July 10, 2021 • 43 mins
Is there really a secret hotspot of paranormal and UFO activity just southeast of Ballard, Utah? Join Ben and Matt as they explore the fact (and fiction) surrounding the bizarre Sherman Ranch.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I was going through this phase where I was
accidentally doing an Andy Rooney thing a while back, and
I had We have a lot of episodes that are
titled like what's the deal with blah blah blah. Hey,
this is one of those. This is one of those episodes.
But despite the title, this is something that many of
our fellow conspiracy realists we're asking us to explore for years.
(00:24):
We're talking about skin Walker Ranch. This is one of
the most controversial stories or groups of stories in the
world of UFOs. Oh Man, the skin Walker Ranch yp
so much mystery here. I can't wait to talk about
this again in some weird time warp where you're about
to hear us talk about it. I don't know what
(00:46):
I'm saying. Hey, here's another awesome UFO episode. We hope
you enjoy it, and there's still more to come from
UFOs two, Ghosts and Government cover ups. History is riddled
with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn
the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome
(01:08):
back to the show. My name is Matt and I
am Ben, and we are joined as always by our
super producer nol the a T. Alien Brown. Oh yeah,
the a t alien little outcasting here this uh, this afternoon.
So ladies and gentlemen, today we are going all the
way out to Utah. As many of you know, we're
located here in Atlanta, Georgia. And the reason we're going
(01:31):
out to Utah is because there are some things that
happen when you're out in a large open area like
many of the places in Utah, that you you might
see something in the sky, you might see something that
you don't really see on the ground that you can't explain.
But that's the reason we're going out there, because there
is one particular place that that some of these things
(01:54):
tend to happen. Ben, And we've been getting lots and
lots of people on Twitter, on Facebook all over the
place saying, you guys have to cover this location, right. Yeah,
we've checked out a lot of the YouTube comments. I've
seen this stuff on Facebook and Twitter asking us to
cover something that is legally known as the Sherman Ranch.
As Matt said, it is located in a place called
(02:17):
Unitalk County, about four hundred and eighty acres of ranch land,
a little bit southeast of a place called Ballard, Utah.
But you perhaps know it better by it's more famous
internet moniker skin Walker Ranch. Oh yeah, and out here
there are all kinds of alleged things that happened, from
(02:38):
cattle mutilations to UFO sightings of various kinds, lights in
the sky, sometimes stuff that happens closer to the ground.
Sure you'll also hear you'll also hear other anecdotes about
so called sensing a presence, telepathic intrusions, Poulter Gey stuff. Again,
all anecdotal. But before we dive into that. Oh, and
(03:02):
that's what we're doing, by the way, ladies and gentleman
spoiler alert, we're looking at some of the fact and
fiction here. Now, Matt, you like you hate this stuff. No, no,
I do not hate this stuff. I just want it
to be real and I want someone to capture something
and when it's just a human being. Most of the
research I've done on this, You've done the bulk of it.
But a lot of the research I've done in this
(03:24):
it's just a person talking to another person like this
and telling a story about what they've experienced. Okay, Well,
I didn't mean to pigeonhole you by saying you hate it. No, no, no,
I certainly don't hate it. I I really like the
ideas it. It hurts me intellectually when someone is trying
to convince me so hard that this thing happened but
(03:46):
they have absolutely zero empirical evidence or yeah, zero zero
universally accepted evan. Okay, it's probably a good way to
qualify that. So that's what we're gonna do today, ladies
and gentlemen. We're going to catch you up on a
little bit of one one about Skinwalker Ranch or the
real name, the Sherman Ranch, and then we're ultimately going
to end on asking you the same questions and maybe,
(04:10):
if we're lucky, somebody in or around Ballard, Utah, will
give us the skinny these stuff. They don't want you
to know about this location. So let's look at the history, Matt.
The uh. The history of this, at least as far
as the paper trail goes, is relatively recent in comparison
to other, um you know, so called hot spots for
(04:30):
this kind of activity. The first documented reports about the
Sherman Ranch are found in a publication called the Utah
Desert News. It's out of Salt Lake City. This was
written by a guy named Zack van Ike in or
e y c k uh not no relation to David
around nineteen nine six, and that wasn't the only time
it was mentioned. That's right. So we were out here,
(04:52):
you know, exploring the Olympics that year, and uh, out
there on the other side, there's some crazy stuff going
down at the Sherman Ranch. Now, this was later mentioned
in Las Vegas Mercury. This was also mentioned several times
by George and App. I believe George and App as
a person who wrote in the Mercury. Yeah, he was
a host of show that I personally really enjoy. I
(05:15):
don't know about you called Coast to Coast, a m
which we have mentioned briefly before on this on this show.
So yeah, the uh, this guy doesn't just write a
couple of things. He really digs in and makes this
uh something identifiable with him, which, as will learn, is
going to be important later. However, if you are to
(05:38):
believe the unofficial histories of I think there's a retired
school teacher and then there's a retired military official of
some sort. Uh. If you're to believe their stories, then
reports of cattle mutilation in this area, this rough area
go back for decades at least and allegedly, or at
(05:58):
least well you how much of this is true. Allegedly
these stories tie into something much much older. That's right,
the legend of skin walkers. This is really cool stuff here.
This is kind of this is the stuff that you
were really interested in, right, this because this falls into
the folklore area where you've got Native American groups who
(06:23):
believe that there is this thing called a skin walker,
which is essentially a shape changer. There are a lot
of different types of these. We've talked about like anthropy
a lot in past episodes about werewolves. Um, this is
kind of kind of similar to that, with a couple
important differences. One of the biggest ones is that the
skin walker can choose to change shape rather than having
(06:46):
the moon kind of affect their change, right, so the
full moon doesn't have anything to do with it. Skin
Walker just goes, okay, it's time change. Uh. Skin Walker
can also change into any animal given whatever circumstances they
find themselves in, such as, Uh, let's say they've got
the pelt of a wolf. Just to use the like
(07:08):
anthropy example, they can then change into the wolf, but
then you can use any other interchangeable animal. They're a
bear even sure, yeah, and this this is a common
across various different uh Native American groups, in Navajo folklore,
for instance, which is where this pops up most often,
or at least in the in the modern West, this
(07:29):
is most strongly associated with Navajo. A skin walker is
a kind of which known as a ye no joshi.
The idea here is similar to some European folklore regarding
lican thropes, because lican thropes in the older medieval stuff
and then uh, well, you can listen to the entire
(07:50):
episode we've done onlike antherpy, but quick and dirty version
for you here. As sometimes in different periods of the past,
people who were thought of as werewolves were also thought
of as witches. It's kind of like the old analogy
about puzzles and mazes, because not all puzzles are mazes,
(08:10):
but all mazes are puzzles. So not all witches are
skin walkers, which is a kind of which, but all
skin walkers are witches. So most of these witches are men,
and they gain their powers through some kind of dark act.
Women can also be these witches, but only childless women.
(08:30):
At least only childless women can be this sort of
which and some of these dark acts would be the
murder of a blood relative. That's pretty heinous, breaking some
kind of serious cultural taboo, or parts participating in some
kind of perversion of these Navajo traditional rituals. Right, this
would be the cultural equivalent of celebrating a black Mass
(08:53):
or going to uh A, which is Sabbath. The The
one of the differences here between the skin walker and
the modern interpretation of the lian throape is that this
is not a situation where someone could accidentally become a
skin walker because they were bitten by skin walker. This
is a conscious decision, or this is the direct consequence
(09:17):
of doing something unholy. The ones who murder a blood relative,
a child, a parent, a sibling, they are the ones
who would get the most, who would become the most powerful.
And some versions of this, as we said, are found
in many Native American cultures, not just the Navajo. The
Aztec have the now all uh it's a human being
(09:40):
able to transform into an animal physically or spiritually. And
then there's the Chilean Chilean or Argentinean chun chon. Now
that's the folklore background of what a skin walker is.
As we continue our our delve into what the skin
Walker ranches. We're going to find that it isn't necessarily
really added to this in particular, but there are there
(10:03):
are things relating to aliens also that will come into
this extra terrestrials and possibly this idea that there is
some kind of supernatural entity that exists somewhere on this land,
you know. Uh, spoiler alert slight spoiler alert. I I
love that you said that you went out and said
extraterrestrials are aliens, because, as we'll find, that's something that
(10:27):
the researchers, Uh, that was one of their big pet peeves.
