Prepare for a mind-bending journey as we bring to light the extraordinary mysteries of Skinwalker Ranch. Strap in for a thrilling discussion as we scrutinize the eerie phenomena experienced by the Sherman family and the enthralling Native American lore that surrounds it. From exploring the uncanny similarities between descriptions of Skinwalkers and Alien Greys to dissecting the chilling case of Sarah Saganitso in Flagstaff, Arizona, we expose a world that's sure to challenge your perception of reality.
The enigmas don't stop at Skinwalker Ranch. We open up the conversation to the peculiar occurrences reported far and wide, from the baffling lights in the sky to the unsettling encounters of shadow people in the Santa Lucia Mountains. We also speculate on the presence of portals or wormholes in the area and delve into the findings of mutilated cows and mysterious beings. Further stirring the pot, we dig into the captivating concept of Apophenia, where patterns are perceived in random details of images, and how this can alter our interpretation of the unexplained.
In our final act, we invite you to join us on an exploration of the enthralling theories of paranormal psychologist John Keel, the man behind the study of the Mothman incidents. The concept of ultra-terrestrial intelligence and the speculation of a multiverse will keep you on the edge of your seat. So, come with us, as we challenge the boundaries of your understanding and plunge headfirst into the world of inter-dimensional and ultra-terrestrial realities. Don't miss out on this unforgettable journey into the heart of the unknown.
Hello everybody and welcome to Alien Talk Podcast. This is where we discuss all things about aliens and UFOs and where we always push the limits of our understanding. We are your host, Joe Landry and Laurie Oldford here again to bring you a fascinating show out across the world wide web as we continue exploring the manifold topics surrounding the idea of extraterrestrial beings, the mystery of UFO encounters, the studies of paranormal occurrences and other perplexing enigmas that seem to be happening regularly in this world of ours. Also want to wish a happy Thanksgiving to our friends in Canada. This is Canadian Thanksgiving today, or tomorrow actually. We're very glad to have you here with us for yet another great discussion. When we talk about perplexing enigmas, Laurie, they really don't come any bigger than Skinwalker Ranch. This place seems to have everything going on all at once UAPs, flying saucers, cattle mutilations, crop circles, shapeshifters, monsters, poltergeist, wormholes. I gave you everything we've ever talked about happening all in one spot, right?
Laurie:
Yeah, yeah, you're right, no kidding about that. The first time I ever heard of such a thing called the Skinwalker was not until I moved to Arizona. I moved here in the summer of 1995, but it wasn't until sometime, probably in 2001, that I first was told about them, as well as the story of the chupacabra. Apparently, stories of these types of creatures are everywhere. In Native American lore they are known as the evil ancient terrors, right?
Joe:
Well, you're a little ahead of me. I didn't know anything about Skinwalkers until I heard about them being mentioned on the History Channel. I mean, I actually didn't hear about them probably some 25 years ago, but not much other than that they were tied to some Native American ghost story type legends. But having done some more reading into the subject, I found that the whole folklore is actually quite sinister. A Skinwalker has ever been an evil spirit, as we can conceive in our minds.
Laurie:
Yeah, that's right. As some stories go, skinwalkers sometimes commit murder. There's a case in Flagstaff, Arizona, where a woman was killed. It was in 1987, the Arizona Daily Sun carried a story about the body of a 40-year-old, Sarah Saganitso, being found behind a hospital where she worked. An English professor named George Adney was first charged with committing the crime and taken to trial. The defense counsil argued that he didn't do it and that a Skinwalker had done it. They alluded to Sarah being a Navajo, and she was found with a broken stick across her throat and some graveyard grass near her truck. The defense claimed the two objects were evidence of a Skinwalker ritual, so it didn't fly. But the professor was found guilty, but he was later acquitted. I mean, how great is the belief in such a thing that it is brought up in a court of law as a defense? This account can be found by Joe Durbin on the website WeirdUS. C WeirdUScom.
