Hunt for the Skinwalker
Science confronts the Unexplained at
a Remote Ranch in Utah
by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp.
Chapter 5
The Curse
In the religion and cultural lore of Southwestern tribes, there are witches known as skinwalkers who can alter their shapes at will to assume the characteristics of certain animals. Most of the world’s cultures have their own shapeshifter legends. The best known is the werewolf, popularized by dozens of Hollywood movies. European legends as far back as the 1500s tell stories about werewolves. (The modern psychiatric term for humans who believe they are wolves is lycanthropy.) The people of India have a weretiger legend. Africans have stories of wereleopards and werejackals. Egyptians tell of werehyenas.
In the American Southwest, the Navajo, Hopi, Utes, and other tribes each have their own version of the skinwalker story, but basically they boil down to the same thing—a malevolent witch capable of being transformed into a wolf, coyote, bear, bird, or any other animal. The witch might wear the hide or skin of the animal identity it wants to assume, and when the transformation is complete, the human witch inherits the speed, strength, or cunning of the animal whose shape it has taken.
“The Navajo skinwalkers use mind control to make their victims do things to hurt themselves and even end their lives,” writes Doug Hickman, a New Mexico educator. “The skinwalker is a very powerful witch. It can run faster than a car and can jump mesa cliffs without any effort at all.”
For the Navajo and other tribes of the Southwest, the tales of skinwalkers are not mere legend. Just ask Michael Stuhff. A Nevada attorney, Stuhff is likely one of the few lawyers in the history of American jurisprudence to file legal papers against a Navajo witch. He has often represented Native Americans in his practice. He understands Indian law and has earned the trust of his Native American clients, in large part because he knows and respects tribal religious beliefs.
As a young attorney in the mid-1970s, Stuhff worked in a legal aid program based near Ganado, Arizona. Many, if not most, of his clients were Navajo. His legal confrontation with a witch occurred in a dispute over child custody and financial support. His client, a Navajo woman who lived on the reservation with her son, was asking for full custody rights and back child support payments from her estranged husband, an Apache. At one point during the legal wrangling, the husband got permission to take the son out for an evening but didn’t return the boy until the next day. The son later told his mother what had transpired that night.
According to the son, he spent the night with his father and a “medicine man.” They built a fire atop a cliff and, for many hours, the medicine man performed ceremonies, songs, and incantations around the fire. As dawn broke, the three traveled into a wooded area near a cemetery, where they dug a hole. Into the hole, the medicine man deposited two dolls. One of the dolls was made of dark wood, the other of light wood. It was as if the two dolls were meant to represent the mother and her lawyer.
Although Stuhff wasn’t sure how seriously to take the news, he recognized that it certainly didn’t sound good, so he sought the advice of a Navajo professor at a nearby community college.
“He told me that the ceremony I had described was very powerful and very serious, and that it meant that I was supposed to end up buried in that cemetery,” Stuhff says. “He also said that a witch can perform this type of ceremony only four times in his life, because if he tries it more than that, the curse would come back on the witch himself. He also told me that if the intended victim found out about it, then the curse would come back onto the person who had requested it.”
Stuhff thought about a way to let the husband know that he had found out about the ceremony, so he filed court papers that requested an injunction against the husband and the unknown medicine man, whom he described in the court documents as “John Doe, A Witch.” The motion described in great detail the alleged ceremony. The opposing attorney appeared extremely upset by the motion, as did the husband and the presiding judge. The opposing lawyer argued to the court that the medicine man had performed “a blessing way ceremony,” not a curse. But Stuhff knew that the judge, who was a Navajo, could distinguish between a blessing ceremony, which takes place in Navajo hogans (homes), and what was obviously a darker ceremony involving lookalike dolls that took place in the woods near a cemetery. The judge nodded in agreement when Stuhff responded. Before the judge could rule, Stuhff requested a recess so that the significance of his legal motion could sink in. The next day, the husband capitulated by agreeing to grant total custody to the mother and to pay all back child support.
“I took it very seriously because he took it seriously,” Stuhff says. “I learned early on that sometimes witches will do things themselves to assist the supernatural, and I knew what that might mean.”
Whether or not Stuhff literally believes that witches have supernatural powers, he acknowledges that this belief is strongly held in the Navajo nation. Certain communities on the reservation had reputations as witchcraft strongholds, he says. It is also not known whether the witch he faced was a skinwalker or not. “Not all witches are skinwalkers,” he says, “but all skinwalkers are witches. And skinwalkers are at the top. They are a witch’s witch, so to speak.”
According to University of Nevada-Las Vegas anthropologist Dan Benyshek, who specializes in the study of Native Americans of the Southwest, “Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I’m no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things—they make people sick, they commit murders. They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into wereanimals and can travel in supernatural ways.”
Benyshek and other scientists do not necessarily endorse the legitimacy of the legends, but they recognize the importance of studying stories about skinwalkers because the power of the belief among Native Americans manifests itself in ways that are very real. “Oh, absolutely,” says Benyshek. “Anthropologists have conducted scientific investigations into the beliefs in Native American witchcraft because of the effects of such beliefs on human health.”
Anthropologist David Zimmerman of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department explains: “Skinwalkers are folks that possess knowledge of medicine, medicine both practical (heal the sick) and spiritual (maintain harmony), and they are both wrapped together in ways that are nearly impossible to untangle.”
As Zimmerman suggests, the flip side of the skinwalker coin is the power of tribal medicine men. Among the Navajo, for instance, medicine men train over a period of many years to become full fledged practitioners in the mystical rituals of the Dine (Navajo) people. The U.S. Public Health Service now works side by side with Navajo medicine men because the results of this collaboration have been proved, time and again, in clinical studies. The medicine men have shown themselves to be effective in treating a range of ailments.
“There has been a lot of serious research into medicine men and traditional healers,” says Benyshek. “As healers, they are regarded as being very effective in some areas.”
But there is a dark side to the learning of the medicine men. Witches follow some of the same training and obtain similar knowledge as their more benevolent colleagues, but they supplement both with their pursuit of the dark arts, or black magic. By Navajo law, a known witch has forfeited its status as a human and can be killed at will. The assumption is that a witch, by definition, is evil.
