Tales From Skinwalker Ranch - Part Two

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After being tormented to the point of mental breakdown, the Sherman family had nowhere to turn.

They were stuck on a property that was haunted by something that went beyond beyond their understanding, and to make matters worse, they were facing financial ruin.

Fortunately, someone had heard their cry for help.

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In March 1996, at around the same time that the Sherman family were considering leaving the ranch, Billionaire real estate developer Robert Bigelow was busy putting together an organization that would come to be known as the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS for short.

It was an ambitious undertaking, and one which was unprecedented.

A well-funded, highly qualified state-of-the-art equipped team of scientists that could deploy anywhere in the country at a moment's notice and investigate events of high strangeness.

Never before had a scientific organization been formed with such significant funding in order to bring systematic analysis and scrutiny to what was essentially paranormal and supernatural research.

These specialised individuals were no fly-by-night dropouts who didn't quite make the cut in their respective fields of study.

These were PhD professors, qualified in subjects ranging from biochemistry and psychology to astrophysics and veterinary science.

Bigelow was careful to recruit only candidates with a sceptical frame of mind, field investigators who would always look for rational explanations first and foremost and leave pseudoscience at the door.

In addition, he also assembled a world-class advisory board, the members of which were handpicked from a wide array of disciplines.

This group would evaluate evidence gathered from the field team's activities.

All in all, NIDS would comprise more than 25 members, the majority of which were from the scientific community, but would also include security personnel recruited from former military circles.

Two of the most prominent members of the scientific team were physicist Eric Davis and biochemist Colm Kelleher.

Kelleher would go on to document both the Sherman's and NIDS experiences in his book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, which he wrote in collaboration with George Knapp.

Shortly after NIDS was formed, they heard echoes in the press regarding a small ranch in the north of Utah, which was apparently being visited by UFOs on a regular basis.

Terry Sherman had reluctantly approached a local newspaper at the beginning of the year to report the strange happenings on his property, almost as a cry for help.

He had long held the suspicion that the majority of the activity was somehow related to secretive military technology.

He did not believe in extraterrestrials or any of the tales regarding Native American folklore, and he hoped that by bringing attention to the phenomena, whoever was perpetuating it might back off.

In the summer of 1996, Bigelow called a meeting to discuss the case.

In many ways, the ranch presented a tantalizing opportunity.

A laboratory out in the field, away from prying eyes that could study a wide variety of phenomena that was occurring on a regular basis and was of the precise nature for which the organisation was formed.

The prospect seemed too good to pass up.

Within a matter of weeks, the NIDS team had met with the Sherman family and after hearing their unbelievable experiences, expressed their interest in purchasing the property from them.

Whilst Gwen and the children were desperate to move and would have been happy never to have set foot on the ranch again, Terry was a proud man and was not quite ready to leave.

He was infuriated at being run off his own land, especially as he still didn't know what was behind the phenomena.

However, he had to do what was best for his family and grudgingly agreed, although he did offer to become ranch manager for the NIDS team.

He was keen to see how their investigation would progress and what answers they might find, if only to get some closure from the ordeal he and his family had suffered over the last two years.

As NIDS was a team of scientists used to working in lab conditions and didn't know the first thing about running a ranch, they happily accepted his offer.

Along with the property, they also purchased livestock to keep as bait, and Terry also housed some of his own cattle there for the same purpose.

By September that year, NIDS had moved their observation trailer and mobile laboratory onto the property.

The field team consisted of four scientists and a group of assistant investigators, who were stationed at the ranch permanently around the clock.

The field team's role was to collect and analyze evidence, and then present it in monthly meetings to the advisory board.

The first thing the team did when they arrived was to run a battery of tests.

The phenomena described by the Sherman family was far too varied and bizarre to pin down to any one explanation, and their initial thoughts were that there was possibly a psychological or environmental angle to consider.

Were the Shermans simply lying for attention?

Had Terry and his family been suffering from a mass delusion?

Were there plants on the land which emitted spores with hallucinogenic properties?