Joe:
Right, and of course we know that the court didn't need to accept the belief in something supernatural like a Skinwalker. That won't happen. They needed only to find that the prosecution failed to meet its burden of proof to find the guy guilty. I guess it would be a little like the OJ Simpson trial, where there is still no one identified as the killer of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. OJ was simply found to not be guilty of doing it. I know that's a pretty controversial case and probably not the best example, but it is comparable to how the evidence tying Professor Adney to the murder of Sarah Saganitso, despite being abundant, did not rise to being beyond a reasonable doubt, and her killer is still unknown. That's the official record for the case, nothing else. But Skinwalkers do make up a significant part of the religious tradition of many Native American tribes, like the Navajo and the Ute, and they share an ominous persona throughout the stories that are told.
Laurie:
Well, many believe that Skinwalkers are shape shifting witches that are part of the dark magic and they come here via portal openings in some special locations where a lot of them are actually reported to be on Navajo lands. Others believe that the skinwalkers are stuff of legend, legends such as the boogie man and werewolves. Now, personally, since I said werewolves, my nightmares as a kid were of werewolves. Hate them.
Laurie:
When I first saw the movie Silver Bullet, it freaked me out. I watched it at my friend's house and had to walk home through a small portion of a wooded area in Canada. And I kid you, not, man, it was one of those harvest moon nights where, you know, it was very bright and it had some cloud cover to add to my dismay. I mean talk about a scary and most eerie situation for a kid to experience. After watching something like that, right and sure enough, when I went to bed that night, I had a nightmare of walking on a trail under a bright full moon, being chased by a wolf. I tripped over a log laying across the trail and fell on my back, just as this giant wolf lunges on top of me. So this dream wolf looked like the freaking wolf from the movie 300. Remember that one.
Joe:
Yeah, that is definitely a bad experience, my friend.
Laurie:
Yeah, the descriptions of the skinwalkers seem at times to match that of the alien greys, you know, skinny with flesh over bones, tight beings, but can move fast, etc. Now, I don't think they are the alien greys though, because in Navajo the phrase ye, ye na luci means with it e goes on all fours. So this doesn't match what we think of as a alien gray at all, but it does possibly match a werewolf, unfortunately. But there are some pretty frightening drawings out there that show something that looks like a humanoid creature yet seems to have the body of a canine.
Laurie:
So the whole skinwalker phenomenon really got thrust into the limelight most recently with the History Channel series about Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, and the show was called the Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch and I think there are four seasons of it now and it has Travis Taylor, one of the hosts from the Ancient Alien series. He's an astrophysicist, among other things. Now I watched the first season so far, but you know that was it To me. It, with its four seasons now, it's becoming too much like the show called the Curse of Oak Island series, and that's into its 10 season now and they are still trying to solve the mystery. So I mean, how many seasons will take the Curse of the Skinwalker Ranch to solve this mystery.
Joe:
Yeah, no doubt. And there is money to be made in the telling of these tales, even to the point that one might say they are being exploited for that very reason. And dragging these, you know, shows out, for you know three, four or five seasons and whatnot, and in these kind of matters it also doesn't take long for people to turn to conspiracy theories, much like how we have with Area 51. There is a lot of urban myth about the military experimenting with different technologies at or near Skinwalker Ranch, and these include the development of advanced aircraft and weapon systems that do things that are beyond the understanding of most people, to include things like the implementation of cloaking equipment that can make an object disappear and reappear, or psychotronic devices that employ mind control, or manmade upper atmospheric and electromagnetic distortions that deceive the senses almost in the way of a hallucinogenic effect. So, the premise for some of the stories can start to get pretty wild.
Joe:
There are also claims that the things happening at Skinwalker Ranch are basically nothing but ploys put into action by the military to scare people away, which doesn't at all sound like a security plan that the military would use.
Joe:
I mean, granted, things are always said to happen in installations, you know mysteries and ghost tales. But it's not like the commanders and chiefs of staff are devising these kinds of stories for the public propaganda and to make a ploy for, you know, the general population to believe it. Those guys are not that creative. No, the military and the Defense Department keeps things secure by physically separating people from the location, by deadly force if necessary, and by controlling the information about it, namely by either confirming what I should say, by neither confirming and nor denying anything about it to the American people. So COMSEC and OPSEC is how they handle such matters, but of course there is also a method called PYSOPs, where they do try to control how people think and make them prone to believe something about their capabilities as being extraordinary, and this involves tactics that are usually applied more toward the enemy during a conflict.
