“Twenty lashes with a wet noodle!” That was the penalty Ann Landers (or was it Dear Abby?) used to impose on herself, whenever she was caught in some egregiously foolish error in one of her newspaper columns. I don’t think I deserve the full twenty. But maybe ten would be appropriate.
The howler in question was perpetrated in my most recent blog post. I quoted the blurb in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot for its December 2 interview with space scientist Haim Eshed, the text of which I’m still unable to get hold of. According to Eshed, “ETs from all over the universe already walk among us, encounters of the third kind are just around the corner and the ‘Galactic Federation’ prevents that information from being publicized so as not to cause a panic. Now he tells how the aliens have already prevented multiple nuclear holocausts, what is really happening at the mysterious ranch in Utah …”
This last, I assured my readers, was surely a reference to the first of the monoliths that seemed a few weeks ago to be cropping up all over the world.
Which, my readers hastened to assure me, it surely wasn’t. The “mysterious ranch” was Utah’s Skinwalker Ranch, featured this past spring on the History Channel show “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.” What’s the matter? these readers might have demanded (but were too kind to do so). Had I never heard of Skinwalker Ranch, a haunted patch of land in the Uintah Basin that’s been the site of all sorts of spooky happenings, some UFO-related, others apparently not?
Well …
It’s never too late to start learning. I chose to begin, not with the History Channel episodes, but with an interview with the ranch’s current owner Brandon Fugal, conducted by skeptic Mick West.
Here’s how I came to it:
I’d seen and been impressed by the YouTube videos in which West proposed mundane explanations for the now-famous Navy UFO videos. (Click here and here and here.) I’d just finished reading his excellent 2018 book Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. I’d begun to explore his metabunk.org website, and discovered the Fugal interview among the “Tales From the Rabbit Hole” podcasts linked to the site. It was conducted on May 29, 2020, before the airing of the final episode of “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.” The interview was also featured on Joe Murgia’s ufojoe.net website, accompanied by an extremely valuable transcript.
Murgia headlined the interview “West vs. Fugal,” and it would be natural to expect it to have been a confrontation. But that’s not quite what happened–at least on the surface. In the debunking strategy proposed in West’s book, “respect” is the key element. Conspiracy-theory advocates, West reminds us over and over, are no less intelligent, no less sane, no less thoughtful than those who doubt them. Advising the reader on how to go about debunking the theories, West consistently refers to their advocate as “your friend.” Under no circumstance is he or she to be blown away with insults or one-liners. Rather, you’re to build a bridge, find common ground. Treat the other as your partner and ally in the search for truth.
Which is what West does with Fugal, and their exchange is amicable and collegial from beginning to end.
Often, as Fugal sets forth the amazing properties of the ranch–speaking as one who’s been compelled, truly against his inclinations, to move from utter skepticism to grudging belief–I think I see disbelief fluttering behind West’s poker face. But it hardly ever comes to the surface. Fugal, ever cordial and welcoming, plays his own role to perfection or near-perfection. “To be candid,” he says, “I fully expected that there was a 95% probability or greater that there was going to be a natural, more prosaic explanation behind what had been reported. And I kind of looked at the ranch and the accounts as being, probably most likely nothing more than an adult, scientific snipe hunt of sorts. …
“No offense to any of the people who had worked on the ranch previously at all, but I thought the most likely explanation for a lot of what had been reported was that it was nothing more than the result of groupthink. A lot of front-loaded groupthink and that people had stirred themselves up into believing that they were seeing something unusual that most likely didn’t have anything extraordinary to do with it.”
At which point the question occurred to me: if that was all you thought it was, what moved you to make your tremendous investment of time and money in that ranch? (Fugal purchased it in April 2016 from UFO promoter Robert Bigelow.) If I’d been doing the interview, I might have asked that question. West, more wisely, chooses to leave it unspoken. It’s adversarial, and tearing Fugal down brings us no nearer to understanding what, if anything, may have been going on at Skinwalker Ranch.
What exactly was it that was alleged to go on?
The two agree: the peculiarities of the spot are notoriously hard to define. “Is there a way,” West asks, “of characterizing what this phenomena actually is or some characterization of the phenomena, other than just being a really strange place where things happen?” To which Fugal responds: “Yeah, good question. … And you’re right. In approaching the claims associated with the ranch, historically, the nature of what was being claimed was not only elusive but rather ambiguous.”
UFOs in the distance? Peculiar malfunctions of 21st-century gadgetry? Or strange feelings among those present on the ranch, nothing you could quite put your finger on?
It’s in this connection that Fugal tells his most amazing story. It took place, he says, in October 2016. “Prominent visitors,” never identified, were on the property when cell phones began malfunctioning. The visitors, collectively, experienced a sense of vertigo that lasted 10 or 20 seconds. Then the security guard (“George”) for the principal visitor disappeared. No one knew where he’d gone. Until …
“As I was walking around to the back of the old homesteads, it was like I entered an anechoic chamber, a soundproof room. And there was an auditory sensation. It was almost like my ears were boxed. And all of the ambient noise, to a degree, was completely muted. And right there in the distance where we had parked the Ranger, the Polaris Ranger, UTV, standing upright, in the back of the Ranger, was this huge, about six foot five, built like a tank, gentleman. And, so I continue to walk towards the UTV, having this sensation and as I made my way and grew closer, the ambient noise came back and was restored, which I thought was interesting.