“Witchcraft was always an accepted, if not widely acknowledged part of Navajo culture,” writes journalist A. Lynn Allison. “And the killing of witches was historically as much accepted among the Navajo as among the Europeans.” Allison has studied what she calls the “Navajo Witch Purge of 1878” and has written a book on the subject. In that year, more than forty Navajo witches were killed or “purged” by tribe members because the Navajo had endured a horrendous forced march at the hands of the U.S. Army in which hundreds were starved, murdered, or left to die. At the end of the march, the Navajo were confined to a bleak reservation that left them destitute and starving. The gross injustice of their situation led them to conclude that witches might be responsible, so they purged their ranks of suspected witches as a means of restoring harmony and balance. Tribe members reportedly found a collection of witch artifacts wrapped in a copy of the Treaty of 1868 and “buried in the belly of a dead person.” It was all the proof they needed to unleash their deadly purge.
“Unexplained sickness or death of tribal members or their livestock could arouse suspicion of witchcraft,” Allison writes in her book. “So could an unexplained reversal of fortune, good or bad.”
In the Navajo world, where witchcraft is important, where daily behavior is patterned to avoid it, prevent it, and cure it, there are as many words for its various forms as there are words for various kinds of snow among the Eskimos.
The Navajo people do not openly talk about skinwalkers, certainly not to outsiders. Author Tony Hillerman, who has lived for many years among the Navajo, used the skinwalker legend as the backdrop for one of his immensely popular detective novels, one that pitted his intrepid Navajo lawmen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn against the dark powers of witchcraft. The following excerpt is from Skinwalkers:
“You think that if I confess that I witched your baby, then the baby will get well and pretty soon I will die,” Chee said. “Is that right? Or if you kill me, then the witching will go away.”
“You should confess,” the woman said. “You should say you did it. Otherwise, I will kill you.”
Hillerman has been harshly criticized by some Navajo for bringing unwanted attention to the subject of skinwalkers. “No one who has ever lived in the Navajo country would ever make light of this sinister situation,” wrote one critic after Hillerman’s book was dramatized on PB S in 2003.
Anthropologist Zimmerman explains why so little information is available on skinwalkers: “Part of the reason you won’t find a lot of information about skinwalkers in the literature is because it is a sensitive topic among the Dine. This is often referred to as proprietary information, meaning it belongs to the Dine people and is not to be shared with the non-Dine”
We know from experience that is it extremely difficult to get Native Americans to discuss skinwalkers, even in the most general terms. Practitioners of a dishgash, or witchcraft, are considered to be a very real presence in the Navajo world. Few Navajo want to cross paths with naagloshii (oryee naaldooshi), otherwise known as a skinwalker. The cautious Navajo will not speak openly about skinwalkers, especially with strangers, because to do so might invite the attention of a witch. After all, a stranger who asks questions about skinwalkers just might be one himself, looking for his next victim.
“They curse people and cause great suffering and death,” one Navajo writer explained. “At night, their eyes glow red like hot coals. It is said that if you see the face of a naagloshii, they have to kill you. If you see one and know who it is, they will die. If you see them and you don’t know them, they have to kill you to keep you from finding out who they are. They use a mixture that some call corpse powder, which they blow into your face. Your tongue turns black and you go into convulsions and you eventually die. They are known to use evil spirits in their ceremonies. The Dine have learned ways to protect themselves against this evil and one has to always be on guard.”
One story told on the Navajo reservation in Arizona concerns a woman who delivered newspapers in the early morning hours. She claims that, during her rounds, she heard a scratching on the passenger door of her vehicle. Her baby was in the car seat next to her. The door flung open, and she saw the horrifying form of a creature she described as half man, half beast, with glowing red eyes and a gnarly arm that was reaching for her child. She fought it off, managed to pull the door closed, then pounded the gas pedal and sped off. To her horror, she says, the creature ran along with the car and continued to try to open the door. It stayed with her until she screeched up to an all-night convenience store. She ran inside, screaming and hysterical, but when the store employee dashed outside, the being had vanished. Outsiders may view the story skeptically, and any number of alternative explanations might be suggested, but it is taken seriously on the Navajo reservation.
Although skinwalkers are generally believed to prey only on Native Americans, there are recent reports from Anglos claiming they encountered skinwalkers while driving on or near tribal lands. One New Mexico Highway Patrol officer told us that while patrolling a stretch of highway south of Gallup, New Mexico, he had had two separate encounters with a ghastly creature that seemingly attached itself to the door of his vehicle. During the first encounter, the veteran law enforcement officer said the unearthly being appeared to be wearing a ghostly mask as it kept pace with his patrol car. To his horror, he realized that the ghoulish specter wasn’t attached to his door after all. Instead, he said, it was running alongside his vehicle as he cruised down the highway at a high rate of speed.
The officer said he had a nearly identical experience in the same area a few days later. He was shaken to his core by these encounters but didn’t realize that he would soon get some confirmation that what he had seen was real. While having coffee with a fellow highway patrolman not long after the second incident, the cop cautiously described his twin experiences. To his amazement, the second officer admitted having his own encounter with a white-masked ghoul, a being that appeared out of nowhere and then somehow kept pace with his cruiser as he sped across the desert. The first officer told us that he still patrols the same stretch of highway and that he is petrified every time he enters the area.
One Caucasian family still speaks in hushed tones about its encounter with a skinwalker, even though it happened in 1983. While driving at night along Route 163 through the massive Navajo reservation, the four members of the family felt that someone was following them. As their truck slowed to round a sharp bend, the atmosphere changed, and time itself seemed to slow down. Then something leaped out of a roadside ditch at the vehicle.
“It was black and hairy and was eye level with the cab,” one of the witnesses recalled. “Whatever this thing was, it wore a man’s clothes. It had on a white and blue checked shirt and long pants. Its arms were raised over its head, almost touching the top of the cab. It looked like a hairy man or a hairy animal in man’s clothing, but it didn’t look like an ape or anything like that. Its eyes were yellow and its mouth was open.”
The father, described as a fearless man who served two tours in Vietnam, turned completely white, the blood drained from his face. The hair on his neck and arms stood straight up, like a cat under duress, and noticeable goose bumps erupted from his skin. Although time seemed frozen during this bizarre interlude, the truck continued on its way, and the family was soon miles down the highway.
