ALIEN: Skinwalker Ranch

If you've been listening to this show for a while, you'll know that usually when something paranormal happens, there's at least one rational explanation for what it might be, even if it seems unlikely or anticlimactic.

But Skinwalker Ranch is different.

The strange things happening on this one property have been reported for at least the last three decades by multiple witnesses.

And the type of stuff that's been reported is so diverse that it seems impossible it could all be happening at once.

There's only one theory that can fit all the pieces together.

And to understand it, you have to put aside everything you think you know about our universe.

This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, we're looking at Skinwalker Ranch, a place in Utah known for an extraordinary number of paranormal occurrences.

In fact, the sheer amount of phenomena happening at this one location has left entire teams of investigators baffled.

We'll have more about Skinwalker Ranch right after this.

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In the fall of 1994, a couple named Terry and Gwen Sherman were looking into buying a ranch.

Now, they're a family of four with a son and a daughter, and they're searching for somewhere to plant their roots.

But mainly, they need a place to house Terry's most prized possession, a herd of top-tier show cattle.

Eventually, the Shermans find a 480-acre ranch in the Uinta Basin, a small rural region of northeastern Utah.

Now, this ranch is listed for a steal, which is surprising since it's so beautiful.

I mean, there's lush open pastures, cottonwood and olive trees, and a 200-foot red rock ridge to the north of the property.

property.

Like this place is gorgeous.

The Shermans can't figure out why it's so cheap.

They agree to purchase the ranch and they're told that it comes with one condition.

They aren't supposed to dig on the land without consulting the old owners first.

No explanations, just don't dig.

Now, this is definitely a little strange, but the Shermans chalk it up to the previous owners being, I don't know, maybe a little eccentric.

No big deal.

The sale goes through, but things get a little alarming when Terry, Gwen, and their two kids walk into the home for the very first time.

Each and every door in the house is fixed with deadbolts, both on the inside and the outside.

All of the windows are bolted shut, and the sides of the house have large metal chains hanging off of them.

They look like they were used to tie up like guard dogs.

So we clearly have about a hundred red flags here, but it's too late for Terry and Gwen to back out.

I mean, they've already bought the place.

So they just keep trying to rationalize it.

Maybe the previous owners were just really paranoid about break-ins.

And apart from the weird fortress-like security, there's really no apparent reason for the Shermans to worry.

For the first couple of weeks, everything is fine.

It's quiet, no disturbances.

But then, one afternoon, Terry and Gwen are unloading some stuff out of a truck when Terry sees a large animal in the distance.

Gwen thinks that it could be a wolf, but it's about three times larger than any wolf they had ever seen.

And it's walking right towards them in this strange sort of weaving pattern.

The Shermans already have some cattle in a pen nearby, and Terry notices that most of them are backing away, except for one curious calf that's sticking its head through the metal bars.

But the wolf, or whatever this animal is, just ignores the calf and walks right up to Terry and Gwen.

It's got this shiny gray hair, light blue eyes, and it's actually not aggressive at all.

It's so calm that it actually lets Terry pet it, and their son even asks if he can pet it.

But then, suddenly, out of the blue, the creature takes off towards the cattle pen.

Before the Shermans can react, it has the calf's head in its mouth.

Terry grabs his gun and he shoots the creature in the torso, but the bullet has zero effect.

Two more shots and still nothing.

The bullet just seems to bounce off of it.

By the fourth shot, it finally backs off and runs away, seemingly unharmed.

Now, Terry follows this thing, tracking its footprints through the mud, but after about a mile, the tracks tracks just stop there's nowhere the creature could have gone to no creek no path nothing it's just gone like it evaporated into thin air at least it seems like it's gone for a while the shermans don't see or hear anything out of the ordinary but a few weeks later the creature reappears gwen is coming home from work and she's like getting out of her car to close the entrance gate and as she's getting back in she sees a movement out of the corner of her eye.

About 30 feet away, the creature is slowly approaching the car.

It walks right up to the hood and stares at Gwen through the windshield.

And standing next to the creature is some kind of large black dog.

There's something really off about it, like its head is too big for its body and it just seems kind of unnatural in a way that's almost hard to explain.

