The Horror at Holloman Air Force Base

The terrifying account of a human abduction and mutilation on the gypsum dunes of the White Sands Missile Range…

Image by Baggeb, via Pixabay.

Everyone knows that aliens love to abduct and mutilate farm animals of various and sundry kinds.

Why they do it is a question that many intrepid explorers of the unknown have pondered, and largely in vain—for the answer seems to be nearly as elusive as the slippery UFOnauts who commit these baffling crimes in the first place.

Maybe these otherworldly creeps are motivated by a cold, scientific curiosity, which compels them to kidnap and dissect our animal life in a bid to understand what makes terrestrial biology tick. Perhaps it forms a part of some alien religious ritual; or maybe the strange buggers like to study the entrails of hapless cattle as part of some weird form of augury, like the Roman haruspices of old.

Or maybe they’re just a bunch of perverts, and mutilating cows and coring rectums is how they get their jollies.

Honestly, at this point, the whole bewildering phenomenon has been going on so long that I think people have forgotten to even inquire anymore into the wherefore of it all. The blood of murdered cattle, and other domesticated animals, has been staining the fair Southwest since that fateful day in 1967, when old Harry King discovered the mutilated remains of Snippy the mare on his ranch in the mysterious San Luis Valley.

That is when it all started…right?

Well, what if I were to tell you that the first case of cattle mutilation in the Southwest didn’t involve a cow at all…nor a prize mare, for that matter? In fact, what if I told you that the first case—or very nearly the first case—of an abduction and subsequent mutilation of a terrestrial life-form by an otherworldly visitant involved, not a farm animal, but a genuine human being?

If we’re to believe the account of one William “Bill” English, then this is the truth of the matter, per the United States government’s own reporting. And the mutilations didn’t start in 1967 at all, but began over a decade earlier, and not in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, but rather in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico.

Descending into the Tularosa Basin from the San Agustín Pass, east of Las Cruces.

Now Bill English, it’s worth noting, is a fascinating but rather elusive character in his own right. The son of an Arizona state legislator (presumably William J. English), he was—so we’re given to believe—formerly a captain in the Green Berets. It was in the latter capacity that Capt. English had his own close encounter of the sickening kind, when he was dispatched as part of a team of special forces hardasses—Predator style—to investigate the downing of a B-52 Stratofortress in the jungles of Vietnam (some accounts say it was in Laos).

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, radio exchanges with the bomber crew just prior to the crash indicated that it was being chased, and was eventually forced down, by…well, you probably guessed it—a UFO.

When English and his team arrived, they found the plane—seemingly largely intact, with no indication of torn-up jungle such as a crashed aircraft would leave in its wake, and with only minimal signs of damage. Oh, and they also found the bomber’s crew—still strapped into their seats, and, yeah, they were mutilated as all hell. That seems to be the all-too-common calling card of a particularly vicious species of extraterrestrial.

But I digress.

After his eventful stint in the military, English decided to reenter government service as a civilian information analyst. His new billet saw him quartered at RAF Chicksands, north of London, where he was assigned to a USAF listening post. So far, so ordinary…but then things get interesting.

As part of his assignment, English was asked to take a look at a certain very top-secret document, and to prepare an analysis of it. He did just that—but this wasn’t some dry report on Soviet troop movements in eastern Europe. The document English held in his hot little hands was nothing less than the elusive and half-fabulous PROJECT GRUDGE/BLUE BOOK REPORT NO. 13 (hereafter GRUDGE 13).

Now the PROJECT GRUDGE/BLUE BOOK reports were released by the United States Air Force, and summarized that branch’s infamous investigation into the matter of UFOs in the decades leading up to the notorious Condon Report in 1968. There were 12 reports initially, and they contained nothing that might be considered sensitive or especially salacious; there was a final report, Report #14, again containing nothing terribly earth-shattering.

Scan of the cover of PROJECT BLUE BOOK Special Report No. 14—presumably very similar to the cover of the semi-legendary Special Report No. 13, which Bill English allegedly analyzed and committed to memory.

