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BooksWorld getting weirder

Hunt For The Skinwalker, by Colm A. Kelleher phD and George Knapp (book review).

When I saw the cover for the book ‘Hunt For The Skinwalker’ by Colm A. Kelleher phD and George Knapp on the SFCrowsnest site, I thought the least I could do was give it a look. Actually, I ended up with its sequel by mistake when I realised this one came first and thought best to read them in order. I’m reading with my science mode turned fall on but still open-minded. I’ve read some of these kinds of books in my youth but not in science mode, just learning information.

The only thing that really made little sense back then, when you dismiss the fake photographs, is why weren’t there a consistent UFO shape. I mean, if you were an alien race here, you would either be using the same transport or something similar to each other. Mind you, in recent years that’s been attributed to the triangular shape, although you have to wonder how much ‘The X-Files’ re-enforced that image.

In Navajo, skinwalkers or naagloshii are people who can transform into an animal form, usually wolves or something resembling the sasquatch, given away by red glowing eyes. The Gorman Farm (names are changed to give privacy in the book) is on an old Navajo reservation in Utah, where odd things have happened and much of this book is devoted to that. It also appears that it is also a hot spot for UFO activity, although, from the text, they aren’t a regular occurrence. I should point out that the Gorman family are or were sceptics being spooked by these appearances, and with a lose of livestock, were happy to sell their ranch on. We should also point out that these odd ‘occurrences’ also happen to the surrounding ranches as well. The skinwalkers rarely get into this book after this point.

The Gorman family moved out after being there 18-20 months and NIDS bought the place, the National Institute for Discovery Science, with the father, Tom Gorman, keeping a caretaker role and some cows there. Again, cattle mutilation is pretty common in Utah, not just at this ranch. Considering the cost of prize cattle, I doubt if any farmer would deliberately fake such mutilations, more so as the farmers didn’t like to talk much about it. I suspect a grandstander would stand out rather too easily from what is written here.

Balls of coloured light had frequently noted, and the mutilated cattle moved from the herd through no obvious means and their dead bodies drained of blood and cut with surgical precision is a known. The authors point out that the original investigation years previously into this was done with no vet assessment or even autopsies. I’ve been having a heavy ponder on the why of this and the sample mutilations suggest looking for some form of contamination. When you consider that Utah and New Mexico are sources for pitchblende, unprocessed uranium, it would certainly be on my list to test the ground and surviving cattle, although without the mutilations and just a Geiger counter.

Half-way through this book, I had a look at Utah on the map on-line. Farming country and pretty quiet overall. If I was part of a scientific extra-terrestrial team, it would be a good choice except for the sub-zero winters, and even they didn’t come out then. The fact that UFO sightings and mutilations have been going on here for a couple of centuries makes it look like a hotspot.

Some of the other UFO descriptions suggest consistency, although I have problems with a mile-wide UFO. Considering how close to Area 51 this is, you would have thought that their radar equipment would have spotted something that large moving around.

There are some gaps like why the NIDS sold the ranch after 8 years. Likewise, despite accounts of underground machinery and even pin-pointed by remote viewing of odd things, no one thought to excavate and see what was there. There’s still the sequel.

The authors go through all usual suspects, including military black ops, balancing the arguments but as strange encounters have been going back centuries, might prevent them. I might hazard a guess that the military might have exploited this, but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that way.

I would have liked to have seen photographs, even if it was only of the holes in the ground caused by the UFOs, but a scan in the second book shows some there to investigate later.

Although this book is less about shapeshifters, there appears to be a colony of sasquatch in the area, amongst other things. I am open-minded about these kinds of things and the analysis here is interesting, but seems to lack any real conclusions or at least doing what I am doing and try to connect some dots.

There is still a matter of inconclusiveness. Mind you, had there been any major revelations, it would have been long in the news by now.

GF Willmetts

December 2021

(pub: Paraview Pocket Books, 2005. 304 page indexed small enlarged paperback. Price: I pulled a copy for about £11.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-4165-0521-1)

check out website: http://cosimobooks.com/bookstore.php?imp=8&texto=PARAVIEW%20POCKET%20BOOKS

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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