3/31/20: CURSING THE SKINWALKER W/ ERICA LUKES
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
I know that at the moment many people are concerned with what is happening with health and their family’s welfare and I am certainly aware that there are statistics that people want to hear about death tolls and community spread but lately it seems that the traffic reports have been replaced with body counts and people want to scare you into thinking this is the new normal.
At the moment, I am growing weary of the scare media and wish to get back to the business of entertaining and informing you.
So, if you would permit me…
We can say that for decades that a lot of very real paranormal stories have reached the point of folklore and urban legend. Hollywood hasn’t helped, with trying to keep basic stories intact without embellishing them for effect, and there are a few newspapers and news reporters that love to mock people who have experienced things that don’t necessarily belong to anything here on earth.
I have been a big fan of the X-Files, and now I am especially interested in the History channel’s Project Blue Book.
One the biggest criticisms of that program is that they take liberties with names and incidents. I agree that they do but is still entertaining. However, you should not expect an accurate education about many of the stories the dramatize.
They are simply inaccurate. Everything is loosely based on accounts of these well-known UFO and paranormal stories. It is again one more way that these stories are injected into the pop culture on a TV network that claims that they are beaming history in your homes.
It is a kind of history but I wonder where history begins and where the embellishment ends.
I have said many times that back in 1995 I was known as Crazy Clyde – now I am not so crazy and what was once fringe on Ground Zero is now pop culture.
The Project Blue Book series took a turn in a direction I did not expect when they decided to dramatize the events that happened to Terry Sherman and his wife on their ranch in Duchene, Utah. The ranch has been infamously called the “Skinwalker Ranch.”
However, in the series the stage is set in the 1950’s when the Ranch was first heard of in the 1990’s. For effect the History Channel and several others have attempted to somehow create a fake history about the ranch, tying together old American Indian folklore in the area and the UFO activity that has been common in Utah’s Uinta county.
Whenever I see this happening, I cringe because I feel that the story is being hijacked by opportunists and that I and several other reporters were the first to break the story there are others with a lot of money that are seeking to embellish the story to sell books and TV series.
While there are UFO’s that are part of the story they are not all of the story. While strange creature sightings are a big part of the story, they get overlooked and while the idea of military involvement may be a tempting go to for an easy hypothesis or conspiracy theory about the place, we are finding that there is a bit of an Oz Factor at play where we see the big paranormal interest with a man behind the curtain pushing the novelty of paranormal like a carnival barker.
This is not something that makes me popular – I have been quiet for many years and I am tired of the monopoly that seems to be held by a few people who will tell you they have exclusives when they are being pushed into the front of the line to fit an agenda.
In 1995, when Ground Zero first started airing in Salt Lake City, this paranormal story of the ranch was kind of in our own back yard. Mildred Beasley, who was the chairwoman of the Utah chapter of MUFON, and UFO investigator Ryan Layton had given me a news tip about a ranch off the beaten path in the Uintah Basin that was being attacked by forces that could not be explained. The story was at first a UFO story. That was just a small part of it, however.
There were also a number of reports that the ranch was also being plagued with werewolf encounters, poltergeist activity, strange voices and other encounters that were unheard of in any paranormal circle.
This ranch, owned by Terry Sherman and his wife Gwen, was literally a ranch of terror with stories that would make the ‘Amityville Horror’ sound like a children’s Halloween Party.
At the time, Sherman talked to very few reporters and wanted to get rid of the ranch without any attention from the press, but word traveled fast in the small community near Fort Duchesne, Utah and soon reporters and paranormal investigators settled in at the overlook near the mesa where the strange activity was occurring.
Very little information was released about the ranch in 1995, only that a strange force was playing games with the Sherman’s. There were strange, shadowy figures inside the house, objects would move on their own, disembodied voices could be heard speaking in unintelligible languages and many head of cattle were found mutilated on the ranch.
It was also reported that UFO’s, in the form of large balls of light, could be seen in the sky, coming down to the ground and strange humanoid figures stepping out of them some even appearing to be like upright, walking wolves.
The area was first called ‘UFO Hill‘ because of the stories that the tribal police would tell about UFO’s and abduction in the area. It was later called Skinwalker Ranch because the locals called the upright walking wolves “skinwalkers.”
In 1995, the ranch came to the attention of NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science based in Las Vegas and owned by millionaire Robert Bigelow. NIDS bought the property and began an unprecedented scientific study of all of these paranormal claims. Observation platforms were built with CCTV cameras. The ranch was under heavy guard with personnel and former lawmen were on the property 24-7 for 8 years.
Not much is known about the Ranch thanks to the successful sanitizing of the story on many talk shows.
However, when Ground Zero first got the news from then Deseret News reporter Zack Van Eyk about the ranch, the story sounded as if it were ripped out of the ‘Poltergeist’ movies.
At the time, I was in contact with Rene Barnett who is a top television and documentary producer. Barnett, who has been producer for shows such as ‘Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura‘, the acclaimed mysterious investigation into Rennes le Chateau in the movie ‘Bloodline‘, and the television show ‘Strange Universe‘. The story of the Sherman Ranch was a difficult story to get on the air because it was in such a remote area and, with it being under heavy guard like Area 51, people were afraid to get near it.
In 2003, I teamed up with a video crew that was doing work for a paranormal television pilot called ‘Unknown Zone’ and we ventured out to the ranch with UFO investigator Dave Rosenfeld to see if we could find anything out of the ordinary. The truth is, we really did not see anything that would be considered terrifying only the blue lights chasing through the fields. The lights appeared to be arcing balls of electricity.
I determined they were piezoelectric lights. This would mean that perhaps below the Mesa, the ranch was in the middle of some electromagnetic vortex.
