Skinwalker Ranch Is A Grift. There, I Said It. | Answers With Joe

growing up my grandparents had a ranch they raised and sold cattle they harvested hay and oats collected farm dogs by the dozen it wasn't a big operation or anything but it was pretty cool they weren't alone either there are over 2 million farms and ranches across the united states as of 2019 anyway most of which you've never heard of some are more well known for just being huge or historic like the xit ranch in the king ranch here in texas and then of course there's ranches like skywalker ranch which is the home of lucas film and south fork ranch which is the home of the ewing family on the tv show dallas and then there's skinwalker ranch which is home to according to legend scary humanoid creatures mutilated livestock ghosts a giant unkillable wolves electronic disturbances and ufos it's almost like an amusement park of the paranormal or 15 x-files episodes in one spot but if we're being pedantic it's not famous because of what happened there it's famous because well if you've heard of skinwalker ranch it's because you've been exposed to the barrage of media about this place books movies feature documentaries podcasts episodes of popular tv shows and as of last year they finished up their second season of a reality show on the ancient aliens channel i'm sorry the history channel keep forgetting they still call themselves that and that show is super popular it's finale ranked number one in its time slot without a doubt skinwalker ranch is a valuable commodity at this point regardless of what's happening there it is pulling in millions upon millions of dollars and of course i've received millions upon millions of requests for a video about it probably because i did a uap video earlier this year which was universally beloved but you know what it is an interesting story and if nothing else it's become sort of a pop culture phenomenon which makes me kind of wonder exactly how we got here so how did we get here [Music] all good mysterious places have a mysterious backstory it's kind of like architecture you need a good foundation to build the spooky on top of and skin wonka ranch is a place that seems ready made for the spoopy skinwalker ranch is located in northwest utah in the uenta basin it's close to ballard utah and consists of 2.1 square kilometers though some sites listed as 1.9 square kilometers in size it was owned by the myers family from the early 1930s to 1994 and they sold it to cattle ranchers named the sherman family and in fact sometimes the property is still referred to as sherman ranch but the sherman's only lived there for two years before selling it to billionaire businessman and aerospace executive robert bigelow bigelow is famously a believer in ufo phenomena and wanted to study the area after hearing about some of the sherman's experiences on the property bigelow owned the property for 20 years during which time the land was investigated by his group the national institute for discovery science but in 2016 bigelow sold the property for 4.5 million dollars to a shell company called adamantium real estate who immediately shut down all roads to the ranch line the property with barbed wire and install security cameras around the perimeter but maybe the most telling clue about what their plans were for skinwalker ranch was when they trademarked the term skinwalker ranch in 2018. literally within a year a feature documentary on skinwalker ranch came out and production began on the now popular and lucrative skinwalker ranch reality show could i sound more cynical right now all right now would be a good time to disclose that yes i am severely biased on this topic i've been pretty open about my disdain for reality shows and the manipulation of reality that they engage in i did a video way way back early in the channel where i talked about duck dynasty and how uh the guys who are on that show were like regular middle class dudes with no beards or anything and then they got cast in this show grew out their beards and made millions of dollars selling merchandise that's the grift and it happens with a lot of reality shows so yeah the fact that there's a reality show around this thing just immediately sets off alarm bells for me but is that a fair thing to say here is that what's going on here is the guy behind adamantium holdings running some kind of grift well let's take a look at the guy behind the curtain his name is brandon fugal he's a real estate mogul and vc investor out of utah figo had a religious upbringing in the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints which is a fancy way of saying he grew up mormon and according to interviews with him this is what spurred his interest in the paranormal you know the idea that we could have proof that there's more out there to reality in the universe than what we can see this would be this would be the ultimate validation of his faith but he's an interesting guy he's got a huge movie memorabilia collection he's passionate about 80s music collects porsches and lamborghinis and that kind of stuff and he's also joined an investment group that wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth fugal told utah business in 2020 that he purchased the ranch as a skeptic believing there would be natural explanations for all the strange activity but he added quote what we are witnessing could be evidence that we live in a multi-dimensional universe that we are not alone that we may be interacting with other entities other intelligence fugal hopes that discoveries on the ranch can help prove that humans are part of a bigger plan that we're not just some random event that there is meaning and purpose to our existence and you know what honestly if he's sincere about that and he does seem sincere in the interviews i've seen of him awesome great i'm i am down for that the question becomes how does making a lucrative reality show out of this further that effort you know is it just that getting the word out might bring in more researchers that might come in and help out are they going to reinvest the money that's made by the show into the research part of it is it a have your cake and eat it too kind of thing i want to note that we did reach out to mr fugal to get some answers to those questions and he was responsive at first but when we threw those questions at him we didn't really uh hear anything back from him after that now i want to be clear he's a busy guy he might have just not had time to get back to it i'm not trying to throw any wild accusations out there or anything i only say that just to get the point across that we did try to cover our bases on that and get his side of the story all right so let's talk about the ranch itself what's what's the deal with this place if you went to basin as the geological remains of the prehistoric uinta lake that was formed in the late tertiary period about 2 million years ago the basin is surrounded by the uinta and wasatch mountains and the rhone and book cliffs it's up to 10 000 feet above sea level and covers more than 9 000 square miles and prehistoric sites show that it was inhabited thousands of years ago by the archaic and fremont peoples and then more recently by the ute tribe fathers dominguez and escalante were the first europeans in the area when they traveled through in 1776 and brigham young sent a small party to explore the basin in 1861 as a possible place to settle but the party reported that the area was valueless abraham lincoln created the uinta indian reservation that same year in gilsonite which is a kind of asphalt was discovered in the basin around 1888. the land