Was the family's water supply being contaminated?

Did the ranch have areas with intense electromagnetic fields?

Were there any instances of very low or ultra-low frequencies, otherwise known as infrasound?

Were there any fault lines running across the property, creating a situation of mild tectonic or seismic stress, which is thought to cause light anomalies and visual hallucinations?

The short answer to all of these questions was a resounding no.

Although it would take longer to answer some of these queries than others, especially regarding psychological factors.

Despite this, aside from a few strange lights seen in the sky, the remainder of 1996 would be uneventful, and the NIDS team were initially doubtful of some of the more bizarre stories they had been told, but all that would change in the coming year.

In essence, the longer the NIDS team spent on the ranch, the more they would come to the terrifying realization that the Sherman family was telling the truth.

On the 9th of March 1997,

Terry and Gwen discovered the carcass of a black Angus calf lying on the grass a little over 100 yards from the homestead.

Gwen seldom ventured onto the ranch since the family had moved away, but on this day, she had been helping Terry tag some of the animals in the pasture.

They had tagged this particular calf and then walked 300 yards across the field to tag others which were grazing to the south.

Whilst they were attending to this task, a dog that was with them began to growl.

Its hair stood on end as it looked back towards the ranch house.

Terry and Gwen followed its gaze and saw that the mother of the first calf was limping back and forth, clearly out of her wits.

When they ran over to see what was going on, they found her calf on the ground.

Its entire abdominal cavity, including all of its organs, had been removed.

The only things that remained were its head, legs and spinal column, with some of the ribcage still intact.

It was also missing an ear, which looked as if it had been sliced off with an extremely sharp instrument.

Most perplexing of all was that there was not a single drop of blood on the grass around the animal.

The ear that had been sliced off was the one that had been tagged less than 45 minutes before.

During that time, something had removed more than 60 pounds of meat from this poor animal, in broad daylight and in full view of the rancher and his wife, though they hadn't seen or heard a thing.

The NIDS veterinarian was baffled.

The cuts were clean and precise, with no spillage of blood.

He surmised that no predator he knew of could have been responsible.

When asked whether they had noticed anything unusual prior to the incident, both Terry and Gwen reported that they had smelled a heavy musk odour in the area.

After the vet had taken the cropsy samples from the calf, the rest of the team began to search for tracks.

In doing so, They happened to pass one of the kennels and saw that the dogs were all huddled inside.

It should be mentioned at this point that NIDS had strategically placed three large observation towers on the property, each surrounded by a chain-linked fence, inside which they housed a number of dogs.

Canines had an uncanny ability to sense when something strange was about to happen, so the team used them as biosensors.

Terry remarked how the dogs hadn't ventured out all day.

In fact, they would refuse to leave their shelter for many days after this event, and slowly but surely, the NIDS team would come to understand why.

Something was lurking on the ranch.

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At around 11pm on the 12th of March, the dogs started howling and barking at something on the far side of the pasture.

Terry and the Nids team had been sitting inside the observation trailer at the time, but soon piled into a truck and headed towards the disturbance.

The 4x4 had a bright spotlight fitted to the roof, and as they rounded the corner, the beam washed over a copse of distant cottonwoods.

In that moment, they saw a pair of yellow orbs sitting about 20 feet up in one of the trees.

It was a huge pair of eyes reflecting the light.

Terry stopped the truck and reached behind him for his rifle.

Exiting the vehicle, he leaned on the open door and took aim.

Through the scope, he could see the outline of a huge creature sitting in the tree.

I'm not gonna let it get another calf, he growled.

It didn't even move as he settled his sights.

It just sat there, staring right back at him.

The moment the rifle's report echoed across the open pasture, the eyes blinked out of existence.

and a loud thud was heard as whatever it was fell from the branches.

Terry got back into the vehicle and drove towards the cottonwoods, stopping about 40 feet away.

There was no sign of the huge animal, underneath the tree or anywhere else.

Everything was silent as Terry and the NIDS investigators spread out and entered the tree line.

