The Skinwalker Ranch Part 2

The Shermans are gone. But the ranch isn’t done.

In Part 2, we go deeper into the most scientifically documented paranormal investigation in American history. Billionaire aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow purchases the property and sends a team of trained researchers — former FBI, military intelligence, PhDs — to live on the land and document everything. What they logged over the following years is extraordinary. Furniture moving in locked rooms. Electromagnetic spikes in the same locations every time. Orbs of light passing through solid matter. And one night in the north pasture, two researchers watch a tear open in the air — and something large climb through it.
We also ask the question that nobody in paranormal investigation wants to sit with: what if the phenomena aren’t random? What if whatever is on that land is aware of being watched — and has been managing what we see this whole time?

The Ute people knew what was there and left it alone.

We are not so wise. It knows you’re listening

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Last time, we left a family standing at the edge of a tree line in northern Utah. Tracks in the mud that led nowhere. An empty rifle. And the quiet, total understanding that the world they thought they lived in had just revealed itself to be something else entirely. The Sherman sold the ranch and walked away. And for a moment, the land went quiet again. But quiet isn't the same as empty. In 1996, a billionaire aerospace entrepreneur named Robert Bigelow purchased 512 acres in the Unitau Basin. Not to ranch it, not to develop it, but to study it. He sent scientists, investigators, people with credentials and equipment and the kind of skepticism that comes from spending your career inside the boundaries of what's proven. The land changed their minds. Tonight we go back to Skinwalker Ranch. The families are gone, the researchers have arrived. And what they documented over the years that followed will make the Sherman's encounters look like a warm-up. You're listening to the Breeze Files. Tonight, Skinwalker Ranch, Part Two What's going on. Welcome to another edition of the Breeze Files. I am your host, Cody Breeze. Along with me is my co-host and partner in crime. All right, guys. Last time we left you guys, it was the first part of our two partner about the skinwalker. What what did you take from that first part?

SPEAKER_02 2:27

It was crazy. Um those of you who called the last episode, I didn't get some sleep. Anyways, yeah, honestly, when you first mentioned you wanted to do an episode about skinwalkers, I hadn't done my research at all. So my first assumption was you wanted to talk about uh the local new discount. Yeah, obviously. I don't know how it's scary, but you know, I'm into it.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Uh anybody that's listening to this, I want you to know that when uh Nick was a young boy, he ate a lot of so he's like I didn't bring him on this podcast because he is the point of um of the operation. He should be more entertaining. Sorry, sorry, guys. Um ready to get into part two.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