As we were preparing our documentary on the subject I asked the locals about the ranch. One native woman who was a cashier at a store was very paranoid about me asking around about the ranch. I mentioned the Skinwalker and she said that “white men should not speak of this creature.” I shopped at the store for food and when I left I was met by a deputy Sherriff of the tribal police that warned me not to go near the ranch, that it was cursed and that there was more to it than just UFO sightings and shapeshifting Wendigos.
He told me about a situation where he saw a naked man walking down a country road just outside of the ranch’s perimeter. The man said that he did not know where he was – he then said that he was supposed to be at a wedding – and that he blacked out and wound up on the road.
He was implying that something witchy was happening to the ranch and that people who get to close often become physically ill and that they need to cleans themselves.
Robert Bigelow decided to pull out of the ranch and no one knows why. All of the data that he collected with his science team has now been locked up and kept secret. Bigelow made the claim that there was no data to support the paranormal activity, however, they were investigating the ranch for eight years.
There was a report that was actually submitted to the show ‘Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura’ that two of the workers at the ranch were killed either by Skinwalkers or extra-terrestrials.
It was also later revealed that retired Colonel John B. Alexander worked for Bigelow and there was also a report that he officiated over the ranch for an undetermined amount of time.
John B. Alexander was the subject of the book “The Men Who Stare At Goats” by John Ronson linking Alexander to the ‘First Earth Battalion’, a group of remote viewers and men trained to communicate with extraterrestrials.
Alexander’s affiliation with the ‘First Earth Battalion’ was quite literally to create a psy-op group that was formed in the U.S. military to allegedly handle extra-terrestrial affairs such as abductions, contact through telepathy, remote viewing and ESP and even possible simulated extra-terrestrial “drills” using holographic technology. ‘First Earth Battalion’ eventually became the ‘Jedi Project‘. All of these secretive psy-op groups are, or were, well skilled in spreading information and disinformation about the occult, the Heaven’s Gate cult, the attacks of 9/11, remote viewing and UFO’s.
They were also shut down because there were many within the military that had accused the military of funding operations that they felt were similar to witchcraft or some other satanic rituals.
Much of what is known about the Skinwalker Ranch can be found in a book that was written by KLAS reporter, George Knapp. In “The Hunt for the Skinwalker,” Knapp provides a horrific narrative that is a page turner about the ranch. However, after the book was launched and a buzz was created about it, Bigelow and his NIDS organization decided to call it quits.
This brought into question the validity of the entire story because the data that was collected was classified as a ‘company secret’ through the auspices of Bigelow Aerospace.
From there came the monopoly and basic control of the narrative.
I backed off from talking about what I knew for years, however I kept in contact with Erica Lukes who at the time was the Utah director of MUFON.
Ever since the New York Times broke the story in December 2017, of of the $22Million dollar “secret” US Department of Defense study named Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP,) there have been claims that some of the money was spent in studying Skinwalker Ranch.
It is rumored that while the New York Times story was coupled with the Tic Tac UFO stories that the Navy had revealed most of the funds provided by AATIP were given to do experiments at the ranch.
This was allegedly carried out by the Defense Intelligence Agency under the Defense Warning Office. The Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.”
The areas of research that were being funded by the program seemed to be things out of “Star Trek.” One grant was for the study of “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy” conducted by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc. Another grant was for the study of “Invisibility Cloaking” by German scientist Ulf Leonhardt, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Yet another area of study was “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions” conducted by Richard Obousy, a theoretical physicist and director of the nonprofit Icarus Interstellar.
There were also reports of mind control experiments and other experiments where humans were being used to interface with exotic technology.
Human tests allegedly were taking place at the ranch as the scientists theorized that he human body could be a readout system for UFO effects by utilizing forensic technology, the tools of immunology, cell biology, genomics and neuroanatomy for in depth study of the effects of UFOs on humans. This approach marked a dramatic shift away from the traditional norms of relying on eyewitness testimony as the central evidentiary arm in UFO investigations. The approach aimed to bypass UFO deception and manipulation of human perception by utilizing molecular forensics to decipher the biological consequences of the phenomenon.
Former Democratic Senator Harry Reid also was instrumental in starting the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Times reported most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, a longtime Reid ally whose company is currently working with NASA to produce expandable vehicles for human use in space.
Bigelow was the former owner of Skinwalker Ranch.
There were some in the national news media that saw this as an abuse of budgetary authority. There were others that gave push-back in the program where again some members of the military saw a satanic or witchy connection to the human tests.
The question is just what you tax dollars were used for?
Many are believing that non-lethal weapons testing was being connected at the ranch to better understand the effects of UFO encounters on human.
However, initial reports about the ranch in 1995 were mainly about paranormal activity – the UFO phenomena has often been connected to the Uinta basin because of books by Junior Hicks and others.
Somehow, the Bigelow connection has bred new stories about UFO’s, testing on humans, underground weapons, and other secret projects that had nothing to do with the ranch back in 1990’s.
All of this newly revealed material is even more controversial than what was first reported.
The ranch has gone from being a hot spot of poltergeist activity to a valuable testing site that was funded by the government.
Rumors of paranormal phenomena on the Skinwalker Ranch going back hundreds of years is bunk.
The paranormal phenomena in question has been part of the legends of the Uinta basin for hundreds of years.
Skinwalker Ranch just happened to get in the way back in the late 90’s and now there needs to be a way to justify their 22-million-dollar investment.
Sure the ranch might be cursed but only because the locals there allegedly were having disputes over property and water rights. The Skinwalker showed up as an omen of bad will and the multimillionaire then showed up to set up shop for tests and research on the UFO phenomena.
There really isn’t a need to sensationalize the story but to make it some mystery that has been around for hundreds of years is really misleading.
