Travis Taylor: “This is the Discovery of the Century Folks!” (Beyond Skin walker Ranch) Part 1

Could Bigalow and a few others be 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.
Poorly understood natural plasma or atmospheric phenomena.
Unknown geohysical processes producing electromagnetic and acoustic effects.
Rare biological or ecological interactions not yet well documented.
Classified but human-made technologies.
Complex interactions between environment, stress, expectation, and perception. Multiple unrelated phenomena later woven into a single narrative. It is without question one of the strangest pieces of real estate on planet Earth.
Picture this. A roughly 500 acre ranch sitting quietly in the middle of remote Uenta County, northeastern Utah. Wide open land, big skies, fresh air, and absolutely nothing that would suggest, yes, this is where reality occasionally breaks.
In 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman bought this place with the most wholesome plan imaginable. They wanted peace, privacy, a simple rural life, raise their two kids, a teenage son and a 10-year-old daughter, raise some cattle, enjoy sunsets, maybe worry about coyotes, not interdimensional shape shifters. They thought they were buying a ranch. They accidentally bought a season pass to the Twilight Zone. Within less than 2 years, the Shermans would flee the property, claiming they had experienced not just a few odd events, but dozens, possibly over a hundred, encounters that made them seriously question whether the universe was following its own rule book. When they finally told their story publicly, the quiet little ranch instantly became world famous and earned the name it is now known by everywhere, Skinwalker Ranch.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to fire of learning. This is the campfire series where we gather around the metaphorical flames and say so you’re not going to believe what happened next. Before we begin, a massive thank you to Yokcomom, Marn Der, Verbach, Sher Cartwright, Blair, Emily Clark, Bill Allen, Rodney Ron, Ariel, Jardial, Steven Turner, WT, Expletative, Surus, Anne Washburn, Turp Ninjas, Arya, Maidani, Sidleon, Will, Robert Maven, and Avantia, Elenni, along with all the supporters listed here who make these stories possible.
You are the reason we can afford the emotional support needed to research this place. Today, the ranch looks like something out of a classified military zone.
Fences, security cameras, locked gates, no trespassing signs that might as well read. Seriously, don’t. We mean it.
Roads are blocked. The message is clear.
Nothing to see here, and even if there is, you’re not allowed to see it. But back in the autumn of 1994, when the Shermans arrived, it looked completely normal. No guards, no warnings, just land, cattle, and the promise of a quiet life. What followed is now considered the standard account of Skinwalker Ranch, later made famous in the 2005 book hunt for the Skinwalker by Dr. Tom Keller and George Knapp.
The Shermans moved in expecting the usual ranch problems, broken fences, sick cows, maybe the occasional predator. They did not expect whatever this place had planned for them. Terry Sherman was no newcomer to ranch life.
He was an experienced cattleman, well known for raising highquality stock, and the land appeared perfectly suited for exactly that.
Wide pastures, good grazing, isolation.
On paper, it was a dream. The previous owners, Kenneth and Edith Meyers, had held the property since the 1930s. By the time the Shermans bought it, the ranch had been sitting empty for years.
It was run down, overgrown, and in serious need of work. A fixer upper, sure, but nothing a capable ranch family couldn’t handle. Or so they thought.
Almost immediately, odd details began to surface.
First, buried in the purchase contract was a bizarre clause requiring the Shermans to obtain permission from the Meyers family before digging anywhere on the property.
Not before building a barn. Not before drilling a well, digging anywhere. At the time, Terry shrugged it off as legal overcaution or an old couple being overly protective of their land. Then they saw the house. It wasn’t just old.
It looked defended. Doors and windows were reinforced with heavy metal bars.
Some windows were literally bolted shut from the inside.
Chains were fixed to either side of the structure, as if once used to secure large guard dogs. It looked less like a farmhouse and more like something that had previously prepared for a siege.
Still, the Shermans rationalized it.
Elderly owners, rural paranoia. Maybe they really didn’t like burglars or neighbors or anything. So, they moved in, unpacked, and started their new life. And that’s when the ranch introduced itself. One afternoon, Terry, his wife Gwen, their two children, and Terry’s father were outside when they noticed a large animal approaching from the distance.