Laurie:
Right and the government does create propaganda, even if top brass may lack an imagination. There are certainly other agencies that do, and they could find a way to play on people's fear by exploiting the already held belief that that place is, well you know, haunted or cursed or dominated by interdimensional portal to other worlds. And then there are some who say it is all merely theatrical hype to form the basis for good television programming and movie talking. And we know that these types of shows are all about viewership and all in the almighty dollar right. I mean, just look at the ancient alien series. What is it? Some 16 or 17 seasons now. Now I can see the ancient aliens being different because it's asking questions and making us think about our past and, you know, could this and that have occurred because of this and that, etc. It's not focused on one set place, you know, attempting to solve its mystery. There is much about the skin watcher, skin walker range that makes you wonder if certain individuals aren't just playing on popular fears and imaginations.
Joe:
Yeah, and really there's nothing about it that is all that unique or new to the paranormal activity narrative. Just about every culture out there has its legends and tales about monsters and malevolent entities that roam the earth. There are the banshees and the Celtic and Gaelic lore, sirens and Greek mythology, the gin of the Arabs, the golem of the Jews and, of course, the Ango-Germanic bogeyman and all the variants of that. There is no shortage of monster stories around the world, even shaman, shamans and witch doctors, who are nothing more than tribes, people or often as ordinary people, and are often said to be possessed by spirits that are wicked and devilish. You also consider how there are practices of black magic and voodoo, and those beliefs abound in the Caribbean islands. So plenty of ghost stories that go around, right.
Joe:
And what is it about this place called skin walker ranch that has gotten so much attention in the last few years? As it is? The real name is Sherman Ranch and it is 512 acres on private property that has 24-7 electronic surveillance and armed security, and it changed ownership several times since the 1930s and is now legally under the hand of Adamantum Real Estate LLC. And UFO sightings started to get reported there after 1966 and were covered by quite a few journalists, one of them being none other than George Knapp, who was a renowned UFO investigator. We talked about him a few times and he actually helped bring a skin walker ranch into a public spotlight.
Laurie:
Right and Sherman Ranch borders on the Unital and Ouray Indian reservation, just to the south of the small town of Ballard.
Laurie:
It's not hard to fathom that it would be situated on land that is revered by the native peoples.
Laurie:
Now, the CEO of that real estate company is Brandon Fugal, who wanted to buy the ranch for the very reason that so many strange things have been said to occur there. Now, oddly enough, the Shermans, terry and his wife Gwen, who acquired the land almost 30 years ago. It sat for almost a decade after the previous owners, the Myers family, had passed away, so it took a while for the Shermans to remodel the old house and completely move in. However, they only kept ownership of it for about 18 months. In 1996, they eagerly sold it to aerospace tycoon and billionaire Robert Bigelow for $200,000. And, according to Hannah Osborne with Newsweek dated April 28th of 2022, Bigelow was very interested in buying it so it could be used for the organization that he founded, the National Institute for Discovery Science, which was disbanded in 2004 for reasons still not yet formally disclosed possibly from tax related problems, I guess and its purpose was to investigate and document the UFO sightings that were being reported in that area.
Joe:
Now the whole thing has become almost like a cult sensation in recent times, not only with the History Channel show, but there was also a horror movie that was spawned in 2013. It was called Skinwalker Ranch and it got to an abduction storyline that follows what it was called a found footage genre. And while there's a lot of people who are fascinated by this place, there are many skeptics, such as freelance writer Robert Schaefer, who said that the claim to all of the strange observations weren't told to the media until just before Bigelow bought the land. And there are others who say that the research going on at Skinwalker Ranch is to be deemed as fringe science, especially considering that the National Institute for Discovery Science was unable to come up with any proof at all after more than 10 years of monitoring the whole place. So I guess the question is how does all the supernatural stories tie into extraterrestrial life?
