Skinwalker Ranch Part 1

In our first ever 2 part series, episode 1, we take you to a 512-acre stretch of land in northeastern Utah that has defied explanation for centuries. The Ute people have always known something was wrong there — something ancient, something aware — and they’ve stayed away. The settlers who came after them didn’t listen.
We walk through the long history of dread surrounding the land, the families who bought it and left without explanation, and then the Shermans — a normal ranching family who purchased the property in 1994 and spent two years watching their cattle die in impossible ways, their dogs refuse to move past an invisible line, and lights in the sky behave like nothing in nature. Until the night Terry Sherman emptied a rifle into a creature that didn’t fall — and followed its tracks to the tree line, where they simply stopped.
The Shermans left. They never went back.
Next episode — the scientists arrive. And things get stranger.
It knows you’re listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

There's a place in the northeastern Utah where the cattle don't sleep. Where dogs refuse to go near the tree line after dark. Where ranchers have found their livestock healthy the night before, but turned inside out by morning. With no blood on the ground. No tracks in the mud. No explanation that fits inside the world we think we're living in. The locals don't like to talk about it. The ones who have worked that land longer than a decade tend to develop a certain look when you bring it up. It's not fear exactly. It's something older than fear. Something closer to the expression a person makes when they've accepted that a thing they cannot explain is simply true. And that talking about it won't make it any more understandable. It's resignation. It's the face of someone who has stopped trying to find the word for what they saw. The Uintaw Basin, northeastern Utah. A stretch of high desert land cradled between the Utah Mountains to the north and the Book Cliffs to the south. It's a region that has been inhabited for thousands of years by the ancient Fremont people, by the Ute nation, by settlers who came west in the 1800s believing the land was empty and waiting. The land was not empty. And it was not waiting. Tonight we are going to a place called Skinwalker Ranch. A 512-acre property that sits on the edge of a small town called Ballard, Utah. Population, a few hundred, and that's if you're being generous. It's not a glamorous place. It's not beautiful in the way that it draws tourists. It is a flat, windswept, and enormous in the way that only the American West can be enormous. Where you can stand in an open field and see every direction for miles and still feel somehow that something is standing behind you. I want you to understand something before we begin. This is not a story about one strange night. This is not a story about one unreliable witness or one rancher who saw something in the dark and let his imagination run away with them. This is a story of a place, a specific, mappable, purchasable piece of land, where phenomena that should not exist have been witnessed, documented, and studied for decades by farmers, scientists, military investigators, and researchers who have staked their professional reputations on what they saw. Poltergeist activity. Cattle mutilations, orbs of light that pass through solid matter, creatures that absorb bullets and walk away. Portals that open the air. Underground anomalies that no geologist can explain. A presence that seems, that seems to know when it's being watched. The evidence does not fit any single explanation. Not military testing, not natural gas, not mass hysteria, not hoax. It just doesn't fit. And the land has been like this for longer than anyone alive can remember. You're listening to the breeze vials. Join with me is my co-host, Nick Mabricage. Thank you for being here with me today, Nick. We have some crazy shit to talk about today. Today we're talking about the skinwalker ranch.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Nick, are you familiar with the skinwalker ranch? I am familiar with skinwalkers, and I'm gonna be honest with Cody. Not those kind of skinwalkers. This is different.

SPEAKER_03 5:34

Yeah. Yeah. I think I know what you're talking about now. Um, yeah. Anytime you bring Native Americans into the mix, some scary shit.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

You're right about that. So the skinwalker ranch. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are familiar with it. There's documentaries about it in movies. Just a lot of unexplainable stuff has happened on this area of land. Uh and we're gonna go into details today about a bunch of instances that you know are we can't really explain what's happened. Scientists have been there, you know, the military, all these people. You know, nobody really has an answer for it. We're gonna get right into it. Again, guys, we're talking about the skinwalker.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

