Skinwalker Ranch – The Full Story | Documentary

It is doubtlessly one of the strangest locations in the entire world. It is a roughly 500 acre ranch located in a remote part of Uwenta County in northeastern Utah. In 1994, the Sherman family purchased the property with the intention of living a simple, private, quiet life. The ranch seemed perfect for this lifestyle. They couldn’t have known how wrong they would be. The Shermans would live here for just under two years until they could no longer endure it. In that time, they would claim to have not one nor even just a handful, but dozens, perhaps over a hundred unexplainable experiences. When they finally went public with their story, the whole world turned their eyes to this remote area of the country, and the Sherman ranch would be given the name by which it is better known today, Skinwalker Ranch. Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to Fire of Learning. This is the Campfire series. Join us as we tell the full actual story of what happened at Skinwalker Ranch. Before we begin, I 

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Today, it’s quite clear there is an interest in the area. Fencing, security cameras, blocked off roads, and no trespassing signs surround the property, making it explicitly clear that the area is off limits to the general public. It was not like that whatsoever when Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased the property and moved in with their children in the autumn of 1994.
What we will now discuss is the standard account of the events that would take place on this ranch in the two years the Shermans lived on it and the years after in which the area was officially investigated, many of the details of which were originally brought to the public in the famous 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker. Science confronts the unexplained at a remote ranch in Utah by Dr. Colum A. Keller and George Knapp.
The Shermans purchased the ranch with the intention of raising their two children, a teenage son and a 10-year-old daughter, and cattle on it.
Terry was an experienced cattle rancher, and the area seemed suitable for the needs of raising the quality cattle for which he was known. The prior owners of the property, Kenneth and Edith Meyers, had owned it since the 1930s. Because the property had been vacant for years before the Shermans acquired it, it was a neglected fixer upper. But the Shermans felt up to this task. As soon as the Shermans had begun moving in, however, they began to notice strange things about the property. Firstly, there had been an unexplained clause in the contract requiring them to contact the Meyers family for permission to dig on the property. Secondly, when they arrived, it is said they found the home itself had been practically fortified, as if the Meyers were expecting some kind of intrusion. The doors and windows had been bolted shut with metal bars placed in the windows as well. There were also chains on each side of the house, which were assumed to have once been used to hold guard dogs. However, the Shermans chocked these unusual features up to the old couple just being a little bit eccentric. The family moved in and began to settle down into their new lives. It was not long after that the first incident occurred.
One day, the Sherman couple, their two children, and Terry’s father noticed a doglike animal in the distance approaching the ranch. From about 400 yardd away, they could tell it was really quite large, probably a wolf. At about 50 yards away, it paused and stared the family down for a moment, then slowly approached them. The wolf did not seem to hesitate whatsoever, which suggested to them that it was possibly tame, maybe even someone’s pet.
As it came closer, they were better able to make out its features. This was no ordinary wolf. The wolf, it was said, came up to the chests of the two 6-ft tall men present. It was intimidatingly muscular with gray fur and piercing blue eyes. Though a strong feeling of unease came over Terry as it came right up to his family, the wolf still appeared completely tame. They even pet the beast. Within a split second, however, the wolf turned and rapidly darted towards the corral that held Terry’s calves. It attacked a curious calf who had stood too close to the gate. Terry and his father rushed to attack the beast and save their calf, but their blows failed to deter the creature in the slightest. Terry called to his son to bring him his gun, a cult 357 Magnum pistol. This is where a tense and strange situation became a horror story.
He shot the creature at pointlank range, but the bullet had little more effect on the wolf than did the blows of the two men. The beast did not simply withstand it. It seemed unconcerned by it altogether. Terry shot the animal twice more. It released the calf and slowly walked away, then turned and faced the family. It stood there staring them down, still showing no signs of having been harmed. Terry shot again and it walked back about 30 more feet, but remained staring at the family. Terry called to his son to bring him his 30 six, a rifle which he used for elk hunting. Even with this greater firepower, however, when he shot at the creature, though it was claimed he heard the bullet hit the wolf from only about 40 ft away, it again had seemingly no effect. He fired again, this time it is claimed, visibly removing flesh from the wolf. Still, it seemed indifferent. At this point, the wolf turned and paced away from the area. To say those present were shocked is an understatement. Terry felt it best to pursue this threat, however, and try to finish it. He and his son followed the beast, but it was moving quickly. They saw it disappear into the trees before they could reach it. However, they were able to follow its tracks. They followed them for about a mile until the tracks disappeared.
This made no sense. The ground on which the tracks disappeared was soft, as soft as the ground on which there were tracks. They could find no explanation as to why the tracks would have abruptly stopped. But abruptly stopped, they had.
As the sun set and their search for signs of the wolf yielded nothing, Terry decided it would be best to return home.
Lacking the ability to answer the many questions they had, Terry felt it best to try to forget the incident.
In the following weeks, there would be more sightings of not just this wolf or one like it, but other odd canines as well. Though these incidents weren’t quite as intense. They were generally just sightings. Eventually, the Shermans would stop seeing these mystery canines for a while. However, this did not mean normaly return to their lives.
Unfortunately, this incident was only the first of a series of incidents that would confuse, disturb, and threaten the family during the two years they owned the property. Soon, the wolves would be replaced by a great many other forms of strangeness.
The family began to notice things going missing on the ranch, and not just trivial or small things. For example, Terry would leave an area for a few minutes and come back to find heavy large ranch equipment missing, such as a 70 lb post digger. Some of the objects, like the post digger, were eventually found. The trouble was finding them sometimes only added to the mystery. For example, the post digger was allegedly found 20 ft up in a tree. Sometime later, there was another major incident.
their first encounter with a phenomenon that would haunt them much more consistently.
