James Lacatski Publishes Book with New List of Skinwalker Ranch Monster Sightings

​On Saturday, former Pentagon UFO-hunter James Lacatski published the third volume in the Skinwalkers at the Pentagon series, entitled New Insights: Inside the U.S. Government UFO Program. As with previous books in the series, this one is an amateur affair, from the awkwardly designed cover to the bizarre choice to open the book with a first line reading, “Welcome! Congratulations! and Thank You!” According to Lacatski, the book draws on official Defense Intelligence Agency documents related to the now-defunct AAWSAP investigation of Skinwalker Ranch that were subsequently cleared for publication. 

Steven Greenstreet on the New York Post took the hit for everyone and read the book, posting to X a series of excerpts of some of the more absurd claims about supernatural encounters AAWSAP researchers allegedly investigated while on the government dime. These include some wild ones, but not all occurred on the ranch. Some followed researchers to other places, including the homes of friends and relatives.

• There was a “little person” who had extra-long arms and ran about like an orangutan, leaping from roof to roof. Lacatski likens the arms to a gorilla, but I suppose any primate will do; the story in the book sounds like a bad riff on scenes from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” so I went with orangutan. These creatures, apparently dubbed “trolls” were sighted multiple times running about naked and so hairy observers could not identify their genitalia.
• These little person trolls are not to be confused with “Basket Lady,” a similar roof-jumping creature said to resemble an old woman wearing clothes of rags, which Lacataski says his source related to the Basket Lady of Ute mythology. I had to check on that one, and it seems that there is a figure called Basket Lady or Basket Ogress, a giant who carries off disobedient children and eats them. However, the character is from the mythology of tribes living in the Northwest, not the Southwest, and the confusion may have come from Ute-Navajo writer Calvin O’John retelling the story of Basket Lady in his 1971 short story of the same name.
• An invisible alien like the Predator from Predator (that was the official report’s comparison, not mine), complete with high speed and guttural roar, stalked the ranch. It earned the sobriquet “Glimmer Man.”
• They also saw an eight- or nine-foot-long worm-like monster that slithered like a snake.
• Oh, and they saw a pterodactyl flying around Skinwalker Ranch, just like the supposed pterosaur sightings that have long been a staple of southwestern tall-tale cryptid sightings since a rash of witnesses claimed to see pterosaurs flying across Texas in January and February of 1976.

Remarkably, none of these fever-dream monsters left any physical proof of their existence.