to bed,

and I said, "James, can you tell me

"who Billie, Leon, and Walter are?"

And without a hesitation, he said,

"They're the men that greeted me when I went to heaven."

Now, I gotta go silent here for a second.

How in the world could such a thing happen?

Well, as it turns out,

Billie is a guy named Billie Rufus Peeler,

who was a member of the same squadron

and was killed on November 17th, 1944.

Billie had auburn, brown hair.

I spent a lotta time with his brother,

because his brother lived in Alexandria, Louisiana,

and I spent several weekends with his brother

learning about family history.

The second one, Leon,

was a gentleman named Leon Stevens Connor

who won the Navy Cross during the Battle off Samar Island,

was killed on October 25, 1944,

and good old Leon had blond hair,

a member of the same squadron.

A third guy, Walter Devlin, they called him Big Red.

I interviewed two or three guys that were pilots,

and one of them was Ken Wable.

He said, "We used to call him Big Red.

"He was so tall, we couldn't figure out

"how he could get in the cockpit of an FM-2."

He was from Queens, New York,

an Irishman from Queens, New York.

Walter was killed on October 26th, 1944,

in the aftermath of the Battle off Samar Island.

All in the same squadron,

in examining the aircraft action reports,

of which there are 82 from that squadron,

their names appear together in several of those missions.

James M. Huston, Jr. was killed on March 3rd, 1945.

So those three men were dead.

How could I say he was wrong?

Oh, they didn't really meet you in heaven.

(scoffs)

He was spot on with the facts.

He only ever received three dolls,

which I think is a strange coincidence.

But he said, "Those are the three men

"that greeted me in heaven."

He didn't say there were four or five.

He said there were three.

That's one of those coincidences

that's just beyond the pale of understanding.

Well, then there were things that James did,

and I'm just gonna call them a surprise.

My wife has an inquisitive nature,

and he was playing in the sunroom one day,

and so she looked at him,

he was doing something with his toys,

and says, "Is there really heaven?"

He said, "Oh, yes, mommy."

She said, "What's it like?"

He says, "Really beautiful.

"Matter of fact, it's right here, it's right next to you."

And she said or asked him, "Well, how do you get back here?"

He says, "Oh, you can come back if you want to."

Just as simple as that.

She looked at him and asked him, "Is God a man or a woman?"

Now, this is one of the most profound statements

I've ever heard anyone say about God.

He said, "God is whomever you need God to be

"when you need God."

When was the last time you heard the pope say that?

I'm not knocking the pope,

but this was a four-year-old child.

At one point, I got to the position where

there were just too many things that were coincidental,

and we're gonna go through some of those here quickly.

Do you think that the universe fights

for people to be together?

I do, and that's one of the things

I felt about this story not being a coincidence,

that there were too many things.

Like Leo Pyatt, if I would have gotten ahold

of anybody else that day from that reunion group but Leo,

those officers, they were all in the ship's company.

The ship's company doesn't mix with...

You could be at one end of the ship

and not know who's on the other end and what they do.

I got ahold of somebody that was in the squadron,

in the ship, knew the guy.

If he would have been from VC-63 or VC-9,

the other two squadrons that served aboard the ship

or somebody in the ship's company, no way.

It would have ended.

The story would have ended with that conversation with Leo.

Then along the way, I had my hat

hanging on this nail of Corsairs.

Well, when we got this package from Anne Barron,

I opened it up and I almost swallowed my tongue,

because here was a picture of James M. Huston, Jr.

standing in front of a Corsair.

As it turned out, James M. Huston, Jr.,

along with two other pilots that I met,

test flew the redesigned Corsair,

and based upon those flights,

the Corsair was adopted for carrier use

in World War II by the U.S. Navy.

And I have aircraft action records of pilot logs

that show these men, Bob Greenwalt

and a guy named Brad Theral, flew off that ship.

Also, information about Walter Devlin.

I have a little memo one of the guys had about something,

flying airplanes somewhere,

so Walter Devlin was one of those guys.

There were two squadrons, the VF-301 and VF-302,

go look them up.

Huston was one of those pilots.

Well, in talking to people that were those pilots,

I said, well, what's that?

My other car's a Rolls Royce?

(laughing)

Whatever else you flew, if it wasn't a Corsair,

you gonna say, "I flew a Corsair."

And so that was the first anecdotal thing he remembered.

I got home from the reunion,

and you talk about coincidences,

in 2002, and I put a posting on a website about Chichi Jima,

and I just took a flyer, throwing a note in a bottle,

toss it into the ocean.

I'm writing about this, learning about this,

can anybody out there tell me anything?

Nine months later, I got a phone call

from a guy named Jack Durham.

He found me after reading my post on the website,

called my house, 'cause I haven't hidden anything.

If anybody wants to come to my house

and look at all this evidence,

it'll fill your dining room table.

So John goes, "Well, listen, we flew a mission that day.

"My plane got shot down, I almost died."

He said, "But we saw another plane get shot down

"when we were attacking the island."

Well, I had the aircraft action report.

The aircraft action report gives you all these details.

I found out that VC-83, which Jack Durham was a member of,

was the bombers that attacked the island on March 3rd, 1945,

and James M. Huston, Jr., Bob Greenwalt, and Jack Larson

flew on that mission.

Are you kidding?

I said, "Well, what happened to the plane?"

He said, "It got shot in the engine

"and it crashed in the water."

I have four eyewitnesses,

including people that have been taped

and put on television already,

that verify how the plane got hit.

It matches exactly what my son said.

Well, I was able to go to the action report

and verify what he was telling me was true.

Finding four eyewitnesses to a plane getting shot down,

in my opinion, death in the air is anonymous.

But the 21 men that were killed

serving aboard Natoma Bay in World War II,

we only know the burial or the resting site of one.

The rest of them are somewhere out in the ocean

and no one knows where they are.

