Hunt for the Skinwalker
Science confronts the Unexplained at
a Remote Ranch in Utah
by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp.
Preface
This book is an account of a remarkable series of unexplained events that took place on a ranch in northeastern Utah and the unprecedented scientific study that followed. For eight years, a team of highly trained scientists and others came face-to-face with a terrifying reality that, on superficial examination, appeared to break the laws of science but that, in fact, was consistent with modern-day physics. At the ranch, scientists found a world where a great deal of activity was hidden from visible sight but, as the researchers soon discovered, was detectable with state-of-the-art instrumentation. The family that lived there came to believe that the ranch was occupied by some kind of intelligence that appeared to control—as if on a whim—human perception, human thought, and human physical reality.
The ranch in question lies well off the beaten path in a remote, rural corner of Utah, but is only about 150 miles from metropolitan, sophisticated Salt Lake City. The location is in the midst of a devout Mormon community and is contiguous with a Ute Native American reservation. Both communities have experienced unbelievable but well-documented phenomena in their midst for more than fifty years. In the case of the Ute tribe, the experiences are documented in the tribe’s oral tradition stretching back over fifteen generations.
The account you are about to read is true. I know because I directly participated in and witnessed several of these events myself. All of these incidents really happened. I, along with a small team of highly trained scientists and investigators, interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses to these strange occurrences, including law enforcement officers, physicists, biologists, anthropologists, veterinarians, educators, and everyday citizens.
In addition to eyewitness testimony, we obtained an intriguing body of physical evidence to support many of the accounts described in the book. We compiled photos and videos and accumulated reports of demonstrable physical effects on people, animals, equipment, everyday objects, and the environment. Although observers might relegate the subject matter to the category of the paranormal, the research team adhered to the strictest scientific protocols throughout the project.
Some of the names in the book have been changed out of concern for the emotional well-being of the family that owned the ranch at the time and for the sake of others who were involved. As readers will discover, this family endured a painful and disturbing series of events that left deep psychological scars. The family has since moved from the ranch and is trying to put these events behind them. We also omitted the names of a physicist and a veterinarian, out of concern that the strange subject matter they pursued at the ranch might interfere with their ability to obtain future employment. The scientific establishment does not look kindly upon professionals who stray too far from what are deemed legitimate areas of study.
We also do not provide the exact location of the ranch itself. We are concerned that specific information about how to find it would encourage intrusions and trespassing by curiosity seekers and paranormal enthusiasts, which has already occurred to some extent. The ranch itself is still private property and its caretakers do not welcome incursions by strangers. Neighbors in this rural area also do not appreciate knocks on their doors from out-of-towners seeking paranormal thrills and other strange experiences.
That said, the reader will learn about the region, the towns near the ranch, and the geography of the ranch itself, including specific information about where various events occurred.
An advisory board of esteemed scientific professionals over-saw this study of the ranch. This board was probably the most highly qualified team of mainstream scientists ever to engage in such a sustained study of anomalies. Board members insisted that established scientific principles and procedures be followed for the duration of the study. The problem is that we were forced to engage someone or something that refused to play by the rules of science. As a consequence, I realized that, despite my training in the minutiae of experimental protocols in immunology, biochemistry, and cell biology, we had to creatively modify the tried-and-true methods of establishing scientific experimental controls and of working under controlled laboratory conditions. We were obliged to conduct science in a weird shadowy netherworld where textbook science was but a quaint memory.
The account you are about to read is purely my own; it is not meant to represent the views of my employer at the time, or of the other members of the research team. I believe that these strange, sometimes frightening, often bewildering events represent far more than a potpourri of unrelated and unfathomable weirdness. In the end, I suspect that this intense concentration of “paranormal” activity could point us all toward a new understanding of physical reality, something that is already being debated at the highest levels of modern science.
The world, it appears, is much bigger, much stranger, and far more complicated than most of us can imagine.
Colm Kelleher
A scientist or mainstream journalist who decides to give serious consideration to unidentified flying objects or other so-called paranormal topics does so at considerable risk to his or her professional standing. I learned this the hard way.
In my twenty-five years as an investigative reporter, TV anchorman, and newspaper columnist in one of the world’s most dynamic cities, I have been fortunate to cover stories large and small. I’ve tangled with Mafia figures, professional hitmen, casino moguls, crooked politicians, drug dealers, gunrunners, car bombers, arsonists for hire, porn kings, outlaw motorcycle gangs, dirty cops, illegal polluters, animal abusers, bagmen, con men, scam artists, pimps, perverts, and scumbags of every stripe. In my own community, I’m generally regarded as a serious journalist. I mention this not as a boast but as a reference point. Even though I’ve written reams of stories about every imaginable topic, it seems likely that I will forever be known in my hometown as the UFO reporter. In the eyes of many of my journalism colleagues, this means I’m a borderline nutcase.
I officially went crazy in 1989. That’s when I produced a multipart television news series about UFOs and a mysterious military base the world now knows as Area 51. The viewing public ate it up. But my fellow journalists were not pleased. For some reason, this serious coverage of a “fringe” topic drove them up the wall. I was pilloried and ridiculed from every quarter.
Rival TV broadcasters snickered and lobbed snide potshots during their “happy talk” segues. Radio DJs made crank calls and recorded song parodies. (The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill” was transformed into “Boob on the Tube.”) Newspapers were relentless in their criticism. Columnists teed off with predictable wise-cracks about Bigfoot, Elvis, and the need for ET to phone home. A media critic wrote that he was rushing home each night to see my reports, not because of his interest in UFOs but so he could be there for the inevitable moment when I finally went “bull-goose loony on the air.” One newspaper writer reacted to my reports about alleged alien abductions by anointing me as “a high priest in the Church of Cosmic Proctology.” The same editorial staff later opined that my interest in UFOs besmirched the reputations of other investigative journalists, so the staffers awarded me the dubious distinction of being the city’s “Biggest Blowhard,” which in a town like Las Vegas is quite an accomplishment. [he is actually a real good reporter, and investigator,the local CBS channel knows this, I lived in Las Vegas from 1971-2005, and again from 2017 to the present, and he is right where he was when we left, I only watch the local news for his I Team reports DC]
I was the subject of three editorial cartoons in Nevada’s largest newspaper, cartoons that were, I have to admit, pretty damned funny. One portrayed a portly likeness of me chasing a flying saucer while brandishing a butterfly net. Another featured alien assassins who had arrived on Earth aboard an interstellar barbecue grill for the purpose of rubbing me out. The subtitle of the cartoon was “The Marshmallow Head Chronicles.” I didn’t have to guess whose head was considered to be soft and spongy.
My general reaction at the time was that criticism of this sort comes with the territory. Whining about it would be pretty pathetic. A person can’t be in the public eye and expect to get a free pass, especially from competitors. But the vehemence with which so many of my journalism colleagues attacked me was a surprise. After all, I was the same guy who had produced so many other stories. How did I morph into the crazy UFO reporter?
