UFOs: The Origins of an Investigation, Part 3

The 3rd and final part of this story is born out of tragedy – the death of Ufologist and friend Kathy Kasten on August 7, 2012. As with parts 1 and 2 of this 3-part article, the origins of what I’m about to share with you could not have been anticipated. As far back as 2005, I had been corresponding with Kathy on matters relative to Roswell and her suspicions that the incident had nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with post-war experiments on human guinea-pigs. At the time of her death, Kathy was working on a full-length book on her theory – parts of which closely matched the findings I detailed in Body Snatchers in the Desert, which was encouraging. So far as I am aware, no specific or serious attempt was made by Kathy to find a publisher, as she wanted to have the entire, lengthy manuscript completed before submitting it to a publishing house – rather than just hand over a brief synopsis and a sample chapter or two. Time and fate, however, sadly stepped in and prevented the next step from coming to fruition. Perhaps realizing that she was on a time-limit, one which was closing in, in early 2012 Kathy surprised me by emailing me to say that she was planning on handing over copies of her Roswell files to me, in the event that I might want to make use of the material – any of it or all of it – should I ever decide to write a sequel to my 2005 book, which I eventually did: The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

It was shortly after Kathy died that her family got in touch, as they had decided to donate to me all of Kathy’s research files, correspondence, and much more – and not just her Roswell-based material. Which was, of course, extremely generous of them. A week or so later, a large amount of files turned up on the doorstep, collectively contained in heavy cardboard boxes. To say there were thousands upon thousands of pages of material, dating back decades, would not be an exaggeration. An Aladdin’s cave? Yep. Due to work and what is known as life, it took me several months to go through the entire collection, some of which had nothing to do with Roswell in particular – and nothing to do with UFOs in general, either. Probably a full third of the material was focused on issues relative to mind-control and mind-manipulation, such as the CIA’s MKUltra program of the 1950s. And there was a lot of material on post-Second World War files on unethical experiments on people in the 1940s and 1950s – which certainly was linked and relevant to Roswell.

Kathy’s notes and records show that from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, she spoke with a few interesting characters, of a somewhat shadowy nature. They advised her that if she wanted to uncover the truth of Roswell, she would be wise to pursue the work and history of a certain William Randolph “Randy” Lovelace II.  That Kathy’s dossier on Lovelace is about five-inches thick demonstrates that she carefully followed the advice of her sources and left pretty much no stone unturned, when it came to the matter of exploring a possible Roswell-Lovelace connection. Of course, for those who aren’t aware of the man himself, there is a big question that needs answering: who, exactly, was William Randolph Lovelace II? Well, let’s take a look.

To say that Lovelace was a fascinating character is an understatement. Born in 1907, he was a physician who graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1934, and, in 1938, took up a position with the Aeromedical Field Laboratory at Wright Field, Ohio (today, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). It was at Wright Field that Lovelace undertook groundbreaking research to understand how exposure to high-altitudes could affect the human body and nervous system. Experiments with new and novel oxygen masks and parachutes were of paramount importance, too. A colonel with the Army Air Corps in the Second World War, Lovelace was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and – in 1947 – helped to establish the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then, in the late 1950s, NASA invited Lovelace to chair its Special Advisory Committee on Life Sciences. Such were his skills in aviation medicine, Lovelace worked closely alongside the original NASA Mercury astronauts. In 1964, Lovelace was appointed to the position of NASA’s Director of Space Medicine. He died as a result of a plane crash in December 1965, in Aspen, Colorado. Both his wife and the pilot were killed, too.

Strangest of all, back in 2011 I had heard a few rumors of a Lovelace-Roswell connection, but I had largely hit a brick-wall. That Kathy’s family very generously donated all of her files to me in 2012 – and which contained a lot of material on Lovelace and Roswell – allowed me to take my research to a new level. As with parts 1 and 2 of this article, I could never have anticipated how and why such developments could – or would – originate and come together.

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