At roughly 400 yards out, it already looked big, wolf big. As it closed to about 50 yards, it stopped and simply stared at them. Not aggressive, not fearful, just watching. Then it began to walk toward them calmly, confidently, as if it had every right to be there. That alone was strange. Wild wolves do not casually stroll up to a family gathering like they’re late for dinner. Up close, the thing was enormous. It stood chest high to two men who were both over 6t tall. Its body was heavily muscled, its fur a thick gray, and its eyes an unsettling almost luminous blue. Every instinct in Tererry’s body screamed that this was a predator. And yet, it behaved like a dog. It allowed them to touch it, to pet it. It showed no fear, no aggression, no tension, just calm, steady breathing and that unblinking stare. Then, without warning, it snapped its head toward the corral. In a blur of motion, it lunged for one of the calves that had wandered too close to the fence and clamped its jaws around the animal.
Terry and his father charged, striking the creature, trying to force it to release the calf. It was like hitting a concrete pillar covered in fur. Their blows had no effect.
No flinch, no yelp, no reaction at all.
Terry shouted for his son to bring his gun, a cult. 357 Magnum, a powerful handgun by any standard. He took aim from point blank range and fired. The shot landed and the creature barely acknowledged it. Not a stumble, not a recoil, no sign of injury. It was as if the bullet had passed through fog. This was the moment the encounter crossed the line from strange wildlife to something far darker. Because this was no longer just a massive wolf. This was something that did not behave like an animal and did not react like one either. The creature seemed completely unconcerned.
Terry fired two more shots. Only then did it release the calf. But instead of fleeing in panic like any normal animal would, it simply stepped back, turned, and stared at the family again, calm and uninjured, as if mildly annoyed by the interruption.
Terry fired once more. The beast retreated another 30 ft, but still did not run. It just stood there locking eyes with them like it was trying to decide whether the humans were worth further attention. At this point, Terry upgraded the situation from this is weird to this is absolutely not okay. He called for his son to bring his 3006 elk rifle.
This was serious firepower, the kind meant to drop a,000lb animal at long range. From only about 40 ft away, Terry fired. He later said he clearly heard the bullet strike the creature. The wolf barely reacted. He fired again. This time, witnesses claimed they saw flesh visibly tear from its side. Still, it showed no sign of pain, no limp, no blood spray. No distress.
Finally, the animal turned and calmly walked away, vanishing into the trees like it had simply grown bored. Stunned doesn’t begin to cover it. Terry, however, was not the kind of man to shrug and go inside after being attacked by something bulletproof. He and his son followed the creature’s trail. The tracks were clear and deep. They followed them for nearly a mile. Then, abruptly, the track stopped, not faded, not scattered, not lost on rocky ground.
Stopped. The soil was just as soft and track friendly as everywhere else. There was no cliff, no water, no explanation.
It was as if the animal had simply ceased to exist midstride. With daylight fading and nerves shot, Terry decided this was one mystery better left for tomorrow. The family tried unsuccessfully to put the incident out of their minds. Over the following weeks, they would see more strange canines on the property, oversized, oddly proportioned, watching from a distance. Nothing as violent as the first encounter, but unsettling enough to keep everyone on edge. Eventually, even those sightings stopped.
Unfortunately, that did not mean normal had returned. The ranch seemed to develop a habit of misplacing things.
Not keys, not tools, heavy equipment.
Terry would step away for a short time and return to find large objects simply gone. One example was a 70 lb post hole digger. It later reappeared 20 ft up in a tree, because of course it did. Then came the lights. One evening after dark, Terry, his son, and his nephew spotted what looked like a white headlight and red tail lights in the distance moving across their land. An RV they assumed.
Trespassers, annoying, but manageable.
They walked toward it. The lights moved away. They walked faster. The lights rose straight up into the air silently, climbing about 50 ft off the ground. Now they could see the shape of the object.
It wasn’t an RV. It wasn’t even close.
It was more like a massive glowing refrigerator hovering in the sky. The three of them stood frozen, watching as it drifted upward, then accelerated and vanished into the night without a sound.
No engine noise, no wind, no explanation. And that was only the beginning. It was becoming painfully obvious that the Shermans were not just unlucky people tripping over random weirdness, but that there was something deeply, fundamentally wrong with the ranch itself.
