The most BELIEVABLE alien encounter | The Skinwalker Ranch story

Some call this location the most paranormal location on the planet. Others call this whole thing just a big hoax.
But what is undeniably true — and frankly, what makes this case so much more interesting — is that unlike the vast majority of paranormal stories and claims, this case was put to an enormous amount of scientific scrutiny.

In fact, there was a decade-long study done on this case where PhDs and scientists converged on this one location and basically studied, around the clock, all these claims of the paranormal that were happening in the area.

And after a decade of research, the findings are pretty, pretty mind-blowing.
The case that I’m referring to is none other than the very famous Skinwalker Ranch.

So the “too long, didn’t read” version of this story is:
You have a family that purchases a ranch out in Utah. As soon as they move in, they start noticing some pretty bizarre things around their property — everything from livestock going missing or being harmed, to strange sightings in the woods of creatures and lights in the sky.

They eventually report it to the news, and that news story gets picked up by a couple of other outlets. A billionaire, who is obsessed with researching the paranormal, sees the story.
He buys the property and installs an entire team of scientists and researchers to basically try to figure out what was happening at this ranch.

They spent 10 years studying it.
The outcome?
Well, turns out some strange things really were happening there.

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Alright, on with the story.

In the northeastern corner of Utah lies a 500-acre plot of desert land where a ranch sits — Skinwalker Ranch.
It was built in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and it was actually built on a piece of land that had apparently been cursed prior to its construction.

The Navajo tribe had a feud with the Utes Native American tribe.
The Utes were selling off other Native Americans they had captured — selling them into slavery to the United States.
So the Navajo, who had previously lived in the area where the ranch was built, were forced off their land.
As the Utes came in and started rounding them up, the Navajo cursed the land with what’s called the Skinwalker Curse.

The idea was to torment the Ute tribe for the hardships they had inflicted.
The Skinwalker Curse — legend has it — is a curse where witches descend on the area and take the form (or wear the skin) of various predatory animals in the region — namely large wolves and foxes.
They inhabit those bodies and terrorize anyone living on the cursed land.

At some point, this ranch was built on that cursed land.
It wasn’t until many years later, when owners of the ranch started seeing predatory animals doing very strange things in and around the property, that they researched the area and learned about this curse.

And before long, the nickname stuck.

In 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased Skinwalker Ranch.
It had been abandoned by the previous owners for a few years, so when they bought it, they got it for way below market price.

They were thrilled.
They bred cattle and now had 500 acres for their herd to free-roam — a dream purchase.

So when they finally moved in — literally the day they moved in — they didn’t care that the grass was overgrown, or that things looked in disrepair.
In fact, when they entered the homestead (the house on the property), they were so excited that they overlooked some strange things they immediately noticed.

Every window had a deadbolt on it.
The inside and outside of every door in the house — not just doors leading outside, but doors between rooms — had locks on both sides.

They also noticed big spikes driven into the ground at the front and back doors, with massive chains coming off of them — clearly meant for some very powerful guard dogs.

They figured maybe the previous owners were a bit paranoid — it’s a huge, isolated property, after all.
So it didn’t raise many red flags.

To be honest, if I moved into a property where every door and window had multiple locks, and there were chains for guard dogs, I’d ask a few questions.
But Terry and Gwen were just too excited.

So on move-in day, they had family over helping them offload trucks and move things into the homestead.
You have to remember: the house sits basically in the middle of the property, and the land around it is mostly open desert — you can see for miles, aside from a few wooded areas.

As they’re offloading stuff from the truck…

That are, you know, basically forests. And as they’re offloading some of the stuff into the house, Terry looks out at one of these tree lines and he notices this huge wolf, or what looks like a wolf, pretty well off in the distance. It’s meandering its way over towards them, but it’s far enough off that this is not enough to be totally worried about it. After all, I mean, Terry was a rancher, and his family were fairly rugged. They only carried weapons, and they were used to, you know, protecting their livestock from predators. So this was not a, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe a wolf is near us.” It was more like, “Okay, let’s make a note that there’s a wolf walking towards us.”

And so Terry does. He tells his family, “Hey guys, just so you know, there’s a wolf coming towards us right now.” The whole family is now standing near the truck, and they’re watching this wolf. Terry recalled, as he’s staring out watching this wolf, that’s almost walking in like a snake-like, serpentine path towards them from hundreds of yards out. It’s still quite a ways out. Terry notices that there was a fence that was out where this wolf is, and the fence was pretty big, and the spaces between posts were about six feet. When he had a good look at the wolf next to the fence, he could tell that the wolf was at least six feet long.

