beautiful ranch, 480 acres, wellwatered. Right up here on this side is what’s known as Skinwalker Ridge.
There are three homesteads that that make up this ranch. That’s the first one. That’s the house where the ranching family lived. Uh there’s another if if we had panned with video wise, which we don’t have. There’s another homestead here and then a third one that make up the whole property. Uh it is a beautiful place. Uh there’s only one road leading into it that becomes significant in a lot of ways. Uh the road leads to a locked gate. Uh and it’s got these ominous keep out signs. Always has had them there to deter trespassers.
It is private property but uh ever since the story of Skinwalker Ranch got out and I guess that’s my fault. Um a lot of curious people have been trespassing and doing all kinds of crazy things there.
As mentioned this 480 acres previously divided into three homesteads. uh the first building, principal residence, where a lot of very very strange things happened. Uh from the the vantage point of the house, you could see these wide pastures and the tree lines and and uh that distance over there on the right hand side, that would have been where the wolf came from if you’re wondering.
Um back down by the first homestead, there’s this metal corral. I don’t You want to try another shot?
That’s an observation post that the NIDS guys built. They had dogs inside. This is uh this is a shot of the property from Skinwalker Ridge.
That’s the second and third homesteads where a lot of very strange things happened. That’s an old uh old building they left on the property. Kind of spooky, especially when you’re creeping around in there at night. That ranch house when they moved in, it was kind of dilapidated. The property had been empty for seven years when the people bought it. uh they didn’t know much about the the legends that surrounded the property. No one had bothered to tell them. When they got into the house, they noticed a couple couple of strange things. On both uh doors were the the two entrances to the house, there was these giant stakes with great big heavy chains as if they’d had guard dogs.
Whoever the last residents were, they’d had these big heavy guard dogs there uh at both doors. They also noticed that there were bolts on both sides of the doors, all inside in the interior of the house, as well as everything was bolted everywhere. It was bolted and and latched down as if uh somebody was trying to keep something out or as if uh they wanted to keep things sort of bolted down. You can go to the next picture. Let’s see what it is.
That’s the spooky keep out sign. I can’t believe it’s still there, by the way.
Hard to believe somebody hasn’t stolen it.
That’s a neighbor who uh is cruising down the road from his property going into the ranch. He uh he’s been there uh even longer than the Gorman family and we interviewed him as well. And we’ll call him Mr. Gonzalez, but he has got quite a few stories of his own as well.
uh that we’ll hold on this for a second uh because we’ll come back and tell you about a story that that white this is the corral and that that white metallic trailer is the scene of one of the strangest incidents that happened to the family. I I’ll jump ahead out of order a little bit uh because some weird things began happening to the the family’s animals after a number of other strange activity paranormal type act or poltergeist type activity. Uh they have four the the animals started disappearing. They lost a total of 14 head. Uh a couple of them were mutilated. Uh a couple of them just disappeared. The tracks would go out into the snow and just poof, it was gone. And so the rancher says to his wife, um as they’re driving past this this uh corral going to town to do some shopping, we’ve got these four prized bulls. They raise these these cattle called semonl high-end uh hybrid cattle.
Very expensive. says, “If something happens to our four bulls, we’ll go under. We’re done.” And uh these things were 2,000 lbs each. Big, heavy, mean, strong animals. And they’re all in this corral. The rancher and his wife come back half an hour later from town. All four bulls are gone. Uh they’re in a panic. They’re run running around looking around. Who could have come onto the property? What the heck happened here? Uh just on a whim, the rancher stands up on on something like a box, peers up into the into that corral, the metal corral, the doors of which are wired shut, and there’s all four bowls inside that somebody had crammed them in there.
They’re all crammed up against each other like this. Uh how you would get one bull in there is a mystery. How you got all four of them in there boggles the mind. It just can’t be done. There’s no way to do it. uh these the bulls, the rancher yells to his wife, “Hey, they’re in here.” And the bulls had been in like a trance um out of it. And as soon as he yelled, they woke up and started kicking the hell out of the inside of this thing here. Uh just another little mystery um that has yet to be be explained. The whole area, the Uenta Basin, has been the site of strange stuff forever. Um, there were Spanish explorers, Father Escalante, who came through there in the late 1700s. They had what sounds like a UFO flying over their their campfire.
Um, Native Americans have been there for hundreds of years. Uh, they have reported the same kinds of things. What we would call UFOs, what we would call Bigfoot, uh, Sasquatch, they call skinwalkers. And I’m not going to go into a whole big explanation about what skinwalkers are or Native American beliefs. Um but it it turns out that in this whole vast Uenta basin uh people 80 90% of the people who lived there had seen UFOs poltergeist paranormal stuff.
