The Confessionals - RELOADED | 15: The Confessions of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent | Rocky Elmore

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

In Episode 15: The Confessions of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent we have Rocky Elmore, a former Border Patrol agent and accomplished author. Rocky takes us on a thrilling journey as he shares spine-tingling tales of the paranormal encounters he and his fellow agents experienced during their late-night border patrols.Become a member for AD FREE listening and EXTRA shows: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinCome Meet Tony:LIVE SHOW in Gatlinburg, TN!Tickets: https://bit.ly/3IC4IkxWatch Expedition Dogman: https://bit.ly/3CE6Kg0SPONSORSGET EMP Shield: empshield.com Coupon Code: "tony" for $50 off every item you purchase! Listen to this episode for more information! Link: bit.ly/3YaMD1NGET SIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsGET Hello Fresh: hellofresh.com/confessionals60 Promo Code: "confessionals60" for 60% off plus free shipping!!!Get Emergency Food Supplies: www.preparewiththeconfessionals.comCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletterSOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIDiscord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelAre you a military veteran struggling with thoughts of suicide?Contact Watchman Readiness Corps for REAL help. A veteran-run organization that is designed to help through hands-on survival training.Website: wrc.vetEmail: [e-mail]: [phone]Instagram: wrc_survivalFacebook: colbywrcvet

Merkel? I guess it's time to go back in time. Are you telling me you built a time machine? Out of a Delorean? Time is but a stubborn illusion. I have a lot of memories of the past. People are time traveling within themselves. Time travel is possible.

Your life. For the rest to the rest. You guys hear that? Hey, I'll reload it. Welcome to the show, everybody. I am your host, Tony Merkel, and I am really glad that you're here. And I'm really glad to be here. I hope everybody's having a great Saturday.

I got a great interview lined up for you tonight. I'm going to be interviewing Rocky Elmore. Rocky Elmore is the author of a book called Out on Foot. He's a retired Border Patrol agent that shares his paranormal experiences while he was on duty as a Border Patrol agent. So this is an interview that I've been wanting to do for a very long time since before I started this show. And I'm really excited to share the stories that Rocky has for us tonight. So without any further delay, let's get to tonight's episode with Rocky Elmore. Okay, so tonight we have a great special guest coming on.

Rocky Elmore. He has written a book called Out on Foot, Nightly Patrolls and Ghostly Tales of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Rocky, how are you? Good. How you doing? I'm doing really good, man. I'm really excited to have you on the show. I've been wanting to interview you since I started the whole podcast. And to have you on, I'm just, I'm ecstatic. And your book is great. I actually listened to it today again while I was driving my truck. And again, it just kind of like, there's certain points in it where I was just jaw dropped. I was like, wow, that's just amazing. Especially today when I was listening to it, because I got like a different tone when I was actually listening to it instead of reading the book. So it was fascinating.

But what was the favorite part of the book for you to write? You know, that's a pretty good question. I think my favorite stories for me were the Morone Valley stories in that little girl in white. Yeah. As far as my favorite part to write, it's hard to say, but I did enjoy some of the comical. parts I put in. Yeah, I absolutely enjoyed those too. I highly recommend people going and checking your book out.

You wrote it, what, 2015, I think it was? Yes. Okay. I finished it up in 2015. I think it took about a year altogether from the time I started it to the time it actually hit the market. It probably took me about four months to actually write it, and then by the time it was edited.

and different things like that. It took about a year, it seems like. Great. Yeah, it's phenomenal. And, I mean, it's 20 years of experience. And it's just, it's a great read. And I highly recommend people going to check it out. Rocky, let's get started with the personal encounter you had with, I guess, for lack of better words, a ghost out in the field.

Sure. We, I had been in probably about, I guess, about three years. And Otai Mountain had just recently burned off in a wildfire and it took off nearly the entire mountain range. It was like 25,000 acres that was lost to the fire up there. So the landscape looked very much like the moon. Giant boulders everywhere. Black soot covered the ground, covered the boulders. The fire was so intense that sometimes when we would be going down a trail or navigating a rock formation,

you jump from one rock to the next rock, and the rock might be as big as a car, and you would jump on it, and the entire shell, outer shell of that rock, would just break and give way, and you would go sliding right off the side of it, which could be a little bit dangerous in and of itself, but that was the kind of intense heat

that had swept over the mountain during that fire. And even though San Diego is kind of an arid area, it did get a lot of marine fog that came up and hung around on the mountain at very high. times of the year. And this was one of those times of the year. Myself and my partner was assigned Otai Mountain and was up around the Copper Canyon area. It was on a midnight shift and we had ridden separately. And so one of the sensors went off and we went over there to work it. It was probably about 1230 or 1. We got set up and this sensor had been going off almost every night,

around the same time, but also we had noticed that the fog had been coming up that canyon every night as well. And it seemed to correlate that as the fog come up the canyon, that sensor banged off. And guys were going to work it, and nobody was catching anything. And this was our time up there. So myself and my partner, we went down there to work it, and it was about probably a 40-minute hike down to the spot we wanted to try to jump the traffic at. So we got down there. We hung around for quite a long time and nothing ever happened. And we finally came to the conclusion that the others had earlier in the week that, you know,

it must have been a false hit because we just didn't get anything off of it. We hiked back up to our vehicles. And by that time, it was probably 3 or 3.30 in the morning. And my partner said, you know, he was pretty worn out. You don't really get, you don't get good sleep when you're working a midnight shift. shift. You just can't sleep through the day for eight hours, you know, like normal people can. So you're always tired on midnight shifts. And he asked if it'd be okay if he took just a little 15 or 20 minute nap, and I would watch out, you know, for both of us. And I'd wake him up if

anything happened, of course. So he did. He kicked back and he was kind of dozed off there for a second. And I noticed the fog was working its way up the canyon and on top of the mountain where we were. And then I seen this figure walking up out of the fog coming up out of the canyon on the same trail we had just worked. And it looked very much like a border patrol agent. And I was quite convinced it was a border patrol agent. So I wasn't very alarmed. I got out of the truck. I was going to just walk around there and talk to them. But then I got to realize, that my partner and I was the only two people assigned anywhere near that area. And I was thinking it was nearly impossible for another agent to have been down in that canyon

and us not know about it and him not have a vehicle somewhere around where we could see it. But still yet, I didn't worry about it too much. And he continued to walk closer toward me, quite nonchalant. And as he got a little bit closer, then I noticed that it no longer looked like a Border Patrol agent, anymore. It looked more like a pilot, like a military or a helicopter pilot of some type, wearing a jumpsuit, some kind of utility belt maybe. And then I began to wonder, maybe there had been a crash earlier in the day we hadn't heard of, and this guy was just walking up. And I still wasn't alarmed, didn't feel threatened in any way. And as he got

closer, almost close enough to speak, he started to smile at me. And it was very, the smile was very normal, but very briefly. And then almost immediately the smile extended out very ghoulishly, almost ear to ear, and his face began to glow. And I was kind of taken back. And then he started to dissolve, turned into a mist and just shot right on by me. Didn't go through me. went off to the side of me on my right side and uh you know i just kind of stood there

dumbfounded i didn't know what to think about that i didn't feel fear at the time i guess i had too much going through my mind trying to figure out uh you know what the deal was with that so every time something happens you know the first thing a board patrol agent does is he starts looking for footprints and that's what i did i turned on my light i started looking for footprints i found footprints for my partner and footprints for me and there were not any footprints for anybody else. And I followed the path where I'd seen the mist go to and there were no footprints anywhere along that trail either, except for myself and my partner. And that was my experience.

That's the only time I've ever seen a full body apparition. Like said, I didn't really feel threatened by it, but I felt like he was just messing with me. Like he's, you know, he smiled, gave me this ghoulish smile. And it's like, I got you. Yeah. So when you saw this coming towards you, did you hear footsteps or was it kind of like completely silent? No, it was completely silent. And I didn't really, that didn't register at the mine, at the time.

Actually, that mountain range is just complete silence up there all the time. There's almost no wildlife up there. A few mountain lions, some rattlesnakes, and that's about it. And I should have heard footsteps. But it just didn't register with me at the time that I was not hearing footsteps. Okay. Well, I mean, when you saw him coming towards you, was it the point where he kind of, his face started to glow when you realized this wasn't an actual person? Is that the point that you realized that you were looking at something else?

