Skinwalker Ranch is a ranch of about 512 acres southeast of Ballard, in Utah's Uintah Basin, that has been reported since 1996 as a site of UFO sightings, cattle deaths and other unexplained events. It was owned by the Sherman family, then by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow, whose research groups studied it, and since 2016 by a company linked to Brandon Fugal, whose ranch is the setting of History's series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. No physical evidence of the paranormal has been published from the property, but the ranch is tied to a real, documented Pentagon contract.
Few places link a family's frightening stories, a private research institute, a Defense Intelligence Agency program, two US senators and a prime-time reality show. Some of the story can be checked against newspapers, contracts and government reports; the rest rests on what people say they saw. Keeping the two apart is the only fair way to read the case, for believers and skeptics alike.
Where is Skinwalker Ranch, and where does the name come from?
Skinwalker Ranch, once called the Sherman Ranch, lies in western Uintah County in northeastern Utah, southeast of the small town of Ballard. Its boundary runs along the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, the home of the Ute Indian Tribe. The surrounding Uintah Basin had a reputation for UFO reports as early as the 1970s, long before the ranch was famous.
The name borrows the skin-walker of Navajo tradition, a harmful witch said to be able to take animal form. That figure belongs to a living culture and is treated seriously by many Navajo people, not as a campfire story. The idea that the ranch itself is cursed is far more recent. Author Jason Colavito, who writes about fringe history, has described the ranch's myths as "entirely a modern creation, fabricated in the late twentieth century." Whatever happened on the property, the "skinwalker" label was applied to it in the 1990s and later, by outsiders.
Who has owned the ranch?
The ownership chain is one of the best-documented parts of the story. County and press records show four main periods:
- Kenneth and Edith Myers, 1934 to 1994
- Terry and Gwen Sherman, 1994 to 1996
- Robert Bigelow, 1996 to 2016
- Brandon Fugal, through Adamantium Real Estate LLC, from 2016
The Shermans, who gave the ranch its earlier name, owned it for only about two years.
What did the Sherman family report?
The Shermans' story reached the public on 30 June 1996 in a Deseret News article by Zack Van Eyck titled "Frequent Fliers?" George Knapp, the Las Vegas investigative journalist, later expanded on it in a series for the alternative weekly Las Vegas Mercury.
According to those early stories and later retellings, the family described strange lights and craft in the sky, unusual impressions in grass and soil, cattle that died or went missing, and a large wolf-like animal that was said to be unaffected when shot. Cattle mutilation stories had circulated in the surrounding area for decades, so the reports fell into an existing local tradition.
These are accounts, not findings. No physical evidence from the Sherman period has been tested and published, and the reports should be read as testimony from people describing what they experienced.
What did Robert Bigelow and NIDS do there?
Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas real-estate developer who later founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999, bought the ranch in 1996, reportedly for $200,000. He had founded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in 1995 to fund research on UFOs and other anomalies, and the ranch became its field site. Terry Sherman worked as a caretaker on the property after the sale, and NIDS placed staff and monitoring equipment there.
Colm Kelleher, NIDS deputy administrator, led the ranch work for several years. With Knapp he later wrote Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005), the main account of the NIDS years. The book describes close to 100 incidents the team saw or investigated, from glowing orbs and unexplained lights to large animals said to be unharmed by bullets. It also records a frank limit: the investigators acknowledged "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication." NIDS was disbanded in 2004.
Skeptics were unimpressed from the start. In 1996, James Randi gave Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award, naming his effort "the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult" claim. In 2020, skeptic Robert Sheaffer called the phenomena "almost certainly illusory," pointing out that NIDS found no proof after years of monitoring and that the earlier owners, the Myers family, had not described anything of the kind.
How did the ranch connect to a Pentagon program?
This part of the story rests on government records rather than eyewitness accounts, so it is best read as a separate track from the ranch claims.
What the documents show
James Lacatski, a technical intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who had worked on missile and directed-energy threats, read Hunt for the Skinwalker. He contacted Bigelow, obtained permission to visit the ranch, and later described having an experience there that he considered anomalous. Bigelow relayed the interest to his friend Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid, with Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, secured a special appropriation of about $22 million in the defense budget.
The DIA used that money for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP. A solicitation was posted in August 2008, and the contract went to a Bigelow company, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Lacatski served as the program manager. As the name shows, the program was framed around future aerospace weapon technologies. One documented output is a set of 38 technical papers, called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, on advanced-physics topics ranging from hypersonics to warp drive and dark energy. The DIA released the list of titles in 2019 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, and most of the papers were later released. The Defense Department has said the effort ended in 2012, when funding stopped. AAWSAP is often linked to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) that The New York Times reported in December 2017, though accounts of how the two relate still conflict.
In March 2024, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published Volume I of its Historical Record Report. It reviewed government UAP work going back to 1945, including AAWSAP and AATIP, and found no verifiable evidence that any government program had obtained or reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology. The wider context of those reviews is covered in the UAP hearings explainer.
What the insiders say
In 2021, Lacatski, Kelleher and Knapp published Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the program insiders' account of AAWSAP. It describes the ranch as one focus of the program's work and recounts experiences reported by people connected to it. The book is the authors' testimony about the program. Government records confirm the contract, the money and the people involved; they do not confirm the paranormal events the book describes.