Uh a guy named Dr. Frank Salsbury uh wrote a book about it uh called the Utah UFO display. And the word display I think is kind of key because it kind of goes back to what Bob Bigalow told us about a performance. Dr. Salisbury a university professor sort of reached the same conclusion that what has been happening for a very long time in the Uenta basin is a display let for our benefit they show us glimpses when they want to show us glimpses they let us see bits and pieces but it’s always by their rules we only get to see what they decide we’re allowed to see uh this book uh that Dr. Salsbury wrote was based on about 400 of the best UFO cases that had been compiled by a guy named uh Junior Hicks who was a school teacher in the Uenta basin. He basically had been there forever. So all everybody in town um had had gone through his science classes.
Everybody knew him. Everybody trusted him. So as these UFO things would happen, he became the uh unofficial UFO historian for the whole basin. and all the best cases, all the incidents would all come uh his way. So he started investigating them and those cases of his that were very well documented form the basis of that book. Uh we got to meet Junior Hicks and talk to him about some of the things he had seen over the years. And as we’re doing it, he mentioned that in all the vast Uenta basin, which seemed to be a UFO paranormal hot spot for as long as anyone could remember, there was one spot in particular that seemed to be the epicenter of the activity, and that was this ranch. And he called it Skinwalker Ranch. He said it was uh the the name came because it is in the path of the skinwalker according to the youths.
Uh, and I I remember getting just sort of a little chill on my arm when he told me about it. Uh, skinwalker, in case you don’t know, in Native American lore, is a shape shifter, a sorcerer, an evil witch, uh, can control men’s minds and and make them do all kinds of things. It uh, assumes the shape of animals. Uh, puts on the skins and then it has the power of those animals. And although we might find it quaint or or stick it in a religious category, it’s very serious stuff to Native Americans. And in fact, in trying to do research for this book, it was uh pretty much impossible to find anyone who was willing to talk about it.
And I’m serious about it. Even at at universities and things of that sort, trying to get anyone to talk about it was was very very difficult. Uh because they figure that if you mention a skinwalker, it comes for you. If it gets your attention, uh you’re going to regret it.
[Applause] why this relates to our discussion.
Um, and I won’t give you too much of a history lesson, but back in the day, uh, 200 years ago, the Utes were very bad ombres, very bad customers, very warlike tribe who really made life miserable for other tribes, in particular for the Navajo. Uh, the when the Spanish were in the southwest, the youths basically formed a a partnership with them. They traded for horses and in exchange they traded Navajos for slaves. Uh the Utes basically ran the Navajo out of what they consider to be their Garden of Eden in the St. Louis Valley of uh of Colorado. So there’s bad blood between those two tribes. The youths believe the youths who live in the area around Skinwalker Ranch and in the UN basin believe that a curse was put on them that the Navajo sent a skinwalker to punish them for all the bad things they’d done over the years. So they believe that this ranch is in the path of the skinwalker. So when we say in the book that we’re looking we’re hunting for the skinwalker, we’re not talking literally about trying to track down a shape-shifting uh sorcerer. What we mean is that uh the Utes, for whatever reason, used the skinwalker legend as sort of a blanket umbrella explanation for all the weird stuff that they’d been seeing at this particular property for as long as they could remember. Uh we were told by the tribal police and tribal leaders that this property is off limits to the tribe. The the reservation surrounds it. I mean, it’s it’s been there forever. They’re not supposed to go there. They they avoid it at all costs. At least that’s what we were told.
The Gorman family, of course, had no way of knowing all this stuff before they moved in. Um, I’m sure I’m not sure they would have paid the same price for the property if they had known about it or whether they would have believed it, even if someone had warned them. In 1994, they they bought the property.
They knew little about its history except it had been vacant for all those years. One thing they noticed, as I mentioned, is all the the stakes and um and the the bolts. And then um there’s a whole lot of spectacular stuff that happened that we’ll get to in a moment.
The stuff that spooks me, that puts the goosebumps on my arms are the little little things that started happening. Um what we might equate with like poltergeist type activity. An extensive menu of just deeply disturbing things that that would happen on the property.
Some of them outright dangerous, but it’s the little ones that really got spooky. And I I’ll give you some examples. Uh inanimate objects showing up in odd places, the frying pan being in the freezer and the things showing up in a microwave. Uh the dad is out in the in the pasture and he’s got a fence p fence post digger, a heavy tool. He uh he’s digging holes to put fence posts in. He stops. It’s leaning against him or leans against it. takes a swig of water, wipes his brow, turns around, it’s gone, and they don’t find it for 3 weeks. It was 75 ft up in a tree. Uh, mom goes to town, she goes shopping for groceries, and it’s a ranch family, so they get a lot of food. She unloads all the stuff, puts it in the cupboards, uh, goes to the bathroom, comes back out, all the food’s back in the bags. Um, or she goes to the bath, she takes a shower every morning. She goes in, she puts a a towel and a hairbrush uh on the cabinet.
She locks the door, takes a shower, gets out, the door’s still locked. Cabinet, hairbrush are gone. Stuff like that. Uh they started seeing shapes, uh odd shadows, things of that sort, um all all around the property. They’d hear noises.