Strange lights and the crafts to which they were occasionally said to have belonged. One evening as nightfell, Terry, his son, and his nephew noticed lights on his land in the distance, a white headlight and red tail lights, probably an RV. Assuming they were trespassers, he was determined to drive them off. However, as the three began walking in the direction of the lights, the lights silently moved away from them. As they increased their pace and drew closer, the lights suddenly rose about 50 ft in the air. They could better see the outline of the vehicle now. It was an object shaped more like a refrigerator than an RV. The group froze, watching as the object flew off into the night sky, disappearing from sight.
It was becoming clearer that the Shermans were not just the victims of random oddities that happened across their paths by coincidence, but that there was perhaps something unusual about the ranch itself. Indeed, as time passed, they would come to learn that not only was the winter basin regarded as an area in which unusual happenings weren’t so unusual, but that the land on which they lived itself may have had a close connection to this strangeness.
Some regarded part of it as cursed.
Often times, when a scary story is said to have precedences in Native American folklore, it uh doesn’t actually.
However, in this case, there does seem to be at least some truth to the claim that the people indigenous to the area.
The Utes have historically regarded the area of Skinwalker Ridge, part of which lies on the north of the ranch as dangerous, supernatural, even cursed, holding a kind of connection to what are called skinwalkers.
Skinwalkers are dark figures from the folklore of various southwestern Amarindian groups. The full extent of skinwalker folklore is not well understood outside of these groups. It is often considered a private and uncomfortable subject. However, from the information that these groups have shared, it is known that skinw walkers are sinister figures capable of wielding powerful black magic. They attain these powers through the completion of a number of dark rituals, including the murder of a family member and the consumption of their flesh. In some instances, the skin walker, in its natural state, resembles a foul, thin husk of a person with eyes that burn a coal red in the darkness. They are said to possess great strength, speed, and endurance. They are closely connected to dark spirits and can cause illness and curse others. They are capable of entering and corrupting the minds of others, driving them mad, causing them to do terrible things. The most famous of their powers, though, is the ability to shapeshift, often transforming into an animal such as a bear, bird, or wolf.
The strange history of the Uenta basin does not end there. In 1911, an article in the Sun Advocate was published discussing strange noises resembling thunder heard throughout the basin that were reportedly causing settlers unease.
Some residents reported hearing them day and night in summer and winter for years. The noise was attributed to layers of rock moving on the Uenta fault. For years beginning the 1950s, residents of Uenta County began reporting what would add up to thousands of UFO sightings, incidents of cattle mutilations, and purported extraterrestrial encounters alongside a wide variety of other abnormal phenomena like Sasquatches and poltergeist activity. This was especially true in the 1970s when the rate of UFO and ET incidents increased dramatically. Uenta County became one of the most significant hot spots of unexplained phenomena in the entire country, a position the area retains to this day.
Frustrated as these occurrences and others like them continued as the cold of winter set in, Terry would often patrol his land at night. He claimed he would often see strange lights moving around in the darkness, though generally they were only glimpses from a distance.
One snowy, fiercely cold winter night, however, it is claimed he noticed a craft which was unlike any he had ever seen before.
It was jet black, dead silent, and hovered about 30 ft off the ground. It began flashing a series of multicolored lights onto the ground below, almost like a disco ball, as if it were looking for something. Terry hid to avoid detection. When the object was about 100 yards away, he quietly stretched, which caused some of his joints to pop.
Seeming to have somehow heard the noise, the object turned its lights off, turned towards him, and then slowly flew away in the opposite direction.
Several weeks later, Gwen essentially saw the same thing following her car one evening. She rushed home and as she pulled in, the object flew over her house and off into the distance. About an hour later, Gwen looked outside and saw a craft like that of the mistaken RV from before sitting on her property.
Inside she could see a 7- foot tall figure wearing a black uniform and headgear standing in what was described as a light filled doorway. She got the impression the figure was staring at her and so she closed the blinds. By the following morning, when she and her husband investigated, all that remained were unusually large footprints.
One of the most common things the Shermans would see were described as large glowing orange objects. They each witnessed them with Terry perhaps witnessing it dozens of times overall.
He would watch them for hours at a time, sometimes with a night vision scope on his rifle. It was said they always appeared in the same place over an area of cottonwood trees about a mile away where one would hover silently. However, it would appear in different shapes, sometimes flat and elongated, other times as round as the moon. The angle from which the Shermans viewed it seemed to influence how its shape appeared, with the area around his homestead being the only area in which it was perfectly visible. It was claimed that motorists on a nearby roadway would have seen a faint, normallooking orange cloud. One night, Terry allegedly noticed something that added to the stranges.
He noticed in the middle of the orange mass a blue spot. He realized it was the sky, blue sky shining in the middle of the object when the sun had long set.
When he began to see fastm moving triangular objects exiting the orange object as well, he suspected it was some kind of portal.
At first, despite how disturbing and confusing these incidents were, no clear harm actually came to the Sherman family themselves, apart from the stress, fear, and confusion these incidents caused.
This was even true of their animals, with the possible exception of the wolf incident. But whether the wolf had any relation to these other anomalies, who could say? However, either way, according to the story, the phenomena or whatever controlled them would begin to take a dangerous interest in Terry’s cattle.
One day, following a fierce blizzard, Terry noticed one of his cows was missing. He went to search for it, eventually finding its tracks, following them until they abruptly stopped in the middle of an open area. Like the wolf, in this case, it was as if the cow had vanished.
There were no predator tracks alongside them and no explanation as to why the tracks would have stopped. His cow was never discovered.
She was the first of five to disappear throughout that winter alone.
The coming of spring in 1995 did not relieve them of their stresses with much of the strangeness continuing to center on the cows. In April, they began to find their cows deceased in horrifying states. They would have much of their rears and bodies removed as if surgically as the missing parts seemed to have been removed with precision, and there was a distinct lack of blood. More cattle mutilations occurred in the following months. Terry began to notice many shared features surrounding them.
