Skinwalker Ranch

The full file

On 30 June 1996 the Deseret News reported that Terry and Gwen Sherman, who with their two children ran a 480-acre cattle ranch just south of Fort Duchesne in Uintah County, Utah, had seen strange things there for about fifteen months, starting with an incident in April 1995. They had bought the ranch roughly two years earlier. The ranch is now widely known as Skinwalker Ranch, a name borrowed from a living Diné (Navajo) belief. The belief is not the subject of this file, and nothing reported at the ranch belongs to Diné tradition. In the 1996 reporting it is simply the Sherman ranch.

What was reported

Zack Van Eyck's article lists what the family described: a small box-like craft with a white light, a 40-foot object, a ship "the size of several football fields", a craft giving off a wavy red beam, and lights coming out of orange circular doorways in midair. There were three circles of flattened grass about eight feet across, set in a triangle. Seven cattle were linked to the sightings. Three were found dead with holes in an eye or cut into the body; four simply went missing. The family had reported none of it to officials. The Uintah County sheriff's office had no UFO or mutilation reports in recent memory, and the Duchesne County sheriff knew of none in the past 18 months.

That autumn the Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow bought the ranch, for $200,000 according to a later trade-magazine account. On 12 December 1996 the Deseret News reported that his National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) had built an observation building and "moved in a pair of scientists and a veterinarian". A 2006 report in the same paper dates the scientists' arrival to March 1997; the two accounts differ.

From 2008 a Defense Intelligence Agency contract, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications programme (AAWSAP), went to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. Bigelow still owned the ranch, and by the Pentagon's later account the contractor investigated it under that contract until 2012. Bigelow sold the property in 2016.

The record and where it is held

Three records were made at the time by people other than the family. The first is the Deseret News coverage of June and December 1996; the June article is read here in a transcription, the December one on the paper's own site. The second is a DIA briefing, "Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Contract Status", for contract HHM402-08-C-0072, dated 16 December 2008. It names the contractor, lists twelve technical areas from lift and propulsion to "human effects", and says nothing about Utah or a ranch. It is held in DIA's FOIA electronic reading room, with the contract's released technical papers. The third is a later government account: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's 2024 historical review, which is not a record made at the time but is the only official statement about the ranch work. The investigators' own case files from the ranch have never been released by the government.

What investigators concluded

NIDS published no scientific findings on the ranch. In 2006 Colm Kelleher, one of its scientists, told the Deseret News that it had been "very difficult to gather the kind of evidence consistent with scientific publication", and that audio and video recorders placed there had produced nothing. His 2005 book with the reporter George Knapp gives a popular account of close to 100 incidents. NIDS was disbanded in 2004.

AARO's review is blunter. It says AAWSAP also investigated "an alleged hotspot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah" owned by the head of the contractor, examining reports of "shadow figures" and "creatures" and exploring "remote viewing". DIA "did not seek, nor specifically authorize, this work", though a DIA employee managed the contract. The programme's papers were never thoroughly peer reviewed, and AARO found no other substantive case work. It ended in 2012; elsewhere the report says DIA cancelled it "due to lack of merit and the utility of the deliverables".

The leading explanation: scavengers, expectation and an unfalsifiable search

For the cattle, the leading conventional explanation was given at the time. The Roosevelt veterinarian Dan Dennis, who was helping the institute's vet with necropsies, told the Deseret News in December 1996 that mutilation reports were "10 percent scavenger activity and 90 percent imagination"; the one case investigated by then was not put down to mutilation. CSICOP's Barry Karr told the paper in June that there was no good physical evidence of alien visits and that eyewitness accounts were unreliable. For the lights, misperception in a region already known for UFO stories is the usual reading; a local investigator quoted in June estimated that over 10 percent of Uintah Basin residents had "seen something".

The explanation is strong because it asks for nothing new, and years of instruments on the property produced nothing publishable. Its weakness is that it has never been tested against the particular cases: no necropsy reports, video or survey data from the ranch have been released for anyone to check.

What remains disputed

The programme's government manager and contractor staff published a contrary account in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), which has not been examined here. Sources also disagree on when AAWSAP began: the DIA contract dates from 2008, AARO says the programme was established in 2009, and press accounts give 2007. What was recorded at the ranch between 2009 and 2012 is known only from participants.

Sources

• Frequent Flyers? Those aliens do get around (archived) — Zack Van Eyck, Deseret News, 30 June 1996, as transcribed by Patrick Gross (heading misprints the year as 1966). The Shermans' account, cattle, sheriffs, Karr, Hicks.
• Universe reports on strange Utah occurrences (archived) — Lezlee E. Whiting, Deseret News, 1996. Bigelow's purchase, NIDS staff on the ranch, one case investigated, Dennis's estimate.
• Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Contract Status (archived) — Defense Intelligence Agency, 16 December 2008, released under FOIA (DIA reading room). Contract number, contractor, twelve technical areas.
• FOIA Electronic Reading Room: AAWSAP/AATIP (archived) — Defense Intelligence Agency. DIA's released AAWSAP contract papers and technical reports.
• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Vol. I (archived) — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024, pp. 22–23 and 34. The Utah work, its lack of authorization, peer review, termination.
• Mysteries of 'UFO ranch' in spotlight (archived) — Deseret News, 2006. NIDS arrival date, instruments recording nothing, Kelleher's account, NIDS disbanded 2004.
• Secret Pentagon Program Spent Millions To Research UFOs (archived) — NPR, 2017. Press reports that the programme began in some form in 2007.
• Why a millionaire real estate mogul bought Skinwalker Ranch (archived) — Utah Business, 2020. Bigelow's purchase price and the 2016 sale.