Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security

Robert Guffey

Apr 2015 · OR Books

About this ebook

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 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,” experimental technology which appears to have been stolen by the U.S. 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).

Ratings and reviews

Perfect read for a guy going through the same ordeal. Accused of stealing chemicals from a public university, history of drug addiction, and stalked & harassed on a daily basis by projected images of façades during the day and human shadow outlines at night. Almost like imposed paranoid delusions into the life of a simple and sain guy living in Augusta, Georgia. Even if this book didn’t correlate with my life, it’s still an awesome account of how the U.S. Government fights small wars every day with unassuming citizens on their own personal property. Yeah conspiracy theories are out there, but this is not one. I believe every word of it. And tech has come a long way since this book was written in 2015..

Intriguing, unsettling and hilarious. The author is very charismatic and humble during interviews.

About the author

Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he is the author of a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Fortean Times, Mysteries, Nameless Magazine, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Third Alternative, and Video Watchdog Magazine.