But this all begs the question—where was Report #13? Was the Air Force just superstitious, like certain hotels with their “missing thirteenth floor”? Or was there in point of fact an actual Report #13, which was never released to the public?

Well, Capt. Bill English insisted there really was a thirteenth report, and that he was assigned to read and summarize it one strange day in 1977. Apparently the document must have left quite an impression, since English was afterward able to recall and replicate in incredible detail the report’s intriguing contents—including the horrifying account of the abduction and mutilation of one Jonathan P. Lovette, a technical sergeant in the United States Air Force.

The incident, we’re told, occurred in March of 1956, at about three in the morning. The witness was a Major William Cunningham, of the US Air Force Missile Test Command at Holloman Air Force Base. The major and Sgt. Lovette were downrange of the missile launching sites, presumably somewhere in the gleaming gypsum dunes of White Sands, with the unenviable early-morning task of searching for errant launch debris from a recent missile test.

It was a pretty routine assignment, and one can imagine the two men joking and horsing around, or maybe pausing to admire the gleaming stars of half a universe in the black dome of the night sky overhead, as well as the mysterious starlight reflected in the white dunes below. In any case, a somewhat over-zealous Sgt. Lovette distanced himself from his officer and topped the rise of a small dune, disappearing for a time from the major’s sight.

Major Cunningham kept at his search for a few minutes…and then he heard it: the chilling scream of a man in the throes of unspeakable terror and physical agony. It was the sergeant, undoubtedly bitten by a snake or perhaps attacked by some night-prowling animal…though the major could scarcely imagine what sort of creature that might be at this time of night, and in this particularly desolate part of New Mexico.

He struggled up to the crest of the dune, and beheld…the most inexplicable and terrifying scene he had ever encountered in his life—the sort of thing a man could never afterward forget. For there was a thing in the air, which the major described as a “silvery disk-like object,” hovering about fifteen to twenty feet above the sand dunes—and this disk was in the act of abducting the terror-stricken Sgt. Lovette.

A typical “Cattle Crossing” sign in New Mexico. Courtesy: Lorie Shaull at Flickr.

Now, you take a drive anywhere in New Mexico, and it’s a cinch that you’ll encounter one of those “Cattle Crossing” yellow diamond signs on the side of the road…you know, the one with a little black silhouette of a cow. And inevitably you’ll find that some joker’s slapped a UFO sticker (classic flying saucer shape, of course) right above the cow. It’s usually understood by most right-thinking and god-fearing people that the UFO in question just sort of “sucks” the cow right up into its hold—an impression reinforced by countless popular depictions in film and television.

But if that’s what you’re thinking in the case of the hapless Sgt. Lovette…well, you’d be dead wrong. See, the thing is, Major Cunningham said that he saw “a long snake-like object,” something like a segmented metallic tentacle I suppose, which had emerged from the flying saucer and was tightly wrapped about the sergeant’s legs, and was in the process of dragging him into the mysterious object.

I’ll bet that’s not what you expected. Hell, it’s not what I expected either—there’s something much more elegant about the kind of “tractor beam” we’ve all come to expect any proper UFO would use to abduct its defenseless prey. But you’ve got to admit: it’s such a strange and unexpected detail that it almost lends a certain baffling air of verisimilitude to Major Cunningham’s story.

Anyhow, the saucer managed to drag the poor sergeant up into its hold or vivisection bay or whatever it’s got going on, and Major Cunningham—who was watching the eerie spectacle, stock still and nearly beside himself with terror—asserted that the disk then shot up into the sky at an incredible rate of speed.

Things happened very quickly now. The major raced back to his jeep, and radioed his story back to Missile Control; they confirmed a radar trace of an unidentified object, and search parties were immediately dispatched. Major Cunningham was returned to the base, debriefed, and remanded to medical staff for observation.

What followed was a three-day search for the missing sergeant. Naturally, no one at the base credited the major’s wild story for an instant. In fact, there was every reason to believe that he would be charged with the missing man’s murder, and, briefly, he was so charged…but those charges were later dropped, in light of what was eventually discovered.