Then we went to another reunion,

and this was in some ways "Comedy Central."

(chuckles)

By that time, we had gotten notoriety and we had been on TV

and so people knew who we were,

including all the veterans knew 'cause I had to tell them.

(chuckles)

Hey, this is what's going on.

Well, by that time I had a lotta credibility

and integrity with these people.

But one of the guys that went to that reunion

was a guy named Bob Greenwalt.

He had actually called me through his son

after having seen something on TV

and said, "Well, listen, I flew with that guy."

(chuckles)

"I was in the Corsair squadron with him."

Well, we're in a hotel and my wife was bringing my son

up to his room, and he was six,

and Bob was coming down the elevator.

Bob stepped off the elevator and looked down at my son,

he knew who my son was by having seen him on TV.

He said, "I bet you don't know who I am."

And James looked up at him and he goes,

"You're Bob Greenwalt."

We asked him later,

"How did you know that was Mr. Greenwalt?"

He said, "I remembered his voice."

And then there were again humorous things.

He would eat breakfast with these two guys.

We got one picture they're sitting at a table,

and he is with his buds.

One day during the reunion, he was kinda pensive looking,

and a little concerned, had this concern,

I said, "What's the matter, James?"

He said, "Why are all these men so old?"

He had this thing in his head about younger people.

And then we got to the point

where we actually had the chance

to go to Hawaii or go to Chichi Jima.

We were contacted by a Japanese TV crew

and we filmed a special, and we went to Chichi Jima,

and the only thing I can tell you

is Chichi Jima oughta be in the Garden of Eden.

It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

It's way out there in the middle of the deep blue ocean.

It's part of prefectures of Tokyo, but it's 620 miles away,

about 130 miles away from Iwo Jima.

And we went there and we had the opportunity

to bring closure.

I'd never thought we would ever get there,

or I had this dream of getting there.

I said what would it be like to go?

Well, we contacted Anne Barron,

we wanted to know if she wanted to go along with...

Anne was 87, she was not going that far.

It took three days to get to Chichi Jima from the U.S.

She wanted flowers put on the water.

We were gonna have a memorial service and get some closure.

And we had that memorial service,

and in that memorial service, healing took place.

We went out into the harbor,

I read a little thing that I had prepared,

he threw flowers on the water,

and he broke down and started crying.

He was grieving.

The Japanese are not demonstrative people.

Everyone on the boat was circled around him,

and every one of those Japanese friends

just had tears in their eyes.

He stood up and saluted and said,

"James M. Huston, I'll never forget you."

He cried and wept all the way back to the shore.

We came home, and we didn't know how

or what this would do to affect him,

because we sailed into the island.

At one point, we were up on top of a cliff

overlooking the harbor, and James tugged on my shirt,

and said, "Dad, this is where we flew in that day."

It was on the ridge over which the planes flew that day

to attack the island,

'cause I have the aircraft action report with a diagram,

and I know where we were standing.

That was one of the last things he said.

But one of the last things he did

was we had gotten back to the United States

and we were gonna spend some time filming

for this special with Anne Barron,

and we were in a little restaurant,

and he took the children's menu out

and he drew a picture on the back of it,

and it was peaceful.

Birds flying, airplanes flying, no bombs,

fish jumping outta the water.

He healed, healing took place.

It was the last thing he did.

So when we get into reincarnation,

when we talk about reincarnation,

you ever hear of the radio station WII-FM,

what's in it for me?

Well, what's in it for you?

Which direction do we search in?

There's so many things I didn't even talk about today

that he conveyed information about and his feelings.

Is it science?

No.

Is it fact?

Yes, these are facts, it's the story.

So in which direction do we move?

We move from the physical to the mental

to theoretical to spiritual.

Somewhere or another, I had to reconcile that

in my own life because I thought this was baloney.

But on that basis, the promise of a Christian

is that our souls go on forever.

Who knows what goes on, on the other side of the veil?

And I've had several veterans who have come to me,

'cause I speak at various veteran groups,

and say, "Thank you for affirming

"that I don't need to be afraid."

That's pretty spiritual stuff, that's spiritual growth.

That's dealing with your soul.

One time I was in a little restaurant in Lafayette

and there were five of us sitting around

and we went out into the...

All five guys, just a bunch of burley old guys,

and we're standing out in the parking lot,

and he said, "Man," he said, "this is amazing.

"I've always been told my soul goes on forever.

"But," he said, "this is proof.

I said, "Well, I don't know whether it's proof,

"but it certainly happened."

I said, "So the five of us are standing here

"dealing with our journey.

"What's going on with my soul?

"How am I dealing with this?"

Well, there wasn't anything inconsistent

between what my Christian belief was and this,

other than a bunch of (chuckles) interesting fact.

So what was I supposed to do?

Just disagree with it and dismiss it?

No, it changed my life,

because that's where everyone needs to spend some time.

You don't have to,

but I'd say spending some time doing that.

Then we had the opportunity for James to have healing

with visiting with Anne Barron, and they were friends.

They would send each other gifts.

It was one of the most beautiful little things to see,

where he is just being so gentle with Annie,

and he called her Annie, and Anne said,

"The only person who ever called me Annie was Jimmy."

We then had the opportunity to honor these men,

all of them, at that reunion.

We had the opportunity to bringing closure to others.

For the very first time, up until that point,

the only person that had been to a Natoma Bay reunion

was James M. Huston, Jr.'s father in 1961 and '62.

He was trying to find information about his son.

At the reunion that we went to in San Antonio in 2004,

we had the families of nine of the 21 men killed.

Well, actually, 10.

And we had a memorial service,

and there's a plaque there dedicated to Natoma Bay,

where these families could come and get closure.

That's the only time other than that reunion,

and then a couple I went to,

to meet these guys and learn more.

Then there were things that happened

that were quite fascinating.

