Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s03e05 Episode Script

1
[eerie rasping]
[eerie rasping continues]
[Jonathan Redbird Dover]
We get asked all the time,
"Do you believe in Bigfoot?"
"Do you believe in UFOs?"
"Or Navajo witchcraft?"
We don't like using the term "believe"
because to believe is an act of faith
based on no evidence.
[Stanley Milford, Jr.] Science today
might look at that and say,
"That can't happen."
That it's make-believe.
But these things did happen,
and a lot of times, we can't explain it.
[Jonathan] People have been
skeptical of our work.
Of course we expect that.
All I can say to them is,
"You weren't there."
"You didn't see what I saw."
[mysterious music playing]
[tranquil music playing]
[Stanley] There's something magical
about the Navajo reservation.
The Navajo reservation
is 27,000 square miles,
that being about
the size of West Virginia.
I probably stood in places
where no other man
has probably ever stood.
It's hard to take that in and imagine.
Seeing that vastness of just remote areas
seems like it's infinite.
If you look at the Navajo reservation,
the Navajo Police
provide the public safety aspect
over our communities.
And the Navajo Rangers
provide enforcement and protection
over all of the natural resources
of the Navajo Nation,
kind of modeling
from the National Park Service Rangers.
The Navajo Rangers were formed in 1957.
The job of a Navajo Ranger
involves working in forest fire areas,
doing evacuations.
We're doing search and rescue operations,
you know,
hanging on the end of a rope
off a cliff in the middle of the night,
looking for somebody
that's stuck down there.
[Stanley] When I look back
at wanting to become a Navajo Ranger,
it was really an exclusive club.
They had a presence about 'em,
and I remember wanting
to be a part of that.
[Jonathan] I met Stan,
it must have been about 1989,
and we started working together
quite a bit.
We were co-SWAT team commanders
for Backcountry Operations.
We got to know each other pretty well.
We've adopted each other as brothers.
In 2000, our chief ranger
called us all in for a meeting
because of a complaint
that was lodged against the department
for failing to investigate a Bigfoot case.
Right now in the United States,
there's no mechanism
to investigate these type
of paranormal cases.
It's just not built into
any of our systems, so they're ignored.
However, you have people out there
who are absolutely terrified
of whatever that happened to them.
And our chief ranger, he said,
"From now on,
these cases are gonna be investigated."
And then he turned to me and Stan,
"And you two guys
are gonna get the major cases."
[Stanley] I think
there were those Navajo Rangers
that would not go anywhere near
these kinds of cases
simply because, within the Navajo culture,
it's taboo to deal with it,
approach it, talk about it.
The reason Jon and I were chosen
is that we grew up in both worlds.
He was born in Oklahoma and raised there.
I was born in Los Angeles
and raised there.
We are part Navajo,
but we didn't hold
to the traditional beliefs
that a lot of the Navajos did
about being around those type of things.
My immediate thought was,
"Oh my goodness."
"We're gonna be The X-Files."
One of the first cases we worked
was up along the San Juan River,
where we had over 30 people
report seeing a Bigfoot,
which is real unusual.
This is the place
where the investigation started.
[Stanley on video] What actually
happened this morning?
[woman] Coming down that highway there,
I thought a person was hitchhiking.
But as I got a little bit closer,
it wasn't a person.
It was a tall, tall body with
It seemed like with hair all over
because I didn't see,
like, facial features or anything.
[Jonathan] We would interview witnesses,
and we talked to some terrified people
who didn't know what was happening.
Uh, they saw something
completely out of the ordinary,
and they wanted answers.
[woman on recording]
One of my grandsons seen it right there.
It's this I don't know.
It's a big, really tall
I don't wanna come down here by myself.
[Jonathan] Well, we've had other
investigations that have been similar.
[woman] Uh-huh.
[Jonathan] We've had reports
of Bigfoot stepping over corrals,
and taking sheep,
and stepping back over,
and walking off with them.
We've had sheep that were killed
by literally having the wool
just ripped off its back.
Just like you grabbed it around the neck,
and just took it, and tore it off.
[man on video] Holy Christ!
No way
to make that mark there.
-[woman] Um, yeah.
-That's a big knuckle, man.
[Jonathan] In interviewing people
up and down the river,
we got a real feel that these occurrences
had been going on for some time.
[Stanley] These Bigfoots
are described many times
as being much taller than a man,
seven-foot, eight-foot.
[Jonathan] Very muscular.
[Stanley] Wide shoulders.
[Jonathan] Built like a tank.
