The year was 1956 at the White Sands missile testing grounds,
near Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The site was used for rocket
tests, and Major William Cunningham was involved in collecting debris for tests
after a successful launch. Assisting him was Air Force Sgt. Jonathan P. Lovette. It was an
uneventful day full of tedious work, and the two men separated to cover different areas
of the field. But what had been a predictable day of work was about to become anything but
when Cunningham was snapped out of his labor by a bloodcurdling scream from nearby. It was Lovette!
In the New Mexico desert, danger wasn’t uncommon - especially with venomous snakes everywhere.
Cunningham was prepared to spring into action with first aid if Lovette had been bitten, but he
wasn’t prepared for what he found. The scream was Lovette, but what had grabbed him wasn’t a snake -
or anything from this world. Lovette was being dragged, screaming in terror, by a long metal arm
that was wrapped around his legs. It was so long, Cunningham didn’t even know where it ended - until
he looked up. The long metallic appendage wasn’t on the ground, but it was leading up to a large
silver disk in the sky, hovering twenty feet overhead. Cunningham stumbled back, frozen in
horror, and watched as Lovette was pulled into the sky and into the disk, which rose into the sky and
disappeared from view. Major Cunningham radioed for help, but the horror was just beginning.
The site was soon swarming with security teams as they combed the missile testing grounds for
any sign of Lovette, but nothing could be found. Cunningham was incoherent and kept talking about
an inhuman object having kidnapped the soldier, and most believed he suffered a mental breakdown.
He was taken to the base hospital for observation and questioning, but he never wavered from his
story that Lovette had been taken into the air by a UFO. Backing up his account according to some
sources - the base had a radar system that did pick up an unidentified radar contact
near the location at the time Lovette was taken. This caused the military to step up the search,
examining the surrounding desert for the next few days. But it would be three days
before anything was found - and what they found would shock and confuse everyone.
It was Sgt. Jonathan Lovette’s body, almost ten miles from where he had been taken. Many people
had suspected Cunningham might have been the one to hurt Lovette, but the location of the body
made that near-impossible - he wouldn’t have had time to move the body before he radioed for help.
The medical examiners concluded that the body had been exposed to the elements for between one and
two days, meaning Lovette had been...somewhere else before his body was left in the desert.
And he was totally naked. But that wasn’t the only thing that was different about his body,
and horrors that had been done to him made people think of one thing - aliens.
Since the earliest UFO sightings, farmers had claimed their cattle were being taken
from the fields by UFOs and returned to Earth dead and horribly mutilated,
often with precise markings that looked like they had been done by a machine.
Most people believed there were other explanations, like cults or natural causes like
predators and parasites. A ranting farmer claiming that his prize cow Bessie was
taken by aliens wasn’t usually enough to get federal investigators involved,
and there had been no reports of anything like this happening to a human - until now.
The on-base medical investigators soon discovered that Lovette’s corpse had been
horribly mutilated, with his tongue removed at the root and his eyes neatly gouged out.
Even more horrifying, his anus and genitalia had been removed,
and many of his organs had been taken out. Making it more confusing, they had all been
neatly extracted, as if through a surgical procedure. But no mad surgeon would do this
to a human. The final revelation about Lovette’s body had been the most disturbing - his body
had been carefully drained of its blood, but the vascular system was intact - not like what happens
when someone bleeds to death. Who - or what - could have done this to Sgt. Jonathan Lovette?
The answers aren’t going to be easy in coming. Project Grudge Report had fourteen
files, and the first twelve and the fourteenth have all been declassified.
They discuss various UFO sightings with a good amount of evidence of them but no
conclusive proof. But Grudge Report #13 isn’t mentioned in any official files
and remains firmly classified to this day, over sixty years later. That’s left many
conspiracy and alien abduction buffs with nothing to do but discuss their theories
of the Lovette-Cunningham incidents - with each theory having strong proponents, but many holes.
The most common theory among skeptics is that Major Cunningham killed Lovette, possibly in
a dispute over the handling of the debris. But that raises the question - who could have done
that to the body and so precisely? Cunningham didn’t have any medical training, so he would
need an accomplice. With the military base having a fully-stocked base hospital and on-site doctors,
the prevailing theory is that he could have gotten a doctor on site to find the body,
move it further off-site, and do the mutilations to it when the search had been called off
to make it look like something otherworldly was the culprit. But this would take a
lot of coordination at a time when everyone was being closely watched,
and the surgical precision needed was likely beyond the ability of 1950s Air Force medics.