Bob Greenwalt always regretted

not being able to talk to the Huston family about Jimmy.

Well, Bob Greenwalt and Anne Barron had a chance to meet

and they went off and sat for a while

to share their memories about Jim Huston.

My favorite picture is I got three pilots together,

Dean Tate, Bob Greenwalt, and Jack Larson,

the first time they'd seen each other in 65 years.

And it was fun listening to them.

I could imagine what they were like when they were 22 or 23,

'cause they were so full of energy

and they were all in their 80s.

And you could just see that Navy pilot spirit in them,

and they just gave each other the hardest time.

(laughing)

I have a video of it.

But it gave them the opportunity to heal.

Another thing that happened was I had the opportunity

to visit with men of another squadron,

and I had an opportunity to visit

with a guy named John Richardson,

who was an eyewitness that day.

And I went to where his home was and I interviewed him,

and he gave a speech about how he felt that day.

And he said, "I was the last person

"to see Jim Huston, that guy alive."

He didn't know who he was till I gave him some information.

They caught each other.

They were about 90, 30 yards away from each other attacking,

and he looked at the pilot of the fighter

and the pilot looked at him,

and he said in that instant, that guy was killed.

He said, "I didn't know who he was,

"I didn't know anything about him.

"I couldn't talk to the family.

"I just knew he didn't suffer."

Well, John had the opportunity to talk to Anne Barron,

and John died about six months later,

but he was at peace, he was able to heal.

(sighs)

This battle for me causes me to have a battle with my faith.

And faith is not a belief without question,

but it's trust without reservation.

It's a confidence that we have about the gift

that we all receive.

So as you read or you examine material about the story,

that's the gift.

(intense rhythmic music)

- My name is Terry Lovelace.

I've got a story to tell you

about what happened to me and my friend in 1977.

What I'm gonna tell you is the truth.

What I'm gonna tell you is hard to believe.

But I can tell you that it's true and it happened to me

and it happened to my friend,

and it's happened to a lot of other people.

It happened to Betty and Barney Hill,

it happened to Travis Walton, Calvin Parker,

and other experiencers I've met and spoke with.

When you're a victim of alien abduction, you are tagged.

You're tagged like an animal on a Serengeti plain

for the rest of your life.

My first experience with UFOs goes back to age eight

when I saw a flying saucer in my backyard.

Of course, no one believed me.

And then again at age 11,

I saw one outside my bedroom window, and no one believed me.

In 1973, I went into the United States Air Force

not so much out of patriotism,

but really for the G.I. benefits for a college education.

And kind of a conscientious objector,

I requested to be a medic, and I was a medic and an EMT,

served for six years, from 1973 to 1979,

did all of my active duty time at Whiteman Air Force Base

in Knob Noster, Missouri.

It's still there.

It's now the home of the B-2 bomber.

Back in 1973 through 1979, it was a SAC base.

Of course, SAC no longer exists, but when I was there,

there was a squadron of B-52 bombers

armed with nuclear weapons

and a squadron of Minutemen II ICBMs, all aimed at Russia.

My hobby, my passion was photography.

I had a darkroom set up in my house

to develop black and white prints,

and you know there's not a lot you can photograph

when you live on a nuclear base.

Cameras are frowned upon.

So I really wanted to use my camera,

and my best friend and my work companion,

I call him Tobias or Toby, came up with a plan.

He came up to me one night and he said,

"Hey, man, I got an idea, let's go camping."

And I'm like, "Camping?

"Toby, are you nuts, man?

"I've never been camping in my life, I'm a city kid.

"You're from Flint, you're a city kid.

"What do we know about camping?"

And he said, "Nah, dude, look, it's not rocket science.

"We buy a cheap tent, we buy some inflatable air mattresses,

"we swipe a couple of nice blankets from the hospital,

"and take some military-strength DEET,

"and some water, and we're good to go, hot dogs, you know."

So we did, and Toby picked the place to go.

He chose Devils Den State Park in Northwestern Arkansas.

And we didn't know it at the time,

but Devils Den State Park in Northwest Arkansas

has a dark history,

has a dark history of people disappearing.

Matter of fact, David Paulides in his books, "Missing 411,"

his fourth volume in the series, mentions...

Well, the title is "The Devil is in the Details,"

and it talks about mysterious disappearances

from Devils Den State Park.

We decided that we were gonna go camping,

but we were gonna be real outdoorsmen.

I thought we were gonna camp in a parking lot,

or the campgrounds, and Toby's like,

"No, no, no, we don't wanna do that, man.

"That's like camping in Walmart's parking lot.

"You're gonna have people next to you.

"You're gonna have children

"and other undesirables running around.

"Let's be real outdoorsmen.

"Let's go find a place secluded on high ground

"and you can take pictures of eagles."

And my friend Toby was an amateur astronomer,

and he wanted to see a clear view of the night sky

without light pollution.

So we drove,

and we dodged the park rangers,

and we took a road that went winding toward the northwest

and the road degraded from pavement to gravel

to finally two ruts in the road.

And my friend Toby, it was almost like

he knew where we were going.

He was like, "Turn here, turn here, turn here."

Now, I admit, he had an unerring sense of direction,

but it felt like we were keeping an appointment.

It really did.

It was an odd trip.

We rolled up on this plateau that was flat as a pancake,

and it was elevated about 20 feet above the forest,

and it was clearcut.

There were no trees, it was a field of wildflowers,

and it was just gorgeous.

And when we rolled up on it,

we both looked at each other and said,

"Yeah, this is the place, this is where we gotta be."

So we pulled off to the side by the treeline

and set up our camp.

My friend Toby was in charge of putting the tent together

'cause he had kids and he was used to putting toys together,

so it made sense for him to be the architect

to put the tent together,

and my job was to gather some firewood.

And of course, I forgot my ax, but we made do.

