'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' Episode 4: Mysterious bone fragments and flying objects lead to more questions
It's a little hard to take History Channel's 'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' seriously. The show aims at solving the mysteries of the titular Skinwalker Ranch in Northern Utah, where strange sightings have been reported for over 200 years. Many investigations had been conducted over the area, but none of the findings were made public.
When Brandon Fugal brought the ranch, he also formed a new team to investigate the strange events at Skinwalker Ranch. There's Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist, Erik Bard, the principal investigator, Jim Segala, a scientist, Thomas Winterton, the ranch superintendent, Jim Morse, the ranch manager, and Bryant "Dragon" Arnold, the head of security.
In this week's episode, we are introduced to two more members. We saw them in last week's episodes as the ranch caretakers, but it is this week that their importance is revealed. There is Kandus Linde, an anthropologist, and Tom Lewis, a technologist, they also happened to have grown up with Fugal.
Unearthing the mystery room
The first task in this week's episode is to figure out what is in the mysterious underground room that Tom Winterton uncovered. In last week's episode, a small, square-shaped, empty room was revealed when Winterton made a hole in one of the walls in the basement to investigate the strange sounds heard in Homestead One.
In this week's episode, the hole is made bigger and Winterton and Taylor go in to investigate. They collect the samples of ash and what looks to be bone fragments that have gathered on one spot on the floor.
When they later study it under a microscope, the team comes to the conclusion that these are bone fragments, but wonder what could have crushed the bones so finely. Taylor agrees that these are animal remains but Winterton points out that the microscopic image looks like a crime scene.
UFO spotted?
The most significant thing in this week's episode and perhaps all of the series so far is the potential sighting of an unidentified flying object when the team spots a glowing object, not once, but twice in the sky.
The second time they notice it, they realize that the object is tracking a path parallel to another flight in the sky. However, all they can see is a blurred image, which is shown to viewers. This leads us to wonder why stronger viewing equipment was not employed and why these so-called scientific investigators kept looking at it with their naked eye the whole time.
This is one of the reasons that makes it difficult to take 'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' seriously. For a team that purportedly involves scientists and researchers, the methods of studying the ranch seem anything but. Sure, there are a lot of fancy equipment and measuring devices being used, but the show makes more use of the shocked and to be honest, biased reactions of those who look to find what they want to see.
'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' will air on History Channel on Tuesday nights at 10 pm ET/PST.