Yeah. And there was just a very brief, you know, just a nanosecond where his smile went from normal to extend. all out from ear to ear basically before the globe began. And of course, you know, when his grin went ear to ear, it kind of started to register a little bit. And then when his face started to glow, it really started to hit me. It was really confusing to tell you the truth because when you're in that environment and you're working, you're expecting to deal with people and that's what you're looking for.

and you try to make everything fit. So I'm trying to make it fit that this is still a real person somehow, and he pulled some kind of trick on me. I don't know what that trick is, but he pulled something on me. But of course, you know, when he turned into a mist and went by me, there was no other explanation, you know. Okay, yeah, because when you said about how his smile got wider, I wasn't sure if that was just like a natural wide

or if it was like unnatural. So what you're saying is that when his smile went from ear to ear, it was like unnatural. It was unnatural like the Joker in the Batman movie. Yes. Gotcha. Curled up on the end. It was ghoulish.

And then the glow started, you know, immediately after that. So did you talk to anybody about this or do you kind of keep it to yourself? No, I didn't. I actually, when I went back to the truck, I noticed that my partner was still dozed off. And within, you know, five minutes, he woke back up And he asked me, hey, did I miss anything? I said, nope, not a thing.

I never told him he doesn't know to this day unless he's heard it on one of these shows, and he's figured it out for himself. But I never talked to him about it. Now, he left the Border Patrol probably a year after that. So he probably, to this day, has no idea what happened while it was asleep. Wow. So in that kind of situation, what makes somebody not want to really talk about it? Was it like you were still trying to figure it out yourself?

Or was it something that almost like an unwritten code amongst the patrol officers where you really don't talk about those kind of things? Yeah, you just don't talk about it, especially with someone you don't know really well and you don't know how they're going to react. Now, I knew this guy fairly well. We'd work together for a while and I liked him. We got along well. But I didn't know if he would start telling everybody. And I didn't want anybody to know. because I didn't tell anybody for a very long time

until right before I left that station. And even then, it was just a couple of guys that I trusted real well. And I just didn't know if this guy would go back to the station and start telling people, you know, hey, Elmore saw a ghost up on the mountain, and then they'd all start laughing at me. Because at that time, I couldn't remember,

I can't remember if I had heard other ghost stories. Well, yes, actually, had because we had already went through the incident with the deceased agent and with agent Santiago. But outside of that, I hadn't heard anyone speak of ghost stories much. So I kind of thought, you know, I might be alone in that and I might just want to keep it to myself for a while. Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, in the, in the moment of that with the environment you work in, you've got to be able to protect your reputation. So I totally understand that. Yeah, because, I mean, that can stop you from getting promoted.

later, it can stop people from wanting to work with you. And, you know, if, if something like that got out of hand, they could actually send you down for a psychological evaluation because you're carrying a gun. Wow. Hey, this guy's, this guy's running around and he's, you know, he's seeing ghost all over the place. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I can understand that. So let's walk into the next thing here that I have on my list. You talk about in your book, now you have, a lot of different stories you share in your book from other people's encounters that you kind of put into the book. And it's all really fascinating. And I kind of cherry-picked today as to which ones I want to talk about. I wanted you to kind of share with the audience, the woman without a face

and then how that kind of correlates with the little girl dressed in white. Yes, there was a couple of different sightings of people in Morone Valley where agents had encountered them and they would be faceless. And the first time I had ever heard of a faceless apparition down there, I had heard it from my supervisor and he'd been told by another supervisor who was a friend of his. And he'd been down in Morone Valley one night working a sensor and he'd laid in on the trail, a lay inns when we just find a good place to to wait on the trail and we wait for the group to come up and, you know, we get them. And he'd went down there alone to work this sensor and he saw an individual come up and he didn't say if it was male or female. So I'm not sure of which it was in this instance. But he allowed the figure to pass as we often do because sometimes a group is coming up behind them. So he let the

individual pass and nothing happened. No group come up. So then he got out of on the trail behind the person and caught back up with them. And as he caught up with the person, the person turned around and there was no face. There was just black mask where the face should have been. That was the first time I had ever heard of a faceless apparition roaming in Rome Valley. Now, a couple of years later, we had a class of new trainees come in, and we had some new training officers, and this was their first class. and they were going to go down in Morone Valley and lay in all night long on a midnight shift.

And my supervisor pulled me aside and said, you know, I'm a little bit concerned about their plan to go into Morone Valley by themselves and operate all night on foot because there had been some bandit activity down there. And he told me, he said, I want you to go and sit north of the northern gate and just hang out there and don't let anybody know. you're there and just listen to the radio and don't intervene and don't help them unless it's an emergency and they call for help. But just hang out there. And that's what he did. So about 5 o'clock

in the morning shortly before the sun come up, one of the trainees said on the radio, he said there's a woman down here screaming that she's lost her child and she's looking for her

child. And she seems to be about a hundred yards or so away from us down to our south. And all the trainees were doubled up. So the training officer told the trainee, said, take your partner and go down there and make contact with that woman and see what's going on. So the trainee started to do that. A few, oh, I don't know if it was a whole minute or not, but a little bit of time went by.

And the trainee got back on the radio and said, we're almost up to her. She's still screaming for her child, and we'll let you know what's going on. And then within maybe three or four seconds, we heard the trainee yell rather excitedly, she doesn't

have a face. And then that was the end of the transmission. I think what happened was he had his thumb on the radio, Mike, and he didn't intend to scream that out on the radio. But when he's seen that woman without a face, he just clenched up,

and he keyed his radio mic and when he yelled out she didn't have the face everybody heard it it was broadcast so then the training officer said is everything okay down there and the trainee come back on the radio and said yeah I think so

so it was obvious that they had not encountered a life or a deceased person without a face because had they done that they would have went through the protocol and there would have been a firestorm of other calls made and, you know, they would have called for help. But with the radio going dead like that, it was obvious they were talking about an apparition

they had encountered. Now, I had heard about a woman down there in the past in Rhone Valley yelling and screaming for her child, but I guess no one had ever actually encountered her face-to-face before to describe her as being faceless. And that leads into the next story of a little girl about three years old that was always seen wearing a little white nightgown that roamed in Marone Valley by herself at night. I believe I had heard of the ghost girl before I heard before this incident what the lady without a face happened. And an agent had told me he was a fairly new agent. and I had, we were working a midnight shift again,

and I hooked up with his agent, and we're going to work some traffic off of a sensor over by Mine Canyon. And as it was getting ready to go in, he said, I was over here about three weeks ago, and I worked this same sensor on this trail. He said, I was by myself. He said, so-and-so was supposed to come over and help me, but he couldn't get here in time.

So I went down this trail to work this traffic. and I waited for a while and I saw this what I thought initially was a guy in a white t-shirt coming down the trail and I thought that was pretty silly that somebody was trying to get through

wearing a white t-shirt at night but I stayed behind his bush and he watched for a while until it got closer and then he realized that it was a child and was a little girl he said he realized then it was

a little girl about three years old looked like she was in her nightgown or something. He said, but she seemed to have a little bit of glow to her, and I thought it was maybe because of the moonlight reflecting off of her light. And he became very concerned for her safety because he noticed that she was completely alone. So he got out from his position, and he started running toward the little girl, and as he got up to her, she just disappeared right as he got there.

he said it really left him pretty much kind of depressed over it he said he was near tears because it was just a little baby and he you know I'm trying to think exactly

of what he told me but you know basically he was running to help the little girl and then she just vanished on him right before that and then he realized that at some point some little girl had lived in this area and something and horrible must have happened to her.

