Skinwalker Ranch

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

RAY: In the summer of 1996, as the alien invasion movie Independence Day captivated audiences, the skies over Salt Lake City, Utah, seemed to hide their own secrets. Assigned to write a story about local UFO reports to tie into the movie's release, Deseret News reporter Zack Van Eyck sought the guidance of Junior Hicks, a respected expert on the subject. Little did Zack know, he was about to embark on a journey that would lead him to the now infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

ZACK: Before let you go, you know. Junior, are you sure there's not anything like local that's happening like recently. Like, is there anything current? And he paused for a long time. Long enough that I thought he was no longer on the line And and he said, well, you might want to call Gwen down at the bank. And it was with those words that this story happened because I was on the phone 5 minutes later before I left town, talked to Gwen.

RAY: Gwen and Terry Sherman had recently purchased a ranch near Ballard, Utah, only to suffer in silence as they were  besieged by unexplainable and terrifying phenomena. Mutilated cattle, ghostly apparitions, and unidentified flying objects tormented them. 

ZACK: But Gwen was, you know, sort of at the end of the rope and wasn't sure Terry wanted to talk to the media. And I said, look, I understand that, but I think this is incredible. People need to know that this is happening.

RAY: Desperate for help, they made the difficult decision to share their story with the world, hoping that someone, somewhere, could shed light… on this strange phenomenon.

[Intro Music]

RAY: The Uintah Basin isa region imbued with a rich tapestry of supernatural and mystical tales. The Navajo and Ute tribes of the region  have long shared stories of the Skinwalker, a malevolent shapeshifter who uses dark magic. These legends have become deeply ingrained in the area's cultural fabric.

When the Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847, they too formed a profound spiritual connection with the land, perceiving it as sacred. 

In the 1950s, UFO reports took prominence in the Uintah Basin, with locals claiming to have seen strange lights in the sky and bizarre aircraft performing incredible maneuvers. These sightings added to the area's reputation as a hotspot of unexplained phenomena, and some have even speculated that there may be a connection between UFOs and the legends of the Skinwalker.

Believing the Uintah Basin was a hotspot for UFO activity, Junior Hicks spent decades documenting sightings and encounters in the region which he recounted in his book, “The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist's Report”

ZACK: There were over a thousand cases of people who had come to Junior over those like three or four decades and said, you know, I saw this is what happened. Out of those 1000, 400 basically were good enough to make a book or were substantial enough where he felt like they were unexplained. And then out of those 400, there was seven in which the witnesses saw a creature or a being either in a craft, like through the port holes, you know, through windows or outside of the craft. So there were seven that were like that. So, you know, a lot going on out there. So Junior was the guy to talk to. 

RAY: Junior was the person that first put Zack in contact with Terry and Gwen, who had moved to what is now known as “Skinwalker Ranch”

ZACK:  I think Gwen was interested in talking to reporter because both she and Terry were just trying to stick it out, but they really were at the end of the their rope because at that point he had already showed the property to a family, but he didn't want to sell it to family and also to a hunting club that wanted to come out. And he didn't feel safe about that. And so I think Gwen in particular was really interested in getting the story out. I suppose just because they were so desperate, needed help and just were sick of going it alone, you know? And it was just like, Hey, it's time for people to know about this kind of thing. 

RAY: It was the Summer of 1994 when the Sherman family purchased the plot of land in the Uintah Basin. Terry, an established cattle breeder who planned to raise premium cattle for auction, moved with his wife Gwen and their two children, a teenage son and young daughter. The property sat abandoned for seven years prior to the family moving in. Before the Shermans, it was owned by the same family since the 1930s.. Scattered across the 480-acres were numerous abandoned homesteads the previous owners had let fall into disrepair. A single lonely dirt road led in, and out of the property.

The Sherman’s curiosity was peaked when they noticed the home’s doors were sealed with heavy locks. A closet even had a deadbolt from the inside as if to serve as a panic room. Outside the house were thick chains near each door, remnants where guard dogs once stood. What were the previous owners so intent on keeping out of the house?