The honest summary is this: a real DIA program existed, it was funded through Congress, a Bigelow company held the contract, and people tied to it took a strong interest in the ranch. No government document confirms that anything paranormal happened there.
What happened after Brandon Fugal bought it?
In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate LLC. Brandon Fugal, a Utah real-estate developer and technology investor, publicly confirmed in March 2020 that he was the owner. Under the new ownership, approach roads were blocked, the perimeter was fenced with barbed wire and monitored by cameras, and signs warned visitors away.
The ranch also became a brand. Adamantium filed for a "Skinwalker Ranch" service mark on 15 February 2017, and it was registered on 14 April 2020. In 2022, Fugal announced a partnership with the Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi, Utah, to study the site's environment and history.
What is The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch?
The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is a History channel reality series that premiered on 31 March 2020. It is produced by Prometheus Entertainment and Letter 10 Productions, from the producers of The Curse of Oak Island. The cast has included Fugal, aerospace engineer and astrophysicist Travis Taylor, principal investigator Erik Bard and ranch superintendent Thomas Winterton, along with a security chief and other scientists. The team uses ground-penetrating radar, lasers, drone thermography and other instruments while investigating reported events. The seventh season premiered on 19 May 2026.
Colavito has likened it to a slower version of The Curse of Oak Island. Science writer Russell Moul wrote that "the team have yet to provide anything to back up their supposed experiences." What appears on screen is the cast's reported observations and instrument readings, edited for television, not peer-reviewed results.
Separating the record from the claims
The documented record includes the location and ownership chain, the 1996 Deseret News article, the existence and leadership of NIDS, the DIA's AAWSAP contract with BAASS, the $22 million appropriation, the 38 technical papers and AARO's 2024 conclusion. The claims include the creatures, the lights and craft, cattle deaths attributed to unknown causes, reported portals, radiation effects and injuries. Those rest on testimony from owners, staff, investigators and cast members.
Testimony is how many investigations begin, but a claim moves into the documented column only when physical evidence is collected, tested and published so others can check it. For Skinwalker Ranch, that has not yet happened. To compare this with other cases can look at the radar and video record of the Nimitz Tic Tac encounter or the documented and undocumented parts of Bob Lazar's Area 51 story.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson has not published a documented personal position on Skinwalker Ranch itself, and none is attributed to him here. The ranch is covered on his platform through a 4biddenknowledge Podcast Network video published on 6 September 2022. In it, investigative journalist Steven Greenstreet takes a closer look at the ranch and its most startling claims, and Roderick Martin, a MUFON investigator and host of the 4BK TV show Why The Big Secret, takes a deep dive into what the video calls the possible conspiracy of Skinwalker Ranch. Those views belong to Greenstreet and Martin.
Carson's wider frame on government UAP programs is set out in his talk on the difference between UAPs and UFOs. There he argues that "UFO" should mean physical craft not built by humans, while "UAP" is a broader government label that, in his view, lets officials avoid saying an object is physical. He also argues that black-budget work contracted to private firms can escape congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests. AAWSAP, a DIA program run through a private contractor, is the kind of arrangement that framing points to, though Carson has not applied it to the ranch by name. His view of classified aerospace work more broadly is discussed in the secret space program explainer.
Watch, read and go deeper
Roderick Martin's investigations of UFO cases and government secrecy continue on 4BK TV in Why The Big Secret. For Billy Carson's own view of the language governments use for these objects, watch or read his UAP vs UFO breakdown. To see how congressional hearings and Pentagon reports have handled the same questions since 2017, read the UAP hearings explainer. And for the much older question of non-human contact that sits behind all of these debates, start at the Anunnaki topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
Is Skinwalker Ranch real?
Yes, the ranch is a real property of about 512 acres southeast of Ballard, Utah, with a documented ownership history. What remains unproven is the paranormal activity reported there; no physical evidence of it has been published in a scientific journal.
Did the government study Skinwalker Ranch?
The DIA ran a program called AAWSAP, funded with about $22 million and contracted to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies from 2008. The program's official framing was future aerospace weapon technology, and the people involved also took a strong interest in the ranch. AARO's 2024 Historical Record Report found no verifiable evidence that any government program obtained extraterrestrial technology.
Who owns Skinwalker Ranch now?
Adamantium Real Estate LLC has owned the ranch since 2016, and Utah developer Brandon Fugal publicly confirmed in March 2020 that he is the owner. The property is fenced and closed to the public, and Adamantium holds the "Skinwalker Ranch" service mark, registered in 2020.
What is a skinwalker?
In Navajo tradition, a skin-walker is a harmful witch said to be able to take animal form. It belongs to a living cultural and spiritual tradition and is not a casual topic for many Navajo people. The ranch borrowed the name in modern times; it does not come from Navajo teaching about the site.
Has The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch found proof?
The series, which premiered on History in 2020 and began its seventh season in May 2026, presents instrument readings and the cast's reported experiences. Critics including science writer Russell Moul say it has not produced verifiable evidence. Nothing from the show has been published as peer-reviewed research.
Sources and further reading
- Zack Van Eyck, "Frequent Fliers?", Deseret News, 30 June 1996
- Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005)
- James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021)
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I (March 2024)
- Defense Intelligence Agency, AAWSAP solicitation HHM402-08-R-0211 (2008) and Defense Intelligence Reference Document list released under FOIA (2019)
