Photo: the gate on the road into Skinwalker Ranch, with "No Trespassing" signs and concrete barriers, October 2013. Photo by Paul (Flickr user crimfants), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Short answer: Skinwalker Ranch is a private cattle property of about 500 acres in Utah's Uintah Basin, southeast of Ballard and next to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. Its fame started with one family's account in a 1996 Deseret News story: lights, "doorways" in the air, dead and missing cattle.

Since then it has been owned by a UFO-research institute, studied under a Pentagon contract, and turned into a History Channel series now in its seventh season. Through all of it, no one has published physical evidence that outside scientists have checked and confirmed.

What's documented: Who has owned it and when, the newspaper record from 1996 on, the government's own account of the Pentagon-funded work there, and what the TV show has aired. The strange events themselves rest on testimony and on footage and readings the show presents.

Status: Unresolved, and likely to stay that way without open data. Season 8 of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch was approved for Utah film incentives in August 2026. As of October 21, 2026, neither History nor the commission had announced a premiere date.

Last checked October 21, 2026, against the sources listed at the end.

Where is Skinwalker Ranch, and who owns it?

The ranch sits in western Uintah County in northeastern Utah, a few hours southeast of Salt Lake City, near the towns of Ballard and Fort Duchesne. It sits below a red-rock ridge and borders the Uintah and Ouray Reservation of the Ute Tribe.

The Deseret News called it a 480-acre ranch in 1996 and 1997. History.com and the ranch's own website now say 512 acres.

The ownership record is the solid part of this story:

• About 1994 to 1996: Terry and Gwen Sherman, who ran cattle there. The ranch had sat empty for seven years after the previous owners died, the Deseret News reported.
• 1996 to 2016: Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas real estate and aerospace businessman. He paid about $200,000, and the deal closed in September 1996.
• 2016 to now: Adamantium Real Estate, the company of Utah developer Brandon Fugal. History.com dates the sale to 2016, and the ranch's site calls Fugal its steward "since 2016."

How did the Skinwalker Ranch story start?

On June 30, 1996, the Deseret News ran a long feature by staff writer Zack Van Eyck called "Frequent Fliers?" It's the first public account of what the Shermans said was happening, and nearly everything since builds on it.

The family told Van Eyck that over 15 months they'd seen three kinds of craft: a small box-like object with a white light, a 40-foot object, and a ship "the size of several football fields." They described lights coming out of orange, circular "doorways" in midair. They said they'd videotaped two sightings. They'd found three circles of flattened grass about 8 feet across.

Terry Sherman said he'd heard men's voices in an unfamiliar language about 25 feet above him while the dogs panicked. Seven cows were dead or missing. Three were found dead and partially mutilated, the family said.

The same article also recorded what was missing. The Uintah County sheriff's records clerk said her office hadn't received reports of UFOs or cattle mutilations in recent memory. The paper noted the Shermans hadn't told officials about the cattle or the UFOs.

Barry Karr of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal said eyewitness testimony couldn't settle what they'd seen. "There's no question that people see things in the sky that they can't identify," he said, "but that just means at the moment those things are unidentified."

The Shermans weren't the first in the area to report odd lights. Joseph "Junior" Hicks, a retired teacher from Roosevelt, told the paper he'd looked into more than 400 UFO sightings in the Uintah Basin since the early 1950s.

What did Bigelow's team find in the 1990s?

Within weeks of the story, Bigelow flew to Vernal and offered to buy the ranch, the Deseret News reported that October. He put the research under the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, which he'd formed in October 1995. He built an observation post and moved in two scientists and a veterinarian, with someone on site around the clock. Terry Sherman stayed on as caretaker and signed a nondisclosure agreement.

NIDS's John B. Alexander, a retired Army colonel, told the paper the goal was "to do good, high-quality research using a standard scientific approach," with results to be published in scientific journals and on the institute's website.

The next spring, the same reporter checked back. "There have been some minor observations, but nothing you would stand behind," Alexander said in April 1997. "Definitely no craft. No, we haven't had any dog-zappers... Nobody has landed." A sheriff's sergeant said no one had reported anything strange on the property since Bigelow bought it.

That's not the only account from those years. In their 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker, NIDS scientist Colm Kelleher and Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp describe many incidents the team says it saw or investigated.

