Skinwalker Ranch: The Paper, the Testimony, and the Vault

0:00All right, folks. Yeah, this is a big topic for me. I got into the skinwalker ranch phenomena, I guess you would call it via the History Channel show. And and I just I, I was fascinated by it. So I started looking more into it. I'm not gonna lie, the show has kind of tailed off for me, they're just doing rockets and lasers over and over and over in the same spot. Anyways, I digress. Let's get into the the actual story here. Because it's a big one. The skinwalker file isn't empty. It's sealed. Tonight, we sort the part of it we can see the documents, the claims, the lock drawer, and we count how big the drawer is. Let's sort it out.

0:52Smoke screen, news minus the smoke. Start before Bigelow, because the file does.

1:07The Uintah Basin has a name locally for what people report their UFO alley. And that name predates the ranch's fame by decades. In October 1966, at a science teacher's talk, a Roosevelt Junior High science teacher named Joseph Junior Hicks walked up to a University of Utah biologist Frank Salisbury and told him what his neighbors had been seeing.

1:34Hicks had been collecting cases the way a careful man collects anything, names, dates, witnesses. By the time Salisbury wrote it up in a 1974 book called The Utah UFO Display, with a forward by J. Allen Hynek. Yeah, that guy. Hicks had documented more than 400 sightings in the basin. A local science teacher, a university biologist. Their book is not in a vault. It was published in 1974 for anybody to read. The basin's paper trail starts in public, and the case contents are testimony collected and attributed. That's the record the ranch sits inside. In the mid 1990s, the ranch at the center of tonight's episode belonged to Terry and Gwen Sherman. In June 1996, they did something ranch families don't usually do.

2:35They went to the Deseret News on the record and described what they said had happened on their land since 1994. Cattle found mutilated with surgical precision, structured craft over the pastures, and encounters with a wolf-like animal they said took rifle rounds without going down. That is absolutely terrifying. No, thank you. That reporting is a document. What the Shermans described in their account carried here at full strength as they gave it. And it matters what happened next because what happened next is the whole episode. The Shermans wanted out, and a buyer appeared who'd been preparing for exactly this purchase for years. In September in 1996, Bigelow bought the ranch. The Deseret News reported about $200,000.

3:31The price is contested in the records, and both figures are in the receipts. Terry Sherman stayed on as an employee of the new owner, of course, under a non-disclosure agreement. The family story, which had been in the newspaper in June, went quiet by contract in the fall. The investigating body was Bigelow's own. The National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, N-I-D-S, founded in October 1995, a year before the purchase. This was not a hobbyist with a camcorder. NIDS put credentialed scientists on the ranch, among them a biochemist, Colm Kelleher, who would run the field work with instruments, protocols, and years of funding.

4:16From 1996 to 2004, NIDS investigated the ranch. NIDS investigated the ranch. And what did eight years of staffed, funded scientific investigation produce for the public record? One book, Hunt for the Skinwalker by Kelleher, and the Las Vegas investigative reporter, the one and only, the legend George Knapp, published in 2005. It recounts roughly a hundred incidents from the team's years on the property. It is the investigation's own published account, and this show carries it at full strength, a testimony from the men who were there. But read the book's own bottom line about its evidence, because the investigators wrote it because the investigators wrote it themselves.

5:02And I quote, difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication, end quote. That's not a critic saying it. That's the team in its own book about its own work. NIDS disbanded in October 2004. No peer-reviewed data set from the ranch was ever published. The underlying records, the logs, the sensor data, the case files, stayed where they had always been in the private custody of the man who paid for them, Mr. Bob Bigelow. Now, the discipline of this show stated plainly because this is where the old version of the episode went wrong and this one won't. The fact that the findings were never published tells you about the custody of the record.

5:48It tells you nothing by itself about what did or didn't happen on the ranch. Bigelow spent his own money on his own land with his own institute. Private money produces private property. The ceiling isn't a mystery and it isn't a scandal. It's a design. But a design has consequences. And the consequence is this. The most intensively investigated ranch in America has a public file made of one newspaper story, one book, and as you're about to see, whatever the government could be made to hand over. Because the story doesn't stay private. Four years after NIDS closed, the Pentagon came to Bigelow's new company and put the ranch's subject matter on a federal.