They’d hear heavy footsteps, uh outside their bedroom door, and then in the middle of the night, get up and there’s nothing there. uh they started seeing these large dark humanoid figures that would appear at their windows and then and then later at the foot of their beds started hearing these disembodied voices the speaking in a language they’d never heard the husband and wife the Gormans are out in their yard one night they tell the story uh they hear these voices it sounds like it’s like 10 feet above their heads speaking in something that’s like Russian or Slavic or some language they’d never heard and they yelled at them they you know hey we can hear you kind of a thing and these these voices were quiet for a second and then they started sort of like mocking them, making fun of them. Um, and it it became sort of a a whole series of mind games.
Everywhere the family was, they felt they were being watched. Everything they did, they felt that somebody was anticipating what they were going to do, that somebody could read their minds.
Um, frequently they heard these loud mechanical noises underground almost like there was an underground railroad or a subterranean steel mill or something just shaking the ground at all hours of the night. Their neighbors would hear it as well and uh and had been hearing it for years. They saw a lot of weird animals, the wolf being one of them. The the the wife also had her own encounter with this horses-sized wolf out at the front gate. She came home one night, unlocked it, and there it was. Uh, it it its back was higher than the top of her car and it was accompanied not by another wolf, but this gigantic dog, a gigantic black dog with a head that was too small for its body. I just weird stuff. Um, they started seeing these birds, exotic birds, red tropical birds that had never been seen in the area before. Um, like they belonged in the Amazon rainforest or something. Uh, or maybe on their on a stopover point to some some other place. They here’s a weird one. Uh one afternoon they’re coming home. They see that their horses are jumping around in the corral are very upset and uh the rancher pulls up and jump runs out thinking that a wolf or something or a dog is attacking the horses and he sees this creature. It’s like almost like a hyena. It’s uh heavily muscled, very low to the ground, um maybe 200 lb and it’s slashing. It’s got these big long claws slashing at the at the legs of these horses which are just in terror. Rancher screams at it and oh the other thing it had was this great big bushy tail like a fox. Doesn’t match any animal this guy had ever seen before. Um so he goes yelling at it and running in the direction. This thing jumps out of the corral and and runs up on the skinwalker ridge and poof, I mean literally disappears right before his eyes. By the way, the wolf, the the wolf that they had seen, the bulletproof wolf, later after the NID scientist came to the property and started interviewing them about all the things they had seen, they gave him sort of like a canine lineup, like pick out the suspect who did this thing. And they went through and looked at all these pictures of wolves and drawings of wolves. And the wolf that they found that most closely resembled the bulletproof wolf was something called a dire wolf. Uh that’s a species that has been extinct for 10,000 years.
Um lots of strange animals that would just show up. So after bulletproof wolves and assorted animals and mystery voices and strange lights and poltergeist type events, where does it go? Well, cue the UFOs. They started seeing them. First it was little balls of light, white light zipping in and out of uh the trees. Then they started seeing these red things that would absolutely terrorize their animals. They would drive the cattle sometimes literally off a cliff. Then they started seeing these things uh that I call the blue meanies. They’re like uh they were about the size of a softball and they’re that the exterior looks like it’s made out of glass and inside is this blue boiling bubbling liquid. And these things uh would literally inspire so much fear that they felt like fallen to their knees. I mean they were afraid of all kinds of stuff. But eventually they got used to some of these things.
Uh but these things when they showed up I mean fear beyond anything that’s rational. Fear completely out of their mind. And it seemed like these things fed on it. that that they drew energy from it, that they just messed with their heads because it it gave them, I don’t know, a sense of power or maybe literally gave them power. Um, they saw a lot of flying discs. They saw sombrero shaped objects that flew right into Skinwalker Ridge. They saw um um all kinds of lights day and night. They saw something that looked like an F F-17 stealth fighter. It had Christmas lights like all around it and it would pop up on the property at night and um and shine a spotlight as if it was looking for things. Uh at the same time that they sometimes would see these hear these underground noises like the Underground Railroad, beams of light would light up the whole pasture.
Sometimes they’d come from out of the sky. Sometimes it looked like they came from out of the ground. Well, you can imagine that the families get a little upset with this whole litany of activity um trying to figure out what the heck was going on. They saw these things that they called orange orbs that look like the like a sun or like a moon. And um Tom Gorman had described this to the NIDS guys the first couple of times he saw it. He’d get his scope and and sort of look at look at these things as he’d see them in broad daylight. And he described it this way. He said, “You look through those things, it’s like you look into another sky.” That there’s a sky on the other side that is not day as it is here. It’s nighttime. And on occasion, things would fly in and out of these orbs as if they’re coming from some other reality into ours or leaving ours and going back to theirs. And I’m not making this up. And neither was he.
um the the uh objects that they were seeing, they’re they’re not fireflies, they’re not strobe lights, they’re not reflections from airplanes, they’re not swamp gas. Uh none of those kinds of explanations work. you know, it’s um we don’t have um and and the military doesn’t have, as far as we know, any kind of blue orbs that can induce emotional states or or terror in people or uh or that have no propulsion system other than some sort of a liquid. So, uh the mystery uh continued to grow. They had some terrible incident incidents. um uh another UFO that made an occasional appearance on the property with this black triangular thing, a smaller version of the F-17. Um Mrs. Gorman, one night, her husband is is away from town.
