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Dec. 13, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:14:07

Edition 423 - Rocky Elmore

Rocky Elmore - ex US Border Agent - with tales of ghosts, spectres, strange creatures and deepest paranormality on America's lonely frontiers...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, I hope you're doing good, as they say, as we are nicely stuck into December, looking ahead to Christmas.
	Have you prepared yet?
	I haven't even started.
	In fact, I probably never will start.
	That's usually my story.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails.
	Please keep, as we come to the end of this year, your emails coming in.
	Go to the website designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
	It's theunexplained.tv.
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	When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	Don't forget also, the official Facebook page is TheUnexplained with Howard Hughes.
	That's there.
	And you also find me on Twitter as well in various other places.
	But, you know, the Facebook page has been growing all this year.
	And thank you very much for being part of that.
	If you feel that you can make a donation for the show in order for it to continue, that would be marvelous.
	And thank you if you have recently made a donation.
	That's very kind of you.
	It's theunexplained.tv.
	Follow the link from there.
	It'll take you to a PayPal section, and that'll be that.
	And thank you very much indeed.
	I've got a great one for you here, so I'm not going to do a lot of talking.
	The guest on this edition, Rocky Elmore, a 20-year member of the United States Border Patrol Agency, an agent for them, with tales from places like the area around Tucson and other areas of trepidation, danger, weirdness, and sheer frightening paranormality, which he tells so brilliantly.
	He's got a book out.
	It's called Out on Foot.
	He has a website.
	He'll give the details of that towards the end of this.
	But we're going to cross to the United States right now.
	Strap yourself in because I think you're going to love this one.
	Rocky Elmore is there.
	Rocky, thank you very much for being on my show.
	Thank you for having me.
	Rocky, tell me a little bit before we get started, where exactly you're located?
	Where we're having this conversation from and to?
	I'm in Oklahoma right now.
	It's pretty much right in the center of the United States.
	Right.
	And wintertime in Oklahoma, I'm guessing big wide open spaces.
	We're talking cold.
	We're talking cold right now.
	Usually this time of year it doesn't get this cold, but this is one of those freak occurrences where the Arctic front come down and it's kind of a plain state.
	We kind of have a joke here that nothing separates us from the North Pole except a barbed wire fence.
	Which is sort of kind of appropriate really for what we're going to be talking about because we're talking about your experiences as a border patrol officer, agent.
	Do they call them agents or officers?
	I'm not sure which.
	They're agents.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	And I have to explain to our listener here in Europe, because they may not be as au fait with this.
	But the United States has an enormous land border at both ends, top and bottom.
	There is an enormous area.
	The top one is Canada, isn't it?
	And the bottom one you're talking about, you're going down through Mexico and down into South America ultimately.
	But there is a vast area and a vast, lonely, difficult area in both of those places, north and south, to patrol.
	Yes, they're pretty well, especially the southern border is pretty well uninhabited, except for just a couple of major cities here and there, like, oh, Tucson's about 100 miles off the border, a little less.
	San Diego sits pretty close to the border.
	But other than that, you're talking about, for the most part, very, very remote areas where nobody lives.
	Yeah, I only ever crossed from San Diego.
	I went across into Tijuana for just a couple of hours.
	And, you know, that was a relatively easy crossing.
	You leave the car on the California side and you just, as you know, walk over the bridge there.
	But I remember being in Tijuana probably for only about an hour because it was just crazy.
	There were so many people and everybody was hassling you.
	And I just thought, okay, I want a nice quiet holiday.
	I've got to get back over the border.
	So I stayed in Tijuana to my eternal shame for one hour.
	And I probably missed some of the great delights of Mexico.
	And I went back to California.
	That's my story.
	Well, Tijuana is a crazy place, a real crazy place.
	It came about its existence in a very unusual way.
	American Prohibition basically created Tijuana.
	It was just a real small fishing village before American Prohibition, where we had alcohol outlawed way back in, oh, I guess it was the 20s.
	So Tijuana sprung up to serve alcohol to Americans crossing over.
	So it's always grown up from its very beginning as this wild, outrageous place where anything can happen.
	And it's still largely that kind of a place.
	Right.
	Sounds like you've got a truck passing you at the moment.
	Maybe it's just your heating system kicking in.
	I think my heating system just kicked on, yeah.
	Okay, well, that's fine.
	If you can just be as near to the microphone as you can be, bearing in mind that's in the background.
	That's cool.
	Now, Border Patrol experiences we're going to be talking about on this edition.
	And they are fascinating in that we're not only talking about experiences in lonely places of a paranormal kind, which I'd never associated with that profession, but you've got the stories.
	But also, of course, the real-life dangers, and they are dangers that you face when you're dealing with people who are perhaps people trafficking across the border.
	There may be smuggling, I don't know, medications or drugs or whatever they're smuggling or people, you know, as we say, across the border.
	And then, of course, there are the kind of creatures that you may find in those areas.
	So not only are we talking paranormal stories here, but we're talking about real life dangers to human beings, aren't we?
	Yes.
	The paranormal really is just something that's an interesting side note, you know, for us.
	It's not something we'd consider to be dangerous to us.
	The real dangers are people, the people we come in contact with and the wildlife.
	In particular, mountain lions is probably the number one danger and rattlesnakes.
	And that's the two things that you really have to watch all the time because This southern border is just, I mean, this is rattlesnake heaven.
	They are everywhere and they're out all night long.
	So you've got to really watch your step, literally.
	And then, of course, you have to learn how to deal with the cats.
	Yeah.
	And how do you deal with those threats?
	You know, the rattlesnakes and the big cats that you may find?
	You know, and this is just kind of my ideal, but I think it holds true.
	With the rattlesnakes, they will move away from you if you give them a chance.
	And for all the fear they cause, I like to say that they're very courteous because they will almost always give you a rattle before they strike.
	And when you hear that rattle, you just hold still and that snake will crawl away if you give it a chance.
	Now, if you step on it or fall on it, you're getting bit.
	As far as the big cats go, the mountain lions, the way you handle them is you have to have a certain mindset and way you operate the whole time you're out there because you never know when they've got you in their sights.
	And you have to act like you're the top.
	You have to move with purpose.
	And you have to be in predator mode yourself and that you're stalking slowly, you're moving with purpose.
	You're not just looking around.
	What really attracts them, I guess, you know, they just, like other predators, they hone in on fear.
	Somebody gets lost from their group and they start walking in circles or they're putting off those fear hormones or they start to run.
	Running is the worst thing you could ever do with a cat.
	And that just seems to attract cats and that's when you're in danger of actually being attacked.
	Have you known people, perhaps people in the border service, other people who haven't been as lucky through your service?
	I'm guessing that, you know, since we're talking, you came through it all unscathed.
	Have you known people who perhaps have been attacked either by the cats or by the snakes?
	Or have you all been trained to the point where you know how to react?