Gwen slams down on the gas and swerves off.

The creatures don't follow her up to the house, but she is so spooked that she actually goes to police.

She tells them what she and her family have seen, and the officers say that's impossible.

There are no wolves in the area and the last time a wolf was seen in the entire state was like 1929, more than 60 years ago at this point.

Later, she's given pictures of different species to see if they can pin down what this thing is that she saw.

And Gwen identifies it as a dire wolf.

And I thought this was something that only existed in Game of Thrones, but this is a real species.

The problem is, dire wolves have been completely extinct for 10,000 years.

So the thinking is, maybe she misidentified it.

I mean, dire wolves don't look that unique.

It must have been another similar looking species, right?

At least, least that's what Terry and Gwen want to think.

They brush this off as just a weird anomaly.

Like all they want to do is focus on the ranch, raise their cattle, and get on with their lives.

But the weird occurrences just keep piling up.

One day at sunset, Gwen is walking along the ridge when she feels something zoom past her head.

It feels so close that she actually ducks, but when she looks up, she sees and hears nothing.

Five minutes later, it happens again.

Whatever it was felt like it had to have been pretty big, but she doesn't see anything.

Meanwhile, Gwen and Terry are starting to realize that objects are disappearing from around the house.

At first, it's just small stuff like kitchen utensils and pans.

They figure, you know, we're just misplacing things.

We've just moved in after all.

It's hard to remember where things go.

But at some point, Terry leaves a post hole digger outside.

This is like a giant drill that looks similar to a jackhammer and it weighs over 70 pounds.

He only leaves it alone for a few minutes to go get a wrench from his truck.

But when he comes back, the digger is nowhere in sight.

He looks everywhere and when he finally finds it, it is hanging from a tree.

Terry has no idea how it could have gotten up there.

Heavy objects aren't just whipped up into trees at random.

But then he remembers the previous owner's warnings about digging.

Terry and Gwen clearly were ignoring those warnings.

The post hole digger hanging from the tree should have been a sign that they need to listen.

But of course, they don't.

Anytime the Shermans do anything destructive to the land, like dynamiting a tree trunk or moving dirt, they hear these weird machinery-like noises and they feel distinct vibrations coming through the ground.

But then, one night, Terry and Gwen are out for a walk when they hear a distinct sound of metal on metal.

And it's coming from above in the sky.

At first, they see nothing up there, but eventually they notice something weird.

A bright light sitting on the ground about 100 yards in front of them.

It looks kind of like a headlight maybe on some kind of vehicle at first.

So Terry and Gwen walk towards it.

But then it just lifts into the air, backs away about 50 yards, and touches back down.

Terry and Gwen keep walking, but the object does the same thing again and again.

Then they hear that metal-on-metal sound again, only this time it's coming from behind them.

They whirl around, but there's nothing there.

And when they turn back towards the vehicle, it's gone.

By the time winter rolls around, Terry is on a mission to figure out what's going on.

He spends more time outside after dark looking for anything out of the ordinary.

One night, the temperature is nearly 30 below, and Terry still goes out there to keep watch.

Eventually, he gets too cold and he decides to call it a night.

But just as he's walking back to the house, he sees a movement out of the corner of his eye, and floating just above the snow is a UFO.

Coming up, the the strange sightings on the ranch intensify.

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I'm gonna put you on, nephew.

All right, um.

Welcome to McDonald's.

Can I take your order?

Miss, I've been hitting up McDonald's for years.

Now it's back.

We need snack wraps.

What's a snack wrap?

It's the return of something great.

Snackrap is back.

Now back to the story.

One night, Terry Sherman is walking back to his house when he sees an unidentified flying object floating just above the ground.

It's flat and dark and Terry thinks it looks about the size and shape of a stealth bomber.

It's making no noise, just hovering there.

Then it starts to move.

It edges slowly along the ridge as if it's searching for something, and it projects these small, multicolored lights onto the snow.

Terry crouches down and watches for a few minutes until suddenly the lights just turn off.

The object zips off and disappears over the ridge.

After all the weird stuff they've seen around the ranch, Terry has no idea what to make of this.