Yeah, that's depressing, actually. I can imagine how that would affect guys emotionally. Well, I heard quite a few ghost stories over the years while I was there, and then, of course, I had my own encounter. My encounter, to me, was actually kind of funny. It didn't bother me. It didn't ever make me think twice before I got out to work traffic again. But of all the ghost stories I heard, when agents told me about encountering this little girl in white. They were always very disturbed by it. And they didn't want to go work in that area again,

really. They didn't want to encounter that little girl again. Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, just the idea, I mean, you got a classic, the classic movies always has a little kid in a hallway staring at you that's a ghost, and it scares the heck out of you, you know, and then to have that happen in real life, and you, you know, if there's an emotional aspect to it, that I can imagine kind of manifesting you. And somebody told me, and I really do believe this, that when you see a child apparition, that it is probably a malevolent spirit, because children pass over. Myself, I'm a Christian, so I believe that everyone probably passes over. And when you see ghosts, it's probably a good chance that it's just a spirit mimicking that person.

and pretty much most of the people I've talked to agree that especially when you see a child ghost, that that's probably the case, that it's an evil spirit trying to take the form of the most innocent thing that it can, which would be a child, you know, two or three years old dressed in white. Because these guys that seen that little girl, they were scared, and one guy actually quit his job over his encounter with her. Wow. That's pretty serious to leave your career for that. he evidently you know he was not cut out to be a border patrol agent he's the only one i've ever

known that has quit his job over a paranormal well actually i do not know the man i do not know the person but he's the only one i've ever heard of that quit his job over a paranormal experience i mean i can imagine sometimes people they really do go through life believing that that stuff's not real and that people are just either crazy or they're lying. And so maybe he was one of those guys that just really believe that stuff's not real. When you're faced with that reality that, hey, this is actually real, maybe it's just too much for him to handle. Just too much, yeah. Well, he was a scope operator and he was assigned to go down to Morone Valley one night, and I believe again, it was a midnight shift. Now, a lot of people who had been around for a while, the agents

who had been around a while, talked about those Marone Valley Gates being haunted. and I believe they were when you got out to open those gates you got some really weird feelings there and it was very uncomfortable now this guy might not have known that when you're just the fact that he was assigned to operate the scope

that is something that normally they give to the new guy because it's not something everyone wants to do so it's an assignment you know that's not the best assignment sometimes. So I can imagine that this guy probably was a new guy. He got sent down to operate the scope, and you usually operated the scope by yourself. So nobody was with him. And he didn't know anything about, he hadn't heard any of the stories, probably about the little girl in white or the gates being haunted. And he pulled up to that first gate and got out to open it, and it was probably about

1.30 in the morning. And before he could get to that gate and open it, he was, was intercepted by that little girl in white. And this time she didn't have a face. The little girl was faceless. And she kept coming at him, and the agent was backpedaling and trying to get away from her. And from what I understand, she pursued him. And then he just broke into a run. He was scared out of his wits.

Got back in the scope truck and tried to get out of there as fast as he could, and he wrecked the truck. And then I was told by someone in management, who would have been in the position to take his resignation that three days later, that agent turned in his resignation and quit the border patrol. And that was his reason why. He did not want to encounter that little girl again. Wow. So when he tells them why he's quitting, you know, obviously I'm sure they're pretty ticked off

that he destroyed the truck. And when he gives that reason, does that give any validation as to what's going on there? Or just like, you know, the supervisors kind of just brush it off and like, well, this guy was just not cut out to be here and he's imagining things. Well, I guess it depends on, no, it probably gave it validation because I know that of the shift commanders I knew, and that's who would have taken his resignation at first probably. Now, at the time we called them FOS as a field operational superiors. supervisor. But basically, so people would understand it, it's basically a shift commander. He's the top guy on that shift.

Okay. Of the different ones I worked for at the time, most of them had had some kind of paranormal experience, and two of them told me that they themselves told me those gates were haunted, and they'd had something happen to them while they were there. the one that told me about him turning in his resignation had not had any experiences it was a third and separate shift commander that command uh FOS had not had an experience but was aware of other people who had and did know about that little growing white being seen in the area so this wasn't something that they hadn't heard before now they probably thought you know he was a bit of a whimp to quit his job over it. Because, I mean, honestly, when you get in the Border Patrol, you're going to work at night

alone a lot, and you're going to be scared a lot. You're going to have things happen, and it's going to scare you. And if you're going to quit every time something scares you, well, then obviously you are in the wrong job. So he probably was in the wrong job, but I think they probably believed his story. He wasn't in that much trouble, honestly. We wrecked vehicles all the time. The Border Patrol absolutely destroys vehicles.

And in the terrain we worked, the train was so rough that we hardly had any vehicles that was older than two years old that was still running. Really? We pounded some of those Ford Broncos so severely on that mountain that we literally broke them in half. I've seen Broncos break in half right at the door and, you know, the roof and the door. And the cab there just didn't have a huge, huge tear in it and break frames in half. The mountain was a really rough place, and the road was really bad, and the terrain was very bad. Much of this area was not even passable by horseback once you got off the road.

It had to be hyped. Wow, that's pretty incredible. I know I used to be a parking enforcement officer when I was in my early 20s. I did that for a year, and I actually got in a fight. with a guy and a couple other things happened. But I wasn't allowed to carry a gun. I wasn't allowed to carry pepper spray, nothing. And, you know, since I couldn't defend myself, I decided to drive truck. But I can't imagine being out there and, you know, in the middle of nowhere, being armed, but having these things happen. I mean, sure, it's going to, it's going to scare anybody.

Yeah. And, you know, a gun kind of gives you a false security to a point. And then when you realize that you're in the environment like you're talking about by yourself in a very remote area, all of a sudden that gun doesn't feel like it's nearly enough. Kind of like you said, you were dealing with these people and you were unarmed. You realize that, you know, I need a little bit more here. I don't have enough. Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I don't even think I told my supervisor about some of those things because it really wasn't anything he could do. I mean, I didn't know who they were and it's just one of those things that came with a job. Yeah, and that's kind of the deal.

Actually, I was shot at it on a couple of different occasions, but there's no report of it because I was told that, you know, you're mistaken you weren't shot at. You were just hearing things. Now, one time it actually blew out the back window of the vehicle I was in, and I just wrote it up that somehow the window just blew up. you know because they said well did you hear a gunshot well no i didn't because the explosion of the window probably covered it up uh did you find a bullet no didn't find a bullet but when they come out to repair the window uh the glass man come out to reinstall a new back window and he found uh the little shards of glass where the bullet had ricocheted off of it and exploded it and he told me he said this is where the bullet hit this is the bullet strike right there by that

time the incident was three days old and they said, yeah, I just forget it too late now. It's old news. Yeah, I mean, things, things happen and things don't get reported. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know what? Let's move on to the last ghost story I'd like to talk about. Now, this one really impacted me a lot when I heard this because there's a lot of emotion behind it and it was a companion of yours. Louis Santiago, could you tell the audience what happened? with him? Yes, he was my classmate. We had went through the Board of Patrol Academy together. 55 of us went in the academy and all 55 of us was sent to the Brownfield Station. That was the first time that they had ever sent an entire class to the same station. Now, him and I was on

the same training unit and we were just about through. We had did our five months at the academy and then we had five months of field training to do, and we were within about three days of completing our last five months of training and becoming real agents, provided we could pass what they call a 10-month test. We've been working this canyon really hard. It's a canyon attached to the back of the dam of Otai Lakes, and it's called Dam Canyon.

The Border Patrol names everything really simple, very very simple the canyon behind the dam is called Dam Canyon makes sense so next to down Canyon there's a set of cliffs

about 120 feet some of them's a little bit more than that but they're average about 120 feet deep or high very steep and obviously it's the whole area is just solid rock in between the cliff

and the dam there's a very narrow trail that leads from the top of the down to the bottom of the canyon. And you usually have to go over that hand over foot. It's not the kind of trail that you can just walk down it. So again, we were working a midnight shift. And we'd been working that area really hard. And I was scheduled to be Louis Santiago's partner that night.

Him and I was supposed to team up together and work that area. But I'd gotten overheated and come down with flu-like symptoms. So I had called in sick for that. that night and we had done a double shift because we had eight hours of classroom that day. So we worked all day and then we went home for about four hours sleep, four or five hours sleep, and then had to report back for duty that night to work all night. So I had already done the day shift and I just couldn't take anymore. I was sick.