	Well, we really don't get trained in that at all.
	That's something you just kind of learn and gets passed on from one agent to the next if you don't already know it.
	I do know one agent, he didn't get attacked by a cat.
	He actually kind of attacked the cat through some very unusual circumstances.
	One night they were running a night vision scope and this scope operates off of heat.
	So it's picking up a heat signature and you can usually tell what you're looking at, but it's a little bit fuzzy.
	It's not like really seeing something on camera.
	And this cat was actually stalking a group and he was probably waiting for somebody to get left behind in the group and then he was going to take that person.
	And so the agent come in being guided by a scope operator that was off probably a half a mile away and was picking up the heat signature off of this cat that was laying down under the bushes and it looked like a person to him.
	So he put the agent in upwind from this cat and the agent just dove right in the bushes on top of the cat.
	Oh my God.
	Of course the cat went crazy because the cat was so focused on the group that he didn't notice, you know, he didn't pick the agent up coming in on him.
	Yeah, the cat let out.
	Well they both screamed.
	The cat let out a scream and the agent let out a scream too when he realized what he had done.
	And the cat did take a swipe at him, but it got hung up in his ballistic vest and that's what kept it from tearing his chest and his neck open.
	Saved his life.
	So he was pretty lucky.
	But I suppose you always have to be aware in those lonely places and we'll talk about the nature of those places in just a second.
	You have to be aware that even though you think you're alone under the stars, something may well be watching you.
	You're never as alone as you think you are.
	Yes, that's true.
	You feel very much alone out there, but you're never as alone as you think you are.
	Okay.
	Can I ask you just about that heater there?
	It seems to have turned itself off.
	Is it likely to sort of go on again on the thermostat?
	I just want to warn my listener that it's going to kick in again.
	If you'll give me just one second, I'll go drop it where hopefully it don't come on again.
	Thank you.
	Only for the duration of the conversation.
	I don't want you to freeze.
	So Rocky's just going to do that.
	The things that we're going to be talking about will include, I want to get into the human dangers of all of this.
	We'll also get into the story of how he got involved in the Border Patrol Service, because it wasn't something that he did sort of straight from school, which is an interesting story in itself.
	Then we'll get into the paranormal and weird stories, not only Rocky's own, but other people's that were involved in his time with the Border Patrol Agency.
	Rocky, are you back?
	I am back, and I dropped it several degrees, so hopefully it won't come on again.
	You're a good man.
	It just depends on how cold it is.
	Let's just hope that that weather bomb doesn't drop while we're having this conversation.
	People trafficking, I guess, is an issue in the areas of the southern states that you were working.
	And also people smuggling goods across the border.
	I guess the kinds of things that people smuggle across the borders are drugs and perhaps illicit alcohol, that kind of stuff.
	But all of those things involve money, of course.
	Somebody's paying somebody else either to get people across the border illegally or to get contraband across the border illegally.
	So where there's money involved, there is the potential for violence and harm to people who are trying to keep them out.
	Yes.
	Everything that goes on on the border is very organized as far as the crime syndicates.
	The human smuggling used to be, I would say, it was very organized, but it was lower in its potential for violence, in that drug cartels did not dabble in human smuggling when I got in.
	There was a saying that you either have dope or you have people, but you usually don't have both.
	But as time went on, the drug cartels got more and more into human smuggling, and that become much more organized and much more violent and changed Really, everything about the border itself and much about the job.
	How long were you in the service?
	I should have asked you this at the beginning, but how long were you in the service for?
	I did 20 years and I did all of it in the field.
	I enjoyed field work, so I just stayed in the field.
	I didn't promote into management or anything.
	I just loved being out there, and so that's what I did for my full tour, 20 years.
	And what was the area from where to where?
	I started out in San Diego, California, was the closest city from where I was at.
	We worked, my station worked a couple of mountain ranges that were about 25 miles away from San Diego, stretched out probably 50 miles away.
	It was called the Otai Mountain Range and the Takati Mountain Range, and that was our area of operations when I was in California.
	After about 13 years, I transferred over to South Texas, stationed Kingsville, Texas, and that was a big checkpoint.
	So not a lot happened there other than just checkpoint work.
	And then my last three years, I transferred to Tucson, Arizona.
	And again, that was a mixture of desert work and mountain ranges.
	Well, two very inhospitable kinds of terrain that you had to deal with.
	Now, doing work on a border, stop checkpoint, is one thing.
	I guess that's fairly routine for people who do it.
	But when you're in a situation where you find yourself having to navigate your way through those things, I guess it's much more than just, you know, like a hike.
	Yes.
	You know, people go hiking for fun.
	And sometimes we go hiking for fun too.
	You know, we want to learn the area, not a lot going on.
	Or even for us, working traffic is fun.
	You know, you get to where this doesn't bother you because if you can't get to where it doesn't bother you, then you're not going to be able to do it.
	You're just going to lose your nerve and you're not going to be able to do it.
	And people do get in like that and they leave relatively quickly.
	But those who stay, you know, you get where this is fun for you.
	You enjoy doing it.
	But these are the kind of hikes that can end your life because you're in very hospitable terrain.
	I've known a couple of agents that set out on a hike and not come back, actually quite a few of them.
	And anything can get you out there because you have a lot of weird things that happen that don't happen to, say, a city police officer.
	Like, you know, you usually don't hear about a city police officer getting bit by a rattlesnake or drowning or dying from heat exhaustion and dehydration, you know, in one single shift.
	But those are things you have to prepare for.
	So it's very much more, I would say in those remote areas, it's more like a military job because you're kind of out there on a patrol on foot on your own.
	Yeah, and you're depending on your own resources entirely.
	In the mountainous areas, I guess you need to know mountaineering, and that's risky in itself.
	In the areas that are more desertified, then it's survival, isn't it?
	It's having enough water.
	It's making sure you don't get lost.
	Yeah, the one thing you learn is you don't get out of the truck without your canteen.
	You have to have your canteen with you at all times, and it's got to be two quarts minimum.
	Anything less than two quarts, and you're probably going to be in a life-risking situation where you may have to call for rescue for yourself.
	And when you're operating in those areas and doing your job, how far are you away from civilization?
	What's the furthest you can be from settlements where there are other people?
	Well, you could easily be 100 miles out from the nearest, what I would call a real settlement of 10,000, 20,000 people or more.
	Actually, some of these little towns down there really consisted of nothing more than a gas station, a convenience store, and the two or three people that run it.
	And there might be five or six residents in the whole town.
	Sassapy, Arizona was that way.
	It sat right on the border, and there was maybe 10 people that lived there.
	10 people.
	And then it was about, oh, it was 50 miles up the road until you got into where people actually lived.
	Are you working alone or in ones or twos?
	How are you working?
	Are there two of you, you and a partner?
	How does it function?
	When I was in Texas, everyone had to ride doubled up.