He’s on a business trip and this thing follows her home.
She’s terrorized. She goes running in the house and locks all the doors, peaks out and sees this thing. Lights it’s it’s it’s landed in the pasture right outside her bedroom window. And um and it’s got this all this light spilling out. It’s as if somebody opened a door.
And then she watches as this really tall figure in what looks like a military uniform walks over to a desk in the middle of this room inside this craft.
and it sits down there and it’s got this visor over and it’s just sort of sitting there watching her. Well, she’s terrorized. She’s calling her husband and get your ass home, man. And uh and trying to uh get him there and get some help and locked all the doors and kind of hides and and uh he got there by morning time and they went out into the pasture. This prop this craft had been gone, but they found these great big like size 14 boot prints uh that they presumed had been left by the guy with the visor. Um, it it goes on and on and on. Um, uh, Tom Gorman made a discovery in the Third Homestead. If you want to let some pictures roll. Um, it was scoop marks.
20, 30 scoop marks, hundreds of pounds of dirt just dug out of his property kind of in a cookie cutter uh, pattern.
How does somebody get in there with a backhoe or heavy equipment and take that much dirt without him hearing it? It’s quiet out there at night. Uh there’s only one way in and one way out. It’s pretty much impossible to do it, but there they are. And even years later, you could still see uh the impressions that were left. Um here’s another incident that happened that was sort of u unsettling.
as uh news of the weirdness about the ranch started sort of filtering out, Tom would go into town and ask his neighbors, “Hey, why didn’t somebody tell me about this stuff and uh he started hearing the stories?” By the way, freeze on that for a time. We’ll come back to that. Um he started hearing the stories that these things had been uh around for a long time. And so the word sort of spread that some strange stuff was going on at the Gorman Ranch.
And as it did, people would show up at the property. Uh, one in particular showed up and he uh is yelling and honking his horn at the gate. Hey, I’ve got to get in there. I’ve got to get in uh to onto your property. I’ve driven hundreds of miles. I’ve been drawn here by some powerful force and I’ve got to meditate somewhere on your on your uh pasture. And the rancher is kind of looking at his kid and they’re laughing about it and everything and figure what the heck is this guy on? What’s he been smoking? And um they said, “Oh, what what the heck? Get in our truck. You can come with us.” They drive him across their property and they get to the middle homestead, which has often been uh the scene of the most dramatic incidents that have been recorded there.
And the guy says, “Stop. This is it. We got to get out here.” And he jumps out of the truck and he says, “This is where I’m going to meditate.” He goes off into the pasture and puts his arm sort of this guy and and I don’t know if he’s chanting or humming or whatever the heck he’s doing. and and the rancher and his son are leaning on their truck and they’re kind of laughing about it and they’re laughing for just a minute and they start hearing a noise. It sounds like a cowbell. Well, they don’t have any cowbells on any of their cows and the noise starts getting louder and then they sort of sort of see a figure moving in the tree line in the shrub line and it is is sort of heading toward this guy who’s blissfully unaware what’s going on. and his eyes are closed and it’s coming his way and it they could see they they identified it later as like the character in Predator when he had that camouflage uniform on. It’s all opaque and crystallized kind of a disguise and this thing jumps out of the bushes and rushes up to this guy who still doesn’t know what’s coming and stops right in front of him. It’s very tall and roars. And this roar they said could be heard for like miles. Well, this guy opens his eyes. He flies back, lands on his back. He’s terror terrified. And this thing, this predator thing, goes back into the bushes and it disappears. The rancher comes running over the guy and hey, you all right, buddy? And uh and the guy latches onto him and won’t let go. Hey, you got to let go of me now. No, I’m not letting go. I’m not letting go of you to get out of here. Listen, you’re going to let go of me or I’m going to pop you one. So, he let him go with the promise that he would drive him off the property. He drove him off and the guy turns around at the gate and he just kind of screams this something to the effect of that this is satanic. The devil lives here and and uh he put a curse on him kind of a thing. I I will add one personal note uh to that little story about where the predator was in that same spot there had been three mutilation cases uh a strange creature crawling out of a tunnel and a lot of other really really weird stuff.
my first visit to the ranch, the NIDS guys figures, well, the scientists, they figure, well, we got a newcomer here.
Let’s uh let’s give it a go. Uh there were certain activities at the property that they learned sort of would generate uh paranormal activity for some reason.
Uh the arrival of strangers for one, uh you make a lot of noise out on on the property building a fire. And the especially the thing that you could do is dig in the ground. And it’s a strange uh legend about the property because the the original owners, the people who had previously owned it, had insisted that when Tom Gorman bought the property that he signed a a caveat that he could not dig in the ground without their prior permission. We’ll come back to that one.