Like my friend said, "Hey, it ain't rocket science."

So we built a fire, and it was an absolutely gorgeous night.

It was blue sky, a trillion stars out,

beautiful, absolutely gorgeous night.

And my friend is pointing out constellations to me,

and we're sitting around a campfire.

We've eaten our hotdogs and it's getting onto nine o'clock,

and I notice, and this sounds so cliche, but it's so true,

that the night sounds, like the crickets,

the tree frogs that you normally hear,

the sounds of the forest that had been so loud

that we had trouble conversing just 15 minutes earlier,

they were gone and it was silent.

And not only was it silent, it was dead still.

I recall that there was a tree in back of our tent

that I could see illuminated by the firelight,

from the campfire, and I remember looking at that

and thinking, you know, one of those leaves should move.

We kinda lost our breeze,

but there should be enough momentum in the air

to move a leaf surely.

But it was static and it was like looking at a picture.

And it really unnerved me.

Had I been there by myself, I'd have been in a car and gone.

But I didn't do that.

Instead, I asked my friend, I said,

"Hey, Toby, man, is this normal?

"Is it normal for it to be this still, this quiet?"

He says, "Oh, yeah, man, you know we've been laughing

"and cutting up, don't worry about it.

"The crickets, the tree frogs, they'll all be back.

"They'll be back, don't worry about it, no big deal."

But I still felt unnerved.

And it was about this time

that he had turned his head to the left

and he asked me, he said,

"Hey, Terry, were those lights there before?"

And I'm like, "What lights?

"What are you talking about?"

And I'm looking, and I'm leaning back

to look over his left shoulder,

and on the horizon there were three little stars,

and they were in a tight little perfect triangle

and they were just off the horizon.

They were far enough off the horizon

that you could see that they weren't lights

from a parking lot or a train or a highway,

and we knew of no aircraft

that had that kind of light configuration.

And we were debating on what it could be,

and I'm still kinda spooked.

And as we're watching this thing, it turns

and it rotates like it's on an axis,

and it turns about 340 degrees, not quite a full turn,

and stops, and then it starts to move up.

This was the time that I first felt a sense of calm.

I felt a sense of disinterest, almost apathy.

It was like I was an observer

more than a participant in the event.

And it was interesting because there was hardly a word said

between my friend and I.

We just watched this thing play out.

And as the stars climbed higher into the sky,

they expanded and always remained,

the three stars always remained equidistant to one another

and we could see because there was so much starlight out,

the sky was blue

and the area inside this triangle was black.

So we knew we were looking at a single object,

not three objects moving in unison, but one object.

And as it climbed into the air, it started to tumble

so that it would turn and then you would see two stars,

and then the other star from the bottom come up and around,

and it was doing this tumbling type motion.

But I had this feeling that it was moving with purpose,

and I don't know where that came from,

but I had the feeling

that it was not just moving by happenstance,

it was moving with purpose.

And it climbed to an elevation and then started to descend,

and it became pretty obvious

that it was headed in our direction.

And we were on a piece of elevated ground, we were up high,

and we could see this dark triangle

move across the forest floor headed in our direction.

And within a few minutes, this things was on us,

and it was right over us, and it was enormous.

It was a city block long on each leg of the triangle.

It was like someone levitated a medical building

or a Walmart, it was just huge.

And what's odd is that we felt no fear.

We felt this calm, as I said, almost disinterest,

almost apathy, as we watched this thing play out.

And it stopped, we're offset next to the treeline,

and this thing takes up the entire meadow

and casts a dark shadow.

And we're looking at it, and there came a light

from the bottom of it, and it was a visible light.

It was like a searchlight cutting through fog,

but there was no fog.

It was just this six-inch diameter column of white light

that came and landed square in the middle of our campfire.

And we looked at each other and we looked at the light,

and I don't think we said a word.

And that lasted for about a minute, and it shut off,

like someone (fingers snap) flipped a switch.

Then immediately in its stead

there came a blue purple-ish laser.

Now, lasers were kind of a new concept in 1977.

I'd seen them on television,

but I'd never seen one in real life,

and this was definitely a laser.

And it would land on our campsite in an area

and stay for a 10th of a second,

then turn off and then immediately appear

in another area of the campsite,

and then it would do this 10 times a second,

so it gave the illusion that this thing was dancing

all around our campsite.

And this light hit me in the chest a couple of times.

I know it hit Toby, it hit my car, it hit our tent.

And I had the feeling that this thing is scanning us,

this thing is checking us out.

And again, I felt this wave of calm wash over me,

and I wasn't afraid and neither was Toby.

The light shut off after about three minutes.

And here was have this thing

docked 3,000 feet over our heads

and suddenly all I wanted to do was go to sleep.

My friend, Toby, stood up and he grabbed his air mattress

and he said, "Show's over."

And I think that's the first word that was spoken

since we first saw the stars.

And he dragged his air mattress into the tent

and threw it into the right

and dove on top of it and went to sleep.

And by the time I followed him,

he was already snoring softly.

And I pulled back the flap of the tent,

and I put my air mattress in the other way.

I wanted my head toward the front,

toward the opening of the tent.

As soon as I lay my head back

on that plastic pillow, I was out.

I mean, it was just like I'd been anesthetized.

I was out.

Four hours pass.

I wake up to flashing bright lights,

absolutely just incredibly bright lights

that would light up the entire inside of the tent,

like an old-school flashbulb back in the '60s or '70s

that would go off and you'd see this blue dot

in front of your eyes for an hour

after every time you blink, it was that bright.

I mean, it lit up this tent like a ballpark at night.

And they were flashing at odd sequences.

They weren't in order.

And they were white and yellow and green

and kind of a rose color.

And in between one of these flashes of light,

there came a white light

that lit up the tent for a good period,

and I look over and I don't have my senses about me yet,

and I could see my friend Toby is on his knees

and he's crying.