They were about five yards apart when Terry was heard to shout, I see him!

Two more loud shots rang out.

As the Nid's team ran towards him, they heard a commotion in the branches ahead as something heavy blundered through the thicket, moving away from them.

It had disappeared by the time they reached the rancher.

It looked like a huge dog, but bipedal, he exclaimed.

After searching for an hour in darkness, The team found only two large footprints, spaced 20 feet apart from each other.

They were each 14 inches long and exhibited huge claw indentations.

The rest of the month passed by without further incident, but the dogs and livestock continued to act strange.

They were on edge and had a haunted look about them, almost as if they could sense that there was a predator in the area.

On the 1st of April, another calf vanished without trace.

No blood or tracks were found.

It was simply there one minute and gone the next.

On the 2nd, one of the weirdest and possibly most famous of all events to take place on the ranch would occur.

It involved four of Terry's prized Angus bulls, which he had temporarily moved back onto the property out of convenience.

Gwen had joined him once again to help out with a few jobs.

They were in a truck heading from the east side of the ranch over to the west, and as they passed the homestead, they looked across at the nearby corral and saw their four black Angus bulls staring back at them.

Each one was worth thousands of dollars.

There was perhaps 12 grand's worth of livestock in this quartet alone.

With the cattle mutilations and disappearances still fresh in their minds, Gwen remarked to Terry how she would be devastated if anything was to happen to those four bulls.

At the west end of the ranch, they repaired a broken fence line and tagged a couple of calves, which had been born the previous evening.

These tasks took them no more than an hour.

On the way back, they rounded the bend in the track heading towards the homestead, and their hearts suddenly skipped a beat.

The four black Angus bulls were no longer in the corral.

Terry jumped out of the vehicle in a panic and ran over to the enclosure.

The gates were still locked, but the bulls were nowhere to be seen.

He couldn't believe his eyes.

Next to the corral was an old trailer, which hadn't been used in years.

Terry happened to jump up onto a feeding trough and look in through one of the skylights, and to his utter amazement, he saw all four bulls standing silently, crammed into the tiny space.

They seemed to be in some sort of trance.

They're in here, he shouted to his wife, and as he did, the bulls woke up from whatever hypnotic state they were in.

They seemed to suddenly realize where they were and began to panic, kicking and thrashing wildly inside the narrow trailer.

In the end, One of the back doors was kicked off, and all four bulls ran out into the sunlight.

It took Terry and his wife two hours of gentle cajoling to get them back into the corral.

When the Nids team inspected the trailer, they did so in a state of mild disbelief.

It would have taken hours to get just one of those angry bulls into such a confined space, let alone four.

In fact, There was no way four bulls would ever entertain the idea of sharing such a small trailer with one another.

The only entrance into the trailer from the corral was through a door which was wired shut.

The NIDS team found old cobwebs strewn across the inside door panel and frame, proving that this entrance hadn't been opened in a very long time.

This was baffling, as there was no other way the bulls could have gotten into the trailer from the cattle pen.

Upon further investigation, they found that the bars of the corral had somehow been highly magnetised, an anomaly which dissipated over time.

This prompted the NIDS team to scan for magnetic fields across the entire property.

Sometime later that month, Colm Kelleher was investigating some strange tracks which had been found on the south side of the ranch when an overpowering scent of musk came over him.

It was an odd smell.

Being stationed on the property for a number of months already, he had become accustomed to the various odours of flora and fauna, but this was different.

About 50 yards away, he could see his teammate picking his way through some Russian olives, but couldn't attribute the strange smell to anything.

Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

and a chill ran down his spine.

Something was close by.

He couldn't see it, but he could feel its presence.

It was watching him.

Finally putting it down to his imagination, he gritted his teeth and continued with the task at hand.

Gradually the feeling subsided, and the muskoder receded.

When he spoke to his teammate an hour or so later, He too reported that he'd felt as if he was being watched and had also picked up on the strange scent.

