Twenty-Nine Palms Skinwalker Mystery

Considering that I don't think I've ever heard a single nice word said about the place, I was one of the Marines fortunate enough to never spend any amount of time on a remote Southern California base called 29 palms or 29 stumps as I've heard, Marines call it. Officially, it's the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. Unofficially, it's one of the places Marines get sent to to be forgotten about and suffer, kind of like the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones. It's enormous, more than 900 square miles of Mojave Desert, mountains, dry like beds, life-fire ranges, mountains, and terrain, built to make Marines miserable before they ever get anywhere near a real war. And to be fair, that's the point. 29 palms is where entire units go to train for combat, convoys urban fighting artillery close air support to combine to arms. All this stuff Marines need to know how to do when bullets are flying over your head. The problem is, when you're not actively training, you're still stuck in the middle of the desert, brutal heat, no shade, no major sitting nearby, not much to do. And that wonderful feeling of being hours away from civilization, while all the moisture is being sucked out of your body through your skin. So yeah, Marines complain about 29 palms a lot. But once the sun goes down out there, the desert also has a reputation for getting kind of weird. Marines talk about strange lights in the mountains, figures moving across the desert, patrols and people ending up where they shouldn't be, and creatures that don't quite move like animals, but don't really look human either. Some call them skinwalkers, some don't know what to call them. But according to the Marines in these stories, something is moving around 29 palms at night, and sometimes it gets a little too close for comfort. From the Marines who live them, these are their true stories of whatever is stalking them through the desert around 29 palms. I'm Luke Lamana, and this is War Time Stories. Mitch Hedberg told a joke once, they went something like, "There's a product on TV," and said it was available for four easy payments of 1995. I would like a product that's available for three easy payments and want a complicated payment. We're not going to tell you which one it is, but this payment is going to be hard. The mailman will be shot, the envelope will not seal, and the stamp will be in the wrong denomination. And the final payment must be paid and welcome. The last thing any business wants is for someone who wants to support them to find their website, find something they want to buy, and they get stuck in the shopping cart. For years now, I've used Shopify for the War Time Stories storefront, and the Shopify checkout makes that process simple, and even more because you guys are so awesome, when customers come back, their details can already be saved, so they can check out with one tap. And because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, I can spend a lot less time worrying about how everything works behind the scenes, and more time creating these stories and even more content. Shopify nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com/WarTimeStories. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Can I come in? You're taking a dump away out there? Pretty far. Any reason? Sorry, can you identify yourself? You know. Sargent, right? Stand by, Sargent, protocol, you know. Maine, this is Roadguard 1. I've got somebody at the wire identifying himself as Sargent right, requesting entry over. Roadguard 1, there it is, no Sargent right in our company. He might be with a different unit, maybe got lost. Let me find out, Sargent, what unit are you with? We checked that, the car lost a unit, like your 25 miles, over. Sargent, you want to help me out? Roger that, copy, just a second, over, Sargent, they don't seem to have you on any of the routes. Yes, sir. Right now. Why? Do not let him in, do you copy? Don't speak to him. Don't even look at him. Run. Do it, run. Shit. I stumbled across this first story, posted to an online message board by Marine, writing under the handle, oh three, five none, but I feel like it was, supposed to be read, oh three fifty none. I assume he was in oh three fifty one, Marine Assaultman, do you guys call that a gunner? Well anyway, he was a grunt, twenty nine palms is largely occupied by infantry units, and of course it is, how do you make a dog mad and ready to kill anything, you keep it outside in the heat? Well, double dogs are no different. Speaking of being outside, in his story he talks about the time he was approached by someone while he was out training in the deserts of twenty nine palms. He said this unusual stranger looked like a Marine, but as the conversation went on it became apparent to him that, well, I'll let him tell it, he writes. Growing up playing video games and watching war movies, I didn't think twice about joining the Marines, so I could be in the infantry. I went through all of the training and the many unwelcome hardships that make you really reconsider and sometimes regret your decision, but I pushed on and made it through. After boot camp I got sent to a desert base known as twenty nine palms, the largest piece of military controlled land in the entire United States, or at least one of them. It covers approximately nine hundred and thirty square miles in total, like