Haunted Cosmos - Skinwalker Ranch, Part II: The NIDS Era

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben continue with Part II of 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 audiobookThis episode of Haunted Cosmos is sponsored by our friends at Lawrenz Contracting out of Dallas, TX. Need roof work, or a roof inspection? Check them out here, at https://russroofing.comThis episode 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 Haunted 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. The summer was reaching its glorious zenith in late July of 1997. Normally quite dry by this time in the ranchlands of northeastern.

Utah, this summer had actually turned out to be quite lush, the pastures bursting with green under the hooves of lowing cattle. But however beautiful the scenery at Skimwalker Ranch, the scientists at the helm of the Nids team, the National Institute for Discovery Science, was growing frustrated. Though they had personally experienced many strange and even terrifying phenomena, they had yet to capture anything that amounted to scientifically useful data. Personal experiences and anecdotes don't exactly count as footnotes in peer-reviewed literature after all. And so, tired of the constant near-misses, the repeated instances of experience without documentation beyond eyewitness accounts,

the team decided to install some surveillance equipment in the form of six cameras deployed in one of the hottest areas of the ranch for strange activity. The cameras were cleverly arranged, so that the cameras captured not only a 360-degree view of the area, but also each other. Each camera post was itself surveilled by another, ensuring that nobody could tamper with the instruments without being captured on film. Certain that nothing could now take place without at least some chance of scientific documentation, the team waited and waited. Unfortunately, nothing is exactly what they captured for a full year.

It was a Monday morning, July 20, 1998, when Tom Sherman noticed something strange. three of the cameras had gone offline. Recalling the recent storms that had gone through the area, the experienced rancher figured that the cameras, which, after all, hung more than 15 feet off the ground on tall poles, must have been struck by lightning. He stepped out of the command and control center into which all of the cameras fed,

and walked the eighth of a mile or so to the nearest cluster of cameras. What he found made the decision easy. He needed to get the Nid scientist there as soon as possible. But upon their arrival, an initial investigation, far more questions were raised than answered. While it was clear that someone or something had set upon their surveillance equipment with the intent to destroy it,

they couldn't make heads or tails of how it had actually been accomplished. One of the researchers recounted, quote, as I examined the cameras on the telephone pole, it was obvious that somebody was intent on inactivating the cameras. All three cameras had been mounted about 15 feet off the ground, each camera facing a different direction, so that the full 360 degrees could be covered.

From the three cameras, the video feed and the power feed came together and went underground at the base of the telephone pole. All the wiring had been neatly anchored to the pole by means of PVC tubing and also heavy-duty duct tape. Each set of wiring from individual cameras had been separately wrapped in duct tape. The PVC tubing now lay bent and twisted at the foot of the pole. All of the duct tape had been meticulously unwound from both the individual wiring and from around the telephone pole itself.

Finally, the wiring itself had been dragged forcefully out of all three cameras. Anybody who has experience in wrapping wiring with duct tape and leaving it to bake in the summer sun will appreciate the enormous difficulty and patience required to unwind the sticky tape several times from individual wires as well as from around the pole. The marks of the duct tape on the damaged wiring as well as on the telephone pole were plainly visible. The tape was nowhere around. We searched the ground minutely for several days,

for several hundreds of yards radius around the pole for the missing duct tape but found no clues. The next part of the investigation was to see if all three cameras went off the line simultaneously, and for this we had to rerun the videotapes. We also hoped to obtain a clue regarding the perpetrators because it was possible the cameras might have recorded the unknown vandals during their approach to the telephone pole.

The videotapes revealed that all three cameras had lost power, almost simultaneously at about 8.30 the previous night. This was just before it had gotten dark, so there would have been enough light to maybe catch the perpetrators in the act of vandalism. Suddenly it dawned on us that one of the remaining three cameras on a separate telephone pole 200 feet away was still working. Better still, it had been pointing directly at the vandalized pole during the incident. There was a mad scramble to retrieve the videotape

and we waited in breathless anticipation as we played back the video. Sure enough, the camera had faithfully recorded everything. There was still plenty of light out as the timestamp rolled towards the fateful 8.30 time, when presumably the recording would reveal who had damaged the other cameras. We watched dumbfounded as the timestamp continued past 830 and revealed no unusual activity. Carefully, we replayed the videotape, checking to make sure we had the correct time. The videotape stamp was precise, but we could see nothing on the footage other than the pole itself and the cattle peacefully munching grass in the pasture beyond.

Each time we replayed the tape, the more certain we became that we had the correct time. This made no sense. Whoever had yanked the wiring out of the cameras should have been in plain view on the tape. Nothing whatever disturbed the pristine stillness. Unfortunately, the resolution was not good enough for us to see the thin wiring in any detail, but it should have afforded us a glimpse of whoever had ripped the wiring to pieces. Completely flummoxed, we took all of the video, tapes back to Las Vegas in the hopes that digital enhancement might give us a clue as to what had happened.

After multiple rounds of digital enhancement, the puzzling incident came into even sharper focus. The resolution became good enough to see the tiny red lights on the bottom of each camera suddenly lose power at precisely 8.30 p.m., confirming that the cameras had actually lost power while being taped. Yet, the enhancement provided no clue whatsoever as to who or what had so forcefully damaged the equipment. The combination of fastidious attention to detail in removing every shred of duct tape from the wiring, while at the same time ripping out the wiring from the camera junction boxes, was disturbing. It reminded me of the same eerie combination of brute force and finesse that had been displayed in dismembering the calf a little over a year previously. And interestingly, both of these incidents had happened less than 50 yards from each other in the same field,

in daylight, and in full view of witnesses in one case and cameras in the other. end quote. Had some unseen force completely dismantled the camera in the blink of an eye, quicker even in the space between camera frames, instantly, does something sinister stalk the fields and mazes of Skinwalker Ranch? The events that took place at Skinwalker Ranch are some of the most inexplicable and strange things I've ever seen. It's as if we're peering into another dimension and observing things that are beyond our understanding. Quote from a credentialed scientific investigator with the National Institute for Discovery Science.

Welcome back, everybody, to Haunted Cosmos. My name is Brian Sovey, and I am joined here by my good friend Ben Garrett. Say hi to the people, Ben. Hello, people. I am widow will we doing to go. No, you're not. He is widowing not. Okay, that was for all of our Zoomer listeners.

All of you like dozen or so zoomers that like us. And speaking of listeners, this is actually the first episode we've recorded now since releasing publicly. So here's the deal. We've recorded eight episodes of this show. Yeah. One through six, one through seven, and then also number 10 with the last one.

So that's really confusing, first of all. It is for you listening. But now we're recording episode eight, and we've released episodes, one and two, and the response has just been epic. We're so great. You guys, we've, you know, I did not believe that we would make it into the top 10 on the Apple podcast charts. And Spotify. After the first episode. Yeah. That was insane. That was insane. And the top 10 on Spotify. It's amazing. So thank you guys. We've had just such an outpouring of support. I know we're like

months in at this point when you listen to this. I know. Yeah. Sorry. Just go there with us. We hope that we've made our gratitude plain on Twitter and Instagram and stuff because we really do feel it. You guys are the bomb. You guys are the bomb diggedy. And we're very thankful that you're listening in. But, Ben, let's cut to the chase here because there's some crazy things happening at Skinwalker Ranch. And they're not too far from us. No, no, no, no, no.

So we're a little concerned. First of all, I want to be able to know. What if it spreads? Put on the full armor of God every day. Put it on. I mean, especially if you live within the realm of a Skinwalker. Yeah, like you're going to want to put it on. Don't mess around.

Don't mess around, okay? Don't mess around. Hey, guess what? If you mess around, you might find out. You might find out. You might find out. Well, guys, in this episode, we are in part two of three of our look at one of the strangest nexus of strange activity in North America, probably. Yeah.

Skinwalker ranch. In part one, which if you haven't listened to, you really do need to go back and listen to part one. You should go back and listen. It'll make way more sense. We laid the groundwork there for this. this 500 plus acre ranch in about northeastern Utah. Kind of if you're looking at the map, there's the L at the top right of Utah.

It's at the bottom of the L, just underneath. Skinwalker Ranch, a cattle ranch. It was owned for 60 years by the Myers family. But then our story picked up in part one. In the early to mid-90s, Terry and Gwen Sherman bought the ranch, moved in, and we told you the stories of the bizarre experiences that they had on the ranch.

Yeah, everything from poltergeist trickster activity to crazy light orbs and stuff. Yeah, and after two years of that, they had decided that they had enough. They were going to sell the ranch. And you might think, well, there's the end of the story, but no, the story that was strange, it gets stranger. Okay. Now, you've probably listened to watch lots of movies that have this certain narrative shape that deploy this certain trope. And the trope is this somewhat eccentric millionaire or billionaire who funds mysterious, strange or dangerous scientific research into an area he's interested in.

You can think of like John Hammond in the movie Jurassic Park funds all this unhinged research. And you know what? He found out? They didn't stop and ask. Wait, no. What they did was your scientists were so consumed with whether or not they could. They could. They didn't ask.

They didn't ask whether they should. Hey, life finds a way. Hey, so true and more, many such cases as we'll continue. Common Scientist L. But common Jeff Goldblum dub. That's true. That guy is a, it's true. That's a, yeah, it's, anyway.

Peter Wayland in the movie Prometheus, I'm not necessarily recommending these movies. But I mean, here, here, the shape is pretty common. It's kind of like a trope you see in movies, stories all over the place. Well, as the saying goes, life does sometimes imitate art. sometimes art it imitates life, but life often imitates art. Oh, yes. And something happened with that shape here in the story of Skinwalker Ranch. When the Sherman's decided to sell the ranch, I mean, who do you think might be interested in buying a ranch?

I mean, remember, the stuff was publicized. Yeah, like people knew what was going on. At least locally in Utah. Yeah, we'll even talk about what it's clear people knew about it. Like, if you saw, if I saw a Zillow ad. And it said, 512 acre ranch in Utah. Check. Okay, that's good.

Beautiful Mesa. Check. Bubbling Creek. Check. Through the property. Check. Water rights. Important.

You got to check that. Big check. That's great. Teaming with dog melting orbs. Okay. Also, cattle sometimes disappears and gets eviscerated and mutilated. Okay. There are occasionally strange flying RVs with space men than them.

Okay, so bad for the kids. Bad for the kids. It will steal all your tools and hide them in trees. Which is the worst part. That's the worst part. Poultergeist activity, like sometimes they'll unpack all your groceries, and then a poltergeist will take them

and put them all back on the table that you started. I don't think I would put an offer. The seller's going to help with closing costs. So let's put that in the pros category. Well, okay, there was a man, though, who was interested in the property, not in spite of that list of crazy things, but actually because of them.

And this man, heard about the ranch in, I think, 1996 in a newspaper ad, or a newspaper story that he had heard about some of this activity. And to that guy, he said, he picked up his late 90s phone, which is like the size of a... Size of a child. Of like a small child. He put it up to his head and he said, to his lawyer, get me that ranch. Brian is holding, he's acting like he's holding the world's biggest phone to his ear. Oh, that man's name is Robert. Bigelow. Robert Bigelow actually is still with us. Yeah. As we record this episode, he's 78 years old. He's an American businessman. And this guy has a net worth in the nine, maybe even 10 figures at various points in his life.

So like Chabani Yogurt? Yeah. This guy doesn't worry about buying it. He buys like multiple at a time. He looks at Chabani yogurt and he's like, I'm not worried about that. Give me it. I want you guys to know that was not in the notes. But it's peak luxury. It's so true, though. It's so true. He's so true. He didn't look at it and he was like, I don't know. I don't know, babe. Can we make it work in the budget? He's $67 per spoonful. Let's be honest. He's probably single. He's probably single. Bigelow, he's a very interesting guy. Bigelow made his money in the Vegas hotel scene. And he made it by essentially noticing this hole in the marketplace where there wasn't like a cheap hotel, motel sort of in the market. It was like you had total, just like total rundown.

garbage or really expensive. And so he came in and he started this hotel chain. You've heard of it, Budget Suites of America. He started that hotel chain. Great name. Great businessman. Built a company up. Some people estimate his net workers with something like 700 million.

He claims a billion at some point. Anyway, a lot of money. A whole lot of money. And before you think that this guy's maybe just a crackpot, because he bought the ranch specifically because he wanted to investigate paranormal activity. Yeah, he didn't want to raise. cattle. No.

And you might look at that and go, well, he's a crackpot. I mean, like, he's just a crackpot. He's actually a very, not only a respected businessman, but he also founded another company called Bigelow Aerospace. Mm-hmm. In 2011, Bigelow Aerospace is an aeronautics company that manufactures and develops these special space station modules that are like actually in use, I think. Yeah.

On the space station. Yeah. Yeah. So he's a really legit aerospace. company. He invested $250 million of his own money in the first two years in Bigelow Aerospace. Wow. So this is a guy who has a serious interest

in business, in technology, particularly in technology in space, space exploration, but also in the paranormal in what he'd call parapsychological topics, like the Thanatology, which is the study of life after death. Yes. Okay, so not a Christian. No.

I want to make that clear to you. This is a non-Christian who's fascinated by life after death, paranormal. Are there other dimensions of existence? Are there aliens? Like, he's just, and he has a lot of money. So he's like, look, I'm going to make Jurassic Park. Yeah. Real IRL Jurassic Park, but demons.

So he bought the Disneyland of weird activity. I repeat myself. But you repair some. He bought the Disneyland of paranormal activity. Yeah. He saw this new. favorite thing. He was like, well, I think he bought it for like 200 grand. It wasn't a serious. That makes me so mad. I don't know for sure. That's off the top of my head. But I mean, in the 90s, though,

$200,000 was like the equivalent of $6,000 million. I know. But right now, like, Landon, Utah guys, is difficult to buy. Good investment. Yeah. Very good. And you'll see by part three of Skinwalker. It was like, great investment. Great investment. Got out at the right time, too. Yeah, he did. He really, he really, really and truly did. I think some people trace Bigelow's interest in this to some deaths that he had in his family of some untimely deaths. And he started, and this is like a warning to people listening to this.

Maybe you're not a Christian. We're Christians. And we're trying to turn the lights on in the dark cracks of this world that God made. And warn you that a lot of people are interested in these sorts of stories. They're fascinated by them. And the reason is because you are not just a meat puppet walking around.

Yeah. You're a spiritual, physical being. You're made in the image of God. And he put eternity in the hearts of men. Yes. Ecclesiastes tells us. And so, you know, it's completely, we should expect, given that that's true, that people would be interested in spiritual things.

Yes. Now, the problem is that when people fell into sin, sin corrupted every good thing that God made. And so our spiritual interest, which is we should. should have an interest in worshiping the true and living God in word and spirit, well, it gets corrupted and we start to, you know, sometimes metal into spiritual world that is not actually good. It's evil. One of the things that the scriptures forbid are things like necromancy, mediumship, talking with the dead, all that sort of stuff. And Robert Bigelow, clearly the doorway for him, or at least a lot of people speculate the doorway for him. He's very private. He doesn't do a lot of interviews

or anything. But it was death in his family, and he wanted to see what happens. Yeah. And I would say, Bigelow, if you ever listen to this, repent and believe the gospel. And then you'll find out. Yeah. You can actually find out for free on a Sunday in many locations across America. What happens after you die. You can actually ascend to the heavenly Mount Zion. Yeah. And surrounded by festal shout and angels. Yes. Great cloud of witnesses and worship the true and living God. Yes. Like for free. And learn about the faith once for all delivered to the same who will inherit the earth. For free. For free. You only even have to buy a strange ranch to contact weird things. Yes. It's for free. It's amazing. The elites don't want you to know this. The elites don't want

you to know this or you literally can. Oh, anyway. So Robert Bigelow buys the ranch. And then you can see this in a lot of his business stuff, Ben. I think, I think this shows up that he's he's kind of a systematic scientific. He has a great respect for what we call the scientific method. Yeah. Very interested. And so he found the National Institute for Discovery Science. Ben, can you tell us maybe a little bit about? Yeah. I mean, I think the best thing to do would just be to read their mission statement. Yeah. So the National Institute for Discovery Science or NIDS is a privately funded Science Institute engaged in research of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations, and other related anomalous phenomena. Note that they think those things are related, which is already interesting.

So they wanted to collect eyewitness accounts from as many people as possible. And they go on to say that NIDS maintains a large database of anomalous activity and investigates reports whenever possible using a combination of high-quality ex-law enforcement investigative teams and contract research involving nationally accredited labs in the veterinary, biological, chemical, and material sciences. The results of these investigations are published in peer-reviewed journals on the NIDs website. So basically, imagine you have this interest in the paranormal. You also have a real respect for the scientific method, observation, data collection, analysis, etc.

Yep. And then you also have enough money to put together every boy's dream, which is like the greatest ghost hunting, beast hunting team in the world. Yes. So this guy has the means and he thinks that it's a worthy cause. And so what he does is he's like, well, hey, if you've ever had a strange experience, we want to know about it. And if it's, and here's, I'll do you one better.

If it's good enough, if it's compelling enough, we will come to you and investigate it. If it's recurring, we will come to you and investigate it. Really, one of the biggest things to note is that NIDS started off with this blanket assumption that UAP's unexplained aerial phenomena and animal mutilations were inextricably linked. Yeah. Which is a huge theme of this show, of Skinwalker Ranch in general, and we'll get into that more. And then one of the other things that they started to really hone in on is this tendency of these type of events when they happen in high quantity in areas, it almost seems like there is an intelligence that knows what's going on, at least somewhat. or even omnisciently in the area.

So why don't you tell us more about that, Brian? Yeah, yeah. So the team here, and some of the, we're going to talk about some of the conclusions they drew, the team that they assembled were, if you look at one of the books that we've referenced several times, The Hunt for the Skinwalker. It's written by a guy named Colm Keller, George Knapp. George Knapp. Knap is a journalist.

If I'm not mistaken, I think that's the category you'd put it in. He's an investigative journalist. Yeah, there you go. So he's a writer, investigative journalist. Colm Keller is a scientist. I think he was a biologist, but he was with Nids. And he was with Nidz. So Nids assembled this team that includes guys like John Alexander,

who's an ex-military colonel. And John Alexander, the guy who inspired the book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Yes. The book and the movie, which is kind of a playful take on his stuff. But John Alexander's this, we could do a whole episode on John Alexander. Yes. Like he's in, he investigates and studies things like remote viewing.

This is government-funded research into remote viewing. The government literally, we're going to talk about that in some episode. You got a guy like Comkeller, you've got Robert Bigelow owns it. There's this whole team of scientists that are assembled, and some of them are known. It's important to understand as well that some of them intentionally remained anonymous. So their credentials would be listed, things like that, but they remain anonymous because it's very controversial. Yeah. To study paranormal things.

scientific. Remember, this is contract work. So these guys aren't thinking like, oh, I'm going to retire here and get a pension. This is, I'm going to spend maybe two years here and then I'm going to move on to something else. Yes. When they move on, they have to still be respected. Yeah, they can't be like, well, there's the weird UFO guy. Like everywhere he walks in, people play the theorem and music. The X-Files theme. You know, like the X-Files theme. Yeah. So these guys would write peer-reviewed papers. They published a lot of their material. It's very meticulous. You can go read it. We're accessing a lot of their website stuff because they stopped really functioning as a continuing. organization in like 2004, the wayback machine captured their whole website. So you can go look at their personnel mission statement, a lot of their writings, and that sort of thing does still exist out there on the web. Yes. What this team of scientists quickly began to realize really was two main things. One of them was that their initial goal of coming in and they thought,

because of all the activity they've been cited by so many different credible witnesses, they were going to immediately come in and capture reams of video, audio, and another scientifically viable evidence of paranormal activity. Right. That maybe would be open to saying like the typical,

well, that's not the UAP, that's the planet Venus, whatever. But at least to be on video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'd be able to capture it. The first thing they found is that that was very frustrating. Right. 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, 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 cosmot in Dallas, Texas, who needs some work done on your residential or commercial roof, or maybe there's been a recent hailstorm 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.

www.rusroofing.com. That's www. russsroofing.com or call Russ himself at 940-395-9-413. Again, that's 940-395-9-4-13. That was an incorrect assumption. They were so frustrated because of the second thing. thing that they found. And the second thing that they found is that the ranch was Disneyland for paranormal activity. But that it was messing with them. Right. And it wanted to make it, they thought, very difficult to capture the things that they were seeing in a scientifically

viable way beyond just eyewitness reports. But in the most frustrating way, it's not that nothing was happening. It's that everything was happening at the wrong time. Yeah. Yeah. And so they concluded, well, I'd say they had a tentative, hesitant hypothesis, is that they were dealing with what Colonel John Alexander coined a, what was a pre-cognitive intelligence. Ben, can you read, there's a quote there from the, I believe this is from Hunt for the Skinwalker, but it might be from a George Knapp article. It's from, it's George Knapp quoting John Alexander. There we go. in some, in one of his works. And he says, quote, I came up with a term for it.

I called it a precognitive, sentient intelligence. It certainly seemed to be intelligent. And it seemed to know what we were going to do before we did it. What? Like, let that sink in, please. Just think about, this guy is like an actual scientist. Yeah. Who's trusted by the U.S. government, which doesn't, I know that.

I know. Yeah. Anyway, presumably in the late 90s, that meant a little bit more. Let me put my chin full hat on. It actually just say, probably a reptilian. Okay, taking it off now. I'm kidding. But imagine, this is what it would be like.

You wake up in the morning and you're like, man, I really want some bacon. And then your kitchen starts cooking bacon for you. You walk down, your kitchen's already cooking bacon. Right. You're like, wait a minute. That's a very nice precognitive. Right, that would be like a benevolent one. This one was more malicious and that it knew.

What John is saying is that the ranch, I'm just going to personify it, call it the ranch, knew that they wanted strange things to happen. But the ranch also knew that they wanted to observe, record, quantify, measure it, collect data on it. So what the ranch would do is say, well, I'm still going to do all these things, but I'm going to do it in between equipment being set up. Or I'm going to mess up the equipment so they can't collect the data. Or I'm only going to do it to this one guy who's like walking over there to go pee or something. I'm going to wait until the NIDS team leaves to go do other stuff.

Because they investigated, we'll still talk about, they investigated areas of New Mexico and other areas as well. And then Tom Sherman stayed on. This is a key point, I forgot to say. Tom Sherman, the ranch, the ranch, the rancher. Previous owner. He stayed on to manage the cattle because they actually saw the cattle as an important sort of living biosensor. You can't just get rid of the cattle. They thought, well, a lot of the activities centered around cattle.

So let's keep him on. They hired him. And he did stay on. So stuff would happen. We'll describe stories where Tom. Tom Sherman would be the only one there. And he's like, you gotta be kidding. Are you kidding me?

Like I sold this for me. We have the Jurassic Park team. Yeah. And they go to New Mexico to study, you know, alien stuff there. And then five minutes later, we get another orb. You know, an orb is driving my cattle off a cliff. We'll talk about that. Anyway, so this Nid's team, they say that, like, that Bigelow was so serious that he constantly drilled them on

adhering to the scientific method, his science advisory board, they had a science advisory board that would like oversee and say, are you doing the investigation seriously? Correctly. And they would hold their feet. They did not want to be a crackpot organization. They wanted it to be completely documented. And so that brings us this story that we told in the cold open. Because that's really an example of the kind of phenomena that led them, Colonel Alexander and others, who have investigated the ranch as well. Yeah. To this sort of like, well, they throw their hands up and they say,

it seems like there's this precognitive, sentient entity that is literally messing with us. The thing that I can't get around with the cold open story, if you remember, they set up the cameras, three of them went off at the same time. Another camera filmed those cameras. Yeah. And at the time they went off,

they saw the power light shut off, but they didn't see who or what had messed up all the wiring at the bottom of the pole. Here's my question, Brian, maybe you know this. Did they ever get footage that showed like the wire was good and then it was bad now? Or could they, or was it too grainy to tell? They just still couldn't tell. It was too grainy.

The best they could see is the light that showed when the camera shut off. Okay. So they know the moment that it happened. It lost power. The wiring was destroyed. Right. But nothing came up. It's actually important to understand.

I don't think they mentioned it as much. the way these cameras were filming is not 24, 30 frames a second. They were filming on a time lapse mode. Yeah. But that might make you think like a picture every... Because they're filming literally for a year. Yeah. So you might think that's how could they do that.

They're obviously not doing 4K 60 frames a second for the absolute state of the hard drive. Yeah. The terabytes that would be required. But it wasn't like once every minute. We're talking like a frame every second. Or, you know, there were a couple modes, but they were still, like, a second or less. Still robust.

So what this means is that whatever did whatever to the cameras, or to the wires, I should say, did it instantaneously. Instantaneously. But, I mean, either it was able to move into the dimension where time didn't matter. Sure, yeah. Or like, it's the flash, and it can do it between frames. It could have been a missing time, what we perceive as a missing time kind of thing. but to whatever entity, if there is an entity

doing any of this at all. Right, if you believe the stories. If you believe any of this at all where they're able to step into a separate dimension where time is more measurable, almost like a space dimension, like length, width, and height. Yeah, and they're able to step in see time.

Yeah. So they can almost pause it. Anyway. Yeah, they can like pause it. The point is, whatever did this had to be big enough, it's going to show up on a camera. I mean, this was like intelligent activity.

directed. It knew what they were trying to do. Yeah. That's the key. It knew what they were trying to do. It knew what a camera was. We'll get into the, we're going to get, like, we're going to keep touching on that a little later. Remind me to ask you a question that I have about this whole pretty cognitive intelligence thing. Because I think it's really key, but one of the, one of the, one of the major themes that we absolutely have already touched on and have to get more into is the cattle stuff. Yeah. The cattle injuries. Because remember, they noticed that the Sherman's were operating a legit ranch when all this stuff was taking place. So like actual good scientists, they don't want to mess stuff up.

They have to maintain the control group, so to speak. So the ranch is still a functioning cattle ranch. Tom Sherman is still on it. And you have all of these crazy stories about cattle mutilations, cattle going missing, and then helicopters spying on the ranch and stuff like that. So let's talk about some of those. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about some of those. Those are exciting.

Because we've got that, you know, well, I know, just I know we've made this connection. So one thing that does interest me, and we need to keep moving and talk about that, but I keep coming back to this moment in Acts 16. Like 16, 16 to like 24 or so, where Paul and Silas are going to a place of prayer, and they're met by a slave girl. And Luke tells us the slave girl had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling. Yes.

Okay, she follows Paul around. Paul gets annoyed with her because she kept crying out, these men are servants of the most high God who proclaimed to you the way of salvation. It's almost like God is forcing the spirit of divination to proclaim the gospel. Yes, almost like Saul's visit to the witch at Indoor. Exactly.

It's like he just enslaves the powers and forces them to do his will. Just like when the demons encounter Jesus and they're like, we know who you are. Please don't send us to the Tartarus. Just like black holes. I mean, we're just going to move on. So Paul cast this demon out. He commands the spirit of divination in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her,

and it came out of her that very hour. And he says it was greatly annoyed, which is one of my favorite lines. The owners are all mad that their hope of gain was gone. They seized Paul and Silas. They drag one in the marketplace. They throw them in prison. Anyway, but that story, what is that? Yeah.

It's some kind of spirit that is able to do some sort of fortune telling. Right. And divination is almost exclusively talked about in a negative light in Scripture. The only exceptions I can think of are Joseph's Diviners' Cup in Egypt. And I think that Daniel's dream interpretation is referred to as divination at one point. But I could be wrong about that. In both of those cases are areas where the people of God are going into pagan realms and sort of using the language of the pagan. Scripture makes clear that it's not the sinful divination.

Right. These aren't necromancy like a calling out of the pagan realms. to the bat to the evil spirits. So I just want to like put a little pin on the map. Yeah. In the conspiracy red thread going everywhere, a guy shaking his hands. Yes.

And just say, I would call Acts 16 and say that if you were, if a pagan were to show up in a scientist lab coat and say, what was that? Before Paul showed up, he would have said, well, that's kind of like a pre-cognitive, sentient intelligence. Yes.

It's divination. I mean, so this is a theme you're going to see. through haunted cosmos. Yeah. We have pagans, often, trying to describe with the language of science and technology things that are fundamentally spiritual.

Exactly. Fundamentally spiritual. Anyway, I'll also just put a pin in something real. We really do you need to move on. But here's the thing. This is our show. People will listen to a three hour

Honest cosmos because they're fussing about it coming out every two weeks. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So let's give them like a six hour. I wish we could do it every week. Yeah, guys. Anyway, so

you have the problem. of it being localized. It's on the ranch. This was the same thing with Mothman and Point Pleasant. Like, why was it localized? Yeah. And you get into this idea

that like, well, is it sort of a talisman? Did the Navajo create a talisman here? But then you're like, well, talisman, that doesn't seem like we have scriptural precedence for that.

I'm not saying we do, but I'm saying don't be so quick to say that. Yeah. I mean, Samson's hair. Yeah, we have examples. Samson's hair.

I'm not saying that God, like, you know, wasn't powerful enough to make him strong without the hair. What I'm saying is that in God's providence, to teach Samson lessons, to discipline his children. Yeah. God placed Samson's strength in his hair. Yeah. God did that.

He created a talisman is what happened, such that when Delilah cut off his hair, his strength waned. And so the idea that some spiritual power, whether it's, you know, evil or good, could attach itself to a physical thing is not unprecedented. Yeah, that's not, and it's also not unprecedented for pagans to give names to spiritual things that are just their name for it. Exactly. Like a talisman, a curse. Exactly.

You know, a gin living in a lamp. I mean, which we're going to do a gin episode at some point. Yeah, we got to do a gin. You know, cursed objects. These are, yeah. These are things where don't hear us saying the pagans got it all right, but do hear us saying the pagans are explaining spiritual phenomena using whatever vocabulary they have, whether that's Bronze Age, yeah, Canaanites or.

or or 2022 lab coat wearing nid scientists. Exactly. You know, they're using, they are using the best they have to try and explain reality. Yes. I just wanted to put that in there because I've been thinking about it more. Like, what about this whole attachment to a thing? Yeah. Uh, situation.

Anyway. So continuing. The ranch continues to have issues with cattle mutilation and all sorts of things. There's one account where this is, again, this is in 97. So Nidz is involved at this point. August of 97. And Sherman, Mr. Sherman, finds that the cows are startled by something.

So he's managing the ranch, and the cows, he noticed, are stampeding south. In such a panic. And by the way, guys, if you don't know cows, cows don't like to run. No. In fact, cows will die if they run. They seldom run.

Very long. Right. They literally will just fall down and die. They get excited, and they become prone to lung infections. specifically in other sorts of maladies. So they run so hard, they break a fence line, like getting all cut up, running through fences, and they go into the neighbor's ranch area, which is an alfalfa field.

And now, so there's another, they're fleeing some kind of danger from the looks of it. But then there's this other danger to talk, to Sherman, he's saying, he's a rancher. He's like, alfalfa can kill cows. Right. He's concerned about, A, the cows have probably like, you know, like you said, cut themselves up by committing to running through this fence. And now they're at risk of eating a bunch of alfalfa if they choose to stop there.

Right. And they'll die. And the sun's setting, like, it's late in the day. Yep. Tom and his son Tad are trying to herd the cows back, but it's something, it's, they're, they're out of control. They're panic. They're losing their mind.

They're very stressed. This will come up in, in the next, in part three. Yeah, foreshadowing. That actually stress can kill a cow as well. Yeah. An acute stressor is very dangerous. So Tom finds that there's like an area that they won't, that they won't go between them and the ranch.

The cows have fled, and now there's like a boundary. or forcefield and they're they will not come back. So he tries hurting them in a different direction, going east instead of north. Dude, this reminds me of the zone of fear with keel in the mothfish. I just thought of this. Do you guys remember that? The road where he wouldn't in the night? He waited till the sun came up to go across.

Wait a minute. Because he was like the zone of the cows found us. It was it was a zone of fear. They found it. They are John Keel. They are the same. Okay. Like you, like another bill.

He took a step. He would get panicked. And he would have to back up. Okay, another biblical connection. Uh-huh. Balim's donkey could see the angel. Oh, and he wouldn't go. Like this is now at this point. I'm just saying. No, no, no. This is the best biblical example we have of something like this. Whoa. And also Exodus 4, Zipporah, the bridegroom of blood. Moses is out of the picture in that story somehow. And God had come to kill Moses, which, by the way, weird is. It's very weird story. But God had come to kill Moses and Zapurorah. Porah is the one that circumcises his son.

Moses is somehow immobilized, and people, commentators will often compare it to Balaam's donkey. Interesting. Saying that Moses was experiencing some either like paralytic fear and he was completely unable to move because he was so afraid. So anyway, keep going to the story, but that connection just leapt out of me. Dude, I love that. Of Bailom's donkey and John Keel, again, look at all the, everything is, there's threads that run through creation. I love that. in the story of history.

But continue the story for us, Ben. Sure. So he tries hurting the cattle in a different direction because they're not going to go into that one spot, the area of fear. So he goes east instead of north. He's like, all right, we're going to go the long way. Pythagoras rolls over in his grave. But all of a sudden, okay,

is he's starting to do this. A golf ball-sized blood-red ball flies into view and shoots at them from the nearby creek. It misses Tom's horse by inches, okay? and then the horse starts freaking out and starts running. The cows are now bellowing in a crazed fear. They're even more afraid now. Also, like a massive or a golf ball size red ball flies at you.

Let's just not gloss past that. That's really weird. Come on. One of his prized bulls is going insane with fear. Super valuable animal. Yeah, very bad. Just like in part one. I think we emphasized well the value of those animals.

So Tom, he's like, okay, what the heck is happening? This golf ball thing just tried to kill my horse. but he's like no time to think about that. I'm worried about the cattle. And then as he's trying to herd them again, as he's like collecting himself, another red orb flies at his horse, and Tom loses all semblance of control over the horse,

which flees towards the canyon. So Tom is on the back of this horse, and now he's like, I guess I'm running to the canyon now. So 10 yards before the horse is going to jump off the canyon's edge, like off of a cliff, Tom flings himself off. He jumps off the horse. barely misses going over the edge.

The horse miraculously falls 20 feet, but isn't injured. So the horse actually runs off this edge. Yeah, it goes, and you'd think it would die. That's how scared the horse was of this thing that was chasing. It was willing to just die. It was like, I'll jump. It's like the pigs when Legion invades the herd of pigs, and they're like, I'll just die. The connections.

Right. So Tom sees two red orbs floating around the now stampeding cattle. he's trying to herd them towards the creek the cows stampede off of a 15 foot embankment into the creek several cows and calves lie injured stuck in the mud

broken legs can't get out of the water they're still afraid and Tom just has to go home yeah he's like he finally I mean he's trying to get him sorted but he's like okay I'm going to regroup his son Tad his young his son is out there

who's very helpful like not a young young lad like older son able to help yeah so there They're like, he's going to go regroup. It's now two in the morning. Remember, this started before the sun went down. It's been seven hours that they've been trying. Like, we just passed over at three minutes.

This had been seven full hours or so of the cattle between the cattle being startled. And him returning back to sort of like regroup, he meets his wife over there. And he's like, hey, this is what happened. The loss was not as bad as he expected. He'd gone down to the creek. And some of the calves had some broken legs. There were some lost animals. but it seemed like most of the cows were actually going to make it.

And they were calm now. They were calming down. And then his wife, he's telling his wife all this. And all of a sudden, Mrs. Sherman, she points out to the fence line up south where this is all happened. And their son, Tad, is climbing over the fence on their way back. And they both see this red orb hovering 10 feet over his head. Yeah. Of course, Mrs. Sherman is frantic.

She screams. Yeah. When she notices it and screams, the orb all of a sudden buzzes low over the ground and starts shooting towards them. And so now they're like, oh, great. I guess this is it. I guess we die. And the Nid's team is going to come and investigate our dead bodies. All right.

Probably mutilated. They'd probably actually call the police, I guess. Nids wouldn't be like, we have jurisdiction. Oh, this is interesting. So, but the red orb, it buzzes over their head, flies off into the western sky and disappears. Now, when Tad, they're in a truck, by the way, they're right by the truck. When Tad, he's now got over the fence, he didn't really notice, walks towards them, they tell him, like, what happened. And they say, all right, let's just, like, hide in the truck.

Maybe Red Orbs can't get into trucks. I don't know, which actually not a bad instinct. I mean, look, when you're scared at night, you hide into the covers. Humans, like, we just think that things keep us safe. In the black-eyed kid stuff, which will probably do at some point, I mean, the guy in the car, it's like, can I get a ride, let me in the car? Maybe the threshold. It's some barrier of entry actually usually is helpful. So they sit in the car for maybe half hour and nothing happens.

So Tom Sherman says, I'm going to go check on the irrigation gates. He's got to lift them, change the flow of the water. There's still ranch stuff to do. And if you are into farming and ranching, like you know it never stops. It's middle of the night. It doesn't matter. He missed seven hours of work. You can't just.

Yeah. Now he's not going to get sleep. He's like, all right, I guess I'm working. So he goes out. And it takes him about five minutes to change the flow of the irrigation. He takes a shortcut from the truck past the old homestead house. He goes past the old homest. It's this abandoned ramshackle ranch house.

And he goes and does it, comes back. And as he meets his wife where he told her to meet him, again, she goes, look at that. She points. And he follows her hand, which is trembling. And there in the distance over the ramshackle ranch house is the bowling ball size blue ore. that they saw right before their dogs got melted.

Yeah. So now they're like, well, again, we're about to be turned into dog butter. Right. It was three dogs before. Now it's going to be three people. Three people. And they're going to just find greasy little piles of Sherman. Well, it seemed to notice the orb that they had noticed it.

And it darted to hide behind the house. So they finally, I mean, they finally, there's like, whatever, we're going home. Yeah. They go back to their house. Tom calls the Nids team because they'd been investigating elsewhere. And he's like, you got to come back. Yeah. They come back.

But again, the Nid's team. Just unbelievable. They couldn't document any of this. My question, so the orb notices them. Yeah. Flees behind the house. Why would the orb flee behind the house? My big question with all of this is why does the, why does the precognitive sentient intelligence do this?

I know. What is the end game here? Like, is the goal to do? just try and terrify people and make them feel helpless. Like, no one's going to believe me. I can't measure this thing. Like, it's happening. Is the goal to drive people insane?

Or is the goal to deceive the most number of people is possible? Yeah. You know? Because if the goal is to deceive the max number of people, then why wouldn't it let itself be measured and quantified and recorded and all this stuff? Right. Especially by people that think that all this is neutral. Right.

but if the goal is to plant the seed of fear and despair in just a few people yeah well then of course you wouldn't want it to be measured right yeah I also think that there's an element and we're going to do a conclusions at the end

of part three yeah we're just like asking questions at this point I just think there's something there with imitation of technology I have a connection there's a doctor who actually episode where these alien orbs show up

and they're like these little machines. And I just think like they keep showing it because the ball of light was like this plasma lava lampy sort of buzzing electrical sort of thing. So you could look at that and a lot of people do look at this and they say extraterrestrial technology. And I'm just saying we're going to get more into that.

Now there's a report. We're going to share this report. It's fairly dry reading. I have it in the notes here with the link. From the way back archive again. This is a report that Nids did on some unusual animal injuries in Cash County, Utah. So this wasn't just on the ranch. There were other ranchers who were involved that reported strange injuries. You can go look at pictures of the injuries the cattle had where they'd have like a big puncture hole on their jugular area. It was bleeding. There was some where they were

convinced that the udders of the milk cows were being literally drained. Yeah, like what? Okay, not through the, not through the teats, but through like holes. Thanks for calling them teeth. Yeah, I mean, that's what they are. That's just be active. Through the holes that they're cutting into the cow. Yeah, like boring in. Okay, then the weirdest one, though.

And again, like there could be natural explanation for this. I don't know. But when you combine it with the strange exanguinating sharp instrument, instantaneous cattle mutilation stuff that happens on the Skinwalker Ranch, there was one where the cow, and it's a classic moo cow. with the black and white. Yeah, the black and white splotches. I mean, just, it's the black and white.

Everyone's favorite cow. And on the back of this animal, there's this, like, scabbing horrible injury lesion. Yeah. And it's only on the white portion of the fur. What you're like, why? Yeah, why? It's like perfectly follows the white and leaves the black area alone. It stays, like, consistently an inch away from the black fur.

And you go, maybe there's, like, some kind of parasite that it sees it as a barrier. I don't know, maybe natural explanation. We'll link to that report. Just know there's a ton more. We literally would have to do a six-hour episode to talk about all of the weird cattle. When it comes to the lesions that doesn't go in the black, inside of me there are two wolves.

One of them is like, it's just trying to mess with you. It's just showing you its power, that kind of thing. Like how detailed and precise it can be. The other one, though, is saying, like, I wonder if there's a difference in chemical structure depending on fur color. that would resist a parasite or some sort of skin-eating virus.

But I don't think there would be. I don't think color would change a chemical. Anyway, that's just... And you can read the transcripts of the report where the cattle rancher, they had a hotline where people could call in to NIDS. That's great. And report things.

And so the cattle rancher, it's a hilarious conversation because it's clearly like a ranch guy. He's like a rancher talking to this lab coat scientist. And the thing that you see through all these is that it was unusual. These are cattle ranchers for years and years and years. The reason they're calling the huntline is because this is not normal.

Like this is, they know, when you've dealt with one animal breed, branching it for profit, where you are very concerned with its health, you get to know pretty much every common malady. Yeah. You know, like, what to look for. And so they called in because they're going, this is weird. Yeah. They know animal predation in the signs of animal predation. They know common parasites and sicknesses.

Now, Ben, I added another section to our notes, literally while you were doing the cold open. Okay. And it's because I remembered it and I went, we have to talk about this. What is it? I'm going to read to you because the connection here, I'll explain the connection first. I'm going to read it to you. It's an excerpt from the George Knapp article, part two of the George Knapp article. It connects to the difficulty they had in documenting the bizarre activity.

So he said, quote, Nid's attempts to measure this range of bizarre activity were unsuccessful. And he's talking about cattle mutilation, specifically in weird animal stuff. He continues. If success is defined by data published in a scientific journal or even data that could be presented to a panel of mainstream scientists, the weird animals observed in late 1994 and in March 1997, felt, so this is both pre-NIDS and when Nid's was there. Yep. He said felt and smelled like real physical animals.

He's talking about the wolf specifically. Okay. And then this other account. But their response to bullets fired from high-powered rifles was unquestionably different from that of any creatures known to science. I personally witnessed the shooting of a large cat-like animal from a tree. It was 40 to 50 yards away and am certain the bullet hit its target. I was just a few yards away when an unknown dog-like animal,

weighing an estimated 400 pounds, was pierced by bullets fired by an experienced. marksman yet no body and no blood were found after both of these incidents the only physical evidence was a single claw mark left in the snow the saga of the bulletproof wolf is likewise difficult to interpret in short after several years of the he says gorman family but that was their cover name the sherman family trauma and focus and of focus nids investigation we managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena or at least no physical evidence that could be considered as conclusive proof of anything this was in spite of hundreds of days of human monitoring and several years of camera surveillance. Actually, I said that wrong. That was Colm Keller. Okay. Okay. Not nap. Not nap. So that was... Colm Kellerer scientist. He was the guy doing the work. He's like, look, we saw a 400-pound dog-like creature and we shot it with a high-powered rifle from 50 yards, which for a high-powered rifle, 50 yards is point-blank range.

For me to you. It's easy. Yeah. He's like, we didn't miss. Right. Nothing. It just leaves. Again. Again. So you have, these are, these are credible, by all counts, credible witnesses. They're seeking to do, say what you will about the whole like materialistic science stuff. It's dumb, okay? But one thing these guys aren't generally are like hyperbalizers. Right. At least they're using the tools they have and they know.

Right. And if anything, they tend to understate things. Now, especially when they're committed to being skeptics. Let me connect another one. This is the Knapp article. Now I had them backwards. This is the nap article. he says this one is his craziest.

He says, of all the strange incidents at the ranch, this one may take the prize. It occurred on the night of March 12, 97. Barking dogs alerted the team of something lurking near, or in a tree near the ranch house. Tom Gorman grabbed a hunting rifle, again, Tom Sherman, and took off in his truck toward the tree. Two Nid staffers followed in another vehicle. Up in the tree branches, they could make out a huge set of yellowish reptilian eyes. Oh my gosh. The head of this animal had to be three feet wide, they guessed.

Because of the eye spacing. Right. At the bottom of the tree was something else. Gorman described it as huge and hairy with massively muscled front legs and a dog-like head. Now, you're going to keep reading, but I'm unsure if this is the same situation, because this is from two different sources. And I'm unsure if Napp is describing the Kelleher thing I just read or if this is a different scenario. It could be the same, but he says, Gorman, who was a crack shot,

fired at both figures from a distance of 40 yards. The creature on the ground seemed to vanish. The thing in the tree apparently fell to the ground because Gorman heard it as it landed heavily in patches of snow below. All three men ran through the pasture and scrub brush, chasing what they thought was a wounded animal, but they never found the animal and saw no blood either. A professional tracker was brought in the next day to scour the area.

Nothing. But there was... a physical clue left behind. This is the same account. At the bottom of the tree, they found in photographed a weird footprint, or rather a claw print. The print left in the snow was from something large.

It had three digits with what they guessed were sharp claws on the end. Later analysis and comparison of the print led them to find a chilling similarity. The print from the ranch closely resembled that, okay, this is, it closely resembled that of a velociraptor. Oh my gosh. An extinct dinosaur. For the record, no one at Nids is saying he's shot a Velociraptor.

They just don't know what it was, end quote. What? Okay, that was the same. I should have framed that better. Those were the same accounts. But, hey, I'll tell you what, though. Skin Walker confirmed. Like, skinwalker confirmed.

Let's just say, I have no commentary on that. That's insane. Rather than, it's like the immortal wolf. I say, number one, why? Yeah, right. But number two, the only options that I can figure out about the veracity. of the story is that either it happened. Right.

Or these men were high on, I guess there's three, or these men were all high on mushrooms. Or they're making it all. And they all had the same trip. They would have all had to have the same trip. Or they're making it up. Yeah, or they're just completely making, which doesn't seem on brand.

It reminds me of the story from one of the security guys for the Nid's team. He visited the ranch after his tenure. And he was kind of, you know, walking around showing the current owners, and we'll talk more about them in part three, but he was showing the current owner owners like where some weird stuff had happened that he had seen. He was just a security guy. Yeah. Like he wasn't a scientist, okay? Yeah.

All he was trying to do was make sure no one invaded the property to vandalize or hoax. And then also that animals would stay away who could potentially hurt the cattle. Yeah. That was his whole thing. And he would always have it aside a big German shepherd, like canine dog, German. Sherman Shepherd. These dogs are big, right? And they're, and they're pretty aggressive. And he was talking about how he and his friend one day were doing their patrols and he looks out into the distance on the path. So it's not like in the brush or anything. And he sees a massive dog cross the road.

Massive dog. And he's like, what the heck is that thing? He's thinking obviously it's a wolf, right? Even though they're still so rare in Utah to have wolves. Okay. And so he's like, all right, we got to investigate. he draws his weapon, going up with his dog to check out the space. The wolf comes back out onto the road. I'm on the edge of my sea right now. Right. Literally. The wolf comes back out onto the road and just starts walking in the same direction as him.

So he's in front of him, walking ahead of him. Like it's leading him? Yeah, like it's leading. Okay. No sense of urgency. No aggression. Dog's like, I am not scared. The dog's like, you can do nothing to me.

And just continues walking about 20 or so paces in front of this guy until finally they make it to the fence line and this thing just walks off the property. Like no big deal. He never sees it again. But here's what he did. Because he went back, it was a relatively wet day, and so one portion of the path had some muddy spots.

Yeah. And this thing, this wolf thing, had walked through it. So he goes, all right, I'm going to go check out the tracks. He goes, checks out the track, and he has his canine dog, his German Shepherd, adult German Shepherd walk beside this other dog's track. Yeah. His goal was to compare stride lengths.

Yeah. Okay? Makes sense. So there's a big, like over a hundred pound German Shepherd. He takes a picture comparing the stride lengths. This thing's stride was at least three times as long as a full grown adult German Shepherd. My grandma bred German Shepherds for Schutzund and canine training for a long time. So I've been around a lot of full size.

They're large, scary dogs. So imagine one that is at least, okay, three times as big. Get out of it. And then it gets better. It gets better. How could it get better? So he sees this. He's a little freaked out, but he's mostly just relieved.

He's like, okay, well, I'm alive. I'm glad it's gone, and I'm glad it didn't seem to be aggressive. Yeah. Well, then his buddy, who was on patrol with him, had gone up, had started walking up the mesa. It's like a scree field of big rocks. So he's walking up the mesa. and he gets to the spot where he just kind of happens to look down into a gap in the rocks. Yeah.

It's sunny enough to where he can look in and see a couple of strange items. And so he calls his friend up, the same guy that had just seen this wolf. And he's like, hey, you should come check this out. So he makes his way up the Macy, joins this guy. Was it us recording Hanna Cosmos in a cave? Dude, it may as well have been. Okay. I'm sorry.

That was first thing that came to mind. It was us talking about the mothman. in the cave on Skimwalker Ranch. Unbelievable. Meta. Fideachian. So he goes up, he gets to the top of this boulder where his buddy is, and he's pointing into this, you know, like a pseudo cave.

Yeah, yeah. He looks in and he sees two massive dog traps. What? And when I say dog traps. Like those claw traps? The claw traps that you would like, like a bear trap. They were the size of the bear trap. Like from fox and hound.

Yes. But it was even bigger than that. Like bigger than a bear trap. the connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The animated cartoon kind of takes the winds out of my sales game. From when your second grade. Right. Spooky. Okay, keep going. So he sees this demon dog,

this demon wolf thing. And then his, I mean, in the same day, his friend calls him up and he's like, those are the two biggest traps I've ever seen. And there was like dog fur around them. Unbelievable. Isn't that just like what? And this guy, he's

recounting the story. And it's as if it's just, yeah, that was Tuesday. Yeah. This happened. Like it, it was weird, but that's just what happens. Now, another element of this precognitive, sentient intelligence that I think is worth noting another wrinkle that is, again, unverifiable.

You literally cannot document that type of phenomena we're about to tell the story of. Yeah. Is that it actually seemed to have similar to injured cold with Woody Dernberger. That's a good connection. The ability to invade the mind. Yeah. So a team of NID scientists were performing a night study in one of the fields. I think it was the eastern field.

And it's the middle of June. It's actually a lovely night. You know in Utah in the middle of June. Beautiful. It's like it's warm, but it's crisp in the air. Stars out there. Stars out there are insane, especially in Ballard, Utah. Like there's no light pollution.

It's wonderful. And so the way that they had set it up was they had two people that were in the tree line and they were looking out in the field. and then they had two people in the field. Now, it was pitch black, but they had night vision goggles. So they were able to see what was going on, and then they also had dogs with them as biosensors. Remember, they want to use the animals,

not only for protection, but also as biosensors. They've noticed that dogs and cows are able to pick on stuff that's going on. This will be a theme in part three as well. And so right out the gate, nothing really is happening. This one guy, you know, he has a fancy camera, and he's ready to take like high-res long-exposure pictures and stuff that's going on, but nothing's really happening. Well, then stuff starts going down.

And to start, I'm going to quote from George Knapp's book. He says, quote, Then it appeared without warning. No more than 75 yards to our left. A silent, brightly lit sphere of bluish-white light about the size of a basketball hovered, moving slightly as if swaying gently. The dogs, which were behind us,

seemed to notice its abrupt appearance. The object was not more than 15 feet off the ground. It appeared to be bobbing slightly and was bright enough that I could see the grass lit up below it. So they see this orb, the dogs are alerted, and so the man with the camera is ready to start taking pictures. But then, then it immediately vanished. As quick as it appeared, it vanished.

It went away. They had seen it for long enough to get it in their night vision goggles, but not long enough to capture it on camera. So what they did was they had this incredible flashlight with them called a maxabeme. And according to literature, you can, if you turn on the maxabeme and pitch black, you can read a newspaper from a mile away. Wow. You can notice a newspaper from a mile away. So they turn on this flashlight and it lights up the field.

And they're moving over this field. And George Knapp continues, quote, We walked over to the spot where the object had appeared and just as suddenly had disappeared. The dogs stuck close by our sides. They were not in the mood for playing, we noticed. We searched the area quickly for a few moments, but could find nothing. Slowly and warily, we walked back to our original position. My colleague was scanning the perimeter of the lush tree-lined pasture

with a pair of Generation 3 ITT night vision binoculars. These by-nose amplify ambient light, both in the visible and to a large extent in the infrared. I was reading the manual camera with a black-and-white infrared film when he exclaimed a blasphemy. He was looking through the night-vision binoculars. directly at the tree line, no more than 200 feet in front of us, all of the sudden he said, there's a huge black thing in the trees just in front of us, and it's moving north.

The man with the camera, the man recounting the story, gets his attention piqued, and he's ready. He's ready with the camera, and he's starting the long exposure shot over where his colleague is indicating, and his colleague continues. It's big, and I'm not sure if it's in the trees or behind the trees. It's blocking out the stars.

So you can imagine this man's shock, but he's ready and he's excited because he has the camera already taking an exposure. So he thinks if this thing's big and I'm using infrared film, we're going to see this. Yeah, like long exposure. Yeah. If it's blocking out the stars behind it and the sky, then we're going to get to see this. Unfortunately, his colleague started to add some comments. He said, it's still moving. And he was muttering the whole time.

Then all of a sudden his colleague exclaimed, it's got me. It's saying we're watching you. Then there was silence. I kept taking increasingly longer exposures to try and catch whatever it was he was talking about. I couldn't see what was causing him such intense anxiety. Remember, it's pitch black. My colleague's frantic actions and tone of voice increased my adrenaline. I knew that if something was out there in the dead of night, it wanted to harm us and we were sitting ducks.

Then he said, it's getting smaller. And then it's gone. But over and over, he kept muttering blasphemy. to himself. I asked him what had happened. He was still shaken. Something big was in the trees just in front of us. It blotted out all the stars through the binoculars, he declared. It took control of my mind. It told me it was watching us. He sounded confused and bewildered. I had worked closely with this guy on numerous occasions, and I knew he wasn't prone to sudden flights of imagination. It seemed to be over, so we started pacing the field again after my colleague had calmed down. The

Dogs were still on edge, to say the least. But as we did our sweep, we didn't notice anything. We were never able to capture these nighttime game players on film. They never showed up on the long exposures. It was an exhilarating but frustrating summer. 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,

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Again, that's the Psalmsproject.com slash haunted cosmos. Check it out today. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. That is so creepy. That is the element of mind invasion. Right.

It's speaking to him and it's telling him not like injured cold. Oh, I'm just, I come in peace. Don't worry. I'm here to help you. Tell me about your, look, where I live, we call a gathering a gathering. Right. It's like, no.

We're watching you. It says, I've got you. I've got you. I mean, demon confirmed. That's insane. And I do want to point out, so I said in there that he was using blasphemies. And we do, people do this all the time. Yeah.

But people do this all the time where something happens to like, oh, OMG, you know? Yeah. And the thing is, we can expect that it was there. that use of the name of God. Yeah, he was saying Jesus Christ over and over. Over and over and over again. But ultimately we don't know. We don't know what the tone of his voice was. We don't know what his motivation was.

But either way, it is interesting that whenever stuff like this happens, people go to the name of Christ. Yeah. Like he didn't just hit his elbow walking out the door to go to work and he angrily said it, you know. It was fear that was motivating him to commit these blasphemies. Or maybe they weren't blasphemies. or maybe they weren't blasphemies and where...

I actually don't know maybe he... Because some people are... You hear this in sleep paralysis, you hear this in all sorts of encounters with terrifying paranormal activity. People will often, even if they did not, like maybe they grew up Catholic or religious or something, but they're not actively, you know, they're not Christians.

Right. They'll often be led or feel the instinct to cry out to Jesus, to Jesus, to Jesus Christ, to say the Lord's Prayer. And I wonder, it's... ambiguous in that account, whether it was that instinct operating where he was like actually calling on Christ or if he was just using it as a blasphemy. Hopefully the first one.

Right. And it does go back to, you know, if we're being charitable and we say maybe that was the use, it goes back to Ecclesiastes telling us that God has placed eternity in man's heart. And when push comes to shove, when the plane's crashing, you're not praying to science. Yeah, you're not like, oh, save me the science. Save me peer-reviewed journal. You are, you come face to face with the reality of death. Yes.

With the reality of your curse and your sin. And you realize there is more to life than this. That's right. There is much more. And I think, I think, I like to think, to be honest, that that's what was happening. I hope so. I do too. But ultimately, we don't know for sure.

At any rate, that's an insane story. And it's really crazy. And connected to this, this is a, another element that you see with, with not just the paranormal activity at the ranch, but also with a lot of UAP, I always want to say United Aerial

phenomenon, unidentified aerial phenomenon or UFO activity, 995 flying objects. You see a lot of the time this psychic element where things communicate psychically with people, or even John Keel, again, the researcher from the Project

Blue Book, government-funded research that was also involved in the mothman flap. He's not involved in Skinwalker, but he would occasionally recount stories where either people that he interviewed or he himself had almost telepathically communicated with the aerial phenomena, where they would think things and it would seem to be responding to their thoughts, or getting in their head like that. And this will be a theme in the final episode of season one, episode 10. We're going to get into this in much more detail. Yes. Easter egg for that. Absolutely. Like just, again, another evidence that we're not merely talking about just naturalistic phenomena.

Exactly. We're talking about something that has a spiritual and psychical element to it. Yeah. So related to that, there was continued UAP activity at the Sherman Ranch. And it wasn't just the Sherman family. There was another story where the Sherman family had seen lots of unidentified flying objects above the ranch, not just the orbs, but all sorts of thing. But they weren't seeing like flying saucers, the disc with the bubble on top and the spaceman with the stereotypical drawing.

Take me to your leader. It wasn't that kind of thing. They had seen lots of, we'll talk about triangles, they like orb phenomena, things like that. But around the area, there were sightings of the classic saucer and disc thing that happened as well. One example was Mr. Gonzalez, who was a neighbor. He told the Nids team that he had seen an unidentified flying object that looked like a Mexican hat. So again, like almost the orb with the big bubble top thing. And he said it flew over his house. So sometimes people call them sombreros because they're like the dome on top.

Gonzalez and his family, they saw this disc and it was like, a silvery shiny disc he said and it gets weird he said it flew over their house and flew directly into the rocks of skinwalker ridge and then seemed to be absorbed into the rocks with no discernible impact explosion not like a plane hitting a mountain and blowing up not like well it's like it flew into it i almost said 9-11 but that was going to sound uh thank you for not However, it is a good image. No, it's actually, it's not a terrible description because if you look at a video of the plane hitting, it's like it disappears into it. But this was even more like it was as if the rocks didn't exist.

They just flew into it and merged with it. We could tell lots of stories of the similar thing that happened, but I want to go through a couple other types of craft they saw. So there's that, they saw black triangles. But put a pin on that. I was just going to say, put a pin in that idea of it passing specifically into the Mesa, because this is going to come up in part three. We don't want to just give everything away stream of conscience because we want to be good storytellers. So we're trying to control ourselves, but just keep putting pins in these things.

Remember that. And we will remind you of these ideas. Remember that. Brian, Black Triangles. So Black Triangles are seen all over the place. I've heard from even friends of mine in Ohio who have seen Black Triangles flying over Ohio. Ohio. Literally, I mean, I talked to one Christian guy not that long ago who saw a black triangle. And he was like, look, I saw it. I'm a Christian. I'm not crazy. I wasn't on drugs.

And it flew towards Wright Patterson Air Force Base. And I was like, what the heck? Yeah. Would you, what? There is this trope of UFOs being focused around like nuclear facilities and Air Force. Military bases. Military bases. And there's, you know, there's a few interpretations of that. But anyway, go on. So the Shermans both reported multiple experiences with what they described as silent hovering triangular craft that had multicolored lights around a black frame. They could not see or hear or in any way discern with their senses a propulsion system that was keeping this thing aloft. And it was something similar to like a B2, if you've seen a B2. But B2s cannot hover.

No. B2s are like very early in fighter craft development. people had theorized and built models of a plane that was basically all wing, and it would have really ideal flight characteristics. But they couldn't develop them until computer-controlled surfaces were, because they were very difficult to fly. Now we can do this with the B2. I'm sure the military has lots of experimental craft that are similar stealth technology shape.

But the element of this that takes it from maybe it's a government thing to what heck. is the complete silence of the propulsion and it hovers. That's non-ballistic motion. Right. I mean, and Ben, you know more about this than I do because you're a literal aircraft engineer. It's non-Euclidean, non-Newonian motion. It just doesn't make sense. It requires, the presupposition that you have to make is that the mechanics of motion that we are familiar with

that allow us to create something like an F-35, for example. Yeah. is a lower form of mechanics. Yeah. And there's a higher form that we're not familiar, or at least mainstream, if you think the government knows and is just hiding it, that we're not familiar with, that would actually not undo,

but just show the triviality of something like the F-35, which is the most advanced fighter craft. Right. In America, at least. Fifth generation fighter, yeah. Right, so some of the theories that people have put out there, and this is actually pretty compelling, and not science fiction, at least conceptually,

is that something that's able to do that, like Tick-Tac video, change direction immediately, like abrupt changes in direction, abrupt stopping. Where the G-forces would kill a human pilot. Right, and then immediate acceleration, where you go from literally zero to, you know, 10,000 in an instant. And then also hovering. To accomplish all these things without, A,

destroying the craft because of the stresses that it would experience. The G forces. Right. And then B, destroying the people inside because of the G forces, what you have to do is actually use space time to propel the craft. Yeah, like gravity and space time itself. Which then you get into the layers of missing time. Like perhaps the reason people experience missing time with UFO encounters or black triangle encounters, you know, is because the object itself is manipulating, is literally having to manipulate the space time around it to work,

to accomplish these things. Now, like, that's getting into materialism. I don't want you to think that we've forgotten the whole motto of the show. But the point is that just because a spiritual event is happening doesn't mean that physical means aren't being used. Yeah, that's a good point, actually. I just want to make that clear. Like, technology can still be used by, it's not like everything is fake.

When Ziggurots were built with the help of giants, they were still built. And Nephilim, sort of thing. They were still built with rocks. Exactly. So I think people don't fully appreciate the physics of the world, too. Again, we're talking about natural stuff. Supernatural stuff's crazy. The physical world is insane.

Still crazy. I read a biography of Einstein not too long ago. And you're talking about just the physics underlying the theories and even things like, what's the project that built a nuclear weapon? Manhattan. The Manhattan Project, which is probably, to date,

the greatest nexus of scientific minds in history. I mean, the mental firepower that was involved in that project. Absolutely crazy. A lot of Nazis. Paperclip. I mean, we'll do that sometimes. But you're actually,

I mean, he's not kidding. I'm not. I'm right. Literal Nazis. Now, the physics undergirding that is, is in,

when you think about E equals MC squared, which then energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. So what it's saying is that, Thanks to the speed of light, mass is energy. Mass is energy, energy. You can convert the two. They're inversely proportional. This is what's happening when you're converting, when you're making a fission bomb or a two-stage,

multiple-stage thermonuclear devices. You're converting mass into energy very quickly. Exactly. Releasing massive amounts of energy. I mean, a megaton energy. We do this all the time when we clap. Yeah. We're converting mass to energy.

You're literally like, there you. That's why you can cook a chicken by slapping it hard. Yeah. I mean, theoretically, you really couldn't. But anyway, think of it. about this. And we'll continue with this is complete tangent. But think about this. A raisin. If you could convert the mass of a raisin into pure energy, you'd have enough energy to power a city like New York City for some substantial amount of time. Right. A single raise, a single raisin. So when we think,

when scientists like nid scientists get in and they're trying to explain this phenomena using purely naturalistic means, these are the ways their minds go. Yeah. They're thinking zero point to energy. They're thinking pulling energy from the vacuum of space. Because there's energy in a vacuum. A vacuum isn't nothing. Right. Really. The vacuum is a medium of space time. Yeah, they're thinking like there's

a massive amount of energy just in space itself. If you could develop propulsion systems that can tap into the energy of the vacuum, you know, this is like, it would make fusion energy which we've been trying to do for 100 years look like a toddler playing with connects or Legos.

So when we look at some of these propulsion systems, the difference between an F-35 and what these things can do is like the difference between a slingshot, a bow and arrow, a Glock 17, 9mm handgun, you know, a laser gun from HALO. You're starting to get into like, we're not talking about blowing a controlled

explosion to propel a hunk of metal through space anymore. Exactly. Like an F-35 with control surfaces. You're talking about using, you know, another example would be throughout the vacuum of space, everywhere in space there is the medium of photons. that like photons don't travel.

Photons are like an audience members in a sports game that are doing the wave. They're sitting in their seat and then when the wave gets there, they lift up their hands and you see the wave. No one's moving. You're talking about like wave particle duality?

Yeah, wave particle duality. So a photon, photons are literally everywhere and they don't move. It's just when the light tells them to react, they react. You're blowing my mind right now. And you see light. It's like the slid.

experiment type of thing? No, those were electrons. Okay. Which are different than photons. Okay, I'm, but now passed. In a way, they're those things. We stepped off the edge of my knowledge. The point that I'm trying to make, here's the point I'm trying to make.

Here's the point I'm trying to make. Is that, like, let's say you can't use gravity. Like, people think there's a graviton, like a particle of gravity. Uh-huh. That's, no one knows. That's speculative. It's a theory. Like, even if you can't use space time

to propel something, another option would be. The point I'm trying to make is that there are multiple options through space, like a wave. Right. By using photons. So you're harnessing the activity of a photon to propel something more than just light.

So there's a light wave and the photon acts as the particle that propagates the light wave. So you have wave particles. And people are like, well, why couldn't you do that for something bigger like a ship? And we don't know. And the answer is, why not? Maybe. Maybe. Why not?

And if there's a you know, a Nephilimic spirit that's been around for far longer and also was the one that initially gave us the knowledge to start creating these things in the first place before we're ready. Wow. Who's to say they don't already know how to do this and are then using it to play off as a higher species that is propagating the materialistic worldview?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah, this is actually a theme, though. I'm glad you said it because there's a theme here where we're going to, like one of my theories is that we have spiritual elements attempting to deceive people into thinking in terms that they are higher technology beings. Yeah. to confirm a materialist evolutionary worldview and things like that. Okay, anyway, theme of the episode, put a pin in it.

The Black Triangles, Nids did an analysis in 2004, and they published it to their website. I don't have it. I think it's there, but I haven't dug deep enough. They looked at more than 500 cases across just North America, and many of them had very similar details that the Sherman saw. In their analysis, basically they concluded that maybe these craft are military technology, maybe because they're related to basis. So what I wanted to do is talk about some of the explanations. Okay. For the UAP.

The NID scientists, again, they were always trying to find natural explanations for sightings. Right. And they did as part of their study. They did detailed analysis of geological data, weather patterns for the area. So let's talk through a few. One of them is planet misidentification. It's my favorite one. Like orbs.

Yeah. It was the planet Venus that flew past your horse. and drove it off a cliff. The third sphere. Which to me makes total sense. The planet Venus shrunk down the size of a golf ball, came down, it turned red, and it did that. Like, I think the third sphere's song had discord entered into it. Okay, here.

Now we're getting into medieval cosmology. We're not going to get into cosmology, which we are researching for season two. But anyway. Yeah. So let's just say planet misidentification. Okay. I'm not saying it is never relevant to UAP. Sure.

People make mistakes. sometimes like when you're driving there's a thing that can happen where if like for example the planet Venus literally is a very very bright object It's usually the brightest thing in the sky If it's right in front of you and let's say it's early evening Or morning

And it's up and it's you're not used to seeing a star that bright Yeah Could you misidentify that as UAP? Well to you it is UAP Yeah right it does Subjectively fit the bill of UAP It's unidentified aerial phenomena You don't know what it is

But someone else could come in and explain it to you and say Hey my brother in Christ, that was Mercury, that was Venus, of Jupiter. These are very bright objects in the sky. Yes. Okay. Dumb though for Skinwalker. Just literally does not relevant.

Literally it's not Venus. Because you can immediately say, okay, what date, which direction were you looking, point in the sky where it was. Okay, Venus wasn't there. Right. Or it was. Or Jupiter wasn't there or whatever. Like we know this.

This is not like we figured out the motion of the planets. We can predict them. We know. Okay. Yeah. Another one could be like meteors. Yeah. Meteors.

And this does obscure atmosphere. or weather phenomena. They say, quote, for example, in the summer of 1952, unidentified balls of light were seen flying over Washington, D.C. on consecutive weekends. The lights were seen from the ground and the air were detected on military and civilian radars were photographed and were repeatedly pursued by military jets. The explanation offered by the Air Force was that the false radar sightings had been prompted by a temperature inversion in the area, a theory that simply did not fit with effects surrounding the sightings and that was publicly disputed by the military's own radar operators and pilots you'll hear regularly the end quote by the way the military give you what i would call a

swamp gas explanation yeah which is from actually john keel he coined that term but on the bad end right john keel early on in some i can't remember where it was they're like the the lights and the swamp in that one area uh-huh people were seeing these lights and he was like oh it's swamp gas yeah lighting on fire. That's what they're seeing. Yeah. So people have used this old swamp gas as a derogatory way of describing stupid explanations. Okay, okay. For, you know, paranormal activity. John Keel later turned out to like actually be pretty chill like that. You know, he was like, I did not know he was chill like that. Yeah, but he is chill. He actually was pretty chill. He woulda-witty-witty-witty on a swamp gas. Okay. I'm so sorry.

People will often, though, try to explain these things away with atmospheric, unusual. you know, plasma ball lightning. Yeah. Here's another one, which is still, I don't even know if it's real. I'm going to be honest. I know. I've never even heard of that. Really?

Like, yeah. People, so you've seen that fake video, right? Which one? The train tracks? I didn't even describe it. Are you telepath? I'm not, look, we're locked in. We're not that locked in.

We're not the same person. You're not in your own. Despite what many people think. Okay. No, plasma ball lightning. I don't know if I've seen that video. Okay. There's a video that video.

that where people said, oh, it's finally been proved because there was this theory that you could have a lightning phenomena that looked like a ball of plasma was floating, almost suspended in the air and moving in weird directions. Oh, that's crazy. And there are all sorts of theories about how it forms. I'm still not

sure. Legitimately, I think there's a debate about whether it's real at all. Okay. There was a video where it was like over train tracks or something, I think. Okay. And it was like a blue ball lightning thing. So one time my mom claims that she saw that happening at train tracks.

Okay, see, and so, but the thing is, this video was fake. It was CGI. Oh, okay, okay, okay, tricked a bunch of people. Okay. Now, ball lightning as an explanation, there is an atmospheric physicist named John McDonald, and supposedly he's done research and basically demolish the explanation of ball lightning as the basis of UAP. He's like, it just doesn't fit, even a theoretical model for what ball lighting does.

It just does not fit what they're seeing. Sure, okay, great. Okay, so that's an explanation. Love it. Earth lights is another one. Great name. These are all mentioned by Nids and their paper on the subject. These are electrical discharges in the atmosphere generated by geological forces in the earth.

Okay, this is real. Okay. But again, does not account for the actual behavior. Like, what happens is scientists sometimes will say, oh, you saw something in the sky. Well, you know what? There's this thing that happens where something happens in the sky. It's got to be that. A lot of people think, what's those lights that come up,

They're in, it's in Appalachia somewhere. Yeah, I know. In Tennessee. Yeah. It's in the Smokies. Anyway, where there's been lights that light up a mountain at night and it's like all the time. Didn't Wendigoon go there? Windigoon went there.

Great video. By the way, Wendigoon, you guys, I need you to go on Twitter and YouTube and all of his comments and say, listen to Honest Cosmos. He's a Christian, I'm pretty sure. Spam Wendigoon. Does videos on weird stuff. We like him. He's so funny. He's so cool.

He's like the dorkiest. I just love him so much. Yeah. Tell Wendigoon to literally for free promote Han Cosmos. But so he, that was one of the explanations. And it literally looks like a spotlight coming up. It is really weird. Please go on.

So you see stuff like this, again, it's just, what you'll find with a lot of these explanations is that while they account for a limited range of some of the sightings, there's usually some percentage that if the witness is, at all accurate. There's just no way. There's no way. That's the thing is the scientists will be like, well, what they saw was this real thing. It's not like they didn't see anything. It's just that they suddenly forgot how to describe how things moved. Yeah, they were like suddenly stupid. And I'm like, come on. Another one that's like this is that I've heard people say that around Skinwalker Ranch, there's natural gas and oil drilling. And sometimes they burn off gases. Sure. Yeah. And they'll be like,

oh, that's what they saw. That is, I've seen that. And I'm like, look, Sherman is not stupid. You have to just start by saying he's not a complete idiot. Right. Why do people start with the, why is Occam's razor saying that not only are they dumb, but they're like, yes, mentally handicapped, okay? Or blind. I don't understand this at all. Like, he probably had a driver's license, Sherman did. Yeah. I bet you he had to pass a site test. I bet he can see. I bet he literally can see. He's a cattle herder. I bet he can see. He's probably capable of vision. He probably has the gift of sight. Like, not even third site, seconds, just normal site.

Just normal first site. Okay, another one. This is probably the most compelling. And I know, like, Michael Heiser has a documentary on YouTube that he did with Logos where he talks about the, like, Roswell stuff. Yeah. There, I will say, there are clearly instances in the UAP, UFO stuff where it is the government doing stuff.

Yes. China, Russia, America. There, 100%, I am certain of that. A lot of it is, too, like some of it's even the false conspiracy theory where the government will feed you a conspiracy to distract you from this real thing. 100%. Okay. So keep a ready sword, guys. Don't be, don't let the gut, don't let daddy government come in and trick you like your daddy did when he was with three and he pretended to pull a carrot out of your ear out of your ear.

Yeah. Like, okay, he's waving his other hand over here. He's like, oh, look at this hand. And he pulls a carrot out of your ear with the other hand. You're like, what? How did you do that? Yeah. Okay.

The government does that. Like, I'm just saying the LSD experiments, the Tuscany. We know this. Yes. So don't think I'm discounting this as part of it. Nid's actually investigated. Are you familiar with the Dulce stuff that they investigated in New Mexico, Ben? Slightly, yeah.

So they did, they realized that there was this other area that had some shocking similarities to Skinwalker. Okay. Same time, mid-90s while they're doing-Albuquerque. Yeah, that's right, along Route 64. So they're going down. The parallels are like UAP, Bigfoot, dog creature sightings, orange and undercolored orbs, strange craft in the sky, mostly

Native American population of 2000 in the town. The Giacaria Apache. I pronounce it like it's Mexican. I don't know if it is. Cool name. That, the reservation encompasses Dolcei. Wikipedia describes it like this. Dulce Bayes is the subject of a conspiracy theory. Love it. Love it. Yeah. Claiming

a jointly operated human and alien underground facility exists under the mesa. There's a connection, yeah. Under Colorado. Under a mesa. Yeah. Near the town of Dulce, New Mexico. So there's, that's the theory.

That's what people think. I'm not saying that's true. Sure. But there's a very similar number of connections. So they actually, one of the reasons, sometimes Sherman would be like, have to go call the Nids team and say, something happened. It's because they went to Dulcee. Ah.

And they also did, maybe we might need to do a Dulce episode at some point, but they, stuff happened there too. Okay. And I read some stories that made me want to include them here, even though they have no barrier. Well, hey, dusty tome. Bigfoot stuff. They'll be dusty tone. Whoa.

Big foot stuff. You know what's interesting? No, that actually, there is a connection there. There is a connection. Let's shoehorn it in. We can't forget. Yeah, let's shoehorn it. This is a short episode already.

We need more content. We can't forget that all of this started with the legend of the Skinwalker. Yes. This Navajo entity. Thank you. Yeah, like a physical entity that was. true king. Yeah, it's a cryptid. All right?

I'd. Guess what else is a cryptid? For real, for real. Peeps. Bigfoot. Bigfoot. Bigfoot is a cryptid. Actually, it's a Neffulom spirit. It's a trail epithicus. No, it's not. It's a hollow word. Be quiet. Dweller. Okay. Unless it really is. I don't know. Anyway.

All right. But my point is, yeah. Oftentimes where you have, hey, where there's smoke, there's fire, where there's fish, there's sharks. Okay. When you have UFO. you're going to have cryptids too. Yep, yep, yep, yep. This is just case and point. You got Bigfoot with UAPs, you have Skinwalker with UAPs,

all it is is across state lines. It's the same old song and dance. Yep. So now I'm going to shotgun out some crazy explanations that they floated. Gang gang. The Nids team and others. This is where they were like, look,

this is beyond known science. Love it. They came up with what they call the interdimensional hypothesis. This is very similar to John Keel's, ultra-terrestrial hypothesis. etc. These are like creatures or beings from other dimensions that are capable of accessing physical reality but don't necessarily have to be physical all the time, but they're capable of influencing

physical reality and they may be capable of mind control. Okay. Okay. So that's a theory. To me, I'm like, you're close. If that's what you want to describe a demoness, sure. Yeah, sure. Fine. Yeah. Another one would be Jacques Valet. You've probably heard of Jacques Valet from other episodes. he had what he called the control system hypothesis, which is a, it's riffing on intradimensional. Patrick Harper had one called the demonic reality. Michael Grosso had the imaginal realm. John Keel, I already mentioned, the ultra-terrestrials. Then we have the older Middle Eastern conceptions and things like the gin.

So they, the researchers weren't dumb. Like, they recognized that many spiritual to supernatural explanations already had existed in these regions from Native American peoples. So again, as a Christian, we're looking over all this and saying what these people are doing. If I could leave you one thing from this episode, what everybody does all the time is they look at phenomena and they explain it using the vocabulary and the world view that they have. Yes. Physicists do this all the time with consciousness. Yeah. Because they don't have a category for it.

And they always try to come up with one. And it's always, here's the thing. It's always unsatisfying even to them. They know that there's just, like, we're missing something. So true, King. And the thing is, we know what it is. We know what they're missing. It's the image of God.

Yeah, you're missing the spiritual element of humanity. Yeah, exactly. They're missing God. They're missing. And they're missing that, but they're still trying to explain it. So then you get into this, like, wild speculation of thought speed and soul speed and stuff that, but it all comes back to this idea when you're, when you're a materialist of, well, it's just something we haven't figured out yet. But who's to say there's not a higher species, a higher, you know, a, you know,

a species on another plane that has figured it out. Yeah. And so to them, like, penetrating someone's mind would be like tightening a bolt on your car. Yeah. You have the tool, and it's an everyday thing. Yes. You know, so materialism, not even once. It's a heck of a drug.

Ben, I would like to now abruptly move into the last section of the NID's investigation section of our skin walker range coverage. I am so excited to get here. I'm going to tell the meditating hippie story and then you can close us out with the the portal. I love it. Let's go. So strange stuff is happening. Some of it's like cryptid, some of its supposed UAP. There's all sorts of crazy stuff happening. But one thing that both the Shermans and the NIDS team, just they, the Nid team especially, they're scientists and they're like, look, this makes me uncomfortable as a scientist,

but it seems like meditation triggers things. Psychical human energy. Yeah. Which, I just want to say, like, even as a Christian, we know that people are embodied souls and that we're not just neurons firing in our brain. Thought is not that. So some of the things we're going to talk about

on Honodic Cosmos, like, remote viewing and things like that, I always wonder, do we, are we more saturated with materialism than we realize and we actually underestimate the reality of things like, do people have some sort of psychical element? I've wondered. that about telekinesis. We're getting so honest right now, but...

Well, I mean, it's some size of the same coin. I just wonder about it. I'm like, I don't know. There's always these myths of people having these abilities. There's stuff all throughout the law in the Old Testament telling you to stone the witches. Yeah, the macamans are stoned. And it's not because it's a waste of time. Right. It's like maybe Matilda wasn't fiction. I'm going to...

Yeah, right. Well, like maybe Carrie was real. The thing is... is God doesn't punish time wasting with a capital punishment. Right. It's not like, hey,

don't worry about necroman. Like, don't do any necromancy because it's all fake. Right. The problem is that it's a real thing. It's just a dangerous thing. And so you do have to wonder,

like, are there people that just, for whatever reason, they are given this gift? You know, and that's incredibly speculative. Right. And it's very speculative,

but there's something that they notice. was that human beings meditating on the ranch did things or triggered things. Hey, you know what? We know that this is true because the practice of yoga is a pagan practice inherent in the practice of yoga when you're trying to align your chakras is meditation. So we actually do know that meditation does have some sort of spiritual element to. There's like a there's a pagan sort of meditation where you're trying to tap into spiritual forces. Right.

And then there's a Christian meditation. where your mind is supposed to be actively latching onto truth. Exactly. The scriptures and you're meditating on the scriptures. You're meditating on the promises of God. That's biblical, good meditation. You should do.

Paganism always has yourself as the object. Yes. Christian meditation always has the object outside of yourself. Yes. Particularly on God, God the Father's son and holy spirit. So true, King. Just so true. So by the end of June of 1996,

some of these like just the phenomena the stories the almost like garbled you know how stories get they're garbled they're amplified whatever they're starting to get out that something weird is happening at this ranch okay so it's newspapers

people are reporting on it now and people start to show up to the ranch and wanting to investigate it so one day in 96 uh sherman is there Tom and his son Tad they see a vehicle come down the entrance gate, down there,

they have a long driveway, you know, and they see the vehicle coming. They're like, oh, here we go. And Tom sees that there's a very large, tall, strong, looking, blonde-haired man at the wheel. Long hair describes him kind of like a hippie, that he's like six foot two, and he looks just like for our,

he looks like a hippie. And the guy shows up, and he tells him that he heard through the grapevine, he driven from a long distance away to come. And Tom's like, You know that this is private land. You're not just allowed to, this is not paranormal Disneyland. There's no punch pass.

You can't come and just, and he's like, look, I want to come. Please, please let me come on your property. I want to meditate. It be confirmed. So he's like, you picture, I picture him as like a Southern California surfer boy who's into the new age. What do you think his name is? His name is probably Brad. Really?

Brad. I like that. What do you think? I was going to go. Shad. Shad. I knew you were chill. I did not know you were chill like that.

So Brad, which is not his name, but that's what we're going to call him. He comes on the ranch and he's pleading with him. He's like, please let me come. I want to do this. I've heard stuff. It might, this might be like the moment that I can tap into the spiritual world. And they're like, all right, okay, my guy. So the Sherman's, Tom and his son, they say, all right, get in the truck.

they get in a Tom's truck they head out onto the ranch and they're like a mile in and the hippie says this is it, this is the spot that he wants to meditate at and by the way the spot that he picked

he didn't know this was the spot where much activity had happened okay weird stuff that's interesting like the tree line stuff the animals a lot of things that happened

at this spot a lot of people say that humans have dozens of senses Not just the five. Not just the five, but we have many that are sort of biosensor type things that we've grown less attuned to because we have grown so materialistic

and less dependent on the environment we're in. One of the senses that I have is the seven cents is like I can feel a vibe that you and I have. I can feel it, hey, close your eyes. I'm closing. I can't see anything. What do you see? Just nothing. That's my world without you.

Bro. So. Let's go to chillies. He taps in. like what we feel when we pull in a Chili's parking lot this is the place he felt at this moment that's a good feeling so they stop he gets out and Tom and Tatter like I guess we wait I guess we're just like babysitting a large hippie he walks out into this little hill there you know it's kind of like an open field there's a tree line in the maybe 100 yards away they stop there and it's just quiet the guy sits down they're like 30 yards away from him

he closes his eyes and in what they describe is a faintly religious gesture spreads both of his arm out. Okay. And they're laughing. Like Tom and his son, they're absolutely tickled. They just think this is hilarious. Because you know the type, like the type with crystals and they're in there, and they've got the dream catchers and they think that they're going to project their, you know,

thoughts out into Orion's belt with their new agey, made up the secret nonsense, right? Where they're just syncretizing a bunch of Eastern mysticism with like warmed over Western thinking and it's just made like a lot of it's just dumb so this guy's meditating and but but they stop laughing after a minute because it's like tom sherman thinks he hears something like the chime of a cowbell and you might say well why would that stop him in his tracks isn't this a cattle ranch well tom sherman knows he doesn't have any cowbells on his animals he doesn't use cowbells so here's the chime and he's like what's going on where is that sound coming from And he's able to hear that he thinks it's coming from deep in the copse of trees up ahead and here he hears it again.

But it's nearer now. It's approaching him. The strangers seem not to have heard it where he's so deep in his meditation that he's silently sitting still in this religious gesture. Now, all of a sudden, Tom believes he begins to see in the trees sort of a faint moving blur. but something moving very quickly in between the trees. He can see sort of this blurry shape, but he can't tell if it's the source of the cowbell. He can't tell what it is.

It's daylight, by the way. And he's looking, he's watching it move from tree to tree almost as if it was circling, and he begins to feel this sense of dread and unease. And then all of a sudden, as he's watching this thing, with no warning, it breaks out of the tree line and it starts to absolutely run towards the man who is meditating. And Tom is blinking his eyes because the thing he's seeing, it's like he, it's like he has some fuzz in his eyes. He can't see it. It's broad daylight, but it's blurred. It's almost

invisible looking. It's like the heat distortion you see on the blacktop on a hot day. And Sherman realizes all of a sudden that this thing, is it is going right for this meditating man. And this guy has no idea because his eyes closed. So just as Sherman is about to yell and say, look out.

All of a sudden, what the hunt for the skinwalker describes as a shimmering, wraith-like huge thing, stopped inches from the meditator and then let out a deep, just animalistic roar that echoed

through the landscape. Like ear-splitting roar. The stranger who's meditating all of a sudden at this roar just falls over himself, leaps to his feet, and begins to scream and he sees the creature and he begins to turn and run towards Sherman. And Sherman notices that the thing looks almost like a pixelated, sort of blurry shape turns and bolts back for the tree line.

The hippie is so terrible. I mean, he's literally, his pants need to be changed. I mean, this is not in the book. I'm assuming he's had an accent. Like, he runs, he grabs on to Sherman, like, clinging to six foot two, large man, like scared cat, clinging to him. He's like, who, like, weeping, like a baby. He is out of his mind with fear. And Tom Sherman is like trying to get himself away from the guy, but the guy's not only

scared like strong but he's like now possessed with the panic of a fear like a drowning swimmer he's clinging him taking him down finally after literally minutes of this tom quietly says into the man's ears if you do not let go i am going to hit you and the guy says i'm i will let go if you promise that you will take me back to my car okay guys transform a fear he says okay take him back to his car guy gets back in his car and like absolutely with no respect for the gravel driveway that they have to maintain, peels out and just barrels down the road and drives away.

Never saw them again. My gosh. Okay. Now here's the cherry. Here's the cherry on top. It was sometime later, sometime later, Tom and Tad, the father and son, were watching, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura

fight alien life forms in the jungles of South America in the movie Predator, as one does. As one does. And they see, you probably know where I'm going with this, they see the predator with his cloaking, that shimmer heat wave look where he turns kind of invisible. And they both in the same moment, they yell out, that's what we saw. That is exactly what we saw. And Tom estimates that the creature was running upwards of 60 miles an hour. There's another really unsettling meditation story. Yeah. And we're going to close with this one

tonight. If that's all right with you, Brian. Ben, it's not only all right with me, we're two hours. But we're two hours then at this thing. We should just... Like, you should probably land the plane. We didn't even scratch the surface of how many stories. No, we did. In fact, before you tell that one, can I just tell one? Oh, yeah.

Because I feel like you're going to tell a portal story. I am going to tell a portal story. And I just want to say that there was a time when Sherman was on the ranch. And he looked up in the sky and he saw a circular opening in the sky. Okay. And he said that it had a different sky than the sky. It wasn't blue. It was like a different...

It's like wormhole stuff. What? This guy. Okay, anyway, keep going. To be a fly on the wall. To be a fly on Sherman's shoulder. To be a fly on Sherman's shoulder. Wow.

Okay, so after that, incredibly anti-climactic tease that Brian just gave us. I'm going to close with another meditation story, like I said. So on August 25th of 1997, again, it's a warm summer's night, beautiful, clear, the Nid's team was sitting on the edge of a bluff near one of the fields, and the field was actually about 100 feet below them. And they were setting, you know, getting all their night vision camera set up so they could monitor the field throughout the night. And there were two main scientists in charge of this study. And I'm going to call them Jim and Mike, but that's not their real names. They chose to remain anonymous. And they had gotten everything set up. The night had begun. It was

pitch black, and thus far nothing had stirred. Some four hours into the watch then, Jim, who was the more experienced investigator, climbed down quietly into the small pasture, and he sat in the middle of the field to meditate, because he had found over the years that meditation sometimes activated some sort of phenomena, whatever that was, although it happened too few times to be anything more than anecdotal observation. Again, it's managing to evade their measurement tools. So Jim is down there meditating and nothing happened. So eventually he gives up. It's 2.30 a.m. at this point, it's been a six-hour watch. And so they decide to move their operation to a different part of the ranch. And so they began to disassemble the camera from its tripod, pack it into their carriers, and they were just going to

huff it on over to a different location that they could look at the pastor from a different perspective. So just as Jim was thinking, disappointingly, that his meditation hadn't produced anything, his eye caught a very faint light on the track, about 150 feet below him. Remember at this point he had climbed back up to the bluff. He watched it a little bit puzzled thinking, ah, it's probably a piece of glass that's reflecting a truck light from down the road that he can't see, or maybe the neighbor's homestead light is reflecting off a piece of metal on the ground, something like that.

But it was a faint yellowish color. and as he watched, it started to grow brighter. So a few seconds later, he nudged his partner, Mike. It's definitely getting brighter at this point, and it actually started to get bigger, too. So Jim kind of quietly under his breath says, hand me the camera. At the same time, Mike quietly and efficiently

unpacked the night vision binoculars he just put away. Jim set up the tripod, all of this being done very quietly, and positioned his camera loaded with infrared feet, film in line with the light that had now grown to six inches in diameter, and it was still growing brighter and brighter into this dull yellow color. So he sets the shutter to about 30 seconds. But as this light continues to grow brighter and bigger, he keeps upping the shutter time to 60 seconds and then 90 seconds. And this yellow light expanded so that it was positioned just

over the ground rather than directly on the ground. It was like it was lifted up a little bit. but he wasn't totally sure how high off the ground it was. And then Mike, who had taken the night vision binoculars at this point, whispered to Jim, it's a tunnel, not just a light. It's not just a circle, it's a tube. And initially, Jim was so fed up with getting the right exposure time dialed in that he kind of ignored Mike, but now Mike was standing up. And he began to utter blasphemies.

And he said hoarsely, Jim, something's in the tunnel. Jim looked carefully at the light below. It had now expanded to more than two feet in diameter. Something that big was definitely going to register on his film, and he was glad for that. Oh my, Mike says suddenly, thoroughly frightened. There's this black thing coming out of it. I see his head. Jim suddenly felt panicked.

His companion was plainly bordering on panic. It has no face, Mike whispered. Jim was wondering why he couldn't see the same thing that his partner was seen. And so he nudged Mike. give me the monoculars. I want to look. But Mike ignored him. He was too transfixed on what he was looking at. He told him, it's on the ground, and it just fell out and walked away. As Mike danced on the ledge a few feet away, plainly in a paned state, Jim could see the light decreasing in size. And within 30 seconds, the dull yellow circle that Mike said was a tube had shrunk to about half its full diameter and was losing its light intensity. In the meantime, Jim pulled Mike close over to him and asked,

What happened? And Mike said, a big black creature just crawled through that tunnel. It got onto the ground and it walked away. That's what happened. And it's lurking around here somewhere. At that moment, Jim felt a chill run up his spine. I only saw a yellow light. Are you sure?

Mike said, of course, I'm sure. The night vision turned the light into a 3D tunnel. And something, some large thing, I'm thinking maybe 400 pounds and at least six feet tall, crawled out of the tunnel. even the distant coyotes had stopped howling at this point. Everything was silence. And the deep silence remained, even after 15 minutes, while they gathered their equipment and walked down the bluff

so that they could analyze the ground. Nothing stirred. And once near the track, though, a strong, pungent sulfur-like smell attacked their nostrils. And they had smelled this before, after other phenomena had taken place. They got out their NART alert counter And they could pick up Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and X-rays

And then after a few minutes of monitoring Everything went back to background normal levels They found nothing unusual in the magnetic field meter Nothing registered And eventually the whole scene The whole aura returned to a level of calm They were able to describe what they had seen The bizarre and creepy sight of a huge black humanoid form

using its elbows to lever itself along a 3D tunnel and then fall out onto the ground down from the bluff that they were on. Jim believed his friend, his colleague. He knew that Mike had spent long hours in the darkness tracking this stuff and he wasn't given to flights of fancy. At least not until tonight. The team spent hours the following day searching for footprints but to no avail. Mike and Jim worked on a written report of the incident.

Their instruments, of course, the camera included, had failed. to record anything unusual. The photos were very disappointing, showing only a single, very faint, blurry light in one of the many roles of film that had been used. Did you know that patrons get access to a bonus show, the dusty tome, as well as early access to main episodes? Support the show and get access to these amazing benefits

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