Stranger than Fiction
September 28, 2017 • Los Angeles
It’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and most fiction works best when it’s rooted in real experience. And sometimes nonfiction is so far-out and loopy that it feels like it couldn’t have been made up. Such is the case with Chameleo, a book that recounts the experiences of Dion Fuller, a Marine who seems to have tangled with the wrong people within the U.S. military when he worked at Camp Pendleton. They start monitoring and following Fuller all the time with large numbers of individuals. Using some futuristic stealth technology, they cloak themselves, even hiding within his apartment, but he manages to detect them anyway. At one point they even rearrange the layout of the apartment, somehow moving the walls around while he’s out. Admittedly the guy is a heroin addict, and such bizarre claims can easily be dismissed as impossible; why would the military invest so much in harassing one person? But he has some compelling evidence, and if you were running surveillance on someone and wanted no one else to believe it, the loopier you did things, the more effective it would be.
This inexplicable motivation and eeriness seem to be a common theme in paranormal activity. Gray Barker’s descriptions of the men in black in 1956’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers paints a similar picture, of entities almost too strange to be real. The late Anne Strieber had a simple BS detector for evaluating UFO reports; she said that if it’s not weird, she didn’t trust it.
Chameleo gets weirder as you get farther into it, and the author, Robert Guffey, is candid about how it all impacted him. By the end of it I was mystified but none the wiser as to whether the U.S. military really is capable of generating paranormal weirdness. Either way, it’s an engaging read.