it's a huge chunk of land in Southern California just a few hours away from Mexico. And let me tell you, when you're that far out, you start to see some shit. Anyway, fast forward to my first field exercise and me losing my mind. To put things in perspective, as to how far away we were from civilization, the closest man-made object was about a three hour car ride away. This particular day was incredibly hot. I think the sun broke 130 degrees at some point, so we spent all day hiding under camouflage netting, getting classes about various military tactics. We literally couldn't do anything else without boiling live. Once the sun sets and things cooled down a bit, we set off into the night to actually get some hard, realistic training done. At night we practiced using our nods to do simple stuff, like reloading, reading maps and whatnot. The night-optic produces an image of ambient infrared light, so you can actually see a lot more stuff than the naked eye. And when I flip my nods down and looked up, I was totally blown away. The sky is absolutely cluttered with stars. Comments and meteors fell this way, and that the Milky Way was out in all its glory. Honestly, the desert sucks ass like 99% of the time, but moments like that make all that other BS worth it. Well, almost. Anyway, after roaming around aimlessly for what felt like forever, we headed back to our patrol base and were granted a few hours of sleep. I was out cold as soon as I laid down, but after like 10 minutes, one of my buddies shakes me away and it's like the last thing you want to hear. Get up bitch, you're on watch. And I'm like, god damn it. I get dressed and I stand my post at the checkpoint as I'm told. I'm giving a radio and told to only lift the barbed wire to let someone in after it gets approved by the officer of the guard. So it's maybe around 2am and everyone else in my company is dead asleep except for me and an officer in the Comtruck. All I can hear is the sound of waves. wind and the distant hills of coyotes. So defend off boredom, I decided to do a bit more stargazing. I heard a coyote yelp off the distance and thought nothing of it. A few minutes later, however, I hear the sound of footsteps drawing closer through the sand. I looked over just as another marine is coming over a small hill, a little ways in front of me. This wasn't any cause for alarm, I figured he was probably just out taking a dump or something. But as he walked towards me, I noticed something odd. You know how human eyes sometimes have that shine to them when you're looking through NVGs if you have looked through them? This guy's, his eyes didn't have that, it didn't reflect any light at all. I thought it was strange, but I didn't think much of it. Realistically, one of us was probably really dehydrated. But everything changed the moment this guy started talking. So he approaches me on the other side of the wire and just stops. I'm staring at him, he's staring right back at me, and after a few seconds of this awkward silence, he simply says, "Can I come in?" His voice didn't sound right, no inflection, no questioning tone, really weird. I asked him what his name was and why he was out so far taking a dump. He tells me his name, Sargent Wright, and totally ignores my other question, same weird voice. Granted, I was new to the unit at the time, so I didn't know anyone named Sargent Wright, but still, I had to verify it. So I grabbed my radio and called it in. Maine, this is Roadguard 1, there's a Sargent Wright requesting entry over. When Maine got back to me, this lieutenant sounded pretty confused. Roadguard 1, this is Maine, there is no Sargent Wright in this company. And the closest other unit is 25 miles away. I glanced at Sargent Wright, who was still standing on the opposite side of the wire. And at that point, I'm thinking like, "Okay, what do you want me to do here?" But before I can even get on the wire and ask, Maine comes back over the radio and is like, "Get back here right now, do not speak to him, do not look at him, just run." Meanwhile, the weird dude is overhearing all this. And as I looked up, I swear his face started to change. Really don't know how to describe it, and yes, it was dark, and nods can sometimes distort things, but his face, it was this contorted, animalistic expression of just pure rage. Like this guy genuinely looked like he wanted to rip my throat out and drink my blood. That was it for me. I staggered back away from the wire and then high-tailed it as fast as I could towards the others. By the time I got back, everyone was awake. All of the vehicle lights were turned on and everyone is packing up and scrambling into the trucks. He drove the entire three hours back to base, leaving behind a lot of stuff like tents, water, food. I never got an explanation from anyone but my squad leader, and even his explanation was cryptic. He was an old school-backwards kind of guy, and he just bluntly says to me that, "Whatever I saw, it wasn't asking to come inside the patrol base." I never really understood what he meant by that, and a lot of steep part of me doesn't really want to. Well, interesting story. I don't always chime in after every story, I don't always have something to say. But on this one, Southern California, Night Vision, if you have heard my story, whether it was in the credit section of an episode or we did an episode on the team stories and the weird things that we've