The Other Worldly Life Forms Program, or OWLF, was a CIA capture unit that used a DEA cover to hunt Predators. Peter Keyes ran it after the jungle hunt in Val Verde, took a team after the City Hunter in Los Angeles in 1997, and died in a slaughterhouse when that hunter cut him in half with a smart disc. Garber survived that night. Sean Keyes later ran the office, Project Stargazer took the work after that failure, and Predator: Hunting Grounds put OWLF back in the field with an older Dutch Schaefer.
After Val Verde
OWLF sent a survey team into the Jungle Hunter's blast crater in radiation suits after the Val Verde self-destruct. Peter Keyes later played that tape for Lieutenant Mike Harrigan in the Los Angeles trailer, with the monitor stamped DAT-AQ-8088. The team found little salvage besides the hole itself. Keyes and Garber also reached Dutch at Mountain Home, the VA hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, and they interrogated Anna Gonsalves, the guerrilla who had survived the same hunt. They wanted that first hunter treated as salvage, and Dutch refused. On 12 September 1987 he taped a statement as insurance against the same government that had sent his team in, then left the locked ward. Simon Hawke's Predator 2 novelization put Keyes in that hospital room as well, with doctors expecting bone cancer or leukemia from the blast, after which Dutch passed the polygraphs, pulled out his tubes, and vanished.
In Aftermath, published in Predator: Eyes of the Demon, news from Pisgah National Forest reported skinned animals with skulls and spines taken, and Dutch went after the Youngblood Yuahro on that mountain. Keyes wanted both men alive, and teams with M24s moved into position, until T'an'tath's ship opened fire, killed Agent Pereira, and extracted Yuahro wounded. Dutch boarded Keyes's chopper under that fire, then stepped off the skids as it lifted.
Cover And Methods
The office used a DEA cover in the field. Keyes and Garber arrived in Los Angeles by helicopter in civilian clothes, then ran the hunt from a trailer packed with monitors. Capture teams wore refrigerated silver suits meant to hide body heat, and they carried nitrogen guns, a net, and restraints. Keyes tracked the City Hunter by the hunter's habit of feeding on beef in a slaughterhouse, treated earlier hunter work in Central America and Cambodia as the same trail, and pointed Harrigan at a sighting during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Los Angeles 1997
After the subway massacre, Keyes pulled Lieutenant Harrigan into that trailer with Garber on the monitors, played him Anna's taped interview from the jungle hunt, and showed him the crater footage and a heat-scent trace they treated as the killer. Keyes treated Harrigan as the hunter's chosen prey in the city and ordered him off the capture. Harrigan did not believe the DEA story and did not stay out. Sean Keyes's later tapes date his own posting as regional director to 23 February 1996, and put him in Los Angeles that July prepping a mobile lab for a live capture.
The Slaughterhouse
Keyes set the trap in a packing house where the City Hunter came to feed. The suits hid the team's heat, so the hunter cycled through his vision modes until work lamps gave the men away, and it killed most of the capture team on the floor. Harrigan broke out of federal custody and went in with a shotgun. Keyes came back with a nitrogen gun, and a smart disc cut him in half before he could freeze the hunter. Harrigan later killed the City Hunter aboard the Lost Tribe ship.
OWLF In Predator 2 Comic
Dark Horse's two-issue Predator 2 adaptation, written by Frank Henkel and drawn by Dan Barry and Mark Bright, gave the capture team a heavier kit than the film. Keyes briefed them on olfactory scans that built an image from scent molecules, then sent them in with bulky freeze guns, sealed helmets, and ultraviolet radio silence. The plan was to freeze the hunter, move it into a cryogenic chamber, and get the self-destruct device off it before another jungle-scale blast could go off in the city. Keyes treated the hunters as visitors for seven hundred years, named Nam and Beirut as earlier heat-and-conflict stops, and put the Central America blast at two hundred acres of rainforest rather than the film's three hundred city blocks.
After The Ship Left
Garber landed an OWLF helicopter at the crater and wanted to know what had happened in the hole, after a night that had cost Keyes and most of the capture unit without taking a live hunter. Predator: Stalking Shadows put Dutch on that same helicopter, where he ordered Garber to land and treated the night as salvage, including a severed forearm in a combat gauntlet. Sean, Peter's son and OWLF regional director, pulled Marine Scott Devlin off the street for the retrieval, recognized Dutch, and lost the argument over the arm. Sean's Hunting Grounds tapes add that the team also recovered green blood and the arm in an alley, then found Dutch already there with a cigar, and that Harrigan later gave them an account of the older hunters who carried the City Hunter's body out.
After Keyes
In Stalking Shadows that office stayed open after Los Angeles, with Dutch working unofficially and taking salvage to their labs while a rival group of suits and mercenaries under Ellison chased the same prizes. The Hunting Grounds tapes name Peter's associate Adam Garber as the man chosen to head operations on 21 September 1997, after the helmet and severed arm bought a funding extension, and they have Sean leaving Dutch off the books under a line marked Cleaning Services. OWLF spent years on a serum of Predator blood cells mixed with human DNA, hoping it could repair damaged tissue the way hunter wounds close, and in March 1998 it sent Dutch's crew to Cambodia after skinned bodies turned up in military traffic.
In Drug War, from Predator: If It Bleeds, former agent Garber was selling rifles for Legends, Inc. at a police conference in Rio de Janeiro, twenty-five years after the Los Angeles hunt, and a hunter in the Cortado Centro favela cost him his legs, then his head.
