If, like me, you sometimes find yourself awake late at night and struggling to sleep, you may have come across a certain History Channel show about a northern Utah ranch full of unexplained events and mysterious happenings.
The Skinwalker Ranch was named after a Native American legend of shapeshifting demons, or maybe warlocks, that could take the form of animals like wolves or eagles. The ranch wasn’t named that by any local Native American tribe, it was named that in the 1996 by the new owner, Robert Bigelow. Bigelow is an American businessman and UFO enthusiast, who has spent millions of dollars investigating UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) and parapsychological events.
He bought the ranch from the Sherman family, who told of cattle mutilations and unusual lights in the sky above the ranch. While stories of unexplained lights in the sky in that area of the Utah go back as far as the 1970s, they only got specific to the ranch once the Shermans moved in, in the early 90s.
Since then, the stories have got wilder. Initially the Shermans were telling of lights in the sky and strange cattle mutilations… then Bigelow bought it, and described monstrous sightings of giant wolves, unknown creatures that disappear into the shadows, alien craft, and people having strange experiences.
In 2016 the ranch was sold on again to another billionaire UFO enthusiast, Brandon Fugal. Brandon thought all these sightings and paranormal events warranted detailed examination, so he did what anyone who wants to solve a mystery does – he agreed to let the History Channel launch a reality TV show to look into these events.
The Truth of Skinwalker Ranch (aka The Curse of Skinwalker Ranch) first aired in 2020 and is now into its fifth season. The show follows a team of investigators including Fugal, his friend Erik Bard, Thomas Winterton, Bryant “Dragon” Arnold, and Travis Taylor – an aerospace engineer and physicist who has worked with the US Defence Agency and NASA. Taylor’s NASA credentials are hyped up quite dramatically in the show, but it seems (at least from my reading) that he has mostly contributed to papers that look into UAPs, and authored a paper on interplanetary defence against invading extra-terrestrials.
This crack team spend the summer months looking at different ways to, from what I can tell, be professionally confused. There’s lots of talk of telemetry, but very little information. There’s a lot of looking at images on very large monitors and asking breathlessly: “What is that?!”
The ranch has dozens of cameras covering all the key areas they like the focus on, all of which seem to be of incredibly low quality – especially considering the team is perpetually followed around by professional camera operators with HD-quality equipment. Pictures are then shown on screens far too large to display the images captured with any clarity, and the blurred images are pored over by this incredulous crew of ragtag misfit scientists.
Our heroes will see something blurry fly over the mountain range of several miles in mere seconds, and ask “how could it move so fast?”, proclaiming “Look at the flight pattern – nothing we have could move like that!” Someone needs to show these gentlemen an episode of Father Ted, because they can’t seem to grasp the difference between something that is small and something that is far away.
These ‘impossibly fast’ blurry black things are more than likely just flies – which are extremely common on a cattle ranch – buzzing close to the camera. Flies can move very fast and erratically. Admittedly they cannot cover miles in seconds, but they can cover a few inches in that time, while being very close to the camera (which also explains them being out of focus, when the mountains in the distance are quite clear).
As for the cattle mutilations, such stories often feature details like the soft tissue of eyes and tongues being missing, with the crew explaining that the blood has been drained from the body. However, actual mutilations receive less focus in the show than the blurred footage of aliens/flies. It’s easy to imagine why; the number of these instances is likely to have reduced with the increased activity on the ranch, as people swarm about with lights looking for alien activity – such bustle is likely to ensure that any natural predators in the area keep their distance.
Mountain cats and coyotes live in the area and are known to attack cattle. Such predators often start eating soft flesh and, if they are disturbed and run away, scavenger birds will eat eyes and tongues. The blood hasn’t been drained, but has settled close to the ground once the heart has stopped beating, giving the top-side of the animal an emaciated appearance.
The show also likes to bring in other “experts” with various different testing materials, such as metal detectors, rockets, drones and drills. They never drill particularly deeply, and they never excavate any areas around their bore holes, ostensibly because of a story they tell of bad things happening to a previous group that worked on the ranch during the Bigelow era who tried to dig on the ranch. Personally, I suspect that it’s more that finding something solid under the sandstone is much harder to be confused about if you know there is a layer of denser rock further down.
They also mostly use their devices in wide open areas with poor internet signal – so when a rocket goes off course in the middle of an open field, unprotected from strong winds, it’s a reasonably explainable event. When a fleet of drones has missing data, or when one malfunctions within a formation of dozens, it is always treated as unexplainable – when the answer could be as mundane as a bad connection. Meanwhile, their detectors seem to go off at random… particularly when swung in the direction of the drilling equipment or cars that we know are just out of camera shot.
People are often filmed having strange and unexpected bouts of dizziness and blurred vision on the show – subjective symptoms that cannot be measured well, especially in the middle of a cattle ranch. Mobile phones will be shown going haywire and unlocking themselves – is that evidence of something spooky? Perhaps not, given the phones shown are often pretty beaten up, with cracked screens and the potential water damage, on top of the ability of modern phones to unlock with facial recognition.
But of course, the biggest trick employed on the reality TV show is… editing! We don’t know that all events happen in the order presented; we often get to hear about, but not see, strange events happening; shaky cameras jerk about to try follow a light in the sky; we see cuts between reactions and events happening on totally separate sides of the massive cattle ranch. It’s quite easy to build a story of unusual events occurring all the time when you get to control what people do and do not see.
All of which allows this ranch, which has experienced unusual events ever since it was bought 30 years ago by people that really want to believe in UFOs, and has increased dramatically in value since it became famous in certain circles, can keep finding newer and blurrier reasons to be amazed by the incredible events happening there.