personally seen, his story just reminds me vividly of that shadow person or whatever it was that I saw and was talking to. He didn't talk to me, so I didn't get to hear what his voice sounded like. But as I said in my story, after this guy who's walking next to me disappears, because I thought it was the Marine that was walking behind me in the patrol, Cedar. We start moving further up this hill, and I get kind of paranoid. Cedar is somehow going to disappear on me, or he's going to fall out of patrol or whatever I was worried about. So I start doing these very frequent spot checks on Cedar, and at one point I do look behind me. And as this guy kind of described, through the nods, kind of at a distance, maybe 10 meters, I'm looking at Cedar's face, and his face just becomes this very distorted grotesque, evil looking thing. So I'm a little confused by the end of this guy's story. Why was there no, like, what are you talking about? What do you mean he wasn't trying to come inside the patrol base? It does come off to me very odd, that he's the first guy on watch. And he encounters this person outside the wire. And the guy just says, "Hey, can I come through the barbed wire?" And he reports it, and the lieutenant says, "There is no sergeant right." I think I need to dig into this, because stay tuned for a future episode on this, because I think I've heard a story about a sergeant right who was killed out in the desert there and he kind of haunts the area, something like that. But anyway, it doesn't really make sense to me. And I don't mean to knock this guy's story. It doesn't really make sense to me that the entire unit hears this report of a guy named Sergeant Wright trying to enter their patrol base during a training exercise, and that prompts them to suddenly just pack everything up in the leave, especially leaving gear behind. So it's a strange story, and I'm not really sure what to make of it. Just like the guy who told the story, he didn't know what to make of it. I would have pressed my squad leader for a little more info, like what do you mean he was not trying to get in here. So you could have just told me, "Hey, there's a guy that died out there, and he kind of haunts the area." The response to that doesn't seem kosher with, you know, a whole unit isn't just going to leave because of a ghost. They'd probably just say, "Well, just invite him in and let him sleep next to you." We already got all the gear, the gas, the fuel, the water, everything out here. Like we're getting our training done, so just my thoughts on that first story, but make of it what you will. Maybe I'm taking it the wrong way, but what he described seeing, I have absolutely seen myself, talking to somebody that wasn't really there, and then seeing a guy's face get really grotesque under night vision. We were both very sleepy, that's for certain, but other than that, let's get to the next story. This next one was sent to me a couple of years back by a Marine named Linda. When Linda was active duty back in the 1970s, she was stationed at 29 palms. She didn't have many nice things to say about the base either, so it's good to know that Marines have been hot and miserable for at least five decades now. Marines are big on keeping traditions alive. Well one night, Linda and her friends left the base to enjoy so much needed time off on weekend liberty. While your average male Marine would probably have driven to the nearest dive bar to drown his sorrows, Linda and her entourage decided to take a road trip to Joshua Tree, National Park, Rest in Peace, Joshua Tree. Now I've driven past this part of California, but never stopped in it, I've actually met a German musician named Comrade on a flight to the UK last year that said he was filming a music video out in Joshua Tree, nice guy, song that he was filming was called Be Mine. Anyway, Comrade spelled K-A-M-R-E-D. So it's a popular tourist spot. People go out there to film, people go out there to hike, people do all kinds of stuff out there. I asked Chatsch-E-B-T for a summary of why so many people like to visit this same spot because it just seems like a very remote desert, like there's like a spring out there, like what is it about it? And the response I got was people go there because it feels like a completely different world. Even though it's only a few hours from major cities, you get huge boulder formations, open desert, strange plants, dramatic sunsets, clear night skies, and a quiet, almost eerie feeling that's hard to find in the city. Well, Linda's story just adds one more eerie thing about that desert. She writes, "This happened to me when I was 19 years old. At the time I was stationed at 29 palms the Marine Corps base in the 1970s. All on Liberty, a friend and acquaintance and I decided to drive out towards Joshua Tree National Park. We had a great time. It was just three of us walking around and taking in all the natural beauty. But as the sun sets, we hit the road back to base. Looking out at the desert was like staring into a pitch black void. only. light on the highway came from my car's headlights. We were just laughing and talking when, out of nowhere, a loud pounding sound started hitting my driver's side door. It scared the crap out of us, but big Marines, you know, were thinking logically or at least trying to, and I figured that I must have hit some poor animal on the road. So I turned the car around to see what I