Hunt for the Skinwalker
Science confronts the Unexplained at
a Remote Ranch in Utah
by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp.
Chapter 21
Dulce
By the end of the summer 1997, the NIDS team had spent about a year hunting a very elusive prey. The initial promise of obtaining data and personal sightings of phenomena had slipped into a strange cacophony of bizarre, unrepeated, transient encounters with something that was difficult to explain. Certainly nothing that had happened so far could be called scientific data on aerial phenomena, which was NIDS’ original mission. The plan for the Utah ranch had been to quickly amass conclusive evidence of a sustained UFO event with video, camera, and other instruments. But whatever had been playing cat-and-mouse games with NIDS personnel was simply too fleeting for us to capture a spectrum of a light or a good video sequence that could be productively subjected to analysis. In short, the abrupt, unexpected events seemed almost designed to evade capture.
As the team continued hunting the phenomenon during 1997, we decided also to begin a second front on another hot spot, with the hopes of gathering enough data from a second location to provide us with a comparative overlap. The area around Dulce, New Mexico, became the focus of my attention for a good part of 1998 and 1999.
The remote town of Dulce lies along Route 64 and has remarkable parallels with the Skinwalker Ranch and the Uinta Basin. Dulce is an isolated town of maybe two thousand people, largely populated by Native Americans, just like the ranch. The Jicarilla Apache reservation completely encompasses Dulce. Also, like the ranch, it is hidden away from the main interstate highway system. It takes an effort to get there.
Dulce lies in a valley surrounded by the majestic peaks of mountains. When you enter the town you immediately sense how run-down the place is. The main street is windswept, and hungry stray dogs search for sustenance. There are no movie theaters and no shopping mall, just a large Best Western hotel that is undoubtedly the town jewel. And near the hotel is a liquor store. The town’s prime entertainment is obvious. Victims of alcoholism can be found lying against street corners, a testimony to the hard life. Until a couple of years ago the local gambling casino was the center of the town’s life, but it closed amid charges of widespread looting of the coffers by unnamed town elders.
At the same time, Dulce has earned a worldwide reputation as a center for paranormal activity. Like the Uinta Basin, in the past thirty years this small, impoverished town has been host to a bewildering assortment of cattle mutilations, UFO activity, Sasquatch sightings, and numerous other oddities. It is accurate to say that Dulce and its surrounds can easily rival the Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah as a hot spot of anomalous activity.
The Dulce area became famous in the late 1970s when a young New Mexico state patrol officer named Gabe Valdez began to investigate, and later report, a series of bizarre mutilations that occurred to the cattle owned by the Gomez family. The Gomez property lies just a few miles outside the center of town. Valdez was an aggressive investigator and he quickly established a reputation in the Apache community as somebody who did not back down in the face of danger. In the numerous bar fights, homicide investigations, and spousal abuse incidents that characterized everyday lawlessness in Dulce, Valdez was often on his own and frequently outgunned. But he never backed down. When the mutilations began to happen on Manuel Gomez’s property, Valdez was right there.
Gomez had begun to complain that someone or something was killing his cattle. The animals were all clustered in a large pasture within a couple of hundred yards of the household. The cattle were usually found the next morning with their eyes, ears, sometimes tongue, rectal region, and reproductive organs removed. Valdez quickly realized that these were not predator or scavenger attacks. The cuts on the animals were precise and usually bloodless. There was definite skill, even artistry, involved. For people who had worked most of their lives around cattle, it was easy to distinguish between the jagged edges and messy blood and guts strewn through the area of predator and scavenger attacks versus the clean, usually bloodless cuts in cattle mutilations. There was no contest. Manuel Gomez eventually lost more than twenty head of cattle and basically went out of business.
Valdez also began tracking strange, round, orange-colored objects that flew around the area and were sometimes observed where a dead cow would later be discovered. Sometimes these objects were the size and shape of a harvest full moon, but unlike the moon, these objects moved in jerky, erratic paths across the sky. Many local Dulce people reported seeing the same objects during the mid- to late 1970s.
I first met Valdez in 1997 when he came to work for the National Institute for Discovery Science. As a parallel project with the Gorman ranch, he and I spent about one hundred days in Dulce. The object of the exercise was to investigate the alleged anomalies that had made Dulce legendary. Valdez had by then retired from law enforcement and was only too happy to continue the investigations with NIDS. After my first trip to Dulce, I realized why most of the amazing events that took place in Dulce had never been publicized: nobody had ever cracked the omerta, or the code of silence, of the Jicarilla Apache tribe.
Valdez was treated like royalty here. On my scores of visits with the stocky, genial police officer, people would run up to him to shake his hand. They would honk their horns as he drove by. It was like accompanying the pope to Dulce. I often suggested to Valdez that he should run for mayor of the town. He would win in a landslide. Valdez would just grin at my suggestion. And of course, the normally reticent inhabitants of Dulce were only too eager to open up to somebody whom Valdez recommended. Over the span of two years, Valdez and I conducted more than seventy interviews with Dulce residents and cataloged a stunning variety of anomalies that had never before seen the light of day.
A study of activity in New Mexico was also useful to NIDS because, like northeastern Utah, Dulce was a desolate area peopled mostly by low-income folks and a large proportion of Native Americans. The area, like northeastern Utah, was far away from the main interstate highway system. Some of the incidents we gathered information about while we were in New Mexico bore no resemblance to those seen on the Utah ranch, while others were similar. What was striking, however, in both New Mexico and in Utah was the sheer variety of the objects seen, and events experienced, by scores of people.
In the late summer of 1979, Terrance Tafoya and Charlie Mundez (not their real names) were relaxing after working on the road by Mount Archuleta just outside Dulce. They were sitting on the tailgate of their truck. It was 8:30 at night and the two were enjoying the peace. Suddenly, over the treetops, about two hundred feet away, a silent silver disc appeared. It was about 150 feet in diameter, metallic, and had a dome on top. It was moving slowly, smoothly, and absolutely quietly. They could easily make out a series of metal struts underneath the craft as it passed over them. Two sets of lights, one blue and one yellow, rotated slowly in a counterclockwise direction underneath the giant craft. The two watched dumbfounded, as the object hovered no more than 150-200 feet above them for about five minutes.
They were amazed that such an object could even fly. The object then tilted at an angle of about forty five degrees and began climbing slowly. Then from a stationary position it suddenly and noiselessly took off across the valley. The eyewitnesses estimated that it took about four seconds to cover the sixty miles over to the distant peaks where it disappeared from their view. The object left a flash of light in its wake.
