Skinwalker Ranch

Skinwalker Ranch in the Uintah Basin of Utah was the site of a long running series of paranormal phenomena. The Sherman (sometimes given as Gorman) family bought the ranch, from absent owners, in the Fall of 1994. The sheer amount of strange events encountered proved incredibly stressful and when they tried to sell the ranch in 1996 the news started to break. The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) picked up this information and bought the ranch for, it is claimed, $200,000. However, nothing about the level of strangeness was known until 2002 when the NIDS allowed George Knapp, a reporter for the Las Vegas Mercury, access to the ranch and his two-part article in November 2002[1] revealed this all to a wider audience. Now NIDS researcher Colm Kelleher and journalist George Knapp have written a book outlining their take on the NIDS investigation from the inside

Phenomena

The Uintah Basin is a hotspot for strange phenomena and the ranch is the center of it all and features strongly in Ute legends stretching back generations. Some of the phenomena encountered include:

• UFOs - nearly half the residents of the basin have reported seeing UFOs ranging from strange lights to strange vehicles to aliens and also a handful of abductions. A range of objects have been seen on the ranch including:
  • Vehicles that look like an advanced version of the F-117 stealth fighter and/or resemble Black triangles.
  • A large refrigerator-shaped object with a white light at the front and red at the back which could hover and seemingly disappear (which bears resemblances to the Chupas).
  • Glowing blue orbs described as being larger than a baseball, made from some kind of hard, clear substance and seemingly to contain some swirling blue liquid. They were capable of inducing fear and affecting electrical items (in particular the lights) merely by their presence, and when attacked by dogs they were reduced to a grey butter-like substance. The description of this orbs bears resemblance to the ball lightning phenomena.
• Cattle mutilation which shows all the common signs: cutting off of an ear, excision of genitals, coring out of the anus and exsanguinations some of which took place in very tight windows of time (20 minutes on one occasion). Locals report that this kind of activity has been going on at the ranch since the 1960s.
• Skinwalkers - the shapeshifting witches are thought to be part of the explanation for a number of strange creatures witnessed in the area:
  • Giant wolves that are apparently impervious to bullets
  • Strange dogs
  • Dog-headed men smoking cigarettes
  • Bigfoot-like creatures - the local Ute Indians believe some of these may be actual creatures but consider some of them to be skinwalkers - the Ute often seem to use the term Skinwalker/Sasquatch interchangeably.
  • A large, hyena-like beast whose description has some resmblance to both the Beast of Gévaudan and the Shunka Warakin.
  • A flock of small red birds.
• A large orange portal in the sky which appears to open into another place (blue sky can be seen through it at night). Black vehicles have been seen entering and leaving the portal.
• Magnetic anomalies
• Trickster or Poltergeists-like activity- including the stuffing of a large number of cows into a small cattle truck. This included a whole range of objects going missing and appearing in strange places after a long search. Doors would also open and slam shut, and in the most frequent example, the salt and pepper would be found in the wrong pots.
• Teleportation
• Large aquatic serpents in the nearby Bottle Hollow are alleged to be behind a number of deaths at the lake. The Hollow is also the site of a number of sightings of balls of light entering and exiting the water.
• Invisible or stealthed creatures – one of which (that attacked at 50 to 60 mph) was later identified as looking almost identical to the stealth blurring seen in the Predator films. Others were “seen” by their effect on a herd of cattle and compass needle or in one case as it walked through a stream.
• An ice disc in the pond.
• "Cookie cutter" holes in the ground removing a couple of hundred pounds of soil at a time.
• Strange sounds including:
  • underground noises as if heavy machinery was at work below the ranch.
  • voices speaking from out of the air
• A large Masonic symbol carved on an inacessible part of Skinwalker Ridge, possibly connected with the presence of the Buffalo Soldiers in the area (a Prince Hall lodge was attached to the 9th Cavalry which was stationed in nearby Fort Duchesne in 1896)

A lot of these phenomena were transient, sometimes happening only once, or often just appearing for a couple of weeks and then disappearing forever, making it difficult for investigators to get results or draw firm conclusions.