	And when I was in Arizona and California, we rode alone, which is usually preferable.
	guys actually want to ride alone for the most part.
	No, you know, I'm You know, I function better in many ways.
	But I can't imagine being in a hostile territory and being alone because if it's mountainous, the area you said around Tucson, some of that is mountainous, some of that is desert.
	But if you twist your ankle or do something that incapacitates you, what do you do if you're on your own?
	Presumably you have radio, but then people are going to take time to get to you.
	And as you say, the nearest settlement may be 100 miles away.
	It may be closer, but it may only have a couple of people in it.
	They're not exactly going to come running.
	Right.
	If you get hurt, it's going to take some time for you to get rescued.
	It's going to take two, three hours, maybe more.
	So, yeah, I mean, you are at much more risk.
	So now, riding alone doesn't mean that you'll always work alone.
	If something starts to happen, you'll call the nearest agent.
	They'll try to get over there as quick as they can.
	And two of you will try to work it.
	But you're right.
	Being alone is much more likely that you will not be able to get a rescue because you may not be able to establish radio communications from where you're at.
	See, we don't think of that because in Europe, most places are fairly near.
	I'm making a big generalization here, but usually radio is going to reach somewhere.
	And what happens if you have a partner with us is your partner can climb up to a high point so he can hit a repeater and get out and call for help.
	But I can think of right off the top of my head at least six or Seven different agents that went out for hikes alone, and something happened to them, and they were killed during the hike.
	They fell off a cliff, they drowned in a creek, they twisted their ankle and just couldn't get out.
	Heart attacks, you know, just all kinds of variety of things.
	I mean, look, if you have something that incapacitates you, you break your leg, twist your ankle.
	That's one thing, and it's very bad.
	You have a heart attack out there, and unless there's somewhere quite close, you may die very easily.
	You will, yes.
	You have very little chance of surviving a heart attack or a heat stroke if you're out there.
	So you have to be a particular kind of person.
	How would you sum that up?
	You do.
	It kind of takes a it's much more of a cowboy type person, which America's famous for, or a military-type person.
	And they're usually kind of one and the same a lot of times.
	You know, they have the same and the military person would be, you know, someone of a Marine mindset or an infantry type mindset that they can go out or a scout sniper where they can just go out and operate on their own all day long and it doesn't really bother them or all night long.
	Or a cowboy that used to be and out amongst the, you know, the ranch.
	He works on the ranch by himself all day and he has to take care of everything by himself.
	So they did look for very self-sufficient type of people back when I came in.
	Of course, over time, everything changes and they try to get more of a mainstream type person now, a college educated and maybe more of a policeman mentality.
	And a lot of times it doesn't work so well for them because the job physically just doesn't really allow so much for that.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I can imagine it's like a lot of fields, actually, even the field that I'm in, journalism, broadcasting, all the book learning in the world is not going to save you from a difficult situation.
	Your ability is based not on your qualifications, I think.
	It's based on your intestinal fortitude, which is something I guess in that job you've got to have a lot of.
	What I didn't ask you is, I mean, from what I read, and maybe I'm wrong, you were neither cowboy nor military, were you?
	You came in from a completely different background.
	Right.
	Now, Oklahoma is a cowboy state.
	And, you know, I kind of grew up in a little bit of a rural setting.
	So I did grow up liking to go hunting, go fishing.
	Everyone around here where I lived and where I grew up, you know, they liked to wear cowboy boots and cowboy hats.
	So I guess I would have been considered more of a cowboy type if I didn't have military service.
	Okay.
	On your photograph on your website, I have to say you have a military demeanor about you, but I guess you've been in the service or just out of the service for some time then.
	Yeah, the Board of Patrol is more of a paramilitary type operation.
	It joins itself more with, like when we train with other agencies, a lot of time we actually incorporate a lot of military type training.
	So I would say that it's a paramilitary kind of operation.
	Okay, so we've learned that you have to be somebody with a certain amount of resources and a certain amount of background to do this.
	Just before we get on to the weird stories, the paranormal stories, et cetera, which we're here to talk about, when you look back over 20 years of service, what's the scariest thing?
	And I'm talking about not ghosts coming out of the ground towards you.
	We'll talk about that later.
	But the scariest situation that you found yourself in where perhaps you didn't think you were going to come out of it?
	By far the scariest situation that ever happened to me was being laid in on a trail waiting for a group to come down.
	And I had a trainee with me.
	And we heard some noise coming down the trail, but it was very quiet.
	And I could tell that it was not a group of people.
	And I told my trainee, and it was very dark, very dark this night, but we had a roadway behind us, and there was some light reflecting off of that roadway a little bit.
	So we heard something coming down the trail.
	We couldn't see what it was.
	And I told my trainee, I said, let's step off the trail, let it pass.
	It's an animal of some kind, probably a deer.
	And we did that.
	We heard the animal pass by, paid no attention.
	So then we took our position back up on the trail.
	And a few seconds later, I heard the worst scream I ever heard in my life.
	And it was a mountain lion scream.
	And we both spun around, you know, faster than I ever moved in my life.
	We spun around and we caught a glimpse of this cat coming across the road, apparently straight at us.
	And we're trying to draw our weapons.
	And, you know, under that kind of intense stress, it's very hard to just draw a weapon.
	And it was wintertime.
	I had a coat on.
	I got hung up in my weapon a little bit.
	I couldn't get the gun out.
	I didn't get a shot off.
	Fortunately, the cat actually was after something that was just nearby us.
	And he went by us and hit whatever it got hold of and just tore into it with this god-awful screaming and guttural sounds.
	It was horrific.
	If that was me, and I pray to God that I'm never in that situation, but if that was me and I saw that, I would be thinking, oh my God, that could have been me.
	Being ripped to pieces.
	Yes.
	Geez.
	We left the area pretty quickly after that.
	We decided not to hang around and work traffic.
	Yeah, no, I can quite understand that.
	If it had got you, would you have had any chance of survival?
	You know, probably not.
	Probably not.
	People do sometimes survive cat attacks.
	You know, if my partner could have got his gun out and shot it, yeah, I mean, yeah, we would have had a chance of survival.
	But the injuries would have been horrific because I've seen what just a single swipe can do to a person from a cat.
	I mean, their claws are so sharp And their bite.
	It's just the way they kill is, I don't guess.
	I didn't know the way they actually killed, and it's quite gruesome.
	And I won't describe it.
	I won't go into it.
	So, do they basically disassemble whatever they're aiming at?
	Yes, they go for a headbite, and then they violently jerk, and they try to snap the prey's neck and try to break its neck.
	And then they wrap all four of its legs around, and they just start raking at you with their claws and tearing you apart.
	So when you see someone who's been killed by a cat, it's very gruesome.
	Was it something that happened regularly?
	I wouldn't say regularly, but it did happen several times.
	And it was mostly people who got separated from a group.