The Sherman’s would soon learn, as an onslaught of unexplainable phenomenon attacked their family over the next two years. It was impossible to label exactly what was terrorizing the family, as it constantly evolved and changed; manifesting as lights in the sky, disembodied voices, unidentifiable wildlife, and much, much more. The elusive nature of these events echoed the trickster archetype, a figure known throughout mythology for its shape-shifting and deceptive abilities, blurring the lines between reality and the unknown.

Thomas Winterton, who today manages the ranch’s day-to-day operations, and is featured on History channel's series Skinwalker Ranch, gave us more background:

THOMAS:  The ranch is special in the fact that there's hot spots all over the world that are known for UFOs or maybe cattle mutilations or Poltergeist. But what makes Skinwalker Ranch special and unique is that there seems to be the entire gamut of activity that takes place there. Everything from reported portals, orbs, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings. Of course, The Legend of Skinwalker, the shapeshifting demonic being that roams along the ridge there. It is just all kinds of phenomena that covers the entire spectrum. So it's not any one thing. It rather seems to be a little bit of everything. 

RAY: One of their first days on the ranch the Sherman’s witnessed an abnormally large wolf approach one of their calves. The family was shocked - wolves are incredibly rare within Utah. So rare, that in 1995 only 20 were confirmed in the state. This wolf showed no fear towards the Sherman's, and walked with a confident slow trot up to the calves’ pen.

Colm Kellher, a biochemist who would later study the ranch, recounts the story in archival footage included in Jeremy Corbell’s documentary Hunt for the Skinwalker

[Audio sampled from Jeremy Corbell’s Hunt for the Skinwalker]

“The wolf stuck his head into the corral, grabbed the muzzle of the calf, in full view- tried to drag it out of the corral. The calf was going wild. So Terry and his dad went over with sticks and started beating on the wolf to try and get it to let go. Several times they beat on the wolf without any effect whatsoever. So Terry asked his son to go get his magnum. The son comes out, the wolf was still trying to drag the calf. Terry shot the wolf three or four times and it was increasingly close range. On the fourth shot the animal I believe let the calf go. But the animal didn’t - the wolf didn’t let out any yelps of pain. No sign of blood. No sign of distress. The animal let the calf go and looked at Terry.

Terry gets the 30-6 which can bring down an elk from a relatively long distance. Shot it at a distance of 20 feet, and this time there was a big recoil from the animal. The animal kind of, you know, recoiled. But it didn’t give off any p[ain. Backed off 10-15 feet, and Terry shot it a 6th time. This time he saw a bunch of flesh that the bullet exited. This time the animal just kind of turned on its heel and just trotted of, almost casually. Exactly where it came from. “

RAY: Terry and his son followed the animal’s tracks, but they mysteriously vanished with no further signs of the creature. It is reported they found a piece of the wolf’s flesh that had come off  from the last shot fired, yet it appeared old and rotten. The experience was unsettling and put the whole family on edge.

Was it possible a rogue wolf had wandered onto his farm and attacked the calf? After asking around town if others have had trouble with wolves, a friend who was a member of the local Ute tribe told Terry that there were songs about the “spirits and spooks” that stretch back generations about the exact area where his ranch was located. According to local legend, the ranch sits right in the path of what is known as a Skinwalker in Native American legend. Thomas gave more information:

THOMAS: So Skinwalker Ranch derives its name from the Skinwalker, which is a shapeshifting, demonic being that can take the shape of many different entities, whether it be the common one is a is a wolf that turns into a man, but it can also appear as a coyote or as a crow. And the legend of the ranch is, is that the Navajos used to be up in this area. And at one point, the Navajos and the Utes got into a skirmish and the Utes pushed the Navajos out of the Uintah Basin. And as they were doing this, the Navajo shaman cursed this specific area of ground that now is home to Skinwalker Ranch with the curse of the skinwalker.

RAY: And things only got weirder from there..