But I think it's I think it's fair to say
that the vast majority of people who were following the
developing story did believe it was extraterrestrial well related exactly.
It was one of their big pet piece. But it
gets into some of the things that a couple other
characters were about to find out, gets into the future
(10:51):
worlds that they get involved with. So let's continue on here, sure, Okay, So,
as we said, the ranch was brought to the public
eye largely due to the efforts of this journalist named
George Napp, who was then host of a radio show
called Coast to Coast AM which is us a great
listen if you get a chance, it's really great. You
You might recognize the name George Nori currently or Art
(11:13):
Bell for the host of that show. Georgia Napp is
pretty great. He I think he hosts on the weekends
or a couple of Sundays every once in a while.
And uh, as he reported on the bizarre alleged occurrences
from this ranch, the publicity caught the attention of an
entrepreneur named Robert Bigelow, who you might also recognize as
(11:36):
the founder of a company called Bigelow Aerospace. A interesting
Bigelow Aerospace. They they specialize in trying to create these
uh not really ruins but capsules where humans can do
things in space, right along with Richard Branson and to
a lesser degree, Ellen Musk that he's one of the
(11:58):
people push he's one of the big parts, or at
least big Lottle Airspace was one of the big parts
of the privatized space exploration industry. Pretty interesting there. So
big Altwle bought this ranch in and he hired another
gentleman named Calm mkellagher who was a molecular biologist and
he brought him on to head up the team of
(12:20):
PhD s who are going to investigate this place. He uh,
he called the group the National Institute for Discovery Science
or NEEDS. Here's what they did. The group monitored the
ranch for twenty four hours a day and they were
scouting for unusual phenomenon or anomalies. According to Kellagher, and
(12:40):
this is as told by Brian Dunning from SKEPTID. They
never came back with any incontrovertible physical evidence. Well, they
collected a lot of They collected a lot of video
and some audio, but as we know, that stuff can
be a little bit like ror shack test. They did,
how however, see occasional cattle mutilations and floating lights. And
(13:04):
let's let's take a second to address this because a
lot of you guys out there probably wondering why I
just said no physical evidence and then mentioned cattle mutilations.
And the problem here is really one of interpretation. To
people who believe that mutilations must be some sort of
proof of the paranormal or a cryptid or you know,
(13:27):
a human being change in shape and eating cattle. Uh,
that is sort of looking for an answer. One expects
a confirmation bias, but to people who consider themselves skeptics,
whether they actually are or not, which is an important distinction. Uh.
These these attacks are within the bounds of normal predation,
(13:48):
meaning that a a regular predator common in the area
might attack, or another scavenger might have eaten the corpse.
I'd like even if they died of natural causes. The
places where cattle mutilation or evidence of cattle mutilation is
shown is usually in the face and or the hind quarters, right.
(14:09):
And this is something that I think on Discovery Channel
we were there, we discussed this several times about how
that's those are the entrances to the soft tissues in cattle.
You're not going to go through the tough outer skin. Uh,
if you're let's say, I don't know, insects that are
eating away at a carcass, or even vultures eating way
to carcass, or a fox, anything of that nature. Even
(14:31):
micro microbes, they're attacking those two ends right, right. And
I'd like to do and well, we'll see if I
get to, but I'd like to do an episode on
cattle mutilations in the future because it's a pretty interesting topic,
especially when you get to the people who study different
types of ways that cattle are attacked, which is which
(14:54):
is fascinating but very grizzly. So that's what they were
looking at. They were primarily looking for or unexplained phenomenon
or anomalies. They were not looking for someone changing shape
and attacking human beings. Yeah, that's why I kind of
mentioned at the beginning that the skin Walker Ranch doesn't
(15:16):
really seem to have that much to do with the
folklore side of what a skin walker is um really
beyond the name. Yeah, and critics will allege this was
largely a marketing employ to call it the skin Walker
Ranch rather than the Sherman ranching ensure there's a there's
inarguably a vivid image captured there right the book you
(15:41):
know Nap George Nap and Colem Kellaher went on to
publish a book called Hunt for the skin Walker, but
this focused mainly on UFO sightings, not on any supposed
supernatural being. And really, again, a UFO is not does
not necessitate an A and it simply means unidentified. You
(16:02):
can read some great quotes with Kelleher saying that what
they're trying to do is turn as many unidentified sightings
into identified objects, which I thought was fair, but also
you know, you can read criticism of the way needs
the National Institute for Discovery Science conducted their research. Maybe
that's a story for another day. I would say, if
(16:24):
you're interested in some of their studies and some of
the reports they put out, Ben you sent me a
link to the way back Machine to their website, and
if you're interested, I recommend going to archive dot org
using that way back machine and checking out needs. Right. Yeah,
the way back machine is a super useful tool, especially
for websites that are no longer active. Spoiler Alert needs
(16:46):
is one of them. Uh. This this also is a
good time for us to mention other, um, other alleged things.
George Knapp has come out before and said that the
family that was living there or before Robert Bigelow purchased
the property, were they moved within just like thirty months
(17:07):
of living there because of heightened paranormal activity. And we're
talking about stuff like going home, putting groceries up in
the kitchen, walking out for a second, and then walking
hearing a tremendous crash, walking back to see everything thrown
away from the out of the cabinets, right, and Crockery
broken whatnot. So let's go and look closer though at
(17:32):
the criticism or the response for these claims. Sure, so
the first big one with that with the family dealing
with you know, lots of paranormal activity. Um we there
is no record of the family actually saying this, right, well,
at least according to what I could find, there was
(17:52):
not anything from the sherman's going on record and saying that.
There's plenty of other people saying they said that, but
I wasn't able to find anything that was clearly them
saying something like that went down. I would love to
hear back from anybody who as a link. You can
find me on the conspiracy stuff Facebook and Twitter. And
(18:17):
I'm sure it really didn't hurt that Mr Bigelow showed
up and was like, Hey, I would really like to
buy a ranch. Here's lots of money, right, yeah, And
and they have never also, to be fair, they've never
come out and said there was nothing like that. We're
just in the money, which is understandable, but they have
not said that. So the concept of skin walkers explored
(18:39):
or earlier like ent therapy episode, which again is I
don't know how you feel mat but it is one
that I thought we did a pretty good job on. Uh.
There there is a genuine clinical condition, a genuine clinical
like antherrapy, in which people do believe they're transforming to
an into an animal. And sometimes it's because some cultural transgression,
(19:00):
breaking a taboo, feeling guilty. But as we mentioned to
that earlier show, uh, because you believe that you are
transforming into a creature does not mean that you physically
are transforming new creature. It can make you a more
dangerous person, but a person nonetheless. So we we came
up with some speculative answers for why these sort of
(19:23):
skinwalker like can therapy where jaguar and other kind of
myths came from. Right. Oh yeah. One of the big
ones was looking at and a person that was doing
things that were so horrible you couldn't attribute or it
was very difficult to attribute those actions to a human being.
So the thought was that perhaps there is something else
(19:45):
going on here. This isn't just a man killing his
family or killing eight families or something like that. This
must be some kind of wolf spirit or animal spirit
embodying this human. So it may just be that serial
killers that this was attributed to them back in the day,
or even just someone who went on a rampage one time. Right. Yeah,
(20:07):
one of the cases that we look at, one of
the most famous cases in that kind of literature, is
that of a fellow named Peter Stump. Uh. And Peter
Stump was confessed to numerous crimes, many of which sound
a little bit exaggerated to be honest. Is so we
do know that while he was incarcerated, despite eventually being
(20:29):
executed for the crime of likand throup, he never managed
to change into a wolf, despite the phases of the
moon that went you know, went around during his incarceration.
So we we know that pretty much the not just
uh skeptics or people who confuse themselves for skeptics, but
(20:50):
pretty much everybody admits that no one has seen a
person transformed into an animal, uh, besides on the big
screen or screen. Right. Right. So then in along comes
this gentleman named James Randy that we've discussed several times
on this show. Uh. He gave Robert Bigelow one of
(21:10):
his self made Pegasus Awards. You may be familiar with these. Um,
it's it's kind of an insult, right, yeah, it's kind
of like a Darwin Award, which I believe Randy gives.