He also mentioned that his field compass had acted up, pointing towards the direction where the scent was strongest and only returning to normal after the odour had dissipated.

These magnetic interferences were the first vague pattern that the investigators had seen.

Over the course of the year, More strange events would take place, which for the NIDS team would remove any lingering doubt doubt they held over the high strangeness occurring on the ranch.

In early June, Colm Kelleher and Eric Davis were on one of their regular stakeouts in front of the dilapidated Middle Homestead, one of the most notorious hotspots on the property.

They were looking out over an open field towards some trees.

Eric was scanning the distance with a pair of night vision goggles whilst Colm was taking long exposure shots of the night sky.

Suddenly, the dogs that were with them began to yelp and cower behind their legs.

At the same time, Eric took a sharp breath and said, Jesus, there's something in the trees over there.

A huge black thing.

Colm could not see anything, but then he didn't have the luxury of the night vision goggles, so instead began focusing his camera on the trees.

It's big.

I'm not sure if it's in the trees or behind the trees, Eric continued.

It's moving north.

Koln continued taking shots when his teammates suddenly announced, It's got me.

It's saying, we're watching you.

Eric kept muttering, Jesus Christ, over and over, as if he was experiencing some inner turmoil, until finally he said that the object was moving away.

When the ordeal was over, Colm asked Eric what had happened, and he replied that he didn't know.

It was almost as if the thing in the trees had taken control of his mind.

On the way back to the observation trailer, Colm made note of how jumpy his colleague seemed.

and wondered if he was more disturbed by his experience than he was letting on.

Over the course of the summer, the NIDS team would play cat and mouse with the infamous orbs of light, which appeared regularly all over the property, but they always seemed one step ahead, only appearing for brief moments and leading investigators on wild goose chases from one end of the ranch to the other as they tried to photograph these strange anomalies.

In August, Two team members would have one of the most frightening experiences.

It was around 3.30am

and they were on top of the ridge looking down towards the notorious middle homestead.

Again, only one of them had a pair of infrared binoculars, whilst the other looked after various scientific instruments and sensors.

They had been standing up on the ridge for about three hours and were about to move on to another location.

When Mike, the investigator with the binoculars, suddenly noticed a light appear in a pasture about 150 feet below.

Bizarrely, his colleague Jim could only see a dull illumination, yet through the infrared goggles, it appeared as bright as the moon.

It was hovering about three feet off the ground, and Mike was talking about how it seemed to be growing in size, when he stopped abruptly and said, It's not a light, it's a tunnel.

I can see through to the other side.

Jim asked his colleague if he could take a look, but Mike was transfixed on the strange phenomenon.

There's something in the tunnel, he exclaimed.

It's crawling out.

To Mike's utter disbelief, he could see a huge, black, featureless figure crawling on its elbows and knees from the other side of the tunnel.

He then witnessed it climb out of the tunnel and then run up the side of the ridge, moving faster than was humanly possible.

Both investigators heard the shale crunch under its feet as it ran past them about 30 feet away, before it disappeared into the darkness.

Immediately afterwards, they were greeted by a terrifyingly eerie silence as an odd musky odour hung in the night air.

In many ways, the things that the NIDS team team witnessed were every bit as frightening, bizarre, and inexplicable as the activity the Sherman family had experienced.

They saw the same orbs of light zipping through fields and tree lines, metallic UFOs hovering over the property, strange creatures and portal-like anomalies.

They witnessed first hand the devastating cattle mutilations, they experienced the poltergeist-like activity, strange odors, magnetic fields, heard the noises underground and many other things besides.

But by mid-1998, the activity had begun to decline, and it would remain that way for many years afterwards, until the team finally pulled the plug and left the property in 2004.

They had not succeeded in explaining what was occurring.

But for the time being at least, they had succeeded in putting an end to the strange activity on the ranch, even if this was not the outcome they had hoped for.

There is a common belief amongst sceptics that the NIDS team failed to gather any supporting evidence, and in some ways, this is true, but not entirely accurate.

They did succeed in recording some of the anomalies on film.