Anyway, so I arrive on the ranch. I’m looking around. We’re interviewing Colum. I got the cameraman with me and I’m I’m having a pretty good time. And they said, “Let’s see if we can stir something up.” So, uh, we went out, uh, and built a big bonfire and made a bunch of noise. And then we got a big earth mover and dug things up. We figured if if anything is here right now, that should that should get its attention.
And then they took me, which I didn’t know this was coming. They took me and put me on a little plastic chair out in the place where the predator had been and left me there.
They had microphones on me and uh a radio and a geer counter or a couple of things. I didn’t even know what the heck it was or how it would operate. I just knew that they were going off somewhere either to drink beer and tell jokes and and wait till someone something came and grabbed me, which was haha, very funny.
And I would like to tell you that I was very brave and I had no second thoughts about it and I would have sat out there all night. Um but that was not true. I mean I was I was spooked about the whole thing. I’ve been hearing about the the ranch for a lot of years and and something did come and get me mosquitoes, but that was pretty much it.
In fact, all the times that I’ve been there, and I still go to Skinwalker Ranch a couple of times each year to check the place out, I’ve never seen squat. And uh and unfortunately, Bob Bigalow, the guy who owns the the property, he hasn’t seen squat. Pretty much everybody else who goes there sees it except for he and I. Uh, so we both concluded that that the two of us either whatever it is doesn’t want to meet us or we’re a jinx or or something along those lines. Um, anyway, as as mentioned, uh, the ranch was sort of like this paranormal shopping list. It it gets to the point where you you list all of it and it just sounds ridiculous.
Well, Colum Keller and I were writing the book. We had to make some really tough choices about the kinds of things that we could leave in and leave out because, man, there’s a couple of them.
We figured if I put this story in uh nobody’s going to believe it. And I’ll tell you what one of those stories is.
Uh the Bureau of Indian Affairs, these uh the the Native American police had told us this thing that they had seen this coming around a bend. They’re on patrol duty in the area around the ranch. They come down this dirt road one night and they see two two figures, humanoid looking figures standing up uh uh with their backs to the road and look like they’re smoking cigarettes. They had trench coats on. Smoking cigarettes stand out on the road. These guys figure, what are these fellas up to? So, they’re pulling up and they’re they shining their lights on the guys and they turn around and they were dogs.
They’re dogs smoking cigarettes. I know you’re what you’re thinking. Why weren’t they playing poker too or something like that? But, um, the guys look at each other. They turn back around. The dogs, the cigarette smoking dogs are gone. Uh, they they get out of their vehicles, pull their guns, go over and look on the ground. There’s the cigarettes, but the dogs, the trench coats, that’s gone.
Now, we had to think about whether we’re going to tell that story or not because it is just patently ridiculous. But since the book has come out, we’ve actually heard three different other accounts of cigarette smoking dogs um wearing trench coats. So, I I don’t know what what force is playing that particular game on us, but uh it’s pretty darn weird. Um there were sightings of what uh the Native Americans would call Sasquatch. Uh these things 7 7 and 1/2 ft tall all over the property. Some of them were chased by the police down in that property uh dark and running across the the the the pastures. There was some other kind of a large animal that was uh seen many times all over the place. Well, actually not seen because it was invisible. You’d watch, you could see it move through the cattle. The animals would move uh scared as if somebody just brushed them aside.
On occasion, this thing would walk through water, the water, bodies of water that are on the property, and it you could see the water being displaced.
It was big. It was uh cuz the a lot of water was moving. You could hear it, but you couldn’t see it. Uh there was this musk odor that was often associated with paranormal activity. When something strange was going to happen, they’d smell this this very powerful sulfuric smell. Uh before it happened, there were uh circular impressions left on the grass much like crop circles. Uh three of them uh each were eight feet in diameter arranged sort of in a triangular pattern. Um all of this was really taking its toll on the family. As you might imagine, the kids’ grades were going down. The mom left lost her job at at a bank in town. Uh none of them were sleeping much. And and then things got worse because bad things started happening to the animals. very serious things. Um, you know, they they live on a ranch. They’ve got a lot of animals, big, sturdy hunting country dogs that aren’t afraid of anything. Um, they refused to come out of their house for days at a time. They were scared about something. Um, several of these dogs just disappeared altogether. There was one night when eight of their cats disappeared. Um, I’ll tell you about the cattle thing in a moment, but I’m going to jump ahead and tell you what happened to the three best hunting dogs. And maybe you’ve heard this story before.
Uh, the rancher is on the phone to somebody I know at the time this happened. These three big dogs are chasing one of the blue meanies and it’s saying just outside the reach of their snapping jaws and it’s leading them across this pasture back toward where that wolf had originally been seen. And so the ranchers, hey, something’s going on here. I’m going have to get off the phone. And right about that point, the dogs went out of sight and went into the the brush line. And then he heard these screams or shrieks.
And he was he’s a very powerful, strong man, a worldclass hunter. He’s been in the country all his life. He was afraid to go out there. He went out there the next morning and there were three greasy spots on the ground and that was all left of his dog. Something just zapped him. Well, that was it. That was it.