Yellow lights would appear on his property, oftentimes in poor weather, and the following day he would find a cow mutilated with again what seemed like surgical precision. It was also noted that the cow carcasses seemed to decay more slowly than they should have.
On one occasion, Terry noticed a strange liquid brown chemical next to a cow carcass. He touched it, describing it as gel-like and cold. It evaporated, however, before he could find something with which to collect it. Each cow was worth thousands of dollars. This was becoming a serious threat to Terry’s livelihood.
Strange things were happening several times a month, but Skinwalker Ranch is famous not merely for the frequency of such events, but the variety as well.
Strange sounds would be heard that seemed to come from underground. Holes about a foot deep and several feet in diameter would appear in areas where flying lights were seen the night before, meaning hundreds of pounds of soil apparently vanished from his property overnight. Mysterious circular impressions were made in the grass.
Terry would hear voices speaking in an unfamiliar language from above him.
Another major oddity observed on the ranch were what were described as flying glowing orbs. Multiple colors were noted, blue, yellow, orange, red. It was said that they quote unquote usually signaled trouble and that they seemed to observe him and investigate his activities. They were generally seen at a distance. However, a few close encounters were described.
On one occasion in April of 1996, Terry’s dogs attacked one of these blue orbs. When the dogs got close to the orb, it descended somewhat and flew around the dogs just out of reach of their bites as if it were taunting them.
The orb then moved behind the treeine and the dogs followed. Once the dogs and orbs were out of sight, Terry heard the dogs give out disturbing yelps and then silence.
The following morning, when he investigated the area, he found three large brown circles of burned grass and the remains of the dogs, which were described as a greasy mess in the center of each of them. During another encounter, Terry and his wife were able to observe the blue orbs much more closely. They were described as perfectly round, about three times the size of a baseball, with a clear shell-like exterior, which was said to be not unlike glass. Inside, they observed what was described as a swirling, incandescent, intensely blue liquid substance that seemed on the verge of boiling. The object also made a faint crackling sound like the sound of electricity. It was also noted to have interfered with the electricity in the house. Perhaps most interestingly, the objects seemed to produce a feeling of intense anxiety in them that seemed unnatural even in the circumstances, as if it were an artificial emotion.
It was following the loss of Terry’s cherished dogs that after well over a year of terror and strangeness, the Shermans came to agreement that it was time to leave. It was around this time that Sherman finally went public with what was happening. He spoke to Zach Van Ike of the Desireette News, the second largest paper in Utah at the time. His story was printed on June 29th, 1996.
The information he gave the newspaper was limited, but it was enough information for the story to spread across the country. Though Terry was reluctant to potentially lose his privacy, he ultimately felt that drawing attention to his situation would deter whoever was responsible or at least lead to answers. It would not stop the incidents. In fact, all it did at first was attract attention to the property, including that of a number of unwanted visitors hoping to investigate. He turned away most, with a few exceptions.
A few of these visitors reportedly actually triggered a number of strange events on their own, namely those who were described as eccentric. It wasn’t long before word of the property caught the eyes of those in high places. Within a few weeks of the first publication, the property would be purchased by an individual named Robert Bigalow, who took possession of it on September 5th of that year. The Shermans, unhappy but desperate to leave, sold the property for less than they had paid for it.
Robert Bigalow was and is a billionaire real estate tycoon whose side interests included the supernatural. He had such an interest in the subject that he had founded an organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS or Nidsai for short, the year prior, an organization dedicated to scientific research of paranormal topics. Skinwalker Ranch was precisely what they were looking for. The NIDS team that formed include a number of professionals and skeptics including individuals with backgrounds in physics, astronomy, psychology, veterinary science, etc. Also associated with the project were noteworthy figures such as Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut who had walked on the moon, the parasychologist Hal Putoff, and the euphologist Jacqu Filet. Chosen to head the research team assembled for the ranch was Dr. Colum A.
Keller, an Irish scientist with a PhD in biochemistry. As you will recall, Kellaher would later be the author of the famous book Hunt for the Skinwalker, which he co-wrote with George Knap, a journalist known for his investigation of UFO topics, namely the story of Bob Lazar’s involvement in Area 51. The Shermans moved to a ranch located about 20 mi away. However, Terry was unable to abandon his desire to figure out what had caused him and his family so much hardship and driven him away. With his family safe, he volunteered to work as the ranch manager. Nids agreed. The research team arrived in September of 1996 to begin their investigation. They would not be permanently stationed on the ranch, but spent a great deal of time there. On their very first day, the team encountered carcasses of mutilated cows, the three large circles of dried grass where Terry had lost his dogs, which was surrounded by tall, healthy green grass, and a number of holes in the ground that were attributed to flying lights.
Soon after, the team witnessed something for themselves.
One night, a bright light was seen hovering over the treeine. It was observed by four people including Keller and Sherman. They said it hovered for about 10 minutes, moved downward out of sight, then came back up. Photographs were taken, but it was claimed that they failed to display the true brightness of the light. None of the four present were able to recognize it as anything familiar. In the following months, they would observe a number of other oddities here and there that suggested that Sherman really was telling the truth.
However, it was in March of 1997 that the period in which the strangest events that the team would witness started happening.
On March 10th, a calf was discovered dismembered with its organs, blood, and much of its body removed. The calf had been seen alive when it was tagged just 45 minutes prior. The injuries were seemingly made with professional instrumentation.
On March 12th at 11 p.m., when dogs owned by the team were heard howling and barking, Terry Kellaher and another researcher gathered in Tererry’s truck to investigate. Eventually, as they drove around the property, they were startled as they came upon what appeared to be a huge animal estimated by Terry to weigh about 400 lb in a tree with yellow eyes that reflect the car lights.
Terry got out and shot at it. The eyes disappeared.