A few days later, at their home in Flagstaff, the family awoke to the sounds of loud drumming. As they peered out their windows, they saw the dark forms of three “men” outside their fence. The shadowy beings tried to climb the fence to enter the yard but seemed inexplicably unable to cross onto the property. Frustrated by their failed entry, the men began to chant in the darkness as the terrified family huddled inside the house.
The story leaves several questions unanswered. If the beings were skinwalkers, and if skinwalkers can assume animal form or even fly, it isn’t clear why they couldn’t scale a fence. It is also not known whether the family called the police about the attempted intrusion by strangers.
The daughter, Frances, says she contacted a friend, a Navajo woman who is knowledgeable about witchcraft. The woman visited the home, inspected the grounds, and offered her opinion that the intruders had been skinwalkers who were drawn by the family’s “power” and that they had intended to take that power by whatever means necessary. She surmised that the intrusion failed because something was protecting the family, while admitting that it was all highly unusual since skinwalkers rarely bother non-Indians. The Navajo woman performed a blessing ceremony at the home. Whether the ceremony had any legitimacy or not, the family felt better for it and has had no similar experiences since then.
This disturbing account is not offered as proof of anything, particularly since we have not personally interviewed the witnesses. It is presented only as an illustration of the intense fear and unsettling descriptions that permeate skinwalker lore, which is accepted at face value by the Native Americans for whom the skinwalker topic is not just a spooky children’s story.
So exactly how and when did the skinwalker legend intersect with the Gorman ranch? Junior Hicks says his friends in the Ute tribe believe that the skinwalker presence in the Uinta Basin extends back at least fifteen generations. The Utes, described by historians as a fierce and warlike people, were sometimes aligned with the Navajo against common enemies during the 1800s. But the alliance didn’t last. When the Utes first acquired horses from the Spanish, they enthusiastically embraced the Spanish example by engaging in the slave trade. They reportedly abducted Navajos and other Indians and sold them in New Mexico slave markets. Later, during the American Civil War, some Ute bands took orders from Kit Carson in a military campaign against the Navajo. According to Hicks, the Utes believe that the Navajo put a curse on their tribe in retribution for many perceived transgressions. And ever since that time, Hicks was told, the skinwalker has plagued the Ute people.
The ranch property has been declared off-limits to tribal members because it lies in the path of the skinwalker. Even today, Utes refuse to set foot on what they see as cursed land. But the tribe doesn’t necessarily believe that the skinwalker lives on the ranch. Hicks says the Utes told him that the skinwalker lives in a place called Dark Canyon, which is not far from the ranch. In the early 1980s, Hicks sought permission from tribal elders to explore the canyon. He’d been told there are centuries old petroglyphs in Dark Canyon, some of which depict the skinwalker. But the tribal council denied his request to explore the canyon. One member later confided to Hicks that the tribe denied the request because it did not want to disturb the skinwalker for fear that it might “create problems.” The tribe’s advice to Hicks: “Leave it alone.”
Dan Benyshek suggests that some parts of this Utes’ account don’t add up. He thinks it unlikely that the Navajo would enlist the assistance of a skinwalker to carry out their revenge on the Utes, no matter how much the tribe might want some payback on their enemy. “The skinwalkers are regarded as selfish, greedy, and untrustworthy,” Benyshek says. “If the Navajo knew someone to be a skinwalker, they would probably kill him, not ask for his help with the Utes. Besides, even if he was asked, the skinwalker would be unlikely to help the Navajo get revenge, since his motives are entirely evil and self-serving. From the Navajo perspective, this story doesn’t make sense.”
But from the Ute perspective, it could ring true. “The Utes could very likely have concluded that the curse is real,” explains Benyshek. “Different tribes or bands would often tell stories about the evil motives of other tribes they were in conflict with, about how another tribe was in league with witches, or how other tribes were cannibals. The Utes might tell themselves this story as a way to explain their own misfortunes.”
Hicks told us that the Indians say they see them a lot. “When they go out camping,” he says, “they sprinkle bark around their campsites and light it as protection against these things. But it’s not just Indians. Whites see them, too.” Like his Ute neighbors, Hicks sometimes uses the term skinwalker and Sasquatch interchangeably. He says he’s seen photographs of the telltale huge footprints often associated with Bigfoot, taken in the vicinity of the Gorman ranch. But whether it was a run-of-the mill Sasquatch or a far more sinister skinwalker isn’t always clear, even to those who accept the existence of both.
“There was an incident sixteen years ago where a skinwalker was on a porch in Fort Duchesne,” Hicks remembers. “They called the tribal police and tracked it east toward the river. They took some shots at it and thought they hit it because they found blood on the ground, but they never found a body.”
We also conducted an interview with a Ute man who worked as a security officer for the tribe. He provided us details about his own encounter with a Bigfoot. Brandon Ware (not his real name) received his police training at an academy associated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He says he was working the 10:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. shift, guarding a tribal building near Bottle Hollow. Between midnight and 1:00 in the morning, Ware walked up to check on the building and noticed that the guard dogs inside were calm but staring intently through a window at something outside. They weren’t barking, he said, just looking.
“I could see this big ol’ round thing, you know, in the patio over there,” Ware recalls, “and the hair started raising on my neck and I kinda got worried a little bit trying to figure out what things were. I stood there and watched it for a few minutes, then it came over the top and headed down the road. But I could smell it. Even after it was gone, you could smell it.”
Ware says that when the creature realized it was being observed, it briefly looked over at Ware, then vaulted over a low wall that surrounded the patio area outside the building. He says it took off running toward the Little Chicago neighborhood, crashing into garbage cans as it moved past the homes, and generating a cacophony of loud barking by every dog in the immediate area. Ware then went into the building and telephoned another on-duty officer who was nearby. By the time Ware left the building, the other officer had pulled up in his patrol car.
Ware told the other officer to turn off his engine so they could listen to the hubbub that was still unfolding among the nearby homes. “We listened a little bit and we could hear it. Then we jumped in and took off. We headed down the hill to see if we could catch up to it.”
