1 MINUTE AGO: Travis Taylor From “Skinwalker Ranch” Is Breaking News, It’s Horrifying

Just moments ago, Travis Taylor — one of the lead investigators from Skinwalker Ranch — reportedly shared a startling update that has sent shockwaves through the paranormal community. What he is said to have revealed may change how people think about unexplained phenomena forever. In this 30-minute faceless documentary, we break down what Travis Taylor allegedly disclosed, the context around his announcement, and why so many viewers are reacting with disbelief and concern. From unexplained events captured on ranch footage to intense scientific investigation behind the scenes, this story uncovers a dimension of the mystery that few expected to come to light.

uh one of the scientists uh investigating Skinwalker Ranch and uh I would like to give you my take on the uh strange phenomena that I’ve seen at Skinwalker Ranch and >> there is a moment in a Reddit AMA that Travis Taylor gave a few years back where someone asked him point blank, “What is the single most unsettling thing you have personally witnessed at Skinwalker Ranch?” And he paused. You could feel the pause even in text. And then he wrote, “I’m still amazed to this day and still have a hard time believing what I saw.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t dramatize it. He just let it sit there like a stone dropped into still water. That is the thing about Travis Taylor that separates him from every other face you will see on paranormal television. He is not a performer to be scared. He is a man who spent decades designing weapons systems for the United States government, who held a classified Pentagon position that the Department of Defense itself has now confirmed, who has two doctoral degrees and four other graduate degrees and more than 25 peer-reviewed publications, and who looked at what he found at a 500 acre property in the Utah desert and came away with his understanding of the universe, in his own words, shaken to the core. The headlines circulating online about Taylor right now range from dramatic to outright fabricated.
Some of them claim he was hospitalized for radiation poisoning in late 2025.
Some of them claim an entire episode of the show was censored and suppressed.
Some claim he called for the ranch to be permanently shut down. Most of those specific claims cannot be verified by any credible source and appear to be generated by AI powered clickbait operations designed to harvest views on YouTube and Tik Tok. But here is what the people behind those videos either don’t know or don’t care about. The real story of Travis Taylor and Skinwalker Ranch is more unsettling than anything they invented. A sitting United States senator funneled $22 million in classified Pentagon funding toward this property. A Defense Intelligence Agency officer visited the ranch, had what he described as a paranormal experience, and designed a secret government program around it. Scientists with top secret clearances, PhDs from major research universities, and decades of classified defense work spent years at this location and came away saying they could not explain what they encountered. And Travis Taylor quietly was at the center of all of it, running experiments on a television show while simultaneously serving as the classified chief scientist of a Pentagon task force investigating the same category of phenomena. The question worth asking is not whether the clickbait headlines are true. They are mostly not. The question worth asking is why the true version of this story, which is far stranger than the fake one, has been so consistently buried beneath the noise.
Travis Taylor was born on July 24th, 1968 in Decar, Alabama in Morgan County.
And he grew up in a small town called Somerville, about an hour’s drive west of Huntsville. Huntsville in the late 1960s and 1970s was not just a small southern city. It was rocket country.
Verer von Brown had come there after World War II to build America’s space program at Redstone Arsenal. And the entire culture of the region had been shaped by it. Engineers everywhere.
Rocket hardware visible from the highway. Children who grew up understanding that the sky was not a ceiling but a starting point. Travis Taylor’s father was a machinist at Wild Laboratories, working alongside remnants of von Brown’s team on early satellite programs. The son absorbed all of it. By the time he was old enough to build a radio telescope in his backyard, which he did with a neighbor as a teenager, he had already decided that the universe was the most interesting subject available and that he intended to spend his life studying it. That homemade telescope won the Alabama State Science Fair. It also caught the attention of the United States Army, which invited him into a cooperative education program at Redstone Arsenal while he was still an undergraduate at Auburn University.
He was 17 years old when he started working on directed energy weapons systems as part of Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative. The program they were building was designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles from space. He was a teenager in Alabama building components for one of the most ambitious weapons programs in American history and simultaneously trying to finish his electrical engineering degree on time. He did finish it in 1991 and then he never really stopped going to school. Over the next two decades, Taylor would earn six degrees, a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Auburn, master’s degrees in physics, mechanical and aerospace engineering and astronomy, and two doctorates, one in optical science and engineering, and one in aerospace systems engineering.
Four of those degrees came from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one from Auburn, and one from the University of Western Sydney in Australia. He became a licensed professional engineer in Alabama. He published more than 25 peer-reviewed technical papers in physics, optics, and military defense.