He's got tracks of tears down his face.

And I thought, what?

And I'm disoriented and I'm thinking,

well, these flashing lights,

they could be the overhead lights of a park ranger's truck,

and there was this noise, and it was a droning noise.

It was like standing next to a big piece of heavy equipment

or a big piece of machinery or a train engine.

It was a noise that was more powerful than it was loud,

if that makes sense.

And I thought, boy, a park ranger running a generator

in the back of his truck, that doesn't make any sense.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're camping, that's right,

we're out here camping.

And I'm trying to logically think about what's going on,

and I notice that my boots are untied,

and I didn't untie my boots.

I didn't take off my shirt, but my boots are on,

they're not laced up, and my socks are sideways,

and you know, I was in the military,

and they teach you to take care of your feet.

(chuckles)

And I thought, oh, god, I gotta fix this,

and I pulled my boots off and put them on correctly

and laced them up, and I was confused how that could happen.

And I look over at my friend

and he's still looking outside the tent.

I'm like, "Toby, what's out there, man?

"What are you looking at?"

And he said, "Be quiet, they're still out there."

And I'm like, "Who, Toby, who's still out there?

"Is it park rangers?

"Who's out there?"

And he said, "No, Terry, they took us

"and they hurt us, don't you remember?"

And in that instant,

(fingers snap)

it was like all of that sedated feeling,

all of that calm that had washed over me, that was gone.

I went from disinterest and apathy to terror.

I was scared outta my wits.

And I got to my knees and I pulled back

my flap of the tent and peeked out.

As I did, Toby's sobbing,

and he rests his head on my left shoulder,

and I peek out the tent and I'm looking at the meadow,

and I notice two things.

This craft that had been 3,000 feet over our heads

when we went to bed had descended

and was now just 30 feet over our heads,

just 30 feet above us, and it was absolutely enormous.

The second thing I noticed was there were about 12 to 15

of what I thought were children,

and I asked Toby, "Toby, what are these kids doing out here

"in the middle of the night?

"This doesn't make any sense."

And he said, "Man, those ain't no kids.

"They're not human beings, Terry, look at them."

And I looked, and sure enough, I could see that their heads

were disproportionately large to their bodies,

their trunk, their torso was spindly and small,

their limbs were tiny and long,

and they walked with a distinctive gait.

They walked like someone with sore feet

or with shoes on that don't fit properly.

They almost walked with a limp.

And they were paired up in twos and threes,

and they're just wandering around this meadow.

There came a light from the center of the triangle,

a column of white light,

again like a searchlight cutting through fog,

a visible column of white light,

and it was about 30 feet in diameter.

It was about as wide in diameter as this thing was above us.

So I'd say 30 feet.

And these little guys in pairs and in threes

would wander into this light and dissolve,

like the old "Star Trek" thing with the transporter

where you see the images of people dissolve,

that's exactly what it was like.

They would step into this beam of light and dissolve.

And we watched this play out, and we are frightened,

we are scared out of our wits.

And we watched until the last two little guys

walked into the light and disappeared,

and then the thing, the noise, the droning noise, stopped,

and the color of the lights on the apex of each triangle

switched from multicolored to just white light,

and it took off.

But it didn't take off like a rocket.

It lifted off like a hot air balloon.

It just slowly rose, and as it rose,

it got higher in the sky, and the higher in the sky it got,

the faster it went, and we saw the three lights,

and then one light, and then it was gone.

And we were so terrified, we sat in that tent

for probably 30 minutes just breathing and afraid.

And I know this sounds crazy,

but I felt that the tent gave us cover.

I didn't wanna be out in the open.

And you know, that's still with me today.

Today, I'll walk a half a mile outta my way

to go around an open field.

I won't be in an open space alone, never.

So we needed to make a run to the car.

I grabbed my wallet, Toby grabbed a flashlight,

I grabbed my keys, and Toby was really the one

that urged me to go,

'cause I was so afraid I didn't wanna go.

And he said, "On the count of three,

"we're gonna bolt, we're gonna go."

And we did, and we bolted outta the tent,

got to my car, got in, slammed the doors.

Toby said, "Are we good?"

And I knew what he meant, I turned the dome light on,

and he checked the car out and looked in the back seat

and under the seats, and there was nothing there.

So we hit the door locks and we started off.

And I said, "Toby, man, can you get us outta here

"in the middle of the night?"

And he says, "Yeah, yeah, I can do that."

And he'd actually made some notes

on the back of a bank envelope

that was in my glove box with a pencil,

so he knew where to turn, and he guided us outta there.

And we were both just sick as dogs.

We were, we were absolutely sick as dogs.

Never in my life had I been so thirsty.

I was completely dehydrated.

I was burned.

It's like I had the worst sunburn

I'd ever had in my life that didn't blister.

The sunburn was every spot on my body,

the soles of my feet, it was on my scalp,

it was under my arms, it was everywhere.

I didn't blister, but it was bright red.

And when the sun came up, I realized that I was photophobic.

It was like I had sand in my eyes, it hurt.

The sunlight hurt.

Whatever they did to me, they gave Toby a double measure,

because he was curled up in a ball

on the big bench seat of my old Chevy,

and just in a lotta pain.

We stopped at a gas station and got some gas,

and I went into the bathroom and rinsed my face off,

and I cupped my hands and held them under the faucet,

this grungy old faucet in this dirty bathroom,

and just drank and drank and drank.

I could not get enough.

I opened the door and here's Toby standing on a post,

leaning on this post about to fall over,

and he looks like train wreck, he looks terrible.

And I said, "It's all yours, man."

He bought a gallon of Grapeade,

I bought a six-pack of orange soda,

and we both downed that liquid like nothing, drained it.

And we were headed back.

It was a six-hour drive, and I know Toby couldn't drive.

I could barely drive, and I got us back to the airbase.