The two officers didn’t see the creature again that night, but they had no trouble tracing its path through the cluster of homes because they were able to follow a noticeable trail of scattered garbage cans. “It must have gone straight on through,” Ware recalls. “We could see where cans—people usually tie up their cans—them were all off. I told the other officer, ‘Hey man, maybe it picked up them cans and was throwing them at those dogs.’ ”
Ware provided further details about what he had seen. His initial impression was of something dark and round. But he says that when the creature stood erect to vault over the patio wall, it appeared to be “huge.” Ware was carrying a large flashlight at the time of the encounter. He says he was using the flashlight just minutes before while checking the doors of the building, but when he tried to use it to illuminate the creature, the light wouldn’t turn on. When the creature took off running down the hill, the flashlight clicked back on.
“He moved quick,” he told us. “Whatever it was, it moved. I called him a ‘he’—it could have been a she. It could have been whatever, but he moved quick going down through there. But it was kind of cool. It was neat. I never knew it.it was something I’ve never seen before. I’ve heard about them. I heard the old people talking about some of these things.”
Just a few nights later, Ware got a chance for a second look. He and another officer, Bob (not his real name), were patrolling a back road that emerges at a spot known as Shorty’s Hill. They emerged from the road into a pasture area that is punctuated by a large rock. “I don’t know if it was the same guy or not,” Ware says. “It was a big ol’ black hairy thing hanging there, and when it turned around, it had big ol’ eyes on him. It had big ol’ red eyes on him about yea big. We’d just passed it and I told Bob, ‘There he is,’ and then he come to a screeching halt and we backed up. By the time we got out, it was gone.”
Ware described the creature’s eyes as being “coal red” and unusually large. He isn’t sure whether the headlights of the patrol car might have affected his perception of the beast’s eye color, but tends to doubt it. He has no doubt about the presence of the beast itself. “We got out there to go look and we had shotguns and pistols and everything. We were going to blow him away,” Ware admits.
When pressed for his opinion of what he had seen, whether it might have been a Sasquatch or even a skinwalker, Ware’s response seemed to draw a distinction between the two, but the distinction became blurry as the conversation progressed and Ware explained his understanding of tribal lore.
“Sasquatch, he’s an old man, an old man that lives on a mountain,” he explained. “He just comes in and looks at people and then he goes back out again. He just lives there all his life, never takes care of himself, and just smells real bad. Almost like, almost like that guy, like he is dirty, dirty human being smell is what it smelled like. a real deep, bad odor. It smelled like dirty bad underarms. The closer I got, the worse the smell got.” Could the creature he saw have been a skinwalker?
“Nope,” said Ware. “A skinwalker’s smaller. A skinwalker is the size of humans, six foot and under. They don’t come in most of the time to where the animals are at. They come in where people are at.
They can come right here and you’d never know he was standing here looking at you in the middle of the night. They can take the shape of anything they want to take the shape of. Like I said, they’re medicine.”
Ware said that skinwalker sightings among the Utes are not uncommon. He told us of an encounter with two shape-shifters near the Gorman ranch. The figures he described are so unusual, so far outside our own concept of reality as to be almost comical, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. One local who saw them in the road in Fort Duchesne described them as humans with dog heads smoking cigarettes. But Ware was perfectly serious in his description. He certainly did not bare his soul for comic effect, and we have no interest in making light of his story. For him, and for many others, skinwalkers are as real as the morning sun or the evening moon. They are a part of everyday life, and they most certainly are integral to the story of the Gorman ranch.
Could the Utes have used the skinwalker curse as an all-encompassing explanation for their assorted tribal misfortunes, as Benyshek asks? Or are they relying on the legend as an umbrella explanation for the wide range of paranormal events that have been reported in the vicinity of their lands for generations—in particular, in the vicinity of the ranch?
If a skinwalker really is a shape-shifter, capable of mind control and other trickery, might it also have the ability to conjure up nightmarish visions of Bigfoot or UFOs? Could it steal and mutilate cattle, incinerate dogs, generate images of monsters, unknown creatures, or extinct species, and could it also frighten hapless residents with poltergeist like activity?
At the very least, the skinwalker legend might be a convenient way for the Utes to grasp a vast menu of otherwise inexplicable events, the same sort of events that might stymie and confuse a team of modern scientists.
Chapter 6
High Strangeness
Winter had set in and the temperatures dropped precipitously. Thirty or forty below was not unusual for this time of the year in northeastern Utah. This was very different from the mild winters in New Mexico the family had left behind, but they did not regret their move. At least, not yet.
Tom had taken to spending a lot of time out at night trying to get a handle on the weirdness on his property, which had really begun to escalate once he brought his cattle onto the acreage. Every night, Gorman crept like a ghostly wraith around the land, trying to catch the intruders in a better light. He was getting nowhere fast. They seemed to have very good antennae. He could see them only in the distance, never up close.
At the end of one fruitless night, the hard-packed snow crunched underfoot as he walked slowly back from the western part of the ranch. It was probably thirty below and Tom wanted to call it a night. He was freezing cold. As he trudged home, to his north lay the snow-covered slope of the bluff, and the post blizzard freshness bathed everything in an eerie pale light. A slight movement out of the corner of his eye caught Tom’s attention. He turned toward the ridge and his jaw slackened. Starkly outlined against the snow-covered ridge was an aircraft that seemed to have just appeared out of nowhere. It was about thirty or forty feet long, and it reminded Gorman of a snub-nosed, smaller hybrid version of the F-117 and the B-2. But it was completely silent. There was no wind, and the stillness was uncanny.
The aircraft was no more than twenty feet off the ground and, as it moved slightly toward him, a recurring pattern of tiny multicolored lights danced their way across the snow. The lights were obviously coming from the aircraft, but Tom couldn’t make out how they were being projected onto the snow. The total silence and barely perceptible movement of the object convinced Tom that there was no way he would have seen it if it hadn’t been so plainly silhouetted against the white snow. Its jet-black color and the noiseless slow motion combined to give him the impression that it was defying gravity.
Tom crouched in the snow to avoid being seen. It was moving slowly along the ridge and seemed to be quartering the ground as if looking for something. Its tiny “disco” lights traced their silent pattern in the snow as the object slowly turned at the end of the ridge and then resumed its journey over the snow, searching for God knows what. It was a slow, methodical search, but for what? The outline of the object, less than a hundred yards away, gave Tom a good view of its short, matte-black wings. It was definitely like a small version of the F-117 “stealth fighter.” The odd angled design seemed quite similar. But Tom knew that the F-117 was extremely noisy.
