New episodes of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch premieres Tuesdays at 10/9c.
Enigmatic crop circles. Malevolent creatures. Bloodless cattle mutilations. Oddly moving lights. For more than a century, Skinwalker Ranch in northeastern Utah has been a place of unexplained paranormal activity. Now, ranch owner Brandon Fugal and his team of investigators, led by Principal Investigator Erik Bard and Astrophysicist Travis Taylor, are using the property as a modern laboratory to unravel some of these mysteries and explore how they connect to ancient folklore about otherworldly entities that might be helping shape our environment—and our existence.
Over the first four seasons of "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch," the team has employed high-tech tools and rigorous scientific inquiry all over the property, from the East Field to the Mesa to the especially mysterious area dubbed the “Triangle.” Along the way, they’ve witnessed plenty of high strangeness, from UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) to signs of interdimensional portals and even a massive dome-shaped object buried underground. Below, Skinwalker Executive Producer Joe Lessard shares seven of the show’s most mind-bending moments of discovery:
1. Mysterious Cow Death
Season 1: Episode 7 and Episode 8
After a young cow on the ranch was found to have died quite suddenly, investigators scanned the area and found little spikes of radiation readings around it—at levels unusual for the area. The vet who examined the animal was surprised to find that it had died of a quick onset of pneumonia, which he believed was caused by some kind of shock or instant trauma.
The surveillance camera aimed where the cow died showed a black, oval-shaped dot in the sky above that moved, but it wasn’t a bug or an artifact of the lens. You could tell it was high in the air and based on how it moved from frame to frame, Travis deduced that it was moving extremely fast—and not like a conventional aircraft. On camera, it appeared that the cow, right before it died, looked skyward. Speculation arose: Did the surveillance block a mutilation? Strange bloodless mutilations of cattle, an unexplained phenomenon reported around the West, had happened on the ranch in the past. Months after the cow died, oddly, the carcass had not been scavenged. It had just decayed, but much more slowly than usual.
2. Rabbi Chants, Temperature Drops, UAP appears
Season 2: Episode 4
One of the great legends of Utah’s whole Uintah basin is that there are interdimensional portals in the area, instant tunnels that connect points in space and time. Einstein called them bridges. Other scientists call them wormholes. Some investigators claimed to have seen them near Homestead Two, a dilapidated later 19th-century building on the Skinwalker property. There had long been stories of strange creatures coming out of there and wandering off into the night.
Travis believes in scientific testing, but he’s also friendly with a rabbi, Ariel Bar-Tzadok, who described ancient Hebrew prayers connected to opening portals. Travis said, what the heck, why not try it? As the rabbi sat with the team, explaining his philosophy, they all saw a floating white orb in the sky, caught on camera. Per the rabbi’s instruction, they went to Homestead Two and built a ceremonial rock circle. He sat in the middle, said a prayer and, all of a sudden, they started to see on the thermal camera a circular temperature aberration, a temp drop, with no other environmental stimuli affecting it. They could walk into the cool area, like when you’re swimming in a lake and hit a cold spot in the water. They also caught on camera a small black object or being, which hopped across the screen and disappeared. They couldn’t put a distinct shape or description to it. The rabbi was impressed and curious. No declarations were made, other than: You take this stuff seriously.
3. Drum Circle Song Prompts Heat Anomaly—and Two UAPs
Season 4: Episode 10
Further investigating the notion of portals, the team invited retired Navajo ranger Jonathan Dover to look at a megalithic spiral of boulders at the ranch’s edge. In his opinion, it’s an artificial construct, made by Native people centuries ago. He believes the spiral shape represents a portal. On the Mesa face, there is an ancient petroglyph depicting a star map, a serpent constellation called Draco. According to an anthropologist working with the team, local tribes considered that Draco petroglyph a portal to the heavens.