[Stanley] With canine teeth.
[Jonathan] Smells like a wet dog.
It's a large, huge, hairy beast.
During that time,
I had heard the name Brenda Harris.
She resided up along the San Juan River.
[Brenda] This is where we used to live.
Our mobile home was parked right here.
And this is where we had some encounters
that had happened.
This was during the summertime.
I had all the bedroom windows open,
living room windows open.
My husband
had just left for work at 10:30.
He was working the graveyard shift.
About 30 minutes later,
I heard something very heavy
walking onto the porch.
[heavy footsteps creaking]
And next thing I know,
we start seeing the doorknob turning.
I unlatched the lock.
Once that clicked,
I could hear that thing
let go of the doorknob.
I was really scared.
I swung the door open,
and I just seen this thing
standing in front of me.
I was like, "Wow."
That can't be what I think it is.
That's huge.
It was black, tall,
and it was covered in hair,
and it wasn't very muscular.
It was kind of scraggy-looking.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
And it just darted off the porch,
and it ran to the west.
About maybe 15, 20 minutes later,
this thing came back again.
And it did the same thing.
It started turning the doorknob.
As soon as I turned the bedroom light on,
it took off.
This went on throughout the whole night.
And then, finally, when daybreak broke,
I said, "Okay.
Well, let's go walk around the house."
About right in here
was the back of my daughter's bedroom,
and this was where we found a footprint.
A little over 18 inches long
and four inches wide.
This thing could have just
torn the door open, but it didn't.
[eerie rasping]
[Brenda] Why was it trying
to get in the house?
It's still a mystery to me to this day.
[mysterious music playing]
[Stanley] Brenda lives in an area
with somewhere near 30 people
reporting the same kind of activity.
[Jonathan] So we took a team of about
six guys up along the San Juan River.
We came out with foot track evidence.
You got a 21-inch footprint
with the toes showing,
and the thing's got a five-foot stride.
If I was gonna do a five-foot stride,
I'd be doing the splits.
The path went along
and hit a barbed wire fence
where it stepped over.
Caught in the fence,
in the barbed wire, was a tuft of hair,
and we collected that
as part of the investigation.
[on video] Several hairs, put together.
These were real small,
but they did have the tag ends on them,
which is what they need
for DNA examination.
The DNA analysis would have told
what species or major group of species
that it belonged to,
but the report just said
"unknown carnivore."
There's no identification for it
in the DNA database,
and that DNA database
has animals from all over the world.
There is no explanation for that.
When I started getting,
you know, interested in this,
I said, "Hey,
let's get the camera and set it up."
So we set the camera up one night
behind our home.
We did pick up what, to me,
what looks like a small, juvenile Bigfoot,
which is probably about this high.
It's a little black figure.
I don't know if it crawled
to where the pool was,
but this thing, to me,
it looks like it boils up from the ground,
it stands and it takes, like,
a runner's stance,
and takes off to the west.
Also, I do have some vocalizations.
[eerie rasping on recording]
[Brenda] I started hearing
different people within the area
experiencing this Bigfoot
that had been coming around.
[Vernida Bissonette] This is where
the horse corral stood.
We had the, um, hog fence stacked
probably as high as that there,
and we had a solid roof up on top.
And over in that corner
was where the panels were being torn off.
This is the corrugated tin
we had covering the horse corral.
We can't rip it, you know.
It's, like, torn, you know? Like paper.
He even ripped all these ones.
He broke all these.
This is some heavy steel.
[Vernida] Brenda came down.
She put up cameras along
around the horse corral.
[Brenda] There's a silhouette
that hits the side of the corral,
and you just see this
tall figure standing there.
We didn't know what it was,
and that really scared us.
I want the people to be aware of what's
out there, and to be really careful,
because we don't know
what these things are capable of doing.
[Jonathan]
During one of our investigations,
we started tracking Bigfoot for miles.
The footprint just stopped,
almost like it was
just jerked into the sky.
[Brenda] A lot of people
believe that Bigfoot
has, like, some kind of
spiritual powers or something
to where they can, like, just disappear.
They'll tell me, "Yeah, I seen a Bigfoot.
I was I was watching it."
"I was kind of following it.
All of a sudden, it just disappeared."
[Jonathan] When we started
getting reports of Bigfoot,
and the reports started increasing,
there was a corresponding increase
in UFO sightings.
[on video] UFO case.
This is an area just off Highway Route 4.
Apparently, on this location
where I'm standing,
an unidentified object light source
beamed light from this area.