They believed they had hit the creature and that it had fallen to the ground, but when he investigated, Terry could not find the creature. Terry then saw it or a separate creature again nearby and shot at it at what he said was point blank range. However, again he could find no carcass. The group would investigate, spending around 2 hours looking for signs of the creature or creatures, but little was discovered.
However, they did find two oval-shaped tracks in the snow about 20 ft apart from each other. From it, it was determined that at least one of the animals appeared to have had two claws 6 in in diameter. Keller compared it to that of a huge bird of prey. The tracks were never identified.
The next major incident, easily one of the strangest, occurred in April. Terry and Gwen were driving by an enclosure containing four of the most prized bulls which were still held on the property.
Gwen remarked that it would be terrible if something were to happen to them. 45 minutes later, they returned to the area to find that the bulls had vanished.
Terry began searching the property. He managed to find them, though the circumstances in which he found them only added to his questions. The bulls were discovered huddled together in a small trailer, seemingly in some kind of hypnotic state. It seemed unlikely that four fully grown bulls would have or even could have entered the trailer and arranged themselves like this on their own. When Terry called out to his wife and banged on the metal door, the bull’s trance was broken and they began to panic, destroying the interior of the trailer. They knocked down a metal door and escaped. The NIDS team was not present when this occurred, but arrived not long after, finding evidence that they said suggested that the bulls had in fact been in the enclosure with no clear explanation as to how exactly they had entered it. While investigating, the team noticed the metal bars that the enclosure in which the cows had been held were magnetized, especially the bars closest to the trailer. They took photographs and footage of the scene.
The magnetization gradually diminished, being barely detectable after 48 hours, though oddities continued to be observed and experienced throughout the months.
The next major incident occurred in early June.
One night, a bluish white orb the size of a basketball was cited about 75 yards away from Keller and one of his Canadian partners, bobbing slightly no more than 15 ft off the ground. Then it abruptly disappeared. The researchers searched the area with a powerfully bright beam and night vision binoculars.
Eventually, the Canadian researcher noticed something with the binoculars.
He said a quote unquote huge black thing in the tree was ahead of them moving north. Keller tried to get a photograph of it, but he could neither see it nor photograph it. Then the Canadian researchers suddenly yelled out me. It’s saying, “We are watching you.” End quote. Keller still could not see it. The unnamed Canadian researcher claimed it was large and blotted out all the stars in the moninoculars. When he snapped out of it, he explained that it had taken control of his mind and had given him that message.
The final major incident that Nids would witness occurred on August 26th of 1997 around 2:30 a.m. On this night, two researchers, Jim and Mike, noticed a yellow light appear about 100 ft below a bluff overlooking the property from which the researchers were observing. It was an area in which one of them had been meditating because there was a claim from past stories involving visitors to the property that meditation could trigger an event. They photographed it. As Mike watched the light with a pair of infrared binoculars, he realized that it appeared to be the light of a tunnel that was opening just above the ground. Then he saw a faceless black humanoid creature estimated to be about 6 feet tall and 400 lb emerge from it and move off into the darkness. However, Jim, who did not have binoculars, did not claim to be able to see this figure, nor did he identify the light as a tunnel. Rather, he only saw it as a much duller yellow light. The yellow light then slowly disappeared. The two researchers descended to investigate. They smelled a sulfurous odor. Their Nard alert machine picked up alpha, beta, gamma, and X-ray radiation that quickly faded. They found nothing else that night or the following day. The photographs they obtained were of poor quality.
Another incident of interest is the one involving the cameras. In July of 1997, the team has set up cameras in an area of unusually high reported activity.
About a year later, three would be mysteriously damaged all at once at 8:30 p.m. When investigated, the wires were found ripped out. However, neither these cameras nor the other cameras which faced these cameras picked up what damaged them, nor anything of much note throughout the entirety of their use, for that matter.
The team would also do a great amount of investigation throughout the rest of the basin and even abroad. When interviewed, a number of individuals shared experiences that suggested that the Shermans were not alone. They too spoke of strange cattle mutilations, balls of light, and mysterious unidentifiable craft. Some of these individuals were Sherman’s neighbors. In fact, regarding the cattle mutilation specifically, Terry even said of his neighbors that, quote, “If I’m crazy, then we both have the same problem.” End quote. It is necessary to mention as well, however, four of the Sherman’s neighbors themselves told the NIDS team they did not believe Sherman’s stories. The NID’s investigation lasted for 6 years from 1996 to 2002, the period of March to August of 1997, represented the period of the strangest and most frequent activity that NIDs reported. After the portal incident involving Jim and Mike, however, fewer and fewer oddities were noted on the ranch. They would continue to research the area for years, but after 1999 especially, there was very little of note happening. In 2002, the investigation ended. In 2004, NIDs disbanded. Bigalow explained on his website that there had been no need for investigative work for well over two and a half years at that point, but stated that he would reactivate NIDS with new personnel if an opportunity arose.
Interestingly, and very importantly, many of the results of this investigation are kept confidential by Bigalow to this day.
In 2005, Hunt for the Skinwalker was published, leading to the next phase in the ranch’s history. The book caught the attention of figures within the United States government, specifically a scientist working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Dr. James A.
Latsky.
Latsky contacted Bigalow about visiting the ranch. While there, Lacatsky witnessed what he claimed to be a strange yellow spectral object, which Bigalow did not see. Lacatsky became convinced of the veracity of the story.
Bigalow then contacted a friend of his, the late Nevada Senator Harry Reed, to tell him about a member of the DIA’s interest in the ranch. Reed’s interest was also peaked. Before long, NIDS was replaced by the much more secretive government-f funed Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program or OAP, which contracted the newly formed Bigalow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BASS, to investigate a great number of UFO and other paranormal cases, including and especially that of Skinwalker Ranch. The BAS OAP investigation was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, receiving $22 million and a staff of around 50 people.