contains oil too it has more than eight thousand gas wells and two thousand oil wells with mineral rights being the primary income source for the uinta and uray indian reservation and then there's fracking which has been occurring there since the 1960s and it comes with some of its own problems a rolling stone article in 2015 concluded that the ground air in the basin was quote fraught with carcinogenic gases like benzene rogue emissions from oil and gas drilling in fact the high level of volatile organic compounds in the area has been floated around as one of the reasons why so many cattle get sick and die in the area even fugal is cautious about the omission saying quote i have four kids but they've never been to the ranch the danger is real and we have to approach the ranch with a degree of reverence and caution a lot of the lore around skinwalker ranch comes from the indigenous tribes that have inhabited the area for thousands of years the uinta and uray reservation stretches across three counties in the basin it's the second largest native american reservation in the u.s covering 4.5 million acres anthropologists say the youth migrated to the northern colorado plateau between a thousand and two thousand years ago and the youths are talented artists specifically known for their religious and ceremonial beadwork and leather work in their religion they trace their origin to a half-man half-wolf god named sanoyev they also believe that all the physical elements and features in the world are spiritually alive their oral history contains sightings of weird creatures in the area and they take this lore very seriously according to ufo investigator junior hicks in an interview with george knapp in 2002 quote they think the skinwalkers are powerful spirits that are here because of the curse that was put on them generations ago by the navajos the utes say that the ranch is the path of the skinwalker so what is a skinwalker exactly well according to laura skinwalkers are kind of malevolent witches that can transform themselves into bears birds coyotes wolves and other animals they're known to the navajo as yi nadluchi which translates to with it he goes on all fours legend says that skinwalkers are usually shamans who kind of go over to the dark side by participating in forbidden rituals and ceremonies that summon evil forces so i guess the shamans are the jedi then skinwalkers are the sith belief in skinwalkers is still pretty strong in the tribes in the area in fact many of them won't talk about it at all because it's believed that if you say its name then you kind of evoke the the being you know it's like he he who shall not be spoken kind of thing so with that history and lore behind it the list of unexplained mysterious events happening at the ranch is pretty extensive including cattle mutilations sightings of strange humanoid figures ufos light beams hitting the basin poltergeist phenomena the appearance of portals balls of light radiation blasts and electronic malfunctions while there are claims of ufo sightings that go back to the 1950s in the uinta basin most of what we think of as skinwalker ranch activity started only in 1994 when the shermans moved there for example the shermans found a dead cow on the ranch after a ufo sighting there they told the deseret news in 1996 that there was quote a peculiar hole in the center of its left eyeball but was otherwise untouched with no trace of blood there were no traces of footprints predators or tire tracks and a chemical like odor was also present another dead cow with a similar hole in its left eye was found later there was also a six inch hole about an inch deep carved out of the cow's rectum along with the same chemical smell what is up with aliens and butts anyway cows began disappearing more mutilated cows showed up there were metallic sounds at night beams of light crop circles you name it all the stuff was happening at the ranch in one story terry sherman claimed to have seen a blue orb moving across the ground and then his dogs kind of went nuts and chased it into a wooded area he heard the dog's yelp and then silence when he went out the next morning to check and see what had happened he found three patches where the grass had died and in the middle of the patches with this little black lumpy greasy thing like like the dogs have been incinerated yeah if you want to hear more about the sherman's experiences i've got links down in the description you can go read all about it so as a guy with two dogs um if something like that had happened to me i think i would get the hell out of there as fast as possible and it seems that the shermans aren't the same they're no different so that's why after only two years they sold the property to bigelow which makes you wonder if the place was so freaky that the sherman's yeted out of there after only two years then what did the myers family see they owned that place for 60 years and the answer to that question is where things really get weird because apparently what they saw was nothing kenneth john myers and his wife edith own the property before they sold it to the shermans and they're not with us anymore but kenneth's brother garth has gone on record as saying that they never saw anything paranormal there he spoke to frank b salisbury phd who published a book called the utah ufo display and said quote there was nothing unequivocally absolutely nothing that went on while edith and my brother lived there and he claims that after the sherman sold the ranch bigelow called garth and asked why he never told anyone about the ufos and according to the book he responded by saying quote i told them they didn't get there until the shermans got there yikes so look the skeptic in me sees a ranch that was owned by this family for a really long time nothing going on there and then they sell it to this sherman couple that move in there and suddenly there's all this paranormal stuff going on and they're telling all these stories about this crazy stuff and then they sell it to this eccentric billionaire who's into that kind of thing make a massive profit off of it he keeps it for a little while then sells it for even more money to this adamantium holdings company which is now making a reality show and money hand over fist it's just it's just generations of people profiting off of this story but the wrench in this theory is that the shermans actually only sold the property for 200 000 they sold it for less than they bought it for they took a loss on this thing they moved away and have refused to ever talk about what happened there ever since they've never sold any books or tried to profit off of it in any way part of that might be because of a non-disclosure agreement they might have signed with bigelow but still and there's nothing really from their past that would indicate that they would do something like this terry sherman was a well-respected breeder of top quality cattle an award-winning cattle back in new mexico before he bought the ranch in utah and before he moved there he had never lost even one percent of his cattle and then he moves there and just they're dying all over the place it's said that the loss of this cattle hit the family's finances really hard not to mention just the psychological stress of it all now if you wanted to double down on the cynicism you could probably make the argument that he wasn't doing as well in the business as he used to his reputation and his pride was taking a hit so he kind of had to conjure up this crazy story to save face but it is weird that the people who set this whole scheme into motion according to the whole griff theory are the people