So I called in sick. So Agent Santiago was assigned to work with a training officer. and three or four other trainees. So he was actually with more people at the time of this incident. So they got out to the dam and they encountered a group and the group ran back down the trail

or climbed back down the trail to the bottom of the canyon. And the training officer and the trainees were going after them. And Agent Santiago was the last one going down. But evidently he must have seen somebody up on the cliff

and he broke away from the group and he ran up to the top of the cliff. lift. And when he got there, the other agents heard him scream and looked over, and they saw his flashlight tumbling down the hill. And they knew what happened immediately. So they went to, they finished climbing down, and they went to the bottom of the cliff, and Agent Santiago had been killed instantly. They found his body there, and he was already dead, and there was nothing that can be done. This happened right at the beginning of their shift, about midnight, and at that time I was sleeping in my bed, and I heard of arithmetic beeping inside my room. It woke me up, and I got up, I started looking around for it, and I realized it was coming from my closet, and opened my closet door, and there was my walkie-talkie from work beeping.

and I thought I had just left it on so I checked it but it was off I turned it on and then back off and the beeping stop I looked over at the clock and the clock said 12-02 I didn't think anything else about it and I went back to bed the next morning I woke up

and talked to one of my classmates I found out that Agent Santiago had been killed and they estimated the time of death just one or two minutes after midnight night. Now, at the time, it was ruled an accident because they couldn't find any real proof that anyone was up there with him or that had been shoved over. So a few days went by, we had his funeral, and the night of his funeral, I came back home and went to bed, and again, I was evoken by that rhythmic beeping. And this time I knew exactly what it was. I got up, I went to my closet, and there was

my radio beeping. And I knew that it was going to be Agent Santiago or some spirit imitating him on that radio. And they were wanting me to press that talk button and make contact. And I didn't have the courage to do it. I didn't want to do it. I did not want to open that up in my house because I wasn't sure of what was going on. I looked over at the clock and the clock said 1202. It was like it did the first time that happened and pretty much the estimated time of his death. I tried to turn the radio on several times and back off and that did not stop the beeping. And finally I took the battery off of it and it stopped. Then that seemed to be kind of the end of it as far as the, you know, the paranormal activity concerning that. And a few months went by

and then we started to hear groups of aliens that we were catching were starting to tell us that they were stopped by a phantom border patrol agent and he was coming up to them and approaching the guide and telling them the guide they couldn't pass and identifying himself as Agent Louis Santiago

and would tell them about his death and how sad he was about his own death that something was left unfinished and he couldn't pass until it was finished. And then that group would just continue to stand there and wait for live agents to show up and take them into custody.

Now, every time the phantom, or every time the apparition of Agent Santiago would stop a group, life agents would always be very close by. But the phantom would leave the group right before the live agents got there. So I don't know if any Border Patrol agents ever saw his apparition or not, or if it was only seen by the groups of people crossing.

But it started happening on a very regular basis. Sometimes every night, it would happen every night. And these people never tried to run away from him, and they always just stood there and waited to be caught. Wow. So people would basically see him, take orders from him, and literally wait for you guys to show up to arrest them. Exactly. and he would he wasn't just saying a couple of words to them he was conversing with them he was explaining to them what happened and uh of course at first we thought this is some agent playing a trick you know just and and and it's very tasteless we didn't like it a bit we thought what kind of agent would be out there uh you know basically kind of making fun of of another agent's death pretended to be his ghost and taking people down

And that turned out not to be true because we looked into it. And one of the reasons we knew it wasn't true because the group themselves convinced us that, no, this is not a living agent. This is a ghost. We can see through him. He floats across the terrain. In one instance, he approached them. He was headless. He was holding his own head.

And he was still speaking and conversing with him, a disembodied voice. voice. Then we thought maybe the smugglers were just making this up to scare the groups, but if you know how smuggling works, it would be totally ludicrous to think that a guide would lead a group over into the U.S. and then scare them into giving up to the border patrol and allowing himself to be arrested. That's just ridiculous. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense at all. None. Not only that, but for the group doesn't necessarily belong to the guide. It belongs to the to that criminal organization. And if some guy was leading, you know,

their cargo over and letting them get caught, well, they'd kill him for it, you know. So that's not feasible either. That wasn't happening either. So we really come to the conclusion, and it was considered, you know, fact, by a lot of people, including some people in management, that the apparition of Agent Santiago was out there,

still doing his job. I caught a group that told us the very same story, the very same thing happened. And this continued on for about seven months. And oddly enough, he was roaming. He was roaming across the mountain. Now, usually when you hear of an apparition or a ghost, the ghost is confined to the area where they lost their life. But in this case, his apparition showed up 15 miles away over on the mountain, nowhere near where he had lost his life.

But it was on a route that would be taken over the mountain and through the valley and then up to Dam Canyon. And his ghost was being seen. It was moving as time went by closer and closer down that pathway toward Otai Lakes and Dam Canyon. So it started out being seen only in the mountain, and then it was seen toward the valley, and then for about the last month that his apparition was seen, it was only seen on the cliffs next to the dam, which kind of brings us to the end. For about the last month, groups were encountering a phantom agent on top of the cliffs at Dam Canyon. And the night before it ended, there was a couple of things.

of agents over there in that area, set up on some traffic, and a couple of guys come up that cliff, and they were walking down the pathway, and they walked right over to the bushes where the two agents were hiding and waiting for them, and they gave themselves up. And they told the agents, who said, we knew you were here waiting for us. And one of the agents, the agent that was in charge, was a female agent, very well respected. She wound up actually being in charge of her own station later and unfortunately later died of cancer herself a few years later but she asked them said how did you know we were over here waiting for you and the two guys said because when we got up to the top of the cliff we were stopped by an agent soaked in blood and he told us that you're

over here and that we had to come over and give ourselves up and that's exactly what they did Now, they actually, after this incident, it was reported, and they started looking for an agent that maybe was over messing around on that cliff because we'd been told not to work traffic on that cliff anymore. It was too dangerous because other aliens had fallen off of that cliff other than Agent Santiago. So there had been several deaths and injuries on that cliff already. So we were told not to work on that cliff. So they looked for someone that was over there messing around, and they could not come up with them. And the two guys that had given up said, no, he was not a living agent.

He was a dead agent. He was a phantom. He was soaked in blood, and he told us where to come give ourselves up to. And that was probably the most well-known sighting of Agent Santiago at that time. And pretty much the whole station was talking about it, you know, by day's end because it was just so bizarre. So the next shift come around, the next midnight shift come around. And shortly after midnight, an agent was sent over near a dam canyon to work a group that was coming up. And when he got to the area, he could hear screaming over by those cliffs.

So he went over to investigate it, and he said there was about nine people up on top of the cliff, and they were all screaming that six people had already went over the cliff. So they mounted a rescue effort. They went down. He called other agents in to help him. They went down, and they found that six people had went over the cliff. One was killed instantly, and that was the smuggler. The smuggler had been killed at the scene. The other five were still alive.

but they're very badly injured. So as they got back to the station to start processing the survivors and make a report of what had happened, well, the survivors started saying that they had been chased over the cliff by an agent firing his gun at them. Well, the first agent to respond to that scene was the only one that was there,

so he came under suspicion. They tried to accuse him of it. they called in the FBI and the FBI basically tried to pin it on him as well but the problem was was the people the surviving group people in the group said no it wasn't that guy he didn't chase this over it was somebody else and they went ahead and took the agent's gun and they did a paraffin test on his gun and also a test on his hand and they discovered that that agent had not fired away weapon and his weapon hadn't been fired. So they're really kind of at a dead end. And this was all

reported in the newspaper, local newspaper, up to that point, everything was reported into the newspaper. Now, what I was told by a senior agent who said he was there, and I've gotten information from this guy before, and it's always proven true, he said, what happened next? And I can't prove this, but he said, what happened next was one of the agents helping the FBI due the investigation, went out into the hallway and took down the pitcher of Agent Santiago and give it to the FBI agents and told them to go over and see if the surviving aliens could identify him. And they did not tell the FBI who Agent Santiago was or what had happened. And supposedly they did that.

And all the survivors immediately identified Agent Santiago and said, yes, that's him. He's the one who chased us off the cliff firing his gun at us. So obviously the FBI was ready to go out and make an arrest. And at that point, the Border Patrol agent assisting them said, well, you can't do that because that's Agent Santiago and he was killed on that cliff last year. And that was the end of the investigation. Nothing else was ever looked into after that. It was just all over right then. Now, the strange thing is,

that was also the last time anyone ever claimed to see the ghost of Agent Santiago. The hauntings were over that night. Never happened again. I served at Brownfield for another 11 years. Never again did I hear anyone talk of a ghost sighting of Agent Santiago or any group ever claimed to be stopped by him. again. So why do you think that is? Well, at the time, we didn't know. I mean, actually, it should have been pretty easy to figure out, really. But at the time, we didn't know. We just

noticed that it just stopped. And it stopped permanently, too. So a few years went by, well, 11 more years went by, and I got transferred over to Kingsville, Texas, and I was riding with a new guy. everyone in Texas had to write double. And I really didn't like it. I liked riding alone. It's what I was used to. But in Texas, you had to ride double. So I was assigned a new guy.