The truly puzzling part was that none of these critics had even a basic familiarity with the large body of UFO evidence, studies, and documents. Their impression of the topic was—and is—based largely on a generic, ill-defined belief that people who are interested in flying saucers are delusional. (Some are, of course, but the same could be said about many journalists.) This impression has been reinforced over the years by the ridiculous tabloid accounts of space aliens who regularly visit the White House or the goofball claims of people who think they were born in another galaxy. In general, mainstream journalists have been reluctant to look beyond the exaggerated fictions of publicity seekers and profiteers in order to find out if there really is something going on. To do so would be to put their professional credibility on the line. I hope that those mainstream journalists who read this book will suspend their disbelief, at least temporarily, because the subject matter deserves serious inquiry, in my opinion.
One of the best things to stem from my unanticipated status as the UFO guy was the opportunity to meet the remarkable Bob Bigelow and, later, members of the board of the National Institute for Discovery Science and its staff scientists, especially Colm Kelleher. Whatever sniping and peer pressure I encountered from journalism colleagues, it was negligible compared to the professional scorn and career consequences that loomed for Kelleher and the rest of the NIDS team. Real scientists simply do not participate in crackpot research projects. A reporter who uncorks a bizarre story or two can eventually be forgiven. A scientist who chases after UFOs or mutilated cattle risks everything. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. To me, it makes the NIDS study of the Utah ranch even more astounding.
Although I was a mere observer to the events that unfolded, the courageous investigation by Bigelow, Kelleher, and the other NIDS team members has shaken me to the core. I will never look at the world in the same way. As readers are about to learn, reality isn’t what it used to be.
George Knapp
Part I
The Hotspot
Chapter 1
“Wolf”
What is that?” Tom Gorman wondered as he looked across the field at the distant animal loping in his direction. He paused briefly and put down the heavy box he had lifted off the truck. Tom had the perfect eyesight of a trained marksman, and he knew from a half a mile away that this animal was big. The approaching shape was much too big for a coyote. His wife, Ellen, joined him, an unspoken question in her eyes. Tom briefly nodded his head in the direction of the animal and she too began to look puzzled. The thing was about four hundred yards away, and the closer it got the bigger it looked. “Wolf?” murmured Ellen. Ed Gorman, Tom’s father, joined them.
The beast was gray, and even from three hundred yards they could see that its pelt was wet from running through the wet grass. The animal loped gracefully in a series of S turns and stopped about fifty yards away from the family. This was very bizarre behavior for a wolf. But this wolf was almost three times as big as any Tom had ever seen. It gazed peacefully at the family. Ellen shifted uneasily and glanced around to see where her two children were. Both were standing in silence on the top of the flatbed truck, looking right at the wolf. “Maybe its somebody’s pet,” ventured Ed.
The animal began walking casually toward the family, unconcerned but obviously determined to make some kind of contact. It appeared completely tame. Tom glanced at the corral seventy feet to his right where he had just unloaded several of his prize Angus calves. They were the first of his herd to be on the property, and briefly he wondered about the wisdom of bringing them onto the land. One calf, more curious than the rest, stood with its head through the bars of the corral, looking directly at the wolf that was now only a hundred feet away. The other animals were at the back of the corral, and they shifted nervously at the strong scent in the air.
From ten feet away, the smell of rain on dog pelt filled the air as the animal trotted peacefully up to Ed Gorman. Ed, like his son, stood over six feet tall, and the wolf reached almost to his chest. Massive muscles rippled beneath its shiny gray-silver coat. The eyes were a shocking shade of light blue that penetrated the soul. Ed reached down and petted the huge beast as it stood looking at the family. Tom felt a tightening in his gut. Something was not quite right. Even somebody’s pet wolf would not be this completely tame. A two-hundred-pound wolf exuding a Zen-like calm? Something did not compute.
The animal walked nonchalantly around in front of the family, and Ellen and Ed began to relax. Ellen turned around and yelled to the kids to come over. Tad and Kate Gorman jumped from the flatbed and ran over. The family began talking all at once. Tad suggested they try to keep the wolf as a pet.
Too late, they saw the swift, graceful bound that took the wolf to the bars of the corral. With unbelievable speed, the young calf’s head was trapped in the animal’s powerful jaws. The movement had been lightning fast, and the family stood paralyzed with fear. The three-hundred-pound calf bleated pitifully as the wolf tried to drag it through the bars of the corral. Tom sprang into action, ran across, and landed two powerful kicks into the ribs of the wolf. Ed followed and grabbed a stout baseball bat he had just unloaded. With all of his considerable strength, Ed beat on the wolf’s back as it braced against the bars of the corral trying to drag the hapless calf through it. The bleats were getting more urgent as the viselike lock on the calf’s snout tightened.
“Get my Magnum,” Tom barked as he aimed more kicks at the wolf’s ribs. Even as the sickening thud of Tom’s heavy boots rained into the animal’s abdomen, the beast seemed unconcerned. Tad ran to the flatbed, retrieved a powerful handgun, and quickly delivered it to his father. Gorman took aim and squeezed the trigger. The shot rang across the field and slammed into the wolf’s ribs. The slug from the .357 had no effect whatsoever on the attacking animal. It didn’t yelp, didn’t pause, and didn’t bleed.
Quickly, Tom pumped two more shots into the wolf’s upper abdomen. On the third shot, the wolf slowly and reluctantly released the bleating calf. The calf scampered quickly to the back of the corral and, still bleating, lay down. It was bleeding heavily from the head.
The huge beast stood about ten feet away from Tom but displayed no signs of discomfort. Tom couldn’t believe it. Three shots from a Magnum should have killed the animal or at least very badly injured it. Not a sound came from the wolf as it gazed unconcernedly at Gorman. The chilling, hypnotic blue eyes looked straight at him. Gorman raised the Magnum again and, aiming carefully, shot the animal near the heart. It backed off maybe thirty feet, still facing the family and still showing no signs of distress.
A chill crept over Tom. The family drew closer together. They were all more than familiar with the power of the Colt Magnum. They had seen firsthand the devastation it causes, yet this huge wolf was not even making a sound after being shot four times at point-blank range. There were no signs of blood on the beast. It seemed peaceful but glanced back at the calf in the corral as if pondering the wisdom of another attack.
“Get the thirty aught six,” Tom said through clenched teeth, never taking his eyes off the huge beast. Tad ran to the homestead and returned in seconds bearing the heavy firearm. Tom had killed dozens of elk from over two hundred yards with this weapon. As he took aim at the wolf a mere forty feet away, he momentarily felt pity for the beast. The thunderous shot rang out. The sound of the bullet hitting flesh and bone near the shoulder was unmistakable. The wolf recoiled but stood calmly looking at Tom. His mouth went dry. He felt a cold sweat running down his back. Ellen began to cry. Ed began to curse softly under his breath, shaking his head in disbelief. The wolf should be a silent, bleeding pile of dead flesh. Instead, it had recoiled, backed off maybe ten feet, but still seemed perfectly healthy.