I don't know too much about it, but it's not
a good thing to win it. It's like a Razzie
or Darwin Award. Razzies are for terrible movies. Darwin is
(21:32):
for people who are unfortunate enough to die and what
could be seen as a stupid way. So yeah, he
gave Big a little one of these for buying the
ranch Um, which he said was absolutely useless. Yeah, he
he said that it was a useless study. You may
recognize Randy, that's R and D I instead of why.
(21:53):
You may recognize him from the thing we mentioned much earlier.
I mean he's he's uh have great standing, so you
probably if you're listening to this show, you've heard of
him before. But he also famously had a a running
contest or I guess challenge where he said if someone
(22:13):
could present claims are provable things of any any kind
of paranormal, psychic or supernatural events of anything from a
ghost to clara voyance or telepathy, he would give them
one million dollars. That study is currently no longer running,
which you know is is kind of a bummer, but
I get it, it's probably expensive to maintain it. Uh.
(22:36):
For the record, according to him, no one ever beat it. Uh.
Some of his critics said that it was um unfair.
But also you know, I also I have I have
not signed up where, nor do I know anyone who has,
so I don't know what the actual processes. But apparently
it's very transparent and you can check some of that
(22:58):
out on his very as websites. Yeah, you can find
videos as well, all over the internets of people attempting
and failing to to do that. UM. To be fair,
I I in previous episodes, I really held James Randy
up in this light that he was this beacon of
truth and like things that I really enjoyed. But I
(23:22):
don't know. The more of these videos I watched, I'm
I'm a little nervous saying this, but I feel like
maybe he's kind of a jerk. Well, the I guess
the best way, the most fair way to say something
like that is that uh, human beings right, emotional creatures
and being creatures that are wont to classify the world
(23:45):
into an US versus them. Uh. People can readily become
antagonistic toward anything that they see as different. And I
understand I completely agree with on on a personal level.
And guys, this is just my opinion. I completely agree
with someone who wants to remove the danger of a
(24:09):
con artist to charlottan or a swindler from from the world,
because it's true that that people have been taken advantage
of numerous times by someone claiming to speak with the dead,
and the dead just happened to want you to give
them money, right, that that does happen. However, as anybody
(24:29):
who has taken a psychology course ever, or maybe read
a book, or maybe really listen to someone once or twice,
has anybody who has ever done one of those three
things knows the way to persuade people if you really care,
if you really give enough of a well ware family show.
So I'll say crap. If it matters to you that
(24:53):
someone sees a truth right, or someone sees an error
of the ways, then there has to be an amount
of empathy and avolved. There's a reason that yelling at people,
bullying them, calling them names never gets them to say, oh,
you have been rude enough to me or abused me
enough that I think you are right. And Star Trek,
the next generation is better or whatever. I know, like,
(25:14):
it doesn't really matter what the actual content of the
of the argument process is because it's about the process,
not about the content that being said, I think it's
done the world a great service. I think it is
an unfortunate error, however, on the part of a lot
of other people who like me, are are fans of
some of this guy's work. It's just an unfortunate and
(25:37):
just tragic error to use the excuse that people believe
in something you don't believe in, especially if it's wrong
and you could help them, to use as an excuse
to bully someone or or to mock them. You know,
like I, I don't go to someone who believes something
that I think is um for woulish, especially tore not
(26:01):
hurting anybody, to yell at them or to deride them.
So that my some some part of my neural mechanism
gets a little bit of a high off of persecuting
the other. That's a sad thing. And you know, I'd
love to hear what you think about this, listeners, because
ultimately the emphasis should be on finding the truth, not
(26:24):
making people feel like garbage. Yeah, that's a rant. Sorry,
that's a rant. And I and I don't want people to,
you know, vilify James Randy. I've never met him personally,
and again, I think that saving innocent people from someone
who would take advantage of them is a noble thing
(26:46):
to do. But that's so far away. That's that's very
little to do with the biggest awards, which we we
had to include because it's it's a pretty it's a
pretty funny pun. And I'd love to see other people
who are other organizations who are rewarded this. I wonder
what his criteria is. But like we said earlier, one
(27:06):
of the other things that they studied here at the
ranch were these glowing lights that kept being reported, and
there are numerous attempts to explain this phenomenal, what the
heck is going on there? Most of these were hinging
on some of the more mundane explanations, like an aircraft
that would be going by with lights that are flashing
(27:28):
or some kind of gas. Um. You know, we've heard
a lot of these things before. Yeah, meteorological phenomenon. Yeah,
it's it's weird because you'll you'll hear these reports of
glowing orbs, right, that's something that frequently happens, and these
have been explained before. Is I mean, to paraphrase Beauty
(27:50):
and the Beasts, it's a tail as old as time.
Reports of will of the Whisp go back decades and
decades and decades and centuries. Well, the fact of the
matter is that as far as mainstream science goes, including
in many cases the team at NEEDS that was investigating this,
there are there is a wealth of possible explanations for
(28:14):
these things, none of which are necessarily extra terrestrial. And
and these guys have said before and the interviews that
they weren't necessarily out to find finger quotes or air
quotes aliens. They were they were trying to find some
sort of explanation for this. But no one has come
(28:35):
up with an instance of one of these alleged glowing
lights that could not be explained by something else, or
even more importantly, that could be explained by something outside
of the bounds of regular science, which you know makes
me wish that Jonathan we're here because this is one
of his favorite hobby horses to ride, Right, he would
(28:57):
get on this horse and oh man, you wouldn't see
him again for a week. Right, So you know, I
love that you point out it could be airplanes in
the distance, because that that tells us. Uh, that tells
us something interesting and that we go into in our
video series that also came out this week, which was great.
You mentioned at the top, Matt, that it was interesting
(29:21):
to you that Bigelow was investigating this stuff and also
founding an aerospace company. Oh yeah, an aerospace company out
there near Las Vegas, which I don't know. He's at
least interested in going to space, right and if if
he wants to do more research in that realm and
(29:43):
he wants to take human beings eventually to space, I
don't know he I'm I'm interested in this gentleman's uh
that maybe the things that he wouldn't release to the press,
that he wouldn't give out an official press release, some
of his beliefs. I want to sit down with this
dude and and talk to them one day. I'm not
a millionaire, so I don't know that's ever gonna happen.
(30:05):
But one can dream. Yeah, who knows? One can always dream? Right,
I want to take it a step further. This is
something we talked about, You and I have talked about
numerous times off the air, which is that many many
of the UFO reports from a few decades earlier turned
out to be top secret aircraft that the US was testing,
(30:30):
And for that time, they were doing phenomenal things that
were just far beyond easily a decade beyond public technology.
We're talking about craft that could fly across the United
States in less than half the time that would take
a normal or a publicly known aircraft. So it's completely
(30:53):
possible that some of these things that are being seen
are actually aircraft being tested, you know. Oh yeah, And
especially in the late nineties like that man the tech was.
We may not even know some of the things that
were being developed at that time. I mean, honestly, we
we may not know yet, right like when everybody found
(31:13):
out that stealth helicopters exist, crash. Wait what yeah? So
so it's completely possible. Just because there isn't any evidence
at this point that it's something supernatural doesn't mean that
there is not um, there's not secrecy of foot you
know what I mean. And at this point, if we
(31:36):
sum it up, if we sum up skin Walker Ranch,
then as near as we could find, it seems that
the investigations of needs, which disbanded, uh, the investigations of
needs bore little in the way of inarguable evidence, at
least in the case of Sherman or skin Walker Ranch.
And like I said earlier, you're gonna hear anecdotes. If
(31:57):
you just type in skin Walker Ranch into any search bar,
you're going to find all kinds of fun anecdotes that
make me. It takes me back to my X Files
days where I just want to go, oh, man, I
love this, this is so cool. Hopefully there's some kind
of shred of evidence that I can hang my beliefs on.
But you're really not going to find it. They didn't.
(32:17):
They didn't find any kind of body or unidentified animal
they could explain these the cattle mutilations that they were
looking into, um and really they didn't make any video
that would satisfactorily show some kind of this inexplicable light
that they kept talking about that would just it's just
it's it's so disappointing to me. Ben, Yeah, I get it.