They were going to get the heck out of there and made the decision at that point, but they just didn’t know at that point how they were going to do it. It’s 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. The rancher and his wife are out there on the on the pasture. You can see what those meadows look like. I mean, it’s quiet out there. They’re 50 yards away from their house when they tag this calf. And then they’re 100 or so yards away. If somebody had come in, if humans, if Delta Force or something like that had come in and snatched that calf up and cut it up there, they would have heard it. If a predator had done it, they would have heard it. something did it as if snatching it up, taking it somewhere else, and then dropping it back in a way that the ranchers didn’t see or hear anything. And it’s it’s just strange, you know, you you hear people, the skeptics who explain the cattle mutilations away as ah, it’s devil worshippers or it’s coyotes or it’s magpies.
Magpies didn’t do that one. Um, and I’ll tell you the epilogue to this part of the story is that uh that this was just about at the breaking point for the rancher. That was his last loss. He was financially close to the to close to ruin. Um, even though the NIDS guys were there helping him out and and the next day, you know, they’re all kind of on edge again. The animals, the dogs, the other dogs that he had got and they they got a bunch of dogs from the shelter, by the way, to use as sort of like bio sensors. If you saw that that compound um that was in an earlier picture there, they’d have them out there to let them know that something was coming and and to use almost as bait, although none of them were ever harmed. Uh so the dogs are spooked. All the animals are spooked. The people are spooked. Uh this is this obviously there’s something big that had just eaten of 75 lbs or 60 lbs of meat. Uh what what column didn’t say in that soundbite is in addition to them finding evidence of a scalpel-like instrument and a heavy machete instrument, there were teeth marks that something had chewed on that calf. Um they didn’t identify the teeth marks though, so something is out there.
Everybody’s on edge. It’s nighttime and the rancher, you know what? We have a actually have a piece of this video.
Remember the late night cow video that you had up there for a minute? I think from tape number one.
H, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell the story. Um, anyway, so the rancher hears a noise. He hears his cattle out. It’s a night time and he he’s patrolling around because he doesn’t want to lose anymore. He’s got a a powerful gun with him in his truck.
Um, the NIDS guys uh hear him making a noise, tearing out across the pasture.
So, they jump in their vehicle and they go after him and they bring in a video camera and then they hear him jump out of his truck. Boom. I got it. The story was as he explained what he had and then did more shots. He had pulled up to this tree and had seen these two creatures.
One is a big round almost looks like a bear. It’s at the bottom of this tree.
And the other one is up in a tree. Now, he can’t see the shape of that creature in the tree, but he knows it’s big because its eyes were like this big green reptilian eyes that big sitting up in the tree glaring at him. Uh, and he shot at that, too. As soon as he shot the thing at the bottom, which is the first thing that he hit, he says, “I hit it.” It goes poof. It’s gone. He shoots the thing in the the eyes in the tree, the second thing, and it fell out. Now, there was snow on the ground. There was still snow at the time, and the Nid’s guys come up behind uh Tom Gorman, rushing to catch him cuz he goes off into the brush, but this thing fell down. And one print is in the snow at the bottom of that tree. and they analyzed it later and it’s tough to do because it is snow. They couldn’t make a cast of it, but it was like a raptor, like a dinosaur. Um, that’s the only thing that the only kind of comparison they could make. And crazy as it sounds, after shooting it out of the tree, they go into the bushes looking for it.
Didn’t find it. No blood. They brought in the the same guy who was the tracker, went looking for it, never found it.
But, um, just sort of adding to the litany. Now, the neighbor, you saw the picture of the neighbor who was driving down the road there. Uh, Mr. Gonzalez, had his own mutilation incidents. So, it’s not just the Gorman family making this stuff up. One of the most unusual ones was he had a couple of cows in a in a barbwire fenced area. They can’t get out. I don’t know why he was keeping them there, but he looks out his window and damn if they aren’t out. One of them is caught under the barb wire. The other one is out in the in the field laying down. He goes out there and sees it and its two front legs are broken. He can’t figure out for the life of him how it got out of the in the enclosure and what had happened to its legs. So, he goes back in the house. He’s going to get a gun and a blanket to comfort the didn’t know whether to comfort the cow who was in agony or to shoot it and put it out of its misery. Comes right back outside.
Cow’s gone. It’s gone.
Scratching his head. goes back in the house trying to figure out what the heck had happened. He uh has a sandwich. It’s an hour later. He looks out his window and to his amazement, the cow’s back. He goes running outside. Now, instead of two broken legs, it has four broken legs. It is as if it had been dropped from the sky twice.
