Haunted Cosmos - Skinwalker Ranch, Part I: The Sherman Era

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben begin their three-part investigation of a topic close to home: Skinwalker Ranch. This Northern Utah ranch has been called the Disneyland of paranormal activity. So what's going on in Haunted Cosmos own backyard? Join us for the next three episodes to find out.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This show is sponsored by our friends at Lawrenz Contracting out of Dallas, TX. Need roof work done? Check them out here, at https://russroofing.comThis show is also sponsored by The Psalms Project,  an ambitious project from musician, songwriter, singer, and producer Shane Heilman seeking to put every Psalm in its entirety to music—including the essential meaning of every verse—in a marriage of King David’s vision with modern music. Visit them online at https://thepsalmsproject.comSupport the show

This episode of Honod Cosmos is brought to you by the Psalms Project, Lorenz contracting out of Dallas, Texas, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that patrons get early access to ad-free main episodes, as well as an exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome? Support the show today and get these benefits and more. And now, on with the show. Terry was overcome with satisfaction as the gate swung into place behind him. He knew it would be hard, challenging work,

but it was exactly the kind of work he was made. made for. The gravel of the dirt road crunched under his boots as he made his way back to his truck, ready to pull the trailer the last half mile to the homestead of his more than 500-acre ranch in the heart of Utah's Uinta County Basin. They had already moved some of their animals onto the property ahead of their arrival, but today was the day they would bring the last of their furnishings onto the property, ready to finally move in and get to work raising a herd of prize Angus cattle. As they pulled up to the house, the family quickly got to work unloading. But before long, a strange occurrence interrupted the joy of the day.

What was that? Terry asked aloud. Setting down the box he had just picked up from the truck's heavy-laden bed. Terry, an experienced hunter, rancher, and marksman, fixed his keen eyes out into one of the pastures surrounding the homestead. Gwen, his wife, followed his gaze out and saw what looked like some kind of enormous animal casually loping across the field about 400 yards off. Is that a wolf? she asked. It was.

The enormous creature was gray, and even from the distance, they could see that its fur was set with the dew of the morning grass. The family cautiously approached the livestock pin it seemed to be heading for. Gwen nervously looked over at their two children. The animal seemed totally unafraid of them, which made Terry wonder aloud if it might be a pet, a tamed animal of some kind. Nonetheless, he kept a close eye on the beast as it was getting closer to some of his prized Angus calves, the first of his livestock to move onto the property. As the wolf approached, they could smell it, that wet dog smell. But the animal trotted right up to them.

The scene was strange. The wolf was taller than any such animal they had ever seen, standing almost chest height to Terry, with pale, electric blue eyes and shades of silver in its coat. In spite of all this, in spite of the fact that such an animal should have been terrifying, they felt an uneasy kind of calm. One of the family members even reached out and patted the animal on the head.

The wolf then turned and sauntered nonchalantly over to the animal corral. One of the young calves, seemingly curious, approached the bars. And that's when the calm moment snapped with the speed of a lightning flash. The wolf leapt at the calf, seizing its entire head and its powerful jaws. The large calf began to blute and thrash in terror, violently pulling away from the wolf in an effort to get free. But the wolf was too strong, holding tight. Terry acted fast, running fearlessly over in king. kicking the creature with all his power.

Nothing. Next, he sees the baseball bat that had been leaning close by, pummeling the wolf in a hail of violent blows. Still, nothing. Get my magnum, Terry shouted. His son, Tad, ran over to the truck and quickly grabbed his father's 357 magnum pistol. Terry, the marksman that he was,

pulled the hammer into battery, took steady aim, careful not to accidentally wound the calf, and fired point blank, into the wolf's exposed rib cage. To Terry's astonished consternation, nothing happened, no blood, no cry of pain, no loosening of its vice-like grip on the struggling calf's head. He fired two more of the large rounds into the animal's side, before the wolf almost casually loosed its jaws, freeing the calf,

which scrambled away and fell down, bleeding profusely. Still, though, the wolf didn't flee. It just stood there, maybe ten feet from the now terrified rancher, looking at him with a rather bored expression. Three rounds from 357 Magnum at point-blank range had seemed to give it no pause at all. Such a beast couldn't be allowed to remain on this land. Terry decided in a moment of clarity. He fired again, this time taking careful aim for the creature's heart.

The only effect? The wolf sidled back, maybe another 20 feet. Get behind me, Terry yelled. And then as they complied, he commanded his son. Get the 30-0-6. His eyes fixed on the hypnotic blue eyes of the seemingly immortal wolf. His son returned in a few moments with the rifle, a weapon more than capable of taking down a bull elk, which Terry had done many times in his years of hunting.

He even felt a brief pang of pity as he lined up the sights and carefully squeezed the trigger back. As the trigger broke, the gun roared out a deafening report, and the Sherman's reported hearing the bullet strike the animal with a thud of bone and flesh. The wolf jerked back slightly, but held its ground, looking up at the rancher with those calm eyes. Terry could hear his wife began to cry in fear and felt a laden chill settled in his stomach as he took aim again uttering a silent curse under his breath

he couldn't keep the thought from running through his brain how is this thing not dead yet he fired again hitting the animal in its broad chest this time he saw a large chunk of fur and flesh blow off the animal as the bullet struck finally the wolf turned to leave but it was still almost totally unconcerned It just trotted slowly away across the field.

Gwen shook with sobs as she held her 12-year-old daughter close, but Terry knew they couldn't let this be. He handed the magnum to his son, Tad, and shouldered the rifle, and the two struck a deliberate course behind the wolf, which was now about a football field away and moving more quickly. Terry wasn't concerned. The ground was soft, and he was an excellent tracker. The wolf, which must have weighed more than 200 pounds,

left deep prints in the pasture. They tracked it through a copse of cottonwoods at the edge of the field, where it had disappeared from sight, and then across another field and into a stand of Russian olive trees. They lost sight of the animal for good at that point, but kept following the trail by the clear tracks that continued to leave behind. About a mile into their search, out of nowhere, the tracks stopped in an open space, about 40 yards before a river that ran across the ranch. The tracks at this point were nearly two-inch-deep impressions in the muddy ground, yet they simply vanished. Terry looked up, there is no way the animal could have leapt the remaining distance to the water, not a chance. He circled the tracks, spiraling outwards, keeping a careful eye on the soft earth.

Nothing. The immortal wolf was gone. With sunset approaching, Terry signaled to his son to turn back to the homestead. The only thing that remained behind in the bizarre encounter, other than fearful confusion, was a bleeding calf and a chunk of wolfish flesh that smelled, the Sherman's reported. like rotten meat. Well, welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Haunted Cosmos. I'm Brian Sauvay, joined, as always by my good friend Ben Garrett. Say hi to the listeners, Ben. Hey, listeners, welcome back. Welcome back. And here in this episode, we begin the first of three installments. You heard that right. Three. At least. Yeah, at least. I mean, there can be more. We believe it's going to be three here as we start this series.

But this topic is one that is near to our hearts here at Haunted Cosmos. And I do mean that quite literally, if you will allow me a pun, our hearts are currently beating in the basement of a beautiful church in Ogden, Utah. And the topic of our conversation for the next three episodes is located a mere three hour drive away via U.S. 40, maybe under 200 miles or so away. Yeah, good old Highway 40. Yeah, I mean, who hasn't? Who hasn't? Who hasn't fallen in love with highway for you? And hopped in their low rider,

rotated those tires down to Skinwalker Ranch. And then driven to Skin Walker Ranch and stayed the place out. And gotten turned around by the security guards, but we'll get there. Yeah. We'll get there. So we're talking in these episodes about Skin Walker Ranch. Maybe some of you have heard about this place. Maybe others of you have never before encountered that term.

It's becoming more popular as television shows and podcasts and other forms of media have covered this topic. But Skinwalker is a 500-acre ranch, just over 500 acres, actually. 512s, yes. Started at 480. Actually. And then it was expanded a bit as other parcels were picked up and added to it. It's out in the northeast corner of Utah.

Kind of, if you picture Utah, this standing rectangle and you cut the square out of the top right to make the Utah shape, it's just under the L. Yeah. there. Yeah. Actually, a beautiful part of Utah because it's where the kind of

alpine mountain region starts to mesh with the desert region. And it looks really messy, but in a beautiful way. Yeah. It's got rivers and it's got desert. It's got trees and it's got pasture land,

but also it is getting into that sort of rocky desert, beautiful desert that Utah is known for. And the reason that we're picking up this ranch, we're very strong if we're picking it up, I suppose, but it's kind of like Disneyland. for supernatural phenomena.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a smorgishborg of high strangeness, so to speak. Tell us what it's got. Yeah, I mean, tell us what the kitchen sink of Skinwalker Ranch is contained for us. It almost be easier to tell you what it doesn't. Yeah, right. All right, but it's got plenty of stories of UFOs, Skinwalkers, the Native American legend,

Bigfoot sightings, mysterious orbs of different colored light. Orbs. That flies at different speeds across the land. And melts your dog. And melts your dog. We'll get there. Poltergeist activity.