(32:40):
And there's a quote that I'd like to pull from
an A M A and ask me anything thread that
uh that George Knapp participated in on Reddit. This this
response when when he was asked why I can't exactly remember,
but I think he was asked about skin Wall Ranch
when his experiences were like because he went there numerous times, right,
(33:04):
And he was asked about um in some very polite way,
about evidence lack thereof, and he said that he felt
at times there was some sort of intelligence that seemed
aware of things, was one step ahead of everybody. And
if and this is a huge gargangeline Purple Mountains of
(33:24):
Majesty's size, if there is something bizarre foot at skim
Walker Ranch, it has yet to be proven, unless, of course,
there's something. I guess the ranch or whatever powers behind
it don't want us to know that idea of an
intelligent being that is doing all of these things. It's
(33:44):
behind the mutilations, it's behind the lights. I love it.
The kid in me loves it. And one day, hopefully
it will be proven by the third wave of researchers
that go and stay at the Sherman Ranch one day perhaps.
Uh So, what what do you think about these stories
(34:05):
about skin Walker Ranch? Is this just a bunch of
WHOI Is there something genuinely strange and disturbing going on?
And I know these uh, I know this will probably
be a bit of a divisive topic for us. Uh
because I I think this stuff is fascinating and I
love seeing there is some sort of explanation. And if
(34:27):
you have to speculate, that's fine to let us know
what you think it could possibly be. Uh. If you
all are like me, um, profoundly disappointed that people don't
actually turn into animals, whether whether through some horrible transgression
or some dark right, then uh let me know about
(34:49):
that too. We can both complain together online. You can
find me on Facebook. I do the Facebook and I
do the Twitter here uh, and you can see a
lot of stories I find that don't typically make it
onto the air or on the news. Matt and I
are both into uncaught serial killers. And just for an example,
one of the recent stories that we posted we're recording
(35:11):
this uh involves a possible uncaught serial killer in a
small town in Ohio. So do visit us at Facebook
dot com forward slash conspiracy stuff to check that out.
And I, oh, we been that freaking sound is back again.
You can only mean one thing. It must be our
(35:32):
movement with hello, hey, hey know how's it going? Man?
That's going okay? How are you guys doing all right?
Doing all right? Uh? So the question for you and
you might have some questions to uh, if you could
just at will transform into an animal, any animal, what
(35:53):
would what would it be? Oh? Any any um? I
guess we should qualify any nonfictional fictional animal. Also, no
like dragons, which is clearly the best one. No final
fantasy summons. You know, my answer might surprise you, Ben,
because you you know about me that I hate and
slash I'm terrified of birds. But that just seems like
(36:15):
the most obvious go to thing because it would be
for transportation alone. I wouldn't have to book flights anymore.
You could just you know, turn into an eagle and
go to the keys or whatever. You know, be some
pretty long flights though, I know, but you get eased
to it, right, I guess yeah, I guess it depends
on what kind of bird you would be, Like would
you be a migratory bird, would you be a frigate bird?
I believe they're the ones that can stay in air
(36:37):
for days at a time. But yeah, one of those.
But they're terrible on the ground. Yeah, they're pretty bad. Well,
you don't have to be a bird in the gray
you turn back into it a person? Is that? Well?
What about you met oh gosh, I would I would
probably go with small, small fox. The small fox. Yeah,
just a tiny little fox. It's cool, man. I just
want to make videos. I would set up a camera,
(36:59):
turn into small fox, make a little fox sounds for
the video, like, turn back into human, stop the recording,
and then upload it to YouTube. Take over YouTube. That
would be great. I gotta watch out for those old
rich dudes on horseback wearing the red coats. Okay, I changed.
It makes me think of invisible. Yes. So I don't
(37:21):
know what which one I would be. It's such a
such a big choice. I guess would be kind of
cool to be a whale, but I don't know. I
don't know if I have the voice for it. Uh.
I asked my asked my girlfriend recently without hesitation. She
was like a house cat turned into a cat. I said,
(37:44):
what would you do? And she said I would learn secrets,
which is which is a great answer, but I completely
don't understand that and it makes me not trust cat.
Would you do as a as a whale? As a whale,
I don't like, just hang out, swim around and I
guess talk trash a large whale or like probably man,
if you're gonna go whale, go full whale, don't go
(38:05):
eight and a half yards. You know, I don't know. Man,
more I think about it, the more whale seems like
a lame answer. Maybe I don't know. A bird would
be cool. I always you know you know this about
about me, guys, Like I've gone through period where I
really want to befriend Corvid's like crows or ravens, because
they're so very intelligent and you can teach them to
(38:26):
recognize you, and they'll teach they're young to recognize you. Um,
but I think I just want to hang with them.
I want to be like they're token human. I don't
wanna You don't think they would pick on you, like
I feel like crows would just hate me. Why is that, man,
you're really good with I mean, you're good with people.
I assume it goes to birds just because I'm not.
I don't know, I'm not a chrow man. I think
(38:47):
they would just they would drag on me all they'd
write jokes. Well there because you know there's some kind
of bilberr crow or raven and he's the one that
I would end up hanging out with. The bilber just
wrang on me all day, so so know you would
be an eagle. Huh. You know, I have to give
us some more thought. That's just the first thing that
comes to mind. Like I said, just if I'm being
purely functional about my skin walking, yeah, I feel like
(39:11):
flight would be a little bit better than than swimming
to and and whales are incredibly intelligent, but you know,
you're kind of limited in what you can do. You're
also a pretty big target, you know. Oh that's right. Yeah.
Did you know Japan is going to unilaterally begin it's
whaling program again? So maybe poor timing on my part
(39:34):
too soon? All right, well, you know what, let's check
back in next week unless unless you've got anything. No,
I just did. The one thing that I guess I
was thinking about is do you guys both read or
watch the Game of Thrones? The see Oh yeah, yeah,
there's the skin changers or whatever in that show, and
and I guess it's not they're not exactly transforming, but
(39:54):
they're sort of inhabiting, you know, it's totem creatures. I
just kind of felt like there had to be a
parallel between the terms skin change and yeah, yeah, that
would be you know, that would be at least an
influence pretty cool. I don't know. Would it be better
to have an animal that like you, inhabit the body of,
or would be better to change into one, because if
(40:15):
you think about it, the drawback to that kind of
thing is you always end up naked at the end.
That's true. That does seem really inconvenient. I think the
vulnerabilities of changing into an animal, especially if it's a
much smaller animal, I think that's dangerous. So being able
to warp into one, but then you leave your physical body,
you know, if it's unattended, someone could always you know, exercise.
(40:39):
Maybe I should stick with the ocean so that we
have this whole land air sea thing going on for
like Superhero a whale and eagle in a tiny fox. Yeah,
I'm still I'm not sold on whale. Maybe just a
sharp oh an octopus? Oh man, those things are cool.
We are pretty cool. I don't know. I don't know.
That's a little bit love crafty and okay, guys, so
(41:03):
let us know. I guess in addition, what kind of
animal you would want to transform into. We're just curious.
We're just no one's no one's getting graded. We're not
gonna be We're not gonna read your email or I
won't read your tweet or your Facebook and think that's
a dumb animal or whatever, because, let's face it, a
whale was kind of out there. It's not the most practical. Yeah,
(41:23):
and who's who's kidding the fox? Come on? Let we
we will not judge you at all. Very interested though,
because that that really is a childhood thing, right, the
idea of being embodying an animal, Oh yeah, absolutely, from
people have animals with which they identify on a spiritual
(41:46):
level to right, um, a certain spirit animal and maybe
a totem of some sort that people worship. Uh so, yeah,
i'd be I'd be interested to hear about that. Oh
what about a spider? What if we's changed into a
spin Yeah? Okay, one time this is I don't know
if I ever told you this, and I don't know
(42:06):
if it's the right with ho say it on air.
But just one more thing. One time I had this
like recurring dream where I cut myself and instead of blood,
I would like bleat spiders o lord, And I found
out that I was actually a massive spiders that had
like stolen someone's skin and just thought I was a
human being. It was trippy, man, that happened inside your head. Yeah,
(42:29):
well it was a dream. It's not real. I'm a person.
Oh man, that is that's horrifying. Yeah, well, uh, speaking
to fantastic Segways, it's I guess it's time for us
to head out. Huh. That's it. So I find us
on Facebook, find us on Twitter, let us know about
all that stuff. But if you don't want to use
any of that social media, you don't want to go
to stuff. They don't want you to know dot com
(42:49):
because your your fingers hurt and you just can't type
that long to b r L. That's cool. Just write
us an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com. M HM. For more on this topic another
unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You
(43:10):
can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle
at conspiracy stuff
So I was going through this phase where I was
accidentally doing an Andy Rooney thing a while back, and
I had We have a lot of episodes that are
titled like what's the deal with blah blah blah. Hey,
this is one of those. This is one of those episodes.