Although the object was bigger than the one seen by the Gormans in September 1996, the silver disc bore resemblance in shape to the object seen in Utah. In short, it was a classic “UFO.” Partly because of the multiple incidents reported by people around the Mount Archuleta area, NIDS began a surveillance program with personnel and equipment on the top of Mount Archuleta. The program was nowhere near as intensive as the one carried out in Utah, but such was the breadth and scope of the previously untold reports that NIDS began to monitor the area.
We tracked down and interviewed both Charlie Mundez and Terrance Tafoya separately. Dulce interviews required a special technique. We learned to arrive unannounced in the village and simply to drive around the town for a couple of days asking quietly about the whereabouts of our target witnesses. Over the next couple of hours we would gradually track them down and then walk up and nonchalantly begin a conversation. Dulce at that time did not have a great number of telephones that actually worked, so making telephone calls in an attempt to track down witnesses was a waste of time. And once again, Gabe Valdez was invaluable because he not only knew the witnesses but where to find them.
Charlie Mundez, then in his late sixties, told us he had also seen something else. He was fifteen years of age at the time and was driving in the direction of Dulce with his family. It was still daylight at 5:30 on a summer’s day. When they crested a rise, the family all saw a huge craft hovering above the valley. Mundez’s recollection was that the craft was shaped somewhat like the Tacoma dome; it had a flat bottom and it stretched from Dulce Lake all the way across to Archuleta Mesa. Mundez declared that the object was probably five miles across. He described a single horizontal row of windows that spanned the middle of the giant craft as it hovered peacefully over the valley. He also said that he could vaguely make out the landscape behind the object, making it slightly transparent. Yet he could also easily see the boundaries of the giant object. The family watched in silence as they continued to drive toward their home in Dulce, but when they arrived and got out of their vehicle and looked up, the object was gone.
We heard of many similar incidents from witnesses around Dulce, many of whom had never told anybody outside the tribe before, with some of the incidents going back to the early 1950s, just as they did in the Uinta Basin. This may be unsurprising given the rash of sightings of UFOs nationwide that occurred at the time, but we felt it was significant that so many people in such out-of-the-way places as Utah and northern New Mexico had witnessed such a wide variety of craft and creatures at around the same time.
We also separately interviewed two very high-ranking officials from the Jicarilla Apache tribe who told us of an incident that had happened in January 1996. Nine people witnessed this incident as they traveled in four cars in a convoy at about 11:30 on a clear moonlit night on the way back from a basketball game.
Visibility was superb. One of the eyewitnesses said that he saw something way off in the distance that looked like a set of pylons with blue and red lights on top, somewhat like a large natural gas platform there. The sight confused him because he knew the road well and had never before seen a natural gas platform. Because of their official positions and involvement in local politics, both have requested anonymity.
As the cars drew nearer, they saw that the “natural gas platform” was actually a huge flying object slowly moving toward them. It looked as if it was just about to crash into the cliff on the edge of the canyon.
One of the officials reached for his cell phone in order to report an aircraft accident and to alert search-and-rescue teams when he noticed that the object was now moving slowly directly over the four cars as they drove through the canyon. The object was huge, one hundred to two hundred feet above them. According to the second official, the object was so big that it spanned the entire canyon from wall to wall and he still could not see the ends of it. This would make the craft more than a mile across.
As it moved slowly over their cars, both people said the underside consisted of rows of dull metal sheets overlapping like roof slates. The second official described seeing large rivets about a foot to two feet in diameter and described the shape of the object from underneath as roughly circular. The first official said that he did not know the shape from underneath but that the object from the side had three large domes on top. The second official pulled his car over and got out just in time to see the aircraft disappearing over the canyon wall. There was no sound. The object seemed instantaneously to appear a long distance away as if it had silently moved at great speed.
Following the interviews, I drove with Valdez to the precise spot in the canyon described by the two witnesses. Indeed, the approximate distance from canyon wall to wall was just under a mile, and for a single object to have spanned the entire canyon, flying above it, implied an almost impossibly large craft. Both eyewitnesses in separate interviews admitted being extremely puzzled as to how an object of such dimensions could move through the air so smoothly, so silently, and so easily. The kind of huge object that flew over Cordoba Canyon would later become famous around the turn of the millennium as thousands of people began reporting football-field-sized objects flying low over populated areas.
At 3:30 on the afternoon of November 17, 1984, Bruce Montoya and a friend drove onto another friend’s property located about seven miles north of Dulce, just over the Colorado border. It was a cloudy afternoon and slightly muggy. They dismounted from their truck to sit on the porch. Bruce’s AK-47 was leaning against the wall of the cabin. Their dog, which was tied to the porch, began barking. They followed the dog’s gaze. Coming slowly across the pasture, about fifty feet up in the air, was the strangest thing they had ever seen. The nearest Bruce could describe it to me was that it looked like a gray manta ray. It was no more than fifty yards away at the closest point to them. The object had upraised wing tips and was about one hundred feet in diameter, but without the tail that a stingray has. It moved at about five miles per hour across their line of sight. The dog became very silent as the object made a noticeable whoof-whoof sound. The two witnesses watched in amazement as the object moved past them, then slowly tilted so that they could see three perfectly circular porthole like structures underneath.
Bruce reached for his AK-47, rapidly inserted a clip into the breech, and looked through the telescopic sight. He focused on the surface of the craft as it moved slowly in front of him. Without knowing what he was doing, he slowly squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. The craft continued to move slowly in front of him, beginning to angle away toward the treetops a couple of hundred yards away. The slow movement seemed almost dream-like. After a couple of minutes, the craft drifted over the treetops and seemed to become slightly transparent. Then there was a flash, and although he couldn’t be sure, he thought that the object had moved away from them at an impossible speed.
Montoya later speculated that the object might have been a creature. Its rough, leathery skin with ridges and dimples reminded him strongly of whale skin or rough sharkskin. It seemed and “felt” biological to him. Was this a creature or a craft? The manta ray shape was vaguely reminiscent of the black Stealth fighter-like object that Gorman saw on the snow-covered ranch in the winter of 1995- 96. The way the black object reacted to Gorman’s slight noise, swiveling suddenly toward him and extinguishing all lights, was much like a wild beast would react. And did the object or creature speed away or disappear into another dimension, as Gorman often wondered of the strange sights on his property?
From the window of his house, Montoya has repeatedly seen small bouncing lights zigzagging over the ridge where several well-known Dulce mutilations occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s. He told us of looking out his widow at about 2:30 one morning in October 1998 and seeing two whitish balls of light flying alternately apart and then together. The balls moved very quickly up and down, zigzagging, and executing right-angled turns. Montoya said that this has been a common sight in Dulce for years.