	They got lost, and they started panicking.
	And as you said, they sensed fear.
	Yep, set off the fear, started running, and they were a pretty easy mark for a cat.
	So I think what we've established here pretty comprehensively, pretty conclusively, is that there are plenty of things, animal and human, that can get you.
	There's plenty in the terrain that can scare you.
	How did you come to assemble...
	They're stories that perhaps colleagues have told you.
	But how did the paranormality arise?
	Did it come to you or did you go to it?
	You know, it came to me and it started pretty early in the career.
	You know, Otai Mountain is a very strange place.
	The whole entire border itself is a very strange place.
	And it's not related, evidently, to the immigration problem.
	It's something that has just always been there probably for centuries.
	And when you say strange, is it a feeling, an atmosphere?
	Can you put your finger on it?
	It is a feeling that you're not alone.
	It's a feeling that there is something else going on here.
	There's something else to this place.
	And it's a very evil feeling.
	There were times when I would actually feel safer and be glad when I confronted a group and I caught a group of people and I took them in as prisoners.
	I would feel safer because that eerie feeling of whatever I was feeling before I confronted them went away.
	And it wasn't coming from a confrontation.
	It was coming from the place.
	Did you get a sense that that area was cursed?
	Because, of course, like all of North America, you know, the people like you and me were not the first in that land.
	There were Native Americans there.
	It was their land.
	Did you feel that that land was in some way, I don't want to use the word, but cursed?
	Yes.
	And actually, the local Indian tribe there, I won't say Native American because they actually at the time, they were, that area was part of Mexico in Spain, so they were, there were Indian tribes that lived there.
	The Otai Mountain and Takati Mountain were both part of Bureau of Land Management, which meant that people couldn't live up there.
	And we just had one road that went over it.
	It was kind of like a national forest where they were preserving it, keeping people off.
	Nothing could be built up on it.
	And probably the main reason for that was that the local Indian tribes said that those two mountain ranges were sacred and that it was forbidden for any human being to go up there because there were these evil spirits that lived in these mountain ranges.
	And if human beings went up there, they were going to get these spirits all riled up and that would be a very bad thing.
	There was even a little settlement, there were actually a couple of settlements over several hundred years that tried to get established in these mountains, in Otai Mountain.
	And at one point, one of the Indian tribes went in there and wiped the whole settlement out back when Spain had it, about 1830-something.
	And they killed everyone there that lived in that settlement to get them out of there.
	So the vibes just from that incident alone would not be the best.
	But, you know, if you get a warning like that from people of wisdom, which, you know, they undoubtedly are and were, it would be wise to heed that warning, I would have thought.
	Yes, and they did for the most part.
	And we stayed off of it.
	The Border Patrol itself didn't regularly patrol that area until the traffickers and the smugglers started to go up and cross the mountain.
	And even then, we tried to work them as they were coming down off the mountain.
	But then they were committing so many crimes, even people they were leading over, that it was almost, it was very much a humanitarian thing to go up the mountain and start working up there.
	And did anybody encounter anybody in the service, yourself perhaps, encounter anything that may have been generated by the spirits or the inhabitants in another dimension that may be there?
	Yes.
	Now, it wasn't something that happened all the time, but numerous agents over time encountered various types of ghost.
	Well, I think they were spirits.
	I don't think they were the ghost of people.
	I think it was evil spirits imitating people that had died up there.
	And so, you know, the people in the service, you say, they're a special kind of people.
	You've got to have intestinal fortitude.
	You've got to be tough.
	So for people who you've known, and maybe yourself too, to be frightened and to encounter those things, it takes quite a lot to make that happen, I would have thought.
	Well, it does.
	And actually, most of these ghost encounters, we'll just call them, most of these ghost encounters just wound up being kind of funny to us.
	You know, I know the only time in my life I ever saw a full-body apparition was up on top of Otai Mountain.
	I encountered it basically alone.
	I was working with someone else that night, but they were taking a little catnap.
	So I got out to work some traffic that I thought was a person coming up a trail.
	And as we got close, this person's face began to glow and smile at me, this real ghoulish type of smile, and then just turned into a mist and just went right on by me like I wasn't even there.
	It's like it was laughing at me as it went by.
	It was pulled a prank on me.
	And you're sure it wasn't some kind of mirage is not the right word, but you said that your partner was tired and taking a nap.
	Maybe you were tired too?
	Well, my partner was tired and he was taking a little nap because we had actually just come up that trail.
	We had worked a sensor that was sitting on that trail because this sensor kept going off night after night.
	Fog would come across the mountain at night and as the fog crossed that sensor, the sensor would go off.
	So we didn't know if somehow the fog was setting the sensor off or if people were just walking in the fog for cover.
	So we were going down there and working it and we weren't ever catching anything.
	So we had been down there and then we hiked back up and he was a little tired.
	He wanted to get a little catnap.
	It was a midnight shift.
	So I said, yeah, go ahead.
	I'm wide awake.
	I'm good.
	And I was wide awake when this happened and I saw this person walking up the trail.
	And at first, I actually thought it was another one of our agents until I realized that only me and my partner were assigned that area.
	So I knew it couldn't be an agent.
	But I got out.
	I wasn't really worried about it for whatever reason.
	I just didn't see this as a dangerous situation.
	It got closer and closer, and it looked like a very live, real person to me.
	And I was about to speak to it, and I got this ghoulish smile and started to glow and went by me.
	So I did what we always do.
	Every time something weird happens in the Border Patrol, we start looking for a foot sign because that's one of the things we're famous for is tracking people by their footprints.
	And that's what I did.
	I get out the flashlight and I'm looking all over for footprints and I see my footprints and my partner's footprints, but there's no footprints for anybody else.
	Okay.
	And once you realized that there were no footprints and anything human would probably have left them unless they were floating off the ground and that's a mean trick to pull, so not human.
	How did you feel?
	You know, it was kind of funny.
	It was.
	It was just kind of funny at first because I realized that this thing had pranked me and was messing with me and really kind of making fun of me.
	It laughed at me as it was going by.
	But then I guess after that feeling wore off, then, you know, the fear, a little bit of fear started to settle in because I thought, wow, that was just not right.
	You know, I don't want that to start happening to me on a regular basis.
	And is that what made you want to start compiling not only your own story, but other people's stories?
	What made me...
	When I got to my station, I had an incident while I was still on the training unit.
	And this actually turned out, I found out later, to be what most people would say was a Bigfoot encounter or a Sasquatch encounter.
	And I was on the training unit with three other trainees and a training officer.
	It was working a midnight shift, and we were at the base of the mountain and on the south edge of Otai Lake, another remote area.
	At that time, it was very remote.
	And fog had settled in, and we were trying to, we were hiking around.
	We were trying to find a trail to work some traffic that was coming down off the mountain.