Uh there were a lot of those kinds of incidents both to the Gormans and to their neighbors. And that is sort of why NIDS got involved. And I’ll I’ll make this short because I know you’re going to have questions on this and other topics, but um um NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, heard about this because Tom Gorman got fed up. He thought it was the military pulling tricks that somehow the military wanted his land and they were playing mind games with him. So he went to a newspaper reporter and he told the reporter about it, thinking if I get enough publicity, maybe they’ll leave me alone. Well, what happened instead was Bob Bigalow heard about it. He flies down to meet with Gorman. Uh by the time that the Bigalow and the Nids people arrived on the property, the Gorman family, the four members were all sleeping in the same room every night on the floor for safety. They were a wreck.
Um they had some instances that that sort of coincide with what we we would describe as alien abduction experiences, scars and missing times and things like that. I mean, they were a wreck. So Bigalow in a sense was sort of a savior to him. He says, “Hey, can I buy the ranch?” Yeah, you bet you could buy this ranch. And then he talked Tom Gorman into what would seem impossible, and that is staying on. The family were moved to another property 20 m away. But Tom Gorman, who was a proud man, stubborn, didn’t want to be run off his land, was determined to get to the bottom of it. And many a night he would be out there on his property with a gun trying to outwit whatever the heck this intelligence was. And eventually he sort of developed sort of a strategy for stalking it and and felt that at times he could avoid it even though other times it seemed to know exactly what he was going to do, what he was thinking, what he was planning. That’s also the experience that the NIDS guys had. They arrive on the property, they come in with sort of guns blazing. Um there was a lot of debate among the science advisory board about what kind of an approach to take with such a unique property and a unique position. uh they opted to go high-tech. So, they put cameras all over the property and sensors and uh they installed a trailer with all kinds of infrared gear and other things. They had a 24-hour a day uh presence on the property and they did what scientists should do. I mean, basic science. So, one of the criticisms we’ve had of the book is, well, where the heck is the science? Well, you got to look for it. What these guys did was look, let’s look for explanations for all this stuff. They did a geomagnetic survey of the property to see if there was some kind of a grav gravity anomaly that would cause any of this stuff happening.
Earth lights, that kind of stuff. They sampled the every plant that they every plant species to see if like there’s magic mushrooms or something growing on the property inspiring all these visions. Nothing like that. They eliminated a lot of possibilities. They talked to all the neighbors. They cast an ever widening net uh talking to local officials to shopkeepers to uh all the people who lived in the surrounding towns who had UFO incidents, people like Junior Hicks and Gonzalez next door.
They did basic investigative work trying to get a handle on what this thing was and then they started seeing the stuff themselves. Uh the lights uh the orbs and a lot of other strange uh strange things. There was an incident where a PhD physicist who has worked on classified programs uh for uh several um military uh entities and intelligence agencies is out there on the property with my friend Col Dr. Colum Kellaher and they see this black thing in the in the in the trees kind of an amorphous cloud and it’s kind of circling them in a in a menacing sort of way. The dogs that are with them are terrified. And then and then this guy, this physicist starts speaking in another voice that this thing had gone into his head. And it’s telling column, “We’re watching you. You’re not welcome here.” And this guy, the physicist, doesn’t remember exactly that happening, but for days later, this thing sort of hung with him um and and sort of terrorized him in other locations on the property. These are these are worldclass guys who saw this stuff. They had an incident where they’re they got two guys up on on Skinwalker Ridge who are sort of watching with infrared and and telescopes and then two other guys are down below. And the guys who are below see this like a a dirty snowball of yellow light hanging maybe a foot off the ground in the middle pasture. You know, George plastic chair pasture. Um, and it’s getting bigger and bigger and they’re talking on the walkie-talkie to the guys upstairs and they say up at the on the ridge and they say, “Can you see this thing?” Yeah, we’re watching it.
And this ball starts getting bigger and then it kind of gets elongated until it looks like a tunnel. And you guys still watching this? Yeah. And the guys with the infrared said, “Hey, there’s something inside this thing.” And sure enough, this large humanoid looking creature starts wriggling through the tunnel from one side trying to get to the other as if it’s coming from somewhere else. And it gets to the end of the this tunnel of light. It stands up. It’s like 8 ft tall uh black featureless. And uh it jumps out. The tunnel collapses on itself and goes away. And this thing, this big thing starts running up Skinwalker Ridge. the guys are up there just about had to had to change their underwear because they’re they’re thinking it’s coming up after them and it didn’t um it just went poof. I mean they these guys are didn’t make this stuff up. I mean they had these experiences themselves and again as with the Gormans um this this entity this intelligence played with them. It’s like it anticipated their moves. You put some cameras so it’s going to watch here. you have an event over there, you put it over there, it happens over there. They had uh they developed a uh almost tried to develop a communication system with the thing and felt that at one point that they were close to it, but it didn’t happen. And eventually they started adopting the techniques that Tom Gorman had used and they’re stalking it. And whatever this intelligence was, it didn’t like being hunted. It liked being the hunter. and uh and it started appearing less and less and less and it sort of punctuated its departure in in a very distinct way.