Dulce in the 1960s and the 1970s was also home to unusual creatures, just as the Utah ranch was. In 1962, Sheila Bromberg was returning home late after working at a local restaurant. She thinks it was about 1A.M. when the strange event happened. Sheila is a small, quiet woman close to seventy years of age, with bright eyes and an engaging manner. She has spent the last twenty years of her life helping out at the tribal center in Dulce. In her quiet way she is passionate about the plight of the Apache tribe in Dulce, the devastating effects of alcohol, chronic disease, lack of education, and other social problems. She does what she can. She was very reluctant to talk with us but eventually agreed to meet with us at the Jicarilla Apache social center—the Best Western Hotel, in other words. We bought her lunch and spoke casually.
Sheila told us she was glad to see her cat standing to greet her that morning as she walked to her doorway. When she lifted the cat, the animal suddenly arched its back, hissed loudly, and dug its nails into her shoulder. This was highly unusual behavior for her pet. The cat was focused on something behind her, but when Sheila looked over her left shoulder, she saw nothing. Then, with the cat still hissing and plainly alarmed, Sheila looked over her right shoulder and saw a small figure standing nearby. She nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was not human. It had a large head, large eyes, and grayish wrinkled skin. Sheila nearly screamed.
The creature simply stood there, unmoving. Sheila quickly opened the door of her home and with the cat still on her shoulder ran inside, where she stayed for some time. When she plucked up the courage to go outside, she circled her house more than once, but the creature was nowhere to be found.
It is worth noting that Sheila’s experience happened in 1962, about twenty years before the huge media publicity regarding the “Grays” and nearly thirty years before the publication of Whitley Streiber’s famous book Communion with its unforgettable painting of the creature on the cover. Sheila’s experience has the ring of authenticity because it predated all of that publicity and also because she had told only her closest friends in Dulce about it. We confirmed that she had actually described this event to others back in the early 1960s.
In the 1970s, Sheila saw a large Sasquatch-like creature standing less than a hundred yards away from her. The creature was over seven feet tall. It stared at her for several minutes before sidling back into the forest. This was not the only sighting of the famed Sasquatch in the area around Dulce.
Because of Valdez’s unparalleled access, we were able routinely to “drop in” and interview some top-level members of the tribe. It was highly unusual to have such access, especially for a white person.
One of the top three people in the tribe in the late 1990s was Wayne Gonzales (not his real name). Wayne is a stocky, well-built man is his early sixties with an impish and irreverent sense of humor. He is also a successful rancher and owns a sizable spread outside Dulce. Wayne told us of an encounter that he had with a Sasquatch on his property in the summer of 1993. In was during late afternoon. Wayne was sitting on his horse with three of his dogs nearby when he saw a Sasquatch break cover, running from the trees. The creature, which was covered with long brown hair, appeared to be running from an invisible pursuer. It was running on two legs like a human and it was running fast, passing just 150 feet away from Wayne. The creature was as tall as Wayne as he sat on his horse, or at least seven feet high.
The three dogs reacted to the creature’s appearance by running under the horse, which was unique behavior for the dogs, to say the least. The creature then saw Wayne, since it had been looking over its shoulder on the opposite side, but it did not react to him. The creature ran swiftly toward a nearby hill and suddenly disappeared “into thin air.” Wayne was certain that the creature did not run out of sight but actually ran through some kind of invisible “opening” before vanishing. The dogs stayed very close to the horse as Wayne rode to the top of the hill. Suddenly, the horse jumped several feet as if clearing an obstacle, but Wayne could see nothing. He noticed the dogs also jumping, but he could still see nothing.
Wayne’s description is striking for two reasons when compared with the incidents on the Utah ranch: first, because the creature itself was seen in both New Mexico and in Utah and second, because Wayne’s narrative encompassed an apparent vanishing of the creature into thin air.
A game and fish warden who had retired by the time we interviewed him around Dulce told us of his sighting of a strange, heavily muscled creature that walked across the track a mere fifty feet in front of him in the 1980s. The creature looked like a hyena but had a prominent, possibly even a bushy, tail. This creature was reminiscent of or similar to the brown, heavily muscled creature that attacked the Gorman horses in the corral in 1999 (see pages 190-92). One has to ask why two apparently nondescript areas are so prone to such a bewildering variety of creatures, unidentified flying objects, and otherworldly phenomena.
Sightings of bizarre orange balls were legendary in the area around Dulce. We spoke to dozens of witnesses who had seen these mysterious spheres. Many witnesses reported that they moved erratically in an abrupt, jerky motion. Two police officers once watched an orange orb hovering about twenty feet over a herd of cattle just a couple of nights after a cow had been mutilated a mile away. The two officers, who worked for the tribe, radioed Officer Gabe Valdez, who was sitting just across the valley in his patrol car. Valdez was watching the same orange orb from a distance. The object moved quickly as Valdez took off after it at 100 miles per hour on the narrow roads. Maybe it had intercepted the radio traffic and knew it was being hunted? Valdez harbored deep suspicions that these things were capable of sophisticated eavesdropping, but he had no idea who owned them.
As he approached the other two officers, the sphere had vanished, but Valdez saw a dark object move over his speeding patrol car. It was moving swiftly and climbing. Valdez was certain the orange object had simply extinguished its light so that it could avoid detection. It was heading north and was perfectly hidden except for the telltale round silhouette Valdez saw against the moonlit sky. Within seconds it was gone. Did the officers interrupt some animal mutilators? He would never know. But the orange object was big enough for several people. Were they the mysterious mutilators? Valdez had hunted the mutilators for decades and still had never caught them.
Only a fraction of these New Mexico sightings had ever seen the light of day. The mind-numbing assortment of objects—from huge, mile-wide metallic objects to several different colored orbs of varying diameters, to silver discs, and large one-hundred-foot-diameter domed discs—was reminiscent of the bewildering range of objects seen by the Gorman family and others in the Uinta Basin.
Chapter 22
Other Hot Spots
No place in the world, other than perhaps Dulce, has experienced the sheer range of bizarre experiences that have been reported at the Skinwalker Ranch. Certainly few other reputed hot spots have been subjected to the same level of intense, long-term scientific observation as has the ranch. That said, there are a handful of other locations where similar phenomena have been reported over the years, places where the sightings of unexplained aerial objects are but a small part of a larger— and stranger—picture. If there is a lesson to be learned or a pattern to be discerned from what has occurred at the Gorman ranch, perhaps there are clues in the experiences of other families who have encountered the unknown. number of objects have some significance? Was it indicative of different phenomena? Were the witnesses just hallucinating something weird in various ways? Was Dulce (and northeastern Utah) a testing ground for a whole slew of U.S. government secret projects?