He spent over 25 years working for the army, NASA, and the intelligence community on programs ranging from advanced propulsion to very large space telescopes to quantum entanglement to classified intelligence disciplines he cannot discuss. He held an above top secret security clearance. He also found time to write more than 20 science fiction novels, record music with rock bands he was the lead singer of, earn a black belt in martial arts, fly his own plane, run triathlons, and raise a family in the same small Alabama town where he grew up. He is, by any reasonable measurement, one of the most overprepared human beings ever to appear on a cable television show about UFOs.
The property that would eventually become the center of Travis Taylor’s most astonishing professional chapter sits in a remote stretch of West Uenta County, Utah in the Uenta basin, not far from the Uenta and Uray Indian Reservation.
It comprises about 512 acres of high desert terrain with a mesa at its southern end, a small river, open fields, and the kind of silence at night that cities have forgotten exists. The Native American traditions of the region include the figure of the skinw walker, drawn from Navajo belief, not Ute, a malevolent shape-shifting entity tied to witchcraft. And local legend holds that a curse was placed on this particular land during historical conflicts between tribes.
That legend is very old and for most of the 20th century it sat quietly in the background while a succession of ranching families worked the land without incident. The Meyers family owned the property for approximately 60 years before selling it in 1994.
In 60 years, they reported nothing unusual. The family who bought it in 1994.
The two Shermans, a couple named Terry and Gwen, were different. Within months of moving in, they reported encounters that, if taken at face value, suggest the land had become something else entirely. A wolf the size of a pony that survived multiple gunshot wounds and finally walked away without injury.
Cattle found dead in the fields with wounds so precise they looked surgical, drained of blood with no tracks around them in the soil. Orange circles of light drifting above the property at night. Blue orbs moving against the wind, changing direction on command, hovering and watching. Disembodied voices from directions where no person stood. Terry Sherman was not a dramatic man by any account. He had bought the property to run cattle on. He wanted to farm. What he ended up doing instead was documenting the incidents in a journal that would eventually reach the attention of a Las Vegas billionaire with an obsessive interest in exactly this category of stranges. The Shermans sold the key property in 1996 for approximately $200,000.
A June of that year newspaper article had described their experiences, and the timing was not coincidental.
Robert Bigalow had been waiting. Robert Bigalow had made his fortune in real estate and hospitality, hotel chains, apartment complexes, commercial development across the American Southwest. and then devoted a significant portion of that fortune to a singular preoccupation, the question of whether humanity is alone in the universe and what that question might mean for the nature of reality itself.
He founded the National Institute for Discovery Science in Las Vegas in 1995, staffed it with credentialed researchers, including biochemists, physicists, and former intelligence officers. And when the Sherman family’s story reached him, he acquired the property. He deployed investigators to the ranch and kept them there, sometimes living on the premises for nearly a decade. He installed surveillance equipment, brought in veterinarians, sent soil samples to laboratories. His chief scientist, Colum Keller, who held a doctorate in biochemistry from Trinity College Dublin, led the field investigation.
Physicist Eric Davis, who had a doctorate from the University of Arizona and later worked for the Air Force Research Laboratory, participated.
Jacques Valet, the French American astronomer and computer scientist who had been studying UAP phenomena since the 1960s and whom Steven Spielberg used as a model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind served as an adviser. They collected reports of close to 100 incidents involving cattle mutilations, aerial phenomena, large unidentified animals, and equipment malfunctions.
And then in October 2004, Bigalow dissolved the National Institute for Discovery Science. The official reason was that anomalous activity at the ranch had declined substantially since the year 2000. The uncomfortable truth which Keller himself acknowledged was that despite nearly a decade of effort by credentialed scientists with serious equipment, they had been unable to produce evidence consistent with scientific publication, nothing publishable, nothing peer reviewable.
The phenomena, whatever they were, appeared to resist documentation.
The cameras would fail at the critical moment. The instruments would give readings that made no sense and then go quiet. The stories accumulated without resolution and eventually Bigalow stepped back. But he did not sell the property. He kept it, maintained a caretaker on site and waited. In 2007, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer named James Latsky read a book about the property. The book was Hunt for the Skinwalker, co-authored by Colum Keller and Las Vegas investigative journalist George Knap, published in 2005, and it described the National Institute for Discovery Scienc’s decade of investigation in detail that no mainstream press outlet had yet attempted. Lotsky held a doctorate in nuclear engineering. He was not a credulous person. He visited the ranch on a tour arranged by Bigalow’s team and by his own account witnessed something he could not explain in the main house on the property. Within a year, he had designed a classified government program around what he believed the ranch might represent as a national security concern. The program was called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program or AWSAP.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who had a long-standing relationship with George Knap and who had developed his own views about UAP phenomena over years of conversations with Bigalow, secured congressional funding for the program alongside Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inuier of Hawaii. The amount secured was $22 million appropriated through the defense budget. In September of 2008, a contract was awarded to Bigalow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. A subsidiary created specifically to receive this contract, which was the only company that submitted a bid. Bigalow put his own resources behind the government funding and deployed investigators to the ranch under official government mandate. DIA personnel visited the property. Some of them, according to internal reports, came away describing anomalous phenomena they had not encountered anywhere else in their careers. The program operated from approximately 2008 through 2011, produced over 100 technical reports, and documented more than 200 anomalous incidents at the property over 5 years.