But despite the title, this is something that many of
our fellow conspiracy realists we're asking us to explore for years.
(00:24):
We're talking about skin Walker Ranch. This is one of
the most controversial stories or groups of stories in the
world of UFOs. Oh Man, the skin Walker Ranch yp
so much mystery here. I can't wait to talk about
this again in some weird time warp where you're about
to hear us talk about it. I don't know what
(00:46):
I'm saying. Hey, here's another awesome UFO episode. We hope
you enjoy it, and there's still more to come from
UFOs two, Ghosts and Government cover ups. History is riddled
with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn
the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome
(01:08):
back to the show. My name is Matt and I
am Ben, and we are joined as always by our
super producer nol the a T. Alien Brown. Oh yeah,
the a t alien little outcasting here this uh, this afternoon.
So ladies and gentlemen, today we are going all the
way out to Utah. As many of you know, we're
located here in Atlanta, Georgia. And the reason we're going
(01:31):
out to Utah is because there are some things that
happen when you're out in a large open area like
many of the places in Utah, that you you might
see something in the sky, you might see something that
you don't really see on the ground that you can't explain.
But that's the reason we're going out there, because there
is one particular place that that some of these things
(01:54):
tend to happen. Ben, And we've been getting lots and
lots of people on Twitter, on Facebook all over the
place saying, you guys have to cover this location, right. Yeah,
we've checked out a lot of the YouTube comments. I've
seen this stuff on Facebook and Twitter asking us to
cover something that is legally known as the Sherman Ranch.
As Matt said, it is located in a place called
(02:17):
Unitalk County, about four hundred and eighty acres of ranch land,
a little bit southeast of a place called Ballard, Utah.
But you perhaps know it better by it's more famous
internet moniker skin Walker Ranch. Oh yeah, and out here
there are all kinds of alleged things that happened, from
(02:38):
cattle mutilations to UFO sightings of various kinds, lights in
the sky, sometimes stuff that happens closer to the ground.
Sure you'll also hear you'll also hear other anecdotes about
so called sensing a presence, telepathic intrusions, Poulter Gey stuff. Again,
all anecdotal. But before we dive into that. Oh, and
(03:02):
that's what we're doing, by the way, ladies and gentleman
spoiler alert, we're looking at some of the fact and
fiction here. Now, Matt, you like you hate this stuff. No, no,
I do not hate this stuff. I just want it
to be real and I want someone to capture something
and when it's just a human being. Most of the
research I've done on this, You've done the bulk of it.
But a lot of the research I've done in this
(03:24):
it's just a person talking to another person like this
and telling a story about what they've experienced. Okay, Well,
I didn't mean to pigeonhole you by saying you hate it. No, no, no,
I certainly don't hate it. I I really like the
ideas it. It hurts me intellectually when someone is trying
to convince me so hard that this thing happened but
(03:46):
they have absolutely zero empirical evidence or yeah, zero zero
universally accepted evan. Okay, it's probably a good way to
qualify that. So that's what we're gonna do today, ladies
and gentlemen. We're going to catch you up on a
little bit of one one about Skinwalker Ranch or the
real name, the Sherman Ranch, and then we're ultimately going
to end on asking you the same questions and maybe,
(04:10):
if we're lucky, somebody in or around Ballard, Utah, will
give us the skinny these stuff. They don't want you
to know about this location. So let's look at the history, Matt.
The uh. The history of this, at least as far
as the paper trail goes, is relatively recent in comparison
to other, um you know, so called hot spots for
(04:30):
this kind of activity. The first documented reports about the
Sherman Ranch are found in a publication called the Utah
Desert News. It's out of Salt Lake City. This was
written by a guy named Zack van Ike in or
e y c k uh not no relation to David
around nineteen nine six, and that wasn't the only time
it was mentioned. That's right. So we were out here,
(04:52):
you know, exploring the Olympics that year, and uh, out
there on the other side, there's some crazy stuff going
down at the Sherman Ranch. Now, this was later mentioned
in Las Vegas Mercury. This was also mentioned several times
by George and App. I believe George and App as
a person who wrote in the Mercury. Yeah, he was
a host of show that I personally really enjoy. I
(05:15):
don't know about you called Coast to Coast, a m
which we have mentioned briefly before on this on this show.
So yeah, the uh, this guy doesn't just write a
couple of things. He really digs in and makes this
uh something identifiable with him, which, as will learn, is
going to be important later. However, if you are to
(05:38):
believe the unofficial histories of I think there's a retired
school teacher and then there's a retired military official of
some sort. Uh. If you're to believe their stories, then
reports of cattle mutilation in this area, this rough area
go back for decades at least and allegedly, or at
(05:58):
least well you how much of this is true. Allegedly
these stories tie into something much much older. That's right,
the legend of skin walkers. This is really cool stuff here.
This is kind of this is the stuff that you
were really interested in, right, this because this falls into
the folklore area where you've got Native American groups who
(06:23):
believe that there is this thing called a skin walker,
which is essentially a shape changer. There are a lot
of different types of these. We've talked about like anthropy
a lot in past episodes about werewolves. Um, this is
kind of kind of similar to that, with a couple
important differences. One of the biggest ones is that the
skin walker can choose to change shape rather than having
(06:46):
the moon kind of affect their change, right, so the
full moon doesn't have anything to do with it. Skin
Walker just goes, okay, it's time change. Uh. Skin Walker
can also change into any animal given whatever circumstances they
find themselves in, such as, Uh, let's say they've got
the pelt of a wolf. Just to use the like
(07:08):
anthropy example, they can then change into the wolf, but
then you can use any other interchangeable animal. They're a
bear even sure, yeah, and this this is a common
across various different uh Native American groups, in Navajo folklore,
for instance, which is where this pops up most often,
or at least in the in the modern West, this
(07:29):
is most strongly associated with Navajo. A skin walker is
a kind of which known as a ye no joshi.
The idea here is similar to some European folklore regarding
lican thropes, because lican thropes in the older medieval stuff
and then uh, well, you can listen to the entire
(07:50):
episode we've done onlike antherpy, but quick and dirty version
for you here. As sometimes in different periods of the past,
people who were thought of as werewolves were also thought
of as witches. It's kind of like the old analogy
about puzzles and mazes, because not all puzzles are mazes,
(08:10):
but all mazes are puzzles. So not all witches are
skin walkers, which is a kind of which, but all
skin walkers are witches. So most of these witches are men,
and they gain their powers through some kind of dark act.
Women can also be these witches, but only childless women.
(08:30):
At least only childless women can be this sort of
which and some of these dark acts would be the
murder of a blood relative. That's pretty heinous, breaking some
kind of serious cultural taboo, or parts participating in some
kind of perversion of these Navajo traditional rituals. Right, this
would be the cultural equivalent of celebrating a black Mass
(08:53):
or going to uh A, which is Sabbath. The The
one of the differences here between the skin walker and
the modern interpretation of the lian throape is that this
is not a situation where someone could accidentally become a
skin walker because they were bitten by skin walker. This
is a conscious decision, or this is the direct consequence
(09:17):
of doing something unholy. The ones who murder a blood relative,
a child, a parent, a sibling, they are the ones
who would get the most, who would become the most powerful.
And some versions of this, as we said, are found
in many Native American cultures, not just the Navajo. The
Aztec have the now all uh it's a human being
(09:40):
able to transform into an animal physically or spiritually. And
then there's the Chilean Chilean or Argentinean chun chon. Now
that's the folklore background of what a skin walker is.
As we continue our our delve into what the skin
Walker ranches. We're going to find that it isn't necessarily
really added to this in particular, but there are there
(10:03):
are things relating to aliens also that will come into
this extra terrestrials and possibly this idea that there is
some kind of supernatural entity that exists somewhere on this land,
you know. Uh, spoiler alert slight spoiler alert. I I
love that you said that you went out and said
extraterrestrials are aliens, because, as we'll find, that's something that
(10:27):
the researchers, Uh, that was one of their big pet peeves.