For three days, as I said, search parties scoured several hundred square miles in their desperate search for Sgt. Lovette. And at the end of those three days of frantic searching, they finally found his body ten miles downrange of the base.

It was not a pretty sight.

He was nude (they always are), and he had been cruelly and horribly mutilated, in a pattern that has become all too familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the cattle mutilation phenomenon. For instance: his tongue had been removed, and a strange surgical-type incision had been performed, extending from under the chin to about the region of the esophagus and larynx.

It probably comes as little surprise that his genitals were removed. Aliens love doing that, the sick bastards. But they took his eyes, too, which seems gratuitous and particularly spiteful. And they cored his rectum, of course…Bill English especially remembered the report using the phrasing “as though a plug,” suggesting that the anus had been excavated out all the way up to the colon. Absolutely disgusting.

Finally, the body was completely drained of blood. The autopsy report even asserted that there was no indication of “vascular collapse,” which is the sort of thing that is often encountered when there is a significant loss of blood. No further comment on that strange finding was offered…you can make of it what you will.

Lastly, it was indicated in the report that the corpses of several carrion birds were discovered in the vicinity, apparently stone dead as a result of consuming the dead sergeant’s flesh.

Bill English said that this section of the report concluded with a number of ghastly black-and-white photographs of Sgt. Lovette’s corpse, as well as an appended note indicating that Missile Control had tracked unidentified radar contacts alongside fired missiles. This even included an incident in which one such UFO apparently caught up with a missile in mid-flight, and brought it aboard.

Maybe it used the same weird snake-tentacle that grabbed poor Sgt. Lovette.¹

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Verdict: So what are we to make of this incident—the ghastly Horror at Holloman Air Force Base?

It’s hard to say. If the story is true, then it would be one of the most shocking and terrifying accounts of a human mutilation episode on record…worse, it would go a long way toward proving that not only is mankind not the highest form of life in the local universe, but that he ranks somewhere alongside the lowly dairy cow in the estimation of our decidedly less-than-benevolent Space Brothers.

Of course…that’s only the case if the story is true. And that’s a pretty big “if.” After all, no one has been able to verify the identity of any Sgt. Jonathan P. Lovette or Major William Cunningham posted to Holloman Air Force Base—or any other base, Air Force or otherwise—in 1956. No one operating at White Sands Missile Range in the indicated time frame has come forth to confirm the story, either.

Then there’s the whole matter of the shady and rather elusive Capt. Bill English, to say nothing of the semi-legendary GRUDGE 13, the very existence of which is disputed. For one thing, English’s military record—which was apparently quite colorful—can’t be confirmed. For another, his personal biography subsequent to his encounter with GRUDGE 13 becomes increasingly fantastic. We are told that he was drummed out of the service immediately upon completing his précis of the document; that he was threatened by military officials, and sent back stateside without so much as a by-your-leave or even a chance to collect his wife and children—whom he had installed in England during his brief stint there.

Naturally, he tried to contact his family, but apparently the US government just wouldn’t let him. For over thirteen years. A far likelier story is that Capt. English simply ditched his old lady and abandoned his family.

But it gets better. Some years later, the Base Commander who summarily dismissed and deported English from England, a Col. Robert Black, shows up at his door with a sob story about how he too was kicked out of the service—and lost his family—over the whole GRUDGE 13 incident. So the two unemployed men decided to stop holding a grudge, and—together with another Special Operations officer who was also booted out of the service over this whole GRUDGE 13 affair—made common cause to figure out what was really going on at the White Sands Missile Range.

Turns out that Col. Black had heard a persistent rumor that a gigantic flying saucer had been tracked near the range on radar, and subsequently crashed (these UFOnauts don’t seem to be very competent pilots). Recovery crews had arrived, but the UFO was so damned big that its retrieval was sensibly considered out of the question; wherefore, naturally, the government ordered that the incredible thing be buried in situ.