Before we talk about UFOs and cattle mutilations and billionaire researchers, we need to talk about the land. Because one of the most overlooked aspects of the skinwalker ranch story is how old it is. The phenomena that modern investigators have documented with cameras and electromagnetic sensors and ground penetrating radar, those same phenomena, or things very much like them, were being reported by the Oot people centuries before the first European settlers arrived in Utah. The Oot Nation has lived in the Uintah Basin for generations beyond counting. Their relationship with the land is not that of outsiders who lived in and set up fences. This is their ancestral home. They know the geography the way you know your own house in the dark, by feel, by memory, by something deeper than maps. The Oot people do not go to that land. They have a name for what lives there, a name that most English speakers encounter in different contexts, through the Navajo tradition, through horror films, through internet forums. But the Oot relationship with this entity is on its own, separate, and older than most of those references. They call it the Skinwalker. Yenal Delushi and Navajo, roughly, it goes on all fours, a being of dark transformation. In many Native American traditions, a skinwalker is a person, a human being, who has gained the power of dark shape-shifting through forbidden ritual. They can move as any animal, they can mimic human voices. They are considered among the most dangerous forces that exist, and they are spoken of with the kind of careful restraint that you use when you genuinely believe that saying a name draws attention. But here's the thing. The Ute elders who have spoken about the property over the years haven't been describing occasional encounters. They've been describing something that is rooted there, something that doesn't wander in and out, something that has claimed that land as its own and has enforced that claim for as long as anyone can remember. When white settlers began moving into the Uinta Basin in the 1800s, they heard the warnings from the Oot people almost immediately. Don't build there. Don't graze cattle there. Don't stay on that land after dark. The warnings were consistent, specific, and given with urgency. The settlers largely didn't listen. And the records from the earliest years of the basin's settlement include accounts, buried in diaries, in church records, and letters sent east of things that don't belong in the story westward expansion, missing livestock, structures disturbed overnight, sounds in the dark that didn't come from any animal that the settlers knew. The land kept its character. New owners, same experiences. There's a theory in the paranormal research called genus loc, Latin for spirit of the place. The idea that certain locations have an intrinsic, persistent character, that the phenomena associated with the place are tied to the geography itself, not to any particular person or period of time. That no matter who lives there, the land behaves the same way. Skinwalker Ranch may be the most well-documented example of this theory in existence. Decades of ownership, dozens of witnesses, same phenomena, same locations on the property, same behaviors, same inability to explain. The land doesn't change. Before the Shermans, before Robert Bigelow, before the television cameras and the scientific teams, there were families, ordinary ranching families who bought the property, tried to work the land, and left. Their stories are harder to piece together because most of them never spoke publicly. But the patterns drawn from their interviews conducted by later researchers, property records, and regional newspaper archives are consistent enough to be disturbing. One family who owned the property in the 1960s and early 70s reported a years-long pattern of cattle dying without apparent cause. Not predator attacks, not disease. The animals simply failed. Necropsies showed no illness, no trauma. Neighbors in the Ballard area during the same era spoke of lights over the property at night. Not aircraft. The behavior was wrong. The angles impossible. The sudden stops and reversals outside of the physics that our propeller or jet engine could achieve. Several neighbors independently described the same lights in the same approximate area of the sky without having spoken to each other about it. One former resident of the region, interviewed decades later, described a night in the early 1970s when she was driving past the property on the county road and saw what she described as a large figure standing at the edge of the field. Not moving, just standing. She assumed it was a man. She slowed down. The figure was too tall. Much too tall. And the proportions were wrong in ways she couldn't immediately name. She drove away. She didn't stop. She didn't look back. She moved out of the basin within a year. The property changed hands multiple times between the 1950s and the 1990s. In almost every case, the sale was quiet, the price was low, and the former owners gave vague or minimal explanations for why they were leaving the land that should, by any rational assessment, have been productive and profitable. You don't walk away from a 512-acre working range without a reason.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Most of them never gave the real one.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