ZACK:  There were lights in the in the field and they thought this was when they first started seeing them, and they thought they were like kids on motorcycles or somebody driving an RV around or whatever. And then they saw them again later and they chased after them after the lights and the lights were going down to the end of the ranch, towards the creek where there's a fence and nothing else. And suddenly the lights just lift up 50 feet and go across the trees and disappear. The three different types of craft that they were seeing, this small six foot like box, like like a refrigerator were flying through the air. And there was like the second vehicles were like people like 40 to 60 feet long and they had short wings and they would emit like a red light that would go on to the ground. And Terry thought it was like some sort of grid that they were following, like maybe looking for something, I don't know. But this was something they saw from their front porch and above the ridge. There were these large portals opened up in the sky and behind on the other side you could see like a different sky, like it was an auburn color.And these were the ships that they saw more than a dozen one night come out and kind of - you know, they came out of those holes above the ridge, came down over the second pasture and did this grid pattern with the red wavy lines like they were looking for something. 

RAY: Over the years the Shermans reported all manner of strange flying crafts. Sometimes they seemed to be mechanical in nature, while other times they seemed to be made of pure energy. Most common was a blue ball of light, about the size of a basketball, which Terry reported became commonplace on the ranch. The lights looked like they were made up of gasses or liquid, and usually left a physiological effect on the family when they would get near. Their flight patterns indicated they were under intelligent  control.

Ryan Burns, a local property owner who lives near Skinwalker Ranch, told us a separate story about his own encounter with mysterious flying orbs in the region.

RYAN: The most fantastic things I've seen are what appear to be almost Volkswagen sized balls of light that will just kind of power up and cross. And they usually are going in the northwest and south east direction, either one way or the other. They're just cool. They just they're just they're as they want to be. So it's just kind of neat as long as you're able to see it.

RAY: Brett Hutchings, the pilot who discovered the Utah Monolith, had his own UFO story to tell us while flying near Skinwalker Ranch.

BRET: It's like coming in and it just stops literally in midair. And I don't know how familiar air with helicopters or airplanes that they have to have, not only like a landing light, but they have an anti-collision light. It didn't have any of those. It was just this incredibly intense, bright white light. It literally just stopped there and then reversed direction - straight the other direction. I kept looking at it going, what in the world is going on here? Anyway, this this light continued to go clear out across Park City, across the Uintah mountains, and then literally disappeared in the general vicinity of where Skinwalker Ranch is. And I went, okay, now I'm really freaked out. 

RAY: Terry Sherman had been out in the fields when he noticed one of the blue orbs hovering near his cattle. His dogs took off after the light, barking and chasing the orb into the tree line. Terry followed them, but soon lost sight of both the dogs and the light. 

The next morning, Terry’s dogs still hadn't returned. He resumed his search, and eventually stumbled upon three scorch marks on the ground with what appeared to be "shortening or butter" in the center. He also noticed other burns and scorches on the trees nearby. But the most chilling part was that his dogs were nowhere to be found. Terry believed that whatever these lights were, they had vaporized his dogs.

The threatening nature only continued to escalate. Cattle started to go missing or turn up dead under mysterious circumstances, and the Shermans began to fear for their own safety. We spoke with Linda Moulton Howe, an investigative journalist and Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, who is an expert on the cattle mutilation phenomenon and had an opportunity to interview the Shermans about their experiences.

LINDA: They went down that road and they were looking for one specific cow.They knew that they had gone down to get the cattle and they were coming back for her. Maybe they had gone only a hundred yards and that one they had picked - they decided to go back and make sure that they had that one particular cow with them, and they found the cow that they had seen. No more than 10 minutes earlier. And it is mutilated.

RAY: Terry Sherman was an experienced hunter and rancher, familiar with the signs of predatory attacks on his cattle. But what he found on his property was unlike anything he had ever seen before. The cuts on the cattle were surgically precise, with no blood or signs of a struggle at the scene. The loss of cattle was not just a financial burden, but a threat to the very livelihood of the family.

Sadly, they were not alone in their experience. The cattle mutilations were not limited to their property, but had been reported by other ranchers in the area as well. The strange and unexplained nature of the mutilations left ranchers and investigators alike baffled, with no clear explanation for the precise cuts and  organs which appeared to be surgically removed. As the mutilations continued to spread throughout the region, fear and uncertainty grew, and the Shermans found themselves at the center of a mystery that seemed to have no end in sight. Ryan Burns, who lives in the area, has heard many of these stories:

RYAN:  It happens way too often. It is, yeah. It's very common and just mysterious deaths are very common of animals, and it's controversial because it's something most people just try to avoid the loss in general so that usually the cattle just end up in a bone yard nearby and that's it.

