Hi, it’s Katrina. Why would the Pentagon spend millions of dollars studying a single random ranch in the middle of Utah? Because whatever is happening at Skinwalker Ranch isn’t just local folklore. It left physical evidence that caught the attention of the highest levels of national intelligence. From ghosts to shape-shifting monsters, cryptids, and UFOs. In today’s video, we’ll be looking at three mysterious ranches home to paranormal activity and try to look past the hype and find out what’s really going on. Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. Skinwalker Ranch can be found in Utah in the western part of Uinta County. It’s right next to the boundary of the Uray Indian Reservation and about an hour away from Dinosaur National Monument. The property gets its name from the most feared figure in local Navajo folklore, the skinwalker.
In Native American tradition, these are not mere monsters, but corrupt, powerful sorcerers capable of shifting shapes and possessing living things. According to the legends, a centuries old conflict left this specific UT territory cursed by these vengeful entities, creating a hot spot of dread long before modern scientists arrived. Seeing as actual skinw walkers have allegedly been seen on the ranch, it’s probably worth giving you the whole story before getting into the creation of the ranch in the 1930s.
According to most Navajo traditions, skinw walkers started out as peaceful healers. They were good and decent people who practiced medicine, but then they were corrupted. Skinwalkers grew too powerful and became evil. Anyone could become a corrupted creature. You didn’t have to be a healer. Anyone who performed a social transgression or broke one of the trib’s taboo laws was eligible to become a monster. The Navajo described skinwalkers as taking the form of monstrous animals. They could morph from a human into a wolf, bear, or
coyote, but they didn’t look like normal animals. They were monstrous and mutated. They were also almost impossible to kill. Legend has it you can only take down a skinwalker with a bullet or a blade that has been rubbed with white ash. Near skinwalker ranch is the Uenta basin where Native American petroglyphs depicted images of insane creatures. Scientists say the artwork was created by the Fremont people as far back as the first century AD. So while Christ was fishing, the Fremont were drawing. The glyphs depict creatures of an otherworldly nature. Some believe they represent contact between ancient tribes and extraterrestrials.
Others think they depict actual skin walkers. The figures are exaggerated, covered in weird symbols, and often have horns. They have large feet and bulging eyes like insects. At sites like Maconi Ranch and 9M Canyon, the ancient artwork really does look like it’s depicting monsters. But are skin walkers real? I guess it’s like asking if magic is real or if vampires and chupacabas really exist. Most scientists would say no way.
And oddly enough, so would the original owners of Skinwalker Ranch. In the 1930s, Kenneth and Edith Meyers established a little ranch for themselves in northeastern Utah, sprawling across 512 acres. Over the next few decades, they grew into wellrespected farmers in the local community. They expanded the size of their ranch, leased parcels out to other farmers, and raised cattle. It was a completely ordinary operation. Contrary to what many people think, the original owners of the ranch never reported any unusual activity. They never talked about aliens, Native American monsters, or any other weird things. Kenneth’s brother, Gareth, worked on the ranch for a little while, and he opened up about the legend of the skinwalkers by saying, and I quote, “nothing, unequivocally, absolutely nothing, happened on the ranch.” Things didn’t start getting spooky until 1994 when a new couple purchased the ranch and moved in with their two children. That couple was Terry and Gwen Sherman. A few years after they entered the property, an article was published in the Desert News, a local Utah newspaper. It was the very first time anything was published about Skinwalker Ranch being a nexus for paranormal activity. The article was titled Frequent Flyers. It went into detail about the unusual experiences the Sherman family had been having since they’d moved onto the property. The article described several specific encounters, including a lot of UFO sightings. The Shermans claimed that they kept seeing orange circular doorways appearing in midair like portals to other worlds. They saw a red glowing thing that lit up the side of the mountain like it was broad daylight.
And that’s only the starter course. The Sherman family discovered circles of flattened grass that made no sense. They found curious markings in the soil that almost looked like alien writing. And then most disturbing of all, their cows started dying in inexplicable ways. One of the animals was discovered with a hole in its eyeball, but was otherwise untouched. A second cow was discovered with a similar hole in its eye and other places. In both of those cases, the Shermans were sickened by an undecipherable chemical smell that clung to the air around the animals. It was pungent and almost metallic, like someone had discharged a weird machine.
What didn’t appear in the article was an encounter that Terry and Gwen Sherman allegedly had with a fearsome creature.