We both lived in NCO housing at Whiteman Air Force Base,

and he lived just a couple of blocks from me,

and I dropped him off, and you know, it was an odd trip back

because something changed.

We had changed, we were different.

I can't explain it,

but this guy who used to be my best friend,

I had mixed feelings about it.

I can't reconcile those feelings,

but maybe it's because he reminded me of a traumatic event.

I mean, normally you would think two people

that go through a traumatic event

would come closer together, but that wasn't the case.

And I dropped him off at his house and I said, "See ya,"

and I drove the two blocks over to my house

and pulled in to our driveway, and my wife was there.

I was 22 years old, and I opened the door,

and she said, "Oh, you're back early."

And then she said, "What happened to you?"

And I told her the truth.

I said, "I don't know, but what do we have to drink?"

And I sat down at the kitchen table,

and she took my boots off for me,

and she got out a gallon of powdered lemonade,

and I just started pounding,

just drinking as much of this lemonade as I could hold.

And she put her hand on my forehead and she said,

"My god, you got a fever."

I asked her for sunglasses

because my eyes could not stand the light.

And she said, "Well, you gotta go to the hospital."

And I didn't protest, I knew I was sick.

But there's kind of a dilemma

in that the hospital squadron is where we worked.

But you know, that's kind of a blessing, too,

in that hospital people take care of their own.

So when we got to the hospital,

and everyone in the hospital

knew we were making this camping trip, everyone knew.

It wasn't a secret.

As a matter of fact, the hospital commander asked me,

he says, "All right, Ansel Adams, bring me back

"some quality black and white prints for my office."

And I said, "Yes, sir, I sure will."

And I didn't have any prints to bring back.

Matter of fact, I didn't take a single picture.

Toby had a camera in his backpack.

The idea of taking a picture of this thing

never crossed our minds, and I don't understand that.

So we got to the hospital, we were both taken in

and we were in separate rooms, separate emergency rooms,

and I had the most extensive

medical examination I've ever had in my life.

And the doctor said, and I knew the guy, I knew the doctor,

he said, "Terry, what happened to you guys?"

And I wasn't about to tell him

I saw a UFO the size of Walmart

hovering over our campsite,

because I was afraid they'd put me in a psyche ward,

I really was.

So I told him the truth.

We went to bed and woke up sick as dogs.

I just left out the part in between.

So, he said, "Boy, I tell you,"

he says, "You are terribly dehydrated."

And he had two IVs running in me,

and they examined my eyes and they determined

that I had flash burns, which is also called

arc welder's burns.

Basically, it's a sunburn to the cornea of your eye,

and it's painful.

It feels like you have sand in your eyes.

So they put me in a hospital room,

and they separated the two of us.

The base commander, the hospital commander,

and two guys in business suits walked into my hospital room,

and the base commander spoke.

And he said, "Sergeant Lovelace, you're to have no contact

"with Sergeant Tobias.

"That means no telephone calls, no visits, no notes,

"no contact through third parties, no contact of any kind.

"Do you understand me, Sergeant?"

And I said, "Yes, sir," but I really didn't understand.

The guy was my best friend.

I didn't understand.

And they had orders cut,

PCS to ship him out to Japan in a matter of weeks.

I mean, they cut his orders at light speed.

They sent us home with a bunch of pills,

and we were to take three pills a day, one with each meal.

And they had a nurse with no name tag

who would come to the house after supper every evening

and count my pills, and do a pill count

to make sure that I had taken the medication.

And after about three days of taking this medicine,

my wife said, "You know what, I think those pills

"are making you goofy."

And she was right, she was.

I mean, I'm sitting around watching cartoons,

and I'm out of it, I'm not with it.

And I stopped taking those pills.

My god, I wish I had saved just one.

And at every meal, I would flush one down the toilet,

and the lady came every night and did a pill count.

She never actually watched me take a pill,

but she would do a pill count.

Never took my blood pressure, never asked me how I felt,

just did a pill count.

I don't know what they were.

I had a physician's desk reference that had a photograph

of every pill in the United States Formulary,

and this capsule was not in it.

That means it was specially made by a pharmacist,

so I don't what I was taking or what they wanted me to take.

And my friend Toby, if he took 14 days of this stuff,

I'm sure he was poisoned.

I'm sure he was...

That led to his demise.

Despite my no contact order,

I decided I wanted to say goodbye to Toby.

I went by the house.

I went up to the door,

a door I'd walked through 100 times before,

and I walked in and I saw his wife Tammy,

and she gave me a hard look and said,

"You're not supposed to be here."

And I said, "I know, there's no contact order, I know.

"I just wanna say goodbye to Toby."

And then it hit me, I think she blamed me,

even though this camping trip was Toby's idea,

I think somehow she blamed me for his condition.

So Toby must have heard this conversation,

and he came out of his bedroom,

and we met in the hallway, and he was just a mess.

He was a short guy and he was always particular

about his appearance, he was very neat, always well-groomed,

and his hair was disheveled, he had on a dirty tee-shirt,

dirty jeans, was barefoot.

I knew this guy well.

We barbecued and partied together,

and I never knew him to drink more than a beer,

maybe a beer and a half, and when I got close to him,

I could smell vodka on his breath or liquor of some kind.

And I wanted to embrace the guy.

I thought it would be appropriate.

And for some reason, I didn't,

and I did this awkward kind of back and forth,

and we managed to do a handshake, and I said,

"Man, I just wanted to wish you luck on your new assignment.

"I heard you're going to Japan."

And he said, "Yeah."

I said, "Well, I wanna wish you well."

And he looked up at me with these bloodshot eyes,

and he said, "It happened, Terry, didn't it?"

And I said, "Yes, my brother, it happened.

"You're not losing your mind, it really happened."

And he said, "Why?"

I said, "I don't know, I have no idea."