6:36Hey guys, this is a brand new channel and a brand new podcast. We're working our butts off to give you some amazing content. It would be a giant help if you do like the content. Please hit like and subscribe. You have no idea how much it helps the channel. Thank you so much and have an amazing day. In 2008, the Defence Intelligence Agency started a program called A-A-W-S-A-P or AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program. It's quite a mouthful. $22 million appropriated across two fiscal years at the direction of Senator Henry Reid of Nevada. And the contract, sole bid awarded in September 2008, went to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, B-A-A-S-S, Robert Bigelow's company.

7:31So for a window of years, the man who owned the ranch also held the Pentagon's contract to study anomalous phenomena. What does the public record of that, what does the public record of that contract hold? First, what it was for on paper, the contract statement of work was aerospace forecasting, studies of future propulsion, lift and concealment. 38 study papers, the D-I-R-Ds were commissioned. 37 of the 38 were released under FOIA, F-O-I-A, in 2022.

8:131,400 pages. That is the public slice of AAWSAP, the studies, not the fieldwork. As the fieldwork, the ranch investigations, the case database was in the government's own telling, not what the paper said. Here's the Aero historical report, the Pentagon's official history of these programs, published March, 2024. And I quote, DIA did not seek nor specifically authorized this work, end quote. Aero says the UAP and ranch work was performed with the program manager's support anyway. The work happened under the contract outside the contract's written scope. And notice how that official history handles the ranch itself. It discusses a property in Utah without ever naming it, the Skinwalker.

9:02Bigelow and B-A-A-S-S appear nowhere in the 63 page report. Government's own history holds the ranch at arm's length. Discussed and not named. Two more documents frame the era. In June, 2009, Senator Reid wrote the Pentagon asking that AAWSAP be made a special access program, the deepest drawer of the classified system had. The request was refused on the recommendation of the director of national intelligence, James Clapper. And a follow on program, code named Kona Blue was later proposed to the Department of Homeland Security. It was rejected, it never stood up.

9:46Meanwhile, the insiders published their own account. In 2021, the program's DIA manager, James Lakatsky, with Kelleher and Knapp, published Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. Cleared through the Pentagon's pre-publication review, pre-publication review which certifies classification compliance and nothing more. It is not government endorsing the contents that's very important to understand. In that book the authors describe BAASS monthly reports recording over 200 incidents and effects that they say followed investigators home from the ranch. Apparitions, orbs, disturbances in family homes in one case sustained for months. They call it the hitchhiker effect. It's testimony from the men who ran the program at full strength

10:39attributed to them. The monthly reports themselves never released which brings us to the one field report that ever got out. In September and October of 2026 the government's UAP disclosure releases, the Pursue releases, began publishing AAWSAP era material. Release 6 in September was contracting records and the study paper. Then on October 23rd 2026 release 7 included the BAASS field report document DOW UAP D174 that is a mouthful folks titled Utah Ranch investigation dated April to May 2010. Understand what this document is and isn't. It never names the ranch. The property appears under a redaction as a person's ranch near Fort Duchenne, Utah. The identification with Skinwalker Ranch is an inference, a strong one from the date, the place, the operator

11:43and the tasking. But this show flags it as an inference every time because the document itself does not say the name. What it says is this, a five person BAASS Utah task force deployed to the area twice in the spring of 2010 late March and again in April. They conducted more than 25 interviews. They left a communication experiment on the property, a padlocked puzzle box with Fibonacci sequence tiles as the proposed key. An attempt in writing to get whatever was out there to answer. The report records no results. They set seven game cameras. The cameras captured no creature and the report contains exactly one laboratory result. Four hair samples collected and analyzed. Three came back domestic dog, one came back raccoon and BAASS Bigelow's

12:40own team accepted the results and wrote it into the report. Whatever else is true about the ranch, the one field report in public hands contains a lab result that points at ordinary animals recorded straight by the investigators themselves. The report also records radio frequency spikes in the 1164 to 1240 megahertz range. A band allocated to satellite navigation. Recorded unexplained in the report and sitting in a band with a lot of ordinary traffic in it. Both facts, neither one a verdict. Now the gap and it is a gap in custody which is the episode's subject. The Insider's book describes a different much larger deliverable. A 360 page report. Utah Ranch investigation August 2009 to February 2010. Which they say

13:36was delivered to the DIA in April 2010. The document released in October 2026 is not that report. It is a shorter later task force summary. The 360 page report appears in no release and according to the insiders in the FOIA record when it was requested the DIA answered that it had no responsive documents. So here's the state of the government file exactly. A contractor whose written scope didn't cover the work. 37 study papers anybody can read. One short field report released in 2026 that doesn't name the ranch. A database the releases list by name and have never produced. And a 360 page report that the men who wrote it say they delivered and the government says it cannot find. Delivered and lost. Delivered and withheld or never