In fact,

So did Terry Sherman when he owned the ranch, and some of this can be seen in Jeremy Corbell's documentary Hunt for the Skinwalker, which is based on Colm Kelleher's and George Knapp's work of the same name.

Most of this video evidence was rejected by the NIDS advisory board, as the majority of the recordings took place at night and captured the most common phenomenon, which was the orbs of light.

Unfortunately, due to the darkness, These recordings only depicted what looked like indistinct points of light in the night sky or off in the distance.

The point the NIDS team made in the aftermath of their investigation was that whatever was haunting the ranch did not like the intrusion.

It did not want to be investigated.

It was always one step ahead and seemed to be completely in control.

Equipment would inexplicably fail at the most inopportune times.

The phenomena seemed to know when the team was waiting for something to happen, and when something did happen, it would occur just outside their camera's field of view and would be far too brief to record in any case.

The activity was nearly always one of a kind, and it rarely, if ever, repeated itself, and if it did, it would be in a completely different place to where their cameras were trained.

It was extremely frustrating for those involved in the investigation, and Robert Bigelow himself would go on to describe the phenomena as a precognitive sentient intelligence.

Despite all this, there are hundreds of well-documented eyewitness accounts, not just from the NIDS team, but also from neighbours, residents of the Uinta Basin, and people who have visited the ranch since out of curiosity.

Skinwalker Ranch is a rich tapestry of strange occurrences, far too bizarre and unbelievable for many people to accept.

But if there is any truth to the claims, and if there are explanations out there, what could they be?

First of all, let's address the elephant in the room.

Could the whole thing have been an elaborate hoax?

Were the Shermans faking the phenomena to offload a property which had in fact turned out to be a financial disaster?

They had lost a lot of cattle and were on the verge of bankruptcy after all, But why invent such fantastical stories?

Surely this would only damage their reputation and ultimately devalue the land.

Not only this, but UFOs and strange creatures had been seen and reported in the region for centuries, and neighbours of the Shermans reported similar activity on their ranches.

This somewhat suggests that the phenomena was not unique to Skinwalker Ranch, and by extension, not not the product of the Shermans' imaginations.

They could not have invented hundreds of years' worth of experiences.

Add in the fact that Robert Bigelow was convinced enough to purchase the property as well as invest millions in a decade-long study, and that the phenomena was also witnessed by the investigative team, who as it happens, were PhD professors.

and initially sceptical.

Some skeptics have argued that the whole thing was created by George Knapp and Robert Bigelow in the hopes of turning the ranch into a supernatural tourist spot, but this hasn't happened.

In fact, Bigelow held on to and protected the property for 20 years, and the only thing he changed in that time was the front gate.

Secondly, consider again the accounts of the locals, which stretch back centuries.

These experiences were there long before Bigelow, Knapp or even the Shermans had anything to do with the ranch.

So if not a hoax, what else could have been occurring?

Were visitors to the ranch suffering some sort of mass delusion?

It is not impossible, but highly unlikely given the sheer amount of people involved.

As already mentioned, NIDS carried out a battery of tests to rule out any environmental factors, and they found no common thread in the psychological profiling of the people they talked to and even themselves, which would point to mass delusion.

Not only that, but in many cases, physical evidence was left behind, be it footprints, mutilated cattle, vaporized dogs, and detectable magnetic fields, amongst many other things.

These physical signs were not imagined.

Perhaps the most popular theory amongst people who believe the phenomena to be real is that the ranch was the scene of extraterrestrial visitation.

Whilst it's true that many UFOs, strange craft and creatures were seen, anything that was left behind by the phenomena and later studied by the NIDS team yielded only terrestrial signatures.

This does not entirely rule out the involvement of extraterrestrials, but it certainly points in other directions.

For instance, could there be any truth to Native American legends regarding skinwalkers?

After all, the Utes firmly believe that the Navajo put a curse on their lands after the latter was pushed out of northeastern Utah.