We suspect that the UFO activity,
that they are coming
on a pretty regular basis.
Most Navajos would tell us
it's just a normal thing.
[woman 1 on video] This is where
we saw the light. This whole field.
[woman 2] A white light. It was like
it was radiating from something.
When you first seen it on over here,
the lights, the straight lights,
straight across,
that was on this side of this hill.
[woman 2] It was really long.
Probably like that.
Everything lasted maybe like ten seconds?
I have another case,
it's not far from here, on Thursday.
-[woman 2] Oh wow! So it is around here.
-So
whether or not
they're correlated between the two,
which I would think
they're somehow related.
When you hear the word "paranormal,"
one of the common phenomena
is what people refer to as "an orb."
And orbs come in all different shapes,
and sizes, and colors, and behaviors.
They operate at speeds and angles
that we couldn't even hope to duplicate.
We had a case involving a young woman
who is working in Flagstaff.
So she drives home back
to the reservation every night.
[woman voice distorted] I would like
to stay anonymous because a lot of people
tend to think you're crazy
or to not believe
in the experience you had.
I was born and raised
on the Navajo reservation.
There had been instances
where strange lights
had been seen in the sky enough
that it was known in the community.
As I'm driving home from work,
it's about 1:30 in the morning.
There are no houses, no lights,
no other vehicles on the road.
It's open desert.
I noticed a red light
off to my driver's side,
and it followed me
for maybe a minute or two.
It never emitted a sound of any kind.
I reached a point in the road
where it made a sharp curve,
so I had to
take my eyes off this red ball.
I looked to my left,
and there was now this big ball,
and it was a bright white light.
It was no longer red.
I was afraid because it was
very, very close to me.
I didn't know what to do.
I realized whatever this was,
it was clearly intelligent enough
to follow me.
It was strange.
It stayed beside me
for maybe a quarter mile
before it shot forward.
Less than 500 feet in front of me,
it stopped instantaneously
and then shot straight up in the sky.
Once it went up in the sky,
it arced across the sky,
and it looked like a shooting star.
It was so terrifying.
I didn't wanna see it again.
In the morning, when I woke up,
I had the worst migraine I've ever had.
Up to that point,
I had never experienced
a migraine in my life.
She reached out to me
because I live in the same community,
and she knew
I handled these type of cases.
I could tell it shook her up quite a bit.
We went around her vehicle
with the compass,
and we're looking for magnetic anomalies.
What we found is two areas
that had intense magnetic attraction.
One was just behind the driver's door
on the panel,
and the other one
was just in front of the passenger door.
If you took a string
and tied it between both points,
the string went right through the driver.
So we think that when this thing
was flying alongside the vehicle,
it must have been scanning
or doing something to that vehicle
that went through her
and may have caused a physical result.
For those people that have those
first-hand experiences
with the supernatural
or these paranormal phenomenon,
it's something they're never gonna forget.
[eerie music playing]
[Jonathan] We investigated many,
many UFO sightings,
but one of the more
fascinating cases occurred
with a non-Navajo resident
of the reservation living near Greasewood.
[eerie music playing]
I spent probably about ten years
of my life, um, on the Navajo reservation.
Taught English as a second language.
So I'd been living in lower Greasewood
for about a year.
Satan's Butte was in the distance,
so I saw it every single day.
It's a flat top mesa.
It's pretty barren. There's no trees.
[ominous music playing faintly]
Every night I would have to go out,
and I would feed the horses, of course.
One night, just as the sun
was going down, just at dusk,
just this odd light in the sky
caught my attention.
I just couldn't figure out what it was.
A couple nights later,
I see this odd light in the sky
hovering above Satan's Butte,
very, very close to where
it was hovering a couple nights before.
[on video] It came straight across here,
and then it dipped down.
-[man] On this side? On the right?
-On this side, yeah.
It has red lights.
I don't know if they go around the back,
but they It goes like this.
You can see 'em kind of diminishing.
What I saw was a large ship.
And then coming out of that
are these tendrils of light.
But they look like teardrops
as they drop to the Earth.
The light was
coming from inside of the ship,
and the tendrils,
I don't know if those are,
you know, little UFO ships,
but they were glowing.
Fast-forward a week.
I see it again.
I thought,
"I've gotta get a picture of this,
'cause that would be so cool."
[camera clicking]
[Stanley] In the photographs
that Jon and I were shown,
there was definitely something there.
[Jonathan] There's enough evidence
from what he gave us
and the incidents that he had
that are just outstanding
from an investigator's standpoint.