RAY: In the midst of the chaos, Linda Moulton Howe had an opportunity to conduct an interview with Terry on Art Bell’s radio program Dreamlands with Artbell on June 30th 1996. Unfortunately, it seems the actual recording has been lost to time, but Linda recounted the experience for us:

LINDA: I had asked him a question that I often ask people. I wanted to know if he had ever seen something that he thought was like a craft. And he said, I looked out a window and then I could see orange lights down in the pasture about a quarter half a mile away. And he said, I just grabbed my rifle with the hunting scope. And he said, And I'm looking through and I can see these multiple orange windows and I know it is a craft. And he said, I just started running. I, I took off. I don't care. I want to confront this. When I ask him, when you get down there, what are you seeing? And he said, I got right under this thing. And he said, and then I couldn't believe it. I'm looking up through this window or something on the bottom. And there are two men there. He said, Well, there's a man. He's huge. He looks very human, but he's much bigger than we are. He said he had a full beard and he was dressed in what I this is a quote, “I would say it was military type dress, kind of charcoal, to dark gray. He goes on saying that this this man, 6 to 8 feet tall, the large man, is arguing with a smaller man with very fine features, narrow nose, very high, high cheekbones. He stressed that the ear tips were back more than a human's, that it had a cap on it.

RAY: Not only did the Sherman’s report seeing beings in the crafts but they also claimed to hear them:

ZACK: They were just out on the pasture and they heard voices talking like above them, that like 25 feet above it couldn't see anything. It was like a tree there. And Terry described the voices as being. There were two. He described them as male. One had a much deeper voice than the other, and they were talking in some kind of language that Terry said was very choppy. So Terry decided just, you know, looking up this, we can hear you. And one of the voices, the one of the lower voices started laughing like a rolling laugh. And then apparently the conversation between the two disembodied voices continued for a little bit and the dogs got freaked out.

RAY: Even inside their home there was no relief from the unexplainable phenomena. They would see apparitions and shadows moving through the house, blinding lights flashing and shadowy creatures outside their windows. Tools and other items would vanish or appear in unusual places, as if moved by some unseen force.

ZACK: She brought the groceries home one day and put them up. And then she went to another room and came back like 5 minutes later. And on the kitchen counter, all of the groceries were back in bags, totally repacked differently, you know. But she had just put them up. It's like, okay, someone want me to think I'm losing my mind? Terry, you know, Terry is like a salt of the earth guy, just a normal human being who just wants to raise his family out in the you in the Uintah Basin where he’s lived for a long time and has relatives who wanted to breed cattle. And he's very sincere guy. And you can tell that, Terry, he just he just wanted it to go away. They just want to live a normal life. They just wanted it to go away and they didn't understand what was going on. And the fact that he was hesitant to say a lot at first and just sort of the way he said everything and he knew this is my guy is not a guy who's doing it for publicity.

RAY: The strangeness of it all left the family unable to sleep, and when they finally were able to, they were plagued by horrible nightmares. As the nights wore on, the sense of unease and terror grew, until it seemed that there was no escape from the relentless onslaught of paranormal activity. The Shermans were at their breaking point, and they knew that something had to be done before it was too late:

Could what the Sherman's had experienced have a non-paranormal explanation? We spoke with Emeritus Professor Chris French, a psychologist, author, and well-known skeptic.. 

CHRIS: I head the anomalistic psychology research unit at Goldsmiths and anomlistic psychology is essentially the psychology of weird stuff. So it typically takes a fairly skeptical approach insofar as the main emphasis is on seeing if we can come up with non paranormal explanations for what appeared to be paranormal events and experiences and wherever possible, put those explanations to the test and see if we can produce evidence in support of those non paranormal explanations. 

RAY: We asked what conclusions we might draw from the Shermans' ordeal.