This guy was fresh out of the academy. And, you know, he was all excited to get to go out in the field and work and full of questions and everything. So we were driving down the road on a midnight shift. And he asked me if I had ever worked any other stations. I said, yes, I worked Brownfield for 13 years before I came over here. And he got all excited. He said, hey, I've got classmates that went out to Brownfield. He said, they told me about an agent who got killed out there.

He fell off a cliff. And they would see his ghost after that. And said, did you ever hear about that? I said, yes, I did hear about that. That was my classmate, Agent Santiago. And I told him the story, everything that had happened. happened and I said but his ghost isn't seen anymore it hasn't been reported for about 11 years and so at that time the guy said well you know what I think is probably the reason his ghost

isn't seen anymore is because when he chased that last group over the smuggler that was killed was the guy who pushed him off and justice had never been done because it had been ruled an accident but most of us all along believed that it was a murder all along. We believed Agent Santiago was pushed off that cliff and killed. And he said, you know, he avenged his own death. When he chased that group over, it killed the smuggler, and, you know, now he could move on. Well, it made perfect sense. It was the only thing I had heard in, you know, in the whole entire situation that actually made any sense.

So I'm at the mindset that that's probably indeed what, happened as incredible as that sounds. Yeah, actually, it sounds pretty logical to me as well. I know I heard that in the book, and it just, it was a perfect conclusion to me. And even if it wasn't the smuggler, just the act of a smuggler falling to its death just like happened to him, maybe just kind of made him feel more complete, you know? Yeah, I myself, if that last story is true that it was him that pushed the group over the side or chased him over the side, I really do believe that it was that smuggler. And one of the reasons why is there's really not that many smugglers that work a given area.

There'll be, you know, it's not like there's 30 different smugglers that work, say, those cliffs. there will be five or six. Now, at that time, we were busy, so there could have been, you know, 15 different smugglers. But the thing is, is smugglers worked the same area over and over and over. And what I kind of think was happening was Agent Santiago's apparition was working the trail that started at the border and worked his way through the mountains and ended up over at the dam. and he was stopping groups all along the way looking for that smuggler.

And that's why he always approached the smuggler and he would make them wait and he would talk to the smuggler. And I think he finally found the right smuggler. That makes sense. Because he had actually encountered quite a few groups up on top of that dam and he hadn't done nothing to them.

And there is one case that he's actually helping a group of aliens that got lost and didn't have a smuggler. It's the only time he ever helped anyone, but these guys had gotten separated from their group or their smuggler had abandoned them and they'd run out of water. And they were really pretty close to getting their ticket punched.

And a lot of people had died coming over that mountain when they ran out of water. You didn't have long. But he approached them, and he told them where to find water. And the group was caught the next day. day. This happened at night. The group was caught the next day and the group told the agents about it. They said, an agent come up to us last night during the night. He saved our lives. He told us where to find water. He pointed to the trail. He said, follow this trail. Go over this hill and you'll find

water. And then they said, but he didn't seem real. We could see through him. And then he walked away. Yeah, see, that's just, wow. I mean, when you paint, when you paint it out that way, it does seem that he found his guy. I think he did. I got to say, I think he did. He found his guy, and that was the end of it. Wow. If there's ever been anything more bizarre ever happened in the history of the Border Patrol,

I have not heard of it. I think probably this is the most bizarre thing that's ever happened in the patrol. Yeah. And, you know, that's what I love about your book, because you really paint a picture as to what it's really like being a U.S. Border Patrol agent, you know, the ins and outs, and what it's like having these people coming across the border and what it is for you to actually have to track them down and the process behind it. I mean, this book has amazing stories outside a paranormal that I just, I'm fascinated by.

You know, the whole, I know you touched on the Bigfoot topic in your book. And I was wondering, could you, you know, briefly touch on that at all? Yeah, that was an incident that, that was my very first paranormal incident in the Border Patrol. And I had, we had been on the field training unit about four months. And this actually happened again over around Othai Lake. And just, well, it was only about two to three weeks before Agent Santiago was killed that this happened. we were going out it was a midnight shift myself a training officer and two other trainees so there was four of us total and they they were setting a scope up out there and in those days this was about uh this was the spring in

1995. And all of our scopes were thermal type scopes. So they saw heat. Now most of these newer scopes, they magnify light. And they do a very good job. You see things very, very clearly. You can see people's facial features. But these older scopes had came off old army tanks and they magnified heat. Now, they were good scopes, but you're not going to see people's facial features and things like that. But you can plainly tell what things are. You could see a rabbit in total darkness two miles away and watch his ears wiggle. So you knew what you're looking at. Scope was set up out there around the lakes that night and very busy at the time.

And the mountains ran, the mountain range ran east and west and they would drop down off the top of the mountain and make their way down toward the lake and the road that run by it. So we were going out there, try to intercept that. and fog had rolled in in the area we were at. We had gotten out of the vehicles, and we were hiking around on the southeast side of the lake, and the fog come into our area, and our training officer got lost.

Now, we weren't really big time lost. We knew kind of where we were, but we couldn't find the trail we were trying to work, and we couldn't find the landmarks we were looking for. So instead of just wandering around, we decided we would just hike along and parallel the Otai River, or actually I think it was some other little creek that ran seasonally. We were paralleling over toward the lake. And as we were doing that, we heard this very, very large splash like something had fell from the sky and crashed into the water.

And it just made the one splash. There was no follow-up thrashing of water or anything like that. And we started heading over that way, and maybe a couple hundred feet before we got there and before we could see the actual creek, I noticed the training officer drew his weapon, which seemed pretty bizarre, because there was four of us together, and you feel pretty safe. you know, I hadn't seen really cause for anyone to draw a weapon, you know, the whole time we had been working up to that point. So that kind of put everyone on edge a little bit, thinking, why did he draw his firearm already? And as we got a little bit closer, I started getting this sense of doom kind of come over me. and I started getting these extremely negative feelings come over me like they were being projected onto me

by whatever we were about to see in the water. They weren't coming from me. And these feelings being projected onto me were of just utter hopelessness of whatever we were going to see in the water. And at that time, I was really expecting to see something horrible over there, and I didn't know what it was going to be. I just knew it was going to be.

horrible. So we finally got up to the water's edge and immediately we noticed there were four or five coyotes walking up and down the side of the creek and they were all focused right there in the middle of the water where we had heard that splash. And they were not paying any attention to us, which was bizarre in itself. And equally bizarre was that we walked right up in between them. Now normally we would never do that because I don't want to get it. bit by a wild coyote and have to get rabies shots. But everyone was so worried about what was in the water and so focused on that that we ignored each other as far as the humans and the coyotes.

And we were standing there side by side trying to figure out what was there. And I could hear something very, very quietly moving through there back to the east. Now, back to the east was also where a supervisor had set up that night vision scope, and he was going to overlook the Otai River and the area coming off the mountain. I also noticed that these coyotes were dry, so they had not been in the water, and they didn't make that splash. Well, a few more seconds went by, and the coyotes decided to get out of there, and they got out of there pretty quickly, and their tails were tucked,

and their ears were back, and they were looking back over their shoulder back toward the water as they were leaving. and we started looking for some kind of footprints along the sides of the creek and we couldn't find anything going in and nothing going out other than our own and for the coyotes. So, you know, we tried to follow it back to the east, but then the brush started to stack up and we just had to give up. We couldn't follow it any further. And at that point, we just kind of chalked it up to something weird.

Now, we just spoke no words at this time. There were no words at all spoken. And we cut back to the west. We gave up on it. We went on about our business. Now, later in the shift, one of the other trainees asked me privately. He said, what do you think that was in water? I said, I don't know, but I was getting very bad vibrations off of it.

And he said, yeah, me too. He said, all the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up. So I know of the four of us that was there, three of us knew something was up, and it wasn't people. It was something way out of the ordinary was going on. Now, I don't know what that fourth person knew. I never talked to him about it or what he felt. But maybe 20 minutes went by, and the scope operator called in other agents to work this route coming down off the mountain. Now this thing that we encountered was headed right back toward where he was set up.

And we knew in about 20 or 30 minutes that whatever it was in the water, if it continued that way, was going to walk right out in front of that scope. And then he would see what it was and the mystery would be solved. So the supervisor called these two guys in to work this traffic and they got out on foot and they got set up. And then suddenly he called him off of it. He told them to get back to your vehicles and get out of the area, you know, quickly. And the excuse he gave at the time was that some very large predator was stalking them. And then he said, well, you know, it's probably a mountain lion.