It also produced something stranger.
Reports that the phenomena did not stay at the ranch. Researchers described returning home to find their electronics behaving erratically.
Equipment malfunctioning in their personal labs. Aerial phenomena appearing in their neighborhoods that mirrored what they had seen on the property in Utah. Keller described this as the hitchhiker effect. the suggestion that whatever exists at Skinwalker Ranch was under some conditions capable of following investigators when they left.
No peer-reviewed study has validated this claim. It is based entirely on the accounts of people who worked at the ranch and who had obvious reasons, professional investment, personal belief to interpret strange events in a certain way. But it is not nothing either when the person making the claim has a doctorate in biochemistry, worked under a classified government contract, and is describing what he observed firsthand.
It was in the context of this institutional history, government programs, classified investigations, tens of millions of dollars spent by both private and federal sources, and still no publishable results. that Brandon Fugal entered the picture in the spring of 2016.
Fugal is the chairman of Kier’s International in Utah, one of the Inter Mountain West’s most prominent commercial real estate developers with an estimated net worth near 800 million salad dollars. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and by his own account, a deeply spiritual man as well as a serious businessman. He purchased the ranch through a holding company called Adamantium Real Estate LLC and remained anonymous for nearly 4 years. He hired his own principal investigator, Eric Bard, a physicist who had been studying the property and monitoring it with sensors and surveillance equipment. He installed new cameras, hardened the perimeter, trademarked the name Skinwalker Ranch, and approached the History Channel about a television series. The network said yes, but on one condition, they needed someone to design and conduct scientific experiments on camera. Bard was an observer and data collector. They needed someone who could build experiments, run them, and explain the results to an audience. The person they found was Travis Taylor. When Fugle’s production team first contacted Taylor, his initial reaction was profound skepticism. He told them in the first conversation that he assumed what was happening on the property was either Russian or Chinese intelligence operations or someone running technology experiments without authorization.
or possibly the skinwalker people themselves, staging events to sell books and TV shows. He was brought to the ranch in 2019 before season 1 filming began and given access to the data Bard had collected. He spent time with the surveillance footage, the instrument readings, the logs of equipment failures and signal anomalies. He asked for access to experiment rather than just observe. Fugal gave it to him and something changed. He has never been entirely specific about the moment when his skepticism shifted, but in interview after interview he describes the transition in similar terms. His 80% certainty that what he was seeing was not a natural phenomenon. His 99% certainty it was not man-made. his description of technologies that exhibited in his words feats way beyond physics we currently understand today and his flat consistent refusal to allow his wife and children to set foot inside the property boundaries. The show premiered on the History Channel on March 31st, 2020 at 10:00 at night. The pilot drew 2.7 million viewers, an extraordinary number for a cable premiere, and the show has not stopped since. Six full seasons have aired as of early 2026.
A seventh is confirmed and expected to debut on the History Channel in the summer of 2026.
The incidents documented on camera have escalated in scope and strangeness with each passing season.
In season 1, Taylor opened a manhole cover at a location called Homestead 2 and experienced what he described as symptoms of radiation sickness in the hours and days that followed. He confirmed this in interviews. I never once thought I’d have radiation sickness in my life. Ionizing radiation had been measured at the site before he opened the cover. What had caused it to accumulate there at that level in the middle of an open field in rural Utah was never determined. Thomas Winterton, the ranch’s superintendent and awintent Basin native who has managed the property for years, developed an unexplained medical condition involving a large protrusion on his skull. the scalp separating from the cranium in a way that doctors who examined him on camera described as having no clear explanation.
This condition preceded the show and has recurred multiple times during filming.
In season 3, the team launched a large rocket from inside the property’s triangle area, a specific section of the ranch that instruments have repeatedly flagged as a focal point for anomalous readings, and watched the rocket suffer catastrophic failure on the launch pad.
