I feel I ought to contribute a few comments on the notorious Skinwalker Ranch in NE Utah which as you say, DS, became the biggest and the best of Robert Bigelow’s paranormal productions. I’m not accusing him of fraud and hoaxing but it’s an unfortunate fact that Bigelow funding has drawn quite a few very unscrupulous characters like Lazar who scrambled to tell the Master just the kind of thing which he wanted to hear. Likewise, the Art Bell show --and more recently Coast-to-Coast-- have attracted numerous charlatans and denied serious researchers and doubters a platform.
However, there are some honest researchers as well and NIDS did have some good people on its research project at the ranch. One of these was a Canadian friend of mine who was given the pseudonym ‘Jim’ in Chapter 19: The Tunnel in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s book Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005). NIDS investigators ‘Jim’ and ‘Mike’ were carrying out a night watch at the ranch when they saw a faint stationary light near the ground below the bluff where they were positioned. They are both watching this with night-vision binoculars when suddenly Mike says “It’s a tunnel, not just a light. There’s something in the tunnel …” In a state bordering on panic he goes on to tell Jim there’s a huge black creature climbing out of the tunnel and this then ambles off into the darkness.
Jim who is right beside Mike sees none of this –only the luminosity. They exchange binoculars but still it is only Mike who sees the bigfoot-like creature exit the “tunnel”. Within a minute or so the light fades and vanishes. There is no sign of the supposed creature if it ever existed. To his credit Colm Kelleher acknowledges in the book that it was only seen by Mike, not Jim, though other subsequent tellings of this story suggest that both men saw the creature.
What is not acknowledged in Hunt for the Skinwalker is that ‘Mike’ is none other than Terry Sherman (a.k.a. Tom Gorman), the Mormon ranch owner who sold the property to Bigelow in 1996 and was kept on as ranch manager as well as being co-opted as a member of the NIDS team.
The book is certainly a sensational story and on first reading seems to be full of convincing evidence for a whole array of paranormal phenomena taking place at this extraordinary haunted ranch. But if one looks more carefully one finds that the majority of these events are anecdotal and the witness in nearly every case described is Terry Sherman (and/or, sometimes, his wife Gwen). Wonderful, strange, stories of the paranormal but there is very little solid evidence to back the stories up. Couldn’t we have some photos of the various UFOs, or of the alleged giant wolf, or perhaps the alleged charred remains of the Shermans’ dogs that were attacked by bright glowing orbs? Evidently not!
I have asked some of those who went to the ranch in connection with the NIDS research project whether they believed everything Terry Sherman told them. Most thought that Sherman was sincere in what he said and that he was not faking what he claimed, or trying to pull some elaborate hoax on them for whatever reason. They insisted that some of them experienced strange events there not directly connected with the Shermans but very few such episodes are recorded.
I think that one should look much more carefully at Terry Sherman himself and consider his mindset and his interpretation of these events. The book clearly shows that he had a paranoid fear of the seemingly hostile environment in which he was trying to raise cattle and make a financial success of his ranching enterprise. He believed that the ranch was under attack by unseen or invisible creatures which were killing and mutilating his cattle and even his dogs. He believed that these mysterious entities were coming through “portals” from another place or from other dimensions. He says he saw strange UFOs over his land and bright animated orbs which attacked and killed some of the dogs.
We are told in Hunt for the Skinwalker (Chapter 8: The Window) that of all the extraordinary things that happened at the Sherman ranch the most common involved strange, unworldly orange structures that appeared low in the western sky and that family members saw these dozens of times. One time Terry felt that one of these could have been a tear or a rent in the sky about a mile away and through the rent he could see the sky of a different world or perhaps even a different time. Again he invokes the concept of a portal between different dimensions or alternate realities.
One has to ask why members of the NIDS team when they were at the ranch never saw these things in the sky. Sherman’s description of the “orange structures” could very well be of sun dogs (parhelia) which are quite common in Utah under certain atmospheric conditions but also something unfamiliar to many people. Certainly, those with an active imagination, might interpret a sun dog as a tear or rent in the sky.
Some of us have friends and acquaintances who seem to have very different realities to our own. One friend in the Midwest says he has had several encounters with reptilian aliens which sometimes manifest in his house during the night. Others say they have been abducted by aliens and perhaps taken aboard UFOs. I see these as subjective non-physical realities with no possibility of me --or anyone other than the experiencer-- seeing the alleged creatures. If they have any existence other than in someone’s mind’s eye, I’d say they were hallucinations induced by certain mental states. Terry Sherman’s vision of a huge dark humanoid emerging from a lit “tunnel” as recounted above is difficult to interpret as anything other than an hallucination. A good recent book on this subject is Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (2012) although this does not touch on UFOs or visions of alien creatures.
Those claiming to be alien abductees and the like often seek physical evidence to substantiate their beliefs and this may include scoop marks on their skin, strange rashes, or alleged alien implants. Most of the supposed evidence for paranormal activity at the Skinwalker Ranch was the killing, mutilation or disappearance of Terry Sherman’s cattle and dogs. Although some of this seems mysterious there is nothing that could not be accounted for as attacks by predators such as coyotes, mountain lions, or maybe avian predators such as black vultures.
Chapter 15: The Killing describes one case where a newly-born calf is killed and mutilated by some mysterious unseen agency in broad daylight. This evidently happened very quickly and was discovered by Sherman and his wife soon afterwards. There were no NIDS investigators present at the time but some of the team were flown in from Las Vegas within a few hours. Although I would say that it sounds like a classic predatory attack by black vultures (which can be a very real danger to calves), the NIDS report dismisses the possibility of predator or scavenger involvement. It makes much of the fact there was almost no blood on the ground despite the fact that calves usually die immediately of shock in such attacks and no blood will pump out once the animal’s heart has stopped beating. It also assumes that the animal’s tagged ear, which was never found and had obviously been cut off with a knife, was removed by the unseen attacker. Ranchers would normally cut off and keep the ear tag of a dead cow to record its number and it seems likely the ear was actually cut off by Terry Sherman himself and that he omitted to tell the NIDS people.
NIDS eventually abandoned their project to find any proof of paranormal activity at the Sherman Ranch which could be published in the form of a scientific paper. Although there was circumstantial evidence of anomalous activity there was nothing that could be presented which positively excluded a natural explanation. Therefore the question must remain whether, if one took the Shermans out of the equation, there was anything truly paranormal going on at the ranch. The brother of the previous owner who sold the ranch to the Shermans in 1994 insists that there was no UFO or strange activity there before that time. This is contrary to what is claimed in Knapp and Kelleher’s book. This man also says that he actually received a phone call from Robert Bigelow trying to convince him otherwise.
Hunt for the Skinwalker is a terrific book but I think that close examination will show that much of it is folklore, fiction, or the product of certain people’s very vivid imagination.
Regards,
George Wingfield