As Tom stretched his aching, freezing body, his bones cracked in the still air. Instantly, the disco lights turned off and the object turned toward him. It hovered silently less than a hundred yards away and only fifteen or twenty feet off the ground. Tom held his breath. The object moved silently away from him without ever increasing its speed and then disappeared into the gloomy night beyond the ridge. Tom heaved a sigh of relief and awkwardly got to his knees in the snow. He looked back several times at the area near the ridge where he had last seen the silent black phantom.
What was this advanced technology? he wondered. Who owned it? And what on earth was it doing there on a ranch in Utah? Gorman silently let himself into the homestead where his family slept and gratefully embraced the warmth.
Several weeks later, Ellen was driving their battered old Chevette home from work when another incident occurred. It was about six o’clock in the evening. Tom was out of town for a couple of days.
The kids were staying with friends and she was not looking forward to spending the night alone on this property. She had jumped back into the car after closing the entrance gate behind her when she noticed a black shadow moving slowly over the car. It was like a dark cloud, but the night was clear.
Looking up, she gasped as she saw a large black, triangular object moving slowly and apparently pacing her car as she drove it slowly along the rutted dirt track toward the homestead. She was deathly frightened. The triangular aircraft made no noise as it flew no more than twenty or thirty feet above her car. She could see it out her front windshield and she could see the stubby matte-black wings as she looked out the car’s side windows.
She saw tiny multicolored red, green, blue, and yellow lights on the ground on both sides of her as she stepped on the gas. The thing kept pace with her for the short quarter-mile drive, and when she pulled into her driveway, the black triangle continued west over the house until she lost sight of it in the gloomy night. She was now badly frightened. She remembered her husband’s description of the silent, stealth shaped-fighter object silhouetted against the snow and she figured the thing was back. She called her husband in his hotel room. He managed to calm her down.
An hour later, she had eaten a quick solitary meal and was washing the dishes. As she looked west out into the dark night, she was startled to see what looked like a large RV parked in the pasture, no more than two hundred yards from her window. The interior of the RV was brightly lit and she could see what looked like a desk inside. Idly, she wondered what on earth an RV was doing trespassing on their property. More to the point, how could it have made it onto the property? After all, there was only one entrance to the ranch and that was right past her home.
Then, a black-colored figure moved into view and sat behind the desk. Her sharp eyesight made out what appeared to be a black uniform, including some kind of headgear. The figure was just sitting at a desk in the night on her property in the middle of a remote ranch in Utah. How weird. The figure suddenly stood up and went to what appeared to be a light-filled doorway. The size of the figure outlined against the brightly lit interior of the RV gave her the chills. The figure looked huge and probably male. If that was a normal RV doorway, he was maybe seven feet tall. And he appeared to be wearing all black clothing, something like a black visor over his face, and knee-high boots.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that the bizarre black triangle she had seen and this threatening black colored silhouetted form might be connected. The figure seemed to be looking out the brightly lit doorway and staring directly at her. She could feel his cold gaze. Quickly, she closed the window drapes and hurriedly called her husband. She wanted him back as quickly as possible. Given the note of high-pitched panic in her voice, Tom decided to return quickly to the ranch. He drove all night and arrived the next morning. Together they walked down to where she had seen the “RV”
Both of them saw the huge footprints in the soft mud at the same time. Ellen became almost hysterical. The size of the boot shaped prints shocked Tom. They were almost eighteen inches long. The prints did not resemble those of a military boot, as there were no ribs, just a smooth surface with a prominent rounded heel.
This event convinced the Gormans not to let their kids out at night. Something that they couldn’t explain was lurking on their property. Ellen used to love walking at night, feeling the wind blowing on her face. That too ended. Henceforth, the Gorman family members were much more cautious. It finally dawned on them that they might be in danger.
Chapter 7
Chupas
The Gormans obviously witnessed some unidentified flying objects over their property and felt threatened by them. Was their fear justified? We think it was an appropriate reaction, especially given the fact the rectangular objects they had seen had previously been linked to human injuries— and death. In Brazil, these box-shaped craft that are said to make a sound like a refrigerator are known as chupas.
Dr. Jacques Vallee, a scientist who has carefully and intensively investigated the UFO phenomenon for more than four decades, went to South America in the 1980s to investigate the chupa wave in Brazil and the numerous reports of UFO close encounters that have resulted in the death or injury of witnesses. The results of his extensive field investigations are detailed in his book Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact. For example, in Parnarama in central Brazil, Vallee reports that at least five people had died “following close encounters with what were described as boxlike UFOs equipped with powerful light beams.” Many of the victims were hunters who, following the local tradition, had climbed into jungle trees at night to wait for passing animals that they could spotlight and shoot. According to researcher Simon Harvey-Wilson, in an ironic twist, the hunters had themselves been hunted by UFO craft, which injured or killed them using light beams of their own.
Harvey-Wilson continues. “As Vallee reports, these chupas (UFOs) ‘are said to make a humming sound like a refrigerator or a transformer, and this sound does not change when the object accelerates. The object does not seem large enough to contain a human pilot.’ In one case a victim called Dionizio General ‘was atop a hill when an object hovered above him and shot a beam in his direction; it was described as “a big ray of fire.” The witness, Jose dos Santos, testified that Dionizio seemed to receive a shock and came rolling down the hill. For the following three days he was insane with terror, then he died.’
Witnesses described the light beams as being blinding, like electrical arcs, with pulsating colors inside and smelling unpleasant, which Vallee suspects may be ozone.”
By November 1977, according to Vallee, the physician in charge of the health unit on Colares Island, Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira, “had seen no fewer than thirty-five patients claiming injuries related to the chupas. All of them had suffered lesions to the face or the thoracic area.” These lesions, which resembled radiation injuries, “began with intense reddening of the skin in the affected area. Later the hair would fall out and the skin would turn black. There was no pain, only a slight warmth. One also noticed small puncture marks in the skin. The victims were men and women of varying ages, without any pattern.”