And that was kind of the talk, you know. The guys did what they were told. They left the area. And everyone was talking, oh, some big mountain lion was stalking these two guys, you know. So the next night, we came back in for work the next night, and the supervisors got back up to address muster before we went out, and he brought the subject back up. He said, last night I had to call a couple of agents off working traffic

because there was a very large predator following them. He said it could have been a mountain lion or something, but if it was, it was the largest one we've ever seen. Now, at this time, nobody knew about our... incident down at the water because since we hadn't seen anything we hadn't told anybody so this supervisor didn't know that we had also had some kind of incident in that area and that was the talk of the station for the next few days and then it kind of died away but I I remembered because I just didn't really buy the mountain lion story because for one thing coyotes when something

intrudes in their area, they go crazy yapping. No matter what it is, they go crazy. And they would yap like crazy if a mountain lion was in their area. And even when people pass through their area, they do the same thing. But these coyotes were too afraid to yap that night. There was not a peep out of them. They were that afraid. And also, I didn't know much about cats at the time, but I didn't think cats, especially mountain lions, I didn't think they were fond of the water. And I thought that very strange that a mountain line would be walking up the center of that river and even stranger that we wouldn't be able to see it. So I didn't really buy that story, but, you know, I was a new guy and I wasn't going to go up and ask that supervisor anything. That would have been a no-no at that time.

Anyway, a few months later goes by and he gets this supervisor gets a transfer. back east somewhere to another state and he goes to another agency. So he starts telling a few stories, which is kind of common. You know, you wait till you leave and then you tell some things. Now, I didn't hear this from him myself because I didn't know him well enough, but several other people did, and they told me, and I was told this by probably about three different agents at separate times, so I believe it. they said what the supervisor had seen that night on the scope was not a mountain line like he said

some kind of bipedal creature had come up out of the Otai river and started stocking the two agents that was working the traffic and he was right behind them he towered over both the agents he dwarfed them said it was the largest heat signature he had ever seen he said it was bigger than any bear could have been now we did not have bear in our area, ever. And the whole time I was there, there was never a bear incident, never bear sign, nothing.

But nonetheless, he said, this thing was walking bipedal, larger than a bear could have been, towering over the agents, and yet the agents are unaware of it. Now, I remember that night, and it was quite light out that night. There was a lot of light,

be it from the fog or a full moon. I don't know what it was, but I know we could see quite well without our flashlights. and yet we saw nothing. And these two agents, this creature, is following them around very, very close, and they don't see it either. But yet the scope operator does. He picks it up because it's putting off heat, and he's the only one who sees anything.

And that really, I started to look into Bigfoot-type phenomenon after that and trying to figure out, you know, at this point I had never heard anything other than Bigfoot was a lost primate or somehow he was half monkey and half man and that's all I had ever heard. I've never been a paranormal researcher. So, you know, I started checking things out and I started coming across other encounters where people were claiming that Bigfoot was an interdimensional type being and he was using portals to come in and out. And it started to make sense to me with my encounter that that splash in the water could have been him dropping through a portal or something. Because it certainly wasn't people going across there, and it wasn't those coyotes. But something made a big splash in the water, and we never saw what it was. And then that also explained why this creature could follow them around the other two agents, and they were totally oblivious to it. but yet it showed up on an infrared scope where it was producing heat. It was a live creature, evidently a flesh and blood creature, somehow with the ability to cloak itself.

You know, I don't know. That's another mystery about Bigfoot that hasn't been solved yet. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, even along those lines, I mean, people talk about how, you know, tracks just kind of seem to disappear. I mean, I've heard stories of people talking about how they're following these tracks, you know, in the snow, and it's just, it's gone. And they're like, where did it go, you know? And it's very curious.

There was a Border Patrol agent. Now, again, I did not know this gentleman. A friend of mine, I guess, knew him. He told me the story initially. And when I was checking things out online, of course, there wasn't a lot of stuff online back in, you know, 95 and 96. but I did find some stories that supposedly was from a Border Patrol agent in Campo that followed Bigfoot prints that he had found on duty, him and other agents, I guess. And he said the same thing, that these tracks just vanished without rhyme or reason, sometimes on a dirt road.

Now, that just can't happen. And if they were fake tracks, there would be other evidence there of well I don't want to go into it because I don't want to help someone fake tracks better that makes perfect sense so I won't say

you know what would happen or anything but let's just say there is no way now Campo was a station like Brownfield it did a lot of sign cutting and probably at that time it probably had better sign cutters and trackers than Brownfield

because it had always been a mountain-type station where Brownfield had only recently turned to being a full-time mountain station in recent years. So they had some guys out there that had been tracking for many, many years, and they were very, very good at it. Now, we can track a barefoot person that weighs 125 pounds and not lose their sign for miles. There is no way that a thousand-pound monkey is going to quit leaving sign that we can't find. anymore.

Yeah, absolutely. It just didn't happen. Now, I heard of, from this, from this agent's story online, of three of them, somewhere around the Lake Moreno area, and they called one of them

Littlefoot, because his prints were considerably smaller than the others, and they would talk about seeing the hair in between the toes of the creature. Now this is something at that time I don't think you would have ever seen on a fake track

but I know from experience that you can easily read the hair in between the toes and tracks. As light as hair is when an animal comes through that has hair between the toes you can see it if you're paying it if you pay attention. You'd be really surprised

what footprints and tracks can can tell you. So I, you know, I have come to the conclusion myself, and I know it's probably not the mainstream conclusion on this, but it's, you know, comes from my personal experience and from what I've heard other people say. I really do lean toward Bigfoot being some kind of interdimensional being, or at least having the ability to cloak itself. because this thing is showing up in places that there is no way a 10-foot-tall monkey can survive and not be found.

You hear reports of this thing showing up on the grounds of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Fort Edwards Air Force Base. The mountain that we worked, we had 500 agents there, and we ran night vision scopes every night, multiple scopes. Now, he was detected several times on these scopes and encountered several times. by agents, but again, can't catch them. We knew every inch of that mountain. If there was a cave he was living in, we would have found it. We would have found them there. But, you know, again, not there. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what to make of that kind of stuff. You know, I've been looking into the Bigfoot topic for quite a few years now, and I hear both sides of the stories. and I just

I think there might be a little bit of everything going on with Bigfoot. It's a very mysterious topic, and I don't know if we'll ever figure that out the whole way. Now, I do think when he's here and someone has an encounter, that it is flesh and blood, that it is a total flesh and blood creature. But I think that when the pressure gets turned up on him too much, that he's just got the ability to bail out.

I don't know how he's doing it. But, you know, he's been seen for thousands of years by millions of people, and there's still not a body. Right. He's got something going on for himself. He's got something going on. Yeah. I don't know if we'll ever know what it is.

Yeah. I mean, we haven't figured it out yet, so, I mean, the odds are against us for sure. Well, maybe if they change their tactics, you know, I have talked to some researchers who have asked me, well, you know, what could we do maybe different to help increase our chances? And the thing that comes to my mind immediately is don't rely on the scopes that magnify ambient light. go back to the older type scopes that are a thermal type scope so you pick up a heat signature you know even even if you believe that this is gigantipithecus you know go ahead and run a thermal scope with it you might be surprised that it might not be visible to your eyes or to the

or to the light magnifying scope but it's showing up on your thermal scope that you know that could be one thing you might be able to change. I don't know what else. Obviously, you know, it seems like this thing's got our number. Yeah, certainly. Well, do you have time for a couple more stories? Okay. Okay. I wanted just to kind of give you an opportunity to tell us some stories that maybe were not necessarily paranormal related. And one of the stories, I just am fascinated. by you actually wound up playing dead in order to catch a group of people. Could you tell us that story? Yeah.

That, I really enjoyed doing that. It probably wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do. But when I was going through the academy, our instructors told us. They said, look, the Border Patrol is just different from other law enforcement. He said, here we're teaching. you, you know, thanks for liability reasons and thanks for safety reasons. But when you get out in the field and start working for real, you're going to break all of these rules because you can't work if you don't.

This isn't normal law enforcement. So I put that to use one night. We had a group coming through Windmill Canyon, and I was down there with another partner. And normally we tried to separate out. We didn't stay together because our goal was to get one guy to cut the group off at the front of the group, and then the other guy would drop in behind the group after it passed him up. And we were going to do that. We had a group of about 15 or so that was coming through Windmill Canyon right down through the bottom of it.