A backup rocket was launched and reportedly deflected mid-flight by something no instrument detected at the time. In the immediate aftermath, multiple team members reported seeing unidentified aerial objects above the mesa. Season 4 brought rockets fired from inside the triangle that flew in curved trajectories that violated their expected ballistic path. High-speed cameras operating at a thousand frames per second, capturing a large anomalous circular area above the triangle at approximately 31 ft of altitude. and the discovery of a carcass in a stream on the property that investigators described as potentially belonging to a prehistoric dire wolf. Season 6, which aired in the summer of 2025, escalated further, an apparent massive invisible spherical boundary encompassing the triangle and much of the property. a drone that reportedly froze in midair and was pushed back 200 f feet by something unseen. And most significantly, drilling into the mesa at approximately 450 ft of depth, where the team retrieved material described as ceramic, heatresistant, and bearing structural similarities to protective coatings used on spacecraft. Whether that characterization is accurate, whether the material is natural or artificial, whether it means anything at all, none of that has been independently confirmed by outside researchers. The show films what it finds and presents interpretations.
Independent verification remains absent.
That absence is the most honest thing that can be said about Skinwalker Ranch in 2026.
The parallel story, the one that most of the show’s audience had no access to until 2022, was happening simultaneously in classified facilities in Washington DC and at Defense Contractor offices across the country. In 2019, the Pentagon established the unidentified aerial phenomena task force under the Office of Naval Intelligence.
J. Stratton, who had worked in intelligence for years and who had encountered Skinwalker Ranch through the AWSAP investigation, became the task force’s director. He needed a chief scientist.
He recruited Travis Taylor. Taylor accepted the position and managed two separate sets of non-disclosure agreements. one for the television show he was filming in Utah, one for the classified government program he was now helping to run. He helped write the 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence Preliminary Assessment of UAP incidents, a 9-page unclassified report that reviewed 144 events and resolved only one of them, a deflating balloon. For all the others, the assessment concluded that lack of data prevented definitive explanations and that a small number of cases appeared to exhibit what it called unusual flight characteristics.
Taylor’s role in producing that document was not disclosed publicly until June 2022 when George Knapp reported it.
Pentagon spokesperson Susan Guff confirmed it, stating that Taylor did serve in a lead role at the task force and was informally referred to as the chief scientist.
Taylor had, in other words, been doing something genuinely extraordinary for the better part of 3 years, investigating unexplained aerial phenomena on thou television for millions of viewers while simultaneously holding a classified government position investigating the same category of phenomena for the United States military. He appeared on the History Channel and he briefed Pentagon officials. He launched rockets in Utah and he reviewed classified incident reports from military pilots. He is the only person in American history, as far as anyone knows, to have done both things at the same time. The critics have been consistent and their objections are not frivolous. Robert Schaefer, a longtime UFO skeptic who has followed Skinwalker Ranch for decades, points to the most inconvenient fact in the entire story. The Meyers family lived on that property for approximately 60 years before selling it in 1994 and reported absolutely nothing strange. 60 years of ranching on the same land, the same mea, the same triangle area that the show films obsessively and nothing.
It was only after the Shermans arrived, sold their story to the press, and transferred the property to Bigalow that the phenomena began to accumulate.
Sheffer suggests the Shermans invented their experiences before selling to what he describes as a gullible buyer. A Penn State historian who studies the sociology of paranormal belief has noted that the property has not been subject to sustained critical examination by independent academic researchers with no financial or ideological interest in a particular outcome. A British skeptics publication reviewed some of the most dramatic footage from the show and suggested that what appears to be impossibly fast objects crossing the frame are likely common insects flying close to the camera lens. Their speed an artifact of proximity.
The FBI investigated cattle mutilations across the western United States in the late 1970s, commissioning a formal study by retired agent Kenneth Raml in New Mexico. His conclusion delivered January 15th, 1980 was unambiguous.
None of the cases he investigated involved anything other than common predators and natural decomposition.
Soft tissue, eyes, lips, genitals, is consumed first by scavengers.
Bloating from decomposition gases causes skin to split in ways that can look to an untrained observer like clean surgical incisions. Maggots remove tissue with remarkable efficiency. The effects that generate headlines about surgical precision are, according to veterinary science, entirely consistent with what happens to an unattended carcass in a field. These are not fringe positions. They are the positions of scientists and investigators who followed the evidence to where it led rather than to where it would have been exciting to arrive. And the people who hold them are not stupid. They are asking with appropriate rigor why two decades of investigation by credentialed researchers with millions of dollars in equipment and funding have failed to produce a single peer-reviewed paper confirming any paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch. It is a fair question.
It does not have a satisfying answer yet. The fabricated headlines are worth addressing directly because they reveal something important about how information moves in the digital age.