Vallee published a more comprehensive list of symptoms drawn up by Dr. Carvalho:
• a feeling of weakness; some could hardly walk
• dizziness and headaches
• local losses of sensitivity; numbness and trembling
• pallid complexion
• low arterial pressure
• anemia, with low hemoglobin levels
• blackened skin where the light had hit, with several red-purple circles, hot and painful, two to three centimeters in diameter
• two puncture marks inside the red circles resembling mosquito bites, hard to the touch
• hair in the blackened area fell out and did not rejuvenate, as if follicles had been destroyed
• no nausea or diarrhea
In describing their experiences with these light beams, most victims claimed, according to Vallee, that “they were immediately immobilized, as if a heavy weight pushed against their chest. The beam was about [seven or eight centimeters] in diameter and white in color. It never hunted for them but hit them suddenly. When they tried to scream no sound would come out, but their eyes remained open. The beam felt hot, ‘almost as hot as a cigarette burn,’ barely tolerable. After a few minutes the column of light would slowly retract and disappear.” Apart from those who had been killed by these beams, most people’s symptoms usually disappeared after seven days.
After asking various forensic pathologists to review his findings, Vallee surmised that “what UFO witnesses describe as ‘light’ may, in fact, be a complex combination of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Many of the injuries described in Brazil, however, are consistent with the effects of high power pulsed microwaves.” Subsequently he pointed out that pulsed microwaves may “interfere with the central nervous system. Such a beam could cause the dizziness, headaches, paralysis, pricklings, and numbness reported to us by so many witnesses.”
Vallee tackled the issue of whether these Brazilian UFOs are deliberately trying to kill people or not. If they are, he considers that they are fairly inefficient. After all, someone in a helicopter with a high powered rifle and night scope could probably do a better job. He does, however, point out that a radiation beam that was designed merely to stun people at one range might be lethal at another range.
Journalist Bob Pratt also investigated the injuries that occurred during the Brazilian UFO wave and wrote a book about it calledUFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil. Like Vallee, Pratt’s investigations of the Brazil wave turned up several deaths and injuries from UFOs. In other words, the New Age bromides that UFOs were actually friendly space brothers intent on the spiritual enlightenment of the human race were not borne out by the experiences of the locals along the northern coast of Brazil.
The issue of injuries from UFOs also cropped up in North America during the last week of 1980. On the evening of December 29, according to accounts by researcher John Schuessler and written accounts by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Colby Landrum had visited several small towns in the Piney Woods area of east Texas looking for a bingo game but found that bingo throughout the area had been canceled for Christmas. Instead they decided to have a meal at a restaurant in New Caney. Betty Cash was then a fifty-one-year-old businesswoman who owned a restaurant and a grocery store. Vickie Landrum, fifty-seven, worked for Betty in the restaurant. Colby Landrum, Vickie’s grandson, was seven.
According to the NICAP report, after leaving the restaurant between 8:20 and 8:30 P.M. , Betty drove along Highway FM 1485, a road usually used only by people who live in the area because it is so isolated. Although the location is only about thirty miles from Houston, it is thinly populated and is covered by oak and pine trees, swamps, and lakes.
At about 9:00, Colby noticed a bright lighted object above the treetops some distance away. He pointed it out to the others. As they drove on, it appeared to get larger and larger. They realized that the object was approaching the road, but they hoped to get by it in time and leave it behind. But before they could do so, the object straddled the road and blocked their way. The object, many times larger than the car, remained hovering at treetop level and sent down an occasional large cone of fire. In between these blasts it would descend until it was no more than about twenty-five feet off the surface of the road. Vickie described it as “like a diamond of fire.”
When Betty eventually brought the car to a standstill, the object was only sixty yards away. It looked as if it was made of dull aluminum and glowed so brightly that it lit up the surrounding trees. The four points of the diamond were blunt rather than sharp, and blue spots or lights ringed its center. Had it not come to rest over the road, the cone of fire from its lowest point would have set the forest on fire. The object also emitted an intermittent bleeping sound. The two women got the impression that maybe the giant object was having some kind of engine trouble.
The three of them got out of the car to take a better look at the object. Vickie stood by the open door on the right-hand side of the car with her left hand resting on the car roof. Vickie is a Christian who does not believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial life, and when she saw the bright object she thought the end of the world had come. Because she expected to see Jesus come out of the light, she stared at it intently. Colby begged his grandmother to get back in the car. After about three minutes she did so and told him not to be afraid because “when that big man comes out of the burning cloud, it will be Jesus.”
As Vickie held Colby, she screamed at Betty to get back in the car with them. But Betty was so fascinated by the object that she walked around to the front of the car and stood there gazing at it, bathed in the bright light, the heat from it burning her skin. Eventually, as the thing began to move up and away, she moved back to the car door. When she went to open the door, she found the handle so painfully hot that she had to use her leather jacket to protect her hands and get back in the car.
As the three of them watched the departing object, a large number of helicopters appeared overhead. “They seemed to rush in from all directions,” Betty recalled later. “It seemed like they were trying to encircle the thing.” Within a few seconds the flying diamond had disappeared behind the trees lining the road. It was then that they realized how hot the interior of the car had become. They switched off the heater and put on the air conditioner instead.
When the effects of the bright light had worn off, Betty drove off down the darkened highway. After driving at sixty miles an hour for five minutes, the object was clearly visible some distance ahead and looked like a bright cylinder of light. Even from that distance, it was still lighting up the surrounding area and illuminating the helicopters.
From their new vantage point, they counted twenty-three helicopters. Many of them were identified as the large double-rotor CH-47 Chinooks, the others were very fast single-rotor types and appeared to be Bell-Hueys but were never properly identified. As soon as the flying diamond and helicopters were a safe distance ahead, Betty drove on. When she reached an intersection, she turned away from the flight path of the object and toward Dayton, where the three of them lived. She dropped Vickie and Colby off at their home at about 9:50 and went home by herself. A friend and her children were waiting up for Betty, but by this time she was feeling too ill to tell them about what had happened.
Over the next few hours, Betty’s skin turned red as if badly sunburned. Her neck swelled and blisters erupted and broke on her face, scalp, and eyelids. She started to vomit and continued to do so throughout the night. By morning she was almost in a coma. Sometime between midnight and 2 A.M. , Vickie and Colby began to suffer similar symptoms, although less severe. At first they suffered a sunburn like condition and then diarrhea and vomiting.