You saw the picture of the telephone pole with the cameras on top. Um anyway, there’s they’ve got three of these cameras on on poles looking at different parts of the of the ranch property and one night they noticed that one of the cameras went out completely and they go out to investigate and something had gone up the pole and ripped the guts out of this camera. and not just ripped the wires out, just destroyed it, but they had had this thick uh tape all the way down the telephone pole. The tape had been baked in the sun and the hot summer sun out there. Yeah, that’s that’s the camera setup. And uh that’s you see the tape. So, they had ripped the tape off.
That was gone. The the tubing that protects the wires that go up the top, that was gone. And they thought, “Aha, you know what? We’ve got the other camera that has a vision that that should be able to see what happened there. We’ll just back time it. We’ll take a look and and see what it was or who went up there and destroyed this camera. They roll the tape back. They can’t see anything. There’s nothing there. The the camera is not crisp enough to see the wires flying or anything, but uh there’s nothing there.
They take the the videotape back to Las Vegas and later could see a tiny little almost like a firefly or something flying around it, but this was no firefly. It was as if this thing said, “We don’t want your cameras here anymore, and we don’t want you here anymore.” And uh eventually the level of activity sort of dropped off to the point where there wasn’t enough for these guys to be there to study. It flares up uh to this day now and then, not only around the ranch, but throughout the UN basin. Um but this is sort of a this is sort of a mystery we’re not going to solve anytime soon.
I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, but I mean it seems like it was a portal of some sort or a dimensional door or things were coming in from somewhere else. You know, in preparation for the book, uh we analyzed a variety of different possibilities of what it could be. We we ruled out hoaxes because the the family didn’t create this story.
It had been there since long before they lived in the area, since before they were born. Uh they didn’t instill the story in their neighbors. Everybody in the whole region had seen these kinds of weird things. They didn’t destroy their own animals. They didn’t uh hoax the the NIDS guys who saw this stuff with their own eyes. Plus, they were they were trustworthy people. They were solid salt of the earth kind of people. Um the other possibility, an ET possibility, I guess. So, you know, we can’t rule it out. We don’t know enough about ETSs to say whether this is what they do or not.
It just doesn’t seem to be consistent with what you and I know about ET or alleged ET behavior. Uh, could it be the military? Well, we can’t really rule that out entirely. I I suppose the military could pull some of this stuff off. I know they would like to have technology like this. We know that they have played psychological games with with people in isolated areas before, probably with a much larger public. But I’m left asking myself, which is the Delta Force commando who gets the order to sneak into the bathroom and steal the hairbrush without, you know, while the lady’s taking a shower? Um, too much of what happened does not match uh the capabilities, at least known capabilities of our military. And so, you know, that sort of leaves uh only one possibility that we kind of kicked around, and that’s a dimensional uh parallel universe, alternate reality, something. uh too many instances where it appeared that we were getting glimpses of other realities. Uh you know the orange balls where things would come in and out this tunnel where something came from somewhere else. These animals that we had never seen before that would wander through. Uh there were there were other things. Um there during u duck season or goose season, these big formations of these geese would fly over the house and right over the house, you know, they’re in this perfect V. Boom.
It’s like they run into an invisible portal or or a tower or something like that up there. Something really strange about that property. Don’t know what it is. Uh don’t know that we’ll ever know what it is, but it seems to I don’t know. It’s just it’s just my uh I’m no scientist, but it just seems like it’s leading us down a path trying to try to teach us another way to to think about things to analyze uh what the world is really like. Um and you know, I I can’t answer it. I I I don’t uh I don’t my brain isn’t big enough to figure it out, but it it just looks like it’s uh it’s leading us toward an understanding of a of a bigger and more mysterious world. Um you know, but we we took a lot of grief over this, you know, um that this is a waste of science, the time of scientists and journalists to pursue these kinds of crazy topics. and and I don’t feel that way at all. You know, in uh in my years among the the UFO faithful, I’ve observed the the nuts and bolts uh saucer afficionados, the you know, they don’t they don’t like the abductees and and euphology in general is is despised by the poltergeist crowd and and the Bigfoot folks have nothing but contempt for all the above, you know. Uh but it just might be that putting all of these different par paranormal phenomena in one place is a way of telling us that some level maybe they’re connected and and maybe someday you uh dumb humans are going to be able to figure it out and that uh you know what we call paranormal today might be normal once we understand the big picture assuming that we ever will. You know the the distance is growing between the rigid dogma of modern science and the everyday experience of regular people all over the world who see strange things uh who see these things happen. Uh they try to tell a scientist and a scientist won’t investigate it because it’s beneath their dignity to give any credence to it. And that shouldn’t be how it works.
You know, scientists are the guys who get their hands dirty, who aren’t supposed to worry so much about um their grants or their peers or their their next job or something like that, but who follow the information and the evidence wherever it leads. Uh people who are supposed to be willing to look at the world in a different way so we can understand it. You know, people like the ones at NIDS who did this stuff, who put their lives on the line, their professional careers. Uh it wasn’t a perfect study. There are different approaches that could have been taken, but this is what scientists science is supposed to do and journalists too. And that is to investigate the unexplained and not explain the uninvestigated. and I’ll take your questions if you want.