Joe:
So Terry and Gwen Sherman, along with her two teenage kids, told Zach Van Eyck with the Deseret News on June 29, 1996, shortly after they had sold Skinwalker Ranch to Bigelow, and they shared their stories about what they had experienced there, and they said that they would regularly see bright airborne lights that were white in color and oblong in shape, and they would emit wavy beams toward the ground, with two of them having been videotaped. Terry even mentioned that sometimes they would be seen emerging from orange discs with circular doors that seemed to open right in midair, and Gwen stated that one time one of them followed her while she was driving her car on a dirt road, and the two of them would say that they would sometimes hear voices coming from overhead, like from out of nowhere. They said it was in a completely unfamiliar language to them and when it was that happened, their dogs would go crazy, but there was nothing around and there was nothing to be seen.
Laurie:
Now, that's very interesting. That's pretty good. Now it got even worse, though, for the Shermans, as they went on to allege that they had some cows that were killed too. Three were found mutilated and four having completely disappeared. They also saw crop circles. As Terry said, he once noticed a strange circular depression in the pasture west of the house and he assumed that someone had removed a tree at some point. But then he started seeing the lights in the field. At first he thought they might be from kids from a neighboring farm riding all terrain vehicles, but realized that that didn't make a lot of sense, because the ranch is isolated by three miles from the front of main road and the access to the other property is blocked by a huge rock bridge. Upon getting closer, he saw through some tall poplar trees that the lights had illuminated the entire side of a nearby mountain as if it was daylight. Then he started coming across newer circular impressions that were made throughout the vast field. So it was very interesting.
Joe:
The problem with their story is that everything they said was never officially reported. The Unitah County Sheriff's Department has no record of any strange phenomena or cattle deaths that were called in. So some people think that this interview was with the magazine reporter and was just done for publicity, and that everything that Sherman said was just fabricated.
Laurie:
Well, a while ago we discussed the possible existence of portals and wormholes.
Laurie:
Some of them seem to be more likely to exist in certain places, so could it be that this area on Skinwalker Ranch is one of those places? This could be an explanation for much of the phenomena that has been witnessed there, just as there are other places where people have experienced paranormal, supernatural or spiritual phenomena. It may be attributable to energy passing from one dimension to another such that it is instantaneously jumps across space and time. The wormholes are like windows or tunnels that connect different points of the cosmos, like shortcuts. So could there be something like that, a vortex in the space-time continuum that facilitates the movement of the transdimensional entities? It's just like how we explain what the ancients perceived at the time of the sightings. If they did see something, was it actually as they described it when telling the account to a tribe and such? Or was it something that caused an hallucination, like a trick of the mind? Could the mind have perceived a skinny-looking, deformed being by looking at an odd tree through a foggy forest close to nightfall?
Joe:
Now, apparently, while the Shermans didn't tell the authorities about any of this, they did confide in a retired schoolteacher named Joseph Hicks, who had done his own UFO and UFO investigations in the area since sometime in the 1950s. According to him, he had talked to over a thousand people who claimed to have seen the very same things that the Shermans had encountered. He told them that he believed that these were all visitations from beings from another world or some other place to conduct research and exploration.
Laurie:
There was also some controversial film footage of flying discs taken by a US Navy warrant officer near Trementon in 1952. It showed a fireball that raced across the sky over Salt Lake City and drew considerable attention back then. Also, our friends at MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, became interested in a February 1993 incident in Iron County, on the opposite side of the state from Skinwalker Ranch, in which a man and woman saw a dozen UFOs, including an egg-shaped craft with a telephone pole-sized landing gear and a large hot dog-shaped craft. After the sightings the couple surveyed the ground nearby and found a trail of small three-toed footprints into snow. There are other markings indicated that a trail might have been dragging, a tail might have been dragging behind. Whatever made the prints. These kinds of encounters are not unique to Skinwalker Ranch, nor is the whole legend of the Skinwalkers for that matter. It's important to note that there are tales of them among many Native American tribes and it's spread all across the Western United States.
Joe:
Barry Carr, the Executive Director of the New York-based Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, has gone on to say that there is no physical evidence that aliens are visiting Skinwalker Ranch, but that there is no doubt that the people have seen things in the sky that they just can't identify. That means that at this particular moment they are unidentified. He pretty much dismisses the Sherman's account, but does say it needs to be further investigated.
