The Paranormal Ranger: A Navajo Investigator’s Search for the Unexplained

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.)