And I was going to be the takedown agent, and I'd found a really great spot to hide and wait for them to come. But unfortunately, it was getting very close to shift change, and it was a full moon. So it was very easy to see anyone come down that trail. And when the guide got up to a certain point, he realized that. And he realized that if he went another 200 yards, that he would be totally exposed.

And, you know, we would see every move they made. The guide also knew it was getting very close to shift change. So he decided to just set his group down and wait. And he was going to wait. and kind of flush us out. He's just assuming that, hey, there's probably agents down here to work us, so we're going to wait them out. So we played that game for a little while.

He waited and we waited. It was getting pretty close to time to go in to the station. So my partner called me. He was south of the group. He said, these guys are still just sitting down. I think we're just going to have to go down and try to get them. So I left my sports. spot where I was hiding and I started hiking out in the open right out in the bright moonlight.

Now between, there's probably about 200 yards, 250 yards from where the group was hiding and where I was at the time. And about halfway down, there was a bend in the trail. And that was going to kind of give me a little bit of cover to where I could at least get halfway down there before they would see me. So right before I got to that bend in the trail, my partner was up on a side hill watching the group through binoculars. and my call number at the time was 259, Bravo 259. And he said, hey, 259, they decided to get up and start moving all at once. He said, find somewhere to go.

Well, I was totally exposed. There were no bushes. There were nowhere to go for me to hide to try to get the group. And I started looking around and thought, well, what am I going to do now? Because it was too far for me to go back to my original hiding spot. And my partner come over the radio again. He said, hurry up, 259. So they're coming around the bin right now.

They're going to see you any second. So I just laid down right there on the trail, put my back up against a little embankment, and decided I was going to play dead. And I took out my revolver. We're carrying revolvers at the time. And I kept hold of it, and I stuck it underneath my leg in case it went bad. And they decided to jump me. I could at least still defend myself.

And I was trying to time my blanche. so I would blink the last time right before they seen me. So sure enough, the smuggler walked up to me, and I stared him right in the eye without blinking, and I just stared at him right in the eye, and I didn't move. And I was using my body to block the trail because they're very superstitious, and they don't want to step over a dead body. So I knew they wouldn't cross me. And the guy stood there, and he looked at me, and one by one, the group started to trickle

behind me and they were all staring at me and they started to talk between themselves as to whether I was dead or not and they're saying you think he's really dead and I heard one say yeah I think he's dead look his guns missing and they talked about what this is going to do for a minute and meanwhile I had to blink so bad I couldn't stand it and my partner was giving me information over the radio and he was saying don't bust them yet don't bust them yet because the last one hasn't caught up and they'll say scatter everywhere if you bust on right now. And I'm thinking, well, I've got to do something pretty quick because I'm going to blink

in a second. The game's going to be up. So I held out a little while longer and then finally my partner said, okay, they're all caught up. Take them now. And I just sat right straight up and I pointed my finger at them. I said, sit down. And they all just froze.

They were terrified. And by that time I had gotten back up and they all sat down. He said for this one guy in the. back. There's always that one guy who just doesn't get it, you know. And he didn't sit down. So I walked over toward him and I pointed toward him again. And I said a little more forceful. I said, you set down. And he was quivering. And he had both his hands over his mouth. And he took one hand away and he pointed at me with his finger. And he goes, in English, he goes, oh, oh, it's you. Yeah, it's mean. I sat down.

that guy collapsed down to the ground and he had both hands on his chest and he was gasping for air you know everybody in the group was laughing at him and making fun of him wow but yeah i i didn't try that again i thought you know i got by with that once i probably don't want to make a habit of doing that yeah you know this one thing i noticed in the book that you talked about a lot was how even though these groups get captured there there is still like laughing and lightheartedness and if they're behaving like there's actually a relationship built between you and the people you've caught until you've handed them over and you got back to the barracks and i just found that really interesting because i think the public perception is that

you're out there and you know at least for me at least i'm thinking you know it's all business all a time and you're not their friend and you're not their friend but there is still humanity there and there's still communication on a normal level, I guess. Yeah, and what you have with a group and, you know, this is something that's really frustrating for agents because, you know, everything in the media is black and white. Agents are, you know, people who support agents, they think a certain way. And people who are against agents, you know, they think, we're just a bunch of Nazis looking for an excuse to kill somebody. You know, any chance we get, we're going to abuse someone.

Right. Do something bad. And they really have no ideal of the relationship between agents and aliens. You know, they even think the word alien is somehow, we use the word alien because we're trying to belittle them. Not, you know, not true. The only thing political in my book is I explain what alien means, and that just basically, you know, mean someone who's not a citizen. There's, it doesn't, there's nothing bad about it. But, yeah, once we catch a group and the takedown is over and nobody's injured, no one's

being threatened, yeah, there's no reason to mistreat people. Now, in every group, you're going to have different kinds of people because every group will have at least one or two smugglers in it, and they're quite capable of injuring or killing you. And so you don't get friendly with them. And then every group is going to have one or two criminals that are not related to smuggling in it. And then the other 80% of the group is just going to be normal people. So you've got to be careful about, you know,

letting your guard down and getting too friendly. But at the same time, you know, everyone's behaving themselves. They're cooperating. you know, why would you mistreat somebody? There's no reason to, there's just no reason to start hollering at people or belittling someone or something like that. Yeah, especially with, you know, I noticed in your book you talk about this a lot and I knew this to be true. You know, these people, the majority of these people that are being brought across the border, they're being mistreated by the person leading them. You know, there's rape involved, there's abuse involved. And so

the last thing they want to do is, the last thing you want to do is mistreat these. people as well. I mean, you're kind of like helping them, you know, you're saving them from, you know, possible death from these people who will leave them behind. Well, and if they're going, if they get into trouble and they're going to be rescued, they're going to be rescued by us. Because for the guides, these guys are not faux key rows, like people think. These guides leave people behind to die without hesitation because he's got cargo to get through and it's a business. And he better get his car go through because he's got to answer to somebody about that. And if he holds his cargo up and loses it every time someone can't keep up, he's going to be dealt with.

So he's going to leave him behind. And not only that, but like you said, rape is just extremely, extremely common. You know, I don't get too specific about that other than it is extremely common. There's been times, like on our mountain, everywhere you go, you have to hike, and it takes a while to get there. So to go, we have one road that goes over the top of the mountain, but you can plainly hear things that are going on down at the bottom of the mountain, 3,000 feet below you, and it will take you hours and hours to hike down. there and there's no roadway there. And you can hear some of these women screaming as you know what's happening to them. And it's just gut wrenching and there's nothing you can do.

Because if you were even to try to hike from the top of the mountain to get down there to try to help them, you're talking about three hours. They're long gone. The bandits and the perpetrators are long gone. You know, and it's it's gut wrenching. Yeah. You know, I think people don't really. that Border Patrol agents see a lot of people die.

A lot of these people who cross, and we're talking through the years, it's been a lot. The last face they saw before they passed to the other side lost their life was the Border Patrol agent trying to save them, left behind by a group, you know. And a lot of them, we don't find until they've already passed on. You know they were left behind and they died alone or they were killed by a mountain lion. You get left behind up on that mountain. There's a very good chance you're getting killed by a mountain lion because those cats lost their fear of humans a long time ago. And human beings for a cat like that, an unarmed human being walking across that mountain, scared and alone is a mill.

It's a very quick, easy meal for them. Sure. Yeah, it's just the realities of the environment that you worked in for so long. And I really appreciated you talking about that in the book. You know, to wrap this up, I mean, let's finish off with that lighthearted story. I guess you can call it lighthearted. Talk about the agent that had to sneak up on something else and tackled it. Well, you know, the difference between tragedy and comedy sometimes is nothing more than just time. someone when I was going through school they told us that all comedies based on tragedy so they're almost interchangeable at times and so this happened to a friend of mine he was a he was a trainee and he was working with his journeyman his training officer now this guy had kind of been around the blocker a time or two he was originally from chili he uh very colorful character. He had two

Anglo-Saxon names, but he was Chilean. He had been in the Panamanian Army and had been through some pretty extensive jungle warfare training, so he could get around quietly in the woods. And then, I believe he had been in the American Army as well, and then he

went into the Border Patrol. Well, one of the first nights he was out in the field riding with his trainee, they were down around Morone Valley. And at that time, Morone Valley was kind of the border between the Brownfield Station and the El Cajon Station. El Cajon worked the east side where Tocati Mountain was, and Brownfield worked the west side where Otai Mountain was.