And he was thinking, “Are my eyes playing a trick on me? Like, that’s an enormous wolf. That’s the biggest wolf I’ve ever seen.” But the wolf wasn’t acting angry or aggressive. It was just kind of skulking its way towards them, very nonchalant, you know, broad daylight. At some point, you know, Terry and the family, they’re standing behind the truck, and Terry said that they all had this feeling that the wolf was not going to harm them.

The wolf got about 100 yards away, and Terry and his family are transfixed. He even said he didn’t understand why they weren’t scared or why they weren’t running away or shooting at it or something, but they just—they didn’t. All of them are just standing there watching this wolf, that’s massive, and the wolf is wagging its tail and acting like a domesticated dog.

The wolf comes over and goes up near Terry’s father, who is there helping unload some of the gear they had. And Terry’s father just kind of reflexively reaches out to start petting this—he’s petting, like, up at his head level—this massive wolf. And the wolf just acts like a domesticated dog and kind of rubs against his hand, then starts walking away from them, just wagging its tail and not doing anything. Not causing them any harm, not snarling, not growling, nothing. Just as nonchalantly as it walked over to them, it walks over to where they had a pen with a couple of cows and calves inside this pen.

One of the calves had its head through the post that was keeping them in this cage, just kind of watching this wolf. The wolf notices it and, in an instant, jumps over to this calf and immediately has the whole head of the calf in its jaws, just trying to rip it out of the cage. But it can’t get it to squeeze through the cage. And so all of a sudden, you know, Terry and his family are broken out of this weird trance, and Terry starts firing shots at the wolf.

It strikes the wolf and has no impact. They run over, they start hitting it with the back end of an axe. They’re trying to get this thing off of the calf because they’re livestock—that was their livelihood. And, you know, these are rugged people, so they’re trying to fight to save their property, to save their cows. The wolf is just totally unaffected. It’s not trying to attack Terry or his son that are trying to get rid of it. The wolf is just trying to attack the cow, but it won’t let go. Finally, it just kind of gives up on the calf, starts kind of retreating.

Terry ends up getting his rifle—a high-powered rifle—and takes a shot at the wolf one more time, but again, it just has no impact on the wolf. The wolf just, at some point, just as I guess bored, turns around and kind of trots off into the woods. After they kind of were brought out of that initial trance, they remembered this horrible smell. It’s like a foul, almost chemical smell that just permeated the whole area after the wolf was there.

Terry and his son, they decided to go track this wolf because now there’s this massive predator that’s going to make owning cattle extremely difficult. And so they would have to go deal with this predator. And so, instead of retreating into the house, they grab their weapons and they track the wolf that’s now jogged off into the forest.

They make it to an area in the forest where the ground is very muddy and soft, and Terry could easily make out these footprints that just suddenly stop. And they just couldn’t make sense of it. So they went back to the house and they told their family, “We tracked it into the woods. There’s no blood trail, there’s nothing. It just walked in and vanished.”

So this is day one of being at this ranch, and they’re all on edge now. The whole family is on edge. They really don’t know what to make of that wolf—the sheer size of it, the fact that it was totally unaffected by being shot multiple times. You know, there’s real concern over their own livelihood because they keep cattle and they’re only going to have more that are going to be out in these pens. And if there are wolves that are three times the size of a normal wolf that are walking around killing cattle, that’s a big problem if you own cattle.

And so they’re on edge, and they’re all, in a way, trying almost not to talk about how crazy and how bizarre that encounter with the wolf was. They’re just like—they’re treating it like it’s just a normal predator problem, like, “Man, we gotta get those wolves, we gotta protect our cattle.” But in the back of everybody’s minds, they’re like, “Something very strange is happening here.”

That would disappear and you know he had previously seen that kind of fighter jet thing that was scanning the area. Like those were two types of lights he would see, but there was a new light he saw as he’s sitting on his porch. It was almost like this orangey orb that appeared off in the distance. Since he had his rifle with a high-powered scope on it, he just lifts up his rifle and he looks through his high-powered scope and he zooms in all the way.

He can see that this orb, he describes it as a portal, that as he’s looking at it, it has almost like an oval shape to it. Even though it was nighttime, in the middle of the orange orb is this blue sky, as if he’s looking through a portal into another world where it’s broad daylight and there’s a sky. He doesn’t know what to make of it, but he can see that a black figure is crawling out of this portal into his property. It looks just like the black entities that were basically walking around his property at night.