On the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in south-central Washington, residents have been reporting odd aerial objects for generations. Native American legends extend the stories back for hundreds of years. One particular region, composed of twenty-eight-hundred square miles of thick forests, farms, and the Yakima Indian reservation, is regarded as one of the most consistent UFO hot spots in North America. So many unexplained nocturnal lights and mystery aircraft were reported by residents in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a formal study was initiated at the request of J. Allen Hynek, the former Northwestern University astronomer who had served as chief civilian investigator for Project Bluebook, the U.S. Air Force study of UFOs that was formally terminated in 1969. The so-called Toppenish Study of UFOs in the area near the Yakima reservation was conducted by Hynek’s associates in 1972, was updated in 1974 and 1975, and, most recently, was revised in 1995. The investigators documented dozens of UFO sightings and close encounters.
The people who live on or near the Yakima reservation didn’t need a study to tell them that something strange had been going on in their sky. Investigators, then and now, say they are hard-pressed to find anyone in the region who hasn’t seen a UFO. Personnel stationed in fire control towers say the sightings of orange balls of light became so routine that they would scarcely report them. Police officers, ranchers, government employees, and everyday citizens have seen not only orange balls of light that seem capable of performing impossible aerial maneuvers but also aircraft larger than jumbo jets that witnesses say could stop in midair, perform U-turns or zigzag patterns, then zoom away in the blink of an eye.
But in central Washington, as in northeastern Utah, the strangest events occurred on the ground, not in the sky. Writer Greg Long, whose book Examining the Earthlight Theory chronicles decades of UFO activity near the Yakima reservation, found a ranching family whose experiences mirror those of the Gormans to a remarkable degree.
Like the Gormans, the “Smith” family chose to live in a rural farming and ranching community. The fertile farmland near the Yakima reservation is known for its corn, sugar beets, apples, and timber, as well as for the quiet, country lifestyle that comes with the territory. Bill Smith, his wife Susan, along with their son and daughter, moved onto their property in 1966.
It wasn’t until 1969 that the family experienced its first “paranormal” event on the farm. Susan Smith says she heard the family’s dogs “throwing a fit.” She responded and saw that the animals were barking ferociously at a boy who was walking along the road in front of the farm. The boy appeared to be Hispanic or Indian, was wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt, and made no sound. As he walked along, he passed behind a tree on the edge of the property, but he never re-emerged on the other side of the tree. After a few minutes, Susan ran to check on him, thinking he might have tripped or otherwise hurt himself. The boy wasn’t there. He had simply vanished. Susan was so upset by the strangeness of the encounter that she ordered the tree to be cut down.
Family members began to hear disembodied voices of men, women, and children. At times, the voices spoke perfect English. Other times, the language was unknown to family members; they described it as “guttural.” On one occasion, Bill and Susan returned home from dinner and heard the voices of little girls inside the house. The mystery girls sounded as if they were at play, laughing and giggling. As soon as Bill and Susan stepped into the home, the voices stopped. Bill recalls the night he heard a loud male voice that sounded as if it was coming from right outside his bedroom window. The voice proceeded to describe the physical characteristics and exact location of everyone inside the house. When Bill went to the window to peer out, the voice stopped. No person could be seen outside, and the family’s usually alert watchdogs failed to notice any intruders.
In addition to the voices, the family grew accustomed to hearing strange noises, including the sounds of footsteps inside the house, bumps and bangs on the walls and on the porch, a frequent electronic beeping noise that would come and go with no apparent source, and a hammering sound that persisted for more than a year. Bill described the sound as that of a metallic post driver hammering a post, over and over, into the ground. The sound usually began around dusk and would persist intermittently, sometimes until dawn. It seemed to emanate from above the ground and was heard by others who visited the farm. Whenever Bill or another family member would go out to investigate, the hammering would stop, only to start again fifteen minutes later.
Each family member—as well as visitors to the property—reported a number of poltergeist-type events. Knives propelled themselves out of frying pans, appliances jumped off hooks, and doors opened and closed of their own volition. Heavy objects mysteriously repositioned themselves. Tools disappeared, then reappeared in the same spot minutes later. A family friend who volunteered to help dig a ditch said he was repeatedly approached, in broad daylight, by what appeared to be the shadow of a man. Shadowy legs would walk up to where he was working and just stand there. The friend, understandably, was spooked and left the property.
During the years when all of these other events were unfolding, the family repeatedly experienced a range of UFO-type encounters. Almost from the beginning, the family saw weird lights nearby. Sometimes, the balls of light were yellow, ringed by an orange rim. Other times, the flying balls were red-orange. In most cases, they appeared to be intelligently controlled. On a few occasions, the property was flooded with an intense light that seemed to emanate from the sky, although no source could be seen.
In the summer of 1972, the family had perhaps its most spectacular UFO sighting. A brilliant light, described as brighter than the sun, seemed suspended above the Smiths’ cornfields. The light would dim for a few seconds, then move a few hundred feet, then become more intense again. At one point when it dimmed, Bill was able to see the source—a large Zeppelin-like craft that he estimated to be the length of three boxcars. The airship was the color of oxidized lead, like an old battleship, and the family could see what appeared to be a row of portals in the side. The craft had no wings, fins, rudders, or obvious form of propulsion as it silently traveled over the cornfields at a speed of thirty five miles per hour.
Bill had a fleeting thought to grab both his rifle and a Polaroid camera but says he received a telepathic message that the object had the family “in its sights” and that it would be foolish to take any hostile action.
Bill froze and touched neither the gun nor the camera. It was his impression that the message had come from some type of advanced intelligence aboard the airship.
One day they found evidence that something landed on one of the lawns. The grass was crushed in a rectangle five feet long and two feet wide. Something else alighted on the family’s automobiles on two occasions, leaving behind a weird pattern of circular markings, as if someone on crutches had walked on the hood and sides of the vehicles.
Because of the family’s request for anonymity, it isn’t known whether the Smiths still live on the property or whether these occurrences are ongoing. Investigators who have pursued the case have few solid ideas about what was behind the strange series of events.