that profited the least from it [Music] one more thing worth mentioning is the issue of digging on the ranch if you've seen the show they're very very serious about not digging on the ranch apparently digging is what kind of stirs up all the spirits and entities and causes all kinds of crazy stuff to happen but could the whole no digging thing stem from something a lot more mundane remember that the uinta basin is loaded with fossil fuels like gas and oil and asphalt and whatnot well according to garth meyers the purchase agreement from the myers to the sherman stipulated that the myers retained mineral rights underneath the ground in other words if somebody were to dig around and find some bubbling crude then that would belong to the previous owners so they don't want you to do that again that's garth meyer's theory another one has to do with those volatile organic compounds i was talking about earlier it is possible that digging may release some of those into the air and might be the cause of some of the claimed medical issues that's seen on the show and yet another reason one might not want to dig there is because there might be radioactive fallout from some of the nuclear blasts that were tested between 1951 and 1962. those were tested in nevada but it's thought that the fallout fell over areas of utah specifically this area in the uintah basin so yeah digging might stir up ancient spirits or radioactive dirt neither of which sound like a good time to me so we talked about the myers we talked about the shermans we talked about the current owner now let's talk about the one the only robert bigelow paranormal gigolo you know what just real quick for the record i like robert bigelow i think he's got some really great ideas um he's a little kooky but it's fine so bigelow bought the ranch in 1994 and then immediately set out the national institute for discovery science in 1995 with the specific intention to study this ranch and they did so for 20 years so what did they find one thing they experienced was an ice circle that mysteriously appeared in 2002 the circle measured five feet nine inches in diameter and was found in an irrigation canal and it was a quarter inch deep shavings around the circle indicated they had been etched into the ice there was no evidence of melted ice and there were no markings tracks or prints in or around the circle either the case went unsolved and there were other stuff that they ran across too like strange bits of metal and a lot of electronic disturbances i'll put a link down in the description where you can see all the stuff that they were investigating not just on the ranch but in in general but i actually kind of lied a second ago when i said that they studied it for 20 years because um that's not technically true nids was actually disbanded in 2004 but it was replaced with another group a much more secretive group called the bigelow aerospace advanced space studies group and nobody really knew what they had going on until this year remember back in the spring of this year when all that ufo stuff came out and there was that report to congress and everything about the us government you know researching aliens and whatnot well that program was called atip the advanced aviation threat identification program and if you're paying close attention during all that you might have seen robert bigelow's name come up that he was he was working with them in some way which isn't a surprise to me he's super into that stuff but this is what he was doing for that program he was researching skinwalker ranch also harry reid the senator that helped fund the program he's a personal friend of robert bigelow's and bigelow's advanced aerospace studies program lost its funding in 2012 when the defense department stopped doing atip so bigelow's researchers had government funding to study skinwalker ranch for eight years and it would be great to know what they found but it's classified and after that research kind of stalled he kind of just owned the land for a few years there until somebody got the idea for a tv show so look here are the prevailing theories around skinwalker ranch a shaman is trapped in an alternative timeline and is causing havoc the ranch is a portal for interdimensional travel for beings and ufos to pass through into our world the us government made contacts with extraterrestrials but they're trying to cover it up it's a spot for extraterrestrials to study us and our reactions to their presence and it's a scam perpetrated by the sherman's bigelow and fugal to make money i mean scam is a big word i mean bigelow wasn't running a scam he's been researching this kind of stuff for a long time he's legitimately interested in it and talks about it a lot in fact he's kind of risked his whole reputation and career on it and look it's very possible brandon fugal is the same way he's legitimately interested in researching this stuff but you know research costs money and he wants it to be well funded so we'll make a reality show out of it it's compelling stuff people would want to watch it he's not wrong about that like maybe this is one of those cases where the smart thing to do and the scammy thing to do just kind of happened to be the same thing hell maybe he was inspired by the mars one program mars one was a privately funded program to take people to mars and the way they were gonna pay for it was by making it into a reality show the idea was people would do research and establish the mars base and do all the science stuff but they'd make a reality show at the same time yeah it didn't work out very well but being a businessman i'm sure brandon fugal ran the numbers and was able to ascertain that this was more likely to be successful than the mars one program because despite what you might have heard it is harder to get to mars than to get to utah but yeah we'll make a tv show and we'll do all the things you got to do to make a tv show work and manufacture drama and all that kind of stuff but in the process we'll do some actual research and hey what if we actually found something that would be huge i am willing to give the benefit of the doubt here that might be exactly what brandon fugal is doing i'm still not convinced that doing a reality show is the best way to do that but his intentions might be pure i guess we'll just have to see where all this money goes but you know what who cares it's fun i've watched it it's it's fine i mean reality shows aren't my thing but clearly a lot of other people enjoy them and i'm sure it was a nice escape over the last couple of years for a lot of people when they probably really needed one i cannot believe i am defending the skinwalker ranch reality show i didn't think i would land here honestly i came to this video ready to throw down i was ready to expose the fraud and here i am defending it ultimately they're making entertainment and on the off chance there is something weird going on there then that will increase the odds of them finding it so i don't know what do you think good thing bad thing dumb got any favorite scenes from the show discuss your favorite theories down in the comments and if it is aliens coming here where do you think they're coming from kepler-16b trappist-1e a few years back nasa put together some travel posters to imagine what it would be like to travel to places like that and i just got posters to put up on my wall of those thanks to today's sponsor displate this plate is an online store where you can buy photo and art printed directly on metal plates which you can choose from thousands of independent artists 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 807,797