That's true. That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

All right, guys, and without further ado, we're gonna dive into part two of the skin block.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Robert Bigelow is not an easy man to categorize. He's a billionaire, an aerospace entrepreneur, the founder of the Bigelow Aerospace, a company that has built and launched inflatable space and habitat modules, actual modules that have been talked with the International Space Station. He is by any measure. A serious and a complex person operating at the highest levels of aerospace in real estate development. He is also a man who is stated in a 60-minute interview. He is also a man who is stated in a 60-minute interview that he is absolutely convinced that extraterrestrial life exists and has already made contact with Earth. He is a man who has spent millions of his personal fortune investigating phenomena that most of his peers won't acknowledge exists. When Bigelow purchased Skinwalker Ranch in 1996 from the Shermans, he wasn't buying a ranch. He was buying a research site. He funded an organization called the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS, and he sent a team to the property that was unlike anything the basin had seen before. Former FBI investigators, military intelligence veterans, PhDs in physics, chemistry, and biology, people with the credentials and the training to document phenomena rigorously and distinguish between genuine anomaly and human error. They lived on the property. They set up cameras and monitoring equipment throughout the land. They logged everything. What they logged is remarkable. In the first year of the NIDS investigation, researchers documented multiple instances of poltergeist type activity inside the ranch house itself. Objects moved without being touched. A heavy piece of furniture in the main room was found on its side one morning, with no explanation for how it had moved. Or how it had been moved without the researchers who were sleeping in the adjacent rooms hearing anything. A researcher's personal items, a watch, a wallet, a set of keys, vanished from a locked room and reappeared two days later in a location that had already been searched. One investigator reported waking in the night to find the bed he was sleeping in vibrating. Not the building, not wind or traffic or a tremor. Just the bed. Specifically, the bed. The sensation lasted for approximately 90 seconds and then stopped. His partner in the adjacent bunk, just two feet away, felt nothing. Another investigator described an evening when the temperature in the kitchen dropped suddenly and dramatically. A drop of nearly 30 degrees that lasted for several minutes in a specific corner of the room, and then normalized, again without explanation. Her equipment logged the temperature anomaly. These weren't campfire stories told around a fire. They were written in official research logs dated, witnessed by multiple individuals, and corroborated by the equipment readings. The electromagnetic readings were, in some ways, even more disturbing. Across the property, researchers documented consistent electromagnetic anomalies in the specific locations, the same locations where the Shermans had reported the most activity. The North Pasture showed readings that their equipment couldn't fully account for. Not power lines, not buried cable, not geological sources that any of their geologists could identify. Their readings would spike without apparent cause and return to normal, equally without cause. Sometimes the spikes preceded a reported visual phenomenon. Sometimes they appeared to correlate with the cattle anomalies, but the pattern was consistent enough that the team knew which areas of the property were active before anything happened. The land had its own electrical fingerprint, and that fingerprint told you where to look. Then there were the orbs. Multiple researchers across multiple nights documented the same lights that the Shermans had reported. Round, luminous, moving in ways that violated standard physics, instantaneously accelerating, perfect stops, trajectory changes after 90 degrees or more at full speed. They were small, the size of a softball. Some were described as being several feet in diameter. Then one night, a team of three researchers watched as an orb crossed the north pasture at a low altitude and approached the east fence line. They tracked it with cameras, and then the orb appeared to do something none of them had ever seen before. It pushed through the fence. Not over, not under, through the wire, as though the wire wasn't there. And on the other side of the fence, it simply stopped, hovered approximately 10 seconds, and then moved straight up into the sky at a speed that took it from the visible to the invisible in less than two seconds. The cameras captured it. The footage was reviewed, but nobody could explain it. But the next morning, one of the cattle on the other side of the fence was found dead. No visible cause of injury or illness. Simply dead. In the location where the orb had stopped. One of the most detailed accounts from the NIDS investigation involved the portal. It was late one evening. Two researchers were in the north pasture when one of them noticed a light in the air ahead of them that was different from the orbs they had seen before. Not spherical, more like, as one researcher later described, a tier. A horizontal opening in the air, perhaps six feet across, with a dark space visible through it that was distinctly darker than the night sky around it. As they watched, a figure emerged from the tier. Not an orb, not a craft, a figure. Large, moving slowly, as though it was climbing through an opening. The figure appeared to straighten up on the other side of the portal, on their side, and then the tier closed. The figure, they said, was enormous. Massive. In the way of something not built for a human scale. It moved off into the dark without acknowledging them. The researchers noted that the time and location in their logs, when they returned to that area of the fields of daylight, the ground was undisturbed. No tracks, no impressions in the earth, just the memory, and the note in the log, and the certainty of two trained investigators that they had seen something exit a space that should not have existed. I want to pause here for a moment. Because this is the aspect of the Skinwalker Ranch story that I think gets the least attention, and it is, to me, the most deeply unsettling. Everything we've discussed so far, the lights, the creatures, the poltergeist activity, the cattle, all of it has quality that is unusual in the paranormal investigation. It responds to observation. Comb Koheler, the biochemist who led the NIDS team, and later co-authored a book on the investigation called The Hunt for the Skinwalker, described this in detail. The phenomena at the ranch seemed to