A Look Inside the Making of ‘The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch’ – ryan

A road snakes through desert land 150 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, leading to a large black metal gate that cordons off Skinwalker Ranch, a 512-acre property in Utah’s Uinta Basin, where over the past few decades, visitors and staff have reported encounters with strange flying objects, malevolent or mischievous spirits, animal-human hybrids, and wolves of prehistoric size. The sprawling compound is showcased each week on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, an unscripted History Channel series about a group of scientists studying the eerie events that seem to converge there. My Lyft driver is greeted at the gate by a dour-looking goateed man strapped with a sidearm and dressed in black pants, a black shirt, and a black ballcap. This is Bryant “Dragon” Arnold, Skinwalker’s chief of security. He opens the gate and directs us to a parking area behind the Command Center, a six-room trailer where a team of scientists and ranch staff monitor the property year-round and which hosts the TV series’ annual three-month production period.

Although the show does a brilliant job of making the ranch seem vast and spectacular, the real thing feels small and would not be interesting to a layperson without knowing the wild stories it has accrued. There are remnants of mining and cattle operations from earlier times; three early-20th century shanty houses that are falling apart, known on the series as Homesteads 1, 2, and 3; a serpentine creek that’s often a dry bed crisscrossed by plank bridges; a stubby mesa roughly a quarter-mile long, ringed by trees and scrub; and assorted creatures. Most of the latter are listed in standard zoological texts: coyotes, squirrels, armadillos, roadrunners, rattlesnakes, house sparrows, red-tailed hawks. But it’s the ones you won’t find in a book that you have to worry about — or so the legends say. 

The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is the tenth most-viewed original program on basic cable and catnip to anyone who, like me, loved The Twilight Zone, The X Files, and spooky campfire tales. As a kid, I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the TV series Project UFO and In Search Of in a state of rapture. I’d check out books from the library about Project Blue Book and Bigfoot and Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. I used to stare up at the stars at night, hoping I’d catch one as it began to move. As Carl Sagan said about our universe, I always thought the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere was likely. I also wondered if there could be a scientific basis for the lore, theology, and imagery that has inspired so much of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic to a creature not advanced enough to understand the science behind it. If that’s true, what might seem to us to be magic — or paranormal activity — might be explicable if we were more evolved. But even an evolutionary leap in brainpower wouldn’t change the fact that humans are complex, emotional, self-deceiving, unreliable narrators. And it’s why I’m still inclined to disbelieve personal anecdotes that don’t have data attached. Like Mulder, I want to believe. But I also don’t want to be treated like someone who doesn’t care if a story is fake as long as it’s fun.

The reasons I have been known to watch quasi-documentary cable programs like Ancient Aliens or assorted ghost-hunting series are the same that I might watch American Pickers or Pawn Stars — because they’re engaging, in a repetitive, comforting way. I see these shows as the documentary-filmmaking equivalent of hot dogs: If the taste is to your liking, go with God, but you’re best off not learning what they’re made of. So when I started watching The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, it was with folded arms. But I quickly realized I’d never seen anything like it.

Strange and unexplainable things happen on the show. Outwardly healthy cattle keel over without explanation, sometimes on camera. Ranch workers are constantly on edge about the possibility of being suddenly laid low by enervating sickness, splitting migraines, brain swelling, or radiation exposure. There are also regular sightings of what used to be called Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, but are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs, to allow for the possibility that the objects are something other than vehicles and to account for sightings that occur in space or underwater. Scans of the long, flat mesa on the property suggest that there’s an immense, unknown, fragmented thing inside. Of course there’s eager speculation that it’s a crashed spacecraft, or one that was abandoned millions of years ago, the mesa forming around it.

So, to see for myself, I visited the ranch in March, and now here I am riding in a Jeep SUV driven by the ranch’s owner and star of the show, Brandon D. Fugal. With his all-black ensembles and oval spectacles, 51-year-old Fugal looks like a Beat poet in a 1950s movie. But he’s the chairman and co-owner of the Intermountain Offices of Colliers International, a commercial real-estate company with a market capitalization of nearly $6.7 billion. Though he dropped out of Utah Valley University, he is now the president of the board of that university’s Woodbury School of Business, and his name tops the school’s Brandon D. Fugal Gateway Building, which was built with a $5 million gift. Fugal got his commercial real-estate license at 18 and has been building ever since. He is unquestionably one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. And now he’s telling me about the first time he saw a flying saucer.