I won’t get into the whole convoluted story here, but Bill English and his new pals show up at the Missile Range with a tricked-out van, complete with desert tires, radar equipment, listening instruments, magnetometers, and some nifty electromagnetic sensors. They go off-road at White Sands National Park, slip onto the Missile Range, and begin looking for the prodigious, buried saucer. Capt. English is on foot, sweeping the dunes with his metal detector, while the van inches across the dunes behind him, when…well, English hears the sound of a heat-seeking rocket streaking overhead. Relying on precision instincts honed during his Green Beret days, he hits the deck, and when the smoke clears, all that’s left of the fancy van and his two buddies is a smoldering pile of wreckage and some barbecued former military officers.

Understandably, Capt. English decides to beat a hasty retreat before the ubiquitous black helicopters arrive, and then—fortunately—he makes it back to his home, in Tucson, Arizona.

On foot. From White Sands Missile Range. In New Mexico.

That’s a distance of over three hundred miles, in case you were wondering, and over some of the most desolate and unforgiving terrain in the United States.

Couldn’t he have at least hitchhiked part of the way?²

So there’s a lot to be desired when it comes to Bill English and his story of the abduction and mutilation of Air Force Sgt. Jonathan P. Lovette. After all, he is the only source for the story. And unless GRUDGE 13 ever turns up, complete and unabridged, Bill English is likely to be the only source we’ll ever have for quite some time.

I will say this, however: there is another individual, by the name of Milton William Cooper, who also claims to have reviewed GRUDGE 13. Like English, Cooper has attempted to recreate the contents of the report from memory, and though he makes no mention of the Sgt. Lovette mutilation, he does have a lot to say about Holloman Air Force Base, which seems to play a central role in the report’s findings. For instance, Cooper claims that the base hosted extraterrestrial visitants in 1964, and that the report contained copious photos of the event; the meeting allegedly concluded in the signing of a treaty between the US Government and these extraterrestrials, among whose provisions was that the feds would get alien technology in exchange for permitting the Greys a certain limited quota of human abductions—purely for purposes of experimentation, or so we’re told.

It’s not exactly irrefutable corroboration, but at least it’s something.

So it seems the jury is still out on this one. For now, the story, and its sole source, seems more than a little dodgy. But it almost makes a certain kind of sense. Maybe those UFOnauts started poking around White Sands Missile Range once we humans began detonating atomic bombs and launching rockets into space. And maybe some overeager alien crew—perhaps disregarding established protocol—decided to pick up a member of the strange and troublesome local species, and perform an impromptu vivisection to see what we’re all about.

Afterwards, in 1964, the feds and the ETs came to an agreement of sorts, and the aliens scaled back their experimentation efforts…supplementing them instead with the occasional cattle abduction and mutilation.

Either way, all roads to the weird and paranormal and out of this world seem to lead somehow to the American West…and almost always to New Mexico in particular.

So I’ll leave you with this: I hear it’s beautiful in White Sands National Park of a moonlit night. But if you decide to go, stay frosty, and keep your eyes heavenward…that might be more than just another shooting star you see streaking across the night sky.

1. The substance of this story, with further intriguing particulars about GRUDGE 13, were abstracted from a report prepared on Oct. 7, 1988, by John Lear, who interviewed Bill English about the matter. Lear’s report and notes were reproduced in the section “GRUDGE 13 REPORT” beginning on pg. 61 of Valdamar Valerian’s book Matrix II: The Abduction and Manipulation of Humans Using Advanced Technology (Yelm, WA: Leading Edge Research Group, 1990). The book can be viewed here.

2. The details of Bill English’s fascinating and exciting career following his dismissal from military service (along with a recap of the GRUDGE 13 material) can be found in the third chapter of Ken Hudnall’s intriguing The Occult Connection: U.F.O.s, Secret Societies, and Ancient Gods (Vol. I) (El Paso, TX: Omega Press, 1990, pp. 39-51), as well as in William Knell’s The UFO Guy (Lulu Press, 2008).