	And we were walking along parallel with this little creek that fed into the lake, and we heard this big, huge splash, like something fell down out of the sky and just splashed right into the water.
	Just one splash, though.
	There was no follow-up movement with it or anything like that.
	So we started heading that way to find out what had happened.
	And as we started to get closer, I don't know what the others were feeling, but I started to feel like these certain emotions were being projected onto me.
	And it was hopelessness and doom.
	It was like whatever was in the water was a totally hopeless being.
	And I don't know.
	I just never had a feeling like that before.
	And it's kind of hard to describe.
	So whatever it was was communicating somehow with you, was communicating its emotions to you.
	It was, yes, it was projecting emotion onto us, like to warn us away and keep us away from it.
	But with, you know, our job, that don't work.
	We keep pressing forward no matter what.
	So we did.
	We kept pressing forward and the emotions got more intense.
	Excuse me.
	So as we got up to the water itself, now this little river, they call it, was actually not much more than a creek and it was probably only a foot, foot and a half deep and maybe 10 or 15 feet wide.
	So we got up there and we could see all the way across it quite easily and we could see there was nothing visible to the naked eye.
	We did notice that there were about four or five coyotes hanging out on the creek and they were real antsy and they were prancing up and down the side of this creek bank and looking into the water exactly where we heard that splash.
	So they knew something was going on.
	They knew something was going on.
	Now, I don't know how much your listeners know about coyotes, but when someone comes into a coyote's area, they start yapping and barking and they raise all kind of fuss.
	But these were quiet.
	They were afraid to make noise.
	They were scared.
	You could see it on them.
	They were scared and they were quiet.
	And they were dry.
	None of them had been in the water.
	So we knew that these coyotes had not made that splash.
	And not only that, But coyotes are very skittish.
	You try to walk up to a coyote in the wild and it will take off unless it's going to attack you.
	So that led to the second very unusual situation in that we walked right up next to these coyotes and we didn't even give it a thought.
	And they let us walk up next to them and they didn't run.
	And we're all standing there next to these coyotes and we're all looking into the water because everyone is just mesmerized with something's going on here, but we don't know what it is.
	And eventually the coyotes just tucked their tails and they ran off and they got out of there.
	We looked around a little bit more.
	We looked for footprints all up and down the side of the creek bank and there was nothing there.
	Now this little creek ran back to the east and to our east a supervisor, a Border Patrol supervisor had set up a night vision scope and he was probably, I'm not sure how far away he was from us, but maybe like three quarters of a mile.
	And we could tell whatever was in the water was going to walk eventually right out in front of that scope and he would be able to see it.
	Now the scope this man was running that night was a thermal scope so it picked up off of heat.
	So as long as it's producing heat it's going to be visible on the scope whether it's visible to the naked eye or not and that's what we noticed was we could not see anything but we could hear it and it didn't make any sense that we would not be able to see what was in that water.
	So eventually we gave up.
	We went on about our patrol because we knew this scope operator would catch sight of it in a little bit and there were other agents over there by Helm that could work whatever this was.
	So that's what we did.
	We continued our patrol, left the area and after about 15 or 20 minutes we started to hear this supervisor running the scope say, hey I've got a group coming down off the mountain, need a couple guys to get over here and work it.
	So a couple of agents show up and they get out, they're hiking around, they're trying to get set up and then suddenly this supervisor tells them to leave the area that there is some very large predator that is stalking them.
	Now this night was actually, I don't know if you ever walked around in the fog at night very much, but you can't see very far, but you can see very well for a short distance because it magnifies the moonlight that's out.
	So you could see very well this night, but only for a short distance.
	And supposedly this predator was following these two agents just right behind them, and they couldn't see it.
	They had no idea of its presence.
	But they were ordered out of the area and they did as they were told.
	And the supervisor said his excuse for getting them out of there, he said, well, this was some kind of real super large mountain lion or something.
	And that was kind of the talk of the town, of the station for the next couple of days.
	How did the supervisor know there was something there?
	Well, he picked it up on the heat signature.
	So what happened was a few months went by, and this supervisor took a transfer to another station in another state.
	And as he was leaving, then he told a few guys what he actually saw on the scope that night.
	And he said it was not a cat.
	He said it was some kind of bipedal creature that had come up out of the Otai River.
	Same body of water that we encountered in.
	And this creature come up and it walked like a man.
	And it started stalking the two agents, but he towered over the two agents.
	It said the agents looked like little dwarfs next to this thing.
	Said he'd never seen a heat signature in his life so large.
	And that's why he couldn't believe that these two agents couldn't see this creature.
	And they had no idea what was there.
	So that indicates and speaks to the idea that a lot of people who study Sasquatch, Bigfoot, all of these things suggest that they have some kind of superhuman, well, superhuman's the wrong word.
	They have some kind of superability to almost shapeshift or disappear.
	You know, they can be seen by some people and not seen by others.
	That's why it's very hard to track down signs of them, for example.
	You know, that they are much more than just a flesh and blood creature.
	Right.
	And then that's what I believe.
	This incident totally changed what I think about Sasquatch.
	I do not think it's any kind of a primate.
	I think it's got the ability to cloak itself.
	It is probably interdimensional.
	And now we're talking about we're not looking for an animal.
	And that explains why we can't catch it.
	Because there are other minor incidents.
	And I can pretty much tell you, if Sasquatch was just a big ape or monkey, we would have caught him.
	Because we had hundreds of agents scouring those mountains every day, every night, every inch of it.
	And we ran multiple night vision scopes every night.
	And if this thing was any kind of a flesh and blood creature, we would have caught it.
	But we never did.
	And I don't think we ever will until this mystery of what it really is is solved.
	You said it came up out of the water.
	Did that indicate that it had been in the water, that it had been somehow able to exist in the water?
	Well, I think what he meant by had come up from the water, I think he meant it was just walking through the river and that's when he first noticed it.
	He noticed it in the water, which, and that is kind of weird in and of itself, is that he didn't notice it coming down the water.
	He just noticed it suddenly leaving the water.
	And so, you know, I don't know exactly what I think about that, but I have heard other people talk about them coming up from being submerged in the water and just appearing out of the water.
	I think that could be possible because when we encountered it entering into the water, it did not sound like somebody jumping into the water.
	It sounded like something had fallen from the sky, A very large object.
	So, I mean, it's totally possible that it was put into the water at a right angle and came out the same way.
	You know, we're talking about something that we can't catch, and evidently, we know very little about it.
	We don't understand.
	But, you know, some of the reports link them with lights in the sky.
	They certainly link them with weird howling and noises.
	Now, that we didn't notice.
	We didn't notice any kind of smell or any kind of howling.
	Now, as far as the light in the sky, we wouldn't have been able to tell because we were covered by fog in our location.
	Right.
	Boy, and I'm guessing that that was a rare thing, or do you think that other people encountered that or something like it and they just didn't tell?