Laurie:
Yeah, right. And there is also an interesting article I recently read from livesciencecom by Brendan Spector. It was dated March 15th of 2021. In it he writes about the shadow people, aka the dark watchers. For 300 years there have been reports of tall shadows, about 10 feet in height that look like men wearing hats and cloaks, on the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains of the California coast, and they seem to only appear in the afternoon, when the sun hits it just right. And no one has claimed to have in-person contact with them, of course. But people have been reported as having seen their shadows and felt as though they were being watched. Even novelist John Steinbeck has written about them. In his 1938 short story called Flight, a character sees a black figure leering down at him from a nearby ridghtop. A line from the book reads but he looked quickly away, for it was one of the dark watchers. Further on, it says no one knew who the watchers were nor where they lived, but it was better to ignore them and never to show interest in them.
Joe:
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned 10 foot tall men. So, you know, believe it or not, bigelow was actually able to harbor up $22 million from the Defense Department to be put to use in research at Skinwalker Ranch. It was included to be part of the whole recent formation of the US government's UAP task force, and in the early 2000s he was a close friend with then Senators Harry Reid of Utah and Ted Stevens of Alaska, who both agreed that the place deserves special attention, so it didn't make its way into the budget. And in addition to that, just about a year ago, in September of 2022, Brandon Fugal announced that he has partnered with the Hutchins Museum Institute to better explore the environmental and archaeological significance of the ranch.
Joe:
Of course, this is a way to bring more capital into scientific studies of the place, but there is something even more intriguing here about the Hutchings Museum in particular. Now, in an interview that is available on their website, hutchinsmuseum. org, Fugal says that in one of the things that has fascinated him the most and he's a big history aficionado and is really fascinated with archaeology in Utah but he said one of the things that fascinated him the most is the account going back to the 1920s, where John Hutchins, who is the founder of the museum, had discovered remains of giant skeletons in Utah that were eight feet tall, and he also went on to say that it was documented, that they were thousands of years old and that it did not match up with other cultural records. And now, being a Mormon, Fugal was very interested in finding out what this reveals about some of the inhabitants who are living in North America in a distant past.
Laurie:
But that reminds me of the Native American lore of the seven to eight foot tall red haired rinds of the Southwest out here in the Grand Canyon area and all that of Arizona. So I mean, you can't help but think of the Watchers and the Nephalim when you hear about something like this. So it does indeed seem that there is an oral tradition about giant and some of the indigenous peoples of the desert Southwest, and they may have just known of such places and may have had contact with these types of entities. So we do find somewhat of a parallel to the biblical narrative in that regard. Now Spector also went on to say that SF Gate managing editor Katie Dowd wrote that those dark Watchers in the Santa Lucia mountains were merely figments of the observers pattern seeking minds, and that it is all just a mental process whereby the brain tries to access significance to what the senses are providing it.
Joe:
Yeah, it's a classic case of Apophenia, which is a process where an observer's mind finds patterns within a random image, within a random assortment of things in an image, and often forming an association with it to something that looks akin to a human.
Joe:
We experienced this when we look at clouds and try to say what shape they make. And this is what you were talking about, laurie, with how people back in ancient times would have perceived what they saw and then came up with their own descriptions of it, which would be and been based only on empirical information. So even if we were to go back just a few hundred years ago, we would see that people's worldview and epistemology were far from what they are today. So if, say, there was a cloud shaped like a gorilla and the observer had never seen a gorilla, or even heard of a gorilla, and didn't know what the word meant, he would obviously not say that the cloud looks like a gorilla, since he would have no conception of a gorilla, even if that is truly what it resembled. Instead, it would be called something else altogether different.
Laurie:
And it may also be associated with a similar phenomenon noticed also in Germany and the harsh mountains known as the brocken gespenst, of broken specter, which, according to Dowd, is another infamous illusion. She claims that it happens when shadows like from a hiker are cast on misty mountaintops. If the sun is behind the observer, the mist plays with the shadow, making it look huge and menacing. It's something like a giant or a monster.
Joe:
So something is there against which the sun will cast a shadow, and that something could be a real person, or it could be someone who appeared out of a portal from another dimension. If a transdimensional being did appear in such a way that a shadow was cast, the people witnessing it could very well say it was something supernatural or even demonic, as they would have no other reference from their own life experiences by which to describe it.
