From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!
– Traditional Scottish Prayer
After I posted my Weekend Parting Shot Friday night, enough people responded that they would like to hear the stories of my visit to Skinwalker Ranch and my UFO sighting, that I decided to go ahead and pen another column, rather than relegating it to a comment response.
Two disclaimers:
- If you are here for hard news, political commentary, or want to own the libs, that’s fine, I get it, and we have no shortage of talented writers here who are doing that as I write this. At my heart, I am more of a storyteller and less of a journalist than I used to be. If you feel compelled to hit the “Back” button, I completely understand.
- There is no “big reveal” at the end of these stories. I did not slip into a parallel dimension, I did not receive any esoteric knowledge, and I was not abducted and *ahem* “probed. The only thing that sets these stories apart from much of the rest of the stuff on the internet is that they are true.
So, if that tracks for you, poke up your fire if you have one, open the beverage of your choice, and I’ll tell you the tales.
Story 1
It was back in 2003, and I was the fire warden for Uintah and Daggett counties in Utah. I was not working for the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, or the NPS. A fire warden is an employee of the Utah Department of Natural Resources and the Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands.
If we were not assigned to a fire, we were either issuing permits or doing fuels mitigation. Fuels mitigation is a technical term for removing combustible material from an area to reduce fire danger. And, since it was still early in the season, we were usually working on a fuels project.
If you look at a map of Utah in the northeast corner, you will see Flaming Gorge Reservoir and National Recreation Area. On the Utah side, there is a cluster of vacation homes known as Flaming Gorge Acres. That is where I was working the day the call came in. Flaming Gorge is a wonderful place to work during the summer. You are up high in the mountains, the sky is usually clear and blue, the air is clean, and about the time you are starting to feel the heat, a summer thunderstorm rolls through around lunch time to cool things off. Honestly, there isn’t a corner office in the world that has it beat.
We had spent the day cutting down trees and limbing and bucking them for later disposal, and running what we could through a Vermeer chipper approximately the size of New Jersey. It was quitting time, and I was covered in needles, sap, dirt, bits of wood, and sweat, accented with a few dabs of saw fuel and oil. I was so tired that I was hoping we didn’t pop a smoke somewhere, since all I wanted to do was find a hot shower and a cold beer. Not necessarily in that order, and possibly at the same time. As I was packing up the engine, I got a call on my cell. A very nice lady wanted to know if I could swing by and give her a burn permit. She was out near Randlett.
Randlett was founded in the 1800s and is largely populated by members of the Ute Indian Tribe, although at one time, there were a number of ranches and farms owned by non-Indians in the area. I haven’t been back in a while, so I don’t know if anything has changed. One of the problems complicating boundary disputes involving the Uintah & Ouray Reservation is that much of the land is checkerboarded, meaning that one parcel might be privately owned, another by the state, the next by the Ute Tribe, and the one after that by some other federal entity. I lived in Randlett back when I did a mission for the Episcopal Church. Where it has not been cultivated, much of it is high desert and covered in sagebrush. It is also about a two-hour drive from Flaming Gorge Acres, and I was beat. I asked the lady if I could swing by the next day. She said that would be fine and that she was at “The UFO Ranch.”
I said I’d be there first thing in the morning.
Since this was in the days before cell phone maps and GPS apps, I got very careful directions from her. Then I went off to find my beer and shower.
You may be saying, “Wait, the ‘UFO Ranch?’” It may surprise some of you, but back before the media, particularly the half-wits at the Non-History Channel, got hold of the story, all of the locals knew about the place. You might have been a true believer, or a bit of a skeptic, or maybe you thought the whole thing was a load of stale dog poop, but whatever you thought, you knew the place existed. It was no frightening, shadowy, “taboo secret.” This, of course, is back when Robert Bigelow owned the ranch. He would later sell it to Brandon Fugal.