might have hit, but I couldn't see anything. There was no traffic, so I got out of the car in the middle of the road and looked at my door. No dense, no blood, not even a slight chipping of paint. I shrugged, got back in my car, and we start driving again. And just a few miles down the road, that same banging noise started up again. Only this time, whatever was hitting us was now on the passenger side. We were girls, our nerves got the better of us, and we all screamed, like it is pure darkness for miles around, and something sounds like it's pounding on the side of our vehicle while driving. We locked our doors, and I backed up, turning at an angle to see the entire road behind us, but it was just empty wilderness. We started driving again. I swear, my foot was all the way to the floor. We wanted to get back to base as fast as humanly possible. After a few minutes, the mood lightens, and we started talking again. But just as things were beginning to feel normal, my car just dies, and then slows down and rolls to a stop. We were on a dark road in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones, and there were no people living anywhere around us. We were stuck. I tried starting the car a few times, and I'm starting to think that my battery must be dead. But just as things are starting to look really bleak, the car suddenly roars back to life, and when the lights come on, that's when we see it. On the right side of the road, there is some kind of animal. It looked like a cross between a wolf and a dog. It was huge, and it had this long reddish brown hair. As we're watching it, this animal stands up on its hind legs, and you could feel the air getting sucked out of her lungs. This thing was tall, at least seven feet with how it was standing up. It looks at us for a second before just bolting across the road and into the night. Scared the absolute hell out of us. All three of us had pretty high security clearances at the time, so there was no way we're going to report something like this. So we all agreed that we are never going to tell anybody about this incident. And I kept my word on that until many years later. I was in a college biology class, and my professor at the time mentioned something called cryptozoology. The study of animals, plants, or other entities whose existence is unsubstantiated by science. After class, I told him about what I saw that night near 29 poms. He said that similar animals had been reported many times. That was the first time I'd ever heard the term skinwalker. I probably wouldn't have believed it at the time, but now I honestly don't know. My professor saw my sincerity and he acted like he believed me, but I don't think anyone else would have at that time. The reason I love shows like Skinwalker Ranch so much is because they show that I am not alone when it comes to seeing strange things that I'm not crazy. Thank you for reading my story. It is a true account of something I witnessed as a United States Marine, attending Marine Corps Communication and Electronic School at 29 poms, California. I understand if you don't believe it, there are still many times when I don't believe it myself, but I was there, it was real. I've never witnessed anything like it before or since, and it scares me to this day. This next story was written by Marine using the handle accomplished bit 627. Like the Marines in the previous stories, some of 627s buddies happened to cross something pretty terrifying in the desert near 29 poms. But unlike those previous stories, when they were confronted with the supernatural, these Marines did, well, just about the most marine thing you can imagine, they grabbed their weapons and tried to kill it. He writes. Okay, so for privacy purposes, I won't say the unit, platoon, or any real names. Also, if you hear this and happen to be one of the Marines that was there, please share your side of the story. I can't recall if this was during MWX or ITX, that's marine, air-ground task force, war-fighting exercise, or infantry training exercise. But either way, it was a live fire range. If I'm not mistaken, the area we were in was near range 230, but in case I'm wrong, here are some of the site details. There was a hill called Machine Gun Hill on the left and to the right of that, there was a mount town with those blackboards used for live fire. There was also a small building located southeast from the mount town that acted as a shack. Anyways, we spent most of the daylight hours doing dry runs and preparation for the live fire drills the next day. Around 200, the sunset and we retired for the night. Given the range, we were able to have an admin bibwack and I expect he means by that sort of an impromptu campsite. So he says, needless to say, I ended up staying relatively late. So I'm there, chilling in my sleeping bag with my phone, when I hear someone yell. We just saw a skin walker who wants to kill a skin walker. We got permission from higher we have live rounds. I'm there thinking to myself like, shut the hell up bro, what the hell are these idiots talking about? And they kept going on and on about what they just seen and looking back. I wish I'd got in on the conversation and asked what was up, but I was honestly so tired. I just put my phone away, tried to block out the noise and racked out. I didn't think about it at the time, but at some point the night I wake up to the sound of coyotes crying out in the