Their livestock was being ravaged by something, which Terry and Gwen assumed was a normal animal, you know, like a wolf or a coyote, maybe even a mountain lion. But when they heard a ruckus and went to investigate, they found an unbelievable monster attacking their livestock. It wasn’t a wolf, but it also wasn’t anything the Shermans had ever seen before. Terry shot it multiple times, but the creature didn’t even seem injured. It left of its own valition, taking off into the wilderness and leaving behind a putrid rotting smell.
During a separate and unrelated incident, the Shermans apparently encountered Bigfoot. Seriously, they witnessed a tall bipedal humanl looking thing covered in red curly hair. Okay, so maybe not Bigfoot, but something similar. Still, the creature was described as heavily muscled and having a bushy tail. It was some kind of Sasquatch Bigfoot creature, possibly related to this skunk ape from Florida or Australia’s Yahi. What really gets me, and I’m sure you’ve thought about this too, is the sudden timing of it all. For decades, different farmers worked that land without a single weird incident. The original owners, Kenneth and Edith Meyers, never saw portals, Bigfoot, or wolves the size of cars. So, what exactly changed in the 1990s? Had these anomalies always been there, completely unnoticed by the Meyers family? Or, and I hate to even suggest it, could the Shermans have made the whole thing up for attention? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone fabricated a ghost story. The legend of the ranch really took off when Robert Bigalow arrived on the scene.
Robert was already deeply entrenched in the UFO and paranormal scene. He was also a filthy rich billionaire with friends in extremely high places.
Bigalow really did have so much money that he could set up his own research group. He named it the National Institute for Discovery Science, which I have to admit sounds very legitimate. It was focused on researching aerial phenomena, aliens, and anything else weird or spooky. Robert Bigalow saw the story published in the desert news and was thrilled. Within weeks, he gave the Sherman family a very generous offer for their ranch, and they took it. The Shermans were out and the billionaire was in. The place became a living science laboratory. Members of the National Institute for Discovery Science flooded the place to conduct research.
They set up observation posts, 24/7 surveillance equipment, and waited to see what they might find. Soon, the researchers began to witness strange phenomena. They supposedly started to see lights in the sky that were definitely not airplanes. Researchers also encountered animals with bright yellow eyes at night that they could not identify. And then came the first cow mutilation. The very first cow discovered mutilated on the ranch had been tagged by the ranch manager just 1 hour earlier. The manager tagged the cow. It was perfectly fine and healthy.
And then less than an hour later, it was discovered completely disembowled. It’s inside scooped out. But where the cow lay in the dirt, there wasn’t a speck of blood. It was like Dexter had shown up and cleaned the crime scene. The cow mutilation is without a doubt the weirdest part. You can dismiss lights in the sky as cosmic phenomena. You can even dismiss the strange animal sightings at night as folks with an overactive imagination. But a cow disembowled in under an hour without a single drop of blood spilled that is out of this world. Naturally, all of those 247 surveillance cameras picked up footage of the creatures, aliens, and cow mutilations. I’m just kidding.
There’s no footage. You’ll never believe why not. All of that fancy equipment used by the scientists allegedly came under attack. Rather than filming the weird entities and anomalies that people were seeing with their own eyes, the cameras malfunctioned, wires were mysteriously pulled from casings, and nothing could be proven. One of Bigalow’s employees, a man who supposedly worked as an army intelligence officer, suggested there was sentient intelligence at work. He went as far as to say the equipment was being sabotaged by a higher life form.
The unknown entity didn’t want them to record the strange phenomena at the ranch. Claiming that psychic skinw walkers disabled the cameras is basically the billionaire equivalent of the dog ate my homework. You can understand why scientists don’t like talking about skinwalker ranch. It would be one thing if there were videos of strange creatures skullking through the dark trees, but there isn’t. You just kind of have to take their word for it, which isn’t very scientific. In 2004, the National Institute for Discovery Science was disbanded. But Robert Bigalow wasn’t done with the ranch just yet. He allegedly received a letter from a senior official inside the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Whoever this person was, they wanted more information about the research Bigalow had done on the ranch. So, Bigalow invited him to visit.