But I think it's I think it's fair to say
that the vast majority of people who were following the
developing story did believe it was extraterrestrial well related exactly.
It was one of their big pet piece. But it
gets into some of the things that a couple other
characters were about to find out, gets into the future
(10:51):
worlds that they get involved with. So let's continue on here, sure, Okay, So,
as we said, the ranch was brought to the public
eye largely due to the efforts of this journalist named
George Napp, who was then host of a radio show
called Coast to Coast AM which is us a great
listen if you get a chance, it's really great. You
You might recognize the name George Nori currently or Art
(11:13):
Bell for the host of that show. Georgia Napp is
pretty great. He I think he hosts on the weekends
or a couple of Sundays every once in a while.
And uh, as he reported on the bizarre alleged occurrences
from this ranch, the publicity caught the attention of an
entrepreneur named Robert Bigelow, who you might also recognize as
(11:36):
the founder of a company called Bigelow Aerospace. A interesting
Bigelow Aerospace. They they specialize in trying to create these
uh not really ruins but capsules where humans can do
things in space, right along with Richard Branson and to
a lesser degree, Ellen Musk that he's one of the
(11:58):
people push he's one of the big parts, or at
least big Lottle Airspace was one of the big parts
of the privatized space exploration industry. Pretty interesting there. So
big Altwle bought this ranch in and he hired another
gentleman named Calm mkellagher who was a molecular biologist and
he brought him on to head up the team of
(12:20):
PhD s who are going to investigate this place. He uh,
he called the group the National Institute for Discovery Science
or NEEDS. Here's what they did. The group monitored the
ranch for twenty four hours a day and they were
scouting for unusual phenomenon or anomalies. According to Kellagher, and
(12:40):
this is as told by Brian Dunning from SKEPTID. They
never came back with any incontrovertible physical evidence. Well, they
collected a lot of They collected a lot of video
and some audio, but as we know, that stuff can
be a little bit like ror shack test. They did,
how however, see occasional cattle mutilations and floating lights. And
(13:04):
let's let's take a second to address this because a
lot of you guys out there probably wondering why I
just said no physical evidence and then mentioned cattle mutilations.
And the problem here is really one of interpretation. To
people who believe that mutilations must be some sort of
proof of the paranormal or a cryptid or you know,
(13:27):
a human being change in shape and eating cattle. Uh,
that is sort of looking for an answer. One expects
a confirmation bias, but to people who consider themselves skeptics,
whether they actually are or not, which is an important distinction. Uh.
These these attacks are within the bounds of normal predation,
(13:48):
meaning that a a regular predator common in the area
might attack, or another scavenger might have eaten the corpse.
I'd like even if they died of natural causes. The
places where cattle mutilation or evidence of cattle mutilation is
shown is usually in the face and or the hind quarters, right.
(14:09):
And this is something that I think on Discovery Channel
we were there, we discussed this several times about how
that's those are the entrances to the soft tissues in cattle.
You're not going to go through the tough outer skin. Uh,
if you're let's say, I don't know, insects that are
eating away at a carcass, or even vultures eating way
to carcass, or a fox, anything of that nature. Even
(14:31):
micro microbes, they're attacking those two ends right, right. And
I'd like to do and well, we'll see if I
get to, but I'd like to do an episode on
cattle mutilations in the future because it's a pretty interesting topic,
especially when you get to the people who study different
types of ways that cattle are attacked, which is which
(14:54):
is fascinating but very grizzly. So that's what they were
looking at. They were primarily looking for or unexplained phenomenon
or anomalies. They were not looking for someone changing shape
and attacking human beings. Yeah, that's why I kind of
mentioned at the beginning that the skin Walker Ranch doesn't
(15:16):
really seem to have that much to do with the
folklore side of what a skin walker is um really
beyond the name. Yeah, and critics will allege this was
largely a marketing employ to call it the skin Walker
Ranch rather than the Sherman ranching ensure there's a there's
inarguably a vivid image captured there right the book you
(15:41):
know Nap George Nap and Colem Kellaher went on to
publish a book called Hunt for the skin Walker, but
this focused mainly on UFO sightings, not on any supposed
supernatural being. And really, again, a UFO is not does
not necessitate an A and it simply means unidentified. You
(16:02):
can read some great quotes with Kelleher saying that what
they're trying to do is turn as many unidentified sightings
into identified objects, which I thought was fair, but also
you know, you can read criticism of the way needs
the National Institute for Discovery Science conducted their research. Maybe
that's a story for another day. I would say, if
(16:24):
you're interested in some of their studies and some of
the reports they put out, Ben you sent me a
link to the way back Machine to their website, and
if you're interested, I recommend going to archive dot org
using that way back machine and checking out needs. Right. Yeah,
the way back machine is a super useful tool, especially
for websites that are no longer active. Spoiler Alert needs
(16:46):
is one of them. Uh. This this also is a
good time for us to mention other, um, other alleged things.
George Knapp has come out before and said that the
family that was living there or before Robert Bigelow purchased
the property, were they moved within just like thirty months
(17:07):
of living there because of heightened paranormal activity. And we're
talking about stuff like going home, putting groceries up in
the kitchen, walking out for a second, and then walking
hearing a tremendous crash, walking back to see everything thrown
away from the out of the cabinets, right, and Crockery
broken whatnot. So let's go and look closer though at
(17:32):
the criticism or the response for these claims. Sure, so
the first big one with that with the family dealing
with you know, lots of paranormal activity. Um we there
is no record of the family actually saying this, right, well,
at least according to what I could find, there was
(17:52):
not anything from the sherman's going on record and saying that.
There's plenty of other people saying they said that, but
I wasn't able to find anything that was clearly them
saying something like that went down. I would love to
hear back from anybody who as a link. You can
find me on the conspiracy stuff Facebook and Twitter. And
(18:17):
I'm sure it really didn't hurt that Mr Bigelow showed
up and was like, Hey, I would really like to
buy a ranch. Here's lots of money, right, yeah, And
and they have never also, to be fair, they've never
come out and said there was nothing like that. We're
just in the money, which is understandable, but they have
not said that. So the concept of skin walkers explored
(18:39):
or earlier like ent therapy episode, which again is I
don't know how you feel mat but it is one
that I thought we did a pretty good job on. Uh.
There there is a genuine clinical condition, a genuine clinical
like antherrapy, in which people do believe they're transforming to
an into an animal. And sometimes it's because some cultural transgression,
(19:00):
breaking a taboo, feeling guilty. But as we mentioned to
that earlier show, uh, because you believe that you are
transforming into a creature does not mean that you physically
are transforming new creature. It can make you a more
dangerous person, but a person nonetheless. So we we came
up with some speculative answers for why these sort of
(19:23):
skinwalker like can therapy where jaguar and other kind of
myths came from. Right. Oh yeah. One of the big
ones was looking at and a person that was doing
things that were so horrible you couldn't attribute or it
was very difficult to attribute those actions to a human being.
So the thought was that perhaps there is something else
(19:45):
going on here. This isn't just a man killing his
family or killing eight families or something like that. This
must be some kind of wolf spirit or animal spirit
embodying this human. So it may just be that serial
killers that this was attributed to them back in the day,
or even just someone who went on a rampage one time. Right. Yeah,
(20:07):
one of the cases that we look at, one of
the most famous cases in that kind of literature, is
that of a fellow named Peter Stump. Uh. And Peter
Stump was confessed to numerous crimes, many of which sound
a little bit exaggerated to be honest. Is so we
do know that while he was incarcerated, despite eventually being
(20:29):
executed for the crime of likand throup, he never managed
to change into a wolf, despite the phases of the
moon that went you know, went around during his incarceration.
So we we know that pretty much the not just
uh skeptics or people who confuse themselves for skeptics, but
(20:50):
pretty much everybody admits that no one has seen a
person transformed into an animal, uh, besides on the big
screen or screen. Right. Right. So then in along comes
this gentleman named James Randy that we've discussed several times
on this show. Uh. He gave Robert Bigelow one of
(21:10):
his self made Pegasus Awards. You may be familiar with these. Um,
it's it's kind of an insult, right, yeah, it's kind
of like a Darwin Award, which I believe Randy gives.