Dozens of YouTube videos and Tik Tok clips have claimed in recent months that Travis Taylor was hospitalized for radiation poisoning in late 2025, that a full episode of the show was censored before broadcast, that Taylor called for the entire ranch to be permanently shut down, and that evidence of deadly electromagnetic anomalies and crystalline soil formations forced a production crisis. None of these specific claims can be traced to any credible source. No History Channel press release, no hospital records, no internal production communication, no corroborating statement from Taylor, from Fugal, from anyone associated with the show. What they can be traced to is a category of website and social media channel that generates AI written pseudojournalistic content designed to match the search terms people use when they look for dramatic news about a well-known personality.
The content follows a template. A real person, a real show with real dramatic footage, a real history of genuine incidents, and then entirely invented narrative layered on top of it all.
invented hospitalizations in quiet recovery rooms, invented confrontations with network executives, invented government seizures and shutdown orders, all described in novelistic pros calculated to look like journalism and sound like a breaking news report. The people clicking on those videos are not foolish. They are people who watched the show, who found the real incidents compelling, and who were served content by recommendation algorithms that had no mechanism for distinguishing real from fabricated.
The distinction matters. What actually happened to Taylor at Homestead 2 in season 1 is documented on camera and confirmed in his own words. What allegedly happened in a hospital room in late 2025 is fiction. The show has been confirmed for a seventh season. Travis Taylor continues to promote it actively on social media. Brandon Fugal announced renewed production in August 2025.
The shutdown never happened. The band episode does not appear to exist. And the hospitalization, as best as any credible source can determine, is a story someone’s algorithm wrote. The question that none of that settles. The question that keeps the show running and keeps researchers flying to a remote corner of Utah and kept the Pentagon funding a classified program for years is the underlying one, which is what, if anything, is actually there. The honest answer in early 2026, after decades of investigation by some of the most credentialed people who have ever taken paranormal claims seriously, is that nobody knows. The phenomena described by the Sherman family, by Nid’s investigators, by Aawsap personnel, and by the television crew are internally consistent in ways that are at least interesting. The same locations, the Triangle, the Mesa, the Homesteads generate anomalous instrument readings across different ownership eras and different teams with different equipment. The electromagnetic anomalies documented on the show are real in the sense that they can be measured. What causes them is undetermined. The ceramic material pulled from the mesa at 450 ft is real in the sense that it physically exists. What it is and how it got there has not been independently confirmed.
The UAP sightings documented on camera are real in the sense that the cameras captured something. Whether those somethings are insects, optical artifacts, advanced technology, or something that has no name yet is an open question. Travis Taylor, who designed weapon systems for the United States Army and helped write classified government assessments of unidentified aerial phenomena for the United States military, looked at all of it and said in a verified, sourced interview, “The phenomena we saw exhibited technological feats way beyond physics we currently understand today.” And then he drove back to Somerville, Alabama, and did not allow his family to visit the property.
His car, he has reported, sometimes starts and stops by itself when he is parked near the house. His laboratory equipment in Alabama behaves erratically after trips to Utah. He has described nightmares in the months following ranch visits that outnumber everything he experienced in the previous 50 years of his life combined.
These are unverified personal accounts and there is no way to know what they mean. But they are made by a man with two doctoral degrees who spent decades working on classified programs for the United States government and he is not performing them for an audience. He says them in interviews where nobody is filming his reaction. He says them like someone telling you something he wishes were not true. What do you do with that?
That is the question the show never quite answers and probably never can.
The skeptics are right that 60 years of peaceful ranching on the same land preceded the entire phenomena narrative.
They are right that no peer-reviewed evidence has ever been published. They are right that everyone with a financial interest in the property’s paranormal reputation has an obvious reason to sustain that reputation. And Travis Taylor, the man with more scientific credentials than anyone else who has investigated this story, is right that he cannot explain what he measured. Both of those things are true simultaneously and they do not resolve neatly. The universe, it turns out, is not obligated to give clean answers. The history of science is a long record of things that were real before they were explicable and things that were explicable before they were real. And the distance between those two categories has always been where the most interesting questions live. Whether what is happening at Skinwalker Ranch belongs in the first category or the second, whether it is something waiting to be understood or something waiting to be debunked is the kind of question that probably requires more patience than any of us are comfortable with.
Travis Taylor has driven out to that property in the Utah desert more times than he can count. He has launched rockets and measured radiation and drilled into the mesa and stood at the edge of the triangle at night with instruments that cost more than most people’s houses. And he has come away with fewer certainties than when he arrived, which is either the most honest thing a scientist can say or the most frightening. Depending on the day, it is probably both. What do you think is actually happening out there? Let us know in the comments and subscribe so you never miss another story like this