While at the ranch, this official was confronted by a shape-shifting object that floated directly in front of him, changed colors a bunch of times, and then disappeared like some fragment of reality that got lost. I can’t tell you if this is true or not, as it’s all hearsay and anecdotal, but it has been speculated that the visitor was so aged by their encounter that they helped create the advanced aerospace threat Identification Program. The AATIP was launched by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who happened to be pals with Mr.
Bigalow. Reed gave the organization a budget of $22 million to search for wormholes, UFOs, and everything else you saw in the X Files. It was probably Harry who encountered that strange shape-shifting object on the ranch, but there’s no way for me to say for certain. I can’t even say if that object existed. What I can say is that a lot of people were upset by the creation of the paranormal investigation unit. An intelligence officer would later tell the New Yorker that government officials called it a waste of money, but because of Harry Reid’s influence, the project went ahead fully funded. The AATIP led to the publication of a massive 500page document. This document titled the 10-month report was filled with numerous cases of the unexplained things that had gone on at the ranch. It concluded that Skinwalker Ranch would make an excellent laboratory for this study of other intelligences and interdimensional phenomena. Then in 2012, they were dissolved just like Bigalow’s earlier group in 2004. Bigalow himself finally left the ranch in 2016 after he sold it to another rich guy named Brandon Fugal.
Brandon brought his very own team of researchers to the ranch just like Bigalow did before him. Brandon was hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery. He and some other scientists like astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor have dug into the unsolved incidents on the property. They even made a show about it called Curse of Skinwalker Ranch. In 2020, Brandon described buying the ranch as the most unusual real estate play that he was ever involved in. But what has he actually found out since he bought it? Brandon’s investigative team have allegedly found proof of anomalous gravitation fields, unexplained aerial phenomena, and even underground anomalies. There is said to be a buried metal object on the property, but no one’s ever found it. To be clear, despite having a popular TV show, Brandon Fugal has never presented one single piece of hard or conclusive evidence of paranormal activity. No evidence of monsters, UFOs, or alternate dimensions. Pretty much nothing. I wish there was a hot spot for extraterrestrial activity and crypts in Utah so I could finally meet a gray alien, but there simply isn’t any evidence of it. So, do you believe in skinwalkers? Do you think aliens visit Skinwalker Ranch, or have the last 30 years been one huge hoax kept alive by crazy rich people? I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments. No matter what, the mysterious energies of Mount Wilson Ranch. You thought there was only one mysterious ranch in the United States, but there are plenty more where that came from. One of them is Mount Wilson Ranch, located surprisingly close to Area 51. It’s been shrouded in secrecy for decades, attracting the attention of conspiracy theorists, top secret government agencies, and Native American historians. The ranch is said to be home to alien artifacts, an entire underground pyramid, and a UFO still transmitting signals to someone.
Remember Robert Bigalow and his team of psychic spies? They secretly researched Mount Wilson Ranch for years while simultaneously hunting for the lost entrance to a legendary giant cave. A giant cave said to hold alien artifacts and abandoned alien mining equipment.
Can you even make this stuff up? The ranch is now notorious thanks to Robert Bigalow’s TV show Beyond Skinwalker Ranch. But are the animal mutilations, alien abductions, and poltergeist real?
Is there really a Native American shaman haunting the place? Let’s back things up a bit to the frontier history of the ranch. It’s been standing in the rugged high desert of Nevada for more than 150 years. It was settled during the gold rush era of the 1870s, back when prospectors flocked to the west with nothing but one of those hobo sticks and a pickaxe. The ranch started out as a simple resting place where people could take shelter from the brutal desert heat. A lot of prospectors journeyed into the nearby hills, so the ranch was a necessity for them, especially because nearby the town of Pio was one of the most lawless places of the frontier. It was notorious for its silver deposits, but also for its gunfights. Prospectors who wanted to get away from the violence found Mount Wilson Ranch a welcome sanctuary. In more recent times, the ranch was purchased by Robert Bigalow, who then performed all kinds of strange experiments on the site. Robert was drawn to Mount Wilson Ranch for the same reason he was drawn to Skinwalker Ranch, paranormal activity. Specifically, Mount Wilson is home to sightings of UFOs, orbs of light that appear in the air, energy fields, and apparitions. One of the more intriguing things discovered on the property was a signal being emitted from an empty meadow. In the middle of an ordinary field, a signal was found bursting out of the ground. It led Robert and his scientific advisers to theorize that there is a phased array antenna system underground. This theoretical system could resemble our modern radar, but appears to have much stronger capabilities. How the scientific team knows its capabilities without ever physically seeing it, I don’t know. You would think that someone with enough money to buy several haunted ranches would have enough cash lying around to rent an excavator and dig, but so far, no one has actually found that array antenna system. This is a common theme at the ranch. I’ve heard theories about technology underground that can generate plasma balls to mimic UFO sightings. And I’ve heard there’s technology capable of manipulating weather patterns. Yet, for all that talk and the involvement of real scientists like physicist Tim Ry, nobody has presented any real evidence. Well, at least not of anything spooky. Scientists did find evidence of underground tunnels, but those are probably connected to the old mines in the area.