It lasted from 2008 to 2010, a period which was marked by a great number of other strange events and occurrences.
The details of this investigation were largely kept secret for many years. But while a large portion still is, some information has come out in recent years. Although there is a huge amount of misinformation about OAP because essentially there seems to have been attempts to conceal what the program was doing and there were other later initiatives such as Luis Alzando’s ATIP work the distinctions between which were not immediately clear. Anyway, in the 2021 book Skinw Walkers at the Pentagon, Lacatsky Keller and Knap outline this era. Like the preceding era, a great number of strange events are said to have taken place in this period, including what has been termed the hitchhiker effect. This refers to the effect the ranch seems to have on those who visit it after they leave. According to the authors, a large number of individuals who visited the ranch during the OAP era experienced or witnessed things similar to what was often reported on the ranch in other places after having left the ranch, like orbs, objects being misplaced in absurd ways, and wolf-like creatures. What’s more, these sightings were said to have spread to these individuals family members and peers who had not been on the ranch in a way that Keller compared to a virus.
However, at the end of this investigation, likewise, though much remains unknown, it appears no substantial evidence was produced of anything unknown to science. The Sherman family moved away. They have since often refused to publicly discuss what happened on the ranch. In 2016, Bigalow sold the property to Adamantium Real Estate, headed by Brandon Fugal on the condition that research continue on the ranch. Sightings of the unexplained continued into this period and indeed continue to this very day. In 2020, an ongoing television show was launched focusing on the investigation of the ranch under Fugle called The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which aired on the History Channel. Like the Nid’s team, Fugal and his team of researchers have been unable to obtain conclusive proof of any phenomena unknown to science existing on the property. However, Fugal is confident that there is something happening here that more than justifies continued investigation. However, behind the scenes of this uh sensational TV show, there does seem to be genuine investigation occurring with Fugal and his team having respectable intentions overall, which I do respect.
So, what can we make of all of this?
Well, firstly, contrary to many claims one might encounter, it is blatantly not true that the incident stopped when the professionals showed up like you would expect of standard nonsense. Rather, the professionals now have a number of their own stories to tell. However, it is true that the team failed to gather much that could be useful to science. At the end of all this investigation, those involved have produced a few low-quality photographs and videos, strange readings on their instruments, and things like a few plaster casts of round impressions in the soil. Moreover, much of this limited evidence has not been released to the public for inspection. Beyond this, they have added to the number of witnesses of these oddities. Likewise, Terry Sherman had only been able to produce some poor quality images and photographs as well. Other than this, their efforts to study and measure the phenomena empirically were constantly foiled. There is no hard evidence as far as we know. Again, there is still quite a bit evidently under lock and key.
Those involved in the NIDS investigation have often been criticized for ignoring the lack of hard evidence. I don’t think they do. Kellaher and Nap did comment on this in Hunt for the Skinwalker and were fairly open about the frustration of trying to find hard evidence and seem to understand the issue of not having it very well. However, there are other very major issues with the book. For example, many of the stories we have so far discussed, as I mentioned in the beginning, were brought to the public by Keller and Knap through the book Hunt for the Skinwalker, but are said to have originated with Terry Sherman and his family. The problem is that for starters, they did not actually interview the Shermans during the writing of the book. In fact, the Shermans were not even aware a book was being written about them until it was published. The authors, to my knowledge, have never commented on or explained this. I personally strongly suspect this was simply a genuine mistake. Likely, they thought they had everything they needed and didn’t want to bug Terry Sherman, whom they assumed, probably correctly, would not be interested in collaborating on something like a book that would give him all this publicity that he did not want. Whatever their reason though, the major problem is that in the words of Terry Sherman himself, the stories in the book, some of which we’ve just looked at, aren’t entirely accurate. He said they only resembled a true accounting of his experiences.
This was brought to light in chapter 8 of the book, The Utah UFO Display by the late Frank B. Salsbury, the 2010 edition, mind you, not this one from 20 years before the incident. Salsbury did sit down with Sherman to interview him and worked with Junior Hicks, a local UFO expert, and James Kerrion to shed further light on this case. This word resemble, what exactly does that mean? It’s hard to say. The Shermans don’t seem to have released an extensive correction, and they are the only people who could shed some light on the specific irregularities in the book for the most part. However, they seem uninterested in doing further interviews. Mr. Sherman did mention some things such as that the version of the wolf story in the book was based on hearsay, but was apparently reluctant to explain further.
That is actually a very serious issue.
There’s really no evidence, but there is witness testimony. But the testimony of the main witness was delivered by others and contains in the witness’s own words inaccuracies.
But the witness has not fully clarified his own account of what happened. Even if this were an honest mistake, and I think it was, it’s a serious blow to the credibility of the whole book. It begs the question of how much else is wrong.
For example, are the descriptions of what the rest of the NIDS team experienced factual accounts?
Frank B. Salsbury also interviewed someone else of great interest. G Meyers, brother of Kenneth Meyers.
Kenneth and his wife Edith Meyers were, if you recall, the individuals who had owned Skinwalker Ranch for 60 years prior to the Shermans. The things the Shermans witnessed and experienced had been reported across the country, including and especially in the Uenta Basin for decades before Skinwalker Ranch was ever famous. But if the anomalies have been active for that long on the ranch itself, as is often believed, as the ranch is in fact suspected to be some kind of epicenter of the area strangess that has lasted for decades, maybe centuries. Why didn’t the Meyers experience anything? Well, they probably didn’t, but it isn’t actually completely clear that they didn’t. The Meyers simply never reported anything and passed away before the ranch and their names became famous. But others have claimed some interesting things. Some have come forward over the years claiming that the Meyers experienced and witnessed some similar things. mutilated cows, strange objects on their land, people who would knock on their doors and disappear, a worker who was allegedly abducted. A store clerk mentioned that Edith Meyers had a few UFO stories to tell, etc. However, G Meyers tells a different story and sets the record straight about what happened with the Meyers and why they sold the ranch in Salsbury’s book, which was written about a year before Gar’s death and about 4 years before Salsberries.