Laurie:
Well, it's like that story I told you about one time, sometime ago now, where, up in the Canadian province where I'm from, which is Newfoundland, the first time a European settler in the 16th century saw a moose looking at him through the trees, he thought it was the devil. This is because he had never seen a moose before and looking at something like what, like that, with its you know, giant antlers and long, narrow face, with a like moose, have this like goatee hanging down from their bottom part of their mouth, and so he associated it with the imagery of what he was taught the devil looked like.
Joe:
Right, the word and concept of moose didn't exist in the minds of the settlers, but the word and concept of devil did exist, so that would have been their only epigraphical agency to describe what they clearly did not comprehend. I mean a poor Mr Moose. He probably got shot by a musket right after that.
Laurie:
I don't know if he did or not, or maybe the guy was too scared and just took off running, I don't know. But but you know, to the Micmak Indians who lived in Newfoundland at the time, they knew exactly what it was and it was, you know, no devil to them. So yeah, maybe the Native Americans know exactly what a skinwalker really is. So you know, I remember there's another story a co-worker once told me while we shared a shuttle ride to work years ago. She said that a friend of hers was chased by a Skinwalker and this was on a lonely highway in Arizona. Now he claims that he was driving his car and saw a strange looking being standing on the side of the road that looked like a red-eyed, hairy monster. He was so frightened by it that he floored his car like zoom, passed it, and that's when he noticed that the creature was now keeping up with him and running alongside his passenger window and looking in at him.
Laurie:
While he was, you know, driving a car at like 65 miles per hour and climbing, he had to look straight ahead and expected the worst of you know crashing the car out of you know, uncontrollable terror overwhelming him or, you know, or this thing was going to smash the window and reach in and grab him as he was driving. So the beast broke off the chase and let him go, apparently. So it terrified this guy so badly that he could or he would never travel that highway again at night alone. So what did this guy see that scared him so much? Was this a true story? I don't know. I wasn't there and this was told by a third party, you know, law enforcement officer at that. But for her friend to not travel that road again, something uncanny and bizarre must've happened to him.
Joe:
Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I've heard about Skinwalkers is that they can move extremely fast, you know, like animals, like a horse or a dog. So, anyway you look at it, the Skinwalker lore is an interesting subject, and may I shed some light on the lost history of the indigenous people of North America. So for next episode, we're going to continue with this theme of unexplained creatures by examining another similar type of figure, which may even be the same as a Skinwalker for all we know, and that is the Moth man. Yes, the Mothman. What is about this thing that has everybody so scared? We'll also talk about how it may have a connection with another eerie creature that is known as the Chupacabra, and maybe it's one and the same thing.
Laurie:
Yeah, just in time for all the wean, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, the tale of the Mothman got started in the 1960s in West Virginia, where a flying bird with red, glowing eyes and the size of a man was reported to chase after people while making a screeching sound. It almost sounds like that what's that thing from the movie where it goes around eating people's eyes. I can't remember the name of that thing. Oh, Jeepers, Creepers, Creepers.
Joe:
Creepers yes, yeah, I totally forgot about that one.
Laurie:
Yeah, just just just came to my mind, but supposedly it was reported in the local newspapers and eventually made its way into pop culture. So could the story of it, like the story of the skinwalkers, have something to do with interdimensionality, in which entities cross into our world from parallel universes through portals, which could be these demonic forces? I guess that would be an explanation for how demons come into this realm, but it's an idea that has been proposed by ephologists as well in recent times to explain some of the sightings that people everywhere have been experiencing. So be sure to tune into that Should be a good episode just prior to Halloween and also check out our website for the October newsletter. And be sure to go to our YouTube channel, as we we have that one video, but we have the second video that should be up and running tomorrow at least, no later than Tuesday. So, by the way, we think you'll like them a lot.
Joe:
Yeah, for sure. And as it is, there was actually a paranormal psychologist named John Keel who did investigate the Mothman incidents, and he went on to claim that it and other aberrations may be a manifestation of ultra- terrestrial intelligence that originates outside of our spectrum of the energy that we thus far have been able to measure, and it might tie into the theory of the multiverse. So, we look forward to joining you again to discuss all that in detail and see what we can learn about this phenomenon of interdimensional and ultra terrestrial reality. So until next time, stay curious.