There doesn’t seem to be anything that special about them. Scientists also identified anomalous readings on their magnetometer, suggesting there are artificial structures below the ground, but again, nobody has dug them up, and there isn’t any concrete proof. In fact, there is not much proof about anything at Mount Wilson Ranch. In 2008, Robert Bigalow appears to have come to the same conclusion. Out of nowhere, he sold the ranch to Jeff McBurnie. Ever since then, the ranch has been owned by Jeff and his partner. They restored the property and now operate it as a rustic guest ranch.
You can rent a room here, stand out in the field at night, and look for visiting aliens. You wouldn’t be the only one. Mount Wilson Ranch has become one of the most popular places to skywatch in the whole country. A lot more people visit the ranch on a daily basis now. Yet, the reports of paranormal activity have dropped off significantly since Robert left. I’m not saying aliens and paranormal activity aren’t real. I’m just saying it makes you wonder what the truth really is.
Let’s go to Stardust Ranch next. Yet another hub of paranormal activity, but without the billionaires. The disturbing history of Stardust Ranch. What took place on Stardust Ranch is about as incredible as what happened to Mel Gibson in Signs. John and Joyce Edmmonds had encounters so crazy, so jaw-droppingly unbelievable that they sold their ranch because they were afraid for their lives. The couple first moved into the property in 1996.
Stardust Ranch is significantly smaller than the other ranches I mentioned today, only about 10 acres. However, John and Joyce weren’t particularly interested in raising cattle or performing science experiments, so they didn’t need hundreds of acres. They just wanted their dream home for their dream life. Instead, Jon and Joyce were plunged into a nightmare world of strangeness the likes of which they had never imagined. At first, they noticed strange noises coming from the dark at night. The noises didn’t seem to come from anything specific. They were just weird and sort of ambient. John and Joyce figured it was just the sound the desert makes at night, so they didn’t think much of it. By the time the figures began to appear, though, they grew suspicious of the noises. John and Joyce started seeing strange lights moving erratically in the sky on trajectories that no modern aircraft could possibly copy. Around the same time they noticed the lights, they also noticed the figures. John and Joyce would spot humanlike figures lurking around the edges of their land, always in shadow and never completely visible.
It was so weird and vague that they could never be positive they saw anything at all. It was as if they were being stalked by shadow people. But every time they tried to focus their attention on the figure, they vanished.
Once that was going on, the noises they’d already been hearing became significantly scarier. John and Joyce began to suspect it wasn’t just the sounds of the desert. One morning, the couple woke up to find their garden furniture had been moved. On another morning, they woke up and found their furniture had been dumped into the swimming pool. Weird, but not alarming.
Not yet. The alarm bells started ringing when their horses began showing up dead.
When John inspected the corpses of his beloved horses, he found wounds and cuts that made no sense. Somebody appeared to have been dissecting the horses, leaving the same types of precision wounds found in cattle mutilation cases. It was around this time that the Edmunds realized their dream property might actually be a portal into hell. Once one of their dogs suffered a similar fate to the horses, it was time to start calling realtors. And maybe the Ghostbusters, too. Would you have moved out at this point? If your animals were being mysteriously killed and someone was throwing your lawn chairs into the pool, would that be enough to make you sell the property? or like John and Joyce Edmmonds, would you have to be abducted first? One evening, while the couple sat in the ranch house, one of the creatures they had been seeing appeared at the window as if looking in at them. It was right after that sneaky peak that the pair began waking up with strange bruises and what looked like needle marks. They suspected the aliens had gotten brave enough to enter their home while they slept and do stuff to them. I say aliens only because that’s what Jon and Joyce said. They assumed their ranch had become the subject of some sort of sick alien experiment. Also, it must have been aliens because vampires don’t mess with garden furniture. They also need an invitation to come inside. In all seriousness, John and Joyce did think they were either being abducted or home invaded by extraterrestrials. On one of those occasions, Jon watched his wife levitate out of their bed, out the front door, and into the front yard.