I don't know too much about it, but it's not
a good thing to win it. It's like a Razzie
or Darwin Award. Razzies are for terrible movies. Darwin is
(21:32):
for people who are unfortunate enough to die and what
could be seen as a stupid way. So yeah, he
gave Big a little one of these for buying the
ranch Um, which he said was absolutely useless. Yeah, he
he said that it was a useless study. You may
recognize Randy, that's R and D I instead of why.
(21:53):
You may recognize him from the thing we mentioned much earlier.
I mean he's he's uh have great standing, so you
probably if you're listening to this show, you've heard of
him before. But he also famously had a a running
contest or I guess challenge where he said if someone
(22:13):
could present claims are provable things of any any kind
of paranormal, psychic or supernatural events of anything from a
ghost to clara voyance or telepathy, he would give them
one million dollars. That study is currently no longer running,
which you know is is kind of a bummer, but
I get it, it's probably expensive to maintain it. Uh.
(22:36):
For the record, according to him, no one ever beat it. Uh.
Some of his critics said that it was um unfair.
But also you know, I also I have I have
not signed up where, nor do I know anyone who has,
so I don't know what the actual processes. But apparently
it's very transparent and you can check some of that
(22:58):
out on his very as websites. Yeah, you can find
videos as well, all over the internets of people attempting
and failing to to do that. UM. To be fair,
I I in previous episodes, I really held James Randy
up in this light that he was this beacon of
truth and like things that I really enjoyed. But I
(23:22):
don't know. The more of these videos I watched, I'm
I'm a little nervous saying this, but I feel like
maybe he's kind of a jerk. Well, the I guess
the best way, the most fair way to say something
like that is that uh, human beings right, emotional creatures
and being creatures that are wont to classify the world
(23:45):
into an US versus them. Uh. People can readily become
antagonistic toward anything that they see as different. And I
understand I completely agree with on on a personal level.
And guys, this is just my opinion. I completely agree
with someone who wants to remove the danger of a
(24:09):
con artist to charlottan or a swindler from from the world,
because it's true that that people have been taken advantage
of numerous times by someone claiming to speak with the dead,
and the dead just happened to want you to give
them money, right, that that does happen. However, as anybody
(24:29):
who has taken a psychology course ever, or maybe read
a book, or maybe really listen to someone once or twice,
has anybody who has ever done one of those three
things knows the way to persuade people if you really care,
if you really give enough of a well ware family show.
So I'll say crap. If it matters to you that
(24:53):
someone sees a truth right, or someone sees an error
of the ways, then there has to be an amount
of empathy and avolved. There's a reason that yelling at people,
bullying them, calling them names never gets them to say, oh,
you have been rude enough to me or abused me
enough that I think you are right. And Star Trek,
the next generation is better or whatever. I know, like,
(25:14):
it doesn't really matter what the actual content of the
of the argument process is because it's about the process,
not about the content that being said, I think it's
done the world a great service. I think it is
an unfortunate error, however, on the part of a lot
of other people who like me, are are fans of
some of this guy's work. It's just an unfortunate and
(25:37):
just tragic error to use the excuse that people believe
in something you don't believe in, especially if it's wrong
and you could help them, to use as an excuse
to bully someone or or to mock them. You know,
like I, I don't go to someone who believes something
that I think is um for woulish, especially tore not
(26:01):
hurting anybody, to yell at them or to deride them.
So that my some some part of my neural mechanism
gets a little bit of a high off of persecuting
the other. That's a sad thing. And you know, I'd
love to hear what you think about this, listeners, because
ultimately the emphasis should be on finding the truth, not
(26:24):
making people feel like garbage. Yeah, that's a rant. Sorry,
that's a rant. And I and I don't want people to,
you know, vilify James Randy. I've never met him personally,
and again, I think that saving innocent people from someone
who would take advantage of them is a noble thing
(26:46):
to do. But that's so far away. That's that's very
little to do with the biggest awards, which we we
had to include because it's it's a pretty it's a
pretty funny pun. And I'd love to see other people
who are other organizations who are rewarded this. I wonder
what his criteria is. But like we said earlier, one
(27:06):
of the other things that they studied here at the
ranch were these glowing lights that kept being reported, and
there are numerous attempts to explain this phenomenal, what the
heck is going on there? Most of these were hinging
on some of the more mundane explanations, like an aircraft
that would be going by with lights that are flashing
(27:28):
or some kind of gas. Um. You know, we've heard
a lot of these things before. Yeah, meteorological phenomenon. Yeah,
it's it's weird because you'll you'll hear these reports of
glowing orbs, right, that's something that frequently happens, and these
have been explained before. Is I mean, to paraphrase Beauty
(27:50):
and the Beasts, it's a tail as old as time.
Reports of will of the Whisp go back decades and
decades and decades and centuries. Well, the fact of the
matter is that as far as mainstream science goes, including
in many cases the team at NEEDS that was investigating this,
there are there is a wealth of possible explanations for
(28:14):
these things, none of which are necessarily extra terrestrial. And
and these guys have said before and the interviews that
they weren't necessarily out to find finger quotes or air
quotes aliens. They were they were trying to find some
sort of explanation for this. But no one has come
(28:35):
up with an instance of one of these alleged glowing
lights that could not be explained by something else, or
even more importantly, that could be explained by something outside
of the bounds of regular science, which you know makes
me wish that Jonathan we're here because this is one
of his favorite hobby horses to ride, Right, he would
(28:57):
get on this horse and oh man, you wouldn't see
him again for a week. Right, So you know, I
love that you point out it could be airplanes in
the distance, because that that tells us. Uh, that tells
us something interesting and that we go into in our
video series that also came out this week, which was great.
You mentioned at the top, Matt, that it was interesting
(29:21):
to you that Bigelow was investigating this stuff and also
founding an aerospace company. Oh yeah, an aerospace company out
there near Las Vegas, which I don't know. He's at
least interested in going to space, right and if if
he wants to do more research in that realm and
(29:43):
he wants to take human beings eventually to space, I
don't know he I'm I'm interested in this gentleman's uh
that maybe the things that he wouldn't release to the press,
that he wouldn't give out an official press release, some
of his beliefs. I want to sit down with this
dude and and talk to them one day. I'm not
a millionaire, so I don't know that's ever gonna happen.
(30:05):
But one can dream. Yeah, who knows? One can always dream? Right,
I want to take it a step further. This is
something we talked about, You and I have talked about
numerous times off the air, which is that many many
of the UFO reports from a few decades earlier turned
out to be top secret aircraft that the US was testing,
(30:30):
And for that time, they were doing phenomenal things that
were just far beyond easily a decade beyond public technology.
We're talking about craft that could fly across the United
States in less than half the time that would take
a normal or a publicly known aircraft. So it's completely
(30:53):
possible that some of these things that are being seen
are actually aircraft being tested, you know. Oh yeah, And
especially in the late nineties like that man the tech was.
We may not even know some of the things that
were being developed at that time. I mean, honestly, we
we may not know yet, right like when everybody found
(31:13):
out that stealth helicopters exist, crash. Wait what yeah? So
so it's completely possible. Just because there isn't any evidence
at this point that it's something supernatural doesn't mean that
there is not um, there's not secrecy of foot you
know what I mean. And at this point, if we
(31:36):
sum it up, if we sum up skin Walker Ranch,
then as near as we could find, it seems that
the investigations of needs, which disbanded, uh, the investigations of
needs bore little in the way of inarguable evidence, at
least in the case of Sherman or skin Walker Ranch.
And like I said earlier, you're gonna hear anecdotes. If
(31:57):
you just type in skin Walker Ranch into any search bar,
you're going to find all kinds of fun anecdotes that
make me. It takes me back to my X Files
days where I just want to go, oh, man, I
love this, this is so cool. Hopefully there's some kind
of shred of evidence that I can hang my beliefs on.
But you're really not going to find it. They didn't.
(32:17):
They didn't find any kind of body or unidentified animal
they could explain these the cattle mutilations that they were
looking into, um and really they didn't make any video
that would satisfactorily show some kind of this inexplicable light
that they kept talking about that would just it's just
it's it's so disappointing to me. Ben, Yeah, I get it.
