Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A former Navajo Ranger turned paranormal investigator reflects on personal and professional encounters with the supernatural. The son of a Navajo educator and his Cherokee Irish wife, Milford grew up with a deep connection to Native American culture. His attachment to Navajo culture deepened after his parents’ divorce, especially during the summers he spent at his father’s house learning about—and encountering—Navajo spirit entities like skinwalkers. As an adult, Milford trained to become a Navajo Ranger, a job that required a “holistic” blend of policing skills and intuition to bring “the individuals I encountered into balance with their surroundings and community.” His open-minded approach became especially important when working cases involving dead sheep that had been slit from throat to groin and drained of all their blood and sightings of flying objects that moved at “otherworldly speed.” Milford’s willingness to treat all incidents—and the people who reported them—with respect earned him the distinction of investigating all Navajoland reports of Bigfoot sightings, ghosts, and extraterrestrials. As he recounts his experiences, Milford interweaves colorful stories from Navajo mythology that illuminate cultural beliefs about the origins of life, monsters, and the spirit world. For him no distinction exists between the supernatural and reality. “Paranormal hotspots”—including places like Gettysburg, where 51,000 Confederate and Union soldiers died during the Civil War—are simply spaces charged with human negativity while Navajo stories about “terrifying monsters” are records of the “tormented places [created] through our division and strife.” Engaging reading for adventurous minds. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

From UFOs to Bigfoot, there have always been phenomena that can’t be explained by science alone. This is what Milford learned from his upbringing—split between rural Oklahoma and the Navajo Nation—as well as his decades as a Navajo Ranger. To his surprise, keeping his community safe often meant guiding them through paranormal experiences. Extraterrestrial encounters, hauntings, witchcraft—Milford investigated these cases just as seriously as he would any other. He became a repository for stories that, for many, were too strange and frightening to reveal to anyone else, and doing so altered his view of the world. Equal parts memoir and supernatural record, Milford’s book shares how these occurrences enlightened him. He leaves the reader with a unified theory of how paranormal phenomena are connected and what this means for us as human beings. And he demonstrates how experience and openmindedness can, over a lifetime, build up to unparalleled expertise.

Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this diverting if unconvincing account, former Navajo Ranger Milford recounts the traditional cases he investigated, as well those more suited for The X-Files. Milford spent his 1960s childhood shunting between Arizona and Oklahoma while absorbing a steady diet of TV cop shows. That led to a career, beginning at age 31, as a ranger with the Navajo Nation in Arizona and Utah’s Monument Valley. Milford covers his rigorous training for the position and his early cases chasing violent fugitives, but the bulk of the narrative concerns his duties with the Special Projects Unit, which explored phenomena “that did not fit within everyday parameters of law enforcement.” “Skinwalkers, ghosts, UFOs, and other entities had so far been unavoidable in my life,” Milford writes, referring to his familiarity with the superstitions of the Southwest: “So when they became a part of my career, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.” With a fiction writer’s gift for description, Milford recalls a Navajo boy’s purported 2003 Bigfoot sighting near the San Juan River and a former railroad worker who reported spotting a UFO in the sky above his Arizona home in 2009. Milford offers skeptical readers few reasons to change their minds, providing little hard evidence and straying into far-fetched theories of interdimensional travel. Still, as far as campfire stories go, this one has charm. Agent: Frank Weimann, Folio Literary. (Oct.)