Fugal says he “didn’t believe in any of that stuff” back in the spring of 2016 when he bought the ranch from its previous owner, Las Vegas–based aerospace mogul and paranormal buff Robert Bigelow. But six months later — October 14th, to be exact — Fugal was giving a tour of the ranch to a retired former Army surgeon who was once stationed at Area 51 and a couple of security agents who were traveling with him. Suddenly one of the two guards in the back shouted “Stop the vehicle!” Fugal says he looked where the guard was pointing and saw “a 40- or 50-foot-long grayish, disclike object — what can only be described as a flying saucer, clear as day, probably about a hundred feet above the mesa.” The object seemed to “change position from one place to another in the blink of an eye,” Fugal says. It darted about 50 feet down, then to the left again, and disappeared. That’s the day he stopped doubting the stories about the ranch. “It wasn’t about belief,” he says. “It was undeniable.”

Fugal recounts the story while standing in the small kitchen of a trailer home on Skinwalker Ranch. The trailer is the command center for the project and the most-used location on the series. It has a few small bedrooms, a conference room, a control room with three long walls of TV screens, and a closet filled with private servers to hold the data that’s being collected from the property every second of every day of every year.

Gathered around Fugal are members of a team who, on his dime, have been studying the goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch for eight years. They’re a colorful crew. Technologist Pete Kelsey creates 3-D maps of buildings and terrain, including Alcatraz, which he mapped for CNN in April. For Skinwalker, Kelsey uses drones, UAVs, LiDAR, sonar, photogrammetry, thermography, and other processes to examine the ranch landscape. “When I first came here,” he says, “I said to myself, ‘This is nonsense. I’ll be gone in 24 hours.’ That was five years ago.” The ranch’s superintendent, Thomas Winterton, is a black-belt martial artist. His wife Melissa owns a company called Resonance Meditations which, according to its website, “​​combines the harmonious blend of meditative sounds and essential oils for profound mental and emotional healing.” Melissa has joined us today to bless me and douse me with sage so that when I leave, I won’t bring parasitic, malevolent creatures home.

The ranch’s chief scientist is Erik Bard, a philosophical gearhead who sounds like Martin Sheen’s Kentucky cousin and gave Fugal’s crew its nickname: the Cabal. Bard met Fugal in 2014 after Fugal had spent two years pouring money into an attempt to develop antigravity technology that was supposedly reverse-engineered from a UFO, only to suspect, along with fellow investors, that the science was bogus. Fugal drove Bard around Salt Lake City in a Porsche and pitched him on joining the project specifically to vet the science, then handed Bard an envelope containing a $10,000 personal check as an advance on his labor. Bard handed back the check, did some data auditing as a favor, and concluded that the science was unconvincing, which prompted Fugal to pull out of the project. When Fugal asked Bard to join the Skinwalker crew, he worried that history was about to repeat itself. So did Bard, who says he found the descriptions of multiple overlapping categories of paranormal activity on the property “really improbable.” That was nine years ago. Now Bard lives at the ranch year-round, flying back to Kentucky to visit his wife and five children (including “naturally occurring quadruplets”). He often operates entirely alone, in what he calls “abject isolation … I’m out here like freaking Mark Watney in The Martian, or that poor little robot in Wall-E.”

Jay Stratton, a bearded, dark-eyed Texan who is the quietest participant in any Skinwalker roundtable, used to be a senior analyst at the Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and served as director of the U.S. government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Stratton drove the hearings in Washington, D.C. that unveiled the video of the “Tic Tac” UAP that was encountered by Navy fighter pilots in 2004. The hearings drew respectful coverage in mainstream media outlets despite being subject matter that was considered kook bait when Stratton was growing up in the ’70s. He has a memoir coming out next year that promises to reveal “all that can be lawfully disclosed” about UAPs.

The unofficial narrator of the series is scientist, engineer, and History Channel regular Travis Taylor, a strapping, strawberry-blond Alabaman with a singsong drawl, and multiple advanced degrees. He says the whole reason he got into science was to improve the odds of encountering extraterrestrials, a topic he was obsessed with as a boy. As of a couple of years ago, Taylor and Stratton also do work on the side for Radiance Technologies, a defense contractor that studies what it calls “exotic defense technologies,” which are rumored to include reverse-engineering experimental gadgets from recovered UAPs, though the company rather coyly denies this. Stratton and Taylor also have a rock band, with Stratton on electric guitar and Taylor on vocals. It’s named the Hitchhiker after the shadowlike beings that many, including Stratton, have claimed to have encountered on the ranch, and that are said to follow visitors home unless they’re dusted with sage as a purifying prayer is recited.

