Skinwalker Ranch

The Uintah Basin of north-eastern Utah has a long reputation for UFO sightings; a retired Roosevelt schoolteacher, Joseph “Junior” Hicks, logged hundreds of local reports from the 1950s onward. In June 1996 the Deseret News introduced readers to Terry and Gwen Sherman, who had bought a 480-acre cattle ranch near Fort Duchesne, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, in 1994. The Shermans said that over 15 months they had seen glowing craft and lights emerging from orange “doorways” in the air, heard voices speaking an unknown language above a field, found circles of flattened grass, and lost seven cattle, three of them found dead and mutilated. Local sheriffs told the paper they had received no such reports.

Within months the ranch was bought by the Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow for his National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which stationed scientists and surveillance equipment on the property from 1997. NIDS researcher Colm Kelleher and the Las Vegas journalist George Knapp later described dozens of incidents in their 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker – among them a calf found eviscerated and bloodless in broad daylight in March 1997 – yet the authors conceded that years of study produced little physical evidence that could be considered conclusive proof of anything. NIDS closed in 2004.

The ranch’s story then merged with national UFO politics. Reporting from 2017 onward linked a visit by a Defense Intelligence Agency official to the Pentagon-funded program, arranged with the support of Senator Harry Reid, that awarded Bigelow’s company a $22 million contract in 2008. In 2016 Bigelow sold the property to a company later revealed to belong to Salt Lake City real estate developer Brandon Fugal, who fenced and guarded it, trademarked the name and opened it to the History channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (2020–).

The name itself is borrowed. In the mid-1990s this was simply the Sherman ranch; “Skinwalker Ranch” is a label that paranormal writers and journalists attached to it after the 1996 reports, popularised by the 2005 book. The word comes from a living Diné (Navajo) tradition – the ranch borders Ute, not Navajo, land – and many Diné people ask that skinwalkers not be discussed at all, so this guide says no more about them. Skeptics such as Robert Sheaffer note that the family who owned the ranch for some 60 years before the Shermans denied any strange events, and argue that the phenomena are almost certainly illusory.

Claims include lights and craft in the sky, glowing orbs, apparent portals or “doorways” in the air, disembodied voices, crop-circle-like impressions, cattle found mutilated or missing, huge animals described as otherworldly creatures, and electronic equipment failing or being damaged.

The roughly 500-acre ranch south-east of Ballard and near Fort Duchesne, particularly its pastures. It is private, fenced and patrolled, and visitors are not admitted without permission.

Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005), the film Skinwalker Ranch (2013), episodes of Ancient Aliens and Project Blue Book, and the History channel’s The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch have made it one of the most famous paranormal sites in America. It also features prominently in reporting on the Pentagon’s UFO research programs.