Tom took a deep breath and raised the weapon again, aiming for the huge chest cavity. The bullet ripped through the animal, and a sizable chunk of flesh detached from the exit wound and lay on the grass. Still the wolf made no sound. Then, with a last unhurried look at the stunned family, the wolf turned slowly and began to trot away across the grass. Tears of fear streamed down Ellen’s face as she hugged her twelve-year-old daughter.
Tom’s face was white and there was strain in his voice as he turned toward his family. “Let’s keep calm,” he muttered hoarsely but didn’t sound very convincing. “I’m going after it.” The animal was now almost a hundred yards away, trotting west across the field in the direction of a dense group of cottonwoods. Beyond the cottonwoods lay a roaring creek. Tad grabbed the Magnum and Tom hefted the thirty aught, and the family watched as they sprinted off in the same direction as the wolf. The animal was only trotting but was covering ground quickly.
Anger and fear pulsed through Tom as he pushed himself to run quicker. He was already out of breath, but they were gaining on the wolf. They could see the animal disappearing into the belt of cottonwoods and then reappear in the open ground beyond. It stopped, momentarily shaking itself free of the moisture from the grass before heading for the creek. Tad ran silently, feeling how upset his father was but concentrating on keeping the wolf in his sight. The wolf seemed to be accelerating. It was now almost three hundred yards ahead of them and still loping easily as it reached a denser patch of Russian olive trees that bordered the creek.
As they ran, Tom noticed that the tracks of the animal were easily visible in the wet ground. Gorman was an experienced tracker and he was confident that they could track the animal even in the thick Russian olives. His sharp eyes spotted the silvery-gray blur as the animal disappeared into the tree line. Minutes later, Tom and Tad ran into the line of trees following the giant animal’s tracks. In some places it had left inch-deep impressions in the soft ground. There was no evidence of blood on or between the huge footprints.
Tom couldn’t shake the fear he felt as he brushed through the tightly woven undergrowth. His pace had slowed because the large trees were interwoven with thorny brambles and weeds. The tracks were still visible. As they approached the creek, they could hear the water gurgling as it cascaded merrily over the rocks.
They broke cover near the bank of the creek and Tom held up his hand. Tad stopped and the two listened carefully. They heard no sound of an animal crashing through the undergrowth. The huge paw marks periodically meandered in and out of the surrounding vegetation but consistently shadowed the direction of the creek. Tom guessed they had run about a mile.
Several minutes later the two broke through into the open about forty yards from the river. They breathed a sigh of relief. It was hard going, stumbling through the trees, making sure the head-high thorns and bushes didn’t take a toll on their skin and their faces. Suddenly, Tom stopped breathing. He grabbed Tad’s arm and pointed. The wolf tracks were directly in front of them, as plain as day, as they headed toward the creek. About twenty-five yards from the river, the prints entered a muddy patch, and it appeared as if the two-hundred-pound animal had sunk almost two inches into the mud. The deep paw prints continued for another five yards and then stopped. The tracks simply vanished. So did the wolf. Gone. There was no possibility that the animal had leaped the intervening sixty feet to land in the river. The tracks just stopped abruptly.
The Gormans walked slowly and carefully, looking at the perfectly formed tracks in the thick mud and trying to see any change that might explain the sudden disappearance. Around where the tracks halted, the ground appeared about as soft as the mud patch. It was as if the animal had vanished into thin air. Tom looked at his son, and he could see that the teenager was white faced and trembling, close to tears. Tom felt stunned. He couldn’t reassure his son, because he just didn’t have an explanation. “We’d best be getting back,” he said hoarsely. “It’s near sundown.” Tad nodded dumbly, fighting to keep his father from seeing how scared he was.
They were silent as they trudged the miles back to the homestead. Thoughts raced through Tom’s head. The family had just moved from New Mexico to get away from the busybodies and the closed community that kept prying into their lives. They had looked in Utah because property prices were right. In this out-of-the-way place, tucked away in northeast Utah, they had found their dream property —a 480-acre homestead that had been empty for almost seven years. The elderly previous owners had virtually abandoned it. The owners were a prosperous family who now resided in Salt Lake City, and they visited their property a couple of times a year to make sure the fence lines were intact. They were willing to unload the property to the Gormans at a very fair price. The family knew that about a year of hard work would be required to fix it up. High ridges bound the acreage to the north, the flowing creek to the south, and extensive fencing to the west. The homestead was hidden about a mile from the nearest road, down a dirt track that was almost concealed. In short, it was a perfect refuge for a family that yearned for privacy and a home where they could relax and put down roots. The Gormans were happy to trade a small-town life in New Mexico for a new start in a Mormon community in rural Utah. Like most of their new neighbors, the Gormans were members of the LDS church, although they could not be considered devout.
As they trudged through the deep undergrowth, Tom couldn’t shake the feeling that something was horribly wrong. Had they made a mistake in buying this place? Thoughts tumbled through his mind, causing his gut to tighten even more. He knew something had happened today that everyone knew was physically impossible. And it had occurred in daylight and in full view.
Quickly, Tom came to a decision as he stood facing his family. He was not going to second-guess their decision to move from New Mexico. “Look, son,” he said to Tad. “I can’t explain what happened and I am not even going to try. Let’s just forget that this ever happened and have a meal in town.”
Tad just grinned weakly, relieved at least that his father was taking charge.
Chapter 2
Legacy
The first time they saw the ranch, its beauty took their breath away. The Gorman family drove the half-mile track into the yard near their small homestead and marveled at the sheer pastoral magnificence: 480 acres of cottonwood trees, Russian olives, and very lush pasture bordered by a creek, and an irrigation canal bubbling near the northern limit of the property. The family was entranced when they first explored this idyllic spot. Later, they would learn of its drawbacks.
The ranch is bordered on the north by a two-hundred-foot ridge made of red rocks and the mud derived from centuries of weathering. When it rains, the mud below the ridge becomes a thick, slippery mess.
And right next to the canal, a muddy track runs the entire east-west length of the property. This too becomes a nightmare to drive on after even a slight rainfall. The Gormans were reminded many times never to drive on that track when it began to rain. They had to haul all of their vehicles out of the canal several times before they finally learned that lesson.
The Gormans couldn’t believe their luck as they first walked the length of the property. They had purchased it for a very fair price. It was the fall of 1994, and many of the leaves were still on the trees. Just beside their homestead, a large pasture that contained a lot of rocks and trees stretched for almost half a mile west. It needed a lot of work, but the spectacular view shone through the disused property that was littered with garbage. Tom realized that the coming months would be tough and much work would be needed before he could bring his herd of prize, registered cattle to graze on the ranch.