Any Navajo that I talked to about it,
none of 'em were shocked.
Everyone was like, "Oh yeah."
I didn't think aliens existed.
I didn't think that there were UFOs.
So I was very, very skeptical,
but the Navajo Nation taught me
that there are things out there
that we don't understand.
[Stanley] When it comes to
the paranormal or supernatural,
that element is already
within the culture of the Navajo.
[Jonathan] The Navajos themselves,
as a people, have a lot of stories
that go from generation to generation
about paranormal activity.
[Stanley] If you look at
pictographs and petroglyphs
on the walls in Red Rock Canyons,
you see these images
that are thousands of years old.
And you see images of UFOs.
Is this what is referred to as star people
and extraterrestrial beings?
[Jonathan] There's a lot of
stuff that happens,
but none of it is talked about
because there's such a stigma.
[eerie music playing]
[Stanley] With the older generations,
they still have
those traditional teachings
of things that are taboo
that you don't talk about.
Because the younger generations
aren't learning those traditions as much,
then they're more open
to experiencing these kinds of things
and sharing the information.
[ominous music playing faintly]
[Jonathan] One of the most
terrifying type of case
that we've investigated
involves the legendary Navajo skinwalker.
[Stanley] Most Navajos
have heard the term "skinwalker."
An entity that can shape-shift
or change form
from a human form into that of an animal.
[Jonathan] They can change shape
into a coyote, into a wolf,
into anything that they have the skin of.
I've had people tell me that
they've seen 'em on the sides of roads
when they were in human form,
and they're painted white,
kind of like if you took a sponge
and dipped it in white paint
and just blotched it all over your body.
And the paint's cracking,
and even the hair is long and painted.
They say that they can run
as fast as a car can drive.
These things are dangerous
and it's frightening.
I know that these skinwalkers exist
because I've experienced it myself.
Prior to my law enforcement career,
I had come to the Navajo reservation.
And, at the time,
I was living near Fort Defiance.
I borrowed my older sister's car
and went to the movies one night.
And it was on this route
when I had something
that was running alongside my vehicle
on the inside of this fence behind us.
It jumps the fence and it begins getting
within three or four feet
of the passenger side of my car,
and it was keeping up with me
at highway speed.
I'm at least 55 miles an hour.
The more that I accelerated,
the more it was right there with me.
[engine revving]
This thing had the body
of, like, a greyhound,
but from head to toe, it was solid white.
The back of it was at least coming up
over the side of the door.
It had a mouthful of teeth.
It had a head that was canine-shaped.
And it had a long snout.
I locked eyes with it,
and its eyes were like
it was self-illuminating.
A fiery orange.
It was like
it was looking straight through me.
I just floored it.
I came sliding into the driveway,
jumped out, ran inside.
And my father was still awake,
and I explained what I had seen,
and that's when he said,
"That's That's a skinwalker."
To see it with your own eyes
and to know that it wasn't make-believe,
that it wasn't fantasy, it wasn't legend,
this was in its actual
running-on-all-fours form.
That was one of those moments
where I realized
that these things are very real.
My aunt sought help from a medicine man.
The medicine man said
me seeing that thing running by the car
was in some way tied to
somebody out there
trying to do our family harm.
The only reason
that people do the shape-shifting thing
is to harm others.
They wanna do harm.
They definitely wanna do harm.
[Jonathan] In my experience,
in 31 years out there,
I can guarantee you that this is real,
and I can guarantee you
that these things are deadly.
Throughout my career,
I never felt that I needed protection.
But when we started doing
these paranormal investigations,
that suddenly changed.
This is, uh, an arrowhead.
It's made out of black obsidian.
And obsidian in Navajo culture
is one of the things that can protect you.
[Stanley] If you perceive
that there's a negative energy there
or an energy
that you're just not comfortable with,
there's ways of dealing with that.
[intriguing music playing]
[Stanley] Negative energy
can attach to us and accumulate.
I smudge by burning cedar or sage.
What that smoke is doing,
it's removing any negative energy
that might be present.
And over the years,
this served to protect me and guide me
in working with this kind of phenomenon.
One of the most interesting
and eye-opening cases
that I've experienced
in my career as a Navajo Ranger
was a hunting case
involving a government office building.
That case had all kinds
of different types of phenomena.
There was employees that were saying,
"Oh my gosh,
there's crazy activity in the building."
"Things moving,
things flying across the room,
things exploding, voices."
This particular building
from probably the 1930s
was at one time even used as a morgue.
