The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

Lore & Background

The series was developed by Letter 10 Productions and the producers of The Curse of Oak Island for the History Channel, which green-lit the show for air in 2019. The first season premiered on March 31, 2020, and ran for eight episodes, concluding on June 2, 2020. A second season was greenlit and began airing on May 4, 2021. Season 3 followed with more publicity on January 26, 2022. Season 4 premiered April 18, 2023. Season 5 premiered April 23, 2024. Season 6 premiered June 3, 2025. A seventh season has not yet been confirmed.

The show features the team utilizing technologies such as ground-penetrating radar to investigate purported anomalies such as ionizing radiation, dire wolves, UFOs and cattle mutilation. The Pentagon UFO videos are also frequently featured.

Reader's Guide

The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch has drawn both viewership and criticism. Jason Colavito, an American author who studies fringe theories, characterized the myths about the ranch as 'entirely a modern creation, fabricated in the late twentieth century.' He described the series as 'a slow-paced effort to reproduce Curse of Oak Island,' a show that had been running since 2014 on the same network. Science writer Russell Moul criticized the show as presenting no actual evidence to support claims about the ranch, stating that 'the team have yet to provide anything to back up their supposed experiences.' Common Sense Media reviewer Stephanie Morgan criticized the show as unsuitable for children, citing 'obviously staged scenes of people in peril' and pseudoscientific methods presented as credible proof. Morgan also criticized the experts presented as 'white men, many of whom take it upon themselves to explain the history and beliefs of the Navajo and Ute Tribes.' The series spawned a spin-off, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, which aired three seasons from 2023 to 2025 before being cancelled. Despite the controversies, the show has maintained a multi-season run on the History Channel.

Did You Know?

• The show is titled The Curse of Skinwalker Ranch in the UK.
• Team member Travis Taylor revealed in season four that he had secretly been working as chief scientist on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).
• The series was developed by the producers of The Curse of Oak Island.
• A spin-off series, Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, was cancelled after three seasons.

Origins and the Birth of a Legend

Skinwalker Ranch occupies roughly 512 acres of land southeast of Ballard, Utah, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. The property's name draws from the skin-walker, a malevolent witch figure in Navajo oral tradition, though the land was long known simply as Sherman Ranch. While UFO sightings in the broader Uintah Basin had been circulating since the 1970s, the ranch itself first entered public consciousness in 1996 through a Deseret News article in Salt Lake City. Investigative journalist George Knapp then expanded the story in the Las Vegas Mercury, detailing how the Sherman family reported a string of inexplicable and frightening occurrences after taking up residence. Terry Sherman, the former owner, spoke of strange lights and unusual impressions pressed into grass and soil. Cattle mutilations had already been woven into the local folklore for decades, and these tales formed the backbone of what would become one of the most persistent paranormal legends in the American West.

The Bigelow Era and the Push for Science

In 1996, Robert Bigelow, founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science, purchased the property for $200,000 after being persuaded by the Sherman family's accounts of mutilated cattle and unexplained phenomena. Under Bigelow's stewardship, the ranch became a research site for the unexplained. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp documented what they described as close to 100 incidents over the property's supposed fifty-year history, ranging from vanishing livestock and glowing orbs to large animals with piercing red eyes that allegedly emerged unscathed after being struck by bullets, and invisible objects generating destructive magnetic fields. Retired US Army Colonel John B. Alexander framed the NIDSci effort as an attempt to collect hard data through a standard scientific approach, yet the investigators openly acknowledged difficulty obtaining evidence that met the threshold for scientific publication. In 2005, Kelleher and Knapp published Hunt for the Skinwalker, which caught the eye of Defense Intelligence Agency official James Lacatski. After visiting the ranch and reporting a personal supernatural experience, Lacatski's account reached Senator Harry Reid and Senator Ted Stevens, who together secured $22 million in the Department of Defense budget for studying unidentified aerial phenomena.

Skepticism and the Weight of Doubt

From the outset, Skinwalker Ranch attracted fierce criticism from the skeptical community. In 1996, James Randi presented Bigelow with a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award, designating him the funder of the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal, or occult claim. Decades later, in 2020, skeptical author Robert Sheaffer argued the phenomena were almost certainly illusory, pointing out that NIDSci's multi-year monitoring produced no verifiable proof and that the property's previous owners, who had lived on the land for sixty years, reported no supernatural events whatsoever. Sheaffer's most pointed claim was that the Sherman family fabricated the story before selling it to what he called the gullible Bigelow, with Terry Sherman continuing to work as a caretaker and potentially embellishing the narrative. In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, condemned the $22 million research program led by Lacatski, emphasizing the complete absence of documentary evidence across decades of investigation and characterizing the ranch as always in the business of selling belief and hope.

From Ranch to Brand: The Fugal Era

In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate LLC, a Delaware-registered limited liability company based in Salt Lake City, for approximately $500,000. The new owners immediately secured the property: access roads were blocked, the perimeter fenced with barbed wire, surveillance cameras installed, and warning signs posted to deter visitors. In March 2020, Brandon Fugal, a real estate developer and tech investor, publicly announced his ownership. Adamantium had filed a U.S. Trademark application for the Skinwalker Ranch service mark in February 2017, which was registered in April 2020 with rights covering recreation facilities, multimedia content creation, motion pictures, and television shows. A second trademark filing in June 2021, approved in July 2022, extended the brand to merchandise including cups, shirts, and caps. In 2022, Fugal announced a partnership with the Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi, Utah, aimed at better understanding the ranch's environment and historical significance, signaling an effort to balance commercial development with some form of scholarly engagement.