This was not, “Oh, that’s strange territory anymore. This was the land maybe actively trying to ruin our lives territory.” As they began asking questions, they learned that the entire Uenta basin already had a reputation for being, let’s say, creatively hostile to normal reality. Locals didn’t talk about strange events the way you talk about rare occurrences. They talked about them the way you talk about weather. Oh, yeah. Weird lights, cattle mutilations, shadow creatures, that sort of thing.
happens every year like snow. More unsettling still was the history tied specifically to the land they were standing on. Part of the property bordered an area known as Skinwalker Ridge. And among the youth people, this region had long been considered dangerous, spiritually contaminated, and outright cursed. Not spooky campfire story cursed. More like do not go there unless you enjoy spiritual ruin and possibly being followed home by something that wears your face cursed.
The subject of skinw walkers is traditionally treated with extreme seriousness and discomfort among many southwestern native groups and for good reason.
In the folklore that is shared, skinwalkers are described as humans who gain supernatural power through acts so dark they make horror movies look like Disney films. We are talking ritual murder of family members, cannibalism, and lifelong devotion to malevolent forces. In exchange, they gain abilities no human should have. Immense strength, speed, resistance to injury, mind manipulation, and most famously, shapeshifting.
In their true form, they are often described as thin corpse-like figures with glowing red eyes and an aura of pure wrongness. But they can transform into animals, particularly wolves, coyotes, bears, and birds. animals that look almost normal, except for being too large, too fast, too intelligent, and far too interested in you, which in hindsight made that bulletproof wolf start to feel a lot less like wildlife and a lot more like a walking folklore footnote.
And the ranch’s resume of high stranges did not stop with ancient legends. Back in 1911, the Sun Advocate newspaper reported mysterious thunderlike booms echoing across the basin.
People heard them day and night in every season for years. No storms, no explosions, just the land itself groaning like it had arthritis and a grudge. Geologists blamed shifting rock layers along the Uenta fault, which is science’s polite way of saying, “We have no idea, but rocks were involved.” Then came the modern era. Starting in the 1950s and exploding in the 1970s, Uenta County became one of the most active hotspots in the United States for UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, alleged extraterrestrial encounters, Bigfoot reports, poltergeist activity, and things that defied tidy classification.
Lights in the sky, creatures in the trees, animals found surgically dissected with no blood and no tracks.
homes reporting shadow figures, voices, and objects moving on their own.
Basically, if the paranormal had a convention center, it would book Uinta County every year. By the time winter settled in on the Sherman ranch, Terry had adopted a new nightly routine, armed patrols. Not because of burglars, not because of coyotes, but because his land had started acting like it was hosting a very exclusive, very secret party, and he was not on the guest list. Most nights he only caught distant glimpses.
Strange lights darting over hills. Brief flashes between trees. The kind of things you could almost convince yourself were stars or aircraft. Or maybe just exhaustion playing tricks on you. Almost. Then one night, the ranch decided subtlety was overrated. It was brutally cold. The kind of Utah winter cold that makes the air feel sharp enough to cut your lungs. Snow covered the ground, reflecting moonlight like a giant silent spotlight.
Terry was out alone when he saw it.
Hovering about 30 ft above the ground was a craft unlike anything he had ever seen. It was jet black, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. Completely silent. No hum, no wind, no engine noise, just there. Then it began projecting beams of colored light onto the snow below. Red, blue, green, yellow, sweeping back and forth in slow patterns. Imagine a flying soundless jet black disco ball. apparently scanning the ranch like it had lost its keys.
Terry did the only reasonable thing a sane human could do in that situation.
He hid behind trees, fences, anything that would keep him out of the craft’s apparent field of view. He watched as the lights moved methodically across the ground as if searching for something very specific, and the unspoken question formed in his mind, heavy and terrifying.
If it’s looking for something, what happens when it finds it? This, he would later realize, was not just another strange night on the ranch. It was the beginning of the realization that Skinwalker Ranch was not simply haunted.
It was active. When the object drifted to within about a 100 yards, Terry did what every human body eventually does when you’ve been frozen stiff in fear for too long, he stretched.
Unfortunately, his joints responded with a series of loud traitorous pops. Knees, back, shoulders. The kind of noises that echo like bubble wrap in a silent room.
Somehow, impossibly, the craft seemed to hear it. The multicolored light snapped off. The black shape slowly rotated as if turning its head. For one long, dreadful moment, Terry had the overwhelming feeling of being noticed.