So, the team invited Blazing Bears, a drum circle group that performs Native chants and songs; they represent different tribal nations but consider themselves one in spirituality. They set up near the base of the Mesa, and performed a drum song, filmed by a thermal camera. In the middle of their song, a heat anomaly appeared on the boulders right above them. At some point, they aborted the ritual and wanted to leave. They said they felt uncomfortable, like they were being watched from something up on the rocks. When the team went to investigate, they didn’t see anything. But later, when they reviewed the footage, they saw two UAPs above the Mesa, diving down toward it and disappearing as if going right into it. Historically, a lot of local Native people won’t go to the ranch, or even look in its direction. The Skinwalker legend is serious to them, and they want to avoid the bad energy. But slowly, as the show progressed, a few have weighed in. For Blazing Bear to come and do this was real respect for the team. When they didn’t feel comfortable, you take that seriously. You look at the footage, see the anomaly, and think: What is going on?
4. UAP Goes Poof! at the Triangle
Season 3: Episode 9
The team conducts different experiments at the Triangle, where many anomalous things happen. In this instance, they took a helicopter and dropped canisters containing GPS devices. Between the altitude of 5,000 feet and the ground, some of the canisters seem to have been directed away as they were falling, away from the direction of the wind. Some fell as if they had bounced off something mid-air, like an invisible obstruction. This culminated with the team bringing in a company to shoot a laser beam directly in the air trained directly up to the Triangle to see if there was any effect on the laser.
The team’s principal investigator, Erik Bard, monitored this from the command center, with an array of surveillance monitors, as well as energy and signal detectors. He called Travis and Brandon to the control room and played back his wide shot, which showed an orb-like UAP ascending alongside the laser beam, going up closer and closer to the beam. But before it reached the beam, it suddenly vanished into thin air. Brandon asked, Did we just record evidence of portals? Is wherever the UAP went the source of the energy? Is that what affected the GPS canisters?
5. UAP Flies ‘Through’ the Mesa
Season 4: Episode 12
Jonathan Dover, the Navajo ranger, had shared with the team Native Americans stories of UAPs entering mesas. The team was conducting another helicopter experiment at the Triangle and had mounted GoPro cameras on the helicopters’ skids. And while nothing specific happened in their experiment, one of the cameras trained toward the East Field happened to pick up a glowing orb that disappeared into the Mesa right near the petroglyph. Moments later, they saw an orb exit the mesa on the same plane, seconds apart, and fly toward the Triangle. It was a lucky catch.
6. Massive Dome-Shaped Object Inside the Mesa
Season 3: Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8
With longtime rumors swirling around about “alien bases” on the ranch and a cave entrance to the Mesa, the team wanted to investigate: Is there something underground? Where the alleged cave entrance had been, all the team could see was a huge aggregation of boulders. The demolition expert they called in said the configuration didn’t seem natural, but more like the result of a purposeful explosion. The team hired a drilling team to drill into the Mesa. As the drill proceeded into the rock, the operators said they were hitting an obstruction that the drill rod could not penetrate. Whatever it was hitting was directing the drill rod down, then suddenly it was directing it up. So, they went in from the top and had the opposite experience, leading them to deduce that the obstacle was oval shaped.
They made a few attempts to penetrate the thing but couldn’t. In the spoils (the drilled matter that’s being displaced), the team found little fragments of metal that they may have been scraping off. They had the metals analyzed at the University of Utah and were surprised to learn that the elements are very similar to the materials NASA use to protect the space shuttle from reentry into the atmosphere. Season 5 will have major follow-up.
7. Rocket Explodes, Blob Appears
Season 4: Episode 3
The team was launching rockets straight up through the Triangle, filming the experiment with a high-speed camera that takes hundreds of images per second, catching things that would be missed by the naked eye. When one of the rockets exploded mid-air, Travis thought it was a malfunction. But the high-speed camera captured a cloudy, blob-like anomaly. There was symmetry to it, like the head of the great and powerful Oz, right where the rocket exploded. They had been looking for strange things at the Triangle, and this was the first indication that they had something anomalous close to the ground, at 31 feet. The great and powerful blob. And there’s much more to come in Season 5 in that airspace.
