THE PREMISE
Unsolved Mysteries‘ episode Paranormal Rangers plays like a real-life version of The X-Files.
The episode kicks off with the title card stating, “In 2000, two Navajo rangers were assigned to investigate reports of paranormal activity on the reservation. The Following accounts are from their case files.”
That promise is enough to make any paranormal investigation junkie’s mouth water. What follows is a chilling series of witness testimonies and re-enactments involving Bigfoot, UFOs, and the dreaded Skinwalker.
Retired Navajo Ranger Stanley Milford Jr. believes there is something magical about the Navajo reservation. The 27,000 square mile territory is the size of West Virginia and stretches into Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. He says the area is so remote he’s probably stood where no one has ever stood.
With his sombre, no-nonsense demeanour, the former Navajo Ranger is the last person you would expect to make on the record claims about supernatural activity.
Navajo Rangers are tasked with critical duties like forest fire evacuations and search and rescues. Milford Jr., along with fellow Ranger Jonathan Redbird Dover began working together in 1987, as co-SWAT team commanders for Backcountry operations, where the men grew thick as thieves.
In 2000, the Chief Ranger called them in to discuss a complaint lodged against the department for failing to investigate a Bigfoot encounter.
According to Dover, right now in the United States, there is no mechanism to investigate these types of paranormal cases. And since there is no system for processing them, they go ignored.
The issue is that the people reporting these incidents don’t care about legal procedure. They’re often left traumatized by their extraordinary encounters. So out of respect for the experiencers, the Chief ordered his team to follow-up on these unusual reports. Dover and Milford Jr. received the team’s “major cases,” making them their unit’s Mulder and Scully.
The rest of the episode recounts some of the unexplainable cases Dover and Milford Jr. investigated throughout their careers.
THE PRESENTATION
Paranormal Rangers takes viewers to locations where witnesses encountered the impossible. Director Clay Jeter uses eerie drone footage, and a haunting score to make these sequences look and feel like a True Detective episode.
Paranormal Rangers features old witness testimony footage and audio recordings of people phoning in their encounters. Whether or not you believe what these folks report, you can hear the terror and sense of awe in their voices.
As we listen to witness testimony, the episode cuts to spooky black-and-white artist renditions of what they describe.
In classic Unsolved Mysteries fashion, the show presents a few creepy reenactments. Watching this show as a kid, the reenactments often scared me senseless and made me anxious about going to bed. This time around I found these sequences rather tame, but they still do an excellent job of helping viewers visualize what is alleged to have happened.
THE CASES
Witness Brenda Harris lived with her family in a mobile home by the San Juan River, where they experienced multiple Bigfoot encounters. As Harris describes what happened, the episode cuts to a spooky live reenactment, culminating with a giant Sasquatch lurking on her porch.
It’s a hard-to-swallow story that Harris shares with total conviction. To back up these big claims, the episode features physical evidence of Bigfoot encounters. This includes an 18-inch cast of a footprint (with a 5-foot stride), and a hair sample that can’t be matched to any animal in the DNA database. There’s also some questionable footage of a strange figure that seems to be evading the security camera.
Here’s where things get even stranger. As the number of Bigfoot encounters increased, UFO sightings also went up.
One anonymous witness, voice disguised and draped in shadow, describes a glowing red orb following her down a lonely stretch of road. The encounter terrified the witness and left her with a head-splitting migraine. Later on, investigators discover her car showed an intense magnetic attraction at the points where the orb probed the vehicle.
Former Navajo Nation Resident Hoss Lors also witnessed something unexplainable. He reports seeing a large ship with tendrils of light emanating out like teardrops. As unlikely as that sounds, Lors captured photos to back up his claims. He describes himself as a skeptical nonbeliever until the Navajo Nation taught him there were things out there we don’t understand.
The episode’s most terrifying case involves the legendary Skinwalker. Milford Jr. says he knows these creatures exist because he’s experienced one himself. He describes a harrowing highway chase I won’t spoil here.
HIGH-STRANGENESS
Anyone who spends time looking into ufology inevitably encounters a term called high strangeness. It’s a concept that comes up often in this Paranormal Rangers. High strangeness refers to the bizarre, and often unbelievable phenomena surrounding UFO cases. A witness’ paranormal experience doesn’t always end after their UFO sighting. It’s not uncommon for them to later report hauntings, precognitive dreams, and even more UFO encounters.
If you go down this rabbit hole, there are many reports of people claiming to see Bigfoot in proximity to a UFO. UFO researchers tend to dismiss these cases because they don’t fit their preconceptions about the phenomena. And let’s be honest, UFO/Bigfoot combo sightings sound ridiculous.
With the reduced stigma around ufology in recent years, it’s easier for researchers to publicly tackle high-strangeness cases. Unbiased scientific inquiry requires people to follow where the data takes them, whether it fits what they believe or not.
Researchers like Jacques Vallée posit ufologists need to pay more attention to the strangest cases. If experiencers did encounter something non-human, they would naturally struggle to wrap their minds around “alien” behaviour.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Paranormal Rangers makes some intriguing points about how Navajo culture accepts phenomena science considers supernatural. It’s too bad the episode doesn’t dive deeper into this line of thinking. Fascinating parallels exist between what Indigenous people call Star People and tales of ufonaughts, and I wish the episode followed this lead.
Paranormal Rangers covers lots of ground but doesn’t go deep in any one area. The show could spend an entire episode breaking down one meaty case, but instead, it jumps from report to report, leaving viewers with only a series of quick hits.
Paranormal Rangers prioritizes supernatural spectacle over cold hard facts. And that’s a shame considering it spotlights two Rangers hired to be the real-life Mulder and Scully. It’s a fun episode that works best as a collection of spooky campfire stories. Paranormal Rangers offer 42-minutes of solid entertainment, but it doesn’t reveal any meaningful insights into Bigfoot encounters, UFO sightings, and the hitchhiker effect.
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