Skinwalker Ranch

John Alexander [ FT363:38-41] discussed Utah’s colloquially named Skinwalker Ranch, which seems to have been (and perhaps still is) a hot spot for anomalous phenomena. It lies in an area known as the Uinta Basin. The caption of the photograph on page 39 implies that the ranch is inVernal. However, it’s some 22 miles (35km) south-west of there.

Alexander recommends the book Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005). Co-authored by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, it describes strange events that reportedly befell Terry Sherman and his family at the ranch in the mid-1990s. (They’re given pseudonyms in the book.) The manifestations included poltergeisttype phenomena, UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, the disappearance of livestock, and other oddities. In 1996, after about two years at the ranch, the Shermans sold it to Robert Bigelow, the property and aerospace tycoon. The book goes on to describe the subsequent investigation of the local phenomena by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a private organisation funded by Bigelow.

Several years ago, I was in touch with Dr Frank Salisbury (1926-2015), who included a chapter on the ranch in the 2010 edition of his book The Utah UFO

Display. He’d had a number of lengthy telephone conversations with Terry Sherman, and the latter contended that many of the things in Hunt for the Skinwalker only resembled a true account of his experiences.

Hunt for the Skinwalker (pp3-9) describes an occasion early in the Shermans’ occupancy of the ranch when a very large wolf-like creature attacked one of their animals, a calf. Despite being kicked, hit with a baseball bat, and then shot several times, the strange creature showed no signs of distress, and trotted away. Terry Sherman and his son followed it, guided in part by its distinct tracks; but then the tracks abruptly ended, as if the creature had vanished into thin air. (Alexander’s article also mentions this incident, but describes it slightly differently.) However, Terry Sherman told Salisbury that much of the story was based on hearsay, although he wouldn’t elaborate.

Dr Garth Myers (1921-2011), a former pædiatric neurologist, informed Salisbury that his late brother Kenneth, and the latter’s wife Edith, had bought the ranch around 1933, starting with about 160 acres (65ha) and subsequently increasing their holding by buying further parcels of land. Garth explained that Kenneth had died in 1987, after which Edith had remained at the ranch until about 1992. She died in 1994, whereupon Garth and his sisters inherited the property, which they sold to the Shermans.

Hunt for the Skinwalker gives a rather different account of the history of the ranch prior to its acquisition by the Shermans. It states, for example, that the property had been unoccupied for almost seven years when the Shermans arrived. But given that Garth Myers was closely related to Kenneth and Edith Myers, I imagine that his version is more likely to be correct.

Garth Myers told Salisbury that he’d been close to his brother and sister-in-law, and that nothing strange had happened when they were living at the ranch. Salisbury ( op. cit., pp220221) considered the possibility that Kenneth and Edith had had UFO experiences, but had refrained from telling Garth about them, because he was sceptical about such matters. But Salisbury indicated that there’s only tenuous evidence for that: an associate of Salisbury’s, known as Junior Hicks, seemed to recall an assistant at a drugstore telling him that Edith Myers had UFO stories to tell. On the other hand, a rancher called John Garcia, with a property adjoining the Skinwalker Ranch, told Salisbury and Hicks about a UFO sighting that he’d had on his own land when Kenneth Myers’s widow was still living at the adjacent ranch. Garcia’s wife had also seen it, albeit fleetingly.

According to Alexander’s article, the person who owned the ranch before the Shermans bought it indicated that he’d kept vicious dogs chained near the doors, to deter anyone or anything from approaching the house. Alexander adds, rather cryptically, that a number of incidents had induced the owner to employ this primitive, but effective, security measure. In a similar vein, Hunt for the

Skinwalker (p11) states that there were indications that the previous owners had chained large guard dogs to both ends of the building. (Technically, at the point when the Shermans bought the ranch, the ‘prior’ or ‘previous’ owners would have been Garth Myers and his sisters. But I presume that Alexander and the authors of Hunt

for the Skinwalker are referring to Kenneth and Edith Myers.) But if what Garth Myers told Salisbury is correct, it seems that Kenneth and Edith Myers didn’t use large guard dogs.

Hunt for the Skinwalker (p16) claims that the greatest concentration of high strangeness in the Uinta Basin has always been in the area occupied by the ranch; but on the basis of his research, Salisbury ( op. cit., p236) doubted that, although he accepted that genuinely anomalous phenomena had occurred there during the Shermans’ occupancy. In fact, he speculated that the Shermans had been singled out to experience such things, and that the tricksterish intelligence behind the manifestations had then orchestrated just enough activity to keep the NIDS team interested for a few years, but also frustrated! Peter A McCue By email