behave differently depending on whether they were being actively observed or passively monitored. When researchers were present and alert, activity would often decrease. When equipment was left running unattended, activity would increase. When a researcher was watching a specific area, things would happen just outside of their field of view. But when they turned, the phenomenon would be gone. Galeller described it as consistent with something that had, and I want you to sit with this word, awareness. Not intelligence in the way we typically meet when we talk about technology or even animal cognition. Something more like a strategic awareness. An awareness of what was being monitored, what was being measured, what the researchers were focused on, and a preference for operating just outside the edge of capture. This is not consistent with a natural phenomenon. Ball lightning doesn't know when you're filming it. A geological anomaly doesn't adjust its behavior based on the number of cameras pointed at it. A hoaxer could theoretically be aware of observation, but no hoaxer has ever been identified on the property across decades of investigation by any of the multiple teams that have worked there. The intelligence theory that whatever is operating on that land is a form of awareness that allows it to manage its own exposure is terrifying for a very specific reason. Because if it's true, then everything we've documented is what it chose to let us see. Everything we know is only what it and that raises a question I don't have an answer to that I think about more than I like.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Pilots have reported anomalies in the airspace over the basin. They don't correspond to any registered aircraft. A rancher whose property borders the Skinwalker ranch land, and who has asked to remain unnamed in multiple interviews, described a period of about six months in the early 2000s when his cattle were exhibiting strange behavior. They wouldn't graze in the north section of his property, the section closest to the Skinwalker Ranch border. For months, they just wouldn't go there. He set up a camera in that section. The footage was largely uneventful. But on three separate nights, the camera picked up a light moving low through the area of the field. Not a vehicle. The train would have made a vehicle impossible. Just a light, drifting, and then gone. His cattle never returned to that section of pasture while he owned the property. A school teacher in Vernel, who had lived in the basin her entire life, described herself as deeply skeptical of anything paranormal, told a researcher in 2004 she had seen something while driving at night on the county road. A dark shape moving across the road ahead of her, crossing from one field to the other. She stopped the car. The shape crossed the road in two strides. She estimated its height, based on what she could see, at 10 to 12 feet. It didn't run, it walked deliberately, without hurrying. It crossed the road and was gone into the dark of the field. She sat in her car for a long time before driving on. She moved away from the base and shortly thereafter. She has never publicly named herself in connection with this account. In recent years, investigators working on the property have turned their attention downward. Ground penetrating radar surveys, the same technology used in archaeological investigation and construction planning, have revealed something beneath the ranch that nobody expected. Large structured formations underground, deep beneath the surface of the North Pasture, the same area with the highest density of surface phenomena. The radar shows formations that do not match any natural geological structure that the geologists consulting on the investigation can identify. They are not caves, not fault lines, not deposits of gas or water. They appear in the radar imaging to be organized, geometric in the way that suggests purpose rather than geology. The depth and extent of formations is still being investigated because nobody has been able to drill to the depth required to determine what they actually are. One geologist who reviewed the radar data and asked not to be publicly named described the formations as inconsistent with anything in my experience. He suggested carefully with full acknowledgement that he couldn't explain it. That the formations resembled at scale large artificial structures, built structures underground. Nobody knows how long they've been there. Nobody knows if they're connected to what happens on the surface. But the north pasture, the area where the dogs wouldn't go, where the Shermans lost their cattle, where the NIDS team documented the orbs in the portal encounter, that is where these formations are concentrated. The land above that ground has been anomalous for over a century of recorded observation. And something is under it.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Here's a chapter of the skin locker ranch for it that gets less attention than it deserves. The United States government has been aware of the phenomenon of the skinwalker ranch for at least as long as serious civilian investigators have. In 2007, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, working with two other senators, secured a $22 million in classified funding for a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The program was run out of the Pentagon largely under the direction of a man named Louis Elizond, and its mandate was to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena and determine whether they represented a national security threat. The Skinwalker Ranch was explicitly included in the scope of that program's research. Let that land free. The United States Department of Defense funded a classified program that considered a 512-acre ranch in the rural Utah significant enough to include an investigation of potential aerospace threats. Documents released to the FOIA requests after the program became public knowledge in 2017 confirmed that researchers working under the AATIP umbrella visited the ranch and filed reports. The full content of those reports remains classified. But what we do know from Elizondo and others who have spoken about the program is that the phenomena at the ranch were considered credible enough to warrant federal investigation. And that the conclusions of that investigation, whatever they were, were significant enough to remain protected information. We also know that the Bigelow's NIDS had a collaborative relationship with the elements of the U.S. government during the period of their investigation. Bigelow has confirmed in interviews that the government agencies were interested in NIDS's research. He has not elaborated on the nature of that relationship. What does the government know about the Skinwalker Ranch? We don't know. But they know something.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

