'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' revealed: How a 420-acre patch of land in Utah became a 'paranormal hotspot'
Next month, History's highly anticipated series 'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' drops, promising full, unprecedented access to one of the most infamous and secretive hotspots of paranormal and UFO-related activities on earth, Skinwalker Ranch.
The series will have some never-before-seen footage of the ranch and what's in it along with experts who will go through the massive 512-acre property in Utah. But what is it that makes this ranch such a mystery to tackle? Here's the real story:
How a regular ranch turned into a hotspot for "frequent fliers"
Originally called Sherman Ranch, the first claims of any sort started way back in the 70s. However, it came to prominence in 1996 after a Utah Deseret News report.
The story picked up when Las Vegas Mercury's investigative journalist George Knapp did a series of articles on a family that claimed that they had experienced terrifying things at the ranch after they had bought and occupied it. Terry and Gwen Sherman had claimed that they had seen things that they couldn't "accept as reality."
"For a long time we wondered what we were seeing if it was something to do with a top-secret project," Terry Sherman had said at the time, "I don't know really what to think about it."
From box-like UFOs to ships that were as large as many football fields, the family talked about the UFOs projecting all kinds of lights and claimed some even had orange doors. Then there were the circles they saw on the flat grass, "each about eight feet across, in a triangular pattern about 30 feet from each other."
They also said that their livestock was being stolen and mutilated. The name Skinwalker came from Navajo legend — a harmful witch.
Paranormal hotspot
Some claims have said that it has unexplained paranormal energy too. Located near the Ute Indian Reservation near west Uintah County in Utah, the Sherman family has also claimed that they saw wolves thrice the normal size, immune to bullets and humanoid creatures.
The connections from the beyond are made to the Navajo tribe, which was allegedly aggressive and took in Ute slaves, according to historian Sondra Jones, author of Being and Becoming Ute.
Among the multiple incidents reported by its residents was a strange and eerie story. In 2002, four young men who were hanging out at Bottle Hollow, a 420-acre man-made reservoir on Ute land, saw a blue-white ball take a dunk into the lake.
Then, it emerged seconds later as a glowing belt of light. It is then said to have moved around in the air and flown away at high speed, disappearing into Skinwalker Ridge.
Some legends believe that according to the Ute, some of the waterways were negatively charged and had evil spirits that could take you inside the water.
Sale and suspicious activity
The Sherman family sold the ranch to a private research organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, which was founded in 1995 by real-estate developer Robert Bigelow.
The aim was to get enough research on the extraterrestrial activity claims. Bigelow was at the time the owner of Budget Suites of America. However, NIDSci shut down in 2004 and a year later.
It stayed with them until 2016 — and was then sold to a shell company named Adamantium Holdings, LLC for $4.5 million. And since then, everyone has been cut off from the ranch. If you remember X-Men, Adamantium was the fictional metal that quoted Wolverine's claws.
Security is tight, the roads are blocked off to keep curious at bay. If that wasn't suspicious enough, Adamantium got a trademark for the name Skinwalker Ranch in 2018. No one knows who really owns the corporation.
We know the real story gives you more questions than it does answers and here's hoping that History's 'The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch' will shed some light on this mystery. Series premieres on Tuesday, March 31 at 10/9c on History Channel.