No amount of coaxing or commanding made any difference. The North pasture was simply off limits as far as the dogs were concerned. This continued the entire time the Shermans lived there. The cattle were next. Over the following weeks and months, the Shermans began finding animals dead or injured in ways that defied explanation. In one instance, a calf was found with a perfect circular hole cut into its rectum. Tissue removed no blood, no sign of surgical instruments, no tracks anywhere near the carcass. A veterinarian who examined the animal said the precision of the incision was beyond anything achievable with conventional tools and field conditions. In another case, a full-grown cow was found with its eye removed, the ear excised, and the udder cut away, again with zero blood loss. As though the blood had been drained before the cuts were made, or as though the cuts had been made in some way that simply did not cause bleeding. The hide around the incisions was smooth, not torn, not gnawed, smooth as if with something finer than any blade the Shermans owned. Over the course of their two years on the property, the Shermans lost somewhere between fourteen and eighteen cattle to unexplained causes. Some died, some simply vanished from a closed fence field overnight, without any break in the fence line, without any tracks leading in or out. They filed reports with local law enforcement. They called the county. They called the state. Everyone came out, looked, wrote things down, and left. Nobody had answers. But it was the night encounters that truly changed them. Terry Sherman described a series of sightings that escalated over the two years. In the early months, lights in the sky, orbs he called them, because he didn't have a better word, round, luminous, moving in the ways that aircraft don't move. Hovering, then accelerating, then stopping dead. Sometimes two or three at a time. His family saw them too, his wife and his kids. One night one of the orbs descended low over the property and seemed to circle the barn. Terry stood in the yard and watched it, and he described a feeling during the encounter they strolled to put into words. Not fear exactly, but a certainty. A certainty that whatever was inside that light was watching him the same way he was watching it. Then came the encounter in the north pasture. It was evening. Terry was checking the cattle. The light was failing. He saw something near the tree line they initially took for a coyote. A large one, but a coyote. He moved closer, and the closer he got, the less it looked like anything in his experience. It was wolf-shaped. But the scale was entirely wrong. This animal was enormous. He estimated the size of horse, possibly larger. The build was wrong too. It was too heavy in the chest. The legs were too long. The head too large. He raised his rifle and fired. The animal turned and looked at him. He fired again and again. He emptied his rifle into the creature at a range where he could not have missed. He was an experienced hunter and rancher who had killed animals his entire life. And he knew, he absolutely knew, that he was hitting his target. The creature did not fall. It didn't stagger. It didn't run. It turned slowly and walked into the tree line. Terry followed it into the edge of the trees, half out of fear, and half because he needed to understand what he had just seen. He found the tracks where the creature had walked. Heavy impressions in the soft ground. And then at the tree line, the tracks simply stopped. The creature had not gone through the trees. The tracks didn't turn. They didn't lead anywhere. They stopped as if whatever made them had ceased to exist at that exact point. He found no blood, no fur, no evidence that the animal had ever been hurt. He stood at the edge of those trees in the falling dark, rifle empty in his hands, and tried to make sense of what had just happened. He would later say that that was the moment. Not the cattle mutilations, not the lights in the sky. That was the moment he understood that the property was not going to yield to normal explanation. The family held on for another year after that. They tried. They had invested their savings, their plans, their future in this land. They were not the kind of people to quit easily. But the encounters didn't stop. They intensified. Gwyn Sherman, who is more private than her husband about the specifics, told at least one researcher that there were things she witnessed that she would never discuss publicly. Not because she didn't believe them. She believed them completely. But because she had decided that there are some things that are worse when they're spoken out loud. In 1996, the Sherman sold their property to Robert Bigelow. They moved away. They rebuilt. They never went back. Terry Sherman gave limited interviews over the years, and the last known quote attributed to him on the subject is one I keep coming back to. Whatever is on that land, he said, it doesn't want to be understood.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

It just wants to be left alone.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

Guys, this is the first ever episode of the Breeze Files that will be a two-part episode. And why is that? Because the Skinwalker Ranch has so much information and so many instances of paranormal activity that we cannot just fit it into one episode. We want you guys to take this information that we've given you so far and digest it and think about it before we come out with the second part that gets even crazier. What do you think about the about so far, Nick, about what we've talked about?

SPEAKER_03 23:56

Well, I'll say this, Cody. When it comes to spirits and goblins and ghouls, um, I am a big time skeptic. Dog man, uh, big time. But listen, when it comes to UFOs, skinwalkers, and things like that, um it genuinely scares me. So when I hear stories like this, uh I'm captivated and I'm terrified at the same time. So uh I'm excited to uh get to part two. Um hopefully I can sleep tonight. I don't know. I'm scared just thinking about it, Cody. I I don't know what I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

I feel the exact same way. This stuff freaks me out. UFOs freak me the F out. With that being said, guys, we're gonna cut this off here. Next time you hear from us, it'll be part two of the Skinwalker Ranch. This has been the Breeze Files. Thank you for listening. And remember, they're always watching.