When the Gormans first entered the small ranch house that was to be their home, they felt a chill. Every door had several large, heavy-duty dead bolts on both the inside and outside. All of the windows were bolted, and at each end of the farmhouse, large metal chains attached to huge steel rings were embedded securely into the wall. The previous owners had apparently chained very large guard dogs on both ends of the house. And they had barred the windows and put dead bolts on both sides of each door. What on earth were they afraid of? Tom wondered.
The previous owners had bought the property in the 1950s but now seemed glad to unload it. They had inserted some very strange clauses into the real estate contract. No digging on the land without prior warning to the previous owners. No digging? What did that mean? The Gormans chose to overlook this seemingly insignificant idiosyncrasy, regarding it as a meaningless clause crafted by elderly eccentrics. They put it out of their minds, in the same way they had glossed over the profusion of dead bolts in the house, which could have easily been interpreted as evidence of extreme paranoia on the part of the former residents.
The Gorman family was more intent on savoring the beauty of the environment, the out-of-the-way location of the ranch, and the certainty that they could raise their children in rural surroundings where the value of hard work and family life would supplant the small-town sniping and gossip that they so loathed in New Mexico. Tad and Kate had always been straight-A students. They took after their parents, who were extremely intelligent, diligent, and hardworking. Tom Gorman was a very accomplished rancher who combined common sense with a razor-sharp intellect. He also had a preternatural sixth sense and operated by intuition. That intuition, and his intellect and common sense, combined to create a very capable rancher, a man who could excel at most anything he did. His wife united her high intelligence with a natural business sense.
The Gorman family had learned the rudiments of artificial insemination by watching Tom’s dad do it and by training. Even before moving his family to northeast Utah, Gorman had already established a reputation in a couple of states as an expert in raising the top-quality Simmental and Black Angus show cattle that fetched especially high prices at cattle auctions. While their neighbors routinely lost 5 percent of their animals every year to predators, incompetent husbandry, and other mistakes, the Gormans saw it as a personal affront if they lost more than 1 percent of their animals per year.
The ranch the Gormans bought was located in the middle of the Uinta Basin (the h in Uintah is dropped when describing natural features), halfway between Roosevelt and Vernal in the badlands of Utah. If the Uinta Basin has any claim to fame today, it’s as a heavyweight contender for UFO capital of the world. Since the 1950s, thousands of UFO sightings have been reported in the area, and it easily ranks among the most active UFO areas anywhere. By some estimates, more than half of the residents of the basin have seen anomalous objects in the sky. Admittedly, 90 to 95 percent of so-called UFO reports are misidentifications of known phenomena. But even by that rigid standard, a very large number of sightings in the Uinta Basin can be categorized as unexplained.
In fact, in 1974, Frank Salisbury, then a plant physiologist and a professor of plant science at the University of Utah, wrote a well-received book on the history of the UFO phenomena in the Uinta Basin titled The Utah UFO Display. Salisbury compiled a very convincing case that local residents were witnessing something very weird, indeed, sensational. Unlike most UFO authors, Salisbury refrained from wild speculations about little green men from Zeta Reticuli. He stuck to the facts because the facts were sensational enough. But Utah’s UFO wave did not end with Salisbury’s study. It continues, unabated, to this day.
“The first UFO sighting in my records happened back in 1951,” says retired teacher Junior Hicks, a small, energetic, wiry man now in his seventies who is widely acknowledged as the region’s unofficial UFO historian. “It was cigar shaped, sitting on the ground during daylight, and was seen by thirty students and their teacher from about fifty feet away.”
Hicks, as a science teacher, took it upon himself to follow up on the case and separately interviewed all of the kids who had seen the object. He quickly concluded that the kids had not made it up. The case so intrigued him that he began to actively pursue other reports of UFOs in the basin. Typically, he would contact witnesses at their homes, arrange to meet them in a quiet and comfortable setting, then interview them, face-to-face, for several hours. Hicks never divulged the identity of the witnesses without their permission. As word of his trustworthiness spread, Hicks began to receive more and more calls about the mysterious objects that seemed to hold a fascination for the Uinta Basin.
Hicks would eventually catalog more than four hundred impressive cases, and this was after he had eliminated the thousands of reports of “lights in the sky.” Hicks’s database was heavily skewed toward close encounters simply because he was too busy to investigate anything but the more spectacular cases. Hicks’s case files helped form the core of Salisbury’s book.
This strange legacy of the Uinta Basin goes back centuries, Hicks told us in an interview in 2003.
“Father Escalante may have seen a UFO when he was here in 1776,” he said. “The records from his trip show that while encamped at El Rey, a strange fireball came across the sky above his camp. The UFOs seen here since I’ve been collecting stories range in size from twenty to thirty feet across, all the way to the size of a football field. Some are round, some oval, some cigar shaped, some triangular. The largest one, a triangle, was seen back in the sixties. We had one resident, an Indian, who took a shot at a UFO with his rifle and heard a ricochet ping as the bullet bounced off the metal ship. The people who see them include lawyers, bankers, ranchers, people I’ve known my whole life.”
Because he taught school for thirty-six years, Hicks has a personal relationship with most of the people who live in the area and has been able to talk openly with them about their experiences, whereas some outside investigators who’ve asked questions have been stymied by mistrust among the local residents, many of whom are understandably wary of being ridiculed by big-city strangers. Hicks says there was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when the Utah Highway Patrol was getting so many UFO calls that the troopers simply stopped filling out reports on the incidents. The UFO stories have predictably attracted a steady stream of journalists, TV crews, and UFO faithful over the years, but they generally stay for only a few days, he says, and the reports they produce rarely do more than skim the surface of what is really unfolding in the basin.
Hicks had his own sighting back in the mid-1970s. He watched an orange ball fly over the town of Roosevelt at a high rate of speed, then make an abrupt right-angle turn. The ball hovered in the air over the town before zipping out of sight at an incredible speed. In at least six of the cases he investigated, the witnesses say they saw not only spaceships but also the occupants of the craft. A rancher whose father had been a Native American shaman told Hicks that a silver saucer landed on his land and that five short human-looking beings could be seen walking around inside the craft. The saucer had a row of windows, the witness said, and the beings inside appeared to be wearing white overalls.
So why would UFOs have such an ongoing interest in the basin? Hicks thinks that it might be related somehow to strong religious beliefs among the local population. The majority of Uintah County residents are devout Mormons, and the Utes who live in the region have their own strong religious beliefs. Hicks also cites the unique geology of the basin as a possible factor in the preponderance of UFO sightings. Gilsonite deposits, for example, are found in few other places in the world, although it’s unclear what interest the mysterious visitors might have in this or any other mineral. Hicks notes that the basin is biologically rich and diverse. At least one UFO witness he interviewed claims to have seen alien beings as they collected samples of native plant life.