“And I yelled to him and I said, ‘George!’ And it was clear that his eyes were closed. He was standing fully upright in the back of this UTV. And by the time I got up there, his eyes fluttered open. I said, ‘What are you doing? Is something wrong?’ And he looked down at me and he says, ‘Well, that was strange.’ And I said, ‘So what’s happening?’ And he said, ‘Well, as soon as all of you piled out of the UTV to make your way around to the front of the homestead, I was paralyzed, and blacked out.'”
The next day, George will fall ill with an undiagnosible flu-like illness and will be hospitalized for three weeks. Meanwhile everybody’s cell phones have gone dead, need to be recharged. And “a silver grayish disc-like object” appears in the sky over a mesa. It’s 40-50 feet in diameter, and Fugal and two others watch it shift its position, not by moving as a normal aircraft would, but by blinking out in one place and blinking on in another.
“And then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone. It literally … it was almost like it was reduced to a dot and was gone.”
What do you say to a story like this?
Do you say, “Wow, now I’m convinced”? Or do you say, “Liar, liar, pants on fire”? Or is there some third alternative, that casts no aspersions on Brandon Fugal’s good faith but still reaffirms a belief in an orderly universe where things of this sort ought not to happen? “That day changed my perspective,” says Fugal; and all West can manage to say in response is, “Right. Yeah.”
It would change mine, too.
West asks whether Fugal drew any diagrams of the disk or its motion, gets a more or less satisfying answer, and then shifts to whether any of the phenomena that haunt the ranch have been photographed. Oh yes, says Fugal, they’ve got good photographic evidence.
Then why not make that evidence available to the public, so it can be examined and analyzed? “Ah, we’re going to,” says Fugal, but it’s hard to find the time; he works 18-20 hours a day on his real estate development business; the ranch is only a small part of his life. West presses him: “Couldn’t you just tell one of your investigators, like, put all the good footage on a Dropbox?” “Yeah! Yeah! We’re working on it,” says Fugal, and makes a vague promise to release some of the data. Whether this promise has been kept, more than six months after the interview, I have no idea.
This is about as confrontational as West ever gets with Fugal himself. He does go on to voice his qualms about the sensationalism of the History Channel’s presentation, which Fugal takes in good spirit and acknowledges they have some measure of justice. He thanks West for his interest; he invites him to come visit the ranch. “I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the future,” Fugal says, and I think, as I’ve thought all through the interview: this is a class act.
Ah, but is it an act?
A dialogue? Or a covert disputation, in which Fugal’s aim is not to rout or discredit West, but rather to implant a sense of himself and West as co-investigators, a pair of hard-headed skeptics of whom only one (Fugal) has so far had first-hand proof of skepticism’s inadequacy before something like Skinwalker Ranch? So far. Let West come out to the ranch, and perhaps his eyes will be opened as well.
Fugal has the advantage here. As impresario of mystery, he’s under no obligation to give a coherent account of what a UFO in the distant sky could possibly have to do with the other strange events he claims. The cell phones losing their juice. The gripping, almost mythic image–I think of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni–of the paralyzed giant, standing like a statue in the back of the Polaris Ranger.
It makes no sense? Fugal never promised to make sense; that’s West’s commitment, not his. All he promised was mystery.
by David Halperin
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I came upon some the Skinwalker stuff recently and probably wouldn’t have spent much time on it except for the pandemic. I watched an episode with a lot of time spent on some dead animal bones behind a wall.
With the sensationalizing done to it by the History Channel, it’s hard to know if there is anything more to it or not.
Yet it is intriguing! I hope to learn more in the coming weeks.
I did read the book ‘Hunt for the Skinwalker’ by the scientist Colm Kelleher and the journalist George Knapp. This book helped to put the Skinwalker ranch on the map. It has its shortcomings – namely the lack of photographic evidence for the claims made, and one has to take witnesses at their word, but this is of course always a problem! – but it gives a good overview of how the whole reputation of the ‘haunted’ ranch evolved, and the early scientific investigations here.
I have not seen the History Channel episodes, but am intrigued.
Ah forgot to add, there is also Ryan Skinner, who has written a few books on the ranch (I haven’t read them), including ‘Skinwalker Ranch: Path of the Skinwalker’ and ‘Skinwalker Ranch: The UFO Farm’. He is a very vocal Skinwalker aficionado, his website at skinwalkerranch.org. Whether Skinner is sensationalist and too literal minded here, or whether he takes a more sober, scholarly approach to the subject, or perhaps a combination of the two approaches, I will leave to you to decide.