IncidentSkinwalker Ranch (1994– )

The Sherman family bought the ranch near Fort Duchesne (on the edge of the Ute reservation) in 1994 and reported a barrage of phenomena; the first press account appeared in the Deseret News in June 1996. Aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow bought the ranch that year and deployed his National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) science team (to ~2004); his firm BAASS later won the Defense Intelligence Agency’s $22M AAWSAP contract in 2008, using the ranch as a research site (the program surfaced publicly in the December 2017 New York Times story, often conflated with AATIP). George Knapp and biochemist Colm Kelleher documented the NIDS years in ‘Hunt for the Skinwalker’ (2005). Brandon Fugal bought the ranch in 2016 and opened it to the History Channel series ‘The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch’ (2020-). The critical epistemic problem: despite decades of claimed activity and millions spent, there is no authenticated, reproducible, peer-reviewed physical evidence; the property is private, the data is filtered through financially and editorially interested parties, NIDS’s own lead investigator admitted they obtained ‘very little physical evidence,’ and the family that owned the land for ~60 years before the Shermans denied any anomalous events. The ‘skinwalker’ name is borrowed from Navajo folklore and grafted onto a site on Ute land ~400 miles away.