Steven Roy Grimsley

Chameleo Steven Roy Grimsley

A mesmerizing mix of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, Chameleo is a true account of what happened in a seedy Southern California town when an enthusiastic and unrepentant heroin addict named Dion Fuller sheltered a US marine who'd stolen night vision goggles, and perhaps a few top secret files, from a nearby military base. Dion found himself arrested (under the ostensible auspices of The Patriot Act) for conspiring with international terrorists to smuggle top-secret military equipment out of Camp Pendleton. The fact that Dion had absolutely nothing to do with international terrorists, smuggling, top-secret military equipment, or Camp Pendleton didn't seem to bother the military. He was released from jail after a six day long Abu Ghraib-style interrogation. Subsequently he believed himself under intense government scrutiny and, he suspected, the subject of bizarre experimentation involving "cloaking"--electro-optical camouflage so extreme it renders observers practically invisible from a distance of some meters--by the Department of Homeland Security. Hallucination? Perhaps--except Robert Guffey, an English teacher and Dion's friend, tracked down and interviewed one of the scientists behind the project, codenamed Chameleo, an experimental technology that appears to have been stolen by the US Department of Defense and deployed on American soil. More shocking still, Guffey discovered that the DoD has been experimenting with its newest technologies on a number of American citizens. A condensed version of this story was the cover feature of Fortean Times magazine (September 2013).