Project Stargazer
Sean's last OWLF tape, dated 29 August 2016, has the office abolished after hunter sightings dropped and a private contractor group promised a live capture within a year. Many of the old agents, Sean included, were moved onto Project Stargazer. General Douglas Woodhurst ran that work from a hydroelectric dam lab on the Georgia side of the Florida line, while CIA agent Will Traeger pushed for private money and control. The Predator: Hunters and Hunted used Stargazer as the name of that work while it ran from the dam, and Woodhurst treated the OWLF years as the time when money had been easier. The Reapers took a live hunter on a Florida cul-de-sac for that lab, and the hunter later clawed free, killed guards, and threw a Combistick through trainer Roger Elliott.
Sean Keyes
Sean Keyes ran the lab in Hunters and Hunted and took that captive from the Reapers. In The Predator (2018) Traeger's people put the Fugitive on a table in the same dam, and evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett met Sean there. The film names that scientist Sean Keyes. The novelization spells him Shawn H. Keyes. The Fugitive woke, put a scalpel through Agent Thomas Church, and tore through the lab. In the film it wounded Sean in the gut and left him alive, and Sean sent Casey after it. The novelization has the hunter behead Shawn, take a hand, and use both on the scanners, then take a scarred historic helmet from a display case. The government shut Stargazer down after Traeger died and the Upgrade hunt wrecked the site.
Reinstatement
Hunting Grounds later put a reinstated OWLF back in the field, around 2025, and a 78-year-old Dutch joined that office after a treatment that mixed his blood with Yautja DNA, work the tapes credit to Sean Keyes. Those tapes also covered the Predator Killer as a prototype whose power pack only lasted a few dozen seconds, and they have Sean debriefing Isabelle Nissenbaum after OWLF recovered the hunter craft that brought her back from the 2010 Game Preserve hunt. Stalking Shadows has Dutch in China about ten years after 2013, doing OWLF lab work, with a rival salvage faction after the same prizes.
Known Members
- Peter Jacob Keyes - Directed the CIA capture office under a DEA cover, interviewed Dutch after Val Verde, led the Los Angeles team, and died when a smart disc cut him in half in the slaughterhouse.
- Adam Garber - Keyes's man on the trailer monitors and the helicopter, then the officer who took over operations in September 1997. He survived Los Angeles, landed at the crater, and died in Rio in Drug War after a hunter took his legs and then his head.
- Sean Keyes - Peter's son, regional director from 1996, and the voice on the Hunting Grounds tapes. He ran the Stargazer dam lab after the 2016 handover. The 2018 film wounded him and left him alive. The novelization had the Fugitive behead him.
- Dutch Schaefer - An unofficial contractor who used OWLF labs and refused to treat the first hunter as salvage. Sean left him off the books after Los Angeles, and Hunting Grounds put him back in that office at 78 after a Yautja DNA treatment.
- Agent Pereira - Died in Pisgah National Forest when T'an'tath's ship opened fire during Yuahro's extraction.
- Scott Devlin - A Marine Sean pulled in for the Los Angeles retrieval, later working with Dutch on hunter salvage while a rival faction chased the same prizes.
- Isabelle Nissenbaum - Survived the Super Predator hunt in 2010, returned to Earth in a hunter craft that OWLF recovered, and went back into the field after Sean debriefed her.
- Isla and Lucas - Later OWLF people abducted with their daughter Ava and dumped on a game-preserve hunt in Predator: The Preserve, where a hunter killed them.
Behind The Scenes
Gary Busey played Peter Keyes in Predator 2, and Adam Baldwin played Garber. An early draft would have opened on a golf course, with white-haired Dutch climbing out of a helicopter to team with Harrigan. Arnold Schwarzenegger left for Terminator 2, and Keyes took that federal slot. Stephen Hopkins directed the 1990 film from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas, and the capture team wore refrigerated silver suits so the hunter's heat vision would miss them.
Simon Hawke's 1990 novelization added Keyes's hospital hours with Dutch. Bryan Thomas Schmidt's Aftermath put Keyes and Garber at Mountain Home in September 1987. James A. Moore and Mark Morris's Stalking Shadows left the office open under Sean after Los Angeles. Jake Busey, Gary's son, played Sean Keyes in The Predator in 2018 and voiced the Hunting Grounds tapes written by Jared Gerritzen, Chris Means, and Jordan Mathewson.
Merchandise
Eaglemoss released issue 41 of The Alien & Predator Figurine Collection in August 2018 as the OWLF Marine from Predator 2, also sold as Taskforce Member, with a collector magazine in the box. The 1:16 hand-painted metallic-resin figure stands about 5 inches (13 cm) on a hexagonal base, in the silver refrigerated suit with a backpack and a nitrogen gun.
Conclusion
The Other Worldly Life Forms Program was the CIA capture office that followed hunters from the Val Verde crater to Los Angeles under Peter Keyes. The City Hunter killed Keyes and most of the slaughterhouse team. Garber lived through that night and died later in Rio. Sean Keyes ran the office after that, Project Stargazer took the dam-lab years, and Hunting Grounds put the OWLF name back in the field with an older Dutch.
Appearances
- Predator: Eyes of the Demon, "Aftermath" by Bryan Thomas Schmidt (2022)
- Predator 2 (1990)
- Predator 2 (Dark Horse Comics #1-2, 1990-1991)
- Predator 2 (Jove novelization, 1990)
- Predator: Stalking Shadows (2020)
- The Predator: Hunters and Hunted (Titan, 2018)
- The Predator (2018)
- The Predator (Titan novelization, 2018)
- Predator: If It Bleeds, "Drug War" by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Holly Roberds (2017)
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020)
- Predator: The Preserve (Marvel, 2023)
Tag Categories: Predator Lore