It's definitely not the most alarming thing that's happened.

It could just be a military aircraft, although there are no military bases nearby and the only small airports in the area would not have anything this high tech.

Then a couple of weeks later, Gwen actually sees the same thing, a triangular aircraft shining multicolored lights on the snow.

And these sightings keep happening regularly.

Meanwhile, the Shermans also begin seeing these glowing orange orbs in the sky.

They almost always appear at night.

Sometimes they're flat and long.

Other times they look perfectly round.

And it's hard to tell, but they seem like they're hovering about maybe a mile away.

But here's the crazy part.

When Terry looks through the scope on his night vision rifle, he swears that he can see right through the orb to blue sky on the other side, as if the orb is some kind of portal to a place where it's still daylight.

There's no easy explanation for any of this stuff.

The aircraft, the orbs, the noises, or that weird wolf creature.

It's all very frightening.

The Shermans are cautious about letting their kids go out at night, but up to this point, whatever's been happening hasn't been harmful to them or to their cattle.

But then one day, still during their first winter at the ranch, there's a terrible snowstorm.

Terry goes out to count his cattle.

Usually when it snows, they're all there huddled together.

But this time, there's one cow missing.

It's not unusual for cattle to wander off, but Terry's worried it's injured and could freeze to death, so he trudges out to find it.

Eventually, he comes across the cow's tracks.

They're fresh, and the spacing almost makes it look like the cow was running from something, which is unusual because there's no kind of predator that Terry knows of that would attack during a snowstorm.

And there are no other tracks around besides the cows.

Eventually, the tracks lead Terry to the middle of a clearing.

And then the tracks just stop.

Terry is baffled, and the cow never turns up.

By the next spring, four more cows have disappeared without a trace.

Terry has never lost this many cattle in such a short period and he can't figure out where they're going.

There's not a single clue until one day that April.

His son is walking past a muddy ditch and sees a cow stuck at the bottom, struggling to climb up to the side.

Apparently, he's got something urgent to do first, so he decides that he's gonna like make a mental note and then come back and help the cow.

But when he comes back about 20 minutes later, the cow is lying motionless in the mud.

He jumps in to check it out and right away he sees that the cow's entire rear end has been carved out.

Something had made a flawless clean cut and then torn out her insides.

When Terry comes to look, he is astonished.

The part that disturbs him the most is that there's absolutely no blood left behind.

Like, we're talking none left in the cow, none mixed in with the mud, none anywhere nearby.

Three months later, Terry finds another cow that's been killed in the exact same manner.

And then the next year, there are two more.

But no one ever catches a glimpse of what's mutilating these cows and it doesn't make any sense at all.

Finally, one night, Terry and Gwen are outside watching the cattle, waiting for anything suspicious to happen when an orb appears just above the tree line.

It reminds them of the orange orbs that they've seen before, except this one is blue and it seems a lot smaller, maybe two or three times the size of a baseball.

It flies slowly above one of their horses, then darts toward the house and stops abruptly about 20 feet above Terry and Gwen.

From up close, it almost looks like the orb is made of glass with bright blue liquid floating inside of it.

And it made a faint crackling sound that made them think that it might have been electrically charged.

Gwen turns on her flashlight to get a better look at this thing, but the orb instantly takes off for the trees and disappears.

Another night and sometime later, the same thing happens again.

Their three dogs are barking at the orb like it's scaring them too.

And against his better judgment, Terry lets all the dogs loose.

They chase after the orb, but each time the dogs get close, it retreats into the sky, holds for a moment, and then dips down again, almost like it's playing a game.

The orb eventually speeds off into a thicket and the dogs follow it.

Within seconds, Terry hears his dogs yelping in distress.

And then everything goes eerily quiet.

Now, given everything that's happened, Terry is not going into the woods himself.

Whatever is out there, he doesn't want it to kill him too.

He waits until the next morning to go out and search for the dogs.

About 10 yards into the thicket, Terry comes across a small clearing and his jaw drops.

In the middle are three large circles of browned grass.

Each is topped with a heaping mass of what looks like incinerated flesh.

