In 1994 Terry Sherman purchased a piece of land in eastern Utah to raise cattle on. By
the very next year, the Sherman family would be haunted by an alien presence,
witness mutilations, and be stalked by a creature from Navajo legends. This area would later become
known as Skinwalker Ranch, and is now considered one of the most paranormal places on Earth.
The Shermans lived relatively peacefully for their first year on the Ranch, but that was all about to
change. Terry Sherman; his wife, Gwen Sherman; and their child would all have their first brush
with an extraterrestrial presence in 1995. It started off relatively harmless with UFOs being
spotted in the skies, but the encounters would soon turn into something much more sinister.
The UFO sightings were just the beginning of what would become a bloody series of deaths and
mutilations at Skinwalker Ranch. The most common UFO sightings by the family were small box-shaped
vehicles that glowed white, an approximately 40 foot long vehicle that hovered in the sky,
and a mother ship that was reported to be the size of several football fields.
One particularly unnerving experience happened when Gwen Sherman was driving home late one night.
She spotted lights in the sky in her rear-view mirror. Gwen continued on,
glancing back every now and then to figure out what was following her. Then,
the lights began to pick up speed. Gwen pushed the accelerator to the floor,
trying to outrun the UFO that was chasing her. She whipped the car down the driveway
towards her house, when she stopped and looked in the sky behind her, the lights were gone.
As time went on, the paranormal experiences came out of the sky and landed much closer to home.
While working on the ranch, the family found three locations where grass had been flattened
into circles without any explanation as to why. Each instance was about 8 feet in diameter,
and if the three circles were observed from above, they seemed to be laid out in a triangle.
The family also found several holes that seemed to have appeared overnight. Each was three feet wide
and a couple feet deep. The Shermans didn’t have an explanation for the strange circles they were
encountering, and had no idea what they meant—that was until the mutilations started occurring.
As the paranormal experiences became more and more common,
the Sherman family started to become worried. They tried recording and photographing the phenomena,
but had very little success. Then things began to get much more creepy.
One April night in 1995 Terry Sherman left his house to check on a cow that was days
away from giving birth. As he approached the field, he noticed some strange glowing
lights near where the pregnant cow was located. At the time he thought the
lights may have been from his neighbor’s kids riding their four wheelers around,
or an RV that had been parked in the field, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
The lights began to rise 50 feet into the air. Terry ran towards the field,
trying to get a better look at what the lights were. He reached the spot where the UFO had been
moments before. It was there that Terry Sherman found the first mutilated cow on his ranch.
The cow had a hole bored into the center of its left eye,
but other than that, it seemed that the dead cow was untouched.
Upon further inspection, Terry found no blood seeping from the wound in the eye,
or anywhere else on the cow’s body for that matter. It was as if whatever killed the cow
had sucked out its insides from the hole in its eyeball. Terry searched the surrounding
area for footprints and signs of a predator, but could find nothing. He believed whatever he had
seen in the sky might have had something to do with the puncture wound and death of the cow.
And this would not be the last instance of the Sherman cattle being targeted by
something paranormal. Not too long after this first mutilation, another cow was found with a
hole in its left eye. However, whatever this cow had encountered had taken things a step further.
Upon inspection, Terry Sherman found that there was also a 6-inch hole carved around the cow’s
rectum. This is when he noticed another connection between the two mutilated cows.
They both had a chemical smell surrounding them, as if they had been experimented on in a lab.
As the year progressed, more cows disappeared, some without a trace. It was winter; the Shermans
were doing their rounds and couldn’t locate one of their cows. There was snow on the fields so
Terry followed the hoof prints of the missing cow. The prints stopped at the edge of one of
the fields near some trees, but the strange thing was there was no sign of what happened to the cow.
It seemed as if the animal had been lifted right off the ground where the tracks stopped.
Terry Sherman stood over the last set of prints and titled his head back
to look up. Above him there seemed to be a circular hole of broken branches
leading through the tree canopy and into the sky above. It was as if something in
the sky had blasted its way through the top of the tree to get to the cow below.
The mysterious force had then picked the cow up off the ground and carried it away.
At this point the Shermans were really scared. If whatever was taking their
cows decided to turn its attention on them, there would be nothing they
could do to stop it. And the scariest part was: the worst was yet to come.
A final dead cow was found by the Sherman’s child. It lay in the snow
not too far from where the other cow had seemed to be lifted off the ground.
When the child got his father and they examined the body, a 6-inch wide, 18-inch deep hole
was found in the backside of the animal. There was no blood or innards in the snow surrounding
the corpse, just a circular hole that had been bored straight into the cow’s rectum.
When Terry took a moment to examine the area around him he noticed the same chemical smell
as with the previous cow mutilations. He looked up into the trees and saw that the
branches had been severed and twigs had fallen around the dead cow in a circular pattern.