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: oZEdcyWF6VA

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SLJis1BAMF]

Just posting this here because I thought it would be a good conversation starter and you all would find it fun, not because I want to knock the show or the opinions of others.

[u/SubstantialPressure3]

Ithink the history channel is a grift. There's lots of experiments, but we never get to hear the results. But I don't think the place is a bust. I think the new owner is just making money wherever he thinks he can, and recouping expenses.
Ive been intrigued with the place since I heard about it in the late 90s. Not much information available until recently. I know a lot of real science went on there, and it's all classified bc of the contracts involved.

  I should have not gotten my hopes up when the history channel started the show. It's the same constant tease, and bad editing. Like the jocks are in charge of the directing and editing instead of the nerds, who would do a much better job. 

 Same hack job and weird editing as oak island and ancient aliens, any real information obscured and ignored, sensationalist garbage pursued, and no results of any experiments. I'm  going to wait for the next book to come out. Ive  lost patience with the show. I still have questions about the results of experiments from the 1st season. 
A friend of mine crudely put it "it's intellectual blue balls"

Ive reluctantly agreed with him. I'm just going to wait for the next book to come out. I'm tired of torturing myself with the show.

I'm a fan of Dr. Travis Taylor, if you have a chance to look up Rocket City Rednecks, you should. I started watching the secret of skinwalker ranch, because to me, his involvement gave it credibility.

I think the History channel and Brandon whatshishead  are  taking advantage of his reputation, his joy for experimentation and science in general, and frankly I was a little worried about him at the end of the season. He didn't look the same at all as he did at the beginning of the first season. When he gets stressed, he makes that thin lipped face, and gets all red, and you can just look at him and tell he's not sleeping well.  I hope to God he didn't sign a waiver to be on that show.

Also, that one guard who has the phone that acts weird? It's because the screen is cracked, and it's letting moisture in. One tiny drop of sweat on a phone with a cracked screen will make your phone act like that for hours.

You can cover the broken screen with packing tape and it will still work just fine. Dude needs a new phone screen. I think mine cost $75.

[u/FortCharles]

So it turns out the real "grift" was finding out there's no grift at all, only to be hit with an in-episode ad at the end? Sounds like bait and switch to me, Joe.