Explanations

Despite definitive conclusions a range of explanations have been put forward to explain the strangeness which might be down to:

• A hoax but there are sightings from so many witnesses in a range of locations across a number of years that it would be difficult to pull off.
• The ranch might be a testing area for advanced military technology.
• A coincidence – if some areas are UFO hotspots and some areas are Bigfoot hotspots, a few rare locations may be both.
• The Ute building homes on a Buffalo Soldier graveyard have, in an ironic twist on the popular horror movie trope, disturbed their spirits.
• A Navajo curse that sent Skinwalkers to punish the Ute. The ranch is off limits to the Ute as they are reported to say "the ranch is in the path of the skinwalker." Junior Hicks, a retired schoolteacher and local researcher, claims contacts amongst the Ute have told him that the Skinwalker lives in Dark Canyon, beyond the ranch, wihin a cave decorated with centuries-old petroglyph depicting Skinwalkers.
• The intrusion of alternate realities or parallel universes or higher dimensions, which may be connected with the orange portal. Both the Apache and the Hopi have folk traditions which certainly be interpreted as folk traditions involving travel between different dimensions (Louis L'Amour’s ‘’Haunted Mesa’’ is said to be a good fictionalised account drawing heavily on these beliefs).
• That our understanding of reality is fundamentally flawed. This may be explained by Michael Talbot’s ideas that this is a Holographic Universe. Equally it could be explained by the simulation argument, as put forward by philosophers like Nick Bostrom, which posits that we are living within a very convincing computer program (as popularised by The Matrix).
• Unique geology which ties in the concept of Earthlights (aka Ghost lights). The fact that the Uintah Basin is the only known major concentration of Gilsonite (also known as uintahite or uintaite) may or may not have some bearing on this.
• The presence at the ranch of a small wormhole, time travel portal, or rip in spacetime that allows technologies and genetically enhanced beings from the future to be transported into the present. This scenario would explain the diverse array of phenomena encountered at the ranch, but is problematic given current doubts about the viability of time travel.

None of the hypotheses can give a definitive explanation of events because they either can't explain the extremely varied activity at the ranch and/or they are largely untestable by modern science.

Other similar sites

Skinwalker ranch is nearly unique but there are other hotspots with a wide variety of phenomena (although researchers and investigators often focus on the UFOs):

• Dulce, NM where activity is so high some have suggested the presence of a super-secret military establishment in the area – the Dulce Base. The NIDS established a presence in the area in 1998 and 1999, based at Mount Archuleta, and interviews with local people, especially the Jicarilla Apache, revealed large numbers of similar reports (UFOs, Bigfoot, cattle mutilation and far stranger things).

• The Yakama Indian Reservation is the center of a lot of UFO activity. One family reported voices, strange noises, poltergeist activity, shadow men, flying balls of light, strange flying vehicles, disappearing people and telepathic voices.

• Elbert County, CO where one family encountered strange aircraft, numerous Bigfoot sightings, cattle mutilations, mysterious voices and encounters with humanoids and flying vehicles as well as a strange small box which stole a tree.

• San Luis Valley where local journalist Chris O’Brien has charted a wide range of unusual phenomena and describes the area as a “paranormal Disneyland” [2]

• Sedona, Arizona which, as well as its famous vortex and New Age beliefs, has one ranch, belonging to the Bradshaw family, that has reported similar events including strange lights, Sasquatch, encounters with grays, cattle and dog mutilation and a portal through which they could see another world.

It is worth noting that these locations share some of the following characteristics:

• Rural
• Lower than average incomes
• Nearby army bases
• Strong local presence of Native Americans and certain tribes have have connections with a number of sites. The Navajo once occupied the San Luis valley and the Ute allied with the Jicarilla Apache to displace them. The Ute homeland once stretched across Colorado. including Elbert Country to San Luis Valley. and also crossed into New Mexico and Arizona. In fact the majority of these hotspots are closely connected to the Ute.

See also

• John Keel - who reported similar overlapping anomalous phenomena in his investigations.
• Hessdalen lights - one of the few other localities that has been subjected to long running scientific explanation of mystery lights and related phenomena.

External links

• NIDS homepage which contains two preliminary reports:
  • Three Reports of Unusual Killing and Mutilation of Calves
  • Report on an Ice Circle in NE Utah, February 21, 2002
• Path of the Skinwalker the original news article which broke the story. Published in two part son 21st and 28th November, 2002 in the Las Vegas Herald.
• Official site for the book
• Interview with Colm Kelleher
• Las Vegas Based Scientists Study 'Skinwalker Ranch'
• Where the Steers and the Aliens Play an article by Sean Castel in Fate, August, 1998
• Utah's UFO Ranch
• NIDS Studies Paranormal Ranch
• NIDS - Robert Bigelow
• Bad Medicine a multipart blog entry on the topic - the second part
• The Legend of Skinwalker Ranch