And with that, I broke gaze, and I'm looking at my shoes,

and I turned and I ran outta the house,

got in the car and went home.

I should backtrack, because there was an interesting

encounter when I was in the hospital.

I spent three days in the hospital.

They had the lights turned off for my comfort,

because my eyes were so photophobic.

And I'm in the hospital bed, it's close to evening,

and my night nurse comes in and she brings an injection,

which was my pain med, which I needed,

and these two guys in blue business suits followed her in,

and I could tell these guys were cops.

I had always been a pretty straight kid.

I'd never been in trouble before,

but I knew these guys were cops.

They had their suit coats were open

and you could see a shoulder holster,

and they carried themselves with that air of authority,

and as the nurse got near my bed,

the shorter of the two, the older gentleman,

said, "If that's gonna sedate Sergeant Lovelace,

"it's gonna have to wait.

"We need to interrogate him.

"We need to ask him some questions."

And they pulled out their credentials,

and they were from the Office of Special Investigation,

United States OSI.

The OSI is to the Air Force was NCIS is to the Navy,

if that makes sense.

They're the investigative branch

of the Air Force's security police.

So this guy, in his 50s, flattop haircut,

sits down next to the head of my bed, and he says,

first he reads me my rights

under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,

and he had this weird Southern accent.

I say he talked sideways.

And I asked him, I said,

"Sir, am I in some kind of trouble?"

And he said, "Son, would we be here

"if you weren't in some kind of trouble?"

And the captain, his co-hort, just laughed.

And I thought, oh my god, what'd we do?

Did we burn the forest down or something?

And I think what happened was the park rangers found

that we had taken the chain down

and drove into this restricted area,

and they found Toby's backpack,

because when we left, we left, we left all our stuff there.

We left the tent, we left his backpack,

we left everything except my wallet and my keys.

And I think his backpack had his address

and his phone number, and I think they called the airbase

and said, "A couple of your airmen set up a camp out here,

"and it looks like they're planning on coming back."

So this guy says to me, he says,

"You know, I wanna know what's going on.

"Do you guys have a little marijuana plot out there?

"Is that what's going on here?"

And that really scared me, because in 1977,

that would have meant Leavenworth Penitentiary.

And I said, "No, sir, no, sir, no, sir.

"We were just sick and we wanted to come home."

And he went on interrogating me and intimidating me

until he was done, and then the captain left,

and it's just me and him in the room.

And he had turned on the lights, which really hurt my eyes,

and he reached over and he turned the lights off,

which was kinda nice.

And he got down next to my face,

and he kinda dropped this tough guy affect that he had,

And looked like a regular human being again.

And he whispered to me, "Son, I know and you know,

"you two knuckleheads stumbled

"onto something out there, didn't you,

"and I think you know what I mean, don't you?

"Oh, I know you know what I mean."

And I didn't answer him.

And he said, "All I wanna know is how many pictures

"you took of it and where's your film?"

And I said, "Sir, I never took a single picture,"

which was the truth.

They knew, somehow they knew.

I don't know how they knew, but they knew.

Later on, about six weeks later,

I got a call to go to OSI headquarters.

They sent a car for me and took me to the OSI headquarters.

I had no notice of it, other than 10 minutes' notice

that there's gonna be a car waiting for me

to take me to OSI headquarters, and I was scared to death.

When I got there, the two officers,

the two special agents that interviewed me in the hospital,

were there, and they took me into an interrogation room,

you know, a tiny room about the size of your bathroom

with a desk and a framed mirror on the wall,

which I'm sure was a two-way affair.

And the major sat down and he said,

"You know, you're gonna be hypnotized today.

"We're gonna give you a little medication."

And I said, "No, sir, I did not know that."

And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah."

He said, "The forms you signed

"when you were in the hospital gave us your permission."

Now, I did sign some forms when I was in the hospital,

but I couldn't read a thing.

I mean, they laid stuff out, put a pen in my hand,

and said, "Sign here, here, here, and here," and I did.

And there's a knock at the door of the interrogation room,

and this guy walks in and he's a major

with oak leaves and no name tag.

And he walks over and he sits down next to me,

and he says, "Sergeant Lovelace, it's so nice to meet you.

"I'm Major Brad Field, but you can call me Brad,

"that is my name."

And it was just creepy, because this guy carried himself

more like a priest or a therapist than a military officer.

And he sat down next to me and he says,

"You know, you're gonna be hypnotized today

"to help you recall some memories of what happened to you

"when you were camping."

And I said, "I don't understand why, sir, I don't want to,"

and he said, "Well, you signed a consent form.

"I can tear this consent form up for you now.

"You don't have to do this.

"I'll just tear this up and throw it away,

"and we'll just see you at the court-martial."

And that scared me to death, and I thought,

I gotta roll with this, and I did.

I knew a little bit about psychology,

because I had been taking psyche classes

on the extension university on base for a couple of years,

and I knew I couldn't be hypnotized against my will.

But the drug, I knew I had no control over.

The drug they gave me I found out later,

because I'm not the only one they've done this to.

In the back of my book, "Incident at Devils Den,"

I give an email address and I say,

"If you've had an experience

"and you'd like to share it with someone,

"send me your information.

"I'm not a doctor or a therapist,

"but I'd like to hear from you."

And I've had a couple of people write to me and say,

"Sodium Amytal is what they used."

It's a short-acting hypnotic,

and it's akin to sodium Pentothal,

or what they call truth serum.

They gave me this drug, and when they did,

I was in a twilight zone.

I resisted his hypnosis,

and I think I did so pretty effectively.

He asked me,

"Terry, you went on a camping trip

"with Sergeant Tobias, didn't you?"

And I'm in this relaxed position now,

because I'm under the influence of this hypnotic drug.

And he says, "Terry, I want you to tell me,

"what did you see?

"Did you see some funny lights in the sky?"