Many of the things witnessed on the ranch do seem to fit in with how Native Americans describe skinwalkers, but certainly not all of the phenomena can be attributed to these particular entities.

Another widely considered possibility is that the military was somehow responsible for the strange occurrences.

Terry Sherman certainly seemed to think so.

It is indeed plausible that the military used the secluded ranch to test out advanced and secretive technologies, with the residents becoming unwitting guinea pigs in experiments involving psychological warfare.

Interestingly, the NIDS Advisory Board contacted a number of remote viewers and asked them to examine the property.

Whilst controversial, remote viewing was studied by the CIA for over 30 years, and in many cases, the results of these studies were astounding.

The first remote viewer had no information about the ranch or any knowledge of what had taken place there, yet he was able to produce an almost exact sketch of its layout, including the three homesteads, the creek, the canal and the ridge.

He pinpointed an area on the southwestern part of the property, stating that there was an energy field there, which he described as disturbing.

Another remote viewer stated that the second homestead, where some of the most frightening phenomena took place, was the site of weird energy vortices.

A third remote viewer was asked to describe what happened during the daylight mutilation of the calf.

He got the impression that it was carried out by a drone of interdimensional nature and that it had some connection to the military.

Another remote viewing exercise conducted by multiple people described the ranch as the site of a military operation.

Three of the five participants independently perceived an underground base.

and a large network of electronic equipment and wires that had been embedded in the ground.

Others saw Navy personnel in dark sunglasses and sporting navy tattoos, reporting that much of the activity was taking place outdoors and at night and was somehow linked to an aircraft carrier.

Another of the group perceived humanoid figures who spoke in a strange language and were seen to be working alongside human beings.

Whilst it's true that the military could have been involved, there are problems with this suggestion.

What of the strange creatures that were seen, or the orbs of light that could affect human emotions?

What about the portal-like structures, or the fact that the phenomena stretches back to a time before the US military was even conceived, unless there are other intelligences involved, which have since invited collaboration with human beings?

and the military-industrial complex.

Overall,

it was said that all remote viewers came away from the task with feelings of dread, darkness and death, and a notion that whatever is taking place at the ranch is inherently evil.

Others have described the property as an interdimensional gateway, where entities of all kinds have the ability to drop into our reality at will and leave just as quickly.

Some have even suggested that maybe all paranormal and supernatural phenomena reported all over the world, from cryptids and aliens to poltergeists and UFOs, all come from the same place.

We see fleeting glimpses of them when they choose to show themselves to us, but then there are certain epicenters where all of these phenomena leak through en masse, and maybe Skinwalker Ranch is just one of those hotspots.

Whatever it is that haunts the property, it is clearly intelligent, but its agenda remains unclear.

It was certainly able to differentiate between animals and humans, as no person who stepped foot on the ranch was ever harmed.

On the other hand, countless cats, dogs, cattle, and even wildlife were mutilated indiscriminately, but it is no worse than what we have done to animals ourselves.

The intelligence behind the activity did seem to enjoy tormenting the Shermans, and later the NIDS investigators.

At times, it seemed able to read people's minds and listen in on private conversations,

such as when Gwen mentioned to Terry the possibility of losing the bulls.

It acted on that information without hesitation, much like a trickster or prankster would do.

At times,

it seemed almost omnipotent.

More than 20 years later, the Shermans have closed the book on their ordeal.

They moved to Idaho and started a new life, accepting that they would probably never know what it was that destroyed their dreams so completely.

Robert Bigelow held on to the ranch for many years afterwards.

The activity was sporadic throughout the noughties, but never quite reached the peak experienced in the mid to late 90s.

He sold the property to Adamantium Real Estate in 2016 2016 on the condition that research would continue.

Almost immediately after the sale went through, the activity experienced a huge spike.

UFOs have since been photographed directly over the homestead.

In Jeremy Corbell's documentary, Hunt for the Skinwalker, He happened to ask the new owner what he says to people who doubt the phenomena is real.

His answer was simple.

he tells them they're delusional.

Join us tomorrow for part three.