Then, without a sound, the object calmly turned and glided away in the opposite direction, like, “Nope, not tonight, crunchy human.” Several weeks later, the ranch apparently decided Gwen deserved her own personal episode.
One evening, while driving home, she noticed strange lights pacing her car from behind. They stayed with her the entire way, like a silent aerial tailgator with no sense of personal space. When she pulled into the driveway, the object surged overhead and disappeared into the darkness. An hour later, curiosity got the better of her.
She looked outside.
There on the property set a craft eerily similar to the RV they had once mistaken in the distance. Only now it was very clearly not an RV. In a brightly lit doorway stood a figure roughly 7 ft tall, dressed in a black uniform with a helmet or headgear. It appeared to be standing perfectly still and staring directly at the house. Gwen did what any rational person would do when confronted with a possible extraterrestrial security guard conducting a midnight inspection. She closed the blinds. The next morning, when she and Terry went outside to investigate, the craft and the figure were gone. All that remained were enormous footprints in the soil, far too large to belong to any normal human. As if that weren’t enough, the ranch also developed a regular light show. One of the most common phenomena the Shermans reported were massive glowing orange objects in the sky.
Everyone in the family saw them, but Terry saw them the most, sometimes dozens of times. He would watch them for hours, occasionally through the night vision scope mounted on his rifle, which is not standard ranch equipment, unless your property is apparently located on a UFO flight path. These objects always appeared over the same distant stand of cottonwood trees about a mile away. They hovered silently, sometimes round like a full moon, other times stretched out and flattened like a glowing cosmic pancake.
From the Sherman’s house, the object appeared crisp and well- definfined. But drivers on a nearby road only saw what looked like a faint orange cloud, as if reality itself had a bad viewing angle.
One night, the weirdness leveled up.
Terry noticed a blue spot in the center of the orange mass. blue sky blue as if the daytime sky were visible through a hole in the middle of the glowing object long after the sun had set. Then he began seeing fast-moving triangular shapes darting in and out of it. At that point, his internal monologue reportedly shifted from, “That’s odd,” to, “I may be watching a portal open over my pasture.” Despite all this, the phenomena initially seemed more interested in putting on a terrifying light show than in hurting anyone. The family was stressed, exhausted, and increasingly questioning their life choices, but they were physically unharmed. Even their animals, aside from the indestructible wolf incident, seemed mostly okay. That would not last. During a brutal blizzard, Terry noticed one of his cows was missing. He followed her tracks across the snow, expecting to find a carcass, a predator kill, or at least signs of a struggle. The tracks simply stopped right in the middle of open ground. No blood, no drag marks, no predator prints, no explanation. The cow had apparently been erased like a chalk drawing. She was never found. She would not be the last. By the end of that winter, five cattle had vanished the same way. Spring of 1995 arrived, and with it, the ranch’s next phase of horror. This time, the cows didn’t disappear. They were found. The cattle that did turn up were found in conditions so precise and clinical that even seasoned veterinarians would have struggled to explain them. Large sections of tissue, particularly around the hind quartarters, utters, and internal organs, were missing, removed with edges so clean they looked cauterized.
No tearing, no bite marks, no blood pooling in the grass. It was as if an invisible surgical team had arrived in the night, performed a flawless operation, packed up, and left without so much as a footprint.
What made it even stranger was the silence of the scene. Predators make messes. They leave drag marks, scattered bones, disturbed soil, and blood trails you can follow for yards.
These cows looked as if they had been carefully placed back on the ground after being processed. And then there was the smell, or rather the lack of one.
In the heat, a dead cow becomes noticeable very quickly. These didn’t.
They lingered in a kind of biological pause, decomposing far more slowly than nature allows, as though time itself had been put on a low power setting. Terry began to notice a pattern. On nights when yellow or amber lights were seen drifting low over the fields, especially during storms or heavy snowfall, a mutilation would almost always be discovered the following morning.
It was as if the lights were a scheduling notification. Inspection complete. Results will be available at dawn. Once beside one of the carcasses, Terry found a puddle of thick brown fluid. He described it as cold, gelatinous, and chemical, not blood, not anything he recognized from veterinary medicine. When he touched it, it had the consistency of refrigerated oil mixed with jelly. As he went to fetch a container, the substance slowly thinned and evaporated, fading into nothing, as if it had never existed at all, which of course is exactly what mysterious alien goo is known for doing when evidence collection is attempted.