One of the best known is Kelleher's own: on the night of March 12, 1997, he says he saw a large creature with glowing eyes in a tree about 50 yards away, then found a single deep track in the snow, as History.com quotes the book. That's his testimony.

The book itself admits the limits. "We managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena," Kelleher wrote, "at least no physical evidence that could be considered as conclusive proof of anything," as IFLScience quotes it.

Bigelow shut NIDS down in 2004 but kept the ranch, The New Yorker later reported.

Did the Pentagon study Skinwalker Ranch? What the records say

This is where the ranch moves into government files, and where it's most often overstated.

According to The New Yorker's 2021 reporting, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official wrote to Bigelow in 2007 asking about the ranch. The book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon identifies him as James Lacatski, one of its co-authors. He visited, and "as one Bigelow affiliate described it," saw a "topological figure" that "appeared in mid-air" from inside an observation trailer. That's an account of an experience. Nobody has produced a recording of it.

Bigelow connected Lacatski with Senator Harry Reid. Here the paperwork takes over. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) laid out what happened next in its 2024 historical report:

• At Reid's direction, Congress put $22 million in the fiscal 2008 and 2010 defense budgets for DIA to assess future foreign aerospace threats. DIA set up the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), also called AATIP, and gave the contract to a private company, which The New Yorker and others identify as Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). The DIA solicitation was posted on August 22, 2008, according to the agency's released records.
• The contract covered 12 technology areas, such as propulsion and new materials. UFOs weren't in the statement of work, AARO says, but the contractor researched them anyway with the DIA program manager's support.
• AAWSAP "also investigated an alleged hotspot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah," then owned by the head of the contractor. AARO doesn't name the ranch, but the description fits Skinwalker. That work included "shadow figures," "creatures," "remote viewing" and "human consciousness anomalies," and a plan to hire psychics. "DIA did not seek, nor specifically authorize, this work," AARO wrote.
• The program was terminated in 2012. AARO found it produced exploratory papers on the 12 tasked areas, "never thoroughly peer reviewed," and no other substantive UAP casework.

DIA has since released some of that output. In March 2022 it released 37 of the program's technical reports, 1,473 pages, to The Black Vault's John Greenewald. They cover topics like warp drives, invisibility cloaking and metallic glass. None is a ranch investigation. The same month, DIA's own FOIA log shows at least two requests for a BAASS report titled "Utah Ranch Investigation: August 2009-February 2010" closed as "No Records." That means DIA's search didn't find it. It doesn't prove the report never existed, and it hasn't been made public.

The insiders' version is in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), by Lacatski, Kelleher and Knapp. The Pentagon's prepublication office cleared the manuscript "as amended" on May 11, 2021, after about 14 months, according to FOIA records The Black Vault obtained. That review is a security check. It doesn't mean the Defense Department vouches for what the book says happened.

For how this fits the government's wider UFO budget, see what the U.S. government spends on UFOs. For the files the Pentagon has released since, see the Pentagon UFO files.

What is The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on TV?

History premiered The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on March 31, 2020. It comes from the producers of The Curse of Oak Island, and the format is similar: a team returns each season, runs a new round of tests, and the narration builds toward possible breakthroughs.

The show presents a set of recurring locations and claims. There's "the Mesa," where the team says it has found buried objects and drilled for them. There's "the Triangle," where it launches rockets and fires heat into the sky, then reports what it calls anomalies. And there's "the Bubble," airspace the team says behaves strangely.

Season 7 ran 14 episodes from May 19 to August 18, 2026, according to History's episode guide. Its listings mention "ceramic materials extracted from the Mesa," a Doppler radar study of the Bubble and a finale with "experts and a U.S. congressman."

A spin-off, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, premiered on June 6, 2023, and took the format to other sites with paranormal reputations.

The cast includes aerospace engineer Travis Taylor. In 2022 he said he'd been chief scientist for the Pentagon's UAP Task Force. A Pentagon spokesperson told Science that he did serve in a lead role but was only "informally referred to ... as the chief scientist," and it wasn't a full-time post. The same article noted he'd told Knapp that poltergeist-like entities from the ranch followed him home to Alabama, which drew sharp criticism from scientists.

Critics have been blunt about the show. IFLScience's Russell Moul wrote that "the team has yet to provide anything to back up their supposed experiences." Skeptic writer Robert Sheaffer concluded the phenomenon is "almost certainly illusory," and IFLScience noted that most of the original reports came from Terry Sherman. A claim often repeated in this debate, that the family who owned the land for some 60 years before the Shermans never saw anything odd, comes via Sheaffer and IFLScience. It hasn't been independently verified.