Taylor, a ranch outsider who was brought in by the History Channel, has a knack for explaining complex concepts in plain language, something he does multiple times an episode while interacting with the rest of the Cabal around conference tables and reading scientific recaps into a camera. “You just gotta have a poster boy,” says Bard, not without some derision. Taylor’s eagerness to entertain science-fiction scenarios like wormholes and force fields sometimes irritates Bard, who insists that he prefers his own speculations stick as close to verifiable data as possible. On X, Winterton wrote that during the first meeting with Taylor, “I thought he was a pompous ass because he bluntly told our team he thought we were batshit crazy.” Taylor agrees there was tension. Winterton, he says, “thought I was coming in trying to take over, tell them they didn’t know what they were doing. But then once I got there and we started working together, we all realized we’re very similar kindred spirits.”

Fugal’s cost of paying the team and keeping the ranch running is defrayed by the show’s production company, Prometheus Entertainment, which regularly works with the History Channel on shows including Ancient Aliens, a series about the fringe theory that extraterrestrials encouraged humanity’s technological evolution, and The Curse of Oak Island, a straightforward account of an ongoing archeological dig on an island near Nova Scotia and the channel’s biggest hit. Prometheus sends a production team to Utah each summer to record the ranch crew doing experiments and poring over the results. Fugal’s team tries to figure out why, from their view, the ranch manifests phenomena that don’t make sense. For instance, as seen on the show, there appears to be an invisible wall roughly 200 feet above an area of the ranch that’s referred to as “the Triangle,” and when they send up balloons, model rockets, and drones within that small area, they malfunction and explode, appearing to smash into an unseen barrier. At the end of season five, the team sent up 200 drones simultaneously, and they all fell from the sky at roughly the same time. The third-party contractor who brought the drones onto the ranch confirmed to me he had no idea what happened.

Detractors of the series pick it apart for scientific and historical inaccuracies and deem it too glitzy, too dramatic, too obviously designed for sale and consumption, and probably fake. In a Facebook group dedicated to hate-watching the series, a viewer wrote that the main players are “laughing at how much they are getting paid to produce this ‘scientific’ show.” There are a lot of social-media comments to that effect, some by individuals who say they’re scientists, communications experts, or otherwise authoritative sources, and find the show unbelievable at best: “It’s been a scam since the ’90s,” says one. “It’s a movie set and a loose series of stories to act out around, write books, and go on talk radio.”

If the phenomenon of Skinwalker Ranch is a massive, ongoing hoax, it’s one that’s been unfolding since the pilot was filmed in 2019, and possibly further back into the 1990s when Bigelow owned the property. Under him, the ranch briefly became a site of ongoing government investigation, courtesy of Nevada senator Harry Reid, a friend of Bigelow who secured $22 million in federal funds to “investigate aerial threats, including what the military preferred to call unidentified aerial phenomena or just ‘objects.’” This operation, based at the Pentagon, was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. It was AATIP that first brought Stratton to the ranch, long before Fugal entered the picture. Opinions vary as to whether Bigelow and the investigators produced anything worthwhile, but most of the findings are classified.

Barry Greenwood, who has studied paranormal activities for decades, is a prominent skeptic of Skinwalker, the place as well as the show. He says the Bigelow era produced nothing that would convince him of strange goings-on at the ranch and doubts the Fugal era will change his mind. “I don’t think they’re involved in deliberate hoaxing or deceptive activities like that,” he says. “But on the other hand, I think they’re a gang of people who believe that there’s mysteries out there that may not be so mysterious.” In an article for the U.K. website IFL Science, Dr. Russell Moul was harsher: “The show is presented as attempting to bring a scientific approach to prove the existence of all the things that have apparently occurred at the ranch. And while it may be very entertaining to watch and has caused much excitement on social media, the team has yet to provide anything to back up their supposed experiences.”

The show’s own production history won’t throw cold water on conspiracists. There’s admittedly a P.T. Barnum–esque aspect to the way the ranch has been commodified via the series, not to mention via Fugal’s own merchandising at skinwalker-ranch.com. The site sells themed hats, tumblers, T-shirts, hoodies, and a “Skinwalker Ranch Insider” membership that, for $8 to $12 a month, affords viewers 24-hour access to the ranch’s surveillance feeds. (Stratton’s wife, Michele, is the site moderator.) There are also Secret of Skinwalker Ranch live events that send Taylor, Bard, and Winterton around the country to chat about the project in front of a live audience. The place has become a tourist destination for celebrity artists — Fugal has hosted Atticus Ross; Trent Reznor and Reznor’s wife, Marqueen; Post Malone; and English musician Robbie Williams. The roads around the place are dotted with hand-painted signs offering discount tours of Skinwalker Ranch, a promise that seems like it’d be hard to fulfill without getting past Dragon. There are nonfiction books, horror novels, documentaries, and narrative films set there, and they make sure to work the name of the property into the title. It’s a legitimate competitor to Area 51 as the cultural epicenter of UAP lore and correspondingly is, as an accountant might say, a growing concern, thus the widespread suspicion that the Cabal is there to claim the lion’s share of the proceeds.