CHRIS: Now, you know, this is pretty much what I do full time. I'm interested in these things. You have to be slightly weird yourself to be interested in stuff you don't actually believe in. But I think it's. I think this kind of claim they are an important part of the human experience. People do have weird experiences. There's no doubt at all about that. So what's going on? Is it genuinely paranormal or are there other explanations? If there are other explanations, that's telling us something really important about how the human mind works. So either way, it's worth taking seriously. You’re typically dealing with people's reports of what happened. Not alway. Sometimes you might have some kind of objective recording equipment that was available at the time, but usually you're dealing with people's reports of what happened. That's different to actually being present at the time and been able to investigate things at the time. We know that human memory is unreliable. Eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable 

RAY: Regardless of the lack of concrete evidence beyond eyewitness testimony, the story of Skinwalker Ranch had caught the attention of Robert Bigelow.

We spoke with Ralph Blumenthal, an author and journalist who wrote for the New York Times between 1964-2009. He’s investigated and written extensively on the topic of UFOs, and is very familiar with Robert Bigelow’s research on the phenomenon:

RALPH: Yeah, Robert Bigelow, who I wrote up in a separate piece in The Times, because he was very interested in a wide range of paranormal activity, including survival of consciousness and life after death. Robert Bigelow is an aerospace entrepreneur, a billionaire who made his money in the hotel business. He made so much money and was so interested in aerospace that he he built up his aerospace business to the point where he has a habitat in the International Space Station.

RAY: In 1995, he founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS. It was through NIDS that Bigelow became involved with the Skinwalker Ranch case, bringing his team of researchers and high-tech equipment to the ranch in an attempt to uncover the truth behind the mysterious occurrences.

 In 1996, Bigelow flew to Vernal in Utah to meet with the Shermans, offering to buy their ranch for approximately $200,000. The deal was closed in September, and the Shermans finally left the property they had come to fear.

With the sale of the property finalized, the Shermans signed a nondisclosure agreement with Robert Bigelow, which has prevented them from speaking publicly about their experiences in detail.

NIDs turned the ranch into a paranormal laboratory, with cameras and sensors placed throughout the property to monitor for any unusual activity. They also sent letters to surrounding ranchers, informing them of the mutilations and urging them to report any similar incidents.

In a telephone interview, John Alexander, a former Army colonel who headed the paranormal research division of NIDS, described their approach as 'good, high-quality research using a standard scientific approach.'

The phenomenon studied at Skinwalker Ranch was described by Alexander as 'precognitive sentient intelligence. He noted that there was a trickster element to the encounters, with no clear patterns or repetition in the activity. Despite this, the team at NIDS was committed to their research, using part of a secret $22 million congressional fund established by senator Harry Reid to research UFO phenomenon.

RALPH: Bigelow did get a good portion of that money, but he put out a lot of reports, some of it, many of which were public. by the way, he he farmed out the money to different university professors who did all kinds of research. So we know where some of that money went. Some of it remains classified. So so we don't know.

Bigelow’s involvement, and the use of secret government funds to conduct research, make this an extraordinarily strange case, and lends credibility to the reports, as pointed out by Ryan Burns:

RYAN: Robert Bigelow once said aliens are here and they're all around us. And when he made that comment, he spoke as if the answer was right in front of us in plain sight.

[Bigelow sampled from 60 mins clip]: “There has been and is an existing presence, an E.T. presence. Now I spend millions and millions, I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else the United States has ever spent on this subject. He was very intimately involved with the property. So it's it's something that I take to heart.” 

RYAN: And he was very intimately involved with the property. So it's something that I take to heart. 

RAY: While NIDs has never shared any definitive proof of the phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch the investigators did reportedly have many experiences. These encounters can be found in Colm Kelleher and George Knapps book, Hunt for the Skinwalker. Colm Kelleher is the Deputy Administrator of NIDS and  George Knapp is an award winning investigative journalist.

One of the most infamous stories is how one of the investigators reported to see some type of portal open on the property, and a unknown creature step out:

ZACK: And then they see this this creature, a humanoid like creature crawling through, crawling through it as if trying to make its way through the tunnel or through the light, or however you want to put it. And then this creature comes out, sets its feet on the ground. It's walking now. The light disappears.  They don't see anything of this being after that. But yeah, they saw basically a hole open in the sky, although it was just above the ground, saw a creature come in and out of it. 