You know, disappearing stuff, strange electronics, portals to other dimensions, maybe even an alien spacecraft hidden under a big hill. Wow. Who's to say? Who's to say? But the crazy thing is that all of these things, all of these sightings have taken place in one little 500-acre slice of land.

This tiny little stamp there. Disembodied voices speaking in strange languages. over your head and responding to you. And as you heard in our opening story, apparently zombie wolves that can't be killed and also just vanish out of thin air. Mormons, being Mormons.

It's got Mormons. It's got Mormons. It's got Native Americans. And it now has one of those history channel shows where the narrator keeps making it sound like they're just about to discover the Ark of the Covenant every four minutes, only to be interrupted by a series of 6,000 commercials. Look, credit where it's due, in this case,

the History Channel show actually actually is crazy. It actually is nuts. A lot of stuff happens. My dad has been sucked into that Oak Island series that they do. Oh my gosh. And dude, every every three minutes, it's like, could it be? Did we find the treasure? Oh, no. No, Spanish gold. And they're like, no, another hole in the ground. Maybe we'll do Oak Island someday, too. I refuse to do Oak Island. No. No, it's the most unsatisfying thing in the world. We'll wait until it's done. And then we'll just, we'll leap. We'll get it already. Well, that should give you, you know, some insight into why we're not trying to tackle this in one episode. And instead doing it in three basic parts, probably three parts. And they correspond roughly to each of the three epics in the ranch's supernatural history. Though one could argue that there is Native American lore going back much further.

But the first episode, which is this one, we're going to talk about the Sherman family. And if you've ever read any of the material, like Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's book on the subject, you might know them by the name Gorman. Yeah, he changed the name for their own emotional well-being, he says. And then they came out late. They were found out anyway. Docks themselves. Yeah, they docks themselves. So we'll try to replace any quotes with Gorman, with Sherman, just so you're not confused.

But if we miss one, that's what's going on. So we'll talk about what got the legend started in the late 90s, this ranch in Utah. In part two, we're going to meet a strange billionaire and his search for the supernatural through a literal crack team of scientists. Yeah. Sounds like a movie plot. It actually was a movie plot. Yeah. It said it was real life.

Yeah. It actually happened, though. And then finally, in part three, we have yet another wealthy eccentric who enters the picture. I actually searched to try and find. He lives in our state. I tried to find a contact to maybe get him on the show. Oh, wow. Turns out super millionaire real estate investors don't just leave their DMs open.

So, hey, Fugall, if you're listening. And he may not want to come to a Presbyterian church basement and talk to too weird. Yeah, strange, strange, strange guys. Yeah, he's a Mormon as well. Yeah. And you got this other wealthy eccentric coming in and funding yet another round of scientific exploration of the ranch, and we'll discuss that. And then in part three as well, we'll do the bulk of our wild speculation. Yeah.

It's going to be a huge amount of storytelling. Yeah. A lot of really intriguing stuff that's happened that we just think, we wouldn't do the story justice. Yeah. We didn't tell you all this crazy stuff. And then we'll, of course, give you our armchair expert diagnosis as to what exactly and precisely is going. And if we're wrong, we'll stake our entire reputations on it. What are the demons up to this?

Right. I mean, it's sort of our own little, like, it's all connected type trope where we're just, I, It was probably the Nephilim. Spoiler alert, all of our diagnosis, almost all the time is going to be, it was the Nephilim spirits. Yes, yes. The Rephaeim. Here they are again, up to their hijinks as usual. So, Ben, before we get in, I wanted to ask you just because I actually haven't asked you this question.

When did you first hear about Skinwalker? It actually wasn't that long ago. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's a crazy hotbed of stuff, but I didn't know about it until after we moved to. here. So that was four years ago. And I suppose it was probably three and a half years ago then that I found out about Skinwalker Ranch. And I was so excited that I lived in the same state as it. I still would like to drive by it someday. And we just maybe wave at Dragon, the security guard.

Yeah. Dragon. Hey, if you guys support the show, maybe it'll fund that three hours. If you support the show, we will go spend the night illegally. Illegally. There is a way that you can look down onto Skane Walker Range, I think. It's like an Area 51-type thing. It's surrounded by tribal land on multiple sides from the local Utah Indians. So anyway, that's when I first heard about it about three and a half years ago. Yeah. And immediately was enthralled.

So I did a bunch of research and shocked, okay, doesn't begin to describe my reaction to realizing that it wasn't just one family. It wasn't just like one group of people that thought all this. was going on. It was three separate groups, two of them scientific groups or attempts to be scientific, one of them closely related to the U.S. government. And then also all of it strung together by this high level, very reputable journalist who is interested in this type of thing. And I was like, my gosh, I mean, what is going on here? What is going on? Yes. I too want to discover the secret of Skinwalker Ranch. I had a similar experience.

Except I had lived here, I had also lived here for some time. I've just been here longer. I've actually been in Utah since not too long after the Sherman's sold the ranch, as we'll see. But I moved here in the late 90s, but didn't hear about it until I was well into my 20s and started again, as you said, same thing.

I was like, what in the world? Yeah, this can't be real. And at first you think, like, this has got to be a couple cooks making stuff up. But then you go deep and you start to see that if it's cooks making stuff up, there are a lot of cooks making stuff up. And they're really committed because they're very committed. Pictures, there's videos, there's audio files of stuff. And you're just left like, wait, wait, wait, wait. The amount of money and that would be required to orchestrate some of these things for virtually no payoff.

Right. Because people are still just going to think you're an idiot. Oh, yeah. It's just mind-blowing to me. A good treatment if you're looking for a book. I think there's an audio book of it as well on Audible, is Hunt for the Skinwalker. Science confronts the unexplained at a remote ranch in Utah by Colm Kelleher,

who is a PhD scientist, will meet later in the story. And George Knapp, who is a journalist. You might have, if you are into this sort of topic, you might have heard of the coast-to-coast radio show, now podcast radio show. George Knapp has hosted that a few times before, and he's an interesting character. Yeah, the crazy thing about Knapp is that he, a lot of people would expect, oh, he's sort of a kooky journalist guy who's just into high strangeness stuff. But he's actually really well-regarded

in the industry as a robustly thorough journalist. He doesn't just do anything because he thinks it's fun. Yeah, he doesn't just take copy paste, copy pasta from Reddit or, you know. Yeah, he's actually doing stuff because he thinks it's least. legit. Yeah. And he's done stuff outside of this arena as well, very reputable guy. Yeah. George, call us. Call on and we'll have you on. We'll have you on the show. And we will try to convert you to Christianity and give you the key to explaining all of the various phenomena that you've been studying your whole life. And the key won't involve any Anacian chance. We can guarantee you of that. Well, let's get, let's get started here. And we'll kind of give you an overview. So you have some

handles to understand basically the overview of how this story got started where the ranch is and how it became such a household name when it comes to high strangeness. So the ranch was owned. You have to remember Utah's history, it's modern American history, really only stretches back not that long in the scheme of things. That's very true. 170. Forget that. Yeah, it's not that long. I mean, young state. Here in Ogden, Utah, where we're recording and where we, you know, roughly live, is you can go back to the 1870s, 1860s, and in the, I mean, you find the first Protestant Christian church planted, I think, in 1870. Yeah. Yeah. I think. I think Salt Lake had earlier Protestant and Catholic churches

because Brigham Young wanted the diversity because it lended more credibility to their statehood. Their appeal for statehood. Yeah. But for the rest of the state, it's all very new. Actual settlement in terms of what we normally think of it as America is pretty recent. Yes, pretty recent stuff. So before that, there had been various Native American peoples, the Uts, what we now call the Uts, the Navajo and other Native peoples who had lived here for centuries and centuries before that. But we're really going to, we'll reach back a little bit into some of the lore and legends that the native people on the surrounding reservations and tribal lands have basically given their own explanation for the activity. Yeah. But we're going to pick up with the modern story here.

and then sort of reach back there. The ranch was owned for a long time in the 20th century by just one family, Kenneth and Edith Myers. They're not going to come a lot into the story, but they own the ranch from 1934 to 1994, but the last seven years of their legal ownership of the land, they didn't live there. Yeah, they were vacated.

I wish, I wish that they had written a bunch of stuff. Yeah. I know that stuff had to have gone down. A lot of the controversy surrounding the skeptical response to the events of the ranch, the purported events of the ranch, we'll come back to trying to undermine and say, well, Ken and Edith, they didn't really say anything happened. But there are reportedly some strange things that relate to their ownership of the ranch. Yeah. So it seems like either Kenneth died and then Edith moved off or Kenneth died and then Edith lived there for a little bit and then moved off the land before selling it to. Terry and Gwen Sherman in 1994.

It also just real quick, the Myers epic that we don't really talk about, those first owners, even though they didn't say a lot of stuff particularly happened to them, it is worth noting that stuff was still going on in the general area. Yes. The newspapers were still reporting a lot of UFO sightings and strange noises and stuff like that. Which gets into the theme that it's really not just localized to the 512 acres of the ranch. It's sort of the Uinta-based base. in general, but we'll get there when we get there.

Yeah, just leave that for a little... We get there when we get there. We get there when we get there. Yeah, so this ranch is situated within a hot spot of aerial phenomenon, cryptid sightings and that kind of thing, a poltergeist, weird things. And we'll get to some of those stories later as well. So in the 90s, in 1994, Terry and Gwen bought the ranch. And Terry was an expert in animal husbandry.

He had college education in ranching and took a very modern scientific approach to But he had extremely expensive and valuable cattle for breeding. I think he had at least four prized bulls that were his, I mean, if you know anything about cattle ranching, you know how valuable a prized breeding bull is. Yeah. I mean, thousands upon thousands of dollars, sometimes very difficult to replace. And normal losses in an operation like this, ranching of cattle in this, really. region would be about 5%.

So, I mean, you're talking about animals that live outside. Stredation. Yep. Disease happens. Normal losses were about 5%. Terry, with his herd of about 80 cattle, was aiming for more like 1%. So less than a cow a year. Yeah.

He's hoping to lose. Ambitious goal. Yeah. And he's an expert even in artificial insemination. He was a very knowledgeable, experienced rancher. He wasn't a greenhorn coming in. and just, you know, like doing things stupidly. That's important as we get into some of the losses they experience,

which turn out to be far higher than 5%. It's not just an oaf who's trying to start a hobby ranch, who's lumbering around and messing things up. This is a guy who was well prepared. He had organized things and structured his entire ranch so that he could actually achieve a loss of 1%. Yeah. Which is insane, by the way.

And then he seemed, things were out of, his control. He seemed to not be able to keep up with the strange things that were happening. And even before anything started happening, apparently some elements of the purchase contract were a little bit weird in themselves. Like there was supposedly a no digging clause. So weird. Where the Shermans weren't allowed to dig on the ranch below a certain depth without notifying the previous owner's estate and asking permission or something like that. Very weird. Which is really weird. And we'll get into the hubbub surrounding digging on the ranch, later on.

Dragon. Yeah, dragon. Oh, boy. It's so offended. For once, we're not talking about ancient malevolent. Yeah, little,

literal dragons. Yeah. We're talking about the fake dragon, which is like a guy named dragon. Right. Self appointed. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.

No, no, you're good. You're good. But yeah, no digging. And then also in the homesteads that were on the ranch, there were bolts on the inside

and outside of the doors to try and keep things out. But then also to, you know, seemingly try to keep things in so weird just really strange stuff they they were reports that there were uh four posts at the corner of the land around the homestead where they would chain guard dogs yeah like big huge guard some of the tribal neighbors reported that yeah there's there's all of these elements have skeptical like we did that really happen is this exaggerated you know et cetera but these are the

reports that uh the shermans and others had passed on so like we said in the cold open as you heard, right from the beginning, when the Sherman's took possession of the land, weird things began to happen. Beginning with this, not just the strange clauses and the contract, but this encounter with this seemingly immortal zombie wolf that attacked one of their calves and then disappeared never to be seen again that they know of that exact animal. But that early encounter with that immortal wolf, it would actually not end up being the last. So neighbors reported seeing wolves in the area as well, which is unusual, as we'll see.

But the Sherman Ranch in particular became sort of a hot spot for wolf sightings and very, very strange wolf sightings. Yeah. One day, for example, I'll give you just one, there are many of these. But Gwen Sherman, Terry's wife, is returning home from her new job at a local bank where she, It was basically a mortgage company that she worked for. And she had an inexplicable encounter as she drove home. She pulled up to the gate, the entrance to the property. She got out of her gray Chivette.

What a fly ride, by the way. What a time to be alive. A 90s gray Chvette. Where mortgage brokers are driving gray Chivette. Chivettes, man. Not a Corvette, but an even cooler. Right. So she gets out of her car and you have to, you know, you do the little two-step.

You get out, you unlock the gate, swing it open, you drive through, you get out again. kind of annoying close the gate behind you this is a half mile away from her homestead so after she pulled her car through and closed the gate behind her and just as she was about to continue on her way home she she thought she saw movement in her peripheral vision to her left and so she sweeps her eyes over there to see what it is involuntary movement any of us would have done and she just let out a cry of fear yeah because what did she see standing over there ben well normally when that happens to us when we're driving, we're like, oh, it was a bird. Oh, it's a bird. A piece of trash. Yeah. And she was shocked to see that actually was a massive wolf standing there,

staring at her about 30 feet away. And it locked eyes with her as she was approaching. And then it started actually approaching the car. And she could see every detail. And one of those details really stood out to her as reminding her of that first fateful day on the ranch. This wolf had bright blue eyes gray fur and it stood impossibly tall yeah way too tall worst part though was that she soon discovered it wasn't alone standing just a little bit further away from the car as if kind of in a backup position for the first wolf was another dog-like creature she was slow to call it a wolf or a dog at all but it seemed dog-like that was jet black and a little bit smaller than the enormous wolf, but no less unsettling because of how evil it appeared.

So she was, of course, shocked by this second animal, and it sort of jolted her out of her paralysis, where she had stopped the car in fear of this wolf that was approaching. Well, when she saw the second one, she stomped on the gas pedal, roared away, driving as fast as she could, down the last half mile to the homestead. And then the next day, she decided that she needed to notify the local tribal authorities, thinking that maybe some animals were loose, maybe just pest control needed to come in and take care of business. But she knew that they couldn't have these animals on their ranch

or anywhere near their ranch, and that was the priority. So when she met with these officials, she was absolutely bemused when they met her story with just silence. They were, they seemed to be just as shocked as her, and she was not looking for, that's not what she wanted to hear. No. She wanted to hear, oh, you found the dog. Yeah, we've got to go take care of these.

That's the neighbor. Because, you know, some people keep wolves as pets. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, but this wolf was so large. She said that she's in her gray Chvette. It had to stoop down and lower its head to look. To look into her window. That is.

Like, can you imagine? That's taller than a great name. I don't want to imagine. I don't want to imagine. That sounds horrible. Absolutely terrifying. So these officials are just like dumbfounded by what she's saying. And she is thinking, please say something.

Please say that you know exactly what I'm talking about. And then they ended up. replying that she must have been mistaken. She must have been seeing things. Not only did no one in the area own any animals that would look like this, but wolves hadn't been cited at all in Utah for seven decades. The last known wolf known in Utah was shot in 1929. And it's worth noting as well that the events at the Sherman Ranch happened before the introduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park in the late 90s. So it's not even like there were some migratory patterns that made their way down from Wyoming. Since then, since the late 90s, when the wolves were introduced to Yellowstone, one of those

wolves was actually trapped in our own city in Ogden, Utah. So we kind of know the pattern. Yeah. And this was not that. This was something else. Yeah. Even still, this was 02. It's still unusual. Wolves aren't generally ranging this far. Sometimes in Vernal, which is not too far from Skinwalker Ranch now. You see them, but these were artificially. reintroduced. Yeah. So this was just, and not only are we talking about an area where there are no wolves. What she reported was so much larger than a normal wolf that it's really impossible.

I mean, almost nearly impossible, if she's correct. So much so that the tribal officials, they basically pulled the whole, all right, we got this white lady here. This lady, she must be seeing things. Was it a coyote that you saw? Like, if you've ever seen. seen a coyote. I mean, maybe they're a little scary. They make some scary noises

at night and their pack of coyotes would be pleasant. But they don't stand shoulder above a chivet. And they're not that color. And they're not, I mean, this is just it wasn't a good. They look, coyotes are brown. Just for starters. She was like, do they think I'm an idiot? They don't

have blue eyes. And Gwen knew what she was seeing because she had seen something like this before. Yeah, already. The first day on the ranch, they see this thing. It's not like she's making this up out of thin air. Were you driving home from the peace pipe ceremony at the local Navajo, you know, wigwong? Wow. That's racist.

As a Native American, I'm allowed to say these kinds of things. Well, over the next few weeks, the Shermans would actually go on to spot that same, supposedly that same large wolf several times are in and around their ranch. And after doing some more study, they determined that this wolf was something like four times the size of a normal wolf at the same. the time in the late 90s, four times the size of that wolf. What Gwen actually described ended up in their research looking more like this old extinct wolf thing, which was called the Dyer Wolf. Which is such a cool name. One of the coolest names of any animal in the world. I think we can the Dyer Wolf. Like if you're a Dyer Wolf, you're just, you don't, you get instant respect from the animal kingdom. Apparently if you're a Dyer Wolf, you can take a few shots from a 357 and a 30

out six and not really think much of it. Even Dyer Wolves, though, I researched this a little bit just to kind of check in how big were dire wolves. Even dire wolves weren't necessarily as large as Gwen described. It just, like, I think the story is that I couldn't find this in the book, but what I heard earlier, and sticks to my memory is that as she was talking with the tribal authorities more, they kind of showed her, okay, what did it look like? Did it look like this, this, this, this? And what she pointed out was a dire wolf. They're like, well, sorry, that's been extinct.

That's extinct. And even if that was it, it would have to be an experience. Like an especially big dire wolf. The Psalms Project is a band putting all 150 Psalms to music in their entirety using a combination of folk, rock, alternative pop, and orchestral arrangements to faithfully and artfully present the entire story of every psalm with music without gutting or censoring the God-breathed text. Over 80 musicians have contributed thus far, including Grammy nominees Phil Kage and Jeff Dio. Here's a quick sample to get an idea of their sound.

Go to the Psalmsproject.com slash haunted cosmos to get either a free CD, two complete album downloads for just $2 or to stream on your preferred platform. Again, that's thesalmsproject.com slash haunted cosmos. Check it out today. The first wolf that they saw was possibly within the realm of the very, very largest wolves we've ever seen, the one that grabbed the calf. Yeah.

This wolf was even bigger. Yeah. Than that. I mean, completely impossibly large. Yeah, we're talking here. It would have to be some, you know, radioactive monster wolf or something like that. And so some of the ways that these sorts of sightings have been explained and why there's an element of, okay, these people must be crazy as they describe this to the local tribal authorities.

but they weren't completely dismissive because they began to see these wolves. There were several more sightings we won't get into. But Terry, Gwen, and others would see these wolf-like creatures on the ranch and around in the area. And what makes this, you know, has an air of legitimacy to the tribal leaders around there

that made some of them say, no, these aren't just crazy city slickers or white folk coming in. They actually might be seeing something real because not only did the Native Americans of that area have lore that could possibly explain these accounts, many of their own tribal police officers and residents over many, many years, going back generations even if you believe the tradition of lore that the natives passed on, had seen and had an explanation for this encounter.

And actually, it's where the ranch gets its name. It's a skinwalker. Skinwalker. Some of them say. The ranch was called the Sherman Ranch for a long time, but then later, it took on this name of Skinwalker Ranch. It even has a, one of the most prominent features of the ranch is a big mesa, like a Red Rock mesa.

And the Navajo people in the region called it Skinwalker Ridge. Skinwalker Ridge. Because they believed that that ridge was in the path of the Skinwalker. So this is stuff that they were even seeing during that Myers era of ownership. And it wasn't just whoever was on the ranch. people in surrounding towns. Yeah, that's right. They had seen many of what the local Navajo called the Ye'A.

Nalda Lushi, which I just pronounced so good. That was really impressive. Say that five times fast. Yeah, Nalda Lushi. The Skinwalker lore does go back pretty far here, but you can, the basic story in the modern era, is that these two tribes, the Utes and the Navajo peoples, had somewhat of a tenuous relationship that came to a head in the late 19th century. So again, not that long ago, when the Utes made an alliance with the American military that ultimately forced the Navajo peoples to leave

their land. Yeah. Okay, so you've got, you can picture how much of a traitor scenario, that's like the tax collector joining with the Roman Empire to, you know, destroys on people. Now, the relationship between these tribes have been fraught before there were, you know, rumors that, so, one of the tribes had enslaved members of the other tribe. And so these were not necessarily completely friendly relations between these peoples. Right. You can picture them kind of like nations that were warring and sometimes in conflict, sometimes staying in a peaceful relations.

And then you introduce the expansion of the military and the westward expansion of America, of the modern United States. And so the Utes betray in the eyes of the Navajo, the people. And legend has it that the Navajo cursed the land by unleashing skin walkers onto the people there. Doesn't that sound a little bit familiar? I mean, yes. It sounds like my good friend, brother not in Christ for sure. Chief cornstalk.

Cursing the land of Point Pleasant West Virginia. Ultimately with the mothman. Ultimately with the Motsie Minuto, right. Oh, yeah, you're right. Dark spirit. You're right. But the thing, so here's the thing. The reason that this curse was so monumental for the Navajo people is that they did largely

think themselves to be a virtuous people. We're more concerned with healing one another when they're sick, helping one another when they're hurting, trying to be good stewards of the land. They did have these actual things in mind. They weren't just trying to be bad. And they had an understanding of what was good and what was bad. And to them, the medicine man, The helper was the epitome of good in this Navajo culture,

because he was the one who embodied helping the people who are weakest to bring them back to full strength, whereas those that would seek to undo that work or to reverse that work were seen as inherently evil. And this is where they got their witch legend from, where the witch would seek to devour, would seek to destroy, to take away all for selfish purposes. And eventually, this witch being, the Lord,

included her ability or his ability even to turn into or possess or disguise themselves as an animal. And when it would do this, when the witch would do this, it then became a skinwalker. So a windigo, a lot of people will think like, oh, they're synonymous, windigo and skinwalker. There is a difference where a windigo is more about cannibalism, which is its own... We'll have to do a Wendygo episode. We'll have to do a Windigo episode. Whereas the Skinwalker is more concerned with just selfish desire in general.

And that selfishness, that self-centeredness leads them to possess other creatures that seem to have these same characteristics that would then allow them to have greater strength and carrying out their desires. And one of the most prominent creatures that it would supposedly inhabit is a coyote or a wolf. And what would happen is if, like let's say the Skinwalker inhabits a coyote or possesses a coyote, it would turn the coyote into like a super dog. A super dog. Yeah, where it grows, it looks more grotesque, it becomes tougher. It really does. It starts to fit all the boxes of the stories. It can keep up with cars moving at highway speeds.

Exactly. Yeah. They even, so you see these, the connection here between these tribal lore and the way that many, many ancient cultures and even biblical examples, their connection is witchcraft. That's right. So, I mean, when we talk about, like, these witchy sort of supernatural events, it's important as moderns to remember that the biblical data would actually tell us that it's not that witchy stuff is fake. Right. It's real. Yeah.

You're not, in fact, you're forbidden to do it. The scripture say, don't practice witchcraft and kill people who do. Yeah. There is a category for a person who would use some, like, arts of the unseen realm to not just. just benefit themselves, but to actively harm other people. And they even had to become a skinwalker, to become a full Navajo witch or a Native American witch, you would have to perform evil deeds. Yes.

Absolutely grotesque, evil deeds, the kinds of things that are completely anathema to normal, the normal unseared human conscience. So this isn't like they're just omitting to be good to people or kind to people. this is like, no, they're actively committing things that would harm other people, that would be against them. So the lore of the Skinwalker is that you could be around a Skinwalker and not know you're in the presence of one, though there were sometimes things about their gaze or their eyes that would give it away. If a Skinwalker, if an Indian discovered, was discovered as a Skinwalker, they would kill them.

And so they would try to hide their true nature or flee from the tribe and go live in wilderness areas. and use their dark magic in order to please themselves and destroy and bring death and corruption. And your general witchy sort of stuff. And so that's all kind of groundwork to say that in this local area, there was supposed to be a hotbed of skinwalker activities because of this curse that the Navajo had laid down on the Ute people. And in this area, it's not on the ranch, but it's near the ranch. There's a territory called the Dark Canyon. And it's in the U.

Which is good branding. Really cool name. Yeah, it is good branding. Let's be honest. It's in the Uinta Mountains, and it's supposed to be a place that the natives are supposed to keep themselves from going, but also they have an obligation to guard any outsiders from also going there because they think that's how dangerous it is. But even just the ranch itself lies within a territory that the natives have limited themselves to, where they are not allowed to actually. Not supposed to go there. supposed to go onto the ranch because of how dangerous it is.

Yeah. And so in this area, because of these legends, because of the reality of curses, I would say, you have a lot of sightings of things like Bigfoot, what people would describe as Bigfoot or Skinwalker sightings, other animals that seem to have been inhabited by this evil witch spirit. And many of these accounts actually come from the tribal police and other law enforcement officers in the area. So it's not just, oh, the medicine man who's taking some piety and now he sees a skin walker.

It's like, no, this very sober-minded police officer who's on the tribal land who says, you know, scouts honor that he saw a skinwalker walking across the ridge and then, you know, do something horrible to someone or something like that. So they're not trying to just blame things on legend. They're actually just saying, this is what we saw. So we don't have another way to explain it. Some natives who actually do buy into the lore would actually object and say, there's no way the Navajos would actually do that. Because if they knew a Skinwalker, they would kill the Skinwalker. They wouldn't join with it.

So there's some, there are competing lore surrounding this. But all of it agrees in this area that this is an area of high strangeness, where there are sightings of everything from lights in the sky to Bigfoot-type creatures to what they would describe as skin walkers. And even just real quick, because I've heard that objection. Oh, the Navajo would never do that. The problem that I have with that is the Navajo are people. Right, exactly.

If they are driven by enough hatred, they'll abandon all semblance of what they think is virtuous. Nobody would ever violate their principles. Yeah, exactly. For the good of themselves and their people or out of revenge. That's right. So, yeah, I kind of reject that objection. There are even in this area, the tribal areas surrounding the property, there are lots of stories like this.

One example of a story from fairly recently goes like this. One night a local and his friends were walking to his apartment building in the tribal area. When all of a sudden a large group of children ran around from a side street crying and looking terrified. And they stopped the kids and they asked, what's going on here, kids? The kids said that they've been playing at the nearby playground. When some kind of large bipedal creature approached them, looks like a man, but it wasn't a man. He had a heavy coat, bulging eyes, and not human,

some kind of animal human hybrid, and the kids all seemed genuinely terrified. The bulging eyes gets me. It reminds me the men in black and the mothmen. Yeah. Tiny with his... And then also like the just the uncanniness where their skin is almost translucent.

It's like, ugh. Weird hair. Very strange. And there's also the... theme here in this particular story of the children being especially in danger of being preyed upon by this. Like, that's supposed to show

how evil this being is. It's so inherently evil that it would even seek to attack just for the sheer fun of it, quote unquote, the innocence of the children. So it's very just interesting stuff. But then it goes beyond that. Like we said in the intro,

it includes poltergeist activity. This ranch was not just a place where Native American lore seemed to come alive, it's also a place where our own sort of modern American idea of the supernatural starts to take shape as well. So Brian, can you tell us about the disappearing tools on the ranch?

Yeah, this was classic what we'd call trickster behavior. And this went there's so many stories again. Which, by the way, the coyote is associated with the trickster god. That's just an interesting connection. The connections that shoot through

this ranch are actually pretty impressive. So Gwen did begin to think that she might be losing her mind from time and time pretty early on the ranch. She would say windows and doors would reportedly slam open or shut of their own accord. She would go into the bathroom to take a shower and find on getting out that her towel, along with everything else she had brought into the bathroom, was just gone. And the door was locked. No thanks.

So it's not like the kids are coming in. One time she says she unloaded a whole trunk of groceries from her car after a shopping trip, like 20 or 30 minutes, putting all the groceries away where they go. in the pantry and the kitchen, she leaves the room to go do something else and comes back minutes later, like not long at all. And she finds all of the groceries

are back on the table, in the bags, as if she hadn't put anything, I mean, she was being gaslit. That's just rude. She would leave an item in the kitchen somewhere, say a spatula next to the sink, and then find that it was completely gone

after leaving the room momentarily and returning, only for the item to later appear in an odd place, days or even weeks later. And she began, I mean, at first she was like, my kids must be tricking me. Yeah, I mean, that naturally, that's what you would think. Trickster's probably the 12-year-old. Yeah. But this would happen multiple times a week, even when it seemed impossible for it to happen.

Terry experienced in his domain out on the ranch, similarly strange things. One time, this is one of my favorite stories along this line. he'd been repairing some fence on the property and using a very heavy duty post-digging tool that weighed upwards of 70 pounds. So he left briefly to go in and get another tool from his truck. And when he came back, he found that the 70-pound post-dgging tool was completely missing. He looked everywhere. And dads, you know how this feels.

Yeah. You know, I know. He looks everywhere. He's getting frustrated. And finally, he storms into the house. And he's like, where did you kids put my post-digging tool? And why do you... This happened to me last summer.

I'm looking for my handsaw, which I know is in my shed, hanging on a hook that I made just for this hand saw. It's not there. I look everywhere. I'm like, kids, what did you do with it? We've never... I don't even know what a hand saw is. I've never seen one in my life. What are you talking?

Sure enough, literally four months later, this was this winter. I find my handsaw rusted out. under a tree covered in snow and mud. And I'm like, oh, it could have been a skinwalker. But this time, it was a skinwalker named Cyroll, a three-year-old skinwalker.

So the kids, though, and Gwen, they really did see, and these are older kids. They're not, you know, like three-year-old, like I have a lot of little people. Yeah.

They're like, we've been in the house for hours, Terry, and he'd been using it at the time. It wasn't like he's going to find a tool in his shed that he hasn't touched in weeks. They're like, we didn't touch it.

so they're all so forcefully protesting your innocence that they're like we'll come help you look dad will come help you look so Gwen and the two kids and Terry

they searched into the evening until the sun went down could not find it Terry is in a towering mood all night he's frustrated you can't sleep he's mad

so two days later on top of that it happens again this time Terry comes into the house and he's like okay seriously who's messing with me

Don't you love it when like as a, we all do this as dad. It's universal. You go from like I even, my son's one and a half and I do this with him where I'm like trying to use like an appropriate amount of the fatherly fear inspiring voice where I'm like, you need to fear me right now because you're, you're being naughty and you're in trouble. And then eventually you get, you start to like bargain. Yeah. Where you're like, okay, look, you've got to just be honest with you.

Just tell me where it's. Just point at what you want. Tell me where this thing is. it's so funny. And it was at that point that Gwen, after they had finally looked for it, because the family,

again, was like, hey, we did not hide any of this. This time it was plight. He'd been doing some fencing. Yeah. And he set his pliers on a fence post. And he literally says he turned around

to do something else. And under a minute, turns back, looks on top of the fence post. It's not there. His pliers are ground. He's like, surely I knocked him off.

Looks around the ground. The pliers are not there. The pliers have. vanished. And that's when you start to do, you're like, well, what if the wind somehow carried them 50 yards away? A hawk. Yeah. This is classic poltergeist activity, where it makes you think that you're going crazy. Well, at this point, Gwen finally told Terry about all the missing items in the house and the strange activity with the groceries and all this stuff. She had kept that to herself until now because now she knew Terry would understand. And this is when Terry began to feel like something really strange was actually going on.

It wasn't just her. And it wasn't just a one-off thing here and there, like the wolf that was weird. Maybe it's just a super tough wolf or something. But now it's like, this can't all be happening in the same place coincidentally. Well, a few weeks later, after, you know, stuff seemingly returned to normal, Terry would finally find that 70-pound post-digging tool. And it was tangled up high in the tall branches of a tree on the property. And it was at this point that Terry finally realized, wow, my family was not lying. Yeah, Gwen did not climb a tree with my post.

My 12-year-old son didn't climb up a 50-foot tree and hide a 70-pound tool up there. Up in the branches. A gust of wind. No chance. And then in another bizarre after all this and seemingly just pointless and random incident, The Sherman's son, Tad, spent hours stacking over a ton of cordwood on the south side of the tree line of the homesteads. In the wintertime, they'd have plenty of firewood. After withdrawing from the job for maybe half an hour to catch his breath, get a drink of water, get a little snack.

He went back outside only to find the entire stack of wood moved more than the length of a football field to the north side of the tree line. Again, just inconsiderate. simply why. That is rude. There's no... This kind of like trickster behavior, the thing that's that's so funny about it is it's like an enormous amount of work for this tiny punchline. I know. You're like, okay, you moved my stack of wood. Right. Why? Well, this, this reminds me again. I think I've alluded to this. Oh, they started... I'm sorry. No, you're good. This is so good. I started the notes. They started having to shake a little bit of

salt onto their, or pepper onto their palm when they went to like eat dinner because over and over someone kept switching the salt into the pepper shaker, the pepper into the salt shaker. What the heck? Like, they're like, who is doing this? And it was so bad they're like, I don't want pepper. I got to make sure this is actually salt. Yeah, yeah. You know, but that's so funny. That kind of behavior. Sorry to interrupt. Well, no, that that's going to help my point because I think I've referenced the bell witch before in haunted cosmos. But this reminds me of the escalation aspect of stuff like the bell witch, where poltergeist activity in general and witch activity even seems to start, you know, where it's

almost funny, like the groceries being taken out and the fact that they're put back into the bags. Yeah. Not only is that an interesting detail. It's also like genuinely kind of humorous. Yeah, it's a little funny. Where if it wasn't so creepy, you'd probably just laugh it off and think like, oh, the old ghost in the house is just that.

But then it never fails. Things always escalate. When stuff like that is genuine, it always gets worse and worse. It eventually gets violent and truly malicious. And one of the ways that it escalated for the Sherman family was that they started to see UAPs and UFOs. Yeah, this is probably one of my favorite weirdnesses of the ranch is that, okay, we've got wolf creatures and skinwalkers. And you're like, maybe there's some Navajo witches. All right.

That makes some kind of sense. At least, hey, we know what it is. The scope is limited to Navajo witch. Maybe it's a Navajo witch dog. And then you're like, okay, poltergeist activity. Maybe there's a Navajo witch that's levitating crap and stealing things from us. Really into pranks. Yeah, like loves pranking people.

Maybe he's like in the background of the tree line watching Tad as he sees. I put the cordwood over there. And he's just like giggling to himself. Maybe it's a witch with a sense of humor. But the thing that's so weird is that then, Yeah. We get flipping orbs and stealth fighter looking to UFOs that are tiny and helicopters with no blades. And this reminds me of when I was working as an engineer, okay?

Yeah. And we would have project management meetings. And we would always address something that we called scope creep. Any engineers that are listening, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. You know. Scope creep is when you get a great idea. for some improvement to your plant or whatever. And your boss says, do it.

And then in subsequent meetings, other stuff gets brought in to that project. And you're like, well, what if we also did this and that and that? And before you know it, the project that you initially planned has now like four-folded in scope. It's ballooned. And the company can no longer afford it. And you're getting blamed for spending too much money. The manager comes back in. He's like, so how did that a fix on the A10 go?

And you're like, well, we read this. to buy a new A-10. We redesigned the Air Force. Yeah. Right. It's now the Space Force. That's probably what happened. Yeah, that's what happened.

So this is scope creep. What's your favorite example of crazy scope creep aerial phenomena? I have one, and I'm wondering if we have the same. Okay. So I have one, and I'm glad you asked, and I'll get, let's see if it's the same. Mine's about the RV. That's mine. Okay, I'll do my second favorite later, but you tell us your favorite.

Yes, let me do this one. I am going to quote just straight out of George Knapp's book, The Hunt for the Skin Walker, because he says it best. So this is a quote from the book. Story goes like this. Terry had finally moved his entire herd of high-end, registered breeding black Angus and cemental cattle onto the new ranch. Around the same time, Dave, Terry's nephew,

had arrived to visit with the family for a few weeks. Dave was not exactly the outdoor type, having lived most of his life in the city, Terry was determined to break him into the ranching lifestyle during his stay. One night, he told Tad and Dave to accompany him on an outdoor jaunt. Terry knew that Dave was a little apprehensive of the dark, so he wanted to break the youngster out of his fear. The three began walking casually through the property to check on the cows.

It was a beautiful dusk, and Terry was appreciating the lovely clear sky that still held some light. A few hundred feet to the north, the ridge was getting darker by the minute. A flash of annoyance hit Terry as he spied the lights of a trespassing RV about a half mile to their west. He had little patience for trespassers who ignored private property and hunted on other people's land. He had let it go a few times before when he had seen distant lights on his property, but this time he was going to tell these louts off.

He pointed out the RV to the two youngsters and the three of them increased their pace. When they were about 200 yards away, the RV started moving away from them. Terry was momentarily puzzled. How could it have seen them? It was pitch black. Perhaps the trespassers had night vision equipment, Terry thought to himself. He and the boys broke into an easy jog. He didn't want this idiot to start breaking fence lines as the RV tried to escape.

The headlamp in front and the red light behind were moving very smoothly now. Terry wondered why the vehicle wasn't bouncing over the ruts in the pasture. Suddenly the lights from the object seemed to rise a few feet from the ground. Sherman's brow puckered. What's going on? Tad muttered. They were covering their ground quickly now, trying to catch the RV. They could see that it had gradually increased its pace, as it maintained the same distance from them.

All three were now running, and again they could see the lights moving a few feet off the ground. As they came to one of the fences through their property, it dawned on Sherman what was happening. The thing was somehow lifting itself over the fence lines. It had already gone over a couple with apparent ease. This was when he felt the first chill. How could an RV be climbing,

over fences. The chase continued and Terry was breathing heavily. They had now entered the last pasture before the very end of the property and that pasture was bound on the western end by a line of the Russian olive trees placed thickly together and right behind a stout five foot high barbed wire fence. Terry grunted with satisfaction as he ran. Those guys were trapped. He still could not hear the vehicle's engine and he wondered why. They were running hard in the darkness now and the red tail light of the vehicle was still about 200 yards in front. Terry kept waiting for the object to slow down as near the impenetrable barrier that formed the western limit of the property. The boys were about 10 yards in front of him, and he was gasping for air now. But since they were only

moments from chasing these intruders, Sherman kept running. He kept glancing down at the rough, ruddered terrain as he ran, making sure that any obstacles were not going to trip him up. Suddenly, a loud gasp from the boys made him look up. The RV was now definitely in the car. the air. All three stopped to watch. With the red light on its tail, it climbed smoothly, slowly, and silently toward the top of the tree line. Those trees were more than 50 feet high. As the object crested the tree line, the bewildered trio saw the shape of the vehicle perfectly silhouetted against the horizon. It was no RV. The object was roughly oblong, shaped like a large refrigerator, with a headlight in front and a red light behind. All three watched in complete silence as the object

slowly disappeared over the trees and the distance. It was flying smoothly and slowly, almost casually. There was no sound. Come on. Why? That's the question. Why? What was it doing sitting there on the property, just still?

I still wonder how did it see the trio? Yeah. Terry, his boy, and Dave. And then why didn't it just take off? Why did it go to the edge of the property before taking off? It's like, is just to mess with them? My favorite part, too, is that Dave's not allowed to come back anymore. Oh, I know.

His parents were like, Dave, you are never going back to that. You're never allowed to work on that ranch. Jerry was like, ah, I failed. He's not an outdoorsy kid now. Either your uncle gave you some hallucinogenic mushrooms, or there are malevolent demon UFO things driving RVs around the land. Either way, his parents were like, hey, Dave, congratulations. You're going to be the indoorsy kid.

There was another one where this isn't in the notes, so it might get a few details wrong. But there was another one where Terry was on the road somewhere like hours away on business doing something. And Gwen is in the house. And she looks out the window in one of the pastors and she sees an RV of some sort. That's creepy. Okay. And she saw the, this is the one with the moon head looking guy or the weird.

Oh, yes. Yes. She looks at, she sees a man in the window of the RV who appears to be wearing some kind of like astronaut looking garb. Yeah. Big helmet kind of thing. Some sort. He gets out and walks around the RV and then she is like terrified, calls Terry. He rushes home, like, but it's hours and hours.

He doesn't get home. I think he drives through the night, gets there and they find like these footprints. These large footprints around in the area. What in the heck? Dude, what is going on? Why? This is like when I was, when I first learned about Skinwalker Ranch and was getting into the research, This is the point where I started to be like, okay, either there's no way.

Yeah, either there's no way at all. Or everything is true. It's either all true because nobody would make that particular thing up. It's all or nothing. And this area, like I said, a few minutes ago, is no stranger to this aerial phenomena. Some of its aerial phenomena, which can include lights in the sky that aren't necessarily craft to UFO that look like a flying craft of some sort. We have a book in the area called the Utah UFO display written by General.

named Frank Salisbury. It was published again 20 years before the Sherman's got there, 1974, looking at hundreds of UFO sightings in UAP in the Uinta Basin, which Frank sourced a lot of them from a man named Junior Hicks, who was a science teacher in the area. He had records going back to the 50s and had more than 400 sightings recorded. He ended up getting a reputation Junior Hicks did as a guy who wouldn't give you up. If you went and told him a crazy story, he wouldn't tell everybody like, hey, your Mrs.

you know, she's been on the peyote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was trusted by the locals, so they would tell him. And he had just hundreds. I think you might be even able to get the book, but he had hundreds of these sightings.

One sighting, he even dated back to 1776, where Father Escalante, who is a Catholic gentleman who is in the area. Basically, it says he wrote that the record from his trip show that while encamped at L. Ray, a strange fireball came across the sky above his camp. The UFO's seen here since I've been collecting stories range in size from 20 to 30 feet across all the way to the size of a football field.

That's insane. Some are round, some oval, some cigar shaped, some triangular. The largest one of triangle was seen back in the 60s. We've had one resident in Indian who took a shot at a UFO with his rifle. Based. Like that guy, he's like, not again. Like the Whiteys took our land.

Is that a Chinese satellite? Not going to happen again. This is what would happen if that Chinese weather balloon thing. Yeah. What was happening right now had been lower to the ground. Rednecks were taking it out. But he, uh,

the Indian shoots at it says, quote, heard a ricochet ping as the bullet bounced off the ship, the metal ship. The people who see them include lawyers, bankers, ranchers, people I've known my whole life. So this is not new. Terry recorded seeing what he described as like stealth fighter looking craft,

but that were much smaller than an actual stealth fighter might be that moved impossibly and shouldn't have been, you know, able to do this non-ballistic motion kind of stuff. Yeah. When we say that, we're talking about it'll just stop. Yeah, like, and then go another direction. Or it'll turn like 90 degrees to the next. direction. And then they also, apart from just crafts and like beams of light, they also saw the classic trope of balls of light or orbs. By early 1966, the sightings of blue spheres at the

ranch became almost commonplace. These orbs were said to be about the size of a softball, made of glass, and filled with bubbling blue liquids that seemed to rotate inside, which is very interesting, very weird. Mr. and Mrs. Sherman say that in April 1996, they, they, watched one of the blue orbs repeatedly circle the head of one of their horses. The horse was illuminated by the blue light and it was very intense and there was also a sound like static electricity in the air, but the ball wasn't lightning. They weren't just mistaking some completely miraculous weather phenomena as a ball of light. The orb seemed to be intelligently controlled, they said. And when Sherman approached the horse with a flashlight, the orb darted off, maneuvering through trees with

speed and dexterity. The Sherman say the blue spheres seemed to generate severe psychological effects on the family. Family members felt waves of fear roll over them, far in excess of what might be normal whenever the blue orbs appeared. It was the appearance of one blue orb in particular that finally convinced the Shermans to sell the ranch. I actually think it was this story that I'm about to tell you, tell me, that led to their final, like, nope, we're out. But can I just say, yeah, go ahead. Real quick. So the overwhelming sense of fear, that's something that I always bring up and drive home because people describe that with Bigfoot, people describe it with certain UFOs. And it doesn't make sense. Like if you see a strange animal like a cryptid, a chupacabra, that's going to be scary.

Like, no doubt you're going to be scared. But you're not going to have lingering dread that gives you psychological damage. Right. That doesn't make sense. These things, the fear that they induce is nonlinear. It far out punches the weight class of what the thing actually looks like. So, Brian, as it turns out, Dallas, Texas is our biggest listener base if you narrowed it down to a single city. Can you believe that?

That's amazing. I don't know why that's true. I have no idea why that's true. Also, my hometown Atlanta is number three. That's a fun fact. Nonetheless, we thank the Lord for all of you Dallas listeners. And we want to do our best to throw you specifically a bone. Yeah, everyone knows that buying a new roof for your house can.

be difficult. You know, you're always getting scammed by hucksters, but you know what would make it better, buying a new roof from a Christian or getting an inspection from a Christian. If you're in the Dallas area and you need roof work done, then you need to reach out to Lauren's contracting at www.rusroofing.com. That's right. If you are a slightly unhinged haunted cosmonaut in Dallas, Texas, who needs some work done on your residential or commercial roof, or maybe there's been a recent and you just want your roof inspected to make sure it's safe. Whatever it is, go check out our friends at Lauren's contracting, and you can find them at www.ruffing.com.

That's www. russssroofing.com or call Russ himself at 940-395-9-4-13. Again, that's 940-395-9-4-13. And it seemed like in some of it they described, like there was one time they were getting home from being out, Gwen and Terry. And at first, when they saw these blue spheres fly up to them. And at first they felt a sense of calm, almost euphoria. Okay. And then it turned like with a flip of a switch into sheer terror and dread.

Yes. So it's mental manipulation. This is one of, this is my favorite orb story in the sense that it's horrifying. He says in another example, one evening in the summer just at twilight, they saw a blue light winking in and out of a stand of trees not far from the homestead. Terry was outside with his three blue healers. These were dogs that were well trained and helped him on the ranch. The dogs became angry and uneasy as the orb began to float closer to them. They put their ears back, they growled, raised their hackles in warning until they were all snarling and mad and seemingly terrified at whatever this thing was.

So Terry decided that he had had enough of these orbs. This was not his first encounter. He was going to try and do something about it. So he decided to lose his dogs after them. He said, go get it. The dogs did not need any encouragement. Other than that, they proceeded to chase the ball, the orb, which seemed to flee at high speed away into the trees with the dogs right on their heels. This was at twilight.

So the light was fading away very quickly, and it finally gave way as the dogs raced into this copse of trees following. the orb. Terry thought that the dogs had chased it off and maybe that he had succeeded in fighting back against this phenomenon when he suddenly heard a high-pitched yelp of pain from one of his dogs. So more snarls and yelps followed and then utter silence. The dogs did not come back that night, but Terry experienced hunter and outdoorsman though he was, was too frightened to go look that night. Somewhat ashamed of himself for being scared, Terry ended up staying up all night, basically just waiting for the dawn so he could go follow and see what had happened with this orb and

with his dogs. At first light, he got his gun and cautiously made his way out into the tree line. And what he found there was one of the most mysterious and horrifying things that he encountered in all of the strangeness of the ranch. Sitting there in the small clearing, Terry found three concentric circles. of pressed down grass. And in the middle of those circles, what he concluded couldn't be anything other

than the remains of his dogs. But they did not look like dogs anymore. What it looked like was what he variously described as three greasy piles of like butter or oily black mush with chunks in it with steaming in the dawn chill and heaps in the center there. And it was as if his dogs had been melted

and burned by the orbs. And he never, I mean, the dogs never came back. That is so unsettling. Also, gets to my point that I think concentric circles are actually demonic and evil. Also, your escalation point about like, oh, they're switching with salt and pepper. And then they're melting your dogs into butter. Like, don't fight back. There was another one where I think Terry, he found out that these orbs weren't omniscient.

He was out in his field, and I think he was gathering hay or something like that in a stacks, and he saw an orb floating up over, this was daylight. And it might have been one of the red, there were red orbs and blue orbs. He sees an orb going up over, like, Skinwalker Ridge. Okay. Kind of like, as if it was scanning. Yeah. And it went over the ridge, and he was like, I'm going to see if it's omniscient,

if it knows where I am, no matter what. He dove into this pile of hay and hid himself so he could just kind of peek out. And he says the orb comes back. and it looked like it's it's almost like where do you go. No. And it starts doing like a search pattern. That is so, that honestly, that almost makes it worse. Way worse.

Because now you know that they're looking for you. There was a story, the local sheriff at the time. I can't remember the guy's name. And this is off the notes. So forgive me if I get it wrong. But anyway, it was a local sheriff and he got called over to the Sherman's because they were seeing so many of these orbs. And he said that, I mean, you know,

He's on the phone with him. He's like, well, what do you want me to do? What am I going to do about this? I'm a local sheriff in the middle of nowhere, Utah. And they were like, well, just, we need another witness. Like, come on, make sure we're not missing something. So he gets there, and he says that they're walking around the area. And this is in broad daylight that this happens. Broad daylight, they're looking out over one of the pastures where some of the cattle are grazing. And it seems like a portal opens about 30 feet off the ground. And this like black, blue orb comes down. and is hovering around the area and then just like smashes into the ground.

What? And then just leaves. It's just like, all right, I'm done. That's what I came here to do. Yeah. They're like, okay, so they go over there and check out the spot where it had been.

And of course, the ground is like burned, which is actually that is interesting. I shouldn't say, of course. That's interesting that it burns the ground. But then also there's an indentation. So it's the solid mass of a thing that created a perfect circle,

concave indention in the ground. And then it also was radioactive, if I'm remembering, right, where they had cattle that would come by there later. And then the cattle would get violently sick after coming into that indentation. Because, you know, cows like to lay down. And so they found this comfy little spot to lay down in, stands up, vomits everywhere. And then the cow just dies soon because of all the radioactivity. Ben, you've brought us. What a great segue.

because it's not, but wait, there's more. But wait, there's more. Not only poltergeist and weird skinwalker wolves and that are immortal that you can shoot and that are taller than your Chavette. Or UAP and lights in the sky and the strange terror orbs that melt your dogs in the dog butter. And, you know, also, they started messing with his cattle. Yes. All of a sudden, out of his 80 prize cattle, by the time they leave in a two-year period, Terry Sherman lost 14 of his. animals. Some of them simply disappeared.

Yeah, disappear. In one instance, it was a snowstorm, middle of winter, and you know, these ranchers, they are very concerned with taking care of their animals. They're always making sure they're all there, no predation, no cattle rustling. Remember, he wanted a 1% loss. So he's looking at less than one animal loss per year. What he got was a 17 loss. What he got was 17 to 12. I mean, almost 20%. He goes out in the snowstorm because he's concerned with the drop in the temperature,

that he needs to make sure his cattle are okay, they get to shelter, you know, etc. So he finds most of them, but he knows there's one missing, and he finds some tracks that lead out in the snow. All right, so very heavy snowstorm at this point. It's blizzarding. Terry's out there. Dangerous situation. But he says, I got to take care of my animals. Again, he's an experienced rancher, experienced outdoorsman.

He believes I can do this, I'm going to be fine. So he starts tracking this animal. And it's going at a walk from the footprints. And Terry is an experienced tracker. He knows what it looks like when an animal is in distress, running from a predator or just walking. It's walking. Then all of a sudden the tracks show that the animals started to run at a breakneck speed. He looks, there are no predator tracks around, can't find any wolf tracks or coyote tracks or anything like that.

It's running at full pelt, full pell, full, whatever, whatever. It's running full, full tilt? Full tilt. And then all of a sudden, just like with the immortal wolf at the beginning, the track stop, no cow. That is literally never finds the cow. That is insane. At one point, multiple of them disappeared overnight, just gone. And you go, what can do that?

Like, are cattle wrestlers going to start wrestling cattle in the middle of a blinding snowstorm? And if so, do they have the technological capability to teleport the cow or, like, somehow levitate it or pick it up without leaving any trace in the snow around? And these events just seemed to be completely beyond comprehension. He could not come up with a reasonable explanation for how his cows could go missing. Cows can go missing. Cows can have predation. There are cattle rustlers. but not like this.

And then here's the thing that gets me about the cattle connection with Skimwalker Range. Normally, you would just tell some stories about cattle mutilation in general. And there were plenty of cases of cattle mutilation. But the poltergeist activity gets combined with the cattle mutilation and terrorization that's going on. Because remember, cattle is this man's life. If he loses these cattle, he's done. And actually losing 14 is almost financial ruin for him. He would even see like some of the orb related stuff would,

the orbs would go through his herd. Sometimes he'd watch the herd and all of a sudden they would split off into two groups. Yep. As if there were some invisible rampaging creature going through. He would see objects kind of hovering like we said around the heads of these things and it would drive them insane. Well, after they lost the 14, very expensive animals, from their 80 head of cattle,

they were, like I said, they're close to financial ruin at this point. They cannot afford, literally cannot afford to lose another cow. And so Terry and his wife are going to the store to get some supplies. They're going to go into town so that they can help beef up the security

of the area that the cattle are staying. And as they passed by the corral that contained those four prized bulls, these are 2,000-pound prized bulls. They're for breeding. They're for breeding so that he can maintain his high level of stake production. And as they passed by the corral that had these breeding bulls,

he commented to his wife, hey, man, it'd really be a shame if we lost one of those. I mean, that would be especially bad. Yeah, because these are the most valuable in the whole. Right. We lose these. We literally won't be able to recover because we won't have any breeding capabilities. Well, so they go to town, they get some supplies,

and they're gone for less than half an hour. When they return to the ranch, they pass by that same corral, and all four of the bulls are gone. It's like messing with them. Right. Like it heard him say that. Which goes back to that omniscience thing.

Yeah. Where it had to look for him, but it's almost like it heard him say that somehow, like it was listening. As you might imagine, Terry is frantic. Yeah. Because right now he's looking at his entire family suffering intense poverty for the rest of their lives

if they can't find these bulls. So they start frantically looking. And as a last resort, Terry decided to peek into a metal trailer that's situated inside the corral. The doors have been shut when they left. There's no way the cows get in there. But you know what we all do when we're desperate.

We look literally everywhere, even when the place we're looking makes absolutely no sense. And when he looks inside, he was shocked to see that all four of the bulls were inside this tiny trailer, squeezed like sardines. There's no way that could have fit themselves into this. They were crammed in.

as if they had to be helped in because they were smushed against each other. And he yelled to his wife that he had found the Bulls and he was really excited. And then he noticed that after he yelled to his wife, he was looking back at the Bulls the whole time, that they seemed to sort of wake up. Yeah, they're looking at a trance. It was like they were in a trance. And they realized the situation they were in and the Bulls themselves started panicking. They breathing really loudly.

They were moving against each other, starting to knock on the sides of the trailer, as if they think like, oh, this is unsustainable. We can't be here. Yeah, we've got to get out. We have to get out. Which just lends more credibility to them not being able to do this to themselves. That to me, it marries together, the poltergeist activity that's now escalating to be more malicious. Because it's like the whatever evil thing is here knows, oh, the bowls or the thing.

The cows are the thing. And so it starts to mess with them in a way that, I mean, it's going to shorten tangy. Harry's life with the amount of stress he's experiencing. Even the, uh, the best little icing on the cake is the latch on the trailer. Reportedly had like cobwebs and as if it had not been open. Hadn't been open in months.

I mean, you're just like, so almost as if he teleported the bulls into the, into this small trailer. That's it. It's like, and not only did, I just,

I love that so much. It's like, why? Not only did cows get messed with and, you know, disvanished, but also much more disturbing. Oh, yeah. There were cattle mutilations. There were genuine mutilations, like I was saying. Multiple.

Ongoing. And we'll talk about some now, but also in the next episode, you'll hear that they didn't stop. The next two episodes. No. We continue to see these strange events. And cattle mutilation is a phenomenon that is prevalent in the Western United States. We have stories going back hundreds of years. at least over 100 years of this.

Actually, the first major outbreak, not in the U.S., but the first... It was in London. London. It was 1606 in the city of London was the first documented case, and it was over 100 livestock in the course of a few days. Strange. Or like mutilated, drained of blood, organ stolen, stuff like that. And this is the classic cattle mutilation story.

It happens actually concentrated along the 37th parallel in the United States. Very interesting. Which is very strange. And what's strangest about cattle mutilation is, Isn't that cattle get violently killed? Yeah, there's predators. Cows are eaten by stuff all the time. But when that happens, it's pretty obvious to anybody who knows what they're looking at to say,

this animal was attacked by wolves or this animal was attacked by bear or it was killed by some sort of normal predator. In cattle mutilation stories, and this is like less than 5% or some small percentage of these cases, they're just seemingly completely inexplicable. where something will carve the animal up with an extremely sharp instrument. Later we'll see that they did forensic analysis on some of these mutilations to determine that the instrument used to carve up the cow

was like an extremely sharp surgical knife. Right, like a scalpel, but really big. Large scalpel-like cuts. You'll see that often the sex organs of the animal will be removed. The eyes will be completely removed. And in some cases on Skinwalker Ranch, we have instances where a cow that five minutes before Tad, the sun had checked on, that would be found literally five minutes later, they were right close to it without any sound or any disturbance where something has cut a hole six inches wide, 18 inches deep, perfectly circular, cord out the animal's rectum, and taken out all of the body cavity organs. leaving behind no blood or organs in the area,

even on a snow-covered ground sometime, leaving behind a completely dead, ex-sanguinated animal drained of blood and its organs, and I'm missing. Yeah, and the first time it happened, they just... Remember, he's going for 1% losses for his herd, okay? So he's already keeping a sharp eye on his cattle over the span of this big ranch.

But the first time it happened, they were checking on their cattle like they do all the time and it was just found dead in a field and they noticed that there was this really crisp, very precise hole that had been cut in the cow's eye. The eye had been removed and the hole had been bored into the head and it seemed like from there all of the blood had been removed. So the only organ taken in this case,

this first case was the eyeball, but all of the blood had been removed and there was no blood on the ground and it was snowing. So it would have been a sharp contrast of blood. So there were plenty of those classic mutilation cases, and then there were also the combination with the poltergeist activity. But as we come into a close here, Brian, I think that you should give us the teaser for the next era of events

that take place on Skimwalker Ranch. Yeah, I mean, at this point, two years in, the Sherman's have had enough. I mean, they feel like they have not owned the ranch. The ranch owns them. they feel like they're being watched continually. They were worried that the violence that was being done now to their herd of prize cattle would not spare them. They would not let their children play outside anymore.

500 acre ranch, the dream is your kids learn how to ranch, they play outside. You know, they learn how to be self-sufficient. Nope. The family friends aren't allowed to visit. They're terrified. They're not sleeping. Yeah. Not only have the financial loss has been devastating to the family.

at this point, nearly a fifth of their prize herd wiped out or completely vanished. But this psychological toll was weighing on them. I mean, they're starting to even report frequent horrific nightmares, rarely sleeping through the night. The whole family started to sleep on the floor in the living room. The kids had been on a roll students when they checked into the ranch. By the time they come to the end of their time there, their grades are tanking. Gwen lost her job at the mortgage company, the bank, because of her abas,

and, I mean, like, telling these strange stories. Yeah, one of the reasons given for her losing her job was that she wouldn't stop telling these strange stories. Yeah. And they're like, no. So it's costing them. If this is a hoax, it's costing them heavily. And so they pack up and leave. They sell the ranch.

And after they sold, they actually heard from a local tribal leader that there had been a bet among the tribal authorities as to how long they'd last on the ranch. So apparently they didn't think that they knew there was something up here. and the longest bet was 18 months, so they outdid it. They made it almost two years, right around two years before they called it quits. And the story might have ended there. If not, for the strange twist that seems right out of a movie plot at the end, it's almost unbelievable. This is cold, sober truth.

This is what happened. The Shermans were worried about selling the ranch to another innocent family. And so they thought they might have to just take the loss altogether. They don't want to stick somebody else with this thing without being honest about it. So they thought maybe he'll take a loss on it completely until they get a strange and compelling offer. An eccentric billionaire from Las Vegas, interested in making contact with supernatural forces, trying to get his hands on alien technology reportedly, and fascinated with high strangeness events, including attempting to contact the dead,

offered to purchase the ranch from them. His name is Robert Bigelow. And so began the next chapter of the epic tale of Skinwalker Ranch as Mr. Bigelow established a crack team of highly credentialed scientific investigators and proceeded to pour millions of dollars into what may have been to that point the most thorough scientific investigation of the paranormal ever.

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