Utah has more than its fair share of ghosts, boogeymen, UFOs, cryptids, monsters, and anomalies. The Uintah Basin is no exception. Back when I was married into a tribal family, I heard snippets of stories about the little people and other strange creatures who roamed the mountains above Whiterocks, water babies, the witch Siants, the Moon Lake Monster, and the occasional Sasquatch sighting. I once heard a story about 49ers. A 49er is a tradition among Native Americans, usually the younger tribal members who get together after a Pow-Wow is over for the night to socialize and have fun while singing. The songs are often about love, loss, and normal, everyday life. You can hear some samples of 49er songs below:
These get-togethers are purely social and can last pretty late. As it was told to me, on more than one occasion, someone would step away from the party for one reason or another, only to encounter a monster or otherworldly creature staring at them from the darkness. So the UFO Ranch settled into its rightful place as just another piece of Uintah Basin lore. But here again, and I can’t stress this enough, it was not something that was the subject of furtive, panicked whispers behind drawn curtains at night. It was just a weird local thing. This, of course, is back when Robert Bigelow owned the ranch. He would later sell it to Brandon Fugal, and it would subsequently become “famous.”
But no one ever called it “The Skinwalker Ranch” since it never had anything to do with skinwalkers. Despite what the morons who post garbage on YouTube and podcasts would have you believe, a skinwalker is not a demon, cryptid, or extraterrestrial or dimensional entity. The tradition goes back to the Diné (Navajo) people and was picked up by the Utes. According to tradition, a skinwalker is an evil witch or warlock that practices dark magic. From time to time, such people may assume the form of a bear, wolf, coyote, or other animal to do whatever wicked things they may have in mind. I knew non-Indians who were sensible, level-headed people who swore they were real. But at least at the time, in Ute society, it was not a subject people brought up, particularly with the elders. There is a belief that to mention a thing is an invitation for it to invade your life, and most people aren’t equipped to handle the consequences of playing around with those forces. So the subject was something most elders preferred not to broach. Whatever Hollywood idiot decided to call the place “The Skinwalker Ranch” had no idea what he or she was talking about, had the cultural sensitivity of a men’s room towel dispenser, and would have served society better flipping burgers at a Carl’s Jr.
But I digress, albeit for expositional purposes.
Following the caretaker’s directions, I rolled up to the ranch the next morning. Apparently, these days the entrance is blocked by barriers and warning signs, which I suspect have been placed there to add to the media mystique. At the time, I just had to go through a gate.
As soon as I got out of the engine, a large, dark figure suddenly emerged behind an outbuilding and ran straight for me. It was a really cool German Shepherd who just wanted a few head scratches before rolling over onto his back for some belly rubs. The caretaker came out. She was a very nice middle-aged lady who pointed me to the burn pile. I gave it a quick inspection and told her I just needed to write her permit, and I would be on my way. She asked if I wanted to go back and fill it out at her house, rather than waiting for me to balance a clipboard on my knee.
Her house was a very small building, located next to an immense trailer where she said all of the researchers stayed when they were on the property. If there was anything out of the ordinary, it was the presence of all the cameras. Cameras were positioned everywhere and pointed in all directions, presumably to catch anything that might go bump in the night, or at any other time. I saw cameras on posts and walls —pretty much everywhere I looked, there was one.
The house was small and spartan, but looked comfortable enough. The back of the house faced a large expanse of land, and the caretaker had a telescope pointed in its direction. Presumably, that is where all the action happened, if and when it did. I noticed a few UFO magazines on the kitchen table. I scratched out the permit and gave her the usual mini-lecture about safety, and asked her to let us know when she started her fire. I was about to leave and get ready for my day of manual labor when she said, “Do you want to see a picture I recently took?”
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.
It wasn’t a UFO, an alien, or a dimensional portal. It looked for all the world like a full-grown cow elk walking along a fence line. However, given the size of the fence and the elk, this animal would have been about 1.5 to 2 feet tall at best. This did not look like a pig, calf, fawn, bobcat, mountain lion, raccoon, possum, or dog. It was definitely in the cervidae family, but it was something I had never seen before. It was an adult, hoofed mammal, but not one that belonged in the Uintah Basin. Was it from another dimension? I have no idea, but it wasn’t from around the neighborhood, that much I know.