In the end, though, he suspects the continued presence of the UFOs might be some sort of psychological exercise designed to see how humans might react to these bizarre light intrusions. “They seem to put on displays for people,” Hicks says, “as if it’s a psychological study. I think we are being visited by beings from another world or some other place and it’s for research and exploration.” Hicks has investigated two incidents in which local residents claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
But along with the aerial displays by UFOs have come more frightening intrusions. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, local ranchers reported the bizarre mutilations of their cattle. Similar mutilations have been reported in other parts of the world. The motives and methods of the mutilators, none of whom have ever been caught in the act, remain a complete mystery. Hicks says he has personal knowledge of twelve to fifteen mutilation cases.
As if checking off a laundry list of every modern paranormal mystery, Hicks further alleges that local residents have frequently reported sightings of creatures that resemble the legendary Sasquatch, better known as Bigfoot. Some of the apelike creatures are Sasquatch, the Utes say, while others might be so-called skinwalkers, beings of pure evil that can assume the shape of any animal.
Despite the many reports of UFOs, animal mutilations, and Bigfoot sightings that seem to permeate every corner of the basin, the greatest concentration of high strangeness has always taken place at what became the Gormans’ 480-acre ranch. Junior Hicks says he has worked on the ranch a few times over the years. He helped to repair pumps and performed other small jobs, and during those visits, he and others have seen things that are not easily explained. He’s seen compasses spin wildly out of control, as if disturbed by unknown magnetic forces.
“It all seems to be concentrated on the ranch,” Hicks says. “The Utes don’t mess with it. They have stories about the place that go back fifteen generations. They say the ranch is ‘in the path of the skinwalker.’ ”
Chapter 3
The Basin
The Uinta Basin has always been more than a little strange.
When Mormon leader Brigham Young sent a small expedition to the basin in the 1860s to see if the region was suitable for settlement, the reviews weren’t favorable. The scouting party reported back to Young that the basin was “a vast contiguity of waste.. .valueless except for nomadic purposes, hunting grounds for Indians and to hold the world together.”
The Uinta Basin is a challenging environment, but a wasteland it isn’t. This stunningly beautiful geographic area of northeastern Utah has been inhabited for more than twelve thousand years by Native American tribes. The first white men to visit the region arrived with Spanish expeditions led by Fathers Dominguez and Escalante in the 1770s. Hunters, trappers, and traders followed. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln established the Uintah Indian Reservation that encompassed most of the basin. The action was taken because of the numerous armed conflicts between Utes and Mormon settlers in the Provo Valley.
Lincoln’s order meant that the Utes had to leave the greenery of the Provo Valley for the harsher environment of the Uinta Basin, 150 miles to the east. The tribe was promised that the reservation lands would belong to the Utes for all time. But within a few years, white settlers began to covet those lands for their own economic pursuits, so the boundaries of the Ute territory were slowly and inexorably carved into ever-smaller pieces.
When Mormon settlers returned to the Uinta region to stay in the 1880s, the Utes’ hold on their lands became even less tenable. In 1885, miners prospecting on tribal lands discovered rich deposits of a black hydrocarbon that would prove essential in the manufacture of paints, varnish, lacquer, and insulating materials. The rare mineral was named gilsonite, after Samuel Henry Gilson, an early proponent of gilsonite economic potential. When word spread about the value of gilsonite, aggressive mining interests staked claims and set up operations on reservation lands, even though such actions were clearly illegal.
An honest Indian agent named T. M. Byrnes temporarily forced the brazen miners to shut down. The mining companies petitioned Congress to declare that more than seven thousand acres of gilsonite rich Indian land should be reclassified as “public domain.” Since the property rights of Indian tribes weren’t a high priority, Congress approved the bill. The Utes were to be compensated with payments of twenty dollars per acre. Those tribe members who didn’t want to sell were plied with whiskey or otherwise tricked, and by 1888 the mining interests obtained control of all of the land they originally sought.
In 1881, another reservation was established adjacent to the first in order to accommodate bands of Utes that were forced by the government to get out of Colorado. This concentration of so many potentially hostile Indians prompted the military to authorize the establishment of a new military outpost, one that would be responsible for guarding the Indian frontier in eastern Utah, western Colorado, and southwestern Wyoming. In August of 1886, Major Frederick Benteen led a contingent of the Ninth U.S. Cavalry to the spot in northeastern Utah where the Duchesne and Uinta rivers met. Ten years earlier, Benteen had served with General George Armstrong Custer’s ill-fated Seventh Cavalry. Benteen survived the massacre at Little Bighorn and eventually was given the assignment of establishing a military outpost at a godforsaken juncture of two obscure rivers in a territory that, for centuries, had been the exclusive domain of the Utes, a nation of proud, fearsome, and unpredictable warriors.
When Benteen rode into what would eventually become Fort Duchesne, seventy-five battle-tested cavalrymen accompanied him. Every one of the seventy-five troopers was black, the legendary Buffalo Soldiers. The 150 or so white infantrymen who had marched into the area a few days earlier cheered the arrival of reinforcements. By some accounts, the Utes who witnessed the entrance of the new arrivals were less enthusiastic. The reputation of the Buffalo Soldiers preceded them.
The legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers is well documented in history books. In the bloody campaigns of the Indian Wars in the late 1800s, approximately 20 percent of U.S. Cavalry troopers were African Americans. Native tribes dubbed them Buffalo Soldiers, in part because of a perceived resemblance between these dark-skinned, curly-haired warriors and the revered buffalo, and in part because of their prowess in battle and in the saddle. At least eighteen Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to Buffalo Soldiers as a result of their actions in at least 177 armed engagements during the Indian Wars in the West.
What isn’t widely known about the Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Fort Duchesne is that many, if not most, of them were Freemasons. This may not seem consistent with our current perception of Masons or Freemasons as mostly white, mostly upper-class captains of industry and politics, but it happens to be true.
Freemasonry is a secret society that traces its roots back to ancient Egypt. The society first appeared in Europe in the 1300s after a predecessor, the Knights Templars, fell into official disfavor and was generally outlawed. The grandfather of today’s Freemasons made its public debut in London in the early 1700s and declared itself a fraternity whose mission was to promote charity and the improvement of society. However, its reliance on secret handshakes, secret ceremonies, its own sign language, and overt mystical symbolism has prompted centuries of suspicion by non-Masons.
Critics of the society—and there are many, practically a society unto themselves—note that the early Freemason lodges in England were dominated by alchemists, astrologers, and students of the occult. The society’s history of absolute secrecy has given birth to generations of lurid speculation, including allegations that the Freemasons are servants of Lucifer. The Masons have done little in the centuries since to rid themselves of their perceived reputation as a festering cauldron of dark intrigues and the mystical arts.