The following morning, Betty was moved to Vickie’s house and all three were cared for there. Betty’s condition continued to deteriorate, and three days later she was taken to the hospital. The burns and swelling had so radically altered Betty’s appearance that friends who came to visit her in hospital did not recognize her. Her hair began to fall out and her eyes became so swollen that she was unable to see for a week.
Doctors examined all three of them intensively and determined that their conditions suggested that they had been exposed to radiation, possibly ionizing UV or IR. The injuries were not entirely consistent with either ionizing radiation or UV/IR injuries only. Some also suspected that microwave radiation may have literally cooked Betty Cash. Betty died of cancer in 1998, possibly as a result of the radiation she received. Regardless of whether the object they encountered was a secret government project or something else, the injuries they received were real.
The Gormans had every reason to be scared.
Chapter 8
The Window
Of all the extraordinary things that occurred at the Gorman ranch, the most common involved the strange, unworldly orange structures that would appear in the western sky. All family members saw these structures dozens of times. They would appear in the sky and seemed to hover low over the cottonwood trees about a mile away. Tom often used a large, four-foot-high tree stump that stood outside the homestead as a vantage point to steady his binoculars or other viewing equipment. His favorite piece of gear was the scope on a night-vision rifle. He could easily hold it steady while leaning on the tree stump and watch the bizarre orange structure about a mile away. Sometimes the object looked flattened and elongated, and sometimes it looked like a large orange setting sun, bigger than a harvest moon and almost perfectly round.
Tom related how one night he set up his scope on the tree stump to look at a gigantic orange object. The detail was astonishing as he looked at the structure hovering silently in the night sky above the row of cottonwoods. Why did it always appear in roughly the same place? The sun had long since set. In the middle of the orange mass Tom could see what looked to him like “another sky.” Through the magnifying scope he distinctly saw a blue sky. On this particular night, the orange object looked like it was a window into somewhere else where it was still daylight. Tom felt like it could have been a tear or a rent in the sky about a mile away, and through the rent he could see a different world or perhaps a different time. He swore that he actually saw a blue sky through the rent. It was nighttime as he gazed through and it was daytime “on the other side.” For Gorman, this was a rare glimpse into what might actually be happening on his property. After seeing the blue sky, Gorman began to think that the strange events on the ranch might be explained in terms of different dimensions, alternate realities, and such.
Another night, Tom was again sitting near his favorite tree stump, once again puzzling at the orange structure that hovered in the same area over an abandoned homestead about a mile to the west. He was training his night-vision scope on the middle of the orange mass. This time he couldn’t see any sky, but the middle seemed like it had multiple layers, like a three-dimensional onion that moved away from him. And then Tom’s sharp eyes picked out a fast-moving black object that was silhouetted perfectly against the bright orange background. The black object seemed to grow bigger, and Tom could tell that it was moving very rapidly in his direction at the center of the orange “window.” Within seconds, the vaguely triangular object had gained considerably in size and it appeared bigger as it flew directly toward him out of the “hole” in the sky. The object was moving at such a speed and so quietly that he could make out only the black shape. The object then quickly vanished into the night.
Tom had seen something few humans have reported. He had seen a flying object, black and possibly triangular shaped, flying from a great distance from the “other side” of the orange structure to his property. This incident convinced Tom that his ranch was the site of some kind of dimensional doorway through which a flying object entered and maybe even exited this reality. On another occasion, Gorman saw another object exiting at high speed through the orange rent in the sky. Each time, the flying aircraft moved much too quickly for him to get a good idea of its size or exact shape.
When I asked Gorman for a detailed description of the orange shape, he told me that it looked different depending on the observer’s viewing angle. On one occasion, Tom was driving off his property as the orange object appeared. He drove quickly on a narrow road that circled his property, and as he did so, the object became less visible. He reached a point where he simply could not see the object. He then turned around and drove slowly back in the same direction and noticed that the orange object came slowly back into his view. But from the roadway, it looked like a faint orange cloud, almost unnoticeable. As Tom approached his property, he saw the object through his windshield gradually becoming clearer, bigger, and more defined. And finally when he reached the homestead, he understood why other people in the area were not making loud noises about the orange hole in the sky.
The Gorman homestead was the only vantage point from which the orange structure was perfectly visible. It was like a three-dimensional orange tunnel that receded away from them, and the sides of the tunnel were perfectly camouflaged with the sky, so from a side view an observer could see nothing at all. The only perspective that afforded a good view into the interior was directly opposite the mouth of the tunnel. For whatever reason, Tom told me, the “mouth” of the tunnel pointed straight at the Gorman homestead. Motorists passing on the roadway a mere mile away could see only a faint, blurry, orange-colored cloud in the sky. It looked perfectly ordinary.
Chapter 9
Vanished
Other than his family, cattle were the love of Tom Gorman’s life. He was far ahead of his ranching neighbors in terms of his abilities as a breeder of high-end cattle and even as a cattle rancher. Gorman took it personally if even a single animal disappeared or died. He would be out at 3 A.M. in snowstorms taking care of newborn calves. He was obsessed with good ranch management.
Then in winter of 1994-95, some very weird things began to happen to his cattle. Immediately after a severe snowstorm, Tom would begin rounding up the animals from a far-flung corner of his ranch. That way he could have a head count within twenty-four hours. On this particular night, one of his breeding cows had disappeared in the middle of a snowstorm. He spent almost twenty-four hours on horseback plodding through snow twelve inches deep looking for the registered Angus. It was one of his best and he was determined to find her. He imagined that she might have fallen and broken her leg and was slowly freezing to death. He had searched most of the ranch except for a particularly dense area of trees in the southwest.
Now, rounding a thick copse, Tom sighed with relief. Ahead of him were very fresh tracks in the snow.
It would be child’s play to track the missing animal now and bring her back. The tracks were plain as daylight and they wound through the dense thickets. As he followed them, Tom’s brow puckered. From the spacing of the tracks in the snow and from the bits of snow kicked up, his experienced eye could tell that the cow had begun to run. This was unusual behavior for a cow in the middle of a snowstorm. Usually it would huddle near a thick grove of trees and get whatever shelter it could until the storm abated. What was this animal running from? Gorman knew that predators usually do not hunt during a snowstorm. As he tracked the animal, it became apparent that the cow had been running at full tilt. She had swerved and careened madly through bushes. Her tracks had broken off several sizable twigs and even small branches of the thick vegetation. The weird thing was that the cow’s were the only tracks. What was she running from? Tom felt a mixture of puzzlement and dread.
