‘Hunt for the Skinwalker’ — what’s really going on in Utah?

Stranger than fiction, or just … fiction?

October 12, 2023

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How did a 480-acre cattle ranch nestled within the Uintah Basin between Fort Duchesne and Randlett, in Utah, become the star of its own comic book series by Zac Thompson and Valeria Burzo, published by BOOM! Studios?

It’s easy when it’s the infamous Skinwalker Ranch, reported to be the haunt of monsters, ghosts, and UFOs for the last 30 years. The series, Hunt for the Skinwalker, is a slightly fictionalized retelling of the allegedly true events which transpired between 1994 and 2004, as recounted in the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah.

BOOM! Preview: Hunt for the Skinwalker #1

As seen in Hunt for the Skinwalker, the story begins in 1994 when Terry and Gwen Sherman – their comic book counterparts are identified as Tom and Ellen Gorman – purchased the ranch, having sunk their life savings into the property, and moved their teenage son and preteen daughter to what was essentially the middle of nowhere, in the hope that this would become “a quiet place where they could get away from it all.”

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, and within 15 months, seven of the Shermans’ cows were either dead or had disappeared. The Shermans had their suspicions as to who, or what, was responsible for this bad luck — the couple claimed that since moving to the ranch, they’d been plagued by UFOs.

The Shermans initially turned to area UFO investigator Joseph “Junior” Hicks, a local high school science teacher who’d been cataloging Uintah Basin residents’ UFO sightings since the 1950s. In 1974, with plant physiologist Frank Salisbury, Hicks published a popular book on the topic, The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist’s Report. Hicks was sympathetic to the Shermans’ plight, but was confused that after a lifetime of investigating UFOs in the Uintah Basin, he’d never heard of any coming from a ranch which had existed in the area since 1933.

In June of 1996, the Shermans took their story to the local newspaper, Desert News, which had also been reporting on UFO activity in the basin since 1978. In an article titled “Frequent Fliers,” by staff writer Zack van Eyck, the Shermans’ claims of multiple UFO sightings, crop circles, disembodied voices, and cattle mutilations were recounted, leading the paper to dub the ranch “a hotbed for UFOs and bizarre paranormal activity.” In both this article and subsequent ones, van Eyck couldn’t help but note the serendipitous fact that the Shermans had chosen to go public with their sensational UFO story a month before the release of the alien invasion blockbuster, Independence Day.

As recounted in science journalist Sarah Scoles’ 2020 investigative look into modern UFO culture, They Are Already Here, the Desert News’ coverage elicited the interest of Robert Bigelow, a reclusive Las Vegas multimillionaire who’d made his fortune from budget hotels, and harbored a lifelong interest in UFOs. Seeing an opportunity to study the phenomena in a geographically defined space, Bigelow bought the ranch in September 1996 for somewhere between $200,000 and $230,000.

In October, van Eyck ran a follow-up article in the Deseret News commenting on Bigelow’s acquisition of the ranch and his dispatching of a team of investigators operating under the moniker of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). No sooner had NIDS begun their investigation than Bigelow ordered a media blackout, barring the press and having all involved – including the Shermans – sign non-disclosure agreements. Van Eyck did elicit one more story from Terry, about how the family’s three dogs had “vanished after chasing [a] light ball” through the air, though NIDS representatives later denied there had been “any dog-zappers” in a Deseret News article from the following spring.

Despite Bigelow’s attempts to keep a lid on whatever was happening at the ranch, word got out by August 1998, according to the Deseret News. That same month the ranch made the cover story of FATE magazine, with the amusingly titled article “Where the Steers and the Aliens Play” by Sean Castel, though it had little in the way of new information.

All this attracted the attention of George Knapp, a Vegas newshound who in 1989 invented the modern myth of Area 51 as the site of clandestine reverse engineering experiments on recovered UFOs. That story having dried up, Knapp needed a new beat, and he had an in with Bigelow. Back in 1993, as part of a $10 million effort to further the study of ufology, Bigelow had produced a short-lived radio show called Area 2000. The program was hosted by Art Bell, the creator and original host of the long-running paranormal and conspiracy theory-themed radio program Coast to Coast AM, with Knapp as a frequent contributor.

In 2002, Knapp published two articles (Nov. 21 and 28) on what he dubbed “Skinwalker Ranch” in the now defunct Las Vegas Mercury, an “alternative news” magazine. In a significant departure from the earlier press reports in the Deseret News and Las Vegas Sun, which only mentioned UFOs and cattle mutilations, Knapp’s version of events now included a veritable menagerie of monsters haunting the ranch, with everything from poltergeists to Bigfoot, raptor-like dinosaurs and werewolves, and an invisible beast akin to the extraterrestrial big game hunter seen in the movie Predator.

An April 2003 Fortean Times article by associate editor Ian Simmons, titled “Strangeness at Skinwalker Ranch,” likened Knapp’s reports to John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies (1975). The big difference, noted Simmons, is that regardless of what one thinks of the Mothman phenomena, we know that it actually happened, as many of the stories recounted by Keel are backed up by newspaper accounts and interviews with eyewitnesses. The Bigelow blackout had prevented independent corroboration, with Simmons noting that even the Fortean Times’ request for an interview had been turned down.

Bigelow eventually shut NIDS down in 2004, which allowed Knapp to publish Hunt for the Skinwalker with co-author Colm A. Kelleher, a former biochemist who Bigelow had originally hired to study the origins of human consciousness. Kelleher and Knapp’s book is full of spooky stories and absolutely no empirical evidence to back any of them up, a fact which leads some, like Robert Sheaffer in an article for the Skeptical Inquirer (May 2020), to suggest that the Shermans hoaxed the whole affair.

The suggestion that the Shermans would fabricate UFO reports to try and sell their failing cattle ranch to a billionaire with more money than he knows what to do with sounds like the longest of cons – except for the fact that it evidently worked. It’s also worth pointing out that even in the Hunt for the Skinwalker comic, the “Gormans” spend more time commenting on their dire financial situation than they do remarking on the paranormal phenomena engulfing their lives.

So how seriously should we take the claims about Skinwalker Ranch? The world of comic books is awash in high strangeness, and readers know that part of fun is the “what if?” What if a man could fly? What if I possessed super strength? And if you start asking questions about how Superman can fly or why the Hulk hasn’t died of radiation poisoning yet, you’re missing the point.

BOOM! Preview: Hunt for the Skinwalker #1

Scoles writes that those involved with Skinwalker Ranch – the Shermans, Bigelow, Knapp, and Kelleher – have displayed a similar aversion to having their claims questioned. Rather than offering evidence of the myriad UFOs, cryptids, and phantoms supposedly haunting the ranch, they instead seem to simply want readers to go along with it. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Hunt for the Skinwalker ends by asking readers to imagine, “What if it happened to you?” Considering this, it seems like the stories of Skinwalker Ranch could find no better home than the pages of a comic book.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.