Another theory is that Sgt. Lovette fell prey to very normal horrors in the desert,
and Major Cunningham’s exhaustion and confusion led him to see something much more twisted and
horrible than what really happened. The New Mexico desert is a dangerous place full of predators,
including mountain lions that are large and aggressive enough to drag off and maul a human.
That doesn’t explain the smooth mutilations, but the long lag time between Lovette’s abduction
and his body’s discovery could mean that he had time to bleed out, and then his body could have
been moved again by another predator. But for the descriptions of the body to be accurate,
it would take a much more intelligent predator to pull this off. Possibly even a human predator.
One of the most popular theories about unexplained abductions and mutilation
involves dangerous cults of devil-worshippers who perform sacrifices to their dark God. Usually,
they target animals in their rituals, explaining the rash of cattle mutilations. They would be
able to use the sharp knives and surgical tools needed to mutilate an animal - or person - and
drain them of blood. While there hasn’t been a documented case of a murder traced to these cults,
there are many unexplained disappearances around the United States that have never been solved.
The kidnapping of a US soldier, though, would be a massive escalation that would bring a much
larger police presence down on these cults - and there’s no record of a manhunt for the culprits
in Lovette’s murder, raising the odds that whatever killed him didn’t come from this Earth.
Are there actually aliens stalking the deserts, looking for prey to experiment on and then return
to Earth, their bodies destroyed? The sheer number of cattle found mutilated over the year lends
credence to the theory, and the description by Major Cunningham of what took his fellow soldier
doesn’t match anything from this Earth. The extent of the injuries to Sgt. Lovette’s body
make it hard to imagine anything human or animal could have done it. But if aliens kidnapped and
murdered a US soldier, wouldn’t the United States have gone to war? We’ve all seen the movies where
aliens attack and America comes roaring back to blow up their ships. The only question
is...with what weapons? In the 1950s, the space program was just getting started. The description
Cunningham gave of the ship that took Lovette was several centuries beyond anything humans had,
and no one would have known how to track or fight it. If Sgt. Lovette was killed by an alien ship,
the US could have done very little but watch the skies and try to prevent another attack.
But there’s another theory about the strange death of Sgt. Jonathan Lovette that’s gaining
more attention as people look into the strange case of Project Grudge File #13.
When a government file is highly classified like File #13, good luck getting a look at it. So where
do we know about the Lovette-Cunningham Incident from? A pair of prominent conspiracy theorists
have claimed to be part of the long-defunct Project Grudge, which allowed them to see
the original file. The first, the notorious UFO theorist William Cooper, claimed to have seen it
in the 1970s and was the first to make public the supposed horrific details of Lovette’s mutilation.
William English, a former Green Beret captain, was working a US security detail at a base in England
when he supposedly got ahold of the file. Colin Bertram, who collected much of this
information for a History Channel special of the case, also mentioned that the case
was discussed by Frank Joseph, a controversial racist conspiracy theorist who believed a war
with extraterrestrials was coming. These three accounts have been circulating, furthering the
spread of the rumors about the incident. But what has the government actually said about it?
The conspiracy theorists will tell you that the government doesn’t want you to know the truth,
that they scrubbed all record of the incident from the books - and they would be right. If
you comb the military files for any record of the strange death of Sgt. Jonathan Lovette,
you’ll find nothing. Nor will you find any record of what happened to Major Cunningham
after his horrible discovery. But they’ve gone further, because you won’t find any
record of either man ever being a part of the United States Air Force - or, in fact,
having existed at all, Did the Government scrub all record of these men from existence,
including everyone who knew them, to cover up this horrible incident?
Or did they just never exist at all? What we know about Project Grudge File #13 is that a man
supposedly died horribly - but there’s no record of any of it happening, and the only claims that
it did happen come from a trio of discredited conspiracy theorists who claim they somehow got
to look at the most highly classified government document of all time. And the government, which
supposedly covered the case up for decades, let them go around telling everyone and even publish
books on the incident! Was the black ops assassin who covered up the incident on leave or something?
The truth may be out there, but the truth about the Lovette-Cunningham incident may
be much closer to Earth, and there’s no proof it ever happened. But anyone
who reads about it is probably still going to keep a closer eye on the stars.
For more on whether aliens are out there, check out “Scientists Submit Actual Proof
Aliens Are Watching You Right Now”, or check out this video instead.