Authorities were brought in to examine the mutilations,
which were eventually chalked up to death by predatory animals. But the lack of blood,
and the strange holes bored into the cows, did not seem to fit the profile of an animal attack.
Many believe there was some type of extraterrestrial presence on the Sherman Ranch,
but there may have been something else, something much worse.
One final paranormal experience occurred to the Sherman family,
and this time it scared them so badly they ended up selling their land. In fact,
it was this experience that would eventually give the farm its current name: Skinwalker Ranch.
It was late at night and Terry Sherman was checking on his livestock. He had brought
his dogs with him, most likely because going anywhere on the ranch late at night
was a little nerve-racking. Suddenly, the dogs began to growl and yip. Terry pointed
his flashlight in the direction the canines were looking. In the treeline he could make
out the shape of a creature. It looked like a wolf, but was much too large. Terry estimated
the creature to be three times the size of a normal wolf with eyes that glowed blood red.
Terry lifted the rifle he was carrying and shot three rounds into the animal.
It was unphased. The wolflike creature glared at Terry and then disappeared into the treeline.
The dogs barked wildly, but they did not pursue. It is believed that the creature wasn’t an alien,
a science experiment gone wrong, or a mutant wolf, but something from ancient Native American
lore. The creature that Terry Sherman saw that night on his ranch may have been a skinwalker.
A skinwalker is a shapeshifting entity that comes from the legends of the Navajo people.
It is interesting to note that although Skinwalker Ranch sits on land that once belonged to the Ute
people, the Navajo nation is nearby. In their legends, skinwalkers can shapeshift; they are
often depicted as werewolf-like creatures, but can transform into anything they wish.
There are commonalities between skinwalker sightings today and the Navajo legends of old.
Although the skinwalker can shapeshift, the creature tends to be slightly deformed when
it manifests itself. The skinwalker is also said to have red, or orange, eyes
that pierce through the darkness. Both of these characteristics are
reminiscent of the creature Terry Sherman saw the night he was out with his dogs.
The Navajo skinwalkers don’t necessarily need to be part wolf, but it is a common
theme. The idea of the skinwalker itself is actually derived from the Navajo term
“yee naaldlooshii.” This translates to “by means of it, it goes on all fours.”
Some Navajo believe that skinwalkers are the evil children of a corrupted medicine man who
abused the magic of his people. Others believe that people who have committed terrible crimes
or taboos against the members of their tribe are turned into skinwalkers as punishment.
There is no hard evidence to support the claims made by the Sherman family other than reports
on the mutilation of their livestock. But many believe there is a lot more going on at
Skinwalker Ranch than meets the eye. In fact, once the ranch was sold, more and more people
came forward with accounts of paranormal experiences they had on or near the ranch.
When researchers looked further into the paranormal activity in the area they found
it could be traced all the way back to the first European explorers in the region. It
is claimed that in 1776 a Franciscan missionary named Silvestre Vélez de
Escalante spotted fireballs in the night sky while camped near Skinwalker Ranch.
And native peoples have passed down oral histories of skinwalkers and paranormal
entities going back to times long before Europeans ever arrived on the continent.
It would seem there are a couple different ideas on what has actually been witnessed
at Skinwalker Ranch. Many in the area claimed to have seen UFOs, but others claim there are
creatures that don’t seem to be extraterrestrial, but something much scarier and perhaps human made.
Eventually the Shermans sold the ranch to Robert Bigelowit who made his fortune in the
real estate and hotel business. He was always interested in the paranormal, so he started
the National Institute for Discovery Science. Basically this was a privately funded research
organization that conducted investigations on paranormal events, fringe science,
and UFO sightings. Now that Bigelowit owned Skinwalker Ranch, he could send his investigators
there to research the paranormal activity that was claimed to be occurring in the area.
In March of 1997 one of the researchers working for the National Institute for Discovery Science
spotted a large, deformed, human-looking creature in the trees on the ranch. The
creature seemed to be watching the researchers. It had piercing yellow eyes that never blinked,
and when one of the researchers shot at the creature with his rifle,
it didn’t seem to harm the thing, but did scare it away.
Upon investigating the area around the tree that the creature was spotted in,
the team found a strange looking footprint. They described the track as being “a single
large print in the snow with two sharp claws protruding from the rear.” Their conclusion
was that the prints “almost looked like a bird of prey, maybe a raptor print,
but huge, and from the depth of the print, from a very heavy creature.”
Paranormal investigations are still ongoing at Skinwalker Ranch to try and make sense of
all of the experiences people have had in the area over the years. There is no definitive evidence
that the land was visited by aliens, skinwalkers, or any other creatures, but investigators are
still trying to prove that Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most paranormal places on Earth.
Now watch “Catholic Church Most Terrifying Ghost Stories.”
Or watch “Wartime Paranormal Sightings that Shocked Soldiers.”