But the forums for those who adore the show outnumber the ones that are only interested in picking it apart or writing it off as a grift. There’s also a subsection of viewers who are open to the possibility that something legitimate and important may be happening, but think the storytelling — ominous music, dissonant sound cues, fast cutting — undercuts believability by making it seem too much like any other unscripted series. One redditor posted that “the ‘infotainment’ style is like UFO junk food, and in a subtle way it undermines the credibility of the topic even as it pretends to take it seriously.”

Fugal doesn’t wave away those complaints. He points to the companion series Behind the Gates, a roundtable show in which regulars unpack each episode, as an example of the kind of programming he’d like to see more of. But he trusts Prometheus’ methods to package the show because the company has made a lot of cable hits and, he says, “the point of a TV show is to be seen.”

During a drive around the property, Melissa Winterton says some visitors have wondrous experiences at the ranch, others have scary experiences, and still others come away feeling nothing in particular. She thinks that might mean the mental state of the receiver matters more than what’s being broadcast. “There’s a really cool thing that Shakespeare said in Hamlet: ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ So maybe what we think is bad may not be bad. We don’t know.” The word thinking is key. With each passing year, the Skinwalker Cabal collectively becomes more convinced that, in some sense — maybe one we aren’t advanced enough to unpack yet — the ranch is alive. Even Bard, who prides himself on being the most data-driven hardhead of the group, increasingly believes that all the uncanny events on the ranch dating back decades were manifested by an organizing intelligence, like the sentient planet in Solaris or the the Shimmer in Annihilation. Or something else entirely. He’s not sure.

In a season-one episode, Taylor raised a concrete grate at Homestead 2 and suddenly felt dizzy and nauseous. His handheld radiation monitor detected ionizing radiation that was alarmingly high, though not lethal, and the following day he was diagnosed with radiation burns on his head and hand. Winterton has endured two spontaneous injuries on the same spot on the back of his head, and the show presented them as inexplicable happenings that were beyond the understanding of local physicians. The first incident happened while he was operating a small bulldozer on the ranch. He says he heard a deep voice in his head commanding him, “Leave this place now.” Winterton started to drive away, then figured he was just imagining things and returned to the spot where he’d been working. He heard the voice repeat the same command, ignored it again, then felt a piercing pain in the back of his head. He was taken to the emergency room, where brain scans revealed a large swollen area on the back of his head. The second incident happened on camera during production of the first season, and is covered in the second and third episodes. “Basically,” Fugal says, “the back of his skull was irradiated and he was in the hospital and almost died.”

Winterton describes the other incident to me while standing in the main trailer at the ranch. Melissa is nearby. His voice has the quaver of a person reexperiencing trauma. His eyes are haunted. He holds up his iPhone and shows me scans of his brain. The swelling looks like a tiny volcano rising up from the curve of his skull. Then he shows me pictures of himself in intensive care, his face swollen, and his head wrapped in bandages. He doesn’t offer theories about the cause. He doesn’t say aliens or demons did it. But he is certain that something real and terrifying happened. During the incident, he tells me, he felt “a gripping terror. It was almost like a person that gets electrocuted.” Soon, the spot had swollen to “the size of a golf ball.”

“I thought it was a venomous bite,” says Melissa.

“They ran 43 different tests on me during the week that I was in the hospital,” Thomas says. “They couldn’t find any assignable cause.”