Then, she was sucked up into a vehicle hovering above their home. The next morning, John woke up and his wife was right next to him. The whole thing felt like a weird dream, and he himself didn’t believe what he saw. Not until he noticed the fresh bruises and markings on Joyce’s skin. She really had been abducted by aliens. But here’s the thing about the aliens that tormented Jon and Joyce. They didn’t come from outer space. At least not according to Jon. He believes the creatures who stalked him and his wife and experimented on them were from another dimension. John said that each time these entities appeared, they were accompanied by a high frequency buzz that seemed to saturate the air. John said the noise was a side effect of the aliens phasing in and out of our world, a byproduct of interdimensional travel. Jon started fighting back. You probably didn’t think the story could get crazier than interdimensional aliens, but it’s about to. The next time Jon saw one of these creatures, I swear this is how the story goes. He grabbed a samurai sword that he kept above the fireplace and stabbed the creature with it. Jon pulled the sword out of the alien’s abdomen so that he could perform a second swing, hopefully chopping the thing’s head off. But when he did, the body vanished as if it had never been there. But it had been there.
Jon had its blood and tissue all over the blade. John said this was all very real and he did sell Stardust Ranch due to constant alien attacks. Those are his words. By the time Jon and Joyce sold the property, Jon had killed nearly 20 of the alien entities. The attacks became so regular that Jon began talking about them on social media. He didn’t know what to do, so he turned to the internet and started posting pictures.
Mostly, it was pictures of the injuries he allegedly suffered while fighting the monsters. After John started posting pictures, that was when he was visited by the men in black. I guess they wanted to know what was going on, but Jon didn’t give any specific details on these mysterious visitors. John’s social media presence increased, and as it did, so did his fame. Jon became a regular influencer, posting consistent updates on what it was like living on what he dubbed Alien Ranch. He posted one image of a katana with dried blood on it and said that it was his favorite method for destroying the grays. He said unless you cut off their head and disconnect the antenna, they instantly evaporate back into their home dimension. He and his wife started speaking publicly and became the focus of newspaper articles and television documentaries. Pretty soon, people began to cast doubts on the credibility of Jon and Joyce’s stories.
Once you go public with something like this and get in on the media circuit, your credibility tends to drop dramatically. People start to assume that you’re in it for the attention and the money. The more John and Joyce shared their story, the higher the price tag on Stardust Ranch. Is there any better motivation for making up a story than making money? John Edmonds put up Stardust Ranch, located in Arizona’s Rainbow Valley, for a whopping $5 million. That’s the ranch house with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a diving pool, plus the property itself, which is 9.67 acres. Rest assured, the ranch was not worth anywhere near that amount of money. Jon had carefully curated a long social media campaign to drive up interest in the property. It’s not what Jon says he did, but it is what happened through his social media accounts. He got everyone invested in the alien phenomenon unfolding at the ranch. He gave updates on social media for years. Then he came out saying the attacks were getting so frequent that he and his wife needed to move immediately and he threw the massive price tag up.
John didn’t get anything near what he wanted. The property was sold at a foreclosure auction in April of 2023.
Developers bought it for $680,000, renovated it, and flipped it for $1.3 million. The incredible irony of it is that if Jon had just sold Stardust Ranch at the original value of the property, which was 1.7 million in 2017, he would have made double. Instead, he tried to make nearly triple its value and ended up with less than half. Now, people are wondering if Jon may have been abusing his wife and blaming it on aliens, all the while trying to drive up the price of his property. On the podcast Unbelievable, Brian Graange and Phoebe Tires discussed the possibility that Joyce’s bruises were actually done by John Edmonds. They suggested possibly, just maybe, that Jon was the one causing everything. John Edmonds passed away in February of 2022. With him gone and Joyce out of the public spotlight, we may never know what truly happened over the two decades they lived on the property. All we can do now is wait and see who moves in next and whether or not they get attacked by aliens. Do you believe in any of these haunted ranch stories? Skinw walkers, alien abductions, interdimensional beings. Are the paranormal incidences from these ranches real or just a hoax? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you soon. Bye.