14:29delivered. Their record does not say. That is not a conclusion. That is an inventory. In 2016 Bigelow sold the ranch to a company called Adamantium Real Estate. For four years the owner stayed anonymous. In March 2020 he stepped forward. Brandon Fugal. A Utah real estate developer and Fugal said something on the record in vice that belongs on the centre of this that belongs at the centre of this episode. When he bought the ranch Bigelow did When he bought the ranch, Bigelow did not provide him the NIDS-era data. The new owner got the land, he did not get the file. Whatever NIDS and BAASS recorded stayed with the man who paid for it.

15:15Three weeks after Fugl revealed himself, the television show premiered, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel, March 31st, 2020. Seven seasons so far. Fugl is an executive producer and the on-camera owner. The team's lead scientific investigator is Dr. Travis Taylor, an aerospace engineer and astrophysicist with a long government career. The show's fourth season revealed, and KLAS in Las Vegas had reported in 2022 that Taylor had also served the Pentagon's UAP task force. The Pentagon's own statement called his title Chief Scientist, an informal one, used by the task force's director, a man you'll meet again in a moment, Mr. J. Stratton, who has himself appeared on the show.

16:13Both versions of Taylor's title are in the receipts, attributed to the people who gave them. What does the show claim? Carried the way this program carries every claim. At full strength, attributed to the team that makes it. A signal at 1.6 GHz that comes up often. Taylor says it surged with his first hour on the property back in 2019 and appeared to originate underground. It recurs across the seasons. At the Mesa drill site, over the old homestead, the show has published no raw data set. So the claim stands as the team's televised account. Two calibration facts offered as facts about the spectrum, not about the ranch.

17:01The GPS L1 signal sits at 1,575 MHz, and the iridium satellite constellation works just above 1616. The neighbourhood is busy. The claim is the team's. The zone the team calls the bubble, a roughly 2,000 foot radius of electromagnetic distortion over a part of the ranch they call the triangle, which also happens to be pretty much the focus of the seventh season entirely so far, where they launched some rocket. Mapped most recently in the current season with a hundred drone swarm. In season four, a rocket fired in the triangle was destroyed as a blob like form appeared above it on high speed camera.

17:47Objects have been filmed over the Mesa across seven seasons. Equipment fails, GPS misbehaves, radiation reading spike presented by the team as correlated with the event. And inside the Mesa, ground penetrating radar indicates something massive and metallic. Drilling in season five and six that brought up layered metal fragments, a dense ceramic like material, a green gel, and destroyed drill bits on material the team describes as harder than tungsten carbide. In season six, at nearly 500 feet, the drill spoils produced a 1964 United States nickel, which the team reads as evidence that somebody dug deep in the Mesa sometime after 1964 in an era for which they found no documented aerial photographs.

18:45That reading is the team's. The nickel is televised. No independent lab report on the Mesa materials has been published. And the dire wolf, the Sherman's report. The Sherman's reported a calf attacked by a dire wolf like animal in the 90s. On the show, the team's biologist, Ben Woodruff, matched a hole in a cow's rib to the tooth of a dire wolf. It's insane. An animal extinct for more than 10,000 years. This year on the podcast, we'll get to next. Fugal described a decomposing wolf like carcass found along the creek. It's jawbone identified by Woodruff as a direct match to a dire wolf with samples sent to colossal biosciences.

19:33A company Fugal invests in, which the show's coverage notes and outside scientists have questioned how definitive the identification can be. The claim and the questioning both stand. One counter account carried straight because the record includes it. Researcher Robert Schaefer, writing in Skeptic in 2020, notes that the Myers family owned the ranch from 1934 to 1994, 1994, 60 years, and reported no supernatural events. That Schaeffer's account attributed to him, and it sits in the file beside everything else. The fact that they didn't report anything certainly doesn't mean nothing happened. Let's keep that clear.

20:19So by 2026, there were two ranches in a way. The one on television every week, experimenting in public, and the one in the vault, investigated for eight years by scientists whose data the television team has never seen. And then this summer, the man who owns the vault started talking. Since August, George Knapp, the same reporter who co-wrote the NIDS book in 2005, has been releasing a series of long interviews with Robert Bigelow on his podcast, Mystery Wire. Great podcast, by the way. Check it out. 11 episodes and counting. Bigelow is in his 80s, and he is saying things on the record that he spent 30 years not saying. It's fascinating. This show reports what he presented, what follows in his account attributed to him

21:07from those episodes. Start with February 6th of this year. Bigelow says he briefed the President of the United States in the Oval Office. 75 to 80 minutes, seven reports prepared over months. He described a sentence, he described the sentence he proposed the President say. A non-human intelligence presence has been on Earth for a very long time using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics, end quote.

