Three items - An update on the 1,000 year old Peruvian "mummies" from Jaime Maussan, Movie actor Thomas Jane on Hollywood and UAPs... Also Meg Walter from "The Deseret News" in Utah on her visit to the secretive and mysterious Skinwalker Ranch.
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This is the Unexplained. | |
| I'm hoping that everything is good with you in your world. | |
| I know it's getting colder here in the northern hemisphere, but here in London right now, sunshine through my window, 12 degrees Celsius, 54 Fahrenheit. | |
| But the apartment is damp. | |
| Much it's always damp. | |
| But the apartment is more damp than usual. | |
| And outside, it's very damp because we've had so much rain, the ground is utterly sodden. | |
| So that's the story here. | |
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| Three things, all from my recent radio show to keep here for posterity and to let you hear again if you never heard them the first time. | |
| Number one, Jaime Mossan, Mexican UFO researcher, journalist, and man around whom there's been a certain amount of controversy over the years, appeared on the show again last Sunday to talk about the event that he'd held, the second event, the further event, on those alien, or claimed alien, certainly unusual mummies that were displayed. | |
| These short creatures, more than a thousand years old, that appear to have come from Peru. | |
| He had an event at which a number of experts, academics, and lawyers verified in their words that these things were real. | |
| Now, we're not saying they're real aliens, but verified that they had lived once. | |
| So you'll hear Jaime Mussan on this edition of The Unexplained, the story I think getting more interesting by the day. | |
| After that, we'll talk with Thomas Jane, Hollywood movie actor. | |
| He's been in TV shows and a number of movies, including Boogie Nights, who's part of the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, which is all to do with getting us closer to the truth about UAPs, whatever that may be. | |
| I think there's been a lot of foot-dragging lately about this. | |
| Something is happening. | |
| I'm not sure whether it's a cover-up or whether the floodgates are about to open. | |
| It's that finely balanced at the moment. | |
| What do you think? | |
| And then the third item, Meg Walter from the Deