Haunted Cosmos - Skinwalker Ranch, Part III: The Fugal Era

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben close out our three-part look at Skinwalker Ranch—the Northern Utah ranch that has been called the Disneyland of paranormal activity—with a look into the current era of research under the ownership of enigmatic real estate tycoon Brandon Fugal.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode of Haunted Cosmos is sponsored by our friends at The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, great project hosted by Matt Whitman. His passion for God’s Word has driven him to release an episode every weekday morning—that’s right, every weekday morning—where he goes through whole books of the Bible in digestible single-episode summaries or multiple-episode series. Visit them at www.thetmbh.com online.This 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 at www.thepsalmsproject.com online.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by the Psalms Project, the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast 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. As the Nids era of Skinwalker Ranch drew to a close, and Bigelow Aerospace began to lose the bandwidth necessary to manage

such a massive investigative undertaking. The ranch went up for sale for just the fourth time in its history. A Delaware-based holding company, Adamantium Real Estate LLC, owned by Brandon Fugel out of Salt Lake City, Utah, was chomping at the bit to purchase the ranch. After some negotiations and due diligence required by some strange clauses in the purchase contract, it had been a government research facility after all. The purchase was finalized and the ranch entered the era of Fugel's ownership. When reflecting on his first visits to the famed ranch, Fugel said the following, quote,

I found nothing unusual about the property other than, on that first tour, we noticed something unusual about the fence line perimeter. These body parts were hanging from the fence line. Animal bladders that were blessed and hung for the purpose of keeping the demonic spirit entities on the property. Apart from that obvious bit of horrifying detail,

Fugel would double down and confirm that even the disinterred animal bits hanging from the fence wasn't enough to give him the creeps. It was just common Navajo practice. In fact, Mr. Fugel considered himself, if he had to pick, more of a scully than a molder, more of a skeptic than a believer. However, he won't deny that he's always been the type of skeptic that remains interested in finding out who's right. This was the primary motivator in his purchase of the ranch. He wanted to know who was right about it all. That, and he was overwhelmed by the ranch's undeniable and surprising beauty. But while on one of the

of his many routine visits to the ranch, before and closely following the purchase, Mr. Fugel's eyes would be opened, so to speak. All previous visits had been completely normal. Nothing strange had occurred, no weird vibes had been felt. Nobody had left and ended up haunted by a sleep paralysis demon. So far, so boring, Fugel must have thought. But then he got out of the helicopter on this one visit. He and his brother, who'd piloted the aircraft, began walking the perimeter of the fence line looking up at the infamous Skinwalker Ridge when they saw it. Against the pale blue sky that had been empty before, now lingered a black disc. Wide and flat, the uncanny thing moved across the sky at impossible speeds and trajectories

until just as abrupt as its arrival, it vanished into the blue. Mr. Fugel was in for it. On August 21st of 2019, three years after he purchased the ranch, Fugel sat down around a long wooden table in a surveillance trailer on the property. He was surrounded by a team of hand-picked researchers who were eager to share the news he had made the emergency trip down from Salt Lake City for. Principal researcher Eric Bard had called him in to see something strange he had noticed while reviewing the footage from the wide array of cameras now peppering the ranch. You see, the day before, something weird had happened. Skinwalker Ranch had experienced, for the first

time in three years, the death of one of her cattle. Now sitting at the this table with the ranch's owner, Mr. Bard thought he knew the reason it had happened. The day before, at 3.41 p.m., Dr. Travis Taylor, another lead researcher from the University of Alabama, was called down to the eastern field of the ranch. A cow had died. When Taylor arrived, he immediately went into action, scanning the area for strange or otherwise unexpected levels of radiation. What he found was shocking. In the immediate area surrounding the cow, the background micro-watering radiation was measuring 20 milawatts per centimeter squared. The amount you'll experience standing two inches from a closed microwave while it's running

is one quarter of that. Additionally, he found that all other frequencies in the background spectrum had risen by orders of magnitude. In other words, all forms of background radiation had spiked up so that now the area was akin to standing in front of dozens of x-rays all running at the same time. Meanwhile, the ranch hands went looking at the way. for the rest of the herd. Every last head of cattle had abandoned the dead cow by dozens of acres, as far as the eye could see across the flat basin. Eventually, they found all 41 heads

clustered in a corner of the ranch they had hardly ever been before. They went from the eastern grazing field to the far western corner of the western field for seemingly no other reason than whatever it was that had killed their brother cow. After the radiation levels reduced by diffusing into the air, the team called a vet in to perform an autopsy. As he slashed the thick hide and snapped the rib cage with branch loppers, a gentleman named Thomas Winterton, the ranch manager, looked on with curiosity. He had seen his fair share of dead cows getting cut up by a vet, but this time was different. This time he couldn't stop thinking about the old legends of cattle mutilation on the ranch.

He had read the stories. He had looked at the pictures, but it didn't really sink in until now. This seasoned animal vet was pouring sweat after 40 minutes of sawing at this animal's bones. having to deal with the horribly imprecise cuts and breaks that naturally come from an animal not tied down, free to shift and roll all along the grass. Thomas was left speechless. How could the cattle from the stories have been drained of all their blood? Suffered the most perfect cuts and incisions imaginable, suffered no broken bones, and all under 20 minutes with no evidence of tampering left behind. Before he had finished processing this realization, the vet gave his diagnosis.

Stress, he said confidently. died of acute stress-induced pneumonia. Stress? What was there to be stressed about? When Mr. Fugel heard the news, he dropped everything and drove down. He was met by Eric Bard upon arrival. With an almost childlike sense of urgency, Eric ushered him into the trailer to view what he had just found. You see, there had been a camera pointed right towards the area where the cow had died the day before, and Eric showed the footage capturing the cow's final moments. after all the other cows had fled in one final desperate act

the beast lifted its head as if trying, straining to stand up. Of course it didn't work. The cow failed to stand and flee. The head dropped and the cow died presumably from acute high-level stress. This in itself,

while macabre, was not necessarily profound. That is, until Eric followed the line of sight of the animal. When he did, he noticed something contrasted clearly against the pale blue of the Utah summer sky, a black object, wide and short like a disc. It had only been captured within a couple of frames. It was so fast. But there was no denying it was there. And there was no denying that on the surface at least, it appeared the cow saw it too, right before he dropped dead. Welcome to Haunted Cosmos. Before I say anything else,

I realized the other day that I've been saying, welcome to the Haunted Cosmos podcast. You're confusing, And it's just, that's not the name of the thing. Although our website is the haunted cosmos. Yeah, I know. But that's because haunted cosmos was taken. And then our email is Haunted Cosmos podcast. It's haunted cosmos, okay? That's what it is, people.

Let's, let's just be the definitive word. Anyway, my name is Ben Garrett. I am your illustrious host. So true. I don't know what that means. But I'm your host. Joined by my co-host, Brian Soeveh. So good to be here, Ben.

Yeah. With you here in this room. Here in this room with our pitchers of water. With our pictures of water. our big foot mugs. Make sure you pick up some merch, guys. Go to the website. Hit the store.

The haunted cosmos.com. Hit a add to car. Smash the like. Smash subscribe button. While we're shamelessly promoting, Ben, tell the people, we've got this flourishing community of haunted cosmonauts. Tell people how to join. There's some sweet benefits that come with patronage.

Yeah, that's true. So we try to make the patronage of this show extremely valuable to people. So what we do is when you sign up to be a patron, you get. the first or second half of whatever season we're in, immediately available to you. Like five episodes at a time. Five episodes immediately available. You can binge listen.

And then we also give you access to a signal chat group. And then I'm working on a Discord server as well, where all the other patrons are there. You can discuss. You can have these crazy... Some of the most crazy things I've ever read in my life have been on this. So true. So if you want...

If you're interested in that, that's another perk. And then also the biggest perk to me. This is the coolest part. This is the best. Every week you get a patron-only episode of our dusty tome show. Yes. And what that is is just other stories, whether it's listeners submitted or stuff that we found online and we're like, this is cool. But for whatever reason, we're not going to do a main show about it, at least not yet.

Then we'll put it on the dusty tone and you'll hear it and it's like, there's music in the background. Same vibe. Yeah, same vibe. And it's wonderful. If you've listened to like lore with Aaron Manky, Actually, I'm sorry. I'm Baron Spanky. And this is chore.

I'm Karen Hanky. Where he tells Lib stories. Yeah, because he's a lib. Because he's an L. The thing is, it's every bit as good as Lore. And Laura is like the biggest podcast in the 14th space. So I mean, I'm not even kidding. I think the Dusty Tome is a great show.

Yeah, it's a really fun show. They're usually a little shorter, like, 20 to 30 minute episodes. Yeah, every patron level gets access to the Dusty Tome. Every, and then... The Sasquatch photographer tier and... up. Yeah. So what we have is the conspiracy theorists.

Yeah. That's the 595 tier a month. They get Dusty Tome and Signal Chat access and Discord when we get it. The Sasquatch photographer gets Dusty Tome, early shows, and Signal Chat. And then the top tier, which is the Cryptid Hunter. Crypted Hunter, they get all that stuff, but then they also get a free piece of merch. You send them merch. Every few months.

Like a couple times a year, we're sending them free merch. Yeah, usually about once a new line out. Once a quarter, we'll send them a shirt or a mug and hook them up. And here's the thing, guys. Like 10.95 months, like, all that. I mean, but think about it. We're giving you four bonus shows on average. Yep.

Two main shows, early access. And it's like going to Starbucks twice. Yeah. I mean, once, if you're a basic white girl putting a pumpkin spice, a vintage pumpkin spice latte or whatever. Vintage? Venty. Vinty.

You used to work there. Stop playing dumb. What are you talking? We actually regularly said back people's order. like that. I was saying, all right, a vintage pumpkin Plice latte, just to see how far I could change it before they would notice, and, like, people never say it. They're like, what is that? Does you just smell dusty? Does it smell old?

Yeah, I don't know. But, Ben, enough about us. Yes. Let's talk about, let's talk about some stuff. Let's talk about why we're here. Let's talk about a mysterious haunted ranch in northeastern Utah. Here's the thing. You know why you're here. We know why we're here. What we're doing tonight is concluding our investigation of the enigmatic Skinwalker Ranch. Oh, so true. saying it is enigmatic, okay, at the very least.

And we're focusing tonight on the current period of ownership, the Fugel era. It's owned by Brandon Fugel. He bought it in 2016, and he still owns it today. Friend of the show, Brandon Fugel. Yeah, we're trying to make that. And when I say friend of the show, I mean, I'm going to stalk him on Twitter and hope he responds to me. And hey, by the way, listeners, spam Brandon Fugel on Twitter. Tell him. Tell him to listen to Hanna Cosmos. Yeah. We would love, he's a Mormon, so we would love, A, to share the gospel with him,

B, to get him like a mountain do or something. Yeah, like, have a mountain dew with him. Yeah. And then we really want him to invite us to the ranch. We want to go hangout dragon

who is not, he's a person. Yeah, he's a guy. He's not a serious. He's not a serious. And as, in fact, we said part three,

but this is ongoing. Like, we could do a part four at some point. Oh my gosh. Because the investigation continues. Yeah, I'm sure dusty tomes will include a lot of skin walker stuff. That's so true.

As we keep going. So stay tuned for that. But anyway, to review. In part one, we discussed the first owners of the ranch, the Sherman family. Well, they got it from the Myers family, who were truly the first owners. But the Sherman's were the first ones to at least document all the weird stuff that was going on. And then in part two, we talked about the NIDS investigation in Bigelow Aerospace, owned by Robert Bigelow, and their investigation of the mysterious ranch.

We discussed some of the major difficulties they had in the investigation, specifically that pre-cognitive, sentient intelligence, where it was almost like the ranch was messing with them. Yeah. Trying to make it hard for them to collect data. Just trickster stuff. Right. And then we left you hanging a little bit as to what the next era of the ranch would look like.

So in this show, we want to really emphasize the common denominators that are linking the three eras together. So we'll talk about what has changed or evolved, like the different phenomena, how they've gotten different. But more importantly, we think, what has stayed the same? Yeah. What has remained consistent? And then we'll also further explore the pagan implications of the land. Remember, this is a Navajo land. And this whole thing started with the curse of the Skin Walker that the Navajo supposedly placed on this property. So when you get into that, you start to get into really occult practices. You start to get into like nexus of dark portals and nether worlds and stuff. And hey, we'll get there when we get there. We'll get there when we get there. Yeah. And then lastly tonight, it is part three. It's our final main installment for now. We're going to give. our takeaways, our own conclusions,

as to, you know, what do we think is going on? What do we think should be the Christian response? How, what's our speculation? Yeah. Like, we're going to get a little unhinged, but hopefully not too unhinged. It'll be like hinged. It'll be, we'll make a distinction.

Hey, it's going to be slightly hinged. Slightly unhinged. We'll say, like, hey, this is what we think and this is what we know. Yes. And there's a difference. You've got to make a distinction, guys. You've always got to make a distinction.

What is certainty versus what? is opinion. That's right. So true. Moving on, I do want to give some reaction to the cold open story. Yeah. So what we have, first, let me go through the players. All right. So we have, yeah, let's get that clear. Brandon Fugel, he's a real estate mogul in Salt Lake City. He is a very, very wealthy man. And he funds the current research that's going on on Skimwalker Ranch. Now, he doesn't live on the ranch. He has multiple other companies that require his attention. So what he's done is he's hired a team of investigators to go do the work for him. These include people like Eric Bard, who's the principal investigator. He's kind of the main manager of the scientific aspect of what's

going on. And then he also has brought on, and this was somewhat spurned by the history channel creating a TV show on it, Dr. Travis Taylor. Now, Travis Taylor is a astrophysicist from the University of Alabama. He's a genuinely credentialed guy. And he's worked on many, many top secret government contracts. So he's there to help them solidify the experimentation. Yeah, continued in the spirit of NIDS to really rigorously follow a scientific method, attempt to find repeatable, documented, scientifically valid information and data on what's going on. They're really, same idea as NIDS, just now with no longer 1990s technology. Yeah, now you have more up-to-date stuff. I mean, the gulf between 90s technology and today is so huge. It is massive.

It sounds crazy, but that's how quick the camera technology and things. Yeah, people don't give that enough credit. Drones. All source. Lidar? Lidar is huge. Lidar is huge. Yeah. So, you're right.

I mean, so same spirit. Yeah. And then just a few other people. So Dragon, he doesn't really... We're not really going to talk about him. He's just cool. I just... And he's called Dragon.

If you watch the show, Dragon is like... He's so intense. A character who's there for the drama. Yeah. His name's Bram. Bryant. And he literally, dude,

in season one episode one, he introduces himself to Dr. Taylor as, hey, you can call me dragon. Like, gives himself the name.

Yeah, he's wonderful. So, you know, it'd be like, if I walked up to you know, I was like,

you can call me the red power range. They call me John Slade. My name is, that's a psych reference if anyone gets him. My name is Luke Skywalker. Hi.

My name is Ben Vader. But he's always like full up tactical. Yeah. Like the body armor. He's got like, Anyway, AR-15 a shotgun at all times. I cannot stress enough. We don't talk about him.

No, we don't. But he's the main character, energy. That's true. His life is the main storyline. And then the last guy I'm going to mention by name is Thomas Winterton. Thomas Winterton is, Brian's laughing because there's this. This is so stupid. Ben, Ben does the most perfect impersonation of Dr. Taylor.

Dr. Taylor, he's from Alabama. He's from Alabama. Let's get it out of it. the way, this is what he does. Dr. Taylor always goes, remember, I was raised in Georgia, so I know Dr. Taylor. He does it. Okay. Thomas Winterton and I went over to the Mesa. You see what's going on here at Skinwalker Ranch. I can't. It's, it's so perfect.

I mean, like, corporate, he's just telling you the difference between these two pictures. They're the same picture. It's the same picture. So, anyway, Thomas Winterton and I, and he is the, he's actually like the ranch manager. So if you remember from Nids, the Nid's episode, they kept the ranch function. They kept Sherman on. Yeah, they kept Sherman on to manage the cattle and everything. So Fugles doing the same thing. By the way, I'm pretty sure I called him Tom through the whole episode.

His name is Terry, isn't it? Well, they gave him a pseudonym of Tom Gorman. Tom Gorman. And I, like, mixed them together. I'm pretty sure through the whole second part. You did. I remember. We kept calling it. I did too, Tom Sherman.

Tom Sherman. His name is Terry Sherman. Terry and Gwen. Anyway, but they kept... You know who we're talking about. Yeah, they're following. So anyway, Thomas Winterton and I,

and he is the ranch manager, so he just makes sure everything's going smoothly on the ranch. But, like, you know, he's like the deacon. He, like, literally does everything. Yeah, yeah. Like, he digs and sets up. If there's, like, heavy machinery, a road to be greater. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, a fence to be mended. I mean, a rocket to be set up. He's wearing cowboy boots in a cowboy hat. He's a thick, callous hand, tough guy. I'll tell you, knows his business. He's a Chad King. He's a Chad King. Let's call it what it is. Call it what it is. All right. And in fact, friend of the show, a friend of the show, Thomas Winnerton, come hang out with us. We would, we'll hang out with you.

Invite us down. We would love to go on location. Dude, we would, yeah, let's shoot our show. We'd go parade up. We would be so respectful. Full armler of God. We would not take any pictures, I promise. Well, probably. No, we wouldn't, Brian. It would be just for us. Unless, unless we were allowed to. Unless we were allowed to. Unless we, well, yeah, I mean, come on. So, good point. The last thing I'll say before we reflect on the cold open a little bit more. Yeah. Is I know I can already see the messages in the tweets and the Twitters.

Oh, it's a show on history channel. Like, this is all faith. Yeah, yeah. Okay, first of all, I hear you. And I understand. Hey, there is the alien meme guy. There's ancient aliens. And they have to recover from that reputation.

Yep. I understand why you'd say that. But here's the deal. And also, just by the way, it is the same producers as ancient aliens. Like, same guys are made. 100%. And you know what? They had fun with it, though. But let me just quote Brandon Fugel. Okay? Brandon Fugle, it says that he agreed to the show as long as, quote, nothing was fabricated or contrived, and I could use my own team who I trusted. So Fugle hired all of his own people. He did not let History Channel hire anyone. Fugle had to sign off on anyone they recommended, personally.

And then he also, part of the contract of the show is that they can't make anything up. They can't doctor any footage. They can't create hoaxes. Everything has to be legitimate. Everything has to be authentic. At least, the only way that it would happen is if they were tricking Brandon Fugel. Yeah. That's what I doubt.

The conspiracy we'd have to go deep. Yeah, you'd have to go really deep. So I just want to get that out of the way first. This is, just like Nids. Like, this is a legitimate investigation. And I get the sense as well that Dr. Taylor and Thomas Winterton and I... And Eric Bard, too. They would not be interested in faking stuff.

No, no, no. He's got, like, Eric Bard is like a classic nerd. Yeah, he, and he's a physicist too. Yeah, they're all... Except Thomas Winterson or not. They all have PhDs. Yeah. And, like, they're really serious about this stuff.

And then Thomas Winterton, like, he's just a rancher, so he's just kind of along for the ride. Yeah. All right. With all that said. All that said. All that said. The cold open. Yeah, let's talk about it.

So here's why I brought it up. I think that it does a good job of linking the common denominators. You have, just like what NID said, anytime there's UAP phenomena, look at animal mutilations. So here we have, and it's not necessarily a mutilation, but the mysterious death of a cow that was stress induced,

like, per the vet, he's like, yeah, this was acute stress. And they're like, well, what could it have been? He's like, I don't know. And then they see this UAP dark across the sky in the footage. So it's linking those things together. And then I also just want to point out

something that will come up more. And that is that after they found the cow, one of the other security guys was like, hey, let's treat this like a crime scene. Right. It's a good idea. He's like, you got, no one touch anything. Let's take pictures. Yep.

And so they all kind of backed off, and he's taking pictures of the cow to make sure that stuff's documented. Yep. And as he's doing that, his phone starts to go berserk. Like crazy. Like, it starts to buy stuff. It like cancels this camera. It deletes images. It's like, deleting emails.

It's opening apps. It's doing all this stuff. He's like, this has never happened before. And then when he, he, like, can't do it. steps away from the cow, it stops. And not only did it do that, but it did that through a secure enclave. So it's multiple times in the show. Yeah, so there was another thing where they were up on the mesa.

On the Mesa. Up in the Mesa. And they're down in this pit. And the guy, like, his phone was locked. Yeah, like security locked. And like off. And it turned on, unlocked, passcode entered. He did none of this.

Right. The difficulty of hacking an iPhone is actually very high. Mm-hmm. And it did it. It was like, boop. Got through all of it. Instantaneously. Which was crazy.

And then starts doing crazy stuff. So it kind of, you know, is akin to all of the instrumentation being fiddled with by whatever forces is, what's the word, like manipulating things on the ranch? Interesting as well. We didn't mention it. We held some things back in Nid's episode, but one of them was instrument and magnetic interferences. Yeah. Where their compasses would spin. They would have magnetic and other instrumentation anomalies.

just over and over. But then again, 90s, all the way now to in the late 20 teens, the instrumentation is shrunk. It's handheld. They've got tri-field meters. They've got all sorts of instrumentation, very powerful. And weird stuff. Yeah, weird stuff.

Weird stuff happens. And then some of the other things that happened that are really alarming, but that we won't get super deep into, but that is important. So Thomas Winterton, he has worked on the ranch since Fugals owned it in 2016. Yeah. Now, the show didn't start until 2019. So there's three years of investigation that we actually don't know much about. And we've been watching this show since before Hona Cosmos. Yes, we've been watching it. We love the show. It's a really good show. Yeah, it is really good.

It's just a bunch of guys having a big old time. It's just a bunch of dudes being guys. There's genuinely weird stuff. And so Thomas Winterton had this thing where he was digging on the ranch. And that's a whole theme where, like, everyone's afraid of disturbing the earth around the ranch. You remember, allegedly, the contract. Yes. Tell us. So allegedly, the contract that the Sherman's had to purchase the ranch from the previous owners, that family that owned it for 60 years said, The Myers. The Myers.

You must notify us if you're going to dig before you do. Like, why? And like, there's, there's questions as to whether or not that's real. But no matter what, the perception is among all the investigators that digging on their ranch is somehow dangerous. And it seems that it was backed up because one time Thomas was doing some digging. and he suddenly got this piercing headache. Yep. Like a piercing headache so bad that he had to stop working

and he actually had to get escorted to the hospital because he couldn't, I mean, he could barely walk. He's like, am I having an aneurysm? He said that he couldn't stroke. Like, imagine a migraine that's the worst thing in the world and you like can't see you anymore. Yeah. He goes into the hospital.

They take an x-ray of his head. And there's this contusion, this like, this weird thing that's growing on the back of his head, almost like someone had injected water in between his skull and his, like, skin, and the doctors were saying that it could kill you. Like, if you hadn't have come in, this 100% could kill you

because they figured out that it was internal bleeding. Yeah. And they had no explanation for it. And the picture, the imaging. Oh, yeah, you can see it to the... MRI imaging, I think? Yeah. Or yeah, it was MRI.

I think it's MRI imaging, and it's like a big bump. Yeah. A hematoma, big bump. You could even see it with the naked eye, though. Oh, yeah, it was huge. His head was all lopsided. Yeah. And then so...

No idea why. Yeah, no idea why. That actually happens again on the show. Yeah. He has to get escorted back to the hospital. Has the same thing as just smaller this time because he kind of caught it quicker. And then there was another person who he was on a team that they had built this, this like a, you know, like a Chevrolet Tahoe or something that was decked out in all this gear that would help them see UAPs. It was your classic, like, cruise.

Crazy nerd, ghost hunting van type thing. Right. But like more science-y than that. Like a mystery machine. Yeah, like decked out. I mean, tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. If Velma had designed a mystery machine instead of Shaggy. Deep cut.

So, and so anyway, one of the guys from this crew, they're all sitting just in the trailer discussing their plan of attack, their plan of experimentation. And he starts to have an uncontrollable tremor. And his head is pounding. It gets so bad that Travis Taylor is like, let's put him in the silo because he knew that no like wave radiation will be able to. It would function like a Faraday cage. Yeah, Faraday cage. And so they go into the silo and all of a sudden it stops. He drinks like four bottles of water and he's good to go.

So weird. Very weird. And all, and I say all that to say that one of the things they discovered in the midst of digging and Thomas Winterton's head and this guy having his tremor is that whenever. stuff would happen, whenever phenomena would occur, if they happened to be measuring radio frequencies, they would get a clear spike at the 1.6 gigahertz signal on the radio wave spectrum. And here's the thing. And this is going to come up throughout the episode. So I wanted to lay it out really clearly now. Here's the thing. Whenever this happened, there was no military installations close by. There was no air traffic that was trying to communicate with them. There was no satir.

satellites. There was no, none of their equipment was operating on that, on that frequency. And this is a frequency that's commonly used in GPS and radio communication. Yeah. And so, was there something trying to communicate with them? That's the idea. I'm just going to leave that there for now. Now, Ben, that that 1.6 gigahertz frequency continues to come up in what was one of the most fascinating elements of the show, I think, in my opinion, was the way that that frequency led them to this nexus seeming strange location and a bunch of phenomena that really sort of centered on this,

well, triangled. Yeah. On this. Talk us through the triangle. Yeah, so that is a really good point. It is one of the more interesting aspects of the show. And I think it actually goes to show the scientific chops of Dr. Taylor.

Yeah. Like he figured out this thing that didn't fit and followed it to the end. And I was annoyed. I was like, he kept going back to it. I kept being like, why does this matter? I don't think this way. Like, I'm not an engineer type.

I'm not good at fixing stuff. And so I was bored. I'm like, I would have not kept going. Yeah, yeah. And he did. I mean, he figured it out. All credit. So anyway.

Kind of. So what he wants to do is triangulate where the signal is coming from, at least thereabouts. Yeah. And so the way that you do this is you measure the signal from three different locations. And then you're able to take that data and figure out where those three points come together. So you can find the general area of the source. source. So what they do is they take that triangulated data and they find out that the source of the 1.6 gigahertz signal was popping up and it was supposedly like 5,000 feet up in the air

above an area of the ranch where kind of there's an intersection of dirt roads and it forms what looks like a triangle. If you have a bird's eye view, it looks like a triangle. So 5,000 feet in the air above this triangle road is the source of this signal. And they start to focus a lot of attention there. And they start to realize that the area above the triangle, that 5,000 foot mark, really acts like an anomalous area. Yeah. Almost like there's some barrier there that you can't see. So here's an example.

One of the things they do is they fly a helicopter over the triangle area. And they go in the different elevations or different altitudes and different patterns to try and figure out if the instrument on the aircraft is going to do anything funky. Yeah. What they find is right in between that three to five thousand foot area, the altimeter in the aircraft multiple times was showing for more than just a moment, like for a long time, that they were only 40 feet off the ground. So strange.

And they knew, I mean, it doesn't take a genius. You're in there with them. You're thousands of feet in the air. And it showed they were 40 feet off the ground. So they were like, okay, this is weird, but maybe something's messing with the altimeter. Instruments malfunction. Right. there's something underneath us that's invisible.

Exactly. Yeah, I mean, exactly. So the pilot is like, all right, well, we need to land because we can't have malfunctioning equipment. And altimeter is actually pretty important. Okay, number one, helicopters are not safe things. Number one, helicopters, common aircraft L. I'm amazed that these guys did it. They're like, you know what?

There's this crazy weird thing where this strange signals coming from, where magnetic anomalies that interfere with important instrumentation work, let's fly a sophisticated helicopter full of instruments. version of a cabana bed. Yeah, and fly up through it. 5,000 feet in the air. You're like, but should you do that, though? So anyway, and they do. They land after this weird thing, and they're like, that was creepy. Well, then our guy, Eric Bard, he's reviewing the footage, and he notices in just one frame,

one frame of footage, a black streak like some object flew underneath the helicopter. And the camera only caught it for one frame. One frame. So it had to be going insanely fast. Because the frame rate on a camera, they're probably filming it either 24, 29, 30, or 60 frames per second. Right. Either way, it's like... Probably not 60, because the resolution wasn't amazing.

That'd be like 4Ks. Yeah, it's probably 30 frames to be, like 29 and 30 frames to be average. Yeah, and the, I mean, the width of the frame had to be at least the length of the helicopter. Yep. Which is probably about 30 to 40 feet. Yep. So you do the math. The thing is traveling fast.

I just did the math. It was traveling real fast. Very fast. Yeah, I'm not going to tell you. I don't want to show off. And then one of the other things that they did, and I'll talk about this before we get into one of the more interesting stories, is that they took the helicopter back up into the sky, brave.

Yeah, yeah. And they had these parachutes that they were going to drop, and the parachutes had all these data sensors attached to them. So they were going to do a bunch of these, and they were going to track the colors, and there was, like, different weights to see how things reacted, all the sciencey stuff, whatever. Yeah.

So they go. technical term. Right, the sciencey stuff. So they go, actually, so they go above the 5,000 foot mark. So they can toss the parachutes through the anomalous area. Yep, with the trackers. And when they look at the trackers again, so they watched all this take place. Yeah.

And there were some weird stuff where like, oh, it looks like it's getting blown by wind that's not there. It's really tough to like land things from 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000, or 5,000 feet. Anywhere near where you're trying to. Right. So stuff gets blown around. and they're kind of like, maybe it's hitting the thing and bouncing off, and the viewers are like, all right, guys, like, relax. But then they go and they look

at the tracked GPS data. Each one had a GPS tracker. And they found that dozens of these parachutes, dozens, showed their GPS going into the Mesa and then popping back out again.

So weird. Like, they knew where the Mesa was. It is no secret. And the tracker, on multiple of them, was showing that it was going into the mesa, flying around in there, and then popping back out, lower, closer of the ground. And it reminds me. It reminds me, too, Ben. What does it remind you of? It reminds me of the siding of the silvery disc that flew into the mesa and just disappeared into the rocks. Yes. I mean, multiple times they have these instrumentation, like, it's not the

same thing, but it kind of rhymes. It's like they had instrumentation messed with with the GPS. because there's no way physically that they watched. It didn't happen. But the instruments said that it did. Okay? So either they missed it and something really weird happened and it literally like flew through the mesa as if the mesa didn't exist.

Right. Dimensional shift of a plank length. Okay. I mean, sure, maybe, but probably not. Good use of the word plank length. Thank you. That was just for you. Yeah, that was just for you, Ben.

That's great. Or there's some sort of magnetic anomaly or anomaly that's messy with the GPS technology, which seems to be the most likely thing is that some sort of failure of the technology. Yeah, sure. But either way, this, it happens in this area. Yeah. Over and over it happens in this area.

And even when they did things, to my memory at least, even when they ran experiments that seemed to fail, it turns out that they didn't actually fail. Do you remember the one with the radio station? Oh, yeah. So here's what they do. They get the 1.6 gigahertz. They get on that train. Yeah.

And Travis Taylor's like, I'm going to follow this gold vein and see where it goes. So they figured out that it was sourced at the triangle area. And they kept recording it. And it sounded like, you know, a crackly radio. Like someone, you know, you could reach the point of being like someone's trying to communicate with you. Yeah, like encrypted radio signals sound like static-y stuff. Exactly. So it sounded that way.

And so Taylor was like, well, what if we just went to the local radio station? and broadcast this recording of this signal that we're getting. And just see what happens. So, again, it's just this like shot in the dark ideas. Such a weird idea. Let's just see what sticks. Yeah. So they go, him and Eric Bard go.

They broadcast their recording for a few minutes over the airwaves. They get this lady at a local radio. It's like in a shack in the middle of nowhere. She's like, all right. She's like, fine. You all come on. Yeah, you plug it in. The listeners won't care.

She's probably Native American. They're like, now we're going to play, you know, for some, we're going to play the signal for the demons. Yeah. That was a Toby Keith. We'll put a boot in your booty. It's the American way. Yeah.

Next thing they know they're listening to. Dave Matthews band is next. After the weird alien thing. So they play the thing and nothing happens. Yeah. And so they're like, okay, you know, whatever. Nothing weird. They kind of expected to see maybe a UAP in the sky.

Yeah. And nothing weird. Whatever. So they go back to the ranch. And then the next day, one of the other members of the team, who I haven't mentioned yet, his name is Jim Morse.

he's just another worker on the ranch he comes up to Eric and Taylor and he's like hey guys didn't you all do that radio signal thing yesterday they're like yeah and he goes okay you need to see this he pulls out his phone goes to social media

I don't know what social media was but it was probably Gab it was like a local page probably the best social media there is Gab he goes to like the local group for Ballard Utah and he pulls up this video

and multiple people had taken similar videos of the night before there's like a dozen or so strange lights in the sky yeah it's pitch black at night there's all these uapes lighting up and then you know disappearing and lighting up again and disappearing and it seems like they're flying in a formation almost doing like a sweep of ballard like they're like they're looking for something is what it i mean that's just what it looks like you know okay again my theory which i know i'm like jumping all the guns it's almost like that's they were looking for the signal. It's like, okay, my theory is that the demons are imitating technological, advanced civilizations in an attempt to fool people who are fooled by an evolutionary biological worldview,

you know, this materialist worldview. This is exactly what you'd expect. All right, I have something that will back that up. Let's hear it. However, it's really stupid. Well, that's even better. But it's a principle, and I want you to bear with it. So you said earlier that these things aren't.

the same, but they rhyme. Yeah, yeah. The things between the Sherman era, the Nids era, and now the Fugel era, they aren't the same, but they rhyme. It reminds me, and this is where the stupidity comes in, of this George Lucas quote. Okay. Where he was talking about Star Wars, the original trilogy, and then the prequel trilogy. And he said that the story's rhymed. Yeah.

And it's like typological. Mm-hmm. And it makes me think that maybe they're not as smart as we're giving them credit for. Because if you go back to the Sherman era, they're mimicking a highly advanced technology, but in a way that would be like contemporary technology today. Yeah. And then today, they're mimicking what we would think is high advanced technology, but who knows, maybe in 10 years, it actually doesn't seem that advanced anymore.

Yeah. And so it's almost like they're just ahead. And that's why you get this rhyme scheme. Interesting. Where like they're trying to do the same thing. the only reason it looks different is because our own technology has evolved. So they have to shift it a little bit

to just stay ahead of the curve. I don't know. That is something to chew on. Maybe it's totally dumb. Brian and I are pretty blessed guys. I mean, we get to make this podcast together for all of you, and because of that, we get introduced to a lot of really amazing other podcasts.

One of those that we've come to know and love is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. That's right. Ben, the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast is hosted by our friend Matt Whitman. In this project, he's got going, it really is awesome. His passion for God's Word has driven him to release an episode every weekday morning. That's insane. You heard us right.

Every weekday morning. Where he goes through whole books of the Bible in single episode summaries or multiple episode series. And he breaks the Bible down quickly and concisely, keeping the episodes short. I mean, it is called the 10-minute Bible Hour and very easy to digest. The 10-minute Bible Hour podcast is a great way to make fun, deep-dive Bible study a part of your daily rhythm. And you can find the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you prefer to get your shows. Or better yet, go to www.v.v.com. That's thetmbh.com.

And there's a link in the description for that, by the way, to find all. all of the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast episodes. While you're there, tell Matt that we said hello. Cheers. Let's move on. Perfect segue. So when they found the triangle area, they found the anomaly in the sky, Travis Taylor decided what he was going to do

was start poking the hornet's nest, is what he called it. Yep. By shooting rocket after rocket after rocket up into the sky in that area. And they realized that when they did this, there was a much higher odds of stuff happening, and they, like the Nids team, also caught on to the idea that the cows could act as biosensors.

Yep. So at every launch, some members of the team would be looking up in the sky and other members would be looking at the cattle in the field. Yep. And if anyone saw anything,

they had to shout. So during one launch, the rocket goes up and they quickly realize that the cows are acting strange. So strange, in fact, that they start stampede. away from the launch site.

Yep. And they have never done this before. This is totally new. It's exactly like what happened back in the day. Right. Sherman. Exactly. So they stampede away.

And so Dr. Taylor is like, okay, look up in the sky. And sure enough, they see, and it's caught on camera, on the history channel, a UAP appear in the sky, and it's the middle of the day. Yeah. It's still visible. And it stays there for like 30 seconds. They film, I mean, they film it clearly. They film it. About 10 people witnessed it for a long time.

and then it disappeared as the rocket parachuted back to the ground. Yep. It's so weird. And this event actually took place just a few days before the dead cow incident that we talked about in the cold open. So all this stuff has to be connected. I love Dr. Taylor, too, the whole time. Me too. He's like, look, look, it's up in the air.

Everybody up there. I mean, he's just like, he is amped. He is so amped. And it's perfect because he's like the greatest combination of Southern nerd. Yeah. But he's truly fascinated by this stuff. Like you can tell it's an earnest, serious interest for him. Right. But just the fact that there's so many witnesses, so many things,

I look at this sighting and I'm like, well, when I first started watching the show, I thought this is going to be another, every episode ends with a cliffhanger that turns out to be nothing kind of thing. Right. You know where they're like, my dad always laughs about the Oak Island show that History Channel has because he watches it. They have him hooked and he knows it.

He's like, they have me hooked. Every episode ends with, could it be the night? Knights Templar? Yeah. And then the next step was just like, it wasn't. And then they just keep going. Is this the Holy Grail? I fully expected that to be the Skinwalker show.

Because I was familiar with the whole Skinwalker story, the Sherman era, the Nids, all of that already. And you know the pattern. They always, every single one of these shows do it. But it's like, man, they got this one and they're like, oh, this one's legit. They legitimately got so many weird things that were actually documented. They did this one thing. Dude, they did this one thing. Where at the beginning of the show, like season one and two,

they were much more interested in trying to dig a lot. Yeah. And then get the ranch to, like, react against them. Mm-hmm. And a lot of it was focused around Homestead 2. Yeah. Which if you remember from Nids, Homestead 2 was where they saw that big, bright, blue orb.

Yep. It was like trying to hide from them. Yep. So this is an area of high focus for every investigative team. And before they really honed in on the triangle area, they were spending a lot of time at Homestead 2. Homestead 2 also where the investigators earlier heard, like the foreign languages over their head.

Yes. Laughing at them. Tons of stuff happen at Homestead, too. Yes. So they are doing a night study of Homestead too. They got their thermal cameras out. They got night vision out. And nothing's really happening.

And then all of a sudden, and it is completely random. Yeah. The cows are still acting fine. They don't see anything in the sky. But one of the team members, I can't remember who, is watching the thermal camera.

And in the middle of Homestead 2, in the middle of the doorway, this black cold void appears. Yeah. And, I mean, out of nowhere, where the temperature drops by like tens of degrees, completely randomly. And then the black void,

you can see it on the camera. It's like a black hole because it's so cold. It grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. And then stays this big for some amount of time. People start feeling really weird. Yeah. They start measuring strange magnetic field anomalies. They start measuring gamma radiation.

And then after a few minutes, it just closes back up. and it goes back to normal temperatures. And it makes you think of the portals. It does make you think of the portals, Ben. And this goes back to what I'm saying. Like, the portal is still there. It's just that for whatever reason,

now they don't feel the need to make it visible in the light spectrum because now we have better thermal imaging. Yeah, or it's just, I mean, one thing that happens when you read the, basically the summaries of the study of any area that was studied over a long period of time, it can give you the sense that every five minutes, something crazy is happening. Yeah, this is multiple years. No, it's like even the Sherman area,

it got intense. Even something as intense as the mothman flap, the 13 months. Yeah. There's still most of the time nothing's happening. Yeah. And most of the time, you're not documenting everything that is happening. So I wonder if they will eventually get some kind of portal activity that is visible. Maybe. Well, they did have one orb situation. Do you remember when the, yeah, the, the king, They had like thermal cameras set up surveilling Homestead too. Yep. And one night, it was after they had seen a UAP.

And it was actually one of the most prominent UAPs they saw. They launched a rocket up. The Cal started acting funny. So, you know, Travis Taylor's like, everyone look up. And they see this donut-shaped UFO. I'm going to call it a UFO. Because it was flying like a ship, but it didn't have any of the navigation lights of a plane.

And there were no satellites above them. Yeah. And it starts like going north across the sky and then it just disappears as if it dissolves into the night. That in itself is really weird. So weird. And then later, Eric Bard calls Dr. Taylor into his office in the middle of the night. Eric had been up reviewing footage. And he's like, you got to lay eyes on this.

Yeah. They see floating about 15 feet off the road in front of Homestead 2, this probably a soccer ball size or a basketball sized light or. Yeah. Just kind of meandering along. Very weird motion. And it's leaving this like trail almost, where it's distorting the image behind it. And it completely stumps the guys.

Yeah, because it looked like sometimes you get dust whirbs in cameras that are close to the lens of the camera. And so they fuzz out, you know what I'm saying, where it's focusing far away. And just like the human eye, if you hold your finger right in front of your eye and focus on something 10 feet away, it'll look fuzzy and huge. Right. So sometimes dust particles do that. But what was strange about this one is that because of the trees, you can see because of the parallax,

you're going in and out of the trees, that this is genuinely far away from the camera. Yeah, they knew it's not dust paradolia right in front. It's not, it's far enough way that you looked at it. And I'm not an orb on camera. Like, I'm not impressed by that, to be honest guys. Like at our church. Yeah, Brian and I have an ongoing few.

We have like security system here. Not going to give you a lot of details about it, but it's infrared and it's got, so it does not. Night Vision and whatever. Okay. So there's like this one spot in the stairway. Yeah, it's a creepy stairway. Where certain members of the staff.

Me and Dan are convinced, who will remain nameless. Me and Dan, are convinced that there is some sort of orby thing happening. I've seen the thing. It's dust. It literally happens at the same time. It's predictable. No. The path is unpredictable.

It goes up and down. Future episode. It's like, dude. The orb of refuge church. And it's like a 10 second episode because that's the whole story. I think it's an angel. See, this is what I have to deal with.

This is what I'm dealing with guys. No, but in all seriousness, I'm generally not that impressed by orbs on camera or because digital photography is artifacts. You see even film. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen mechanically.

Bugs crawling on the lens. Security cameras look really freaky. But this one. But this one, I will say, is difficult to explain. Yeah. And it's also, so there's the parallax with the different tree branches

where it's clearly in front of someone behind others. But then there's also, like, the boundary of the sphere is really clear. Yeah, it's very clear. It's not like it's a fuzzy boundary. You know what?

I think it's the ghost of JFK. I'm just kidding. He would be haunting the Pentagon. For obvious reasons. I mean, for obvious reasons. Don't unalive us, CIA. Yeah, that was a joke. This is all satire.

This is all satire. Anyway, so there was that orb situation that happened there. there was the infrared cold spot that they saw. There was a lot of other activity, just like NIDS, where they would have personal experiences. Right. Feeling really intense fear or emotions.

But they had medical events with migraines and weird. I mean, a lot of stuff like that where the people were functioning almost as biosensors, but then not quite documentable. Yeah. So along with the normal Nid stuff of experiencing many things, they actually did, though, man. They captured so much. They did capture a lot.

And one of the things that they had in common with NIDS was this, proclivity for equipment to malfunction right when you needed it most. And in people that were contractors brought onto the ranch who do this full time with their equipment. Decades of experience. Like the drone guy, for example. Oh my gosh, yeah. So this guy comes on the ranch. I forgot about that.

He's going to do some mapping and aerial footage and stuff like that with a drone. It's a very expensive, like $30,000 drone. I'm not talking about GoPro Hero, Lark or whatever it's called the Maverick. The Maverick Pro. It's not a Mavik Pro 4. Okay, it's huge. It's like probably two to four feet across. And it can do LiDAR.

Like, it can map the geography of the year. Yes, really high level stuff. So it, which LiDAR reminds me about how we have to do an expedition bigfoot thing. Anyway. Oh, that shows. Okay. All right. Expedition Bigfoot guys.

You guys. You guys. Okay. But the LiDar drone comes on $30,000 drone fully charged. Like, a guy does this routinely. Gets hired to go to, for geological surveys mainly, not go something. Like he's not doing weird stuff. No, yeah, he's doing this for like oil surveying.

Like big, big, I mean, when you pay this guy's probably thousands and thousands of dollars to have him come. Laying foundations for commercial projects. Shows up, drone won't work. I can't remember exactly what it was. Like, here's the thing. It was fully charged. Yeah. And it was working when they were at the command center.

Yeah. Like the, you know, where Eric Bard's office is. Yeah, and there's a helipad. Yeah, it's where everybody gets together on the ranch. And then they go over to Homestead, too, where they're going to launch the thing. and all of a sudden it won't connect. The battery is plummeting in power. And if he goes back to the command center,

it like starts working again. The problem, though, is that now the battery is drained. So he can't actually do anything because the battery is supposed to last for like a ton of time, like a full day or something of up and down. And now he's like, well, I can't risk it falling out of the sky. Like the battery's almost gone. Yeah.

And there's no explanation. Stuff like that. Stuff like that. The best one, though. Yeah, what's the best one, Ben? Is when the people came down from the Salt Lake Astronomy Society. This is the craziest. Okay, so this is like near the finale of season three.

Yeah. And they've honed in on the triangle area. They've honed in on the anomaly that's about 5,000 feet up in the air. And Brian, tell us about the crazy night of unfortunate events that occur when these guys point the telescopes in the sky. It is absolutely crazy. So these guys are bringing in a range of telescopes from like really high-end amateur hobby telescopes, some of them, all the way through, I mean, like, astronomical society grade.

These guys, three telescopes was like, these were some of the nicest you can get. Very, very expensive telescopes that had computers in them that would help to map the sky, tell you where you were. You could tell it where to go and it would know where it is in the sky. but the way that they worked is that they would map onto a known location in the sky to begin with so that the telescope could orient itself. Yeah, and tellibrate. This is where I am.

Okay, I know where I am. Yeah. Good. And with the date and the time and that information, then you could say, now point at Orion's belt. Right. Point it serious. Lock onto it and track it. Omacron percy.

I8. Go show me that. Perfect. And it would instantly lock on. And the idea of the experiment, just so you know, was that they were pointing the telescopes up through the triangle anomaly area at the stars in the sky behind it so that they could see if there was any disturbance in the light. Yeah, like any lensing or refraction, anything like that.

Because they know with a high degree of precision, astronomical photography, and this is the high degree of precision. They know exactly what should be happening. Right. This is actually the way that astronomical discoveries are often made is by seeing light do stuff that shouldn't do. Right. And then you go, oh, there's a big black hole there. Yeah, there's bending light.

There's making the light bend. Yeah. So they're taking, again, Travis Taylor is an astrophysicist, right? So he's, right? Astrophysicist. So he's like, all right, this is my wheelhouse. This is his world. One of the three members who had never heard of the ranch before didn't have any prior

spooky knowledge, anything like this. He's just like, I'm showing up to help with this television show, probably super stoked to show off his knowledge on TV. Like the nerd who collects train sets and finally a show is like we need a guy that knows everything about model trains from the 1950s. Or like a really attractive girl's

like, tell me about trains. And he's like, I have been training for this for my entire life. Born for this. Yes. Okay. So he's super stoked, shows up, puts his telescope in. It's got a database of known constellation, stars and planets that it can lock

onto. Sunset. It's getting finally dark enough. They've been waiting and setting up for hours. Experiment can begin. And Travis Taylor, he figured that he was going to try to provoke some sort of activity, not just look at it statically, but also provoke some activity with rockets. And I'll provide another layer of detail there, too. Yeah, we'll come back to the rocket element.

So he's going to shoot rockets up. But what they had also done was they got three insanely high-powered lasers. Yeah. Like super lasers. And they set them up so that they all point up and then, converge at the 5,000 foot mark. So Travis is like, I want to really bother the anomaly. That was his idea.

They're like poking the hornet nest times, everything they've got in the kitchen. Yeah. So these telescopes are pointing like at the convergence of these lasers. They want to shoot the rocket right through it. And then they just want to look at the sky. Film all of it. You can film through the lenses of these telescopes as well. Sorry.

So, no, you're good. That's good info. So they're setting up the thing. And all of a sudden, the astronomers like, hang on, pause guys. like pause the TV show, like don't shoot the rockets or anything. I can't get my telescope to calibrate. Right. My telescope, the computer, is failing to recognize the position we're in on the earth

based on what the sky looks like. He's had this telescope. He's been using this tool for over 10 years, trying to manually lock onto the object, you know, trying to figure this out. And all of a sudden he figures out what's happening is, in his words, something is getting into his computer on the telegraph. And deleting stars.

Yes. So what he said was he was looking at the convergence of these lasers, at the anomaly area. Yeah. And everything within that perimeter was getting deleted off his computer. It's all known stars. It's all known. It should be in there. He had, he was watching them get deleted.

Yeah. And they're like, oh, that's gone. It's gone, gone, gone. And he's like, what? This is just a useless pile of junk now. And none of this had ever happened before. Ever. Nothing like it.

So something was hacking in it. Just like the telephone. the iPhone. I call it a telephone. Just like the sonogram. Just like the sonagrant. That's a medical thing. Dial me up because, you know, you have to go, chik-k-k-k-k-r, wind me up. He,

this never happens. Somebody's hacking into his computer or something. I mean, what some... And I know you guys are like, look, it's a software glitch. Like, a software does... He's been using it for 10 years. It never has anything happen. He doesn't have. Shows up to Skinwalker Ranch.

It does the most routine of functions. like the, this isn't even advanced stuff for this telescope. No, no. This is the, this is the, so you can start. Right. Stuff. This is the setup. And it just starts deleting the stars. What has the power to delete stars out of the sky?

That's my question. Whoa, that's a big question. Okay, that's not actually what I am. To be clear, the stars were deleted. But all this kept happening, and it was problem after problem. Constellation and galaxy and star, one after another, was deleted from the sky's database. finally he commented and I'm quoting quote it doesn't want me to look at the anomaly

yeah it's like nah it whatever it is doesn't want him to look there and he was able to manually lock on to things that were just around the perimeter of that anomalous weird but whenever he would go inside it was like nope nothing there nothing is there so all of his tech was useless now but our good friend our hero our hero Dr. Travis Taylor

Yes. He got excited about this. Of Thomas Winterton and I. Thomas Winterton and I, he's the eye. He was like, you know what? We got to shoot off rockets right now. Because something is going down. He had the presence of mine. He's like a kid in a candy store with the rockets.

He's like, these are my rockets. I'm a rocketeer. He's like an expert in this. I am. We got to shoot some rockets right now. I am a rocket. He's literally a rocket. He's like, something's going on.

It's time to poke. We want to poke the bear right now and see what happens. Wouldn't you know it, though? that right before the rocket launched, they're in the countdown. Like they're at five, okay? Two of the three telescopes lost their connections to their cameras. Making any...