RAY: As NIDS continued their investigation at Skinwalker Ranch, they remained cautious about making conclusions. A NIDS spokesman told reporters that 'we know so little in terms of what the overall scope of these phenomena are that it's just embarrassing to try and make some conclusions at this point.'

The spokesman went on to describe the selective nature of the anomaly, noting that it seemed to be particular about how it exposed itself and to whom. He emphasized that creating a spectacle or 'tailgate, football stadium type of atmosphere' was unlikely to continue the activity they were observing. 

ZACK:  Well, the problem is the ranch doesn’t really cooperate because it doesn't give you enough tangible evidence and it doesn't want you to know this for example. One thing they did is they put up cameras, three different cameras on three different poles in the middle pasture below. The activity was happening and each camera could see the other camera Okay. And then they had one day where just all the cameras went blank. These cameras were taped on to the poles and they were all recording at the same time. In one instance, all of the instrumentation from the cameras, the tape, everything was stripped, pulled off. They were all shut down at the same time, and none of the camera angles showed anything going on with the other camera It happens instantly. Nothing can be seen. And the end result is that they can't film anything that is happening in the pasture,, so obviously somebody doesn't want them to have the cameras up and whoever doesn't want them to have the cameras up has the ability to get rid of those cameras without being seen in less than a second.

RAY: Dr. French has a different perspective on the seemingly intelligent and elusive nature of the investigators experiences.

CHRIS:  Well, it turns into a non falsifiable hypothesis, which in scientific terms is not great If you've got this ready, get out. For a complete lack of evidence. I mean, there's there's other claims, obviously, that there is some kind of conspiracy, possibly involving, you know, the government. But again, it's a very kind of convenient way to explain the complete lack of evidence or even evidence that seems to count against your paranormal hypothesis. Well, that's been that misinformation, disinformation that's been put there by the conspirators. So, you know, it just I think basically it's not a very convincing line of argument. If people can see things with their eyes, that implies that, you know, there is there is light that is hitting their retina. That light should also affect a camera. It's very convenient that people can argue, well, it just doesn't you know, it's I don't find that convincing.

RAY: After years of studying at Skinwalker Ranch, Robert Bigelow eventually sold the property to a Utah businessman named Brandon Fugal in 2016. Fugal, a successful real estate developer, had long been fascinated by the strange stories surrounding the ranch and was eager to take on the challenge of owning it.

Since then, Fugal has turned Skinwalker Ranch into a popular reality television show on History Channel. The show promises to reveal the secrets of the ranch, featuring interviews with witnesses and dramatic reenactments

Thomas Winterton, who works closely with Brandon and is featured on the television program added this:

THOMAS:  Our work on the ranch is ongoing. The investigation started the day Brandon bought the ranch, and it's been going nonstop since. Even though we're doing this television series and we've done some filming during the last two summers, when the cameras go down and the production crew leaves, we actually get back to science as actually, you know, the show can be somewhat disruptive to the science sometimes just with the filming schedule and the way that we have to work around the production. We're always trying to add new and better equipment, whether that be cameras, whether that be sensors, we're constantly upgrading our infrastructure. 

RAY: From cutting-edge technology to rigorous data collection, the Skinwalker team believes they're on the forefront of discovering something beyond our current understanding of reality. But not everyone shares this belief. 

Dr. French urges everyone to consider the evidence or, more specifically, the lack thereof. 

CHRIS: I just have not seen any convincing evidence that there's anything that needs to be explained that we we've got kind of lots of anecdotal evidence from sources that may or may not be reliable. There are certainly kinds of factors that would lead people to want to kind of keep this legend running. But, you know, basically the bottom line for me would be would just just show me some hard evidence.

RAY: The vast, starry sky above the ranch keeps its secrets well-hidden, leaving us to speculate about the true nature of the strange tales told. 

Whether supernatural elements are at work or if these stories are simply the result of human imagination and mythmaking, it forces us to ponder our place in the universe, and what mysteries it holds.