And the ranch was still not done diversifying its portfolio of nightmares. At times, low thunderlike booms would roll beneath the ground, vibrating through the soil as if massive machinery were operating far below the surface. Then, almost on schedule, large circular holes would appear overnight in areas where strange lights had hovered.
These were not small animal burrows.
They were several feet across and a foot deep, meaning hundreds of pounds of earth had been displaced and gone somewhere.
Where no one could say. The dirt was simply missing. Perfect circular impressions would also appear in the grass, pressed flat as if something heavy and round had rested there. No tire tracks, no landing gear marks, just geometry stamped into the earth. On more than one occasion, Terry reported hearing voices from above him while he was outside at night. Not English, not any language he recognized, just murmuring, as if a conversation were taking place overhead, slightly out of phase with reality, like tuning into the wrong radio frequency.
And then there were the orbs. Small luminous spheres in shades of blue, yellow, orange, and red, drifting silently through the air. They did not flicker like reflections or behave like conventional lights. They moved with intention. They paused. They changed direction. They seemed to observe. The family came to regard them the way sailors regard storm fronts. Not necessarily hostile, but definitely bad news. Most encounters were distant, the orbs floating over fields or near tree lines. But a few were close enough to make it clear these were not illusions.
In April of 1996, one blue orb drifted low enough that Tererry’s dogs decided it was either a threat or the world’s strangest tennis ball. They charged. The orb responded by descending slightly and circling them, always staying just beyond snapping distance, darting and weaving with what could only be described as playful precision, like it was actively teasing them. Then it slipped behind the trees. The dogs followed. Seconds later came their yelps, high-pitched, panicked, cut off far too quickly. The next morning, Terry found three large circular patches of scorched grass. In the center of each was what remained of a dog, reduced to a greasy, dark residue, as if their bodies had been flash heated and partially vaporized.
No blood trails, no scattered bones, just burn marks and something that looked like the aftermath of a very targeted, very final energy discharge.
In another encounter, Terry and Gwen managed to observe a blue orb at close range.
It was perfectly spherical, about three times the size of a baseball with a clear glass-like outer shell. Inside, an intensely bright, swirling blue substance moved like liquid plasma, luminous and restless, as though it were boiling without producing heat.
The orb emitted a faint crackling sound similar to static electricity. And as it hovered near the house, the lights inside flickered and electronics malfunctioned as if the object were radiating a powerful electromagnetic field.
In other words, the ranch now featured bullet resistant shape-shifting predators, vanishing livestock, surgical mutilations with no blood, evaporating unknown chemicals, underground machinery sounds, perfect geometric ground markings, disembodied voices, and floating plasmospheres that treated dogs like unfortunate science experiments.
All of this on a property purchased by a man who had simply wanted to raise cattle, fix fences, and live quietly. By this point, the question was no longer, “What is happening on this ranch?” It was, “Why does reality keep showing up here to run its strangest tests?” Perhaps the most unsettling detail of all was not what the objects did, but what they made people feel. Whenever the orbs or the larger craft appeared, the Shermans described a wave of anxiety that went far beyond normal fear. Not the there’s a bear outside kind of fear.
Not even the something is very wrong here kind. This was a sudden crushing dread that seemed to come out of nowhere, like someone had reached into their nervous systems and turned the terror dial to maximum. It felt artificial, imposed, as if the emotion itself were part of the phenomenon. As though the ranch wasn’t just being watched, but emotionally tuned like an instrument. After the loss of Terry’s beloved dogs, after more than a year of relentless high strangeness, mutilated cattle, vanishing animals, glowing portals, and plasmospheres that apparently considered pets to be optional, the family finally reached a breaking point. They were done.
This was no longer unusual ranch life.
This was we are raising children on what appears to be a paranormal testing facility.
In the summer of 1996, Terry made a decision he had resisted for a long time. He went public. He contacted Zach Vanick of the Desert News, then the second largest newspaper in Utah, and told him carefully, cautiously what had been happening on the ranch. The article ran on June 29th, 1996.
Terry didn’t reveal everything, but he said enough for the story to spread fast. Very fast. His hope was simple.