And I said, "Yes, Brad, I did."

And he says, "But they weren't funny lights,

"were they, Terry?"

And I said, "No, Brad, they weren't."

And he asked me, "Who were they, Terry?"

And I said, "They're the space people."

And I was dumbfounded.

I mean, it was like a slap in the face.

I could not believe those words came out of my mouth.

But under this drug, I could see in my mind's eye

this thing playing out.

I could see them taking me aboard this ship.

I mean, I don't have a clear linear memory

of what happened to me, but I have bits and pieces,

flashes of memory, memory that manifest

in the form of nightmares for 40 years,

repetitive nightmares, which I journaled.

All my kids knew was that dad

would have screaming nightmares once or twice a year.

And I was determined not to tell the story.

I didn't wanna tell the story.

My wife and I never talked about it,

my wife and I never saw UFO movies or

sci-fi or anything like that,

because it disturbed my sleep.

I went to the hospital in 2012 with pain in my leg,

and when I did, they did an X-ray,

and what they found was astounding.

Above my knee, clear as a bell,

you could see what looks like a transistor,

or some kind of little RIFD device with two wires on it,

and below my leg, there's a cluster.

The pictures are in the back of my book.

There's a cluster of tic-tac shaped objects,

arranged in a floral pattern

with a little dot in the middle.

And the radiologist came down, and he looks at the film,

and he says, "Well, when did you have an accident?"

I said, "I wasn't involved in any accident."

And he said, "Well, you had to be.

"There's no way you could get these objects

"this deep into your muscle tissue and your fascia.

"You had to have been in some kind of car accident

"or some kind of trauma."

And I said, "No, I never hurt this leg before."

And he says, "Sure you did, you got a scar.

"I'll find it."

And he insisted on examining my leg.

And he rolled up my pant leg, and he looked and he looked,

and then he turned the lights out

and he had his intern bring a handheld blacklight.

'Cause evidently scar tissue will fluoresce

under a blacklight.

And he examined my knee for 10 minutes,

and he sat down, and he looked stumped.

And I said, "Doctor, how often is it

"that you find a foreign object in the body

"without their being a corresponding scar?"

And he said, "Never."

He said, "I've been a radiologist for 23 years,

"I've never seen this before.

"The thing above your knee is obviously

"some kind of manufactured manmade device.

"The thing below your knee in the floral pattern

"is the consistency of bone, but I think not."

And I said, "What do you mean, you think not?"

And the doctor said, "Well, I've never known bone tissue

"to spontaneously sprout in the middle of a calf muscle,

"much less arrange itself

"in this symmetrical floral pattern."

He said, "It's just bizarre."

And that to me was a slap in the face.

That to me made me decide that I wanted to write the book,

I wanted to speak publicly about this.

I wanted to let people know that this happens,

that they're here, that they take people against their will

and there's little we can do about it.

One of the most common questions I'm asked

is what happened to your friend?

You know, that's an interesting question.

He was shipped out to Japan within weeks.

My wife and his wife were close friends,

so when she came back to the states,

she looked us up and found us in Michigan.

And she had married, divorced Toby,

and married this long-haul trucker

and said, "We're gonna be near you

"and we'd like to stop by and visit."

And we said, "That'd be great, we'd love to see you."

So she stopped by and we welcomed her in.

Tammy and whatever animosity she felt toward me

seemed to have softened over the years.

This is four or five years down the road,

and she told me about what happened to Toby,

and that was that even though he wasn't a drinker,

he fell into a bottle and never got out.

I had tried to contact Toby, and that made sense.

I had tried to contact, I had his dad's phone number,

and I tried to contact him once or twice,

and I spoke to his dad, and his dad told me,

"Well, you know, Toby's not doing real well.

"He's kind of living on the street."

And I said, "Well, I'll give you my phone number.

"Would you have him call me, please?"

And he said, "I promise, I will."

Well, I never heard from him,

and the next time I called the number, it was disconnected.

So a couple of years pass, I finish my law degree,

I'm practicing law, and I'm working on a case.

Well, it doesn't matter.

I'm working on a case with the FBI,

and I became friends with an FBI agent,

and I ask him, I said, "Hey, could you help me

"find this buddy that I was in the military with

"back in the '70s?"

He said, "Sure, I can find anybody."

But he said, "I can't do an official investigation.

"It's just between us, I'll do it for you as a favor."

I said, "That'd be great, that'd be cool, thank you."

So, a couple weeks later, he says,

"Meet me at the bar, and I got news for you."

I said, "Okay," so I did.

I met him at the bar on Friday night,

and he said, "I've got bad news for you.

"Your friend's dead."

And I said, "He's dead?

"How can he be dead?

"He's a healthy 26-year-old man by now.

"I mean, that doesn't make sense."

And he says, "Well, it was an automobile accident,

"and he didn't survive, I'm sorry."

And I thought, "Oh, okay."

I mean, I was sad, but I accepted it.

I assumed the source wouldn't lie to me, but he did.

He did lie to me, because when I started writing this book

in 2017, I was determined to find his obituary.

Using his real name, I did a computer search,

and I found that he died in Bay City, Michigan,

on September 4th, 2014.

So he'd been alive all these years,

and we never had the opportunity to reconnect.

And it was kinda sad.

There was a memorial book where you sign in

when you go to the funeral, and there were just three names.

Two I didn't recognize,

and the third was the director of the funeral home.

So, not a lotta people visited Toby's funeral.

So that's a sad ending, and I'm just grateful

that my wife noticed that the pills

that I were taking was poison,

because I believe that's what happened to him.

I believe he took all 14 days' worth of those pills

and I think that's what happened to him.

But I can tell you this, that once you're taken,

you're taken for life.

You're missing time, seeing things in the sky,

it never goes away, it's always there.

And with that, I'll conclude,

and thank you very much for listening.

(intense rhythmic music)