21:42I'm gonna say that one more time because it's an absolutely incredible statement. A non-human intelligence presence has been on Earth for a very long time using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics, end quote. He declined to say anything about what the President said back. Obviously.

22:07And then the detail that belongs in this episode above all others. Bigelow says he deliberately left his B-A-A-S-S and skinwalker material out of that briefing. Judged it in his own words as reported, not credible or relatable enough for the room. Think about that. The man with the largest private file on this subject on Earth in the Oval Office chose not to bring the ranch. Chose not to bring the ranch. His stated reason was about the audience. It was not about the findings because in 30 years, including this entire podcast series as the coverage of these episodes is noted straight out, Bigelow has never explained why his data was never shared. The SEAL has a mechanism, private money, private property, an NDA from 1996.

22:58The SEAL has never had a stated reason for the man who built it. Asked on the podcast whether he is sure the United States recovered alien machinery and transferred it to contractors, Bigelow answered, yes, yes, for sure, end quote. I am sure five years ago on the same host program, his wording was the machinery really does exist and that his company never possessed any. Asked whether living beings are held in the United States, his answer this time was, yeah, that's my guess, end quote. His word, guess. Asked whether reverse engineering has succeeded, I don't know, end quote. Certainly a guess and a don't know.

23:45All three are his. All three run exactly as he gave them. On the ranch itself, he added detail nobody had published. I'm not gonna lie, I've never even heard that. A rumor has circulated for years that Bigelow's own security staff fought aliens at the ranch. His answer, nothing like that ever happened, end quote. What he described instead was a guard in the ranch's double wide trailer allegedly forced upright, paralyzed, choked by something until he nearly blacked out. And a second officer followed home to Las Vegas, smothered in his bed and a woman in old fashioned clothing at the foot of it, who in Bigelow's telling turned her head as if receiving an instruction, at which point the paralysis stopped.

24:33Oh boy, I can't even imagine. Like seriously, can you imagine?

24:40Bigelow identifies her as a human spirit. He says a spirit dimension coexists with this one. And he said this about the people the government sent out there. Every government participant at Skinwalker Ranch was affected, singling out Jay Stratton's family. He described a camera on a pole at the ranch, camera on a pole at the ranch pulled apart and disabled while the second camera watching it recorded nothing approaching it the phenomenon he says seemed to communicate but would not let itself be recorded and in September sitting across from Brandon Fugal he told the current owner his whole method is wrong years of years of provoking the site and filming whatever reacts has hit has hit its limit whatever is there Bigelow says does not read

25:29words it reads intent Fugal said he'd consider the chain and then in October the vault moved Bigelow announced that the DIA letter dated September 29th confirms the agency has located an inventory of the AAWSAP records and intends to prepare material for release KLAS reported the letter on October 9th now the discipline the letter has not been independently published and the DIA has made no public statement authenticating it so tonight it stands as Bigelow's account and a significant one because if the inventory is real the question that has hung over this file for 20 years where is the field archive may finally get an answer with a date on it in the same episode Kelleher the NIDS field chief himself said the

26:22investigators at the ranch struggled to determine whether they were dealing with spirits or extraterrestrials and maybe they're the same thing that's me saying that by the way and the researchers need ways to authenticate who or what they're communicating with the man who ran the science on that ranch is saying on the record that his own team could not sort out what it meant into its own categories so let's close the sort documented a newspaper record and a sale with an NDA in 1996 a scientific Institute that worked the ranch for eight years and left one book a Pentagon contract whose written scope never named the work 37 study papers anyone can read one short field report released last month that doesn't name the ranch and a

27:15new owner who states on the record that he never received the old data claimed at full strength hundred and hundred incident investigations effects that followed scientists home a president briefed recovered craft yes yes for sure and seven seasons of televised experiments on the same ground and the unknown the size of the locks drawer the NIDS and BAASS findings themselves a 360 page report that its authors say was delivered and the government says it cannot find that one still gets me a database listed by name and never produced and a reason for the seal that in 30 years the man who built it has never given the file isn't empty it's sealed those are different problems and only one of them can be solved by asking for the key read the

28:15receipts decide for yourself