The similarities to the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah are numerous—a rural family of four experienced both UFO- and poltergeist-type events over a long period of time, for no apparent reason or motive, and in the vicinity of a Native American tribal community. The events seem to have been orchestrated by some intelligence. This intelligence seemed to react to the emotional states of the family members. While the farm property appeared to be the epicenter of the strange events, there were many other manifestations that were witnessed and reported by many other residents of the region.
A remote ranch in rural Colorado was the site of events that even more strikingly resemble the activities at the Skinwalker Ranch. Once again, investigators have withheld exact details about the location of this ranch and the identities of the witnesses, but enough is known about this case to draw obvious comparisons.
The case was originally investigated by a team associated with the now-defunct Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, one of the leading UFO investigative groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Investigators included Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, anthropologist Peter Van Arsdale, and seismologist John Derr. Popular British UFO researcher Timothy Good publicized the results of their investigation in his 1991 book Alien Contact.
According to Good, the principal witnesses were a husband and wife named “John” and “Barbara,” their teenage sons, and family friend “Jim,” a former U.S. Air Force security officer. John, Barbara, and Jim pooled their resources to purchase a somewhat run-down ranch that had been vacant for some years.
The property contains grazing pastures, wooded areas, and natural springs, and is said to be located in the general vicinity of ongoing military operations, although the name of the base has never been made public.
Over a period of four years, family members experienced a wide range of bizarre and frightening occurrences. It began with strange noises and electronic humming sounds that had no apparent source. The family came to associate the humming noise with UFOs. UFO sightings became almost commonplace on the ranch. In one dramatic instance, the witnesses say, a fleet of nine flying saucers landed in front of the ranch house. They also saw other craft of varying shapes and sizes floating silently past the property, both during the day and at night. Family members say they frequently heard the sounds of heavy footsteps in and around the ranch house, as if the place was haunted.
In October 1975, the family’s teenage sons came across the remains of a cow that had been mutilated. They also spotted huge footprints that they later learned were made by a Bigfoot-type creature that was spotted on or near the property several times. The footprints suggested that the creature had followed the teenagers back from the woods after their discovery of the mutilated cow.
After a second animal mutilation on the ranch, Jim went to town to discuss the situation with lawmen.
The deputy he contacted told him that there had been hundreds of mutilations in the area and that there was no reason to investigate them all since they were likely carried out by “extraterrestrials.” Colorado, it should be noted, is where the first publicized animal mutilations occurred. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases have been documented in the state, and they continue to this day.
Jim was unwilling to accept the explanation offered by the lawman. He and the others began to suspect some sort of military involvement in light of the ranch’s proximity to assorted military activities. For a time, they also theorized that an unscrupulous real estate agent might have been sabotaging their ranch operation as a way to force them to sell the property. In time they would discard both of these suspicions.
The Bigfoot sightings continued. In one instance, a large, hairy humanoid pushed its way through a barbed-wire fence and chased after family members, who ran into the house. They returned later and found not only eighteen-inch footprints but also a tuft of hair on the wire, hair that was tested by a Denver biologist who could not identify the species. Another time, Jim saw one of the hairy humanoids running beside the corral and he shot it with his rifle. He says he definitely hit his target, but the creature barely flinched. He found no blood or other trace at the spot of the shooting. When he chased after it, he heard a weird sound that resembled a soft whine combined with an electronic beeping noise. Jim reported the shooting incident to law enforcement, which severely chastised him for using his gun. (In addition to family members, a total of twenty witnesses claim to have seen the Bigfoot creatures at the ranch, including friends, visitors, and employees.)
There were other sorts of intrusions as well. At times, family members found themselves paralyzed, unable to move. Barbara was knocked unconscious by a powerful and unseen force as she peered out the window at UFOs floating in front of the house. After coming home one night to find the children huddled in fear, Jim ran out into the yard and yelled a threat to blow up the property, arguing to the unseen intelligence that if his family couldn’t have the property, then no one would have it. He says a response came in the form of a clear, loud voice, in what he described as stereophonic sound, that told him, “Dr. Jim, we accept.”
The telepathic truce didn’t last, however. Family members witnessed humanoid figures clothed in tight-fitting suits on the property. On one night, Jim awoke to find a nearly seven-foot-tall being in a space suit, complete with cosmonaut helmet, standing beside his bed. The being vanished before his eyes. Jim went to his lawman friend and talked about moving the teenagers off the property because they might be in physical danger. The lawman reportedly counseled him that while the phenomenon had sliced up cattle and other animals, and had certainly frightened residents of the area, no physical harm had ever come to any humans.
Another incident occurred one midnight as the family entertained a few out-of-town guests. All lights in the house went out. The group was gathered around a stereo and had been listening to the phonograph. When the power went off, a voice emanated from every speaker in the place, the stereo as well as the television. The voice told the group, “We have allowed you to remain. We have interfered with your lives very little. Do not cause us to take action, which you will regret. Your friends will be instructed to remain silent about us.”
One of the guests, an electronics expert, dismantled the stereo, determined to find out how this could have happened. The radio receiver had been off when the voice was heard; only the phonograph was being used. The electronics expert was baffled. He speculated that some sort of transmitter might have been used, but such a transmitter would have had to be incredibly powerful and sophisticated.
The most dramatic episode occurred in January 1977. Jim felt a compulsion to travel to the top of a hill on the property. John’s oldest son accompanied him. Months earlier, the hilltop had been burned by something that left a charred thirty-five-foot circle where nothing would grow. Once the duo arrived on the hilltop, they noticed a yellowish light in the trees. When they approached the light, they saw that its source was a metallic box. The box emitted a humming noise. Jim advised the teenager to stand back as he walked toward the box. When he got within a few feet, the humming sound changed to a louder, angrier tone, something akin to a swarm of enraged bees. Jim cautiously decided to walk the teenager back to the car, which was a short distance away. When he returned seconds later, the box was gone. (Jim’s lawman friend later recounted his own encounter with a similar box that he spotted under a tree. Rather than approach it alone, he returned to the office and brought a fellow deputy back to the spot. Not only had the box disappeared, but so had the tree.)
Jim’s hilltop mystery didn’t end with the disappearing box. Later that same night, he saw another light in the trees. He sent the boy back to the house for safety, then went to investigate. When he arrived at the source of the light, he saw two men whom he described as short, almost effeminate, with large eyes and blond hair, and wearing what appeared to be tight-fitting flight suits. Sixty feet down the hill, a dimly lit flying saucer rested on the ground. And in the shadows stood a Bigfoot creature.
“How nice of you to come,” the strangers reportedly exclaimed in perfect English.