And a El Cajon scope operator had seen a group over on the Brownfield side. So we switched radio frequencies, and he called up a couple of Brownfield agents to see if they could work that traffic forum. So they did that. They responded. and Dalton, the trainee, was with his journeyman, and they got out, and Dalton was real eager to please, real friendly guy like that, and always eager to help. So nonetheless, the plan was the scope operator told them, he said, now, I've got the guide, has crawled into a bush about 40 yards, ahead of the group. There's about 30 in the group, and the guide is out ahead of them.

And I'll put one of you guys in on the guide, and the other guy go get the group. So Dalton volunteered to go take the guide out, and the journeyman was going to go after the group. So they split up, and as Dalton approached on the bush that the guide was hiding in, the El Cajon scope operator kind of got a little bit weird, and said, hey, just jump in on him and wrap your hands around his mouth so he can't scream out and warn the other ones. Well, Dalton was new and that made perfect sense to him, and he was eager to please, so he did exactly as he was told. He just jumped into that bush blind, no flashlight, no nothing, just dove into it head first, landed right on top of the guide, wrapped both his hands around where he thought the guide's head was, and then the most unbelievable scream.

you ever heard took place because it was a mountain lion. The wind had blown the scent's group in the groups sent into the cat's face. So he never heard Dalton come up from behind him because Dalton was upwind from him and he didn't catch his scent either. And he was so focused on that group that he was taken totally by surprise when Dalton jumped on top of him. I wrapped his hands right around his head, just like he was told, and that cat just went ballistic on him, and managed to get loose from him, and he took one swipe at Dalton's throat. And the swipe got hung up on his vest, and that saved him.

He missed his throat by about an inch. But he took the one swipe, and then he ran away. He ran south toward the training officer. The training officer spun around when he heard the cat screaming. and Dalton screaming. He spun around and tried to draw his weapon, but he was so shaken up. He dropped his weapon on the ground,

and the cat just kept running right on buying. Now, there happened to be a helicopter in the area trying to help him out. He shined his floodlight down, and he picked the cat up running away in the spotlight. They did take, Dalton was uninjured, they did take him to the hospital as a precaution,

and his shirt was ripped as red. and he continued wearing that shirt after that. Now, normally, if you had a torn shirt, they would tell you to throw it away and get a new one, but nobody ever told Dalton to quit wearing that shirt. It's a trophy. It was a trophy. Wow, that's incredible. That story is just, I can't imagine trying to jump a mountain line, even knowing what I'm jumping on,

let alone doing it blindly. I mean, the amount of time that it takes for you to jump on something, try to tackle. it and then realize it's not what you thought it was and figure out how to get out alive. I mean, my lord. Yeah. I mean, you couldn't turn loose fast enough. I can guarantee you that. You couldn't turn loose fast enough. Yeah, that's incredible. Well, Rocky, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Before we get out of here, where can people find you in your book? It's on Amazon. Now, it's also on, I believe they can also get it through Barnes & Noble online. but the best way to get it is on Amazon.

And then I do have a website, rockyelmore.com. Now, I have not decided whether I'll write another book or not, but I do have some other things in the works. One of the reasons I wrote the book was I wanted to encourage other people in law enforcement and the military to kind of break that taboo, especially if they're retired, not so much if they're still working. I don't want anyone to mess their career up over there. But I would like to hear other law enforcement who have stories, and I know they're out there

because I'm hearing them and I'm getting them, that have other paranormal stories to go ahead and share them. Yeah, I would love to hear more of these paranormal stories from these officers and stuff because I feel like it just lends more credibility. When you hear it coming from somebody who's such a professional, you know, they're trained to observe things a certain way and be able to recall details. I would love to hear their stories. And there's some good ones out there too.

I can't share them right at the moment. Like I said, I do have some other things working. I'm not sure if I'm going to do another book or not. On my website, they can submit a story if they would like to. They'd like to leave a story there. If someone in law enforcement has had some paranormal event happened to them, they want to share it, and they can do so anonymously. I won't give their name up.

Everybody's name in the book that did not give me permission is fake, obviously. Dalton's name is not actually Dalton. It's something else. So I don't give people up when they give me a story unless they tell me it's okay. And some people are okay with that. They're like me. They don't care. It's like, you know what?

This happened to me. You weren't there. I'm going to talk about it. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the next book, if there is a next book, Do you think that UFO story will make it in? Because you kind of tease us in the book about the UFO story. Then you said, that's all I'm going to tell you that something did happen.

Yeah, you know, the problem with that one is I could not get a clear answer. And I did ask, I could not get a clear answer. I said, is this sensitive information or not? And I could not get a clear answer. So I just don't, I didn't want to risk it. And, you know, probably I should have left it out of the book, I guess. But sometimes it's okay to be teased a little bit. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I can almost guarantee you that if you come out with another book and you hint that that might be in there, I mean, people are going to go ballistic trying to buy that book because just because, I mean, I'll tell you, when I heard that, I was like, oh, my gosh, what is that story? And I'll never know. I'll tell you what, I wish I could tell you because, yeah, one of the best I've heard. And you know what I found is that I've seen the comments, some people's comments and heard them, that just the fact that I hint at that story, but I don't tell it, is proved to them that, oh, the government knows. The government's involved. They know all about it. And, you know, and that's okay because, you know what, the book is true, but I didn't write it with an agenda to prove anything.

I actually, the two things I wanted to accomplish with the book was I wanted to be like campfire stories and I wanted people to feel like they were somehow involved, that they felt like they was there a little bit to kind of get a little bit of that feeling that we get. And then, of course, the other thing was I wanted to encourage other people in law enforcement, especially if they're retired, to go ahead and share their stories to write their own book or something, you know. So I don't take all this stuff too serious. I know I know some people, you know, really do because they're really wanting that smoking gun. I tell my stories and people can elect to believe them or not, but I didn't put anything in there false that I know of. But at the same time, you know, I'm not trying to convince everyone that Bigfoot is. is a certain way or that ghost or a certain way or that spirit, you know, there are no ghosts through all spirits, you know.

Nothing like that. People can draw their own conclusions and mainly I just want them to enjoy reading the book. Yeah. And I'll tell you, you really did. I mean, when you said the campfire stories, that's exactly how it feels when you're going through this book. It feels like you're just sitting around and you do a great job of just drawing out the imagery as to what you're trying to describe.

I mean, I could really picture what you were talking about as you were sharing the stories. It's just a phenomenal book. I highly, highly recommend it. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Another thing I've noticed, it's been coming to my attention more and more. And this is something that they couldn't do a few years ago because of the Internet. People are looking these places up. You can find these places.

You can Google them and find pictures of these locations where these sightings happened. And people are really enjoying doing that from what I hear. So obviously they're welcome to do that because these places exist. Yeah. But in the book, you did tell people to be careful if they want to go out to these locations because you're not going to see what you want to see, but more than like you'll run into things that you don't want to even get near. Right.

And they'll also get in the way of the agents. And that road going up that mountain is treacherous and it's dangerous, and it's a one-lane road. And when agents go up and down it, they're in radio contact with each other all the time so they don't have head-on collisions. Now, I do not encourage people to actually go up O-Type Mountain or down Rhone Valley.

I encourage them to look it up online and the satellite pictures and things like that. Now, there's actually been a couple of places that have been torn down at the old ranch house in Rhone Valley I talk about has actually been torn down since I left. There is some kind of a water treatment facility or office or something there where that old ranch house used to be.

You know, most of these events happened 20 years ago, so the area has changed. They're not going to be able to get into Proctor Valley. I went out there. I met Wes out there after I interviewed for his show, and I took him to, unfortunately, it rained on us while we were there. So we were not able to go all the way down Rhone Valley or up the mountain because of the rain. And I could not even get us into Proctor Valley because they had built that all up. And there was a golf course setting where there used to be a gate where we went into Procter Valley.

So some of these places have been, you know, they're not there anymore like they were at the time of the stories when I was there. Yeah, that's understandable. All right, man. Well, I really appreciate you coming on. on tonight and I know the audience is going to love this so I will let you know when this show goes live okay thank you I do and I'll I'll put it on on the website so very cool all right Rocky I will talk to you later okay thanks Tony thank you well that's the show everybody I really hope you enjoyed it I certainly did as always I really hope you guys have a great week

take care friends I need to introduce myself I'm a taste I I just gotta finish this recording, please.