Skinwalker Ranch: What's on the Record, and What's Made for TV

On June 30, 1996, readers of Salt Lake City's Deseret News met a family with a problem nobody could solve.

The Shermans ran a 480-acre ranch "just south of Fort Duchesne in Uintah County," in northeastern Utah's Uinta Basin. Over about 15 months, the paper reported, they said they'd seen three distinct kinds of UFOs, lost seven cows, and heard voices speaking an unknown language from empty air.

Thirty years later, that property is the most famous ranch in American paranormal lore. It has been owned by an aerospace billionaire, studied under a Pentagon contract, and turned into a cable franchise.

The question is simple. How much of Skinwalker Ranch is documented, and how much is television?

Layer one: a newspaper story

Start with what's actually on paper from 1996.

According to reporter Zack Van Eyck's story, Terry Sherman said four cows disappeared without a trace and three were found dead and partially mutilated. One had "a peculiar hole in the center of its left eyeball," the paper reported. "I think it's definitely associated with the cattle mutilations," Sherman said of the lights.

He also described standing in a field with his dogs and hearing male voices about 25 feet above him. The dogs, he said, barked, growled and ran for the house.

The same article carried the first skeptical note. The records clerk for the Uintah County Sheriff's Department said it had not received reports of UFOs or cattle mutilations in recent memory. The family, the paper noted, hadn't reported the incidents to officials.

That's layer one: first-person accounts, published in a mainstream newspaper, with no independent physical evidence.

Layer two: a billionaire's institute

Within weeks, Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow came calling. The Deseret News reported that he offered about $200,000 and closed on the ranch in September 1996.

Bigelow had founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, the year before. He moved scientists and a veterinarian onto the property. Retired Army Col. John B. Alexander, one of NIDS's scientists, told the paper that "one of the missions of the institute is to make information widely available."

What did NIDS find? NIDS investigator Colm Kelleher co-wrote the 2005 book "Hunt for the Skinwalker" with Las Vegas journalist George Knapp. Even that sympathetic account conceded, in a line quoted by skeptic Robert Sheaffer, that "we managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena."

Bigelow shut NIDS down in 2004 but kept the ranch, The New Yorker reported.

Layer three: the Pentagon

This is the part that's genuinely documented, and genuinely strange.

In 2007, according to The New Yorker, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official who was curious about Skinwalker wrote to Bigelow. Bigelow connected him with his old friend Sen. Harry Reid.

The official later visited the ranch. There, from an observation trailer, "he is said to have had a spectral encounter," The New Yorker reported; a Bigelow affiliate described a "topological figure" that "went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius-strip-shaped." That account is secondhand, and it's never been independently corroborated.

What followed is on the official record. Congress appropriated $22 million. DIA set up the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program, or AAWSAP, in 2009. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a Bigelow subsidiary, was "the only bidder," according to The New Yorker.

In 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) described what happened next, without naming the ranch. It said the program investigated "an alleged hotspot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah," then owned by the contractor's head, including reports of "shadow figures" and "creatures." The contractor, AARO said, also planned to hire psychics to study "inter-dimensional phenomena."

"DIA did not seek, nor specifically authorize, this work though a DIA employee set up and managed the contract with the private sector organization."

AARO said the contract produced exploratory science papers that "were never thoroughly peer reviewed," and that the program ended in 2012 "due to DIA and DoD concerns about the project." The New Yorker counted 38 papers, on subjects like warp drives and "spacetime metric engineering."

The insiders' version

The people who ran that program tell it differently.

In 2021, former DIA official James Lacatski published "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon" with Kelleher and Knapp, an insider's account of the program and its work at the ranch. Records obtained by The Black Vault show the Pentagon's prepublication office cleared the manuscript "as amended" on May 11, 2021, after DIA, the Air Force and Homeland Security reviewed it.

That clearance is a security review, not an endorsement. It means the book didn't reveal anything classified, not that the government vouches for what's in it.

AARO, for its part, says many of today's "reverse-engineering" claims trace back to a "consistent group of individuals" with ties to the canceled program "and a private sector organization's paranormal research efforts." That is AARO's reading of the record, and the debate over it is far from settled.

Layer four: television

In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to Utah real estate developer Brandon Fugal, according to Utah Business, which describes the property today as 512 acres.

On March 31, 2020, History premiered "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch." History's show page now lists seven seasons and 120 episodes, with a cast that includes Fugal, aerospace engineer Travis Taylor and investigator Erik Bard.

The network's pitch says the ranch has reportedly been the site of hundreds of paranormal and UFO events across more than two centuries.

The show brings real instruments: ground-penetrating radar, drones, sensors. But here's the gap. A television episode is edited for suspense, not for review. Instrument readings presented on cable are not the same as calibrated data published with methods so other scientists can test them. We could not find peer-reviewed publications presenting the show's anomalies.

Fugal is candid about where he lands. "What we are witnessing could be evidence that we live in a multi-dimensional universe," he told Utah Business. He has also described himself as having started out a "healthy skeptic."

Skeptics are less charitable. Sheaffer, writing for Skeptic magazine in 2020, called the ranch's "phenomenon" "almost certainly illusory."

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• The Sherman family's accounts were published in the Deseret News in 1996, and Bigelow bought the ranch that year.
• A Pentagon-funded contractor investigated paranormal claims on the property under AAWSAP, work AARO says DIA did not seek or specifically authorize.
• A History series has run on the ranch since 2020, under owner Brandon Fugal.

What we don't

• What, if anything, caused the cattle deaths and lights the Shermans described.
• What the DIA official actually experienced at the ranch.
• Whether any of the show's instrument readings would survive independent, peer-reviewed analysis.

The ranch that built a program

Here's the twist most viewers never get. The most important thing about Skinwalker Ranch isn't a glowing orb or a creature in the brush. It's paperwork.

A newspaper story brought a billionaire. The billionaire's ranch drew a DIA official. That official's interest became a $22 million Pentagon contract. And that contract, renamed and argued over, became the AATIP story that broke the disclosure era open in December 2017.

Whatever is or isn't happening in that Utah dirt, the ranch has already changed how Washington talks about UFOs.

So be honest: does Skinwalker Ranch help the case for serious UAP research, or does it make the whole subject easier to laugh off? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

• Frequent Fliers? — Deseret News, 1996
• Millionaire leads quest for UFO data — Deseret News, 1996
• How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously — The New Yorker, 2021
• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024
• New Documents Detail Slow, Multi-Agency Vetting of "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon" — The Black Vault, 2025
• Claims About Pentagon UFO Program: How Much Is True? — Robert Sheaffer, Skeptic, 2020
• Why a millionaire real estate mogul bought Skinwalker Ranch — Utah Business, 2020
• The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch — History
• The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (series overview) — Wikipedia
• Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program — The New York Times, 2017