When diving down the rabbit hole of UFOs and other extraordinary phenomena, one mustn’t search far to find the tales of the Skinwalker Ranch. The fabled Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre farm in northeastern Utah. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, UFO sightings began to become more and more frequent in the areas around the ranch. Then in 1994, the property was bought by Terry and Gwen Sherman, who began to report strange and unexplained occurrences.
Among the many sightings reported at the ranch, one of the most intriguing is the origin of the name Skinwalker Ranch. For those who may not know, a skin-walker is a creature based on the Navajo legend of an animal consumed by hunger and is extremely dangerous. Early in the Shermans tenure at Skinwalker Ranch, they noticed a smell that seemed to be emanating from near their livestock pen; the scent was of rotting flesh.
Then, upon the Shermans investigations, they observed a creature with bright piercing eyes. This creature looked like an enormous wolf or coyote; the beast slowly moved toward the pen when it suddenly lunged forward and attacked a calf. Terry then began to shoot at the entity with both a handgun and, when that didn’t work, a rifle; the creature was unfazed after being visibly hit by the gunfire and wandered back into the underbrush.
However, giant wolves were not the only sightings plaguing the ranch. The Shermans also reported bright lights in the night sky. The said lights were spheres of blue or orange light hovering and zipping around at high speeds. In addition to bright lights flying through the night sky, the Shermans also began to notice that farm animals, including dogs and cows, were being brutally mutilated and dismembered at a surgical level which rules out the possibility that a wild animal perpetrated these attacks.
In 1996 the Shermans had enough of their dream home turned nightmare ranch and began trying to sell it to anyone interested when an avid UFO researcher and real-estate tycoon Robert Bigelow bought the property for 200,000 dollars in 1996 and held ownership till 2016. In 1995, Robert founded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) with Bigelow. Hungry for the truth, he established a compound at the former cattle ranch complete with state-of-the-art technology, Ph.D. level field researchers, scientists, and 24-hour security detail to guard the property. The researchers were tasked with gathering evidence, interrogating witnesses, and searching for an explanation for the phenomena so prevalent at the ranch.
Unfortunately, the program produced little hard evidence to prove previous owners’ claims of Extraterrestrials and skin-walkers at the ranch. This led to the disbandment of NIDS in 2004. After the dispersion of NIDS, Robert Bigelow replaced the organization with the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), which was more secretive than its predecessor. The organization was also pursuing a government sponsor. In 2007 the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was a classified investigatory effort tasked by the United States Defense Department to study the phenomena at the ranch.
As the next several years passed, the United States government funneled $22 million into the program to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects. The $22 million that came from the US government was at the behest of Harry Reid, a Nevadan senator. This information was classified at the time and was only released to the public in 2017 when the New York Times revealed the events and the funds put toward the ranch. When news of this spread, a member of the Department of Defense affirmed what the government-funded program was.
In 2016, Robert Bigelow sold the ranch to a skeptic named Brandon Fugal via his company Adamantium real estate, for an estimated $4.5 million. He would shut down all paranormal investigations until Fugal encountered a UFO while walking the perimeter of his property with his brother, which caused him to go from skeptic to believer. After Brandon further researched his new property, he learned about phenomena following them home from the ranch, an effect known as the hitchhiker effect. The hitchhiker effect is the sensation experienced from venturing into the ranch, in which persons afflicted with the effect leave the ranch and begin experiencing UFO phenomena. The influence also spread amongst family and friends of people who knew others who had been to the ranch as they soon began having otherworldly experiences.
Skinwalker Ranch is a unique UFO conspiracy simply for its size and sheer scale, including all the organizations involved. Unfortunately, the Skinwalker Ranch provided little hard evidence to back up the claims that came from the Shermans, who originally sold the property to Bigelow to research the marvels at the ranch; however, something must’ve been worth garnering over $22 million in research money. Whether Skinwalker Ranch’s tales of UFOs and un-killable wolves are substantial or not remains to be seen.
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