Some of the seemingly untrue claims about the Meers experience don’t come from Hunt for the Skinwalker, but that book seems to have made some errors about them as well. The common story is that the Meyers bought the ranch in the 50s and mysteriously vacated it in 1987.
7 years later, they sold the abandoned ranch to the Shermans, who upon entering the property found it in disrepair and found the main building seemingly heavily fortified. G Meyers contested this. The ranch, which was purchased in the 30s, not the 50s, he said, wasn’t just abandoned. Kenneth died in 1987.
Edith lived there for five more years on her own until she moved to a resting home in 1992. The ranch was vacant for 2 years, not seven. Even during those two years, the property was leased to other ranchers and occasionally visited. He also added that there were far fewer locks and fortifications on the house than is often claimed, saying that someone could have easily kicked the door down to get in if they wanted to.
He also said that his sister-in-law did not live there with guard dogs, but rather had only one three-legged dog for part of that period on her own. When Edith died in 1994, the ranch was left to G. G and his sisters decided to sell it. They sold it to the Shermans not long after. Most importantly, he told Salsbury that quote, “There was nothing, unequivocally, absolutely nothing, that went on while she and my brother lived there.” End quote. Salsbury asked if this may have been something that Kenneth and Edith just didn’t share. G had a background in science, and Salsbury said he seemed to have a very skeptical attitude about such things, and so it was proposed that they may have never told him because they knew they wouldn’t be believed. However, Gar adamantly rejected this possibility, saying they were very close and kept up with each other on a regular basis. G also worked on the ranch himself for a few summers as a teenager. G also claimed he told Robert Bigalow this same thing when Bigalow called him to ask why his family had never reported anything.
Upon hearing Gar’s account, Bigalow went so far as to call him a liar. This is actually very interesting because this is not the only incident in which Bigalow was said to fly off the handle when it was suggested to him that there could be nothing happening on the ranch, which has led some to suggest that his employees may have exaggerated or even made things up during the investigation in order to please their boss.
But was Scar Meers a liar? Well, there’s one person who generally supports Gar Meer’s account to the best of his knowledge. Terry Sherman. Furthermore, while the neighbors of the property have their own stories to tell, not many recall anything happening to the Meyers.
Although neighbor John Garcia claimed he did see a round floating reddish orange housesized object on their land that the Meyers did not know about. What about that strange clause requiring that the Shermans contact the Meyers if they wanted permission to dig on the property? That could easily be explained as them wanting to retain mineral rights. It’s actually a pretty common topic when dealing with land like this.
And this is an area where that is a legitimate concern. It’s probably something Fugal is concerned about, too, given how controversial digging on the property is on the TV show. That being said, neighbor Charles Wyn claimed Kenneth Meyers was a bit noticeably strange about digging in certain areas of the property while he was there.
Instead, he claimed bad things would happen if one were to dig, never explaining why. Another problem that I would like to see addressed is that while the events in the book were said to have been taking place, Jacques Valet, who was associated but not stationed on the ranch, was reporting at the same time that the team wasn’t witnessing anything. Was he referring exclusively to hard evidence? Were Kellaher and his colleagues simply not sharing this information with him?
Anyway, Salsbury’s interviews deal a heavy blow to the most famous version of the Skinwalker Ranch account. Many of the details of the standard story that everyone tells are either questionable or even flatout not true. Again, I’m not blaming Hunt for the Skinwalker exclusively for that, but it does have to be said that the book did make some mistakes. And yet, this is not sufficient to close the case. When the dust clears, we’re still left with a very strange case on our hands. As Salsbury himself, who was sympathetic to the possibility of the existence of such supernatural entities, admits, the popular account is inaccurate, but does resemble the original claims, as is verified by people like Zack Van Ike, Junior Hicks, and Sherman himself. When we focus on what we do know of Sherman’s own account, his own account alone is profound and leaves us a fascinating case to dissect. Sherman did see the strange lights and orbs. Cattle did disappear and others were found mutilated, which others observed. He and his family, in his words, did see the orange portals in the sky. Sherman and Junior Hicks actually when he visited the ranch in 1996 saw the unfortunate state that the dogs had been left in after their purported encounter with the orb. The shed was in a destroyed state after purportedly holding four teleported bulls, though it was a shed, not a trailer. His neighbors, namely John Garcia and Charles Wyn, did see some similar things on their properties.
Going with what we do know, how do we explain what happened here? The three main conventional explanations for this sort of thing are hoaxes, delusion, and misidentifications of normal objects and phenomena. Which of these, if any, fit this situation? This is kind of difficult.
It has been suggested that the entire thing was a hoax, perhaps orchestrated to sell the property. It would be a bit extreme for Sherman to kill his own cattle or dogs to spin a story, but perhaps he invented most of the stories to quickly get off the property because he really was losing them to something more natural. Was this the invention of a desperate rancher? While hardly anyone involved in the investigation believed the Shermans to be dishonest, and there was nothing in their character or history that would suggest they were, unfortunately, even the word of the most honest person in the world would have to be taken with a healthy amount of skepticism in a case like this. There are a few glaring problems with the hoax explanation, however. Firstly, while the researchers didn’t see everything that Terry saw, and exactly what he and they saw would have to be further verified, they did claim to see a number of things which seemed to validate at least some of what Terry Sherman was saying. The theory that the whole thing was a hoax, therefore, requires that one assert that either A, the Shermans were the greatest hoaxers in history and fooling professionals behind their backs for years, or B, not only they, but the NID’s team and probably others as well were involved in the hoax. Were they?