After everything, the decades of accounts, the scientific investigations, the military interests, the underground formations. We're still left with the central question. What is Skinwalker Ranch? Let me tell you what the major theories are. Theory one, it's a hoax. This is the easiest explanation, also the least satisfying. For hoax to account for the full body of phenomena documented at the ranch across multiple families, multiple independent investigations, multiple scientific teams in over several decades. It would require a conspiracy of an extraordinary scale in longevity, perpetrated by people ranging from the U elders depending on officials, and never once successfully exposed. No hoaxer has ever been caught on the property. No equipment failure has ever been found to explain a documented anomaly. The hoax theory requires more plausibility than most of the paranormal explanations. Theory two, it's classified military technology. Some researchers argue that many of the phenomena, particularly the aerial lights and the physical effects on humans, are consistent with advanced experimental technology being tested in a remote area. The Utah Basin is relatively isolated. Classified military tests have taken place in remote areas of the American West before. It's not an impossible theory. But it doesn't explain the cattle mutilations, it doesn't explain the creature encounters. It doesn't explain the records of youth avoidance that predate any military aviation program by centuries. And it doesn't explain the underground formations. Theory three, it's an interdimensional window. This is the theory that most seriously advanced by researchers who have spent most of the time on the property. That the Utah Basin and the ranch specifically exists over or near a location where the membrane between our dimension and adjacent ones is usually thin. That what people are seeing in what has been documented is the result of phenomena from other realities bleeding through into ours. The intelligence that Kalleller described, the adaptive quality of the phenomena, the sense that something is aware of observation, fits a model in which entities from other dimensional layers are interacting with our world at a point where interaction is possible. Non-invaders, not conquerors, something more like observers from the other side, who have their own agenda and their own rules of engagement. This would explain why the phenomena have been consistent across centuries and across ownership. It's not about the people, it's about the place. Theory 4. The Ute were right all along. The oldest explanation, perhaps the one that deserves the most respect, that something, a spiritual entity, a dimensional being, a force that doesn't fit any category in Western science, has inhabited that land for as long as people have lived near it. That the Ute warnings were not superstition. They were knowledge. Accumulated, specific, and accurate knowledge about the nature of that particular piece of ground. That what scientists now call intermensual phenomena, what ranchers call lights and creatures and vanishing cattle. What researchers call electromagnetic anomalies, the Ute called it by a different name. And they knew enough to leave it alone. Brandon Fugel purchased Skinwalker Ranch from Robert Bigelow in 2016. Fugel is a prominent Utah real estate developer and entrepreneur. He was, by his own admission, a skeptic when he first heard about the ranch's reputation. He bought it. Partially, he said, because he was curious. And partially because he is a businessman who recognized the potential of the property beyond its paranormal history. He changed his position quickly. Headaches, disorientation, a persistent feeling of being observed that he couldn't shake. He has described standing in the North Pastor and having an absolute conviction that something in that field was aware of his presence. Under Fugel's ownership, investigation of the ranch has continued with a new team of researchers, many with backgrounds in scientific and engineering disciplines. They have access to equipment that didn't exist during the NIDS era. More sophisticated radar, better imaging, improved sensor arrays. The phenomena have continued. Aerial anomalies have been captured on high-resolution camera. A Mesa on the property, called the Homestead Mesa, has been identified as a particular focus of activity with multiple incidents of equipment malfunction. Anomalous readings and investigator reports of physical effects in that area. One researcher suffered what was later described as a sudden onset neurological event on the Mesa. Headaches, confusion, loss of short-term memory that resolved within hours of leaving the area, but left him with effects he described as lingering for weeks. He returned to the property. He said he couldn't explain why he went back. He said the ranch had a quality that made you need to understand it. Even when understanding it was clearly not going to come easily. That's a phrase that comes up repeatedly among serious skinwalker ranch investigators. The need to understand. Not just curiosity, something stronger. Something that keeps pulling researchers back even when the property has physically affected them. Frightened them. Or even given them things they can't sleep on. Something in the place that makes the questions feel urgent in a way that's hard to articulate and harder to ignore. The ground penetrating radar surveys have continued. The underground formations remain unexplained. Drilling has begun in some areas, with results that are still, as of now, being processed and analyzed. What's down there is still unknown. The youth people, when asked about the ongoing investigation, respond with something between amusement and sadness. They didn't need the radar. They didn't need the cameras. They didn't need the electromagnetic sensors. They knew what was there. They left it alone. The ranch is still active. The investigation is still ongoing. The answers are still not forthcoming. And something on five hundred and twelve acres of northeastern Utah is still watching everything that happens on its land. Holy shit, people. There is so much to unpack here between parts one and part two. It's just insane. Like I can't really explain any of the scientific parts of this. I don't really understand it myself. But the main takeaways that I took from this are over time there's been accounts of huge humanoid creatures, unexplained cattle mutilations, unexplained portals, underground formations, stuff lying in the sky that cannot be explained. I mean, it it's it's literally insane. Like, what do you have to take away from what we just talked about?