distance. And as I'm listening, I distinctly remember thinking, why do they sound like that? I'd heard coyotes plenty of times before, but these ones just sounded off for some reason. I didn't put two and two together until the next day. So I woke up the following day and while packing up my stuff, I heard people start talking about what happened the night before about. Who were those guys yelling and what was at about a skin walker? After talking with some of the guys and eavesdropping on the odd conversation, a clearer picture of what happened started to take shape. So apparently these two senior guys took this boot, you know, this new guy for a run because they caught him sleeping on road guard earlier in the day. This poor kid, they ran him pretty far east from where a bivouac site was. The story goes that while these guys were on the run around 2,200-ish, they heard coyotes howling from somewhere in the distance. Nothing unusual about that. But all of a sudden they start hearing growls and noises that they described as unnatural. They all got this feeling that something wasn't right and decided to start heading back to the bivouac area. That's when they saw this tall creature standing on its hind legs out in the distance. The three of them watched this thing as it got down on all fours before taking off towards the general direction of the coyotes. According to the seniors, it didn't run like any coyote or some other wild dog. It was more of this frantic, unnatural crawling motion. From there, the guys just booked it as fast as they could towards us. Once those Marines returned, they stormed into the command post the CP where higher was and started explaining what they just witnessed. Apparently, the boot couldn't stop crying. He was so afraid. They actually had to give him some drugs to calm him down and knock him out. And I don't know about you, but you got to be pretty ballsy to storm into the CP and start yelling crap about a skin walker. So, I guess they must have been serious. As for the live rounds that they were talking about, I'm not sure if they actually got the go ahead to use them from higher as they stated, but it's not far fetched to think that they were actually loaded up when they came to us asking, you know, if we wanted to kill a skin walker. We had our gear laid out to the side with our mags loaded with live ammo for the following day anyhow. It wouldn't take much for them to just grab their stuff and go try to find this thing. But thankfully, I think cooler heads prevailed and the impromptu skin walker hunt never happened. At least, I don't think it did. Pant. Why did I have to fall asleep? The entire next day was just a big running joke about skin walkers and when to go's running around the area. I wish I could have asked the guys more questions about what they'd heard and saw, but they were already being pestered by everybody. But one thing is for sure, those guys definitely saw something out there. I am certain of it. Now, whether they actually saw a skin walker, I honestly couldn't tell you. But as I stated earlier, these guys had the balls to storm into the company's CP, crying, and waking the entire camp up on the grounds of "We saw some strange ass shit." If that's not enough to convince you that there's some real shit out there, then I don't know what to tell you. I'd love to hear if anyone else had their own strange stories about 29 pumps. But yeah, her friend from saying units, real names, etc. Call me paranoid. But I am not trying to get contacted by "Men in Black" for this shit. This next story was first brought to my attention by my buddy Nick over at Tales from the Gridsquare. In it, another Marine recounts yet another strange incident that occurred while conducting a training exercise at, you guessed it, 29 pumps. Honestly, I don't know if this is a skin walker encounter, except with how it compares to the other stories, and there are rumors that the base was built on an Indian burial ground or something like that. The place is cursed. But whatever these guys stumbled into, it was disturbing to say the least. Your rights. My platoon was tasked with being the OP4 opposing force for a battalion being evaluated during MWX, Marine, Air Ground Task Force, or fighting exercise in 29 pumps. It was getting dark, and we were getting settled into a defensive posture for the night and about to pull watch. I was going around to each truck and getting an EDL count before we turn to. EDL stands for Equipment Density List, and is basically our way of maintaining accountability for all our stuff. We take inventory of everything we bring with us into the field and everything on that list should come back when the exercise wraps up. Well, naturally, I come to find out that one of my juniors lost his binoculars a few hours into the OP and, of course, decided not to say anything. Some time passed and we ultimately decided to backtrack a route to try to find them. So it's O300 at this point, and our convoy of six is heading down an MSR main supply route adjacent to Lead Mountain. And as we're driving along, I catch a glimpse of something crawling across the road on all fours in my peripherals. Even though I only saw this thing out of the corner of my eye, I saw enough to know that it wasn't an animal. I'm a believer in the paranormal and I was well aware of 29 palms' history of strange activity, so I just ignored it because, you know, if you