Both recount an alleged incident of March 1956 involving Air Force sergeant Jonathan P. Lovette, who was assisting Major William Cunningham in the White Sands missile testing grounds near Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. While searching for scattered debris from a recent rocket test, Cunningham was shocked when he heard a loud scream. Thinking Lovette had perhaps been bitten by a snake, Cunningham crossed the dune to aid his partner when he purportedly witnessed one of the more bizarre human-extraterrestrial encounters.

Instead of finding Lovette nursing a snake bite, Cunningham, according to English, recounted seeing the soldier being dragged by a long serpentine arm, wrapped around his legs, connected to a silver disk hovering in the air 15 to 20 feet away. Cunningham watched, frozen in horror, as Lovette was pulled inside the craft, which then rose vertically into the sky. The major then stumbled toward his jeep and radioed for assistance.


Security teams arrived and the disturbed Cunningham was confined to the base hospital for observation and treatment after retelling what he believed he witnessed. According to Joseph’s Military Encounters book, base personnel did confirm an unidentified radar contact near Holloman at the time Lovette vanished. The base dispatched search parties into the desert, but it would be three days before Lovette’s nude corpse was discovered—some 10 miles from the site of the alleged abduction. From all indications the body had been exposed to the elements for 24 to 48 hours. According to English, the report offered no explanation of what might account for the missing third day, and the autopsy performed on Lovette raised more questions than delivered answers.

First question was: Why had Lovette’s corpse been so severely mutilated? His tongue had been cut from the lower portion of the jaw, his eyes gouged out and his anus removed. In the Air Force medical examination report pertaining to the incident, English alleges that the coroner remarked on the apparent surgical skill used to remove the organs—in particular that the anus and genitalia had been neatly extracted like a plug. Perhaps most puzzling was the fact that the body had been completely drained of blood, but surprisingly, there was no vascular collapse usually associated with death by bleeding.

Though Grudge Reports 1 through 12 have been declassified, along with Report 14, no official mention or accounting of Report 13 exists. The Lovette/Cunningham case remains unsubstantiated and no follow-up reports regarding the incident—if it in fact did happen—are available.