I thanked the caretaker, and I was on my way. But what did she photograph? A perfectly normal animal that was somehow altered by a trick of the light? Was it a double exposure? Or, did some species of deer or elk somehow slide between dimensions?
The answer is likely much more mundane, whatever it is, since the ranch, aside from the cameras and the reputation, was unremarkable and otherwise indistinguishable from any other spread in the region. Not counting the “phantom elk photo,” my trip there was no different than the rest of the permit visits I made across the Basin. I am not sure if it is a strange place, but I can say for certain that it is a place that has been made strange by urban legends and media saturation.
(All that said, if you decide to go adventuring in the Uintah Basin in search of “high strangeness,” you would be well-advised to consult a map and get the necessary permissions from the Ute Tribe, lest you find yourself in handcuffs on a trespassing charge. Boundaries are there for a reason, and they should be respected. And while you may not adhere to other people’s beliefs, at least respect them.)
Story 2
This took place maybe five or six years ago, before I started writing for PJ. At the time, I was a website content writer for a company specializing in dental websites. That meant dutifully taking up my spot in a cubicle farm every day. My workday started at 7:00, and it became a tradition to take one last lingering gaze at the mountains before heading in to wear out my nose and shoulder on the grindstone and wheel, respectively.
Have you ever had a moment in which your mind considered multiple possibilities in an instant? That is what happened to me. First, I thought I saw a bit of garbage caught in an updraft, and I wanted to grab it and throw it away. A nanosecond later, I thought I might be seeing a paraglider. That pastime is popular in Utah, but why in the hell would a paraglider fly over I-15 in Pleasant Grove, Utah, at the start of rush hour? Another nanosecond later, I took in the size and the shape. It was high in the air, rectangular, and about twice the size of a football field. It stayed there for a few minutes before disappearing. Any Star Trek: TNG fans may remember the holodeck. When a character would say, “End program,” the object or scene would dissolve. That’s what happened. A light strobed in one corner, and it dissolved.
I know what some are going to say, “Pics or it never happened!” Well, for one thing, when something that strange happens, your first inclination is to keep looking at it to try and figure out what it is. I did try to snap some photos of it with my cellphone, but nothing showed up. All I got were shots of an empty sky. Scoff if you want — that’s fine — but that is the way it went down. I did look for photos of rectangular UFOs on the internet; the closest thing I could find to what I saw is here.
I did not go home and reconstruct Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I did not start a religion or try to contact my Star Brothers through crystals or drum circles. The truth is, I said “Well, I’ll be damned,” and went into the office and started working. I told my wife and my boss, but it was not a life-changing event. Once in a while, I look up at the night sky and wonder what I saw, but I’m not going to alter my existence over a sixty-second incident in a parking lot.
Was it an honest-to-god UFO? Was it a military exercise? A publicity stunt? Or was it just a strange combination of light and atmospheric conditions that created an aerial mirage?
To tell you the truth, I don’t really want to know. Our media and politicians lie to us, and AI threatens to do the same tenfold. The internet, for all of the good it was supposed to do, is also a conduit of depravity and inanity. Never before in history has humanity been so well-informed and so atrociously ignorant. And, after all, it is called “doom scrolling” for a reason.
There are no more spaces on the map that say “Here there be dragons.” But we need dragons. We need Bigfoot, sea serpents, dog men, moth men, Jersey Devils, UFOs, and even portals to other dimensions on otherwise nondescript ranches. Those monsters make it easier for us to cope with the all-too-real creatures of the 21st Century. We need things that go bump in the night to help us deal with the things that go bump in the day.
And as Orson Welles said at the conclusion of “The War of the Worlds” broadcast:
That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian… It’s Hallowe’en.”
Author’s Note: Thank you for reading this, and thank you to all of the PJ readers who asked for these stories. For the first time in a long time, I had fun and enjoyed writing again. – L.B.
I hope you enjoyed those stories. Of course, not everything we offer here on PJ is this…weird. However, we have plenty of great writers who offer news and commentary on the events of the day. If you would like to support our work, please consider becoming a VIP member. Help us expose the truth—sign up with promo code POTUS47 for 74% off your VIP membership.