Jim says his encounter lasted about five minutes. According to Timothy Good, the strangers apologized to Jim for the inconveniences they had caused and assured him that “a more equitable arrangement” would be worked out. They told him several other things that he found to be insignificant but insisted that he should not repeat any of it. Jim had many questions but didn’t ask any. He says he advised the strangers that the mutilations of animals might be unwise since it might draw too much attention to their presence, but they declined to admit any involvement with the mutilations. The strangers reportedly demonstrated their control of the Bigfoot creature by ordering it to pick up the blinking box. When it touched the box, the huge beast dropped to the ground. The strangers then emphasized that contact with the box could be lethal.
The two strangers stated that Jim’s memory would not be tampered with, implying that they had the power to do so if they wished. They said that they would return to talk again. Jim felt it was time to go and walked back toward the house, his head spinning. He wondered if they were going to give him the cure for cancer, or a billion dollars, and he pondered what might be meant by “a more equitable arrangement.” He was not convinced that they were space aliens and remembers thinking that somehow the government was behind the whole thing.
The possibility of military involvement isn’t without some foundation. During the period of the cattle mutilations, the family often saw military-type helicopters flying over the property. Jim believes that the helicopters he saw were too small to have carried out the mutilations because, he reasoned, whoever was responsible most likely hoisted the heavy animals into the air to perform the surgeries, then deposited the carcasses on the ground. In his estimation, small helicopters couldn’t lift a twenty seven-hundred-pound bull.
His curiosity was further aroused when he called the nearby military base to complain about helicopters that sometimes landed on his property. During his conversation with a colonel, Jim says he was asked what he thought about the cattle mutilations. The question seemed to come from out of the blue. Jim offered the opinion that perhaps UFOs were responsible. The colonel then admitted, in an amazing burst of candor, that the base was having its own problems with UFO intrusions. The colonel then asked if Jim had filed any complaints about his Bigfoot sightings! The officer confided that base personnel had received strict security instructions about how they should deal with both UFO incidents and Bigfoot sightings.
Such a conversation, if it happened, would seem to violate any number of military protocols. At least one critic of this case has argued that this odd, off-the-cuff chat strongly suggests that the officer was playing along with some sort of psychological exercise, mind game, or disinformation effort.
The team of APRO investigators told Tim Good that they believed the witnesses were being truthful in their description of these events. Psychologist Leo Sprinkle said he was initially skeptical of the case but that he viewed the principal witnesses to be “reliable and sincere.” The other investigators agreed with this assessment. If it was all a mass hallucination, its long duration and daunting complexity would certainly put the entire affair in unique company.
While Tim Good and the original investigators have declined to make public any specific information about the location of the ranch, an article on the Internet sheds some light on the case. The paper, “UFOs: The Military Unmasked,” was written in French by researcher Emmanuel Dehlinger in 2003. It identifies the location of the ranch as Elbert County, a sparsely populated area southeast of Denver. Descriptions offered on the official Elbert County website seem consistent with what is known about the ranch. The two-thousand-square-mile county, home to a mere 22,254 people in 2003, is known for its ranches, farms, abundant wildlife, and sleepy country charm. What Elbert County doesn’t have, though, is a military base.
That said, Elbert County abuts El Paso County, which is home to three large military installations, including Peterson Air Force Base, the hub of the USAF space command operations, home to the Twenty-first Space Wing, which is the sole organization within the USAF responsible for worldwide missile warnings and space control operations. The U.S. Army’s Air, Space and Missile Defense Program is also headquartered there. What’s more, Peterson AFB’s elite “Team 21” works directly with NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain complex in protecting the United States from any intrusion or potential threat from the sky. When the residents of the ranch said that they had a vantage point from which they could observe military operations, could they have been talking about activities on test ranges controlled by Peterson AFB?
According to Jim, the military base he contacted was well aware of UFO incidents, animal mutilations, even Bigfoot sightings on the ranch. The colonel’s astonishing and somewhat cavalier acknowledgment of these bizarre episodes led writer Emmanuel Dehlinger to suggest that the military had orchestrated the entire saga. Dehlinger’s paper argues that a covert military agency conducted a “psychological manipulation” of the witnesses by using electromagnetic waves somehow to induce hallucinations as well as to manipulate electrical devices. Dehlinger thinks a combination of advanced hypnosis and costumed actors may have convinced the ranch family that their encounters with the assorted beings were real. And Dehlinger argues that an artificial luminous projection system, perhaps based on plasma technology, could have been used to create the many UFO sightings. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to scare the hell out of one unfortunate family? Dehlinger thinks the military wanted to take control of the property because it overlooked a strategic range that was being used by the air force. Sure enough, in 1979, the family gave up, sold the ranch, and moved away. Similar suggestions have been made about the Utah ranch, that a covert military group created an elaborate melodrama in order to seize control of the property, for whatever reason. And, as we know, the Gormans did move.
But the most glaring weakness with such an argument is that the military has no need for an incredibly sophisticated, long-lasting, and undoubtedly expensive charade. If the Pentagon determines that a particular piece of real estate is needed for strategic, security, or intelligence reasons, it can simply seize the land and deal with the consequences later. Such is the case with Nevada’s infamous military base known as Area 51. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Air Force commandeered eighty thousand acres of public land adjacent to the base in order to create a larger buffer zone. Armed security forces were positioned around the previously accessible acreage. Two years after the seizure, the Pentagon petitioned Congress for the official permission to do what it had already done. (Years earlier, the managers of Area 51 forcibly ejected a family from the privately owned mining operation because the mine site had a view of the secret base. The family had owned the mine for nearly one hundred years.)
Both the Utah ranch and its Colorado counterpart had been vacant for years before the new families moved in. If the military truly wanted the properties, it could have quietly acquired them during those years. It didn’t need to produce a special effects extravaganza worthy of Steven Spielberg or George Lucas just to get some ranchers off their land.
Chapter 23
Vandals
By the end of July 1997, no scientifically useful data had yet been obtained at the ranch. As a part of a switch to a more proactive and less reactive strategy, the NIDS team decided to install a number of surveillance cameras near one of the hottest spots on the ranch. A series of six surveillance cameras were deployed in an area several hundred feet from the command and control center. The area was chosen because a series of dramatic events had occurred nearby, including the brutal mutilation and killing of a calf a few months before, the disappearance of six cattle, and the observations of the blue orbs and the famous orange holes over the cottonwoods. If any orange hole ever opened up in the same area of the sky, it would be captured in all its glory by the surveillance cameras.
Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, the cameras silently recorded everything in the sky and on the ground of a good portion of the ranch. The cameras were standard surveillance equipment, some of which had the ability to see into the infrared. We kept hard copies of the recordings and monitored them for unusual activity.
