Retired Navajo Ranger Stanley Milford Jr. has seen some things in his life that can’t always be explained.
Milford, who split his time growing up between his mother’s house in Oklahoma and with his father on the Navajo Reservation, said not only was his upbringing between two different geographic areas, the two were culturally different as well: Oklahoma was more “mainstream and Western” while the reservation was steeped in “Native American culture.”
When he grew up, he graduated from the United States Indian Police Academy and became a Navajo Ranger, where he and his partner, Jonathan Dover, investigated paranormal cases called in by residents. For those who have been in the area a while, he also cut his teeth in law enforcement by helping during the 1998 Four Corners manhunt for the three men – Jason McVean, Robert Mason and Alan “Monte” Pilon – who killed Cortez Police Officer Dale Claxton and took off into the Colorado/Utah desert.
He’s just released his memoir, “The Paranormal Ranger,” and will be at Maria’s Bookshop and in Farmington to discuss it. He’s also been featured on shows, including Nexflix’s reboot of “Unsolved Mysteries.”
If you go
WHAT: Author Event and Book-Signing With Stanley Milford Jr. and his new release, “The Paranormal Ranger.”
WHEN: 6-8 p.m. Oct. 10.
WHERE: Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit https://tinyurl.com/y67bn8sx.
The memoir is a mix of Milford’s autobiography interspersed with chapters about the Navajo origin story.
Milford and Dover first got into paranormal investigations when they were called to take over the case of a Navajo grandmother, who lost a sheep.
“She recounted this story of this Bigfoot stepping over into her sheep corral and taking off with one of her sheep,” he said. “She called the department, and two Rangers were assigned, and one of the Rangers was a comedian; he’s just constantly joking and laughing and carrying on. It’s just his personality, but I think the grandmother was probably offended by that, and she contacted the chief ranger and probably chewed him out.”
Because of her call, the chief called a department meeting, and told everyone that no matter how strange a case may seem, it’s real to the person making the call, and every case was to be investigated as such, even if responding officers didn’t believe it. And then, Milford said, the chief looked over at him and Dover and said they were going to oversee these cases and manage them.
“And that’s how it happened,” he said. “As far as us being assigned to it, we weren’t sitting over there raising our hands to be the Navajo ‘X Files’ or whatever. That wasn’t the case. We were assigned to do it, and that’s what we did.”
Milford said the idea to include the origin story into his memoir was inspired by a case in 2009 of a haunting he investigated in Window Rock, Arizona.
“It was an office space, and the director had said ‘my staff are experiencing all kinds of what they’re describing as paranormal phenomena.’ She approached the chief ranger at the time and asked if he had anybody that could come in and validate any of the stuff that they were claiming,” he said. “I put together a team of four individuals. We went in on two nights, and one of the prominent things about that case was coins would materialize and fall out of nothingness, out of thin air.”
And even after all this time, he said the coins appearing followed him: “Last month, I had the most coins that I’ve ever experienced ... this phenomenon still happens to me to this very day. Witnessing that with your own eyes, it really changes your worldview.
“It made me realize that, like with the Navajo, in their creation story, they talk about this idea of coming through these different worlds into the physical world that we’re in right now. Some of them describe either four worlds or five worlds, depending on the version of it. It got me thinking that, like with these coins, these coins are manifesting in our physical world from somewhere else. It got me to thinking about string theory and the idea of other planes of existence or dimensions.”
Milford said he starting thinking even further about different paranormal phenomenon that people refer to, “like Bigfoot and UFOs and extraterrestrials, even the witchcraft, even the skinwalkers and things like that. I think they use the these other dimensions coming and going into our physical world from these other dimensions. That’s how we experience it.”
“John and I lived in the woods at times, being Navajo Rangers right in the heavily forested high mountain areas, and we did not find the evidence that supports these things live out there,” he continued. “You can find all of that with bears, mountain lions, cougars, coyotes and everything that lives out there. You can see where it beds down. You can see where it goes out and hunts and drinks. You can find all of that evidence of that ... but the thing with the Bigfoot, you don’t see all of that evidence, although twice I’ve witnessed this thing that people refer to as Bigfoot. And so I know that these things do happen, and they do exist. So it could interdimensional.”
And while he’s had his share of people who don’t believe in what he’s seen and believes, Milford said the key is to be open-minded.
“You’re always going to have people that are going to take the opposite 180 view from what you’re talking about, and I understand that,” he said. “I think the message that John and I are conveying out there is much more important than listening to those people that are going to put it down. And John and I are open minded; we were very open minded. I remember one time we presented in Dulce, New Mexico, at one other UFO thing. There was an elderly Native woman that came up to us. She was in her mid 80s, and she came up to us with tears in her eyes and hugged us after we did our presentation. She said, ‘Thank you for doing what you do.’ She went on to convey a story about when she was a young girl encountering her UFO and her family members are standing around her with their jaws wide open because she never, ever shared that experience with them. I think, out of fear of being ridiculed or shunned, or whatever it might be, she never shared that experience. She thanked us and she said, you’re giving people that have these experiences more or less a forum to be able to come together and share these experiences with like-minded people that are willing to listen.
“And that’s really, ultimately what the book is: to let people know that these experiences do happen, and to be respectful of others that do have these experiences, and letting people know these people aren’t crazy, and they’re not alone. And I would dare to say worldwide, if you looked at every family on this planet, if you looked in the history of their family, there’s probably somebody within that family that has had some type of so-called supernatural or paranormal experience, whether it’s seeing UFOs and lights in the sky or hauntings. I think it’s much more common than we could ever imagine.”
katie@durangoherald.com
