Skinwalker Ranch

A ranch in Uintah County, Utah, where the Sherman family reported UFOs and other strange events to the Deseret News in 1996. It later drew private and government-funded study and a HISTORY TV series.

In 1996 the Deseret News reported that over the previous year or more the Sherman family's 480-acre ranch, a short way south of Fort Duchesne, Uintah County, Utah, had seen UFOs and other paranormal activity. The paper said the Shermans had witnessed the events themselves and caught some on video, yet still found them hard to accept as real.

Wikipedia notes that UFO reports from the Uintah Basin were publicised in the 1970s, and that after the Deseret News the ranch's story spread through articles in the Las Vegas Mercury by the investigative journalist George Knapp, which ran as a series. Those stories told of a family who said they met frightening, unexplained events after buying and moving onto the property.

The New Yorker reported in 2021 that in 2007 a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, curious about Skinwalker, wrote to Bigelow. Bigelow put him in touch with Senator Harry Reid, a friend of many years from Nevada, then Senate Majority Leader. Reid and the official met to talk about a shared interest in UFOs.

In Skeptic, Robert Sheaffer quotes the book Hunt for the Skinwalker, which says years of NIDS investigation turned up very little physical evidence and nothing that could count as conclusive proof. HISTORY's series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch later brought a research team to dig below ground there. HISTORY describes the ranch as the scene of several hundred paranormal and UFO events over more than 200 years, with some of the study secretly paid for from U.S. government funds.