In America, many of the key figures in the formation of the republic were Masons, including Benjamin Franklin. (George Washington attended two or three meetings but wasn’t a cheerleader for the cause, whatever that cause might be.) American currency is plastered with Masonic symbols and slogans, largely because of the efforts of a thirty-third-degree Freemason named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Future president George H. W. Bush gained his entry to the club when, as a student at Yale, he was initiated into an alleged Freemason farm team known as the Skull and Bones Society, which accepts a maximum of fifteen new members each year, all of them male and all of them rich.
Conspiracy theorists suspect that the Freemasons are adept in the mystical arts, that they have mastered certain supernatural abilities, and that they consider their upper-echelon members to be gods, beings who have achieved spiritual perfection. On a more mundane level, critics also allege that the Freemasons, or their alleged co-conspirators the Illuminati, the Trilateralists, and the Bilderbergers, are intent upon imposing a new world order, a one-world government, a system under which national interests are subservient to the greater planetary good, that is, “good” as determined by the Freemasons. This is one hell of an ambitious conspiracy theory. [not theory, it's a fact DC]
It seems so incongruous on the surface to presume any possible connection between black soldiers stationed at a remote outpost in Utah in the late 1800s and a secret, mystical society still bent on world domination in the early twenty-first century. Nonetheless, the Buffalo Soldiers of Fort Duchesne were full-fledged, ritual-practicing, secret-handshaking members of the world’s best known, most influential, and most mysterious male fraternity.
The soldiers of Fort Duchesne became Freemasons because of an emancipated slave named Prince Hall who emigrated from England to America and established African Lodge No. 1 in Boston on July 3, 1776, certainly a precipitous moment in American history. Although there are disputes about the legitimacy of this account, “Prince Hall Lodges” quickly multiplied in the new nation. One of those lodges was established in Texas in the mid-1800s, which is where it intersected with attachments of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers. A few decades later, the Masonic seeds that had been planted by that frontier lodge in Texas found their way to a remote corner of Utah.
The Utes who live in Fort Duchesne today are very familiar with the stories about the Buffalo Soldiers and their interest in Freemasonry. A patch of ground that once was designated as the graveyard for the Buffalo Soldiers has since been covered over with houses built for Ute tribe members. And that’s where things begin connecting to our story.
“The one right at Turnkey, there is supposed be a graveyard right in there,” a former tribal police officer told us in an interview, “but still they built houses. When they built apartments, they built them right over top of that graveyard. Black soldiers, mostly black soldiers in there.. .My grandmother told me about that years ago.”
The tale reeks of irony. After decades of spooky Hollywood stories about greedy Caucasians building housing developments over Indian burial grounds, thus unleashing hostile Native American poltergeists bent on revenge, is it possible that Indian opportunists may have disturbed the spirits of dead African-American soldiers who, in life, were steeped in mystical arts? By building homes over a known graveyard, did the Utes awaken an unknown force that has since plagued them with ongoing appearances by unearthly beasts and other inexplicable phenomena? It’s a question tinged with superstition and sensationalism, but it’s one that some tribe members have asked themselves for years.
When Congress designated the seven thousand acres of Ute land as part of the “public domain,” it inadvertently exempted that acreage from any official control or law enforcement. A bawdy collection of saloons and brothels quickly sprang up, and the soldiers of Fort Duchesne were among the most loyal customers, even though the so-called Duchesne Strip was officially off-limits to all military personnel. Outlaws like Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay hid out in the strip since no lawmen had jurisdiction there. Soldiers, both black and white, drank and cavorted with miners, with outlaws, with prostitutes, and with Utes. As the soldiers returned to the fort following their drunken forays, they often passed by a ravine that became a handy spot for disposing of empty whiskey bottles.
So many bottles were tossed into the ravine that it eventually earned the name Bottle Hollow, a term still used today. Bottle Hollow is now mostly covered by water. In 1970, the federal government authorized the creation of a reservoir on Ute land in partial repayment for the diversion of tribal waters for the Central Utah Water Project. Today the Bottle Hollow reservoir covers some 420 acres and is a popular fishing spot. The fact that Bottle Hollow almost directly abuts Skinwalker Ranch is not lost on the Utes or other local residents.
The reservoir has a mysterious legacy of its own, one that seems inextricably linked to the ranch. The Utes have long believed that Bottle Hollow is inhabited by one or more large aquatic snakes, something akin to the sea serpent legends that are attached to other, much older bodies of water around the world. Eyewitness reports of serpent sightings in the reservoir date back almost to the time when Bottle Hollow was first filled with water. Obviously, the reservoir isn’t old enough to be inhabited by a Paleolithic oddity that somehow survived into modern times. But what are we to make of the statements made to us by several seemingly honest witnesses, people who didn’t want any public attention whatsoever?
One eyewitness is the same tribal police officer who told us about the graveyard of the Buffalo Soldiers. “We used to see things crawling around in the water that looked like giant snakes,” he told us. “It would swim straight down from the marina and go all the way down to the bottom end. You could see it on moonlit nights. I seen that, well, everybody, the other guys have seen that snake in there too.”
Tribal police officers say an inordinate number of drowning cases have occurred in Bottle Hollow over the years, and at least some of them are unofficially attributed to the presence of the mystery snake. One case that was investigated by police involved the death of a Ute woman who was swimming at night with a male companion. Witnesses on the beach said the woman screamed that something in the water had grabbed her and was pulling her under. Her companion told officers that he dove under the water and grappled with a huge snake in an effort to free the woman, but she was dead by the time he got her back to the surface. Obviously, there are other potential explanations for what occurred that night, but the witnesses on the beach supported this version of the event and investigators took the report seriously.
There are also numerous accounts of strange lights that have been seen entering and leaving the waters of Bottle Hollow. In 1998, a police officer told us that he saw a “large light” plunge into the middle of the reservoir and then quickly exit before flying away into the night sky. The witness did not remember whether the object made any kind of splashing sound during its entry or emergence from the dark water. In 2002, we interviewed four young Caucasian men who said they had recently been on the beach with their dates when a blue-white ball of light flew out of the darkness from the direction of the Gorman ranch. The glowing ball dove into the water just a few feet from the shore, then emerged seconds later. The mystery object had changed its shape while submerged, the witnesses said. From the original ball shape that entered the water, it emerged as something resembling a shimmering, maneuverable belt-shaped shaft of light. After performing a brief writhing aerial dance, the belt of light zipped away at a high rate of speed, hugging the ground before disappearing below the top of Skinwalker Ridge. After questioning the four men at length about their backgrounds and the sighting itself, we concluded that they were honestly describing the event to the best of their abilities. They certainly weren’t seeking publicity and requested that their names not be made public.
