Skinwalker Ranch

Famous claims, no proof after years of monitoring

Skinwalker Ranch, once Sherman Ranch, covers about 512 acres southeast of Ballard in Utah's Uinta Basin, on the edge of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. The name comes from the skin-walker of Navajo legend. UFO reports from the basin were publicized in the 1970s, but the ranch's own story starts in 1996, when the Deseret News and then George Knapp, in a series for the Las Vegas Mercury, reported a family's account of what happened after they moved in: vanishing and mutilated cattle, lights and orbs, and large animals with piercing red eyes that bullets did not harm.

That year the aerospace businessman Robert Bigelow bought the ranch for $200,000 and set his National Institute for Discovery Science to watch it. Knapp and Colm Kelleher counted close to 100 incidents in their 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker. The book reached James Lacatski of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who visited and reported a supernatural experience of his own. Bigelow passed it to his friend Harry Reid, and Reid and Ted Stevens had $22 million written into the Department of Defense budget to study unidentified aerial phenomena.

The evidence never arrived. The institute's own investigators admitted difficulty obtaining anything fit for scientific publication. In 2020 the skeptic Robert Sheaffer judged the phenomena almost certainly illusory, pointed out that the owners before the Shermans had lived there 60 years without seeing anything, and suggested the Sherman family invented the story before selling. James Randi had already given Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award in 1996 for funding the purchase, and in 2023 the ufologist Barry Greenwood wrote that decades of exploration had produced no documentary evidence.

Bigelow sold in 2016 to Adamantium Real Estate, the company of the developer Brandon Fugal, for around $500,000. Roads to the ranch were blocked, the perimeter was fenced with barbed wire and watched by cameras, and the History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is filmed there. Drill rigs for oil and gas stand on the land all around it. The ranch is private and patrolled, and the pin marks the story, not a place to visit.