ignore the paranormal, it's more likely to leave you alone, I guess. While our convoy comes to a sudden stop and over the net, I hear someone just cross the road. Both my lieutenant and platoon sergeant got out of their vehicles to investigate the issue. As it turns out, this person, they saw crossing the road, was a Marine. This kid had no name tapes on his camis. No cat cart, his military ID, but he had all of his usual kit. When our lieutenant asked him about how he got here, the Marine said that he was with truck company, went to the bathroom in the morning and just woke up in the middle of the mountains. He straight up didn't remember anything else. We looked at the notes we took when we were given our orders and discovered that this kid's company was over 15 clicks kilometers away from our position. There was no way he traveled that far across the desert on his own in full kit. This kid also spoke very broken English, but it's not uncommon for English to be a Marine's second language, but I'm saying it was difficult to just understand this kid at a basic level. It was just a really, really weird situation, and it only got worse as the night goes on. As our lieutenant and platoon sergeant try to get more info from this kid, we're scanning the direction that he came from with thermals and night vision. We started seeing blinking lights throughout the distant mountain range and there was this black mass in the corner of the range that was radiating hot on our thermals. As we're watching this, our platoon commander follows the lost marine procedures, and about three hours later, a single humvee comes rolling down the road towards us. What immediately struck me as odd was that the gunner on this humvee was a lieutenant colonel. The driver was a sergeant and vehicle commander V.C. was a lance. The ranked ability just didn't add up, like why is a high ranking officer on the gun when that role is almost exclusively manned by a lower enlisted Marine? These guys all had a blank face. No emotion. The lieutenant colonel and sergeant didn't even acknowledge my platoon sergeant or lieutenant, no words, no return salutes, nothing like that. The lieutenant colonel just stood there, and I remember thinking he looked more like a wax figure than a man. The lance got out of the truck and said thank you gentlemen, put the kid in the back of the humvee and proceeded to drive off into the night. Everyone was left scratching their heads, even my lieutenant thought the whole thing was creepy. I don't know what the hell we stumbled into that night, but everything about it just felt sinister and off. Creepy as they are. One of the things I do love about reading these stories is getting to vicariously relive all those little moments that we as Marines all shared. Getting woken up like five minutes after you finally fell asleep because you have the second shift on Firewatch. Guys losing their gear and just not mentioning it until way later, and then everyone has to go look for it because it's on the EDL, or seeing something weird and immediately deciding that's none of my business and walking in the other direction. You really do look back on that part of your life and you realize, man, you were an absolute stud. They had you up at all hours of the night, hiking mountains, swimming in the ocean and pitch black darkness, walking through jungles, hunting for skin walkers apparently, but for me, all of that was 10 years ago. The military structure quickly goes away and your age does eventually start to catch up with you. I try to handful of supplements over the years, some of which I do still use. Marsmen is one that I've stuck with. Like that last story about like getting a lieutenant colonel on the gun and a sergeant driving the whole testosterone space is confusing his hack and honestly pretty sketchy. I wasn't interested in lifelong injections or anything that felt extreme. I just wanted something simple. Marsmen is simple. It's designed to help your body make better use of the testosterone it's already producing and for me it's just become part of my daily routine. It's not like pounding an energy drink, it just feels like a kind of a steadier sense of drive throughout the day. Made in the USA, third party tested and if you are not part of the 91% of guys who love it, there is a 90 day money back guarantee. Just check out the reviews. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts at mengotomars.com. That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them who sent you. So as if 29 palms wasn't bad enough already with the heat, the isolation, the field ops, the sand, the rocks, the lack of anything fun to do, slowly drying out into a piece of beef jerky apparently, you also have whatever this is. More than one marine across decades of service, reporting things that all seem to point back to the same basic idea. And once the sun goes down at 29 palms, the desert gets interesting. Johnson, so I would look like another marine standing outside the wire in the middle of the night, asking to be let in to the patrol base. Only there was no sergeant right in the company, no other unit nearby, and whatever main heard over the radio, it was enough for them to tell Johnson to stop talking, stop looking and run. Linda's story took us all the way back to the 1970s when she and two other Marines were driving back from Joshua Tree and something started pounding against their car. No