One other salient point about the Buffalo Soldiers and the strange occurrences in the vicinity of this graveyard is worth mentioning. A geologic feature now known as Skinwalker Ridge contains an unusual carving, which was discovered by Tom Gorman and was later examined by the scientific team that would investigate the ranch. It’s an inscription located several feet below the top of the ridge, as if someone had hung suspended from the rim in order to carve it into the rock. The best guess is that the carving is one hundred or more years old. It’s a Masonic symbol, no question about it, a strong suggestion that at least a few of the Freemasons among the Buffalo Soldiers may have visited the Gorman Ranch a long time ago.
Today, Uintah County, in the heart of the basin, consists of forty-four hundred square miles and more than twenty-five thousand residents, most of them white Mormons. Nearly a tenth of the population is Ute Indian, with their own settlements near White Rocks, Fort Duchesne, and Randlett. The county’s economy is based mostly on ranching and farming, with cattle, hay, and alfalfa the principal agricultural products. Geologists describe the region as “an unusually rich source of hydrocarbon bearing materials,” including oil, oil shale, tar sands, and coal. Oil and gas deposits were discovered in the area in the 1950s and are still being exploited. It is not uncommon to see oil rigs pumping away on almost any main road in the region. In addition, Uintah County officials often refer to their area as “Dinosaur Country” because of the prevalence of fossilized remains from prehistoric times.
Of course, the Gormans were completely unaware of this history of the area when they bought their ranch in the Uinta Basin. They had escaped the frying pan of small-town gossip and stepped into the terrifying fire of the unknown.
Chapter 4
The Weirdness
The Gormans tried to ignore the wolf incident. It had been too surreal. One of their new neighbors remarked casually to them a few days later that their land was home to a herd of large wolves. They were relieved to hear that their family was not party to some collective delusion. Other people had seen the wolves too.
A few weeks later, Ellen was driving in her gray Chevette back to their homestead. She was coming home from her new job with the local mortgage company. She had opened the gate to the property and closed it behind her. As she sat in the car, she noticed a movement to her left in her peripheral vision. She gasped. The wolf was huge, and it had silently approached within thirty feet of her. Now it stood outside her window. As she stared into the friendly light-blue eyes of the huge animal, she felt a knot of fear tighten. The animal’s head stood over the roof of her car. This was no ordinary wolf—it resembled the bulletproof animal they had encountered only a few weeks previously.
Easily visible in the gathering twilight was another animal, all black. It stood farther away from the car and appeared more reserved. It was large, but not quite as big as the wolf. It looked like a very weird dog but unlike any she had ever seen. Perhaps it was an exotic breed created by centuries of mating on the nearby Ute Indian reservation? Maybe one of her Ute neighbors owned this wolf? The dog’s head was much too large for its body, but the body was still big. Now thoroughly alarmed, Ellen slammed the gas pedal with her foot and drove quickly along the last half mile to the homestead. She made a mental note to complain to the local tribal office in Fort Duchesne the following day. No matter how placid and tame these huge wolves appeared to be, they were still wild animals. She was determined that they would not be allowed to roam freely on the property, especially since the family was preparing to move their extremely expensive herd of registered animals onto the grass fields within a few more weeks. Winter was approaching.
Ellen was really puzzled the next day when her polite requests to rein in the wolves were met with blank stares and uncomprehending silence at the tribal office. Nobody owned any wolves around here, she was told. In fact, wolves had not been seen in this part of Utah for seventy years; the last wolf in Utah had been shot in 1929. (These events happened a full year before a herd of gray wolves was transplanted into Yellowstone Park and into Central Idaho in 1995, and in December 2002 one of those wolves would be caught in a trap near Ogden, Utah. In 2004, a couple of wolves were spotted around Vernal.) The soft-spoken tribal official eventually told Ellen that she must be mistaken. Perhaps she had seen a coyote?
Ellen was furious. She left the tribal office convinced that somebody was not telling the truth. She remembered that the huge animal had to bend down to breathe on her car window. It was about four times the size of any wolf she had ever heard about. And the disquieting incident of the bulletproof wolf came back to haunt the family. They saw the huge animals in the distance a couple more times in the next few weeks. Then they seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth. The family became so busy with ranch chores that Ellen quickly forgot about the huge animals; out of sight was definitely out of mind.
Ellen enjoyed their tranquil countryside far away from any snoopy neighbors. Every evening after finishing all her chores, she liked nothing better than to walk on the property, when she could look at the stars in a pristine dark sky. There was no pollution in this part of Utah. Her sharp eyes were able to pick up the green-red star Betelgeuse when it was visible in the night sky. She loved the silence.
In late 1994, on her second walk along the top of the two-hundred-foot ridge, she was humming joyfully to herself when she felt a huge rush of wind as something very big flew past her, just missing her. She ducked instinctively. Whatever it was, it had missed her by a few feet. Whatever had flown past her had created significant turbulence. It must have been pretty big, she thought to herself. There was no other noise apart from that strange rush of wind.
A bat? It was much too big and too fast for a bat. This thing was very solid and bulky, and it was flying fast. Five minutes later, as she resumed her brisk walk, it happened again. This time it was even closer. Again she ducked. She should have seen some kind of silhouette, because this time the thing was flying west directly toward the light of the setting sun. There was enough light still in the sunset to spot something that big. But she saw nothing. She felt a twinge of uneasiness. Could it have been a bird? A lot of birds don’t fly in the darkness. She was puzzled. She turned around to go back. This was getting creepy. She breathed a sigh of relief when she got back to her family. She decided not to tell them.
During the days when Tom was out working on the ranch and the kids were at school, Ellen began to seriously question her memory. She would leave a kitchen utensil on the counter and go outside for a moment and return to find the utensil missing. It would later turn up somewhere unexpected. She couldn’t figure it out. She began to suspect that one of her kids was playing games with her. Similar oddities happened a couple of times per week.
Ellen was getting increasingly worried about her memory when one evening Tom stormed in and demanded to know who had hidden the post digger. He was irate. Both kids looked up from their homework. They were puzzled. Ellen told him that all three had been in the house for the past couple of hours. Tom said that he had left the seventy-pound implement on the ground and gone to his truck to get a wrench, returned a couple of minutes later, and it was gone. He was angry because he wanted to finish mending a broken fence, and it was almost dark. The family went outside to help him look. Thirty minutes later they gave up. Tom was silent and frustrated the whole evening.
