Like most good things, the book first appeared in October. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon was independently published on the 10th of October, 2021. It tells the story of a program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) that ran out of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2008 to 2010. It investigated UFOs and other paranormal happenings. A special focus of the program was on the 'Skinwalker Ranch' property in Utah's Uintah Basin - and an alarming discovery was made through study of this site. It seems to be possible for paranormal experiences to move among populations as if they were infectious agents. A contagion of the impossible.
One documented case of this apparent infectious capability of the Skinwalker Ranch phenomena was told in the first chapter of the book. Jonathan Axelrod (likely a pseudonym) was a senior aerospace engineer in Naval intelligence, and had been involved with the AAWSAP program since the beginning. He had been sent to Skinwalker Ranch in July of 2009, and there - along with two of his team members - he had an encounter with a bizarre unidentified flying object. After he went home from this mission, however, it would soon become apparent that what he had seen on the ranch was not content to stay on the ranch.
Among other escalating anomalies on the Axelrod property, one of the details I was shocked to see in the DOD-cleared book was a description of a strange animal - or animal-like entity - that menaced the aerospace engineer's family. This beast was said to resemble an enormous wolf. It stood on its hind legs, and ran bipedally with no qualms. It seemed highly hostile towards the family. Both Axelrod's wife and two children saw the hairy horror prowling their property. If the Defense Intelligence Agency - and by extension the Pentagon itself - takes reports of werewolf-like monsters seriously, then perhaps it's time we should too. If we take this plunge, what kind of nightmarish wonderland might we find ourselves in?
Well, there's a story that I heard coming over crackling airwaves one night which might shed some light on that question...
Dial D for Dogman
James' mother and his aunt were really close, and so he has many fond memories of going over to that house in the evening with his grandmother, so that the three adults could catch up and play dice together. His cousins were all significantly older than him, and so he often found himself simply marooned all by his lonesome. It was him and the phone booth.
One evening in the late 1980s (either '87 or '88), James and the cousin who was closest in age to him were playing in the yard of the aforementioned house. They were tossing a softball and their grandmother had stashed in the yard back and forth between them in the dusky light. His cousin threw it a little too high for him to catch, and so it flew over his head and over the rusty chain-link fence that surrounded the yard. Presumably grumbling to himself, he approached the fence and moved towards the overgrown alleyway just behind it - and as he did so, he could hear something moving. Getting closer, he could now see movement.
The thing behind the fence had brownish fur, and at first he assumed it was a dog. Then he realised it was too big to be a dog, and that its body looked wrong. It looked like a man, lying down on its belly. There were distinct hands, holding onto the chain-link fence. It had a pointed snout and long ears, and it appeared to be attempting to drag itself down the alley. James froze, staring at the creature. The only word his young brain could conjure was 'monster'.
Finally snapping out of his dazed state, James ran back into the main section of the yard to fetch his cousin. "Hey, there's something crazy in the alley back here!" He explained that he'd seen something weird, and then of course his cousin wanted to see whatever it was too. They headed back towards the alleyway together, but by the time they arrived there the creature had vanished. James pushed it from his mind, and thought nothing of the crawling terror until his sophomore years in high school, when it would force its way back inside his head.
During his teenage sophomore years, he would always get home from school, have a quick bite to eat and then go to his bedroom and lie down before even thinking about doing homework or going out anywhere. He was always tired. One night, he was lying in bed when the distinct feeling of not being alone anymore came over him. It was dark in his room and it was dark outside, but his bedroom door was open a crack. Light came in from the rest of the house, meaning that the room wasn't totally pitch black. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he noticed a number of figures stood around him. At first he thought it was his parents, but then he noticed that they didn't quite look human. They were too tall. His heart sank as he thought back to the alleyway. There were at least three or four of the monsters in his bedroom. He lay there for a moment - paralysed with fear. He closed his eyes for a split second, and then when he opened them again the beasts were gone.
In the years since, he tried to rationalise this experience away as a dream. A hormone-fuelled nightmare. But it didn't feel like a dream - it felt physically real, it felt like they were there in his room. He said that he felt like he was being observed by the creatures.
The next time he would see one of the monsters would be 2005, when he was working at a Borders Group bookstore. He had a large group of friends, and they would often go to eat out at a restaurant in the same shopping centre as the bookshop. On the nights that he wasn't working, they might all drive to one of their houses and share in merrymaking and a few drinks. One of these nights, however, it was just James and Gary going to a friends' house. Gary was James' boyfriend at the time - later his husband. They drove up to the house, stayed for some appetisers and perhaps a beer before they felt the need to go home and unwind. As they were driving down a rural road, just a few blocks away from their house, James noticed that there was something in the road.
He slowly stopped talking and started to focus solely on the strange thing in the centre of the road. Gary followed suit, and soon the two lovers were sat in silence in the car. The weather was misty, but not too foggy to impede visibility. The object blocking their path was an animal. It had a long snout and pointed ears, like a dog. It was on all fours at first, but then it stood up on its hind legs - showing that it had a torso and arms like a man. Its legs were digitigrade - bent backwards like those of a dog, not plantigrade like a human's. The horrifying apparition looked towards them, and then faded out of visibility. "It was just sort of not there anymore".
All the other encounters, James could at least try to rationalise. Maybe the creature in the alley was just an injured animal that had managed to drag itself out of view before his cousin saw it? Perhaps the entities in his bedroom were the product of a hormonal teenager's nightmares? But this experience was something beyond that. There were multiple witnesses, as Gary would later confirm to James. He wondered if perhaps the werewolf-like creatures really were from his mind, and that he had somehow 'projected' it into the street. But they felt physical every time.
As he thought more about it, James realised that he was the common denominator in all of these experiences. The wolfmen had followed him from his grandmother's house, to his parents' house and now to his own house. They were stalking him. Seemingly unprompted, he started to think back to his times playing in the phone booth. It felt like it was connected somehow. He called his mother and asked if she remembered it - to which she replied by confirming that she did. He asked her what he had told her he was doing in there, and she was unsure. She said that he would just sit on the bench, giggling and talking to himself. A little while later, however, she called him back. She'd remembered something about what he had said about his time in the phone booth. James had said that he would go to visit the 'Puppy People'.