A year passed. The cameras picked up nothing unusual.
Then on July 20, 1998, Tom Gorman noticed that three of the cameras had stopped recording. He walked the several hundred feet out to the telephone pole to see if a lightning strike (of which there were several that summer) had disabled the cameras. What Tom found necessitated a fast telephone call to Las Vegas. I took the call. Tom told me that somebody had badly vandalized three of the surveillance cameras—the wiring had been forcefully ripped out. But the three other cameras were still running. The call provoked a fast trip to Utah for the research team.
The ranch was green and the vegetation was especially verdant that summer. The cattle grazed as usual in the large field nearest to the homestead. As I examined the cameras on the telephone pole, it was obvious that somebody was intent on inactivating the cameras. All three cameras had been mounted about fifteen feet off the ground, each camera facing a different direction, so that the full 360 degrees could be covered. From the three cameras, the video feed and the power feed came together and went underground at the base of the telephone pole. All the wiring had been neatly anchored to the pole by means of PVC tubing and also by heavy-duty duct tape. Each set of wiring from individual cameras had been separately wrapped in duct tape.
The PVC tubing now lay bent and twisted at the foot of the pole. All of the duct tape had been meticulously unwound from both the individual wiring and from around the telephone pole itself. Finally, the wiring itself had been dragged forcefully out of all three cameras. Anybody who has experience in wrapping wiring with duct tape and leaving it to bake in the summer sun will appreciate the enormous difficulty and patience required to unwind the sticky tape several times from individual wires as well as from around the pole. The marks of the duct tape on the damaged wiring as well as on the telephone pole were plainly visible. The tape was nowhere around. We searched the ground minutely for several days for several hundreds of yards radius around the pole for the missing duct tape but found no clues.
The next part of the investigation was to see if all three cameras went off line simultaneously, and for this we had to rerun the videotapes. We also hoped to obtain a clue regarding the perpetrators because it was possible the cameras might have recorded the unknown vandals during their approach to the telephone pole. The videotapes revealed that all three cameras had lost power almost simultaneously, at about 8:30 the previous night. This was just before it had got dark, so there would have been enough light to maybe catch the perpetrators in the act of vandalism.
Suddenly it dawned on us that one of the remaining three cameras, on a separate telephone pole two hundred feet away, was still working. Better still, it had been pointing directly at the vandalized pole during the incident. There was a mad scramble to retrieve the videotape and we waited in breathless anticipation as we played back the video. Sure enough, the camera had faithfully recorded everything; there was still plenty of light out as the time stamp rolled toward the fateful 8:30 time when presumably the recording would reveal who had damaged the other cameras.
We watched dumbfounded as the time stamp continued past 8:30 and revealed no unusual activity. Carefully, we replayed the videotape, checking to make sure we had the correct time. The videotape time stamp was precise. But we could see nothing on the footage other than the pole itself and the cattle peacefully munching grass in the pasture beyond. Each time we replayed the tape, the more certain we became that we had the correct time. This made no sense. Whoever had yanked the wiring out of the cameras should have been in plain view on the tape. Nothing whatever disturbed the pristine stillness. Unfortunately, the resolution was not good enough for us see the thin wiring in any detail, but it should have afforded us a glimpse of whoever had ripped the wiring to pieces.
Completely flummoxed, we took all of the videotapes back to Las Vegas in the hopes that digital enhancement might give us a clue as to what had happened. After multiple rounds of digital enhancement, the puzzling incident came into even sharper focus. The resolution became good enough to see the tiny red lights on the bottom of each camera suddenly lose power at precisely 8:30 P.M. , confirming that the cameras had actually lost power while being taped. Yet the enhancement provided no clue whatsoever as to who or what had so forcefully damaged the equipment.
The combination of fastidious attention to detail in removing every shred of duct tape from the wiring, while at the same time ripping out the wiring from the camera junction boxes was disturbing. It reminded me of the same eerie combination of brute force and finesse that had been displayed in dismembering the calf a little over a year previously. And interestingly, both of these incidents had happened less than fifty yards from each other in the same field, in daylight, and in full view of witnesses in one case and cameras in the other.
The three remaining cameras on the ranch continued their surveillance. Another eight months passed.
Tom Gorman was still working as ranch manager in April 1999, hoping to get some “closure” on the bizarre incidents that drove him off the property. It had been three years since the family had vacated the property that they had once loved. He waited silently for Ellen to jump back in the pickup after she had padlocked the gate behind her. He drove slowly down the familiar track leading to what used to be his homestead. It was a bright, sunny afternoon.
“What is that?” Ellen muttered, looking puzzled. Tom squinted west. The sun was in his eyes, but he could make out the clouds of dust coming from the corral about a quarter of a mile away. Tom kept a couple of his horses in the corral just in case he had to saddle up to retrieve any errant cattle that had broken through the fence line—an all too common occurrence in the past three years. The cattle had a nasty habit of stampeding en masse through the fence line. This usually meant hours of work for Tom to ride the cattle down and to herd them back onto the proper land. He had understandably grown tired of driving the twenty-five miles back to his place, putting the horses into the trailer, and then driving back to the ranch in order to saddle up and play cowboy. It was a lot easier simply to have a couple of horses in a corral at the ranch on standby.
Tom was puzzled as he drove. He could see the horses moving quickly around the corral in the distance. Their wild kicking generated clouds of dust. The Gormans were about three hundred yards away when it became obvious that the horses were not alone in the corral. Amid the clouds of dust and spooked horses, Tom could make out a reddish brown blur that seemed to be running around the narrow space. He mentally made a note to himself to give a good thrashing to whatever dog was doing this to his horses. Panicking the horses like this might be good fun for the dogs, but it left the horses stressed for days.
As they drove closer, the scene became clearer. “That is no dog,” Ellen said as she leaned out the open window. They were two hundred yards away and she had a much better view of the corral out the passenger side of the pickup. She was right. Tom slowed to get a better look. Although the clouds of dust were still being kicked up, he could now see the perpetrator.
It was a big animal, very heavily muscled, with short legs. It seemed to have the shape of a hyena’s body, but it had a bushy tail! “What the hell is that?” he muttered. The creature was plainly hunting his horses but did not seem intent on causing serious harm. It would lunge at one of the horse’s legs, looking to bite it. The horses would then kick out and gallop around the corral.