damage, no animal, no explanation, then the car dies, the lights come back on, and they see this huge wolf-like thing standing near the road. And then it stands up on two legs. Then there was the range 230 story, two senior Marines take a boot out for some corrective motivation. They hear coyotes making unusual noises, and they come running back, claiming that they saw something upright in the desert drop onto all fours and move like no animal that they've ever seen. And because they were Marines, their immediate solution was to grab weapons and go kill it. Then there was the Op4 convoy near Lead Mountain that we ended with, something crawls across the road. A marine appears in the desert with no namepapes, no ID, and no memory of how we got there. There's lights in the mountains, the black mass that's hot on thermals, and then a humvee arrives with a hodgepodge crew that doesn't look or act right, collects the missing marine and disappears back into the dark. Take in one at a time, maybe you can explain some of this way. Heat, sleep deprivation, coyotes, night vision, bad lighting, a training mix up. Everybody's just tired out there and act and weird. A big animal at the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe. But when you stack these accounts together, 29 palms starts to feel less like a normal base with a few spooky rumors. And more like a place where Marines keep running into the same basic premise. What the hell is going on out there? And then, the Marine Corps didn't make that desert strange. It was strange long before there were ranges, humvees, mount towns, or miserable boots standing road guard up to in the morning. People were living in that desert thousands of years before it became a marine base. And in at least one part of the training area, those people left something behind on the rocks. According to an official Marine Corps article, 29 palms doesn't just have Marine Corps history. It has a much older history. In one sealed-off section of the training area, along a dry riverbed, some group of ancient natives left something behind. They're called the Foxtrot Petroglyphs. Nearly 2,000 images carved into stone across dozens of rock panels. Some show people, some show animals, but most are abstract lines, circles, symbols, shapes that probably meant something very specific to the people who put them there, like Egyptian hieroglyphs before the Rosetta Stone. And we just don't fully understand them now. And that's the important part, because archaeologists don't claim to know with total certainty what any of these markings mean. There's a lot of debate about it. Some of them may have marked places people lived or traveled through some of them, been connected to hunting. Some may have been made after a successful hunt or before one, almost like a prayer for luck. And some may have had a religious or spiritual meaning. One of the images mentioned in the article is a big horned sheep high up on a rock face. And according to archaeologists John Hale, animals like that could have meant more than just, this is an animal we saw and we hunt. But it's no secret that native belief systems show that certain animals could be seen as spirits or as something closer to sacred figures. So when you look at these carvings, it's possible. You're not just looking at ancient graffiti. You might be looking at a place where ancient people believe that the physical world and the spiritual came close together. A place where a shaman or a hunter or whoever carved those symbols into the rock believed something happened, something worth remembering, something worth marking. Now does that explain the stories we heard in the episode? Does it prove that the desert is crawling with skin walkers? Who knows? But just maybe 29 palms has been strange for a very long time is the point. It's just that our Marines are only the latest people to notice it. Try to stay awake on fire watch, guys. Ortime stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana, written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing, sound design, mixing and mastering by Alex Carpenter, with additional audio work by me. Animation and motion design and production coordination by David Williamson. Research by Jake Howard and myself. Art work by Pecata and Radomir Isgarovic. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around here for the after-action in the credits. I didn't want to interject in the story and keep disrupting with my own personal anecdotes and the sides. But in one of the stories, the one about the skin walker that they were hunting, they said that the boot that they brought this guy back, they're hazing him and they bring him back and he's crying about this creature that they saw. And what it immediately, I've said this before in the past where it's funny how you can listen to a story that you have nothing to do with and then something said in that story sparks something in your mind. And I feel like that's what's happening. You guys listen to these stories. We get you guys emailing us and stuff like that. It's really cool. It's just it's funny how these stories, that these experiences we have, whether they were the product of sleep deprivation or something else, just kind of get buried in the file cabinets of our mind and then you're listening to something anyway. What I wanted to share was I was going to the airport. We actually, me and my wife, we parked our