One explanation for some of the anomalies is that the radiation poisoning and other physical ailments experienced by staff and visitors are byproducts of reactions to nuclear waste or other toxins, perhaps buried at the ranch by parties unknown — not impossible, considering Utah has an extensive record of toxic- and radioactive-waste problems. If that was true, it would be irresponsible to let anyone even set foot on the ranch, let alone have a crew camp out and film a TV program there. The Cabal is unmoved by such arguments. I get the sense that if they all have one thing in common, it’s a conviction that they are involved in something so amazing and unprecedented that no outsider can ever fully understand it, and that the uniqueness of their mission outweighs the safety concerns or academic protocols. In an interview with Punk Rock and UFOs, a blog that exclusively covers those two topics, Taylor suggested that if Skinwalker Ranch were known to be contaminated or unsafe by federal or state authorities, “there would be people in jail” for allowing anyone to set foot on it. Bard and Fugal both tell me they plan to produce a report or publish their findings eventually but aren’t going to do it right now because they don’t feel that the experiment is over. “Whatever this is, we’re still doing it,” Bard told me during a conversation in the control room. “You don’t peer-review an experiment that’s not finished.”

If you’re thinking these people sound like obsessives addicted to the thrill of a chase that might never end, well … yeah. The show gets that, and amps it up with dynamic editing and action-movie music, even if what’s onscreen is a couple of guys in boots and hats looking at an animal carcass. The filmmaking transforms Skinwalker Ranch into a magic island in a sea of dirt, rock, and sand, and turns the Cabal into a band of brothers who bond by shooting off rockets, scrutinizing LiDAR maps, and enhancing video footage to figure out if a blurry speck in the sky is a UAP or a falcon. In an episode covering the aftermath of Winterton’s second brain injury, there’s a moment where Taylor and Arnold return to the trailer after Winterton has been taken to the hospital and tell Bard and ranch superintendent Jim Morse what happened. Morse and Bard are shocked. Morse, a big man who looks a little bit like the illusionist Ricky Jay and has a similar no-nonsense demeanor, is moved to tears by the news. His voice breaks as he asks Taylor, “How bad is it?” The combination of immediacy and intimacy is what separates Skinwalker from shabbier, cornier unscripted series, especially ones on paranormal subjects. And it’s what may shift a viewer’s attitude from disbelieving or agnostic to — not credulous, exactly; let’s say receptive. A core of authenticity gives the series a pulse of human truth even when it’s repurposing classic unscripted-TV techniques and advancing preposterous narratives.

I’m not saying I think there’s a UFO buried in the mesa or a dimensional portal hidden inside the ranch. I am saying that if indeed the series is one of the most fiendishly elaborate ongoing pranks in TV history, it means the writers deserve not just screen credits but development deals, and that the Cabal are natural-born thespian geniuses who could teach a course at Juilliard titled “How to Stay in Character for 6 Years.” And I’m saying that someone needs to sit Fugal down and explain the first rule of showbiz: Never put your own money into a production.

Not that Fugal would listen. He’s all in. He sees Skinwalker Ranch not as an expensive hobby but a calling. Whenever he talks about his attachment to the place, his language becomes more elevated, verging on Evangelical. He tells me that, like a lot of Utah residents, he is a Mormon, raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but had a “crisis of faith” in his 40s right before he bought the ranch. He’d been drifting away from religion over the years in part because of his voracious reading habit. He owns thousands of books — some of them rare, signed first editions — and the collection is heavy on theology, philosophy, and history. Fugal says that by the time he flew to Nevada to meet with Bigelow about purchasing the ranch, he had come to the conclusion that “organized religion is nothing more than a manmade construct, nothing more than a cultural tradition; that, like Santa Claus and UFOs or any of these topics involving the paranormal, they are nothing more than man’s attempt to find mystery, to find some meaning in both the product of groupthink and the superstition that continues to undermine critical-thinking skills.”

But the day that Fugal saw the silvery blob in the sky above the mesa changed all that, he says. It filled him with a drive to know the once-unknowable through science. “Have I made the leap to say I believe that this is all coming from some other planet, some other worlds, and this is aliens?” he tells me. “No! We don’t know the agenda or the origin behind the phenomena, only that it is real, and that not only I have witnessed it with my own eyes, but that countless people through thousands of years of history have witnessed phenomena that defy any natural explanation, and that by taking a disciplined scientific approach to test theories and test this environment, we can explain it.”

Are there definitive answers out there? Perhaps. Has the Skinwalker crew found them? I don’t know, and neither do they. But damned if the show doesn’t make you doubt your own doubts. While watching a recent episode at home, I felt the show’s kinetic enthusiasm working on me again, reconnecting me to that wide-eyed kid who watched repeats of In Search Of and new episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos at the same time. The DNA test on the maybe-dire-wolf came back at last. A pie chart indicated that the creature’s genetic composition was 10 percent plain old regular wolf but the rest came from a predator whose genetic profile didn’t match any canine species known to science. Whatever that thing is, it’s something new — something that will only lead to more questions.