(32:40):
And there's a quote that I'd like to pull from
an A M A and ask me anything thread that
uh that George Knapp participated in on Reddit. This this
response when when he was asked why I can't exactly remember,
but I think he was asked about skin Wall Ranch
when his experiences were like because he went there numerous times, right,
(33:04):
And he was asked about um in some very polite way,
about evidence lack thereof, and he said that he felt
at times there was some sort of intelligence that seemed
aware of things, was one step ahead of everybody. And
if and this is a huge gargangeline Purple Mountains of
(33:24):
Majesty's size, if there is something bizarre foot at skim
Walker Ranch, it has yet to be proven, unless, of course,
there's something. I guess the ranch or whatever powers behind
it don't want us to know that idea of an
intelligent being that is doing all of these things. It's
(33:44):
behind the mutilations, it's behind the lights. I love it.
The kid in me loves it. And one day, hopefully
it will be proven by the third wave of researchers
that go and stay at the Sherman Ranch one day perhaps.
Uh So, what what do you think about these stories
(34:05):
about skin Walker Ranch? Is this just a bunch of
WHOI Is there something genuinely strange and disturbing going on?
And I know these uh, I know this will probably
be a bit of a divisive topic for us. Uh
because I I think this stuff is fascinating and I
love seeing there is some sort of explanation. And if
(34:27):
you have to speculate, that's fine to let us know
what you think it could possibly be. Uh. If you
all are like me, um, profoundly disappointed that people don't
actually turn into animals, whether whether through some horrible transgression
or some dark right, then uh let me know about
(34:49):
that too. We can both complain together online. You can
find me on Facebook. I do the Facebook and I
do the Twitter here uh, and you can see a
lot of stories I find that don't typically make it
onto the air or on the news. Matt and I
are both into uncaught serial killers. And just for an example,
one of the recent stories that we posted we're recording
(35:11):
this uh involves a possible uncaught serial killer in a
small town in Ohio. So do visit us at Facebook
dot com forward slash conspiracy stuff to check that out.
And I, oh, we been that freaking sound is back again.
You can only mean one thing. It must be our
(35:32):
movement with hello, hey, hey know how's it going? Man?
That's going okay? How are you guys doing all right?
Doing all right? Uh? So the question for you and
you might have some questions to uh, if you could
just at will transform into an animal, any animal, what
(35:53):
would what would it be? Oh? Any any um? I
guess we should qualify any nonfictional fictional animal. Also, no
like dragons, which is clearly the best one. No final
fantasy summons. You know, my answer might surprise you, Ben,
because you you know about me that I hate and
slash I'm terrified of birds. But that just seems like
(36:15):
the most obvious go to thing because it would be
for transportation alone. I wouldn't have to book flights anymore.
You could just you know, turn into an eagle and
go to the keys or whatever. You know, be some
pretty long flights though, I know, but you get eased
to it, right, I guess yeah, I guess it depends
on what kind of bird you would be, Like would
you be a migratory bird, would you be a frigate bird?
I believe they're the ones that can stay in air
(36:37):
for days at a time. But yeah, one of those.
But they're terrible on the ground. Yeah, they're pretty bad. Well,
you don't have to be a bird in the gray
you turn back into it a person? Is that? Well?
What about you met oh gosh, I would I would
probably go with small, small fox. The small fox. Yeah,
just a tiny little fox. It's cool, man. I just
want to make videos. I would set up a camera,
(36:59):
turn into small fox, make a little fox sounds for
the video, like, turn back into human, stop the recording,
and then upload it to YouTube. Take over YouTube. That
would be great. I gotta watch out for those old
rich dudes on horseback wearing the red coats. Okay, I changed.
It makes me think of invisible. Yes. So I don't
(37:21):
know what which one I would be. It's such a
such a big choice. I guess would be kind of
cool to be a whale, but I don't know. I
don't know if I have the voice for it. Uh.
I asked my asked my girlfriend recently without hesitation. She
was like a house cat turned into a cat. I said,
(37:44):
what would you do? And she said I would learn secrets,
which is which is a great answer, but I completely
don't understand that and it makes me not trust cat.
Would you do as a as a whale? As a whale,
I don't like, just hang out, swim around and I
guess talk trash a large whale or like probably man,
if you're gonna go whale, go full whale, don't go
(38:05):
eight and a half yards. You know, I don't know. Man,
more I think about it, the more whale seems like
a lame answer. Maybe I don't know. A bird would
be cool. I always you know you know this about
about me, guys, Like I've gone through period where I
really want to befriend Corvid's like crows or ravens, because
they're so very intelligent and you can teach them to
(38:26):
recognize you, and they'll teach they're young to recognize you. Um,
but I think I just want to hang with them.
I want to be like they're token human. I don't
wanna You don't think they would pick on you, like
I feel like crows would just hate me. Why is that, man,
you're really good with I mean, you're good with people.
I assume it goes to birds just because I'm not.
I don't know, I'm not a chrow man. I think
(38:47):
they would just they would drag on me all they'd
write jokes. Well there because you know there's some kind
of bilberr crow or raven and he's the one that
I would end up hanging out with. The bilber just
wrang on me all day, so so know you would
be an eagle. Huh. You know, I have to give
us some more thought. That's just the first thing that
comes to mind. Like I said, just if I'm being
purely functional about my skin walking, yeah, I feel like
(39:11):
flight would be a little bit better than than swimming
to and and whales are incredibly intelligent, but you know,
you're kind of limited in what you can do. You're
also a pretty big target, you know. Oh that's right. Yeah.
Did you know Japan is going to unilaterally begin it's
whaling program again? So maybe poor timing on my part
(39:34):
too soon? All right, well, you know what, let's check
back in next week unless unless you've got anything. No,
I just did. The one thing that I guess I
was thinking about is do you guys both read or
watch the Game of Thrones? The see Oh yeah, yeah,
there's the skin changers or whatever in that show, and
and I guess it's not they're not exactly transforming, but
(39:54):
they're sort of inhabiting, you know, it's totem creatures. I
just kind of felt like there had to be a
parallel between the terms skin change and yeah, yeah, that
would be you know, that would be at least an
influence pretty cool. I don't know. Would it be better
to have an animal that like you, inhabit the body of,
or would be better to change into one, because if
(40:15):
you think about it, the drawback to that kind of
thing is you always end up naked at the end.
That's true. That does seem really inconvenient. I think the
vulnerabilities of changing into an animal, especially if it's a
much smaller animal, I think that's dangerous. So being able
to warp into one, but then you leave your physical body,
you know, if it's unattended, someone could always you know, exercise.
(40:39):
Maybe I should stick with the ocean so that we
have this whole land air sea thing going on for
like Superhero a whale and eagle in a tiny fox. Yeah,
I'm still I'm not sold on whale. Maybe just a
sharp oh an octopus? Oh man, those things are cool.
We are pretty cool. I don't know. I don't know.
That's a little bit love crafty and okay, guys, so
(41:03):
let us know. I guess in addition, what kind of
animal you would want to transform into. We're just curious.
We're just no one's no one's getting graded. We're not
gonna be We're not gonna read your email or I
won't read your tweet or your Facebook and think that's
a dumb animal or whatever, because, let's face it, a
whale was kind of out there. It's not the most practical. Yeah,
(41:23):
and who's who's kidding the fox? Come on? Let we
we will not judge you at all. Very interested though,
because that that really is a childhood thing, right, the
idea of being embodying an animal, Oh yeah, absolutely, from
people have animals with which they identify on a spiritual
(41:46):
level to right, um, a certain spirit animal and maybe
a totem of some sort that people worship. Uh so, yeah,
i'd be I'd be interested to hear about that. Oh
what about a spider? What if we's changed into a
spin Yeah? Okay, one time this is I don't know
if I ever told you this, and I don't know
(42:06):
if it's the right with ho say it on air.
But just one more thing. One time I had this
like recurring dream where I cut myself and instead of blood,
I would like bleat spiders o lord, And I found
out that I was actually a massive spiders that had
like stolen someone's skin and just thought I was a
human being. It was trippy, man, that happened inside your head. Yeah,
(42:29):
well it was a dream. It's not real. I'm a person.
Oh man, that is that's horrifying. Yeah, well, uh, speaking
to fantastic Segways, it's I guess it's time for us
to head out. Huh. That's it. So I find us
on Facebook, find us on Twitter, let us know about
all that stuff. But if you don't want to use
any of that social media, you don't want to go
to stuff. They don't want you to know dot com
(42:49):
because your your fingers hurt and you just can't type
that long to b r L. That's cool. Just write
us an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com. M HM. For more on this topic another
unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You
(43:10):
can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle
at conspiracy stuff
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