[phone ringing]
[Stanley] There was a female worker there
who was experiencing repeated calls
into her desk phone
over, and over, and over.
And there was nobody there
when she would pick up the phone.
[phone ringing]
[Stanley] And the phone company
wasn't unable to determine
where these calls were originating from.
[ringing continues]
[Stanley] This building
had three different levels.
So, on that particular investigation,
I developed a team of four individuals
to be able to witness these things.
My name is Tony Milford, uh,
Anthony Milford Jr.
I'm of Navajo descent, the Navajo tribe.
Stanley approached me
to help with the investigation.
I'm a little apprehensive
because this is definitely a haunting.
It's definitely a poltergeist
because it's moving things around.
[Stanley] We went in
on a weekend around nine o'clock at night.
I was downstairs.
All of a sudden,
over here on my left side,
there was two distinct male voices.
[eerie music playing]
I couldn't make out
what they were saying to each other.
[coin clinking]
Immediately following that,
we hear a coin fall on the floor.
And I asked,
"Did you guys drop a coin there?"
"Did you hear that too?"
Sure enough, there's, like, a quarter.
Where'd that quarter come from?
[Stanley] For me, as an investigator,
you always have
a certain level of skepticism.
I had everybody pull their pockets out
just to make sure
nobody had coins in their pockets.
And almost immediately,
as we went into that next room,
a coin fell, and we could see it.
And just when that happened, another one.
Ting.
"Did you hear that one?
That one's on the other side over there!"
And so now we're like,
"Okay, uh, something's going on here."
"Why are these things doing this?"
"Where are they coming from?"
Stanley got hit in the back by a coin.
And this thing was thrown,
I mean, with force,
and it came from an area we're all facing.
And you're like,
"Where'd this thing come from?"
[Stanley] Later on,
there was coins just on the desk.
We came back and the coins
were stacked up on their own.
These are the actual coins
that were involved in the investigation
in the office space there.
There was a total of 65 coins.
They were all denominations of US coins.
They all landed heads up.
I had come to the conclusion
that it was simply a spirit
that was letting me know that,
"Heads up. I'm here."
Following the investigation,
the next night,
one of the investigators, Dusty, was here.
As we were sitting here
working on the computers,
a quarter fell behind me
in the middle of the floor back here.
Dusty got up with a digital camera.
He began photographing
around my residence.
Just as he came through
the threshold of my bedroom door,
five coins fell over the top of his head
and fell on the floor.
We knew that the coin activity
that was involved in the investigation
had followed us here to my residence.
Again and again, here in my home,
they all landed heads up.
Most peoples, most cultures have this idea
that we all have a life force,
or energy, or soul within us.
And when we're deceased,
that life force leaves us.
When it leaves our body,
it goes somewhere else.
And at times,
we see the result
of these energies making themselves known.
The coins was really a key
in opening my mind
to the fact that there's
an underlying commonality
among all of these paranormal events.
[Jonathan] One of the things that we found
was that all of these different phenomenon
can be connected through this idea
of a multi-universe or dimensional gates.
[Stanley] So the coins obviously
came from somewhere else.
They manifested into our physical world,
and I witnessed that.
They are different dimensions.
And within those different dimensions,
you have these beings like the Bigfoot.
You have UFOs.
And from time to time,
they're crossing over
into our physical world.
And if you look at these
Navajo creation stories,
it kind of fits, you know?
[Jonathan] In Navajo culture,
this theory actually extends back
to the very beginning of time,
what they call "The Emergence."
In The Emergence, the Navajo people
came through several different worlds.
They say that there's a hole in the sky,
and they climb up through this hole.
That, to me, is very suspiciously
an accurate account
of some kind of dimensional gate
that they came through into this world.
What if those gates still exist?
We don't see them.
We don't know where they are,
but it's very possible
that they're still here.
[intriguing music playing]
[Jonathan] The paranormal investigations
only constituted less than 1%
of everything that we did
as Navajo Rangers.
But when they did happen,
they were very significant.
These cases are amazing.
[intriguing music continues]
[Jonathan] It's been
ten years since I retired.
I miss doing the investigations,
doing that kind of work.
[Stanley] I no longer
work for the department,
but I'm not gonna stop helping people,
especially those people
that are living in fear.
[Jonathan]
We're always looking for answers,
no matter how crazy they might seem.
[Stanley] There's so much more
to the universe and to our world
than what's right here in front of us.
We've only begun to scratch the surface.
[sinister music playing]
[mysterious music playing]
[mysterious music continues]