In addition to these figures that are crawling, imagine that scene from The Ring where the girl crawls out of the well. They’re crawling out of this portal into his property and then scurrying away into the tree line. He sees weird craft as well coming into his property through this portal, and then the portal shuts and disappears.

Following this night with the orange portal, Terry started to notice blue orbs that he and his family would say were the worst and most terrifying thing of all of the things they experienced. And considering they had tall, featureless black humanoids peering in their windows and wrapping on their windows, that’s saying something.

Okay, so blue orbs started showing up on their property. And the way they described it, Terry and his family said that whenever the orb came near you, it gave you this extreme sense of anxiety. It was almost like it was emitting this feeling that you automatically got where suddenly you were unbelievably anxious and terrified of the blue orb. And then as soon as it left, you would not be anxious anymore.

So one night, he’s sitting on his porch, like he had begun doing, and he sees this orb show up on his property. His three dogs are sitting with him, they see the orb, and they start growling and barking. He lets his dogs go, thinking that maybe they can scare this thing off. The dogs take off running towards this blue orb, and they chase it. You can see the orb, Terry can see the orb, that starts to kind of retreat. He’s thinking, “Oh my goodness, I finally won something! My attack dogs are going to scare this orb away!”

They chase off into the woods, and he sees this thing, the blue orb, retreat into the woods. And then, when he’s thinking again, “Finally, a little victory for us,” he hears his dogs yelping. He’s too terrified to go check it out, so he ends up going inside, locking the doors, locking the windows, like they had been, and just kind of retreating.

The next day, when the dogs haven’t returned, Terry and his son go out looking for the dogs in the forest. When they get out there, they get to a clearing and they find three stacks of ashes in little burned-out circles, as if there had been a fire previously in these three little spots. It turned out it was the ashes of his three dogs that had gone into the woods. They had just been vaporized.

Terry decides that it’s time to leave, and he wants to sell the ranch. So, he puts the property up for sale and goes to a local news outlet and tells them about what’s happening on his property. And as fate would have it, a billionaire by the name of Robert Bigelow, who had invested millions of dollars in setting up a scientific research team—this all-star team of PhDs specifically to research what he described as “high strangeness” (which really is just paranormal)—he was obsessed with the paranormal and wanted to investigate it.

He had actually seen that fairly obscure story, and when he saw that the property was up for sale, Robert Bigelow, the billionaire, saw this great opportunity to buy the piece of property and actually make it the headquarters of his own scientific research team. Not only to investigate what was happening on Skinwalker Ranch, but to use it as a hub for other scientific research.

He purchases the ranch, and Terry, even though he did not want to spend any time at the ranch, on some level wanted to know what the research was going to show, because he was very curious: “What is going on at this ranch that’s been plaguing my family?” So, he offers to stay on as kind of like the ranch manager, because Robert Bigelow and his team are a bunch of scientists and businesspeople, and they don’t have any experience on the ranch. So, they’re happy to keep him.

Terry is still connected to the ranch, but at this point, he sold it to Robert Bigelow. So, Robert Bigelow’s scientific team was called the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS for short. Bigelow had actually built the team before purchasing Skinwalker Ranch, and what he went out and did is recruit some of the most incredible scientists and PhDs he could possibly recruit. But he didn’t want people who were interested in the paranormal. He wanted people who were inherently skeptical, so that if he was ever able to prove the existence of high strangeness, he would have credibility in doing that.

So, he went out and found these incredibly skeptical, incredibly smart scientists and PhDs, and they moved into Skinwalker Ranch. The first thing they did was to start doing testing to make sure that all the stories about Skinwalker Ranch coming from Terry and his family were not just some grand illusion by the family—that they could have just made it up. So, they get in there and they start running these tests.

That first year, as they’re running these tests (which are largely things like, okay, let’s check the environment and see if there aren’t any plants that are giving off spores that could be hallucinogenic, let’s check their water supply and make sure there wasn’t something happening in their water supply, let’s do psychological assessments of the family, let’s ask neighbors, let’s do all our diligence to make sure it’s not something environmental or psychological), over that first year, while they’re doing this research, there isn’t much activity at the ranch, save a couple of instances where there were some strange lights.

So that first year is fairly uneventful. But what’s important is that the NIDS researchers came to a conclusion: This did not seem like a hallucination. This did not seem like something coming from a plant or a water supply. This seemed like Terry and his family were really experiencing something odd. They just didn’t know what it was.