Skinwalker Ranch: 512 Guarded Acres in the Uintah Basin

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 11, 2026 · How we verify

Skinwalker Ranch is roughly 512 acres of sagebrush and pasture southeast of Ballard, in Utah’s west Uintah County, pressed up against the boundary of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. It is one of the most written about pieces of private land in the country, and almost none of what has been written about it is verifiable. The property takes its name from the skin-walker, a malevolent witch in Navajo legend, and it has been sold, studied, fenced, trademarked and televised on the strength of stories that its own investigators conceded they could not turn into evidence.

What follows keeps the record and the reports in separate columns, because at this location the gap between them is unusually wide.

Quick Orientation to the Ballard Property

• Size: approximately 512 acres (207 ha)
• Location: southeast of Ballard, west Uintah County, Utah, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation
• Former name: Sherman Ranch
• Nickname: the UFO ranch, from a claimed 50-year history of odd events
• Current owner: Brandon Fugal, via Adamantium Real Estate LLC
• Access: none. Roads in are blocked, the perimeter is watched by cameras and barbed wire, and signs are posted to keep people away

The Deed Trail: Locke to Myers to Sherman to Bigelow

The ownership history is the one part of the Skinwalker story that sits on paper. Before 1934 the land belonged to Benton M. Locke and Ona Ora Bryant. From 1934 to 1994 it was held by Kenneth and Edith Myers, a tenure of sixty years. Terry and Gwen Sherman bought it in 1994 and held it only until 1996, when Robert Bigelow, founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science, purchased it for $200,000.

That 1996 sale is the hinge of the entire legend. UFO reports across the Uintah Basin had been publicized in the 1970s, and cattle mutilations had been part of local folklore for decades. Claims specific to this ranch first surfaced in 1996 in the Salt Lake City paper the Deseret News, and later in the alternative weekly Las Vegas Mercury, in a series by investigative journalist George Knapp. Those early stories laid out what a family said had happened to them after they bought and moved onto the property. Bigelow was reportedly convinced to buy by the Sherman family’s accounts of mutilations, strange lights, and unusual impressions left in grass and soil.

Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016 to Adamantium Real Estate LLC for around $500,000. Brandon Fugal, a real estate developer and tech investor, publicly announced his ownership in March 2020. In 2022 he announced a partnership with the Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi, Utah, described as an effort to better understand the environment and historical significance of the ranch.

What the NIDSci Investigators Reported Seeing

These are reported experiences and investigator claims, not established events. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, who published Hunt for the Skinwalker in 2005, state that they saw or investigated evidence of close to 100 incidents on the property. The catalogue includes:

• Cattle that vanished, and cattle found mutilated
• Sightings of unidentified flying objects and glowing orbs
• Large animals with piercing red eyes that they say were unscathed after being struck by bullets
• Invisible objects said to emit destructive magnetic fields
• Bigfoot-like creatures, crop circles, and poltergeist activity reported by former owners

Retired US Army Colonel John B. Alexander, who was involved in the work, characterized the NIDSci effort as an attempt to get hard data using a standard scientific approach. The investigators nonetheless admitted to difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication. That admission matters more than any single anecdote: several years of monitoring by a privately funded team produced nothing publishable.

How a Utah Ranch Became a $22 Million Line in the Defense Budget

The Kelleher and Knapp book was read by Defense Intelligence Agency official James Lacatski, who contacted Bigelow and obtained permission to visit. Lacatski reported a supernatural experience at the ranch, which Bigelow relayed to his friend Harry Reid. Reid and Ted Stevens, himself a UFO experiencer, agreed the place deserved attention and inserted a line into the Department of Defense budget appropriating $22 million to study unidentified aerial phenomena. Whatever one makes of the ranch, its influence on federal spending is a documented fact.

The Skeptical Case Against Skinwalker

The counterargument is blunt and worth reading before any visit is planned. In 2020 skeptical author Robert Sheaffer judged the phenomena almost certainly illusory, noting that NIDSci found no proof after several years of monitoring and that the previous owners of the property, who had lived there for sixty years, said no supernatural events of any kind had happened. Sheaffer’s least-assumption explanation is that the Sherman family invented the story before selling to Bigelow, and he points out that many of the more extraordinary claims originate solely from Terry Sherman, who stayed on as caretaker after the sale.

Bigelow’s spending drew ridicule at the time. In 1996 skeptic James Randi gave him a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award in the category for the funding organization supporting the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult claim. In 2023 ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million program led by Lacatski, emphasized the absence of documentary evidence after many decades of exploration, and called Skinwalker always in the business of selling belief and hope.

That last phrase points at something concrete. Adamantium Real Estate LLC filed a U.S. trademark application for the service mark “Skinwalker Ranch” on February 15, 2017, and it was registered on April 14, 2020, covering recreation facilities and the production and distribution of multimedia, motion picture and television content. A further filing on June 21, 2021, extending the mark to cups and mugs, shirts, sports caps and hats, was registered on July 12, 2022. The ranch is a brand as well as a place.

Visiting Skinwalker Ranch Is Not an Option

Do not plan a trip. After the 2016 purchase, roads leading to the ranch were blocked, the perimeter was guarded by cameras and barbed wire, and signs were posted specifically to prevent people from approaching. This is working private property in a thinly populated corner of the Uintah Basin, adjoining reservation land, and there is no public access, no tour, and nothing to see from a legal vantage point.

What is accessible is the paper trail and the surrounding region. The Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi has published 3D scans of sites across the ranch through its partnership with the owner, and the wider Uintah Basin UFO literature, including the Knapp and Kelleher book and Frank B. Salisbury and Joseph Junior Hicks’s survey of over 400 Utah sightings, covers the same ground without requiring anyone to climb a fence.

Never trespass, and always get permission before any kind of investigation.

Sources

• UFO Sightings Keep Uintah Basin Buzzing
• Frequent Fliers?
• How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously
• Harry Reid on What the Government Knows About UFOs
• Claims About a Government "UFO Program". How Much is True?
• Wikipedia: Skinwalker Ranch