- Kelleher, Colm A. and George Knapp.
Hunt for the Skinwalker.
New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2005.
ISBN 1-4165-0521-0.
-
Memo to file: if you're one of those high-strung people prone to be
rattled by the occasional bulletproof wolf, flying refrigerator,
disappearing/reappearing interdimensional gateway, lumbering giant
humanoid, dog-incinerating luminous orb, teleporting bull, and
bloodlessly eviscerated cow, don't buy a ranch, even if it's
a terrific bargain, whose very mention makes American Indians in the
neighbourhood go “woo-woo” and slowly back away
from you. That's what Terry Sherman (“Tom Gorman” in this
book) and family did in 1994, walking into, if you believe their
story, a seething nexus of the paranormal so weird and intense that
Chris Carter could have saved a fortune by turning the
“X-Files”
into a reality show about their life. The Shermans found that
living with things which don't just go bump in the night
but also slaughter their prize livestock and working dogs
so disturbing they jumped at the opportunity to unload
the place in 1996, when the
National Institute for
Discovery Science (NIDS), a private foundation investigating
the paranormal funded by real estate tycoon and
inflatable
space station entrepreneur Robert Bigelow
offered to buy them out in order to establish a systematic
on-site investigation of the phenomena. (The
NIDS Web site does not appear to have been updated since
late 2004; I don't know if the organisation is still in
existence or active.)
This book, co-authored by the biochemist who headed the field team
investigating the phenomena and the
television
news reporter who covered the story, describes events on the
ranch both before and during the scientific investigation.
As is usual in such accounts, all the really weird stuff happened
before the scientists arrived on the scene with their
cameras, night vision scopes, radiation meters, spectrometers,
magnetometers (why is always magnetometers, anyway?) and set
up shop in their “command and control centre”
(a.k.a. trailer—summoning to
mind the VW bus “mobile command post” in
The Lone Gunmen).
Afterward, there was only the rare nocturnal light, mind-controlling
black-on-black flying object, and
transdimensional tunnel sighting (is an orange pulsating luminous
orb which disgorges fierce four hundred pound monsters a
“jackal lantern”?), none, of course, captured on
film or video, nor registered on any other instrument.
This observation and investigation serves as the launch pad
for eighty pages of speculation about causes, natural and
supernatural, including the military, shape-shifting Navajo witches,
extraterrestrials, invaders from other dimensions,
hallucination-inducing shamanism, bigfoot,
and a muddled epilogue
which illustrates why biochemists and television newsmen should
seek the advice of a physicist before writing about
speculative concepts in modern physics. The conclusion is,
unsurprisingly: “inconclusive.”
Suppose, for
a moment, that all of this stuff really did happen, more
or less as described. (Granted, that is a pretty big hypothetical,
but then the family who first experienced the weirdness never
seems to have sought publicity or profit from their
experiences, and this book is the first commercial exploitation
of the events, coming more than ten years after they
began.) What could possibly be going on? Allow me to humbly
suggest that the tongue-in-cheek hypothesis advanced in
my 1997 paper
Flying
Saucers Explained, combined with some kind of recurring
“branestorm” opening and closing interdimensional gates in
the vicinity, might explain many of the otherwise enigmatic,
seemingly unrelated, and nonsensical phenomena reported in this and
other paranormal “hot spots”.
February 2006 