	You know, I don't know how rare that was, but I, and it's going to be hard to tell.
	I do have a couple of other incidents in the book where people saw something very, very briefly, and usually it was at dusk or daylight because the scope wasn't involved.
	But I will say one thing.
	There are certain things in law enforcement that's absolutely taboo people won't even talk about with their friends, hardly.
	And ghost is something that they will talk about.
	That's more acceptable.
	They will talk about ghost.
	And next is they won't talk much about UFOs.
	A little bit, but not much.
	But Bigfoot is probably the biggest taboo of all.
	They almost will never, you never hear anyone bringing Bigfoot up.
	Double whammy, they are elusive, and people don't like to talk about them.
	That makes a difference.
	They don't like to talk.
	Did you come across UFOs?
	I did not, and I never really heard any UFO stories.
	Now, right before I retired, I did catch wind of one of the control centers catching something on camera.
	And it's kind of, you know, it's one of them deals where everyone's got these really, really good cameras anymore.
	And our own Navy has come out, you know, and talked about different things as far as UFOs.
	They're starting to talk a little bit more about those kind of things.
	And I think they're going to have to because the cameras have gotten so good that we're doing surveillance with, whether they're military, law enforcement, and whatever.
	These cameras are so good, they can get such definition on these craft now that there's just no denying it.
	So do you think that some of the border agency cameras might have been capturing things of this kind and we're simply not getting to hear about it?
	Or is that too big a stretch?
	No, I think that could be possible.
	Yeah.
	But these cameras are going to be, you know, it's going to be sensitive information for the most part.
	So I don't think you're going to hear much about it.
	Did you ever get told, or anybody you knew get told in the service I mean, not to talk about some of the things you encountered?
	No, I never did.
	But when I was doing a live radio show soon after I wrote the book, there was a gentleman that called in, and he had been in charge of one of the stations there in California.
	And they had actually worked my area in previous years.
	Now, he was retired, and he was a little bit older than me.
	And he had a UFO story, a very good UFO story.
	And he said he was going to speak with a local news station about it.
	And he got called in.
	And the chief told him that you are not going to go down there and speak about that.
	So he was hushed up.
	I think for the most part, they don't have to tell people to be quiet because nobody wants this stigma on them.
	You don't want to be known as the guy who walks around and sees ghosts, he sees Bigfoot, because you are not going to get promoted.
	You just killed your career when you started that.
	Well, you know, nothing changes.
	It's decades ago, but I've said on this show many times before, my dad was a police officer, and it was exactly the same, but I know that he had ghostly encounters because he used to tell us about them around the fireside when I was a kid.
	So these things happen if you're in any kind of service, I think.
	One of the stories you tell, and maybe you can put some, well, there is no flesh to put on the bones, but you can put some detail on the bones of this story, was the story of the ghost of a girl that appeared in the middle of nowhere and a girl without a face, I believe.
	That is my personal favorite story, and that is the only ghost story, ghost sighting or encounter that ever scared the agents.
	We had multiple other encounters of various types, and the agents laughed them off.
	They thought it was funny.
	It was kind of cool.
	If you saw a ghost, it was cool.
	It was like, okay, I got initiated.
	I saw a ghost.
	But with the case of this little girl, it was very disturbing to them.
	It was not something that they got over quickly.
	This little girl was about three years old.
	She was always seen wearing white.
	Most people thought it was a nightgown.
	Others thought maybe it was some kind of a dress.
	But she was hanging out in this valley that separated the Otai Mountains and the Takati Mountains and called Marone Valley.
	And that's usually where she was encountered and seen.
	Well, there's probably, I think I've got at least four stories in there about her.
	Is there one particular that you would like to hear?
	Well, what's the best one?
	Go overall one.
	What's the best one?
	Or can you give me a roundup, as you say, of all of them?
	Well, the best one to me that for a long time, every time I even relived it and thought about it, I would get goosebumps.
	For me, the best one was I had been working in Otai Valley with my partner one day, and we had rode separately in separate vehicles, as usual.
	And it was a late day shift.
	And there was a couple of gates that set on this Marone Valley, I should say.
	Marone Valley had a road that went down between the two mountain ranges and is very narrow between the two ranges.
	There's a couple of gates there to keep people out of.
	Well, it was always said that these gates were haunted, Especially the first one.
	So we were working our shift.
	The shift ended.
	It's getting dusk.
	My partner leaves out before I do.
	And as I'm leaving out about five, ten minutes behind him, I encountered an agent from another station who shared part of that valley duty-wise with us.
	And he was coming down to begin his shift.
	Now, he drove by me.
	I waved to him.
	We didn't stop and talk or anything, but I just waved to him as he went by.
	When I got up to the gate in Roan Valley, my partner was sitting on the side of the road.
	And I thought, well, that's kind of weird.
	Why is he not going back to the station?
	And he's sitting on the side of the road.
	And I pulled up next to him, rolled the window down, and asked him, you know, what's up?
	And he said, I got to tell you something.
	He said, did you see that agent that just went down south?
	And I said, yes, I did.
	And we were sitting right at the gate with a little creek next to it where we were talking.
	And Sal was my partner's name.
	And Sal said, when I got up here, that guy was all shooken up.
	He said, he told me when he got out to open this gate and he walked up to open the gate, he looked over in the ditch, and there was this little girl, about three years old, floating face down in the water.
	She had a white dress on.
	And he came back to, he said, he went over back to his vehicle, and he's half in his vehicle and half out of his vehicle, kind of leaned in, and he's grabbing the radio microphone, and he's calling for help to report this apparent drowning of this little girl.
	And he looks back over at the creek, and the little girl isn't there anymore.
	So then he looks down next to him, and the little girl is standing next to him and staring him right in the eyes.
	That's straight Stephen King, isn't it?
	That is.
	And what was she like?
	Because I think they all describe this girl as being without a face.
	Well, now, I only heard one story of her being without a face.
	The incident in which she was without a face, actually, an agent was so shook up over this, he just called it quits.
	But he was assigned to, there was an agent assigned to run one of the night vision scopes on a midnight shift.
	And he had come down into Marone Valley with the scope truck.
	And he got out to open that gate, and he was by himself.
	It's probably about 1.30 in the morning, best I remember.
	And he walked up to that gate to open it, and he encountered this little girl, and she was walking right at him.
	And he said that she did not have a face, that her face was missing.
	And she kept coming at him.
	And he was terrified, he was scared out of his wits.
	And he ran back to his truck, and he was in such a hurry to get out of there, he wrecked the truck, did some damage to it.
	And then three days later, he just turned in his resignation.
	And his reason for quitting was he said, I'm just not going to risk seeing that little girl again.
	That was why he was quitting.
	Well, I have some sympathy with the man.
	I'm not sure what I'd have felt.
	And those who reported that the girl had a face, I don't know what is more scary, looking at something that is presumably not of this world that has a face and is looking at you, or something that just does not have a face.