Sunlight might scare off whatever was responsible, or at least attract people who could help explain it. Instead, it attracted everyone. Suddenly, the ranch became a paranormal pilgrimage site. UFO enthusiasts, psychics, self-proclaimed shamans, ghost hunters, government watchers, and people who just really wanted to be abducted started showing up. Terry turned most of them away. A few, described politely as eccentric and more accurately as absolutely unhinged, were allowed to stay briefly, and according to reports, their presence sometimes made things worse.
Strange activity reportedly spiked around certain visitors as if the phenomenon itself were reacting to particular personalities, which is unsettling because it suggests the ranch wasn’t just active, it was selective.
Word of the play soon reached people with money, influence, and a deep interest in the unexplained.
Within weeks, the property caught the attention of Robert Bigalow. Bigalow was and still is a billionaire real estate magnate with a long-standing fascination with UFOs, consciousness, and fringe science. In 1995, he had founded the National Institute for Discovery Science or NIDS, an organization dedicated to applying serious scientific methods to paranormal phenomena.
In other words, he had a checkbook and a PhD level curiosity about exactly the kind of nightmare Terry was living in.
Skinwalker Ranch was not a problem to Bigalow. It was a research opportunity.
On September 5th, 1996, Bigalow purchased the ranch. The Shermans, desperate to leave and thoroughly done with being supporting characters in a cosmic horror story, sold it for less than they had paid. Peace of mind was worth more than profit. They moved to another ranch about 20 mi away. But Terry couldn’t quite let it go. With his family finally safe, his curiosity and perhaps his stubbornness pulled him back. He wanted answers. He wanted to know what had stalked his land. Killed his animals, terrified his children, and driven them out of their home. So he did something few people would do. He volunteered to return as ranch manager.
Nids accepted. In September 1996, the scientific team arrived. They were not fringe mystics. They were physicists, astronomers, psychologists, veterinarians, engineers, and medical doctors. Among them were heavy hitters, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, parasychologist Hal Putoof, and UFO researcher Jacqu Vali. The project was led by Dr. Colem Kellaher, a biochemist who would later co-author Hunt for the skinwalker with investigative journalist George Knap. On their very first day, the ranch wasted no time saying hello.
They were shown the mutilated cattle remains, the three burned circles where the dogs had died, surrounded by tall, untouched green grass like some kind of lawnc scorching crop circle. The unexplained holes in the ground where lights had hovered. And then, as if to make sure no one thought the Shermans had been exaggerating, the phenomenon itself made an appearance.
That very first night, the team watched a brilliant light rise over the treeine.
Silent, steady, unmistakably not a star.
The investigation had officially begun.
The strange light over the treeine was witnessed by four people, including Dr.
Colm Keller himself and Terry Sherman.
It hovered silently for nearly 10 minutes, as if it had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be.
Then it slowly descended out of sight, only to rise again moments later, like it had forgotten its keys and had to come back. Photographs were taken, but everyone present agreed the camera completely failed to capture how intensely bright the object really was.
It wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t a helicopter. It wasn’t a flare. It wasn’t anything they could name. And that was the problem. Over the following months, smaller but consistent oddities kept reinforcing the same uncomfortable conclusion. Terry had not been exaggerating.
If anything, he had been holding back.
Then came March of 1997 when the ranch seemed to shift into a higher gear, as if someone behind the scenes had flipped a switch from background weirdness to full paranormal assault mode. On March 10th, a calf was found dismembered in a way that made even seasoned veterinarians uneasy.
Organs gone, blood gone, large sections of the body removed with edges so clean they looked like they’d been done with surgical tools rather than teeth or claws.
What made it truly disturbing was the timeline. The calf had been tagged and observed alive just 45 minutes earlier.
In under an hour, it had gone from healthy to professionally dismantled as if it had been rushed through a cosmic meat processing facility with no waiting line.
Two nights later, on March 12th, around 11 p.m., the team’s dogs began howling and barking in that very specific tone that says, “There is something out there that should not be out there.” Terry, Kellaher, and another researcher jumped into Terry’s truck and began scanning the property with the headlights. That’s when they saw it. Up in a tree, illuminated by the truck’s beams, was a massive creature, its eyes glowing yellow in the light. Terry estimated its weight at around 400 lb. This was not a raccoon having a bad life choice moment.