On August 14, 2026, the Utah Film Commission listed The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch: Season 8 among three productions approved for state film incentives, filming in Uintah County. Neither History nor the commission had announced a premiere date as of October 21, 2026. Some TV listing sites show 2027 dates, but History hasn't confirmed any, so we don't repeat them.

What's documented, what's claimed and what's TV?

Can you visit Skinwalker Ranch, and why is it called "skinwalker"?

You can't just drive in. It's private, posted and gated, as the photo above shows. Utah's official tourism site says the best way to see it is from the mesa behind it, on a guided ATV tour or by camping at UFO Valley Campground. Because the ranch borders tribal land, the site also asks visitors to come with respect for the Ute community that lives there.

The name comes from Navajo tradition, where a skinwalker is a kind of witch said to take animal form. That's an odd fit. The ranch is next to Ute land, and as History.com points out, it's about 400 miles north of the Navajo Nation. Drawing on historian Sondra Jones, History.com also notes that skinwalkers don't feature in Ute religion.

What would settle the Skinwalker Ranch question?

Instruments have pointed at this ranch for 30 years. What's missing is anything outsiders can check: raw sensor files with calibration records, chain-of-custody records for soil or "ceramic" samples sent to labs, and results published where other scientists can attack them. A release of the BAASS ranch reports, if DIA or the contractor still holds them, would show what the Pentagon-funded team actually logged. So would giving an independent team access with its own equipment.

Until then, the record supports a narrower story than the one on TV. A family reported frightening events. A wealthy researcher bought the land and watched it closely. His team came away with almost nothing it could stand behind. A Pentagon contract later paid for more of the same, work the Pentagon's own review says DIA never specifically authorized. Nothing here has been shown to be alien or paranormal.

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon also covers far better-documented cases, including the Navy's 2004 Tic Tac encounter. Kelleher said in a 2021 radio interview that one of the four Tic Tac pilots appears in the book under a pseudonym, The Black Vault reported.

If you want to know why officials now say "UAP" instead of "UFO," we cover it in why UFO became UAP. For another case where the legend outgrew the original evidence, read what actually happened at Roswell. And if you ever see something you can't explain, here's how to report a UAP sighting.

Sources

• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I," February 2024 (released March 2024), AAWSAP section
• Defense Intelligence Agency: FOIA Request Log, fiscal 2022 ("Utah Ranch Investigation" requests, "No Records," March 21, 2022)
• The Black Vault: John Greenewald, "The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) Documentation" (archive of DIA releases, incl. the Aug. 22, 2008 solicitation and the March 25, 2022 release of 37 reports)
• Utah Film Commission: "Three New Productions Approved for Film Incentives in Utah," Aug. 14, 2026
• HISTORY: The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, Season 7 episode guide
• Deseret News: Zack Van Eyck, "Frequent Fliers?," June 30, 1996
• Deseret News: Zack Van Eyck, "Millionaire Leads Quest for UFO Data," Oct. 20, 1996
• Deseret News: Zack Van Eyck, "No UFOs or ETs Have Dropped In at Spooky Ranch," April 27, 1997
• HISTORY: Adam Janos, "How Skinwalker Ranch Became a Hotbed of Paranormal Activity," Jan. 17, 2020, updated Feb. 18, 2025
• The New Yorker: Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously," April 30, 2021
• Science: Keith Kloor, "Pentagon UFO study led by researcher who believes in the supernatural," June 29, 2022
• The Black Vault: John Greenewald, "New Documents Detail Slow, Multi-Agency Vetting of 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,'" Aug. 12, 2025
• IFLScience: Russell Moul, "Skinwalker Ranch: Hoax Or A Hub Of Paranormal Activity?," updated June 13, 2025
• Visit Utah: Arianna Rees, "The Unknown & Otherworldly Near Vernal, Utah"
• TheFutonCritic (HISTORY press release): "Beyond Skinwalker Ranch" premiering June 6, 2023
• Skinwalker Ranch (official site): research team and property overview, 512 acres; Brandon Fugal "steward of the ranch since 2016"
• Wikipedia: "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" (season premiere dates)
• Wikimedia Commons: "Skinwalker Ranch (10393732103).jpg," Paul (crimfants) on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0