Skinwalker Ranch and the rise of UFO political religion

Plus: Founders Club this Saturday

Founders Club is this Saturday at 5pm UK / noon EST / 9am PST - founding members will get sent an email with a link. One hour of open conversation and Q&A about whatever founders want to discuss, plus an update on what I’m working on at the moment.

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I read a book this month that was so far out I honestly thought it was some kind of April Fool’s Joke, a Lovecraftian horror presented within the frame of an official Pentagon briefing. But no, it really did emerge from the Pentagon. The book is called Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, it was published in 2023, and it shows the Pentagon is investigating far wilder stuff than anything dreamt of in Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.

The book recounts a $22 million investigation by the Defence Intelligence Agency, funded by Congress through Senator Harry Reid in 2008, into a ranch supposedly replete with UFOs, werewolves, Bigfoot, poltergeists and other paranormal phenomena. It’s the investigation that started the entire ‘secret Pentagon UFO programme’ story published in the New York Times in 2017, which has since snowballed into something like an apocalyptic expectation of government UFO disclosure.

It’s possible this story points to something real and extremely weird. But I will also present the alternative view - put forward by the recently-resigned head of the Pentagon’s UAP programme and by Steven Greenstreet, an investigative journalist at the New York Post - that this is all a massive wild goose chase and media circus concocted by a handful of well-connected true believers and UFO media grifters. In creating a widespread belief that the Deep State is hiding The Truth, it’s potentially dangerous, opening the door to conspiracy-peddling populists who are happy to feed the public’s prejudices.

See for yourself which version you believe.

Hunt for the Skinwalker

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon came out in 2023 but the book was inspired by an earlier 2006 book called Hunt for the Skinwalker, by a biophysicist called Colm Kelleher and veteran UFO journalist George Knapp. This is what it claims:

There is a 480-acre ranch in Uintah County, Utah called Skinwalker Ranch. It was bought by a family called the Shermans in 1994. Weird stuff started happening to them at the ranch. One day, a giant wolf appeared and attacked their cows in front of the family. The ranch owner, Terry Sherman, fired several shots into the wolf, apparently without effect. The family also became plagued by poltergeists - household objects and even large vehicles went missing then reappeared in strange places. Blue orbs and dark triangles hovered over the family. Several of their cattle were mutilated. The family also claimed to see a large Bigfoot-type creature. And they said their three dogs pursued glowing spheres into a forest and were then incinerated.

The ranch is in a county and state with an unusually high concentration of UFO sightings. In 1974, Frank Salisbury, a professor of plant science at the University of Utah, wrote a book on the history of the UFO phenomena in the Uinta Basin titled The Utah UFO Display. Are Mormons culturally primed to have UFO-type religious experiences, considering their faith’s belief in multiple worlds, angels and demons? Keep that possibility in mind.

Even for Utah, Skinwalker Ranch seemed unusually festering in the freaky. Perhaps it was the name - a ‘skinwalker’ is a Navajo evil shaman, who can shapeshift and turn into a were-wolf. Kelleher and Knapp’s book quotes one Navajo:

They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into were-animals and can travel in supernatural ways.

According to Kelleher and Knapp’s book, the Ute tribe betrayed the Navajos and were cursed by them, to be forever haunted by paranormal reality TV shows from the History Channel.

Bigelow at Skinwalker

So we already have a few elements of a good pulp horror story - UFOs, werewolves, Bigfoot, Mormons, and evil indigenous brujos. Now let’s introduce a billionaire and military intelligence…

An article appeared in the Deseret News about the Shermans’ weird and distressing experiences, and attracted the attention of a billionaire called Robert Bigelow. He’s spent more money than anyone else hunting UFOs, investigating paranormal activity, and trying to discover the secret of life after death. He is to Ufology what the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative is to psychedelics.

Robert Bigelow

Bigelow became interested in UFOs after his grandparents had a close encounter in 1947. He retained an interest in the paranormal, but went off to become a billionaire, and made hundreds of millions of dollars building, selling and renting out properties in Las Vegas. In 1999, he also went into aerospace and worked with NASA building an expandable space station called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, though Bigelow Aerospace closed in 2020.

Bigelow funded academic programmes to research consciousness but became frustrated with their lack of results, so he set up his own private research organisation, the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS), in 1995. It had a scientific advisory board with some of the so-called ‘invisible college’ of veteran UFOlogists - French scientist Jacques Vallee, CIA remote viewer Hal Puthoff, Harvard psychiatrist and UFO abduction expert John Mack, UFO journalist George Knapp and others.

When Bigelow read about Skinwalker Ranch in the Deseret News in 1996, he thought it presented an opportunity to study the UFO phenomenon scientifically - a place where weird shit reliably and predictably occurred. So he purchased Skinwalker Ranch from the Shermans (they had already moved out) and handed it over to NIDS to study. NIDS hired Colm Kelleher to lead the team, which included John Alexander, one of the Pentagon paranormal investigators described in Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.

A team of investigators led by Kelleher moved onto the ranch and set up surveillance equipment. Bigelow himself regularly flew to Utah in his private jet to spend time on the ranch and investigate. The only problem was, nothing much happened. Jacques Vallee recorded, in his private diary, there were no UFO sightings at Skinwalker Ranch in 1996, 1997 or 1998. The complete absence of UFO activity even made the Deseret News:

NIDS finally closed down in 2004, without any obvious findings. But then, in 2006, Kelleher and Knapp published the book Hunt for the Skinwalker, which was full of wild tales of paranormal activity.

Apparently NIDS investigators had seen portals of light in the sky, glowing orbs, and even a humanoid creature emerging from the portal. One investigator had felt himself to be possessed by a strange shape which made him say ‘we are watching you’.