The animal’s big red bushy tail reminded Tom of an exaggerated fox tail. But the rest of the body was all wrong for a fox. The animal looked and moved like a hyena, but its head more resembled a dog’s. It had short, stubby legs like a boar, as it made sudden rushing movements across the corral. They were forty yards away now and dismounting from the vehicle.
Tom and Ellen now had a very good look. This was like nothing they had ever seen before. It was definitely not a dog. And it definitely was not a fox. Nor a hyena. Its reddish coloring was all wrong. He figured the animal weighed about two hundred pounds. However, his immediate concern was for his horses. Tom slammed the pickup door and took off running.
The creature suddenly stopped the hunt and turned to look at Tom as he sprinted toward the corral. Instantly, the creature took off in the opposite direction, jumped nimbly through the metal bars of the corral and headed up a slight incline. Tom reached the side of the corral, no more than fifty yards from the fleeing animal. He was determined to see where the animal was heading. It ran quickly up the slope away from the corral with Tom in hot pursuit. Then it was gone.
Tom stopped. The creature had vanished into thin air. It was open ground. The creature was far too big to have vanished down a rabbit burrow, but Tom would have seen the large bushy tail anyway. Within a minute he had reached the place where the animal had disappeared before his eyes. There was nothing there. The ground was too hard for tracks. Tom caught the distinctive smell of wet fur in the air. It reminded him of the rank smell of a wet dog.
After searching fruitlessly for a few more minutes, Tom hurried back to his horses. Both of them had bloody hocks. They were severely scratched but not seriously hurt. He figured the animal could have inflicted much more serious injuries on the horses if it had meant business.
After 1999, there were other sightings of the large, reddish hyena like creature, once by a ranch employee and also by a local man a few miles from the ranch. In both cases the creature fit Tom’s description of the original two-hundred-pound animal.
Tom had seen other strange animals on the ranch, of course, like the large wolves, one of which was bulletproof, that had haunted the ranch for several weeks after the family had moved onto the property and then had disappeared into the mists, never to be seen again. Tom also told me about some tiny bright red birds that had suddenly appeared. For a few days the birds, about the size of a wren, fluttered around a couple of trees near one of the abandoned homesteads and then vanished, forever. The birds’ fiery red color together with their tiny size made them seem more like tropical birds, not indigenous to northeast Utah. Tom also told me about huge spiders he had seen in the same area around the abandoned homestead. Just like the birds, he saw the large spiders for a few weeks, then never saw them again.
Other locals saw strange animals as well. In October 1998, a man and his wife were returning to their home. As they drove along the narrow roads about three miles from the ranch, the wife spied some movement in the field next to the roadway. It was dusk, but there was still sufficient light to make out a human like figure running across the field. As the couple watched, the figure kept up the pace of an Olympic sprinter over hundreds of yards. They could not make out its features, but it looked like a dark, very muscled man running smoothly and effortlessly at an unbelievable speed. The creature or man was running in the direction of the ranch. What amazed the two witnesses was the smooth and rapid pace the running figure sustained. They watched it as it disappeared gradually from their field of view.
Throughout the years, the surveillance cameras had continued recording data, and with the exception of maybe a dozen instances of fast-moving meteor like objects and suspicious aircraft activity (possibly due to drug smuggling), we managed to obtain no sustained evidence of anomalous phenomena. We still mounted regular field trips to investigate activity on the ranch but noted nothing of any consequence during our visits. In addition, beginning in 1999, two people began living on the old Gorman homestead, with instructions to keep eyes wide open and to report anything out of the ordinary to headquarters in Las Vegas. But the years rolled on with progressively fewer and fewer incidents. Altogether we logged hundreds of night watches, but no sustained activity occurred with anything like the dramatic flair of the summer of 1997. By 2004, when I left NIDS, it had been several years since anything of note had happened on the property.
Tom Gorman had warned NIDS when we moved the giant observation trailer onto the property that our approach was much too heavy-handed. The flurry of activity and the large disruption that marked our arrival seemed to be a turning point in the intensity of the activity. The NIDS team never approached the kind of stealth that Gorman had advised. Instead, Gorman frequently implied that we had acted like bulls in a china shop. (We were, after all, hunting a quarry.)
Between August 1996, when NIDS acquired the Gorman property, and March 1997, not a great deal of activity occurred. Then with the dismemberment of the calf, all hell had broken loose. In May 1997, a series of unexplained phenomena followed the installation of a large wire enclosure for the sentry dogs. Between June and August 1997, the phenomenon was present every time scientific personnel were. This included the sightings of balls of light in June followed by the mysterious, apparently telepathic transmission to the physicist on the scene. During July, there were multiple sightings of balls of light and other light phenomena, all in the same area of the ranch. In August, the red ball incident occurred, and then a few days later that creature crawled through the hole. That incident marked the end of the period of intense activity in NIDS’ presence.
Afterward, the phenomenon became much more fleeting. Did it lose interest? Or was there something now missing from the engagement? Perhaps it was the level of emotion that the Gorman family had provided in spades but was missing from the scientific team. The stress level in the family was unbelievably high. It was palpable. The Gormans did not interact with the phenomenon because they wanted to; they simply had no choice. In contrast, the NIDS scientific personnel were there by choice. They carried with them an attitude of cool detachment. There was almost an aggressiveness in the pursuit of the phenomenon that may have psychologically turned the tables, assuming of course that a consciousness was involved.
At the risk of inviting strong disagreement from other NIDS scientists, one could ask the question: Could NIDS have approached this research differently? Did our preoccupation with measurement reach a point of diminishing returns? It could be argued that our research was overly focused on one question: Is this real, or is it an artifact of (a) researchers’ fugue states, (b) malfunctioning equipment, or (c) natural causes? In short, did NIDS leave any stones unturned? Could we have more emotionally engaged the phenomenon without sacrificing scientific objectivity? Was the period from March to August 1997, during which the activity appeared to intensify dramatically, some kind of test designed to assess the scientific team? And did NIDS fail the test? Was some kind of emotional engagement expected or needed in order to deepen the dialogue? Was “contact” of some kind being offered? Did NIDS’ strict adherence to scientific protocols get in the way?
We may never have answers to these admittedly speculative questions.
next
Part III Aftermath and Hypothesis
Chapter 24
The Media
Rumor, innuendo, and wild speculation are the enemies of any scientific investigation, especially one that is focused on such unusual phenomena. Since the arrival of NIDS at the Gorman property, considerable efforts have been made to limit public disclosures about unusual events observed on the ranch. The policy was adopted for very practical reasons, but the secrecy has contributed to the creation of a vibrant and.....
PART 6
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/01/part-6-hunt-for-skinwalkerthe.html
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