	I think they're probably both equally terrifying.
	The people who told stories about her, except the one where she didn't have a face, usually they said she just stared at them.
	She stared them right in the eyes.
	A friend of mine was sitting one night, and he had a trainee with him, and he was sitting just off of Maroon Valley on a place, intersection.
	There was an intersection, and people can actually find these places on Google, Google Maps, if they want to look them up.
	There was an intersection between Otai Mountain Road and Chicken Ranch Road, and Mine Canyon ended, came up and ended at that intersection.
	At that intersection, there was a decent sized tree.
	I wouldn't say it was a large tree.
	It was a good sized tree by California standards.
	And it sat just off of that intersection.
	And this friend of mine was sitting there one night with a trainee, and they said it was probably about three in the morning, something like that.
	And they just got this weird feeling swept over them, and they started looking around because they could tell something was up.
	And they were drawn to that tree.
	And there's that little girl standing under that tree.
	Now, we're talking about a very, very remote area where nobody lived, at least at this time, for miles around.
	So there was no way this little girl was lost from, you know, a group of people or someone who lived by.
	And they said she had a real slight glow to her, and she was just standing under that tree, and she was just staring at them.
	And they just kind of froze.
	They didn't know what to do.
	They could tell that it was a ghost.
	And after a few seconds, she just started to drift away.
	But they were very, I'm trying to think of the word for it.
	It was a very disturbing incident for them.
	It wasn't something they forgot.
	No, you wouldn't forget it.
	And, you know, historically, was there anything in the history of that area that might have suggested that a little girl would be there?
	A kidnapping, murder, something like that?
	I did try to look because after numerous sightings of this little girl, I thought, well, you know, obviously, whether it's actually the little girl's ghost or it's a spirit imitating this little girl, obviously this little girl was alive at some point and something very bad must have happened to her.
	And I did.
	I tried to find out what happened.
	The only couple of things I came up with was that there had been some silver mining in that area in the early 1900s, late 1800s.
	But I didn't come up with any stories of what happened to any of the people who worked there.
	But it makes you, if people Encountered her four times, then probably they're still encountering her.
	Oh, I think so, yes.
	I've heard of recent encounters with her.
	Now, I did come across, and I mentioned this earlier, about a settlement, a Spanish settlement being in that area back in the early 1800s.
	And the local Indian tribe attacked that settlement because they didn't want them in there and pretty much killed everyone in the settlement.
	There was a story that I did find about a little girl that was about two or three years old, and her sisters were holding her.
	Her teenage sisters was holding the little girl during the raid and begging them not to kill the child.
	I don't know if they did or not.
	The mother was killed.
	All the male family members were killed.
	I don't know what happened to the little girl, but the two teenage sisters were taken off into captivity and never seen or heard from again.
	So that is the kind of story that could leave an imprint.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So I'm thinking it could be somewhat related to that.
	That's the only thing I ever found to explain that little girl.
	I heard an interview with you.
	I listened to a number of interviews and read a few things about you before we did this.
	One of them, you referenced a phantom phone call, I think.
	Are you aware of that?
	Was it a phantom 911 call, something like that?
	No, I'm not.
	Maybe I got that wrong.
	Okay, well, there is this.
	I did have some on my radio.
	Uh-huh.
	When a classmate of mine, his name was Luis Santiago, we were on the training unit, and he got killed while we were on the training unit.
	We were working a midnight shift, and we were working the back area of Otai Lakes, and there's the dam at the south end of the lake, and then there were cliffs next to the dam, and there was a trail that come up between the cliffs and the dam.
	He and I were scheduled to be partners that night, but I come down with the flu, so I'd called in sick.
	So he wound up working with a different training unit.
	And during the course, toward the beginning of their shift, he either fell off the cliff, off the back of the dam, or he was shoved off of it, and he was killed.
	And it was shortly after midnight.
	Now, I was home, sound asleep, because I had the flu, and my radio, my service radio, started this rhythmic type of beeping that I had never heard before.
	And I thought it was some kind of distress call.
	So I walked over to the radio, and it was turned off.
	It wasn't on.
	So I thought, well, yeah, I thought it must have a short or something in it.
	So I turned it on and off a couple more times, and the beeping stopped.
	Now, I didn't know anything about what had happened at this time.
	So I went back to bed.
	I got up the next morning and found out that Agent Santiago had been killed on duty right after midnight.
	And actually, when this happened, I looked at my clock and my clock said 12.02.
	It was two minutes after midnight.
	And that's what the newspaper article said, that they thought his time of death was just one or two minutes after midnight.
	I thought, wow, that was really strange.
	But I just kind of wrote it off as a coincidence, didn't give it any more thought after that.
	And I went ahead and went to work the next night and the next couple of nights, and nothing happened, nothing out of the ordinary.
	And then I believe it was Friday was the day of Agent Santiago's funeral.
	So we were given a day shift so we could attend the funeral.
	So I worked that day, attended the funeral.
	I come home that night.
	I was asleep.
	And I'm woken up again by this radio beeping.
	And this time I know exactly what it is.
	I know it's that service radio.
	And I walk over to it and I look at the clock and the clock says 12.02.
	And sure enough, the radio's off.
	And I tried to get it to stop beeping.
	It wouldn't stop beeping.
	And I had this, I just knew that there was something on the other end of that radio that wanted me to press that talk button.
	And I was going to hear what I would have been the voice of Agent Santiago.
	I knew that's what was going to happen.
	And I was just sitting there, you know, I had chills going up and down my spine and I did not answer that call.
	I just waited till it stopped.
	I actually wound up taking the battery off the radio to get it to stop because I was afraid that that was some kind of a spirit imitating Agent Santiago and I was going to let it in my house if I'd answered that call.
	And I was told by investigators, paranormal investigators later, that that was a wise decision.
	Said, if you would have hit that talk button on that mic, you would have let something into this house that you would have never gotten back out.
	Sounds to me like your knowledge of all of this, as we come to the end of this conversation, goes much beyond the kind of stories that police officers and others tell about, yeah, I saw a ghost and don't know what that was, and that's it.
	Your knowledge of this, where you talk about spirits imitating people who lived and died, your knowledge goes much beyond that.
	It seems to me that you seem to have been not initiated in, but you seem to have become aware of another dimension, a darker side, another side.
	Yes.
	You know, I'm a Christian myself.
	So when I hear about ghosts, I don't just automatically think that it's the ghost of a person because I think that people go on.
	And maybe they don't.
	Maybe they do hang around for a little bit until something's settled because that was something that come up with these ghost sightings of Agent Santiago was that he would tell people that he couldn't go because something wasn't settled.
	But I have a tendency myself to believe that it's very, very ancient spirits that have been roaming this earth for a very long time.
	And They're just messing with people.
	They like to scare people.
	They like to get inside of people and get in their houses and latch on to things and torment them if they can.