This would have meant Bigalow risking his reputation and perhaps a few dozen people on the Nid’s team risking their careers on a heist with relatively little gain. Now, you can argue several people involved did end up gaining. You can point out that Keller and Knap made money from the book. Bigalow made money selling the property, but don’t forget all this started with the Shermans who lost money. Terry Sherman sold the property to Bigalow for less than he had paid for it, and that doesn’t seem to have been out of desperation either.
There were reportedly other buyers offering more, but Sherman said he did not want to put anyone at risk. So, he went with the group trying to buy it to investigate. Furthermore, the Shermans have never tried to profit off the story in any other way either, having returned to private life and seemingly trying to avoid the story. Could it have been a hoax orchestrated by a third party?
Again, this was a little more than just a crop circle. They’d have been dealing with the greatest hoaxers in history.
Who would and even could orchestrate such a thing? Perhaps the American military. Terry was a practical man who even during the strangest incidents suspected the US military was behind all the activity in some kind of Scooby-Doo sort of way. It’s almost certain that the government possesses advanced technologies that the public doesn’t know about. And it is true that they have been willing to pull stunts on the public before. However, why this to study the family’s reaction and test secret technology? Perhaps, although they would have taken a huge risk given the amount of attention they’ve drawn to the area, especially given they continued for years, even after making the news to drive the Shermans from their property so that they could acquire it. The government doesn’t need theatrics to confiscate land. It’s difficult to blow all of this off as a hoax. Could it all have been a delusion?
No one appears to have been professionally assessed psychologically.
However, this brings us back to the explanation being something that would have to apply to not just the Shermans, but the NIDS team and many others as well, being delusional for years. They actually tested for many things in the environment that could have interfered with the mental states of anyone on it, but managed to find no evidence of anything. Furthermore, importantly, there were several things like the cattle mutilations that clearly did happen. Perhaps people were frightened by the things they were seeing and their minds filled in the rest, leading them, especially the Shermans, to mistake normal objects and occurrences. Maybe even we could throw a little bit of the hoax theory in there as well and assume a few people were playing along with the fear for their own profit. Maybe. But that leaves the question of what was responsible for the things which they did see. As far as that goes, going into the topic of misidentifications, what known natural phenomena could explain these things? Well, I’ll have to summarize a bit here because there’s such a wide variety of things that were reported that would each have to be individually looked at that it would really be enough to constitute its own video. In summary, this is really where the lack of clear information about what happened stunts and needlessly complicates the case. Looking at the more reliable accounts themselves, what we do know paints a picture that is difficult to simply explain away. For starters, cattle mutilations are a common phenomenon not unique to the ranch. They long predated it and have been observed around the world. The common explanations are that cattle typically are attacked by predators or eat poisonous plants and decompose or are interfered with by their environment in a way that owners wouldn’t expect.
Many cattle mutilations appear bloodless, for example, because blood can quickly pull into the lower areas of the body and denature. Given that cattle tend to decompose relatively quickly, evidence that would point to natural causes of death quickly disappears.
However, cattle mutilations remain a famous area of debate because owners do not always accept these explanations, sometimes because they’ve been around dead animals before and have never witnessed anything like the strangeness they observe in these incidents. This definitely seems to apply to the skinwalker ranch case, although a lot of what the veterinarians had to say about the cattle carcasses specifically doesn’t seem to have been released. Ball lightning is a common explanation for many UFO sightings and often gets brought up in the skinwalker case to explain the orbs that were reported.
However, ball lightning is rare, occurs almost exclusively during storms, and does not last very long. The things Sherman and others witnessed were longived, frequent, appeared at all times of the year, and seemingly behaved with purpose, as if there were a consciousness behind them.
The orange portals are also difficult to explain. Could they be optical illusions of some kind? Some sort of strange weather anomaly that tends to form in the area in which Sherman saw them? If so, why aren’t these things still so easily observed? As far as the creatures that were seen go, especially on the night with Keller and Sherman, there is a great variety of wildlife indigenous to Utah. bears, raccoons, coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, while none cleanly fit the description of what was seen in the tree on the night in March of 1997 or in a few of the other incidents. And while these researchers doubtlessly familiarized themselves with the local fauna, these creatures also weren’t often well observed. In the incidents in which the creatures were well observed, like the initial wolf incident, the original story has again been skewed. The noises coming from underground are very possibly geologic activity as was reported about a century ago. The ships that were observed could very well have been misidentifications of normal craft. Although the reported behavior and design differs remarkably from anything known for many other incidents alleged to have taken place like the portal incident, the holes in the ground, and a telepathy incident, it’s difficult to explain these as misidentifications of normal things.
Long story short, conventional explanations may explain some things, but they do struggle here, even with regard to the things that were observed by multiple people. We must therefore ask, could it in fact be the case that forces and/or entities unknown to science are responsible for what happened at Skinwalker Ranch? After all, we cannot completely rule it out. Before we get into this, however, it should be remembered that, as I’ve mentioned on here before, the fact that a situation cannot be explained with conventional explanations does not mean that the most exciting, most unlikely explanations suddenly take precedence. Could there be a natural explanation for the cattle mutilations in strange lights, which though unknown to science is much more practical and less exciting than aliens or skinw walkers? Certainly Keller considered tectonic strain theory for example, although found it did not apply. Again, maybe this region has just the right features to produce some kind of very rare atmospheric or geological phenomena that we don’t really see anywhere else for some unknown reason.
However, if many of the witnesses are to be believed, there seems to have been a kind of consciousness orchestrating these events. What could this consciousness have been? This too is debated by those willing to speculate this far. This reads very much like a UFO extraterrestrial incident, but some people include the possibility that these could be advanced humans or extradimensional beings. From our perspective, I suppose it’s a a dime’s worth of difference between the three.