Two evenings later he rushed in and demanded to know who had taken his pliers. He had left them on a fence post, turned around, and when he turned back, they were gone. He was seething. Again the family looked for the pliers, but to no avail. It was then that Ellen decided to fess up. The same thing had been happening to her, she explained. She reeled off multiple instances. The family stared at her as she spoke. Tom grew quiet. The look on his face told her everything. He had begun to suspect that something was terribly wrong. Shortly afterward he went outside to think. She knew better than to come out to talk to him. This was not the time for a family conference. There was too much to do. Tom had finally moved his entire herd of high-end, registered breeding Black Angus and Simmental cattle onto the new ranch. Around the same time, Dave, Tom’s nephew, had arrived to visit with the family for a few weeks. Dave was not exactly the outdoor type, having lived most of his life in the city. Tom was determined to break him into the ranching lifestyle during his stay. One night, he told Tad and Dave to accompany him on an outdoor jaunt. Tom knew that Dave was apprehensive of the dark, so he wanted to break the youngster of this fear. The three began walking casually through the property to check on the cows. It was a beautiful dusk, and Tom was appreciating the lovely clear sky that still held some light. A few hundred feet to the north, the ridge was getting darker by the minute.
A flash of annoyance hit Tom as he spied the lights of a trespassing RV about half a mile to their west.
He had little patience for trespassers who ignored private property and hunted on other people’s land.
He had let it go a few times before when he had seen distant lights on his property, but this time he was going to tell these louts off. He pointed out the RV to the two teenagers, and the three of them increased their pace. When they were about two hundred yards away, the RV started moving away from them. Tom was momentarily puzzled. How could it have seen them? Perhaps the trespassers had night-vision equipment, Gorman thought to himself. He and the boys broke into an easy jog. He did not want this idiot to start breaking fence lines as the RV tried to escape. The headlamp in front and the red light behind were moving very smoothly now. Tom wondered why the vehicle was not bouncing over the ruts.
Suddenly the lights from the object seemed to rise a few feet from the ground. Gorman’s brow puckered. “What’s goin’ on?” Tad muttered. They were covering the ground quickly now, trying to catch the RV. They could see that it had gradually increased its pace as it maintained the same distance from them. All three were now running, and again they could see the lights moving a few feet off the ground.
As they came to one of the fences through their property, it dawned on Gorman what was happening.
The thing was somehow lifting itself over the fence lines! It had already gone over a couple with apparent ease. This was when he felt the first chill. How could an RV be climbing over fences?
The chase continued and Tom was breathing heavily. They had now entered the last pasture before the very end of his property, and that pasture was bound on the western end by a line of Russian olives placed thickly together and right behind a stout five-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Tom grunted with satisfaction as he ran. The bastards were trapped.
He still could not hear the vehicle’s engine and he wondered why. They were running hard in the darkness now, and the red taillight of the vehicle was still about two hundred yards in front. Tom kept waiting for the object to slow down as it neared the impenetrable barrier that formed the western limit of his property. The boys were about ten yards in front of him and he was gasping for air now. But since they were only moments from catching these intruders, Gorman kept running. He kept glancing down at the rough rutted terrain as he ran, making sure that any obstacles were not going to trip him up.
Suddenly a loud gasp from the boys made him look up. The RV was now definitely in the air. All three stopped to watch. With the red light on its tail, it climbed smoothly, slowly, and silently toward the top of the tree line. Those trees were more than fifty feet high. As the object crested the tree line, the bewildered trio saw the shape of the vehicle perfectly silhouetted against the horizon. It was no RV. The object was roughly oblong, shaped like a large refrigerator, with a headlight in front and a red light behind. All three watched in complete silence as the object slowly disappeared over the trees in the distance. It was flying smoothly and slowly, almost casually. There was no sound.
Tom’s breathing was still coming in painful gulps. He felt cold chills running through his body even as he sweated profusely. The boys, still gazing open mouthed, turned to Gorman looking for an explanation. Even from several feet away, he could see that Dave was crying softly in the darkness. The fourteen year-old was obviously very frightened and was deeply disturbed by something this bizarre.
Tom knew that his son was made of sterner stuff, but Tad too was waiting for an explanation. “I have no idea,” Tom muttered as he turned away, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. What was really spooky was that they never heard the sound of an engine, even from 150 yards away.
What will I tell Ellen? he wondered as they trudged back. His mind was racing, looking for some kind of rational explanation for what they had seen. Some kind of military exercise out in the wilds of Utah? It made no sense to him. Why would they test exotic hardware on someone’s private property? Nothing added up. They walked in silence all the way back to the homestead, the young fourteen-year old shivering with fear. Dave’s stay would be cut short. His parents let the family know that the youngster would not return to his cousins while they still lived on that property in Utah.
A few weeks later, Tom and Ellen were walking out on the trail heading west and enjoying the cool air about an hour after sunset. The trail passed close to the ridge that marked the northern boundary of the Gorman property. The bluff was composed of dried mud and sandstone, and was still noticeably red as darkness intensified.
Tonight, there was no sign of rain, and the Gormans chatted quietly as they walked. Suddenly a loud metallic sound came from their right, cutting through the nighttime stillness. Startled, they stopped abruptly. Both had acute hearing. A few seconds later, they heard the noise again. It sounded like metal being banged on metal, and it seemed to be coming from about a hundred feet above them in the darkness. Tom was puzzled. What could be making the noise?
Ellen clutched his sleeve and silently pointed in front of them. Tom saw the bright light about a hundred yards out. It was a vehicle. “Probably some miners lost,” he said, putting two and two together. They felt slight apprehension as they walked toward it. As the couple approached the object, it lifted off the ground, moved about fifty yards away, and slowly settled back to the ground. “It’s that thing Tad and I saw a while back,” Tom muttered to his wife.
Slowly they walked in the direction of the bright white beam that stabbed the darkness in front of it.
They could just make out the refrigerator shape behind the light. And the reddish glow behind the object was familiar to Tom.
As they drew nearer, the object again lifted off the ground and glided smoothly away in total silence. Again they tried to gain ground, but each time the object repeated the frustrating maneuver. It was clearly watching and reacting to them, trying to keep them at arm’s length. Beneath his nervousness, Tom felt a spark of outrage. Who the hell do they think they are? he thought angrily.
In the distance behind them, they both heard the mysterious metallic sound again. They turned away from the chase momentarily to try to get a fix on the sound. When they turned back, there was no sign of the light in front of them. The vehicle had either turned off its lights or had vanished. Slowly they walked toward the spot where they had last seen it. Nothing stirred in the still night. They passed the spot on the path where it had been, but there were no tracks in the hard-baked mud.
They didn’t talk much after that, although they walked the entire length of the ranch to the western boundary. The night appeared to have swallowed the mysterious flying refrigerator. Tom knew then for certain that something very unusual was unfolding on the ranch they had purchased just a few months before.
It was around this time that the Gorman family first heard the rumors that were circulating in town. The scuttlebutt being whispered in local coffee shops and stores acknowledged the legends told by the Utes about the secret history of the Gorman property. In short, the ranch was considered to be off limits for tribe members. Piece by piece, the Gormans learned that their land was cursed and no Native American would ever set foot on it. Why, the Gormans wondered. Nobody would give them a straight answer.
next
PART 2
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/part-2-hunt-fo-skinwalkerthe-cursehigh.html
The Curse
No comments:
Post a Comment