This story is excerpted and adapted from Colin Dickey’s new book, The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained. June 1996, and the United States was on edge. A year after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the country watched anxiously as a standoff between the FBI and a militia group unfolded in Jordan, Montana. The Montana Freemen had declared themselves outside the reach of U.S. law, had stopped paying taxes, and had embarked on a scheme of counterfeiting and bank…
