Skinwalker Ranch

In 1994, a rancher named Terry Sherman and his wife, Gwen, bought a 480-acre property in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah and moved their cattle onto it.

It was a beautiful, isolated place: flat pastures along a river, bordered by a long red sandstone ridge, cottonwood trees, a farmhouse and a few outbuildings at the end of a dirt road. The nearest town was small. The nearest city was hours away. It seemed like the perfect place to raise cattle and children in peace.

Within two years, the Shermans had sold the ranch and left. In an interview with a Salt Lake City newspaper in 1996, they described a list of experiences so strange that the property soon became known around the world under a new name: Skinwalker Ranch.

The Wolf

The first strange thing, the Shermans said, happened within weeks of their arrival.

Terry Sherman was out on the property one evening when an enormous wolf approached the family’s cattle. It was far bigger than any wolf he had ever seen — some accounts say three times the normal size. It walked right up to a calf and grabbed it through the bars of a corral. Sherman shot at it, he said, at close range. The bullets seemed to have no effect. He shot it again and again, finally with a powerful rifle. The wolf simply backed away and walked off. Later, he said, when he tried to follow its tracks, they ended abruptly, as if the animal had vanished.

The Cattle

Over the following months, the Shermans said, their cattle began dying.

Some of them were found dead in the fields with strange wounds — precise, surgical-looking cuts, organs removed, and no blood around the bodies. Some cattle simply vanished. In one incident, the Shermans said, they found a cow dead in the snow with no tracks around it, as if it had been dropped from the sky.

The family’s dogs disappeared too. Terry Sherman said that one night, he heard his three dogs barking frantically at something in the darkness. Then the barking stopped. According to the account later published by researchers, all he found in the morning were three strange circles on the ground.

The Lights

The Shermans also described strange objects in the sky over the ranch.

They said they saw lights hovering above the ridge, some small, some huge. They described what looked like a large, glowing craft and smaller objects flying in and out of it. They said they saw what appeared to be a kind of glowing doorway in the air, from which other lights emerged. They heard voices in the fields, speaking in a language they didn’t recognize, coming from somewhere above them. They said they felt watched constantly.

The Name

In June 1996, the Deseret News published a story about the Shermans’ experiences. Shortly afterward, they sold the ranch.

The buyer was a Las Vegas real estate billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who had made a fortune in hotels and aerospace and had a long-standing interest in UFOs and the paranormal. He had founded an organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, to research unexplained phenomena. He set up a full-time scientific monitoring operation on the ranch, with cameras, instruments and investigators living on the property.

Over the following years, NIDS researchers reported many strange experiences of their own: lights in the sky, strange animals, equipment malfunctions, and at least one more mysterious cattle death. But they were never able to capture definitive, verifiable evidence of anything paranormal. In 2004, NIDS shut down.

The name “Skinwalker Ranch” came from the local Ute people’s oral traditions and from a Navajo legend about the skinwalker — a witch or shapeshifter who can take the form of an animal. According to stories told in the area, the Ute people believed the land beneath the ridge was cursed, or that the Navajo had placed a curse on them, and they avoided it. That story is often repeated, but it’s worth saying that the use of Native American spiritual beliefs to market a haunted ranch has made many Native people uncomfortable.

The Government

The strangest chapter in the story of Skinwalker Ranch came out years later.

In 2008, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency launched a classified program to study unusual aerial phenomena and advanced aerospace threats. It was funded through a contract with a company owned by Robert Bigelow. As part of that program, according to reporting by journalists and accounts from people involved, investigators studied Skinwalker Ranch. The program ended a few years later, and its existence became public in 2017, when the New York Times published a story about the Pentagon’s interest in UFOs.

In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to a company owned by a Utah businessman, Brandon Fugal. The new owners brought in scientists and investigators and launched a television series, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which has run for several seasons. They’ve reported strange readings, equipment failures, unexplained injuries to some team members, and possible radar evidence of objects in the sky. Skeptics argue that much of what appears on the show is dramatized or easily explained.

What’s Out There?

I find Skinwalker Ranch fascinating precisely because of how many serious people have spent so much time and money there and come away with so little that they can show to anyone else.

There are many possible explanations for what the Shermans experienced: wild animals, poachers, cattle predators, misidentified aircraft, natural lights, the power of fear and suggestion in an isolated place. Some skeptics have suggested that the publicity surrounding the ranch has fueled a cycle in which every strange noise and odd light becomes part of the legend.

And yet, for nearly thirty years, the reports haven’t stopped.