When he rounded a corner and entered a clearing fifty yards in diameter, his breath stopped. The tracks ran wildly out into the middle of the clearing where there was no cover. He felt a cold chill. The tracks just stopped dead in a foot of snow. There was no ambiguity. The animal had just vanished. The last four tracks indicated that the cow was still running at full tilt. The small bits of snow lying around the actual indentations were exactly the same as the previous four imprints. Vainly, he looked left and right, wondering if she could have somehow leaped into a crevice, but there were no crevices. She had just vanished. Gorman quartered the area for half an hour, carefully avoiding the tracks.
What could have lifted a thousand pound cow in full flight off the ground in the middle of a vicious snowstorm? Gorman knew that most helicopters couldn’t do it. But something had bodily and dramatically stolen his cow by removing the running animal from the ground. It just didn’t make sense.
The other possibility was even more fantastic and unbelievable. Could the cow have simply run through a “doorway”? Tom’s mind flashed on the bizarre orange holes in the sky that were becoming increasingly common to him and his family. He hated science fiction. He was a practical man. But he forced himself to ponder the unthinkable. If the cow had run through some kind of “hole,” then that doorway had been a one-way entrance.
Tom never saw his animal again.
Over the next few months, another four animals just disappeared. Tom’s stress level had climbed dramatically as a result. By April 1995, the very long winter had ended and the heavy rains had begun. For nearly two days the rains lashed the ranch and, as usual, Tom was out there tracking his cattle, along with his son Tad, also on horseback. As the rain hammered down and with only about twenty feet of visibility, Tad was chasing one of the calves that had been born a couple of months prior when he passed a bawling heifer in the canal. She was trying to climb up the muddy embankment, but it was so slippery that she kept sliding back into the water. The animal was plainly distressed and was being vocal about it.
Tad made a mental note to turn back to rescue the heifer after catching the calf. It took him twenty minutes to catch the panicked animal and return it to the mother who was waiting patiently in a sheltered grove. Then Tad returned for the struggling heifer. His heart sank as he saw the animal lying motionless in the canal. In spite of the downpour, the canal was not too deep, so he wondered how on earth the heifer had drowned. He dismounted his horse and jumped the few feet into the canal. What he saw made him retch and to holler for his dad.
The heifer was lying motionless, and her entire rear end had been carved out with what looked like an extremely sharp instrument. Gorman came galloping up at the sound of his son’s panicked yells. His face turned ashen when he jumped into the canal with his son. There was no blood in the stream. The cut was flawless. It looked as if a six-inch-diameter, perfectly circular saw with a sucking device had jammed into the heifer’s rear end and effortlessly sucked out the entire insides of the animal without any loss of blood. And it had happened right in the middle of a heavy rainstorm.
Tad swore to his dad that he had seen the animal fully alive and healthy a mere twenty minutes before. Both of them climbed grimly out of the canal in silence. Tom took a rope, tied it around the heifer’s hocks, and with the rope tied around the saddle of his horse, hauled the dead animal out of the canal. He felt sick to his stomach. He wondered what he would tell Ellen so she wouldn’t become hysterical.
The strain of the missing cattle together with the relentless campaign to hide things in her home was beginning to take a toll on his wife. Ellen had begun to feel that something or someone was constantly watching her and waiting for her to leave a room before taking something and hiding it in the microwave. Now this bizarre mutilation had happened with her son and her husband very close by. Tom had heard the phrase “cattle mutilation” before but had dismissed it as the fanciful campfire stories of bored cowboys. He took it very seriously now. He searched the banks of the canal for footprints or tracks, but he knew the heavy rains would have obscured them in a matter of minutes.
Three months later, while riding out early one morning to check his cattle, Tom found yet another mutilated animal. The black Simmental cow was lying near some bushes. He had been worried because he had seen several mysterious lights flying low among his cattle the previous night. The bright yellow headlamps that flew silently and low over the property had become commonplace and created yet more stress and fear for his family. As Tom rode toward the animal, his worst fears were realized. The four-year-old cow’s reproductive organs and rear end had been carved out. As he dismounted from his horse, Tom felt a cold anger welling up inside him. An unknown trespasser was violating the sanctity of private property and his family’s well-being. He was determined to catch whoever it was. And, if possible, make them pay.
Tom’s eye caught a glistening in the sun near the animal’s head. One of the ears had been skillfully removed, and right next to the shoulder, a pool of brownish liquid was reflecting the sun on the animal’s hide. The pool was about two inches in diameter. He looked closely, and it appeared to be evaporating. He gingerly put his finger into it and a thin gel like substance felt cold. He smelled it and noted a strange chemical odor that he did not recognize. He was determined to try to sample the strange substance so he rode swiftly back to the homestead to get a tightly sealed container. When he returned, it was too late. The material had almost completely evaporated. Gorman swore in frustration.
In early 1996, Tom lost two more animals to mutilation, and this time he noticed that the carcasses were decaying much more slowly than they should have, given the humidity and the temperature. Each time parts of the cattle had been removed with the grim precision of a master surgeon. And each time Tom had seen the puzzling lights flitting around his animals the previous night. He also noticed that the mysterious mutilators seemed to prefer to carry out their handiwork under cover of heavy lightning and thunderstorms. How any technology could reliably function in a heavy thunderstorm was beyond him, but Tom had begun to wonder if he was the victim of some very advanced military skullduggery. Was his ranch the site of some military technology concept testing? Gorman was never sure.
Tom was losing his livelihood, and he felt that finding these perpetrators was now an urgent matter. He was sure that these interlopers were breaking the law. They also had very advanced abilities and used extraordinary stealth to carry out their missions. He was at a complete loss to understand what technology could mutilate animals with such precision.
But Tom’s problems with cattle mutilations, although economically devastating, were not unique. They had been widespread throughout the western states, and many eastern states, since the early 1970's.
next
PART 3
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/part-3-hunt-for-skinwalkermutesorbsthe.html
Mutes
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