So here's the thing. Let's differentiate here. So they couldn't automatically lock onto objects because they were getting deleted from their database. That's one thing. But they could still see on their computers what the telescope was looking at. So they could manually move it and point to the thing

and say, all right, this is going to have to do. do, let's keep her steady, right? But now the computer screen, the camera screen was black. They couldn't, so they could still look through the aperture and see stuff, but there was no recording available. Guys, this is like a USB connection, okay? So crazy. This isn't like, this isn't even Bluetooth. This is literally like you plug it in, boom. This shouldn't happen. No. And so the guy who had never heard of the ranch before, the guy who, he was operating the biggest telescope and his reaction when you see it is just so genuine. He sincerely doesn't understand

how any of this is possible. They're like welcome to the ranch. Right. And so it was it was then that principal researcher Eric Bard, our guy Eric, for the first time in his multi-year career on the ranch, he's been here since 2016. Yeah. He lost any access to any of the surveillance cameras on the ranch all at once. What does that remind you of, though? Nids. It reminds me of nids. And the other thing is cold open and nids. These are multiple independent systems. These are connected.

It wasn't as if they're all plugged into the same power outlet. They've got cameras on batteries. We've got lots of things, multiple points of failure. Some of them are using hot spots. Some of them are using routers. Some of them are using Ethernet. It was like when they brought that big investigative van on that we talked about earlier. It just all stopped working.

I think it was called Osiris. And it all like four times in a row. Right when they were about to do something, it would shut off. It would shut off. They would reboot. You'd be like, okay, ready to go. For multiple minutes, everything would be great. And then at like three, two, it would shut off again.

And then one- We're firing in five, four, three, shut off. But here's what that tells me. What does it tell you, Ben? Is that they're getting close. And it speaks English. Well, it does, obviously. They know all.

Tuah. Okay, anyway. But it's like they want them to waste rockets because they're getting close to something. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm right there with you, Ben. So all this is happening. By the way, Eric noticed that while all this is going on, telescope camera shutting down,

the 1.6 gigahertz signal is being played like hardcore. Of course. It's like spike. And when you see the wave form that they show like the little graph, it's like everything's functioning down here. There's like a little baseline. It's always going. Yeah.

And then at 1.6 gigahertz, it's like 10x. Forget Mount Everest. Just like a perfect pinpoint spike. Yes. And there it is. And it would go away and come back. Yeah. So here's their plan.

Here's their plan. This is Dr. Taylor's plan. He's going to take a separate laser beam, like a high-powered laser pointer. And he's going to get his guy to point it up in the sky so that the telescopes have something really visible, high contrast that they can lock on. And they're just going to hope, literally wing in a prayer, hope that the cameras turn back on. And so that if they do, they'll be ready. So this guy's shining the laser. All this is happening in the same night, people.

this guy's shining the laser beam up into the air and he's like, hey Travis you're gonna want to come look at this Travis goes over there and looks and when it reaches a certain point in the sky the laser beam starts to bend come on camera laser beams don't bend

I know unless there's a gravitational anomaly that's a pretty strong gravitational you're telling me are you kidding me and then it also like split and forked into two different beams at the end and it would come back together. It would do it as he moved through this. Yeah, it would like phase in and out.

You guys. So weird. So on top of all this, I know this is a lot happening. In addition to all this, Thomas Winterton starts seeing that the cows are acting strange. This is the last straw. So you know how last time the cows were running away? Yeah.

So this time, they were all like crowding around the area. Like there was a fence around these guys and it was just cows lining the entire fence. Like they were super curious as to what was going on. And it's weird. It's weird. Like cows don't behave that way. They're normally just happy to mind their own business. And you got Thomas Winterton, who knows all about them, looking and this is weird.

He's a cow guy. And he's like, this is not right. This is messed up. So our guy, Travis Taylor, he's like, okay, let's look up into the sky. And they all look up, all of them, the telescope guys, the camera crew, the entire research team. They all see as bright as Venus, a mat. and it's not Venus, by the way. It's not Venus.

But they see a massive ball of light slowly drifting across the sky. It looks like a planet, but it's not a planet because it's spherical. There's no blinking lights, but it almost moved like organically, like an amoeba crawling across the sky.

That's what it seemed like. And then it flew steadily east before abruptly, like in a 90-degree turn, started going north, moving a little bit quicker. one of the astronomers who is operating a telescope who saw it said quote it didn't have a deliberate direction like an aircraft and there was no blinking lights it was it was lazy taking its time it was far too big to be any aircraft and they also have the aircraft data at all times right they monitor part of what eric they monitor air traffic is air traffic over the ranch because everything that goes in the sky has to have an you know uh what is f aaa beeper that sends out right this is what is what I am. I'm a 747 going, this is my direction. See, you know, even small planes,

they would know. Yep, nope. Nothing. Nothing. Slowly, the object faded away, whatever it was. And right when it did, the telescope started working again. The databases were restored. The camera connection was restored. And they knew that the night was over. Nothing more was going to happen.

Yep. Except, later that night, Eric would record what appeared to be a massive explosion of light from out of nowhere in the sky. And when you look at the footage, it almost looks like a door being opened in a dark room that's backlit, and then light coming through, and then the door shut again really fast.

What did I say? It seems like a portal. What did I say? I said, they're going to catch a portal, man. They did. And then, you know what, by the end of this outline that I did not totally read ahead, trust me, they filmed a portal.

I mean, come on. It's insane. It's insane. Come on. So, Brian, as we close out this episode, a series. Let's give our closing thoughts and comments. What do you think is going on?

I'll keep it really simple and say that there's kind of two, there's two levels for me. One is there's this theme that this is land that was pre-Christian and never actually Christian. We have native peoples, animalistic, animist, religion, things like that, native religion. And then we have, otherwise known as demons. Right.

Right. Of course, I repeat myself. Then we have Mormonism come in. Yes. Mormonism is another one of these. Mormonism actually shares much more in common with Greek polytheism than it does with Christianity. Even though that sounds crazy, it's a polytheistic or a henothistic religion where they believe in multiple gods but only worship one. Yes.

Believe you can become a god. It's very much like created gods. They're much more akin to Greek deities than they are to the one true living God of Scripture, who's there's no other. there was none before him, none after Isaiah 40, Isaiah 44. I mean, go read it. 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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Check it out today. So we have this land that is overrun. with pagan and and then cultic false religion. Okay, that's a big theme to me. And we see a lot of the things that these sort of religious ideologies are interested in all of a sudden show up. One of them is animistic issues like Skinwalker stuff, Bigfoot sightings, things like that, the wolf, all of these. That screams Native American lore to me, which is also deeply wrapped up with the Mormon story. Which is that the Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel.

It's not true, but that's their story. Okay, then you have this other element that ties directly to me with Mormonism. Because Mormonism is also like an extraterrestrial. They believe that there's like a planet where God is from, Kolop. Yeah, it's like a plurality of worlds. Yeah. And you can, like even the science fiction of an author like Brandon Sanderson, I think Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, Brandon Sanderson.

He wrote The Way of Kings, the Miss Born series, sci-fi writer. a great writer honestly teacher at b yu professor on writing millions and millions of books sold i think at this point yeah his worlds are very much Mormon because he's Mormon and his sci-fi basically world builds in a Mormon way where there are planets with gods a different world things like that as opposed to something more like Tolkien or lewis when they wrote it was from a more medieval and Christian perspective okay so that's one element here where you have the Mormon and native stuff the entities are showing what they want to see. Yes.

They're showing what they want to see. And the other element is what I've been saying the whole time, in my opinion, is that increasingly in North America, we have been seeing and we will continue to see an explosion of demonic counterfeits that are imitating technological advancement to support a materialist and highly advanced, you know, extraterrestrial story. Yeah. And we're going to get, I want to give all this away.

We're going to talk more about this in a future episode. But to me, it's, it's that story of the West apostatizing and or in this case, a pre-Christian. Utah's still pre-Christian in my view. Yes. And the gods still attempt to reign. Yes. That's what I'm seeing. Yeah.

I see Utah as one of the, one of the United States. of the dark corners of Christ's world where the strong man's goods, there's still a lot of them to be plundered, because it's a very dark place. So I like that. You have a really holistic perspective. It's a broad perspective. I'll try and come up with what I think is a more, like, short-term view or a more like localized small scope perspective. What do I think is happening at the ranch? I do think it's demonic? I do think it's demonic. And for many of the same reasons that you brought up, it's a pre-Christian place. Not only is it pre-Christian, though, the religions that have been practiced in this place and that still are, are grossly pagan.

It's not just atheism. It's not just this, like, foolish denial of God that the fool says in this heart there is no God. It's this brazen, high-handed rebellion against the order that God has placed into the world. So they're not just ignoring Psalm 19. they're also ignoring passages like Leviticus 18 that says the Lord is casting the Canaanites out, or the land is casting out the Canaanites, vomiting them up because of all of these sins that they've committed. Chief among them was failing to properly worship the living God. So I think that that's very true.