It's the three dogs, and they've been burned.

This is the last straw.

Whatever's going on, Terry and Gwen now feel like it's attacking them directly, and they want answers.

So the Shermans reach out to this guy named Joseph Jr.

Hicks.

He's a retired science teacher who's been keeping track of the unusual activity in the area for decades.

And it turns out the orbs and UFOs the Shermans have been seeing aren't uncommon.

In fact, Hicks has records of almost 400 UFO sightings in the Uinta Basin.

Some are just distant hovering lights, similar to the orbs that the Shermans saw on the ranch, but many are actual aircraft.

Like in 1966, a postal worker reported seeing a silver craft hovering in front of a hill outside of town.

And in 1970, a man and his three sons saw some sort of craft with two exhaust jets poking out the back.

Apparently, cattle mutilations were also common.

Dozens of cases were recorded during the 1970s, most of them not far from the Sherman's ranch.

But there was no hard evidence of what was happening, no clear explanation, and no one knew how to make it stop.

The Shermans were at a dead end.

They realized they had no choice but to sell the ranch and move before things got any worse.

Luckily for them, in June of 1996, a soon-to-be aerospace billionaire named Bob Bigelow read an article about the Sherman's ranch in a local newspaper.

Bob had been obsessed with UFOs for decades, so when he hears about the sightings on the ranch, he decides to conduct a little investigation of his own.

Bob puts together a whole team of researchers to keep tabs on the ranch, and over the next year, they witness almost everything the Shermans had described.

Lights and objects over the ridge, another unexplained cattle mutilation, and even a strange creature that couldn't be shot dead.

Then, in April of 1997, another strange incident occurs that is way more frightening than anything that's happened before.

And it might finally explain what's causing all the tear.

Up next, we'll dive into some theories about the raid.

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Now, back to the story.

On the afternoon of April 2nd, 1997, Terry Sherman checks on four of his most valuable bulls.

He finds them happily grazing inside their locked corral.

He goes out to do some more chores, comes back 45 minutes later, and now the corral is completely empty.

All four bulls are missing.

Even after everything he's seen, Terry can't believe this.

I mean, there's no broken fence.

there's no sign of an escape or any sort of theft or struggle, like nothing.

So he looks around for footprints, and there aren't any of those either.

He checks everywhere.

Eventually, he checks inside a small trailer at the end of the corral.

The only door to the trailer is tightly locked, and Terry hasn't opened it in years.

But he's so desperate, he decides to glance through the window, anyways.

And sure enough, he sees all four bulls crammed inside.

They're standing completely still, like they're alive, but they're staring into space almost as if they've been hypnotized.

Terry calls Bob Bigelow's investigation team to come out and look around, but they have no idea how the bulls got trapped in there either.

They do, however, take out their metal detectors and they find out that the bars of the corral next to the trailer are highly magnetized, which isn't true of the rest of the corral or anywhere else on the ranch.

And 48 hours later, the magnetization is entirely gone.

It's as if in those 45 minutes while Terry was gone, something had caused a magnetic field to appear, literally pulling the bulls into the trailer.

The scientists are absolutely fascinated by this, and they start doing long late night watches to see if they can get any more readings.

One night in August at about 2:30 in the morning, two of the scientists are sitting on top of a bluff with their cameras, and suddenly a small light appears about 150 feet below them.

One of the scientists looks at it through binoculars, and he says that it's a yellowish orb floating just barely above the ground, and it looks like it's getting larger or maybe just closer.

As it does, it starts to look less and less like an orb and more and more like a tunnel.

And suddenly, he sees something crawl out of the tunnel like some kind of humanoid creature.

It slinks out of the light, sets foot on the ground and just walks away into the darkness.

And then the tunnel shrinks and fades away.

Now, naturally, this guy is spooked out of his mind.

They wait there for about 15 minutes just to be safe.

Then they go down to take measurements of any radioactive or magnetic activity, but their instruments don't pick up anything abnormal.

As crazy as it sounds, the scientist is 100% sure of what he saw.

Yes, it defies the laws of physics, but he says it happened.

So if there's no scientific explanation, what else could it be?