car and then we were just going to get an Uber from this parking garage to the airport, skip the shuttle. It was faster, Uber was cheap. So we booked the Uber and it's this really, really nice guy that pulls out and I've just some chat. I start talking to him and asking him, you know, whatever. Well, he's talking like a Marine. He says some stuff and I was just like, are you a Marine? He's just like, yeah, you know, I was like 1980s, 1990s. And he was a drill instructor at one point of his career. I think he retired after 20 years. So, you know, I'm, every, I mean, he wasn't as eager maybe to talk about his service. I was kind of dragging it out of him because I'm like, "Mom, and like, give me the funny stories. Give me like 10 minutes and I'm in the car with him." I'm trying to get something, you know, just something memorable from his time in service. And I don't, I probably prompted it because, you know, this is what I do. And I asked him, I said, you know, what was the weirdest thing? You ever remember seeing or did you ever have any sort of like supernatural paranormal experiences in, in the military? It's an odd question because sometimes it, it doesn't always provoke a response. You're, a lot of guys will look at you funny like, you know, I was speaking with a police officer, a local police officer and, you know, I have a friend who's in the police force and introduced me to his buddy. And that was the question I asked him, right? And he goes into this just, yes, like we picked up this one, woman who, he, he's a Christian. So maybe he was viewing it through that lens, but he's like, this woman was possessed. Like she was, she was talking about how she, like when she's laying in her bed, she can like see, like entities like hovering over her. And it was like a, it was a health and welfare sort of check on her, like her family called and said, hey, can you check on her? So they took her in an ambulance and they put her in the back and he's sitting the back in the ambulance. So this is another side story that I'm going down. Because where else am I going to put this? And he said, as this woman is basically, as this woman is laying on the gurney, she's shifting between different personalities and different voices are coming out of her. He's like, there's like the voice of a child, there's the voice of a man, there's like her voice, and she's saying all these weird things and speaking in different dialects and languages is just, he said it was freaky. And I could not wait to get out of the back of this, this ambulance and just drop off at the hospital. Well, apparently later this woman ended up taking her own life, it's really sad and this whole thing, but he just said, yeah, like we see some really weird stuff. I was just kind of, what have you seen in your career? Well, anyway, getting back to the Uber driver, it was so interesting for me because we're having this whole conversation and I'm kind of like, I'm the one team, everything up, like, well, what about this? And what about the, like, what do you remember of this? And like, how long were you a drill instructor? Or what was your, what company were you with? And I was like, oh, golf company, I'll have his echo company and all this stuff. And he just, you know, he's nice. Friendly, but he wasn't like super engaged. But then I asked him this question. I'm like, what's the weirdest thing? And it's like his demeanor kind of shifted. And he goes, you know, when I was in boot camp, when I was, when I was leading recruits, we had this one recruit that when we were out at Edson Range, out in the desert, doing, you know, night stuff, night land navigation, stuff like that, whatever. He said, this kid came in and he was like upset, like he was crying. And he said that he had seen something like out in the desert, like a person or something like that. And it's basically the kid got processed out. But he said, whatever happened to this kid out in the desert, he would not let it go. Like he was real eight up about it kind of thing. And he's, I don't know if he ever got a full story of what the kids saw. But this is Southern California, again, mind you. So this is kind of in the ballpark of like being 29 palms, camp peddled in that kind of thing. So he would have been a camp peddled in, by the way, for that experience. So I was like, okay. And that, you know, resonated with me. I've been wandering around the desert, seeing weird things in the dark, on Camp Pendleton, we've heard stories like that. So it just, you know, it's just this individual like the boot in this story. It affected them more deeply, I guess. And that's where I got my inspiration from to share this story again. As you had this guy crying about a skin walker, and here's this other guy that reminded me of the drill instructor who told me about a kid that just cried himself out of the Marine Corps, basically, because he just could not let this strange experience go. Very, very interesting. But that being said, thank you for listening, thank you for watching, subscribing, liking, sharing, commenting, anything, and everything you guys do that helps support this show. We really appreciate it. As always, a huge shout out to both our patrons, our YouTube channel members, for your incredible support. May God be with each and every one of you, no matter what you're dealing with. And I will see you in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]