Furthermore, there also seems to be some cryptozoolology in here. What were those strange canines? Were they connected to the purported aliens? Some people put forward the possibility that the Shermans were dealing with ghosts because of what seems like poltergeist activity. As a side note though, people use the term poltergeist activity without necessarily implying ghosts are responsible. It just refers to objects being moved around in unusual supernatural ways. Other people point to the initial legends of the skinwalker and the possible influence of black magic in the area. How could we possibly determine which of these to favor? Some people put forward the idea that they’re each present and that these things are interconnected somehow and that the ranch simply represents a hot spot where these anomalies can enter our world. But while some see it as a strength to the argument that something unusual is happening here, the fact that a wide variety of things are reported in the same spot could also be considered a weakness. The more things people see, the more likely it becomes that people are seeing things. Ultimately though, if these events are all true and there was a consciousness behind them, be it skinw walkers, ET, interdimensional beings, or the US military, the big question to ask is what were they doing? This kind of brings us to what I called the interstellar boogeyman paradox back in my video about Kelly Hopkinsville. This referred to the apparent contradiction between the high level of intelligence and complexity that one would expect aliens to have to be able to travel across interstellar space with relative ease and the lack of intelligence they display once they’re here by the seemingly mundane, pointless, and sometimes ridiculous things they do. It seems to apply here as well. However, as always, the fact that we don’t understand a motive doesn’t mean there isn’t one or that it’s bad. But it is still worth questioning. What interest does an extraterrestrial or extradimensional civilization have in Sherman’s cows? Why are aliens so obsessed with cows?
Speaking of cows, it is interesting that while animals were harmed, humans were not. Was there a consciousness? whatever it was that drew a distinction between the two. Did it simply avoid harming humans because of the alarm it would cause? Either way, it still couldn’t be said to have been benevolent. It routinely harassed the Shermans and attacked their livelihood to the point of driving them off the property. There are also claims, some of which are connected to the ranch, that interaction with these types of phenomena seem to result in later health problems. Though the phenomena do not seem to have disappeared with the arrival of the researchers, which is a very important detail, the strangeness did scale back a bit when the researchers were present.
Terry and even Keller wondered if the phenomenon became aware of their presence and was masterful at revealing itself to them without providing them evidence of its existence. As Salsbury mentioned, if there were an unknown consciousness behind these events, it would surely be masterful enough to have only revealed itself when it so desired.
The lack of evidence would probably have to be explained in this way for this explanation to be true. Not having evidence is the big problem. Of course, no matter what a proponent of the supernatural phenomena hypothesis can argue, the skeptic can always point to the lack of hard evidence. And they have a very fair point. The lack of hard evidence is an even more impactful aspect when you remember that this place has been professionally investigated since 1996.
26 years later, investigation is still ongoing. For all this frequent unbelievable activity, there is practically no evidence to reinforce the claims that there is something unknown to science active on the ranch. It is not for lack of trying, though. Terry apparently tried to collect samples of things and photograph and record phenomena, but he seems to have been consistently thwarted in his efforts. He isn’t a professional investigator, though, and in his words, he tried. He can’t be blamed too much. Although I am curious, where are the photographs or footage of something like the portal, which he said he was able to see for hours at a time? Anyway, regardless, the main concern really is that the professional investigators couldn’t obtain much better. Another problem, why did Terry take over a year to publicly report this? That is also suspicious.
However, according to a poll I did on my community tab, most of my viewers wouldn’t immediately run off and report a paranormal encounter to the world either. Regardless, there is evidence from his conversations with Junior Hicks, who also visited the property in 1994, for example, that this was occurring on the ranch as early as he claimed it was, well before he decided to sell the ranch. Finally, it’s worth noting there was a degree of secrecy to the NIDS and OAP investigations. Robert Bigalow and the US government have a great degree of information that they have not released to the public. We certainly do not know everything that took place here. Could Bigalow and a few others be a part of a small group of people to know about some sort of reality shattering information obtained from the ranch? Are they simply unwilling to release this information to a world which they feel is unready for it? I doubt it. Bigalow started Nids with the intention of investigating these kinds of strange reports and bringing answers to the public. Perhaps he was forced to keep quiet about some things later on by the government.
Although I also doubt that Bigalow is still publicly active in efforts like this, albeit with more focus these days on providing evidence for the existence of the afterlife. Whatever it is that we do and don’t know, I think the fact that he sold the property to Fugal in 2016 is a tell that Nids and these subsequent investigations in which he was involved didn’t really produce much that he considered valuable. By the way, as far as I know, Bigalow never saw anything on the ranch himself.
I know this presentation probably has come off to skeptics as tinfoil hat type stuff and what you might call believers as cynical closed-mindedness.
This, I think, is because I try to argue for each explanation as strongly as the evidence warrants. My takes may not always be perfect, but I do give my best shot at giving each side a fair chance because that’s how I think it should be done. We must not be pseudocientists clinging to exciting fantastical explanations for what’s occurring in these types of cases. Conversely, we must also not be pseudos skeptics clinging to preconceived ideas about how the universe works when the frontiers of science make it blatantly clear after all that we don’t actually understand all that much about the universe.
The bottom line regarding this case is that there is no hard evidence of anything existing or having existed on the property that would challenge modern scientific understanding of the universe. But it is noteworthy that it also is difficult to dismiss the case with conventional explanations. Perhaps there really isn’t much to this story.
Perhaps there was once something of extreme significance, but it has moved on from this now heavily scrutinized area. Or perhaps one day our understanding of the universe will change on Skinwalker Ranch. I hope you enjoyed this video. If so, I invite you to come check out the rest of Fire of Learning, especially my other Campfire videos and to subscribe to see more videos like this in the future. By the way, I know I didn’t cover the OSAP program in quite as much detail. I would be happy to do a part two if there is sufficient interest in that. To support the channel, there is a link to my Patreon page in the description. A special thanks to my current patrons listed here. I also run a science channel much like this called Lucenox, so come check that out, too. This has been a Campfire documentary. Thank you for watching.