United States. Department of Homeland Security. - Chameleo: a strange but true story of invisible spies, heroin addiction, and homeland security

GUFFEY UNDERSTANDS THE UNIVERSE IS PREPOSTEROUS, LIFE IMPROBABLE, AND CHAOS RULES: GET USED TO IT.

PAT CADIGAN, AUTHOR OF MINDPLAYERS

ROBERT GUFFEYS WRITING HAS IMPRESSED, ENTERTAINED, AND ENLIGHTENED ME PRETTY MUCH SINCE I FIRST MET HIM IF HE WROTE IT, READ IT.

JACK WOMACK, AUTHOR OF RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE

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 U.S. Marine whod stolen night vision goggles and perhaps a few top secret files from a nearby military base. Homeland security goons, weird cloaking technology borrowed from an experimental project codenamed Chameleo, new and exciting uses for spaghetti, and illicit substances in myriad forms come into play.

2015 Robert Guffey

Published by OR Books, New York and London

Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

All rights information:

First printing 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-939293-69-5 paperback

ISBN 978-1-939293-70-1 e-book

Text design by Bathcat Ltd. Typeset by CBIGS Group, Chennai, India.

Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI in the United Kingdom. The U.S. printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.

To the inimitable Mr. Watts

and to Richard

without both of whom this book could never have been written.

I warn you that what youre starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. It will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything resolved and satisfactorily explained. Not by me it wont, anyway. Because I cant say I really know exactly what happened, or why, or just how it began, how it ended, or if it has ended; and Ive been right in the thick of it. Now if you dont like that kind of story, Im sorry, and youd better not read it. All I can do is tell what I know.

J ACK F INNEY , The Body Snatchers, 1955

Listen, therefore, to the deposition that I have to make. It is indeed a tale so strange that I should fear you would not credit it were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction. The story is too connected to be mistaken for a dream, and I have no motive for falsehood.

M ARY S HELLEY , Frankenstein, 1818

Richard Schowengerdt, founder of Project Chameleo, in March of 2006. Photograph by Melissa Guffey.

Robert Guffey interviewing Richard Schowengerdt in March of 2006. Photograph by Melissa Guffey.

Dion Fuller in Seattle, summer of 2004, standing beside the van he drove from San Diego all the way to Winona, Kansas. Photograph by Robert Guffey.

A more recent photograph of Dion Fuller.

Dion Fullers farewell message to the NCIS and their invisible devil spawn.

A UFO-like drone streaking off into the skies above Humboldt County in July of 2012. Photograph by Dion Fuller.

My friend Dion first told me about the invisible midgets in the summer of 2003. Not long before, hed caught his girlfriend Jessica having sex with some other dude in Pacific Beach, a suburb of San Diego, where they lived, and he physically threw her out of his apartment. Without Jessicas stabilizing influence, he sank deeper and deeper into his old habits. Pacific Beach was the worst possible place for Dion at that moment. The only people there were alcoholics and meth addicts and the policemen who arrest them.

He started drinking more and more. Then he went back to speed and meth and heroin and everything in between. One day he was riding along on his bicycle, drunk, and slammed into a building or a police officer or something like that, and broke his leg. As a result he couldnt go to work anymore at Bubs Dive Bar & Grill. Or so he claimed. It could be they just fired him for becoming more and more of a total fuck-up, something Dion had a talent for. Anyway, somehow he was able to wrangle a steady stream of disability checks out of the government while waiting for his leg to heal. With nowhere to go, he decided to start selling drugs out of his apartment, which was located at 1621 Hornblend Street between Jewell and Ingraham. That is when everything definitely took a turn into The Twilight Zone.

More and more fuck-ups and scumbags were hanging around the apartment. The place became notorious. The cops drove by there all the time, just to make sure nothing was getting too out of hand. One night, in the midst of another twenty-four hour party, some kid in his early twenties named Lee dropped by the place and asked if he could stay there for awhile. Dions reaction was sure, what the hell, why not. The place was a party house. People were coming in and out of there all the time. What was one more person?

This kid, however, was different from all the drifters who had stayed at the apartment before. Lee had recently gone AWOL from nearby Camp Pendleton. He had taken with him 1) twenty-five pairs of night vision goggles, 2) a nine millimeter pistol taken off the body of a dead Iraqi general, 3) a DOD laptop, and 4) an entire truck. How such a feat was possible in our post-9/11 lockdown society is beyond me. The truck was not stashed at Dions apartment. The other three items, however, were.

Lee had the gogglesthree or four of the pairs, at leaststored in a trunk. Dionperpetually buzzed out of his minddidnt think there was anything odd about any of this until he saw the DOD logo appear on the kids laptop one evening (on July 18, 2003, to be exact). Thats when the seriousness of the situation dawned on him.

Hey, you cant turn that on in here, Dion said. They can track that shit with satellites! Theyll be here within seconds.