Since the book came out, it has faced some criticisms. The main one is that, despite the book’s subtitle (Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah), there is no scientific data in the book, nor any photos. It’s just stories. In addition, despite the fact the majority of the book concerns the experiences of the Sherman family before the arrival of NIDS, the authors of the book didn’t even interview them or tell them they were writing the book. Frank Salisbury, author of the book on UFO sightings in Utah, discovered this when he investigated the ranch and interviewed Terry Sherman.

Another issue - the book claims that weird events had been happening at the ranch for decades and even centuries. But Frank Salisbury interviewed someone from the Myers family, who lived at the ranch for 60 years before the Shermans. They insisted there had been absolutely zero freaky goings on. This from Salisbury’s book:

A third issue - according to some staff members of NIDS, there was pressure from Bigelow to find and report weird events, so some of them simply made stuff up to please the boss.

Doesn’t this remind you of psychedelic science - the ultra-wealthy New Age funders, the small circle of true believer investigators, the pressure to report what funders and investigators want to find? Although of course, to psychedelic science’s credit, it has published a great deal in peer-reviewed journals. Anyway, the book could have retired to the far corners of pulp non-fiction, but instead, it inspired a $22 million Pentagon investigation. This is how that happened…

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon

In 2007, Dr. James T. Lacatski was an intelligence officer serving in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Warning Office (DWO). He read Hunt for the Skinwalker and was amazed.

I read the book cover to cover. I was legitimately interested in this as useful to the military, and useful to my particular group, which was looking at possible threats to new weapons systems; that’s what attracted my attention.

He passed on the book to a friend of his in US Navy intelligence. In the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon this friend’s name is changed to Jonathan Axelrord, but various experts suggest Axelrod is actually US Navy intelligence executive Jay Stratton. He read the book while serving in Iraq and passed it around the intelligence community there, ‘who also read it avidly’.

In 2007, Lacatski wrote to Robert Bigelow saying he wanted to lead a Defence Intelligence Agency investigation into Skinwalker Ranch:

I presently work in the Defense Warning Office of the DIA. The purpose of my visit would be to assist me in developing a strategy on how my office can characterize the potential threat aspects of the phenomena encountered in your research efforts.

He visited the ranch with Bigelow, and had a spontaneous vision of a tubular bells type shape appearing in the kitchen. Bigelow didn’t see the shape, but it was enough to convince Lacatski that the DIA needed to get to the bottom of this.

Bigelow then contacted US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who was a friend to whom he had donated tens of thousands in campaign donations. Reid, a Mormon, shared Bigelow’s fascination with UFOs and the paranormal and had attended NIDS events. Senator Reid persuaded two other senators - Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye - to commit $22 million in congressional funding to a secret program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) to investigate ‘aerial threats’. The program description was drafted by Lacatski, with no mention of UFOs, werewolves, Skinwalker Ranch or any other paranormal phenomena. The $22 million program was then put out for tender to private bidders and - guess what - Bigelow Aerospace Advances Space Studies (BAASS) won the contract to investigate Skinwalker Ranch. Senator Reid says Bigelow’s bid was the best bid. It appears to have been the only one.

For two years, from 2008 to 2010, Bigelow’s team - led by James Lacatski with the assistance of Jay Stratton and others - investigated Skinwalker Ranch and other anomalous occurrences around the US with a team of 75 people, at a cost of $22 million in tax-payers’ money. Then the money ran out, and the project was abruptly closed. The Pentagon never published the results from the study, apparently because they recognized a DIA study into werewolves and poltergeists would subject them to ridicule, but some members of BAASS decided this was because of opposition from a secret group within the Deep State who were opposed to disclosure - the infamous ‘Men in Black’.

In 2023, Lacatski, Kelleher and George Knapp got to publish their findings in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. The Pentagon agreed to the publication, with the waiver that they didn’t not accept the claims as true. So what did all that money and all those investigators and equipment discover? Again, the book doesn’t present any scientific data, no photos, not a single peer-reviewed article published in a journal. You can’t even access the BAASS database. What we have instead are more wild stories.

For example, here’s one story of an encounter with a ‘dino-beaver’, involving Kelleher and a Pentagon analyst called Juliet Witt (name changed). They went out to the ranch with photographic equipment one night:

Suddenly a cone of silence descended on Kelleher and Witt; the crickets seemed to go silent and even the faint rustling of the breeze in the trees ceased. Turning around, they saw a creature ambling towards them from the south. It was the size of a 150-pound pig and should have been making considerable noise as it walked. Yet, the cone of silence dominated the moonlit scene as the creature glided past within 30 feet of Kelleher and about 50 feet of Witt. To Kelleher, it appeared the animal had a series of dinosaur-like spines on its back and also sported a very large, flattened beaver-like tail. It noiselessly coasted past the pair and disappeared around the southwestern corner of the building, still not making a sound. Even Kelleher, who had spent hundreds of days and nights on Skinwalker Ranch and had already been exposed to his fair share of bizarre anomalies on the property, felt a distinct chill as he watched the surreal animal shuffle silently away. The freakish hybrid of small dinosaur and large beaver had silently and suddenly appeared out of the night in the pasture and had just as silently disappeared without leaving any trace. There had been no time to take photographs, and once again Kelleher was left feeling baffled and frustrated.

As New York Post journalist and Skinwalker sceptic Steven Greenstreet commented, ‘no time to take photographs’? This is a 150-pound dino-beaver ambling right past them, but they didn’t think to take a photo?

The main finding of the project was something called the ‘hitchhiker effect’. Apparently, visitors to the ranch got some sort of supernatural infection, whereby weird stuff kept happening to them after they left the ranch, and also to their family and even neighbours.

After the paywall, werewolves haunting US military intelligence…and their families. No, for real. In a Congress-funded study.