The Luna Document

Deep in the rugged Gila Wilderness of Western New Mexico lies a narrow, high-altitude mountain valley with a dark and recurring history. Every civilization that has attempted to settle its cold creeks and pine-forested slopes—from ancient indigenous tribes to Mexican agriculturalists and 19th-century American homesteaders—has vanished without a trace, leaving behind only blood-stained floorboards, open doors, and abandoned belongings.

The Luna Document reconstructs a terrifying regional legend across three generations of chilling evidence. It begins with the discovery of a handwritten 1952 manuscript hidden within an antique dictionary, detailing an 1899 encounter where two drunken Arizona cowboys stumbled into a high-mountain cave filled with towering, hair-covered, bipedal beasts devouring a cow. A decade later, a giant ape-like skull with a small bullet hole in the forehead was brought down from the mountains, only to be lost in a 1928 house fire.

When UNM scholar Dr. R.H. Hinton ventured into the mountains in 1952 to locate the ancient burial site, he vanished forever. Decades later in 2011, explorer Elias Mercer retraced Hinton's footsteps into the Gila National Forest—equipped with a camera, GPS, and a revolver—only to find himself hunted by heavy bipedal footsteps, overwhelming odors of decay, and relentless midnight wood-knocking echoing down the canyon.

Told through historical accounts, archival notes, and a waterlogged field notebook recovered years later from a collapsed campsite by a forest ranger, The Luna Document is a haunting gothic western thriller that explores what happens when human curiosity crosses paths with an ancient, territorial nightmare.