This was something big, heavy, and very comfortable being off the ground. Terry fired. The glowing eyes vanished. They heard movement as if something had fallen. They assumed the shot had hit its mark, but when they searched the area, there was nothing. No body, no blood, no tracks leading away, just gone. Moments later, either the same creature or another one appeared again nearby. Terry fired at what he described as point blank range. Again, no carcass, no wounded animal, no evidence that anything solid had ever been there at all. They spent nearly 2 hours searching in the snow. What they finally found only deepened the mystery. Two massive oval-shaped tracks about 20 ft apart.
Each impression showed what looked like two claws, each roughly 6 in in diameter. Dr. Keller compared them to the talons of a gigantic bird of prey. A very gigantic bird of prey, one that biology textbooks do not acknowledge exists. No known animal matched the tracks. Then came April, and with it one of the most quietly terrifying events on record. Terry and Gwen were driving past an enclosure that held four of their most prized bulls. Gwen, half joking and half genuinely anxious, remarked how awful it would be if something happened to them.
45 minutes later, they came back. The bulls were gone. Four massive, fully grown bulls, each weighing close to a ton, had vanished from a secured enclosure without breaking fences, leaving tracks, or making any noise.
Terry began searching the property, expecting to find damage, escape routes, or at least chaos. What he found instead looked like something out of a surreal dream. The bulls were all inside a small trailer, huddled together, packed so tightly it looked physically impossible.
They stood motionless, calm, unresponsive, as if frozen or sedated.
Bulls do not voluntarily cram themselves into tight spaces. Bulls especially do not do it politely and in silence. When Terry banged on the trailer and called out, the animals suddenly woke up. The trance broke. Panic exploded. The bulls began slamming into the walls, tearing apart the interior, eventually smashing through a metal door and bursting out in a frenzy. The NIDS team arrived shortly afterward and examined the scene. The evidence strongly suggested the bulls had indeed been inside the trailer, but how they had entered remained unexplained.
There were no signs of forced entry, no ramps positioned, no human machinery involved. Then the investigators noticed something else. The metal bars around the enclosure were magnetized. Not weakly, strongly. Especially the bars closest to the trailer. Compasses deflected. Metal objects clung. The magnetization gradually faded over the next two days, almost as if whatever field had caused it was dissipating, leaving behind only a lingering after effect.
Photographs and video were taken, measurements were recorded, and yet no conventional explanation fit, and all of this was just the prelude. By early June, the ranch was about to deliver another event that would push even hardened researchers to the edge of their skepticism.
One night, a bluish white orb about the size of a basketball appeared roughly 75 yards away from Dr. Colm Kellaher and one of his Canadian colleagues. It hovered no more than 15 ft off the ground, bobbing gently like it was floating in invisible water, the way a beach ball drifts in a swimming pool.
Then, without warning, it simply vanished, not faded, not flew away. One second there, the next second gone. Like someone had hit a cosmic mute button.
The researchers immediately swept the area with a high-powered spotlight and night vision binoculars. After several minutes of scanning the darkness, the Canadian researcher suddenly stiffened and said he could see something. There’s something huge and black in the trees.
He said it’s moving north.
Keller tried to look where he was pointing, tried to photograph it, tried to see anything at all. He saw absolutely nothing. Then the Canadian researcher suddenly blurted out in a strained voice at saying, “We are watching you.” Keller still saw nothing. No shape, no shadow, no movement, just stars. The Canadian researcher later explained that whatever he had been looking at had filled his binoculars completely, blotting out the night sky, and that in that moment he felt as if his mind had been briefly hijacked. The message, he said, had not been heard with his ears, but placed directly into his thoughts, which is, of course, exactly what you want to hear from your colleague at 2:00 in the morning in the middle of nowhere.
The final major event witnessed by the Niti team occurred on August 2006, 1997.
Around 2:30 a.m., two researchers, Jim and Mike, were positioned on a bluff overlooking the ranch. Below them, about 100 ft down, a soft yellow light suddenly appeared near the base of the cliff. This was no random location. One of the researchers had been meditating there earlier because previous visitors had claimed that meditation sometimes activated the phenomenon.
Apparently, the ranch responded to mindfulness exercises. They began taking photographs.
Mike, using infrared binoculars, noticed something deeply unsettling. The yellow light didn’t look like a hovering orb anymore. It looked like depth, like an opening, like the illuminated interior of a tunnel forming just above the ground. And then something stepped out of it. Through the binoculars, Mike saw what he described as a large, completely black humanoid figure around 6 feet tall and massively built, perhaps 400 lb with no visible face.