Ongoing phenomenonSkinwalker Ranch Phenomena

A 480-acre cattle ranch in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah, adjacent to the Ute Indian Reservation. The Hicks (then Sherman) family purchased the property in 1994; over 1994–96 they reported a continuous catalogue of phenomena — cattle mutilations, unidentified luminous craft, large unknown bipedal creatures, orbs of light, poltergeist activity affecting electronics. Junior Hicks, a retired Uintah Basin schoolteacher with no prior public profile in paranormal research, kept a private log. The Hickses’ decision to sell came when, by their account, a large wolf-like creature attacked one of their calves and was not visibly affected by rounds from a .357 magnum. The buyer in 1996 was Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow, who renamed his research foundation NIDS (National Institute for Discovery Science) and stationed onsite monitoring crews continuously from 1996 to 2004. The NIDS team included biochemist Colm Kelleher and physicist Eric Davis; their work is documented in Kelleher and George Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker (Paraview, 2005). In 2008 Bigelow’s BAASS — under the DIA’s $22M AAWSAP contract championed by Sen. Harry Reid — made the ranch the primary onsite study location of a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency-funded program; this is documented in James Lacatski, Kelleher, and Knapp’s Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (RTMA, 2021). Lacatski was the DIA program officer; he and the AAWSAP team witnessed an event on the ranch in 2008–09 (described in his book) that Lacatski states changed his career. AAWSAP/BAASS work at the ranch continued through 2012; the program’s deliverables included 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) on topics including warp drive, traversable wormholes, and biological effects of UAP encounters. Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016 to Utah commercial real-estate executive Brandon Fugal, who in 2020 opened the ranch as the setting for the History Channel reality series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. The property has had continuous on-site research staffing since 1996 — thirty years as of 2026. Whatever is happening at the ranch, and whether or not anything is, the documented length of investment is itself the unusual fact.