	And that's something I kind of had fought, you know, through the years.
	And as these things started to happen in the Border Patrol, I started to think about it a lot more and look for answers because it happened so many times.
	But yeah, you're right.
	I've kind of looked into it a little bit more than what the average person would that just sees one ghost, forgets about it, goes on with their life.
	You know, this is something that happened enough through my career.
	And it wasn't even that.
	It was just that you could just feel the evil on this place.
	This place, this mountain was evil.
	And you could feel it.
	I even denoted in the book at one point that the entire mountain range in about 1998, I think, or somewhere around that area, the entire range caught on fire and burned pretty much totally off.
	And it felt like the presence of evil was greatly lifted, like it had almost been purified somewhat.
	Now, it was still there, but it wasn't nearly like what it had been in the past.
	So your experience is almost biblical, but certainly elemental of that.
	You know, you are interacting with the sorts of things that people who live in a city, and I live on the fringes of London.
	You know, we don't come into contact with those sorts of things.
	It really brings you into connection with something else, it seems.
	Yes, you know, and that's, I'm glad you brought that up because another point I would like to make was all of the sightings that I'm aware of and that I have in my book, all of the sightings would be classified as an intelligent haunting.
	These were not imprints, you know, where, like that guy I encountered on the trail, he didn't come up that trail at that same time every night because I worked that trail for many years and I never had that encounter again.
	But all of these sightings were intelligent.
	They came up to people and they interacted with them and many times they even spoke to them.
	What sorts of things did they say?
	Actually, Agent Santiago, he came up and he would actually, after his death, his apparition was coming up and arresting people, stopping large groups of people.
	We're talking 30 and 40 people at a time.
	And he was taking them into custody.
	They knew he was a ghost because they could see through him.
	They could see him float.
	They even said one time he didn't have a head.
	He was carrying his head and the other was still speaking.
	And he was holding them in place until real agents, live agents, showed up.
	And when the live agents got there, right before they got there, he would vanish.
	And then the agents would take the group into custody.
	And these groups would be screaming and crying and wailing.
	And they were terrified.
	Well, you've heard of ghost riders, but here is the officer continuing to do his duty beyond the grave.
	Continuing to do it, yes.
	Now, agents usually did not encounter, I'm not sure any agent ever actually encountered Agent Santiago.
	Agents would encounter other people, and these people would come up sometimes and speak to the agent.
	Again, it's kind of a funny story, but it's scary at the same time.
	These guys I didn't know personally.
	It was told to me by someone I did know.
	It had actually happened before we were working in the area.
	It happened to two guys, two agents, a male and female actually from another station.
	But they had come down just outside of Marone Valley into a place called B Canyon one night, and they were working some traffic and they'd set up on the trail.
	And the way we usually set up on a trail is we separate and one guy goes south and then the other agent will go north a couple hundred feet.
	Sometimes we'll be closer, depending on the terrain.
	And that's how they had set up this night.
	One of them had got on the east side of the trail and the other was on the west side of the trail.
	They were pretty close.
	They were probably only about 30 feet away.
	And they're trying to work this traffic.
	Well, the traffic doesn't really show.
	It doesn't come walking down the trail like they're expecting.
	But suddenly, there's this, what they said, a young Mexican man standing between them in the darkness.
	And it's light enough they can see him.
	But he just appears in between them.
	There was no way he could have got down the trail and got past either one of them.
	But there he is between them.
	And he starts to talk to them.
	And he's speaking in Spanish.
	He said, officiales prende leos.
	And that means, officers, turn on your flashlights.
	So they both turned on their flashlights and shined it on this boy.
	And instantly, he disappears right before their eyes.
	Oh, boy.
	So what was their reaction to that?
	He asked.
	Well, I imagine it was kind of like what mine was.
	It had to be, at first, it had to be shock.
	And then they probably looked for footprints like everyone always did.
	Like you did.
	Didn't find any footprints.
	And then it probably had to be laughter because how did that happen?
	And then I imagine a little bit later, a little bit of fear probably settled in.
	You're out of the service now.
	You've retired from it.
	Is life boring?
	You know, it's a double-edged sword.
	It kind of is at times.
	It is.
	I miss the patrol.
	I miss doing those things.
	But as I denote in the book, about four months before I retired, the wife and I had a baby.
	Okay, so you've got plenty to do.
	I have a five-year-old, and he's in school right now, or I wouldn't be able to do this interview.
	Life goes on and the world turns.
	That's fantastic.
	Oh, my God.
	This boy is wound up like an eight-day clock.
	It is not boring.
	Are you going to let him join the service if he wants to?
	I hope he does.
	I kind of hope he does grow up and want to do some time either in the Border Patrol or the Marines.
	I had some family members and uncles that were in the Marines, so I have a soft spot for Marines.
	But I kind of hope he does.
	It's a wonderful experience to be part of something that's bigger than yourself.
	That's true.
	It's camaraderie and all of those things.
	Yes, the camaraderie.
	You know, it's very difficult.
	You know, at first I thought, man, I made a mistake.
	This is not for me.
	I made a big mistake.
	But you either get used to it or you quit.
	And I got used to it, and then I started to love it.
	And I would, you know, there's nothing I would do over differently other than maybe I would have done it at a younger age so I could do it longer.
	What do they say?
	What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?
	Yes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
	Well, boy, these have been incredible stories.
	I would love to speak with you again, maybe on my radio show next time, Rocky.
	People say, are they still sending you stories?
	In fact, if somebody's, you know that I have listeners to this around the world, if there's somebody who wants to send you a story, are you still accepting stories?
	I have a website and they can or they can look me up on Facebook.
	What's the website then for starting?
	The website is rockyelmore.com.
	Yes.
	And the book is called Out on Foot.
	The book is Out on Foot, Nightly Patrols, and Ghostly Tales of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
	I can't even begin to tell you how much I've loved this conversation and you tell the stories so well, but there's an awful lot to take in.
	And I think I'm going to play this back now and have a good old cup of coffee and a big think.
	Rocky Elmore, thank you so much.
	Well, thank you.
	I've enjoyed it.
	Yeah, me too.
	Massively.
	Thank you, Rocky.
	Thank you.
	Rocky Elmore, check out the book.
	And I promise you, I'm going to talk to that guy again.
	I was absolutely enthralled with that.
	And, you know, I hope you were too, because that was remarkable in so many ways.
	So many stories.
	And sometimes, you know, when people are telling you stories, you can almost, it's like watching a movie.
	You can predict which way it's going to go.
	Not with those stories.
	Rocky Elmore is the man's name.
	Your feedback on my show, this particular edition or any edition, always welcome.
	Please go to the website, theunexplained.tv and you can email me from there.
	More great guests in the pipeline as we trundle towards the end of 2019 and up to 2020.
	So until next we meet.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online and please, whatever you do, especially now, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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