SPEAKER_02 32:44

I think what's incredibly fascinating, Cody, is the fact that this phenomena takes place, not just like, oh, this happened in the 70s, and then a little bit uh in the 80s, 90s. This spans centuries, you know, beginning with the youth people, you know, and then sprinkled throughout centuries of stories and phenomena that continue to this day. And what's crazy is this isn't just, oh yeah, Uncle Bill, you know, he says he's seen a dog man in Michigan, he didn't tell anybody, blah. No, these are encounters that are documented, official files that include all the way up to the US government are involved in these investigations, and that is something that sets this phenomena apart from any previous episode. And even the strongest skeptic has to look at this information and go, okay, a lot of this might be true. A lot of it seems very sci-fi portals, extraterrestrials. A lot of this is simply just hard to deny. The evidence is there and it's hard to argue with it.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

I know that a lot of people might think that you're an idiot, but that is actually a pretty good explanation of how these two episodes have gone. And I agree, the amount of evidence, the amount of research, the official documents, it it's hard to argue that this that is what makes this different from any of the episodes before. All right, guys. That concludes our episodes on the skinwalker ranch. Moving on, I have finally gotten a few submissions about people's personal account of the paranormal. Yes. Yes, I finally have. But guess what? I need more. I don't just need three. I need 12. I need 20. I need 50. All right. I want to hear about your guys' own personal experiences. Everybody knows about the conjuring story. Everybody knows about the Amity Bill stories. But let me tell you something. Nobody's heard about Uncle Chuck's encounter with a demon. Nobody heard about Billy Bob's encounter with a UFO. But everybody wants to hear it. So, you guys listening to this, do me a favor. You have an aunt, uncle, cousin, brother, or you yourself have had some kind of paranormal experience. I want to hear about it. I want you to send it to my email. C-O-D-Y-B-R-E-E-Z 25 at gmail.com. Or, you know, message me on IG or TikTok at the Breeze Files. And also give me a file or a follow while you're at it. All right? All right, guys. That does it for this episode of the Breeze Files. Thank you guys for listening. And always remember it knows you're listening.