Skinwalker Ranch

The Deseret News, 1996

The Deseret News story "Frequent Fliers?" of June 30, 1996, described a 480-acre ranch just south of Fort Duchesne that Terry and Gwen Sherman had bought about two years earlier. The Shermans and their two children said they had watched three kinds of craft over 15 months, along with lights that emerged from "orange, circular doorways that seem to appear in midair." Four cows had disappeared and three had been found dead and partly mutilated. Terry Sherman said they had wondered "if it was something to do with a top-secret project." The Uintah County Sheriff's Department's records clerk told the paper she had received no reports of UFOs or mutilations in recent memory, and the Shermans had told no officials.

Weeks later, Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas real estate developer, flew to Vernal and offered about $200,000 for the ranch. The sale closed in September. Terry Sherman signed a nondisclosure agreement and stayed on as caretaker, and Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science kept someone on the property around the clock.

The name

The Deseret News called it the Sherman ranch in 1996 and 1998 and "the UFO ranch" in 2006. Skinwalkers come from Navajo storytelling. In George Knapp's two-part 2002 article in the Las Vegas Mercury, Junior Hicks, a retired teacher who had investigated more than 400 UFO reports in the basin, said the Utes believed a Navajo curse had brought skinwalkers to the ranch and that tribe members were forbidden to set foot on it. Betsy Chapoose, the Ute Indian Tribe's cultural rights and protection director, told Vice in 2020 that she had never heard any story of a curse and that nobody had come to her office about the ranch in 30 years. Louise Tsinijinnie, a Navajo Nation spokesperson, said skinwalkers are not something many Navajo will discuss and that she could not confirm a curse on the land.

The Pentagon

The New York Times reported in 2017 that Harry Reid said Bigelow had told him in 2007 that a Defense Intelligence Agency official wanted to visit his ranch in Utah. The Times did not name the ranch. A report from the Defense Department's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, released March 8, 2024, says the $22 million AAWSAP program, also called AATIP, paid a private contractor to study aerospace technology, and that "investigating UFO/UAP was not specifically outlined" in its statement of work. The contractor also "investigated an alleged hotspot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah" that its head owned. The report says the agency "did not seek, nor specifically authorize, this work," though one of its employees managed the contract. It calls the Utah work "unrelated work on alleged paranormal activities" and names neither the contractor nor the property.

In May 2026, Brandon Fugal, who owns the ranch, told KSL that it was "the center of gravity for a Pentagon-funded, black budget program."

The evidence

Hunt for the Skinwalker, the 2005 book by Colm Kelleher and Knapp, says that after years of investigation the team obtained "very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena," according to the skeptic Robert Sheaffer, who adds that many of its most unusual incidents were witnessed only by Terry Sherman. Garth Myers, whose brother and sister-in-law owned the ranch from 1933, told the author Frank Salisbury in 2009 that "there was nothing, unequivocally, absolutely nothing that went on while she and my brother lived there."

The ranch today

Adamantium Real Estate bought the ranch from Bigelow in April 2016. Fugal made his ownership public on March 10, 2020, and told Utah Business that he bought it "as a healthy skeptic" who expected a 95 percent chance of a natural explanation. On January 22, 2026, Uintah County approved an oil-well permit on neighboring land over his objection, writing in its resolution that it "did not receive any evidence supporting the claims that an oil or gas well would disrupt any existing land use on neighboring properties."

The ranch is gated, and entry is by the owner's invitation only, according to Utah.com, which also points to a campground near the property that advertises UFO-themed ATV tours as "the closest you can legally get." In October 2026, the ranch's website sold a membership from $8 a month with live camera access.