As it turns out, it's rumored that there's a curse over the entire Uinta Basin.

You see, this specific area of Utah is home to a Native American tribe called the Ute.

During the 1800s, the Utes were generally aligned with the Navajo tribes nearby.

But at some point, they cozied up to the Spanish settlers and even took part in the Spanish slave trade, abducting Navajos who were then sold as slaves.

All of this adds up to a laundry list of sins against the Navajos.

And some Utes believe that in revenge, the Navajos cursed their tribe with a humanoid creature known as the Skinwalker.

Now, most Native Americans won't even mention the Skinwalker out of fear of it.

It's some kind of shape-shifting creature, and it can disguise itself as any kind of animal, like, say, a dire wolf.

It's also believed that the Skinwalker is pure evil.

Its only purpose is to stir up mischief.

This definitely fits with the mysterious creatures wandering around the ranch.

Still, an ancient curse is pretty far-fetched, and it doesn't explain the magnetic fields and magically appearing tunnels and even UFOs.

The only other possibility that the scientists can come up with though is that none of this is really happening.

Like either it's a hoax that they themselves have fallen for, or there's some sort of hallucinogenic plant in the area that's causing all of these quote-unquote sightings.

These are both pretty weak theories.

There's no evidence of any kind of hallucinogenic plant in the area or in the water system.

But at this point, the scientists just sort of give up.

In 2016, the ranch is sold to a real estate tycoon named Brandon Fugal.

He is fascinated by the stories about the ranch.

He hires a new team of investigators, a camera crew, and he opens the place back up, renaming it Skinwalker Ranch.

With better technology than in the past, the team should be able to capture the strange occurrences and finally figure out what's going on.

In their first few months, they see strange, bright lights over the ridge, mysterious black or silver objects zooming through the sky.

They see cattle running around in strange patterns, and they even measure electromagnetic radiation surges around the ranch, not unlike the magnetic field that drew the bulls into that trailer.

But this time, they're able to figure out where it's coming from.

Now, typically, electromagnetic waves come from sources on the ground, like buildings, power lines, or cell phone towers.

But Fukel's team finds that the waves are coming from somewhere in the sky.

The higher you get above ground level, the stronger the waves become.

What's more, the measurements spike every time the UFO appears, but it doesn't seem like they're coming from the objects themselves.

As of this recording, the team's investigation is still ongoing.

Their latest conclusion is that the entire basin is acting as a kind of energy conduit, like a giant natural satellite dish.

It's receiving radio waves from a source in the sky, but just what that source is, nobody knows.

Obviously, the radio waves are a significant discovery, but they don't really explain the creatures, the spacecraft, or the almost ritualistic cattle mutilations.

You'd have to either disregard all of those stories together or believe that the Shermans, Bob Bigelow, Brandon Fugal, decades of scientists, investigators, and eyewitnesses are all in on it together.

And honestly, I find that hard to believe.

They'd have to be so organized to perpetuate all these stories for so many years and there doesn't seem to be anything in it for any of them the most plausible explanation for all of this might actually be the one that sounds the most far-fetched a wormhole theoretically if a powerful enough energy surge occurs it could cause a tear in the space-time continuum opening a portal to another universe Remember those orbs that opened up into portals and how Terry looked at one of them through his binoculars and saw a clear blue sky on the other side?

Or the scientist who saw a tunnel open up and a creature walk out of it?

This could also explain the objects disappearing and reappearing in strange places, how Terry's cattle got from the corral to the trailer and the energy surges that the scientists are picking up on on the ranch.

It sounds crazy.

But if a wormhole connected our present day world with the ancient past, a dire wolf could conceivably crawl through.

If it connected us to a parallel universe, a mythical creature like the skinwalker could also come through.

And if it connected us to some distant alien planet, a futuristic looking spacecraft could also fly right onto Earth.

Obviously, there's no hard measurable evidence for this theory, but it just might be the best explanation we have for the centuries of folklore and the decades of eyewitness accounts.

And if there's one thing science has taught us, it's that there's a ton about physics we still don't understand.

The answers to some of the universe's greatest questions could be right there at Skinwalker Ranch.

Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck originals.

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