Beastly Encounters - More Close Encounters of the Skinwalking, Shapeshifting, Demonic Werewolf Kind

Continued From "Close Encounters of the Skinwalking, Shapeshifting, Demonic Werewolf Kind" (Pt 2) By Tom Horn & Cris Putnam

Continued... Another cryptid sometimes associated with Bigfoot, which was first reported in the 1980s on a quiet country road outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, is called “The Beast of Bray Road.”

A rash of sightings between the ’80s and ’90s prompted a local newspaper (Walworth County Week) to assign one of its reporters named Linda Godfrey to cover the story. Godfrey started out skeptical, but because of the sincerity of the eyewitnesses, became convinced of the creature’s existence. In fact, she was so impressed with the consistency of the reports from disparate observers (whom the History Channel’s TV series MonsterQuest subjected to lie detector tests in which the polygraph administrator could find no indication of falsehoods) that she wrote not only a series of articles for the newspaper but later a book, titled Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America. In her book, she claims that “the U.S. has been invaded by upright, canine creatures that look like traditional werewolves and act as if they own our woods, fields, and highways. Sightings from coast to coast dating back to the 1930s compel us to ask exactly what these beasts are, and what they want.”^[1] Her book presents a catalogue of investigative reports and first-person accounts of modern sightings of anomalous, upright canids. From Godfrey’s witnesses, we learn of fleeting, as well as face-to-face, encounters with literal werewolves—canine beings that walk upright, eat food with their front paws, interact fearlessly with humans, and suddenly and mysteriously disappear. While Godfrey tries to separate her research from Hollywood depictions of shapeshifting humans played by actors like Michael Landon or Lon Chaney Jr., she is convinced there really are extremely large, fur-covered, anthropomorphic, wolf-like creatures that chase victims on their hind legs.

Werewolves, like other cryptids, are deeply connected in history not only with occultic lore but with the alien-similar fauns and incubi that sought and obtained coitus from women. In the ancient Bohemian Lexicon of Vacerad (AD 1202), the werewolf is vilkodlak, on whom the debauched woman sat and was impregnated with beastly seed.^[2] St. Patrick was said to have battled with werewolf soldiers and even to have transformed the Welsh king Vereticus into a wolf. (The strange belief that saints could turn people into such creatures was also held by St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that angels could metamorphose the human form, saying, “All angels, good and bad have the power of transmutating our bodies.”^[3]) Long before the Catholic saints believed in such things, the god Apollo was worshiped in Lycia as Lykeios or Lykos, the “wolf” god. The trance-induced utterances of his priestesses known as Pythoness or Pythia prophesied in an unfamiliar voice thought to be that of Apollo himself. During the Pythian trance, the medium’s personality often changed, becoming melancholic, defiant, or even animal-like, exhibiting a psychosis that may have been the original source of the werewolf myth, or lycanthropy, as the Pythia reacted to an encounter with Apollo/Lykeios—the wolf god. Pausanias, the second-century Greek traveler and geographer, agreed with the concept of Apollo as the original wolf man who, he said, derived his name from the pre-Dynastic Apu-At, an Egyptian god of war. But Virgil, one of Rome’s greatest poets, held that “the first werewolf was Moeris, wife of the fate-goddess Moera, who taught him how to bring the dead back to life.”^[4] Romans of that era referred to the werewolf as versipellis, or the “turn-skin,” reminiscent of later indigenous peoples of America who still believe in “skinwalkers,” or humans with the supernatural ability to turn into a wolf or other animal.

ENTER THE SKINWALKER

According to local legend, a ranch located on approximately four hundred eighty acres southeast of Ballard, Utah, in the United States is (or at least once was) allegedly the site of substantial skinwalker activity. The farm is actually called “Skinwalker Ranch” by local Indians who believe it lies in “the path of the skinwalker,” taking its name from the Native American legend. It was made famous during the ’90s and early 2000s when claims about the ranch first appeared in the Utah Deseret News and later in the Las Vegas Mercury during a series of riveting articles by journalist George Knapp. Subsequently, a book titled Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah described how the ranch was acquired by the now defunct National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which had purchased the property to study “anecdotal sightings of UFOs, bigfoot-like creatures, crop circles, glowing orbs and poltergeist activity reported by its former owners.”^[5] A two-part article by Knapp for the Las Vegas Mercury was published November 21 and 29, 2002, titled, “Is a Utah Ranch the Strangest Place on Earth?” It told of frightening events that had left the owners of the ranch befuddled and broke—from bizarre, bulletproof wolf-things to mutilated prize cattle and other instances in which animals and property simply disappeared or were obliterated overnight. As elsewhere, these events were accompanied by strong odors, ghostly rapping, strange lights, violent nightmares, and other paranormal phenomena. Besides the owners of the Skinwalker Ranch, other residents throughout the county made similar reports over the years. Junior Hicks, a retired local school teacher, catalogued more than four hundred anomalies in nearby communities before the year 2000. He and others said that, for as long as anyone could remember, this part of Utah had been the site of unexplained activity—from UFO sightings to Sasquatch manifestations. It was as if a gateway to the world of the beyond existed within this basin. Some of the Skinwalker Ranch descriptions seemed to indicate as much. For example, in one event repeated by Knapp, an investigator named Chad Deetken and the ranch owner saw a mysterious light:

Both men watched intently as the light grew brighter. It was as if someone had opened a window or doorway. [The ranch owner] grabbed his night vision binoculars to get a better look but could hardly believe what he was seeing. The dull light began to resemble a bright portal, and at one end of the portal, a large, black humanoid figure seemed to be struggling to crawl through the tunnel of light. After a few minutes, the humanoid figure wriggled out of the light and took off into the darkness. As it did, the window of light snapped shut, as if someone had flicked the “off” switch.^[6]

In 1996, Skinwalker Ranch was purchased by real-estate developer and aerospace entrepreneur Robert T. Bigelow, a wealthy Las Vegas businessman who founded NIDS in 1995 to research and serve as a central clearinghouse for scientific investigations into various fringe science, paranormal topics, and ufology. Bigelow planned an intense but very private scientific study of events at the farm. He was joined by high-ranking military officials, including retired US Army Colonel John B. Alexander, who had worked to develop “Jedi” remote viewing and psychic experiments for the military as described in Jon Ronson’s book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, former police detectives, and scientists including Eric W. Davis, who has worked for NASA. In the years before, Bigelow had donated 3.7 million dollars to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas “for the creation and continuation of a program that would attract to the university renowned experts on aspects of human consciousness.”^[7] Bigelow’s Chair for the university program was parapsychologist Charles Tart, a man “famous for extended research on altered states of consciousness, near-death experiences and extrasensory perception.”^[8] But what Bigelow’s team found at the Skinwalker Ranch was more than they could have hoped for, at least for a while, including “an invisible force moving through the ranch and through the animals.”^[9] On this, the Las Vegas Mercury reported in November of 2002: “One witness reported a path of displaced water in the canal, as if a large unseen animal was briskly moving through the water. There were distinct splashing noises, and there was a foul pungent odor that filled the air but nothing could be seen. A neighboring rancher reported the same phenomena two months later. The [ranch owners] say there were several instances where something invisible moved through their cattle, splitting the herd. Their neighbor reported the same thing.”^[10]

Yet of all the anomalous incidents at the ranch, there was one that took the prize. On the evening of March 12, 1997, barking dogs alerted the NIDS team that something strange was in a tree near the ranch house. The ranch owner grabbed a hunting rifle and jumped in his pickup, racing toward the tree. Two of the NIDS staffers followed in a second truck. Knapp tells what happened next:

Up in the tree branches, they could make out a huge set of yellowish, reptilian eyes. The head of this animal had to be three feet wide, they guessed. At the bottom of the tree was something else. Gorman described it as huge and hairy, with massively muscled front legs and a doglike head.

Gorman, who is a crack shot, fired at both figures from a distance of 40 yards. The creature on the ground seemed to vanish. The thing in the tree apparently fell to the ground because Gorman heard it as it landed heavily in the patches of snow below. All three men ran through the pasture and scrub brush, chasing what they thought was a wounded animal, but they never found the animal and saw no blood either. A professional tracker was brought in the next day to scour the area. Nothing.

But there was a physical clue left behind. At the bottom of the tree, they found and photographed a weird footprint, or rather, claw print. The print left in the snow was from something large. It had three digits with what they guessed were sharp claws on the end. Later analysis and comparison of the print led them to find a chilling similarity—the print from the ranch closely resembled that of a velociraptor, an extinct dinosaur made famous in the Jurassic Park films.^[11]

In his new book "Longwalkers - The Return of the Nephilim", popular author and radio host Steve Quayle takes us from "Skinwalkers" to "Longwalkers" in describing how the 'Cryptid' phenomenon we have been discussing may actually be in fulfillment of end-times prophecy. Though his work is written in a fictional format, he includes a personal letter that he received from a pilot who flew a 12-foot tall, dead, cannibalistic giant out of the Middle East after destroying a Special Forces group hunting the Taliban in 2005. The giant had six fingers and six toes and the Longwalkers book cover is said to be an accurate artistic representation of the actual event. The pilot related material evidence to Steve in a subsequent phone conversation that only someone who actually observed the giant could have possibly known. Such stories of anomalous cryptids moving in and out of man’s reality, the opening of portals or spirit gateways like those described in "Longwalkers" and at Skinwalker Ranch, and the idea that through these openings could come the sudden appearance of unknown intelligence was believed as fact in biblical times, a phenomenon we will continue to investigate in the next entry.