However, for stuff that I'm about to get into focused on the Mesa as a geographical entity, I almost think, and you know, this is very speculative, very speculative, but I almost see this place, this Mesa specifically, as a sort of nexus, like a geographical location where supernatural, especially demonic entities, have much more access or something. Like it seems like either it's Talismanic where they've latched onto it for the lore, and so they're just, they're taking that and they're running with it. It's a thin place. Yeah, it's a thin place. Perfect. Much like Bethel, like Jacob's Ladder type situations where he goes to Bethel and it's this thin place where there's the presence of God is there.

It's literally the gate of heaven. And then you have the Tower of Babel, which is almost this pagan twist on the same thing. In fact, in fact, the stories of Jacob's Ladder versus Tower of Babel are typological, they're typologically identical. It's just one is the positive of the other. Interesting. And so you have in the Tower of Babel potentially this place where they didn't choose it at random, but they call it the Tower of Babel the gateway of heaven. Yeah, it's the gate of heaven.

Because stuff was actually happening there. And so they build there because they have eyes in their head and they notice. Like humans don't do things randomly. And so I think that maybe speculation could be said that this is a sort of thin place, a nexus place, where for whatever reason, maybe it's just the sheer amount of, of pagan practices that have occurred. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's just the providence of God that we can't see into.

This place is almost a nexus that allows, not allows, but gives the demonic entities the ability to have more freedom almost, or where they're able to express more, or were they're able to try and start their attempt at decepting and thwarting the plans, deceiving, and thwarting the plans of God. And of course, we know that that'll all come to ruin for them and it'll come to nothing. But until it does, like, this is a place under judgment. I mean, of course Utah is under the judgment of God. It's a horribly sinful and pagan place.

We have the blood of children in the streets with Planned Parenthood, and then we also have a very high-handed rebellion against the proper worship of the living God, a denial of his existence, and then a active worship of his enemies. Yeah. So that's that for me. Ben, that was breathtaking.

Eric. It was truly magnificent. I almost just called you Eric. I would take it. Brian, you are breathtaking. I'm... So... Thank you, King.

Here's what we're going to do. As we close tonight, what I want to do is kind of go back to the beginning. This place, if nothing else, is forcing us to go back to true science, which is we make observations that we don't understand and we try to reckon with what we're seeing in nature. And what I do like about this place is it's forcing even the atheistic scientists to realize maybe against their will that there's no such. which thing is neutrality in the world. There are things that we can't explain.

There are things that we don't understand in the slightest. And it all goes back to me for the Mesa. Skinwalker Ridge, this place where it all started, the curse of the Skinwalker, the traditional path of the Skinwalker. The Nids team saw those massive dog traps in the caves. This team, the Fugel team, threw smoke bombs into the Mesa at one point. And the smoke didn't come back out. They found negative pressure, pulling air in.

It pulls air in. In it's almost as if there is a void and there's a huge chamber under the mesa. The parachute trackers went into the mesa and then came back out again. Maybe underneath this mesa is a horror of demonic origin. Maybe it's nothing at all. Maybe I'm completely wrong. We don't know. That's fine.

We don't know. Maybe it's a particularly great glory of God hit under a particularly large rock. You don't know that. You never know? But as all good stories do, this one finds its current conclusion back at the beginning, at the mesa. Well, as part of the Fugel era study, they've taken great interest in what the local Navajo tribesmen have to say about all this stuff. In fact, they brought in one of the tribe elders at one point because they had discovered something perplexing. On top of the mesa, underneath the

highly problematic triangle area, the ranch hands stumbled upon what appeared to be an ancient megalithic rock formation. Now, all of this is sandstone, so the erosion is pretty heavy, but it seems too ordered to be natural, especially over such a large area. The area in question is a massive circular rock formation with a central mound of stones that include on them a number of engravings and what looked to be even ancient tooling marks

like drilled holes. Now, I'm going to resist the temptation to do what I really want to do, which is going to a massive rant about megalithic structures and circles and spirals. I mean, that's for another time. But that's for another time. Go back, Khali Tapley.

Yes, season two. Season two, season two. The point is, the Navajo Elder guy said that this formation is almost certainly, a place that was set up by the ancient dwellers long ago as a sort of gateway to ward off the evil spirits of the nether world. So they thought that this was, to use your phrase, a thin place. In other words, the Navajo Elder thought that this looked just like the kind of thing his ancestors would have built and used to protect their own world from what they were sure

was a portal to an evil and other dimension. Now, make of that what you will, okay? That doesn't mean that they're right. It just means that they believed that was what was causing all this nefarious stuff to take place. Coupled with that old use of these type of structures, there's also strong evidence that the formation was used for astrological purposes, tracking the planetary and stellar movements for some form of worship or protection. Look, the less religious among the team certainly don't give this type of specificity much weight. The whole team recognized that this, when considered in conjunction with everything else that happened in the area, must mean, though, that the mesa is somehow important.

They at least granted it that. The mesa was important. It was a big player in this haunting game. And so they called in backup. They got a ditch digger to come to the property so the team could send a drill right into the heart of this hill. What they found was, at the very least, confusing. The drill began to hit a hard layer of what was presumed to be just.

hard earth, and that layer pushed the drill down so that it couldn't come back up. It was propelling it deeper and deeper into the ground vertically. And then, eventually, it broke through. And the drill was allowed to start going back up, but in such a way that it kept knocking into that hard layer above it. The drill operator described the phenomena as if the drill had gotten pushed underneath a dome and was now riding back up the inside surface of that dome. Now this is strange enough in itself, but it doesn't stop there. You see, the way these drills work is that inside of them, there's a hollow tube,

so that as they drill, they're sending out through the tube the dirt that they're removing so that the operators can examine the minerals. Well, as they're hitting this hard layer, they notice first that no dirt is coming out anymore. The drill isn't actually drilling through any medium besides air, and yet it continues to push forward. Eventually, though, they notice some small flakes of stuff

trickle out of the pipe, only it's not hard dirt. It's actually a really thin, very brittle, metal. As with many revelations, this team offers us. They can't give much of an answer as to why this is the case. They're figuring it all out at the same time we are. But every member of the crew, from the drill operator who's done this a thousand times to the scientist-doctor standing by, was confused. Everyone is left asking themselves the unavoidable question, is there a metal structure inside of this mesa? Now the team called whatever the drill was facing, a, quote, mysterious void containing an impenetrable object.

The ranch manager, Thomas Winterton, has gone on record answering the following to the question, is there a UFO under the mesa? He responds, quote, There's definitely something unnatural in that hill. You can imagine that us drilling into it, several hundred feet and pulling out metal, that the University of Utah was intrigued. The professor there who analyzed it said he didn't think the material was natural. He didn't really see a way that it could be naturally occurring.

I mean, it's metal. That would say that we've got an artificial object inside that hill. Having been all over the mesa myself, I mean, it's very baffling. So there's definitely something artificial, a couple of hundred feet in that hill. We leave you with one last story tonight. Addie Diaz is a member of the local Ute tribe and his Skinwalker Ranch is next door neighbor. One night in 2021, her and her friend were bringing in groceries after a long day of working in errands. It was truly night, too.

Summer was creeping in fall, and the days were beginning to shorten. By the time they got home from the store, the sky was full dark. As she took a load of groceries in, her friend called her back out. She was very excited about something and wanted Addie to look up at the sky. Now, her friend was also a local, living next to the ranch, gets you somewhat numb to high strangeness if you're not careful. But it meant her friend must really be seeing something wild. So she went out to join the fun. The fun ended when she crossed the threshold of her door, though.

It was so quiet, a heavy quiet that was so uncanny and made itself immediately felt and known to all. You didn't have to be listening for it. It was just there or wasn't there. May sound cliche, but the absence of sound was deafening. When she looked up, she saw a bright light in the sky heading north. She's seen weird lights in the sky before, but this one stuck out to her. Sure, it was really bright, but the movement, it moved so differently. As she watched it, the light came to an abrupt and dead stop in midair. Addie knew it was coming next.

The light would disappear. They always disappear once you see them, fading away into the night sky. Only this one didn't disappear. It didn't fade away or dissolve into some otherworldly portal. It stopped and paused, and this started north again, faster now. It accelerated more and more until finally it was gone. Not because it vanished, because it was too far away to see anymore. Addie said,

my grandpa would talk about different anomalies he would see and things that would happen around the farm. One night he was out in the four-wheeler and he noticed the cows were looking up at the sky. There was a big old bright ball very low to the ground. It rose up and then just disappeared. That was before he saw the skinwalker another time. My grandpa went out into the field

and he noticed a tall, dark figure just watching him cut hay. And each time he circled around the field, the thing would get closer and closer. He said it looked like it had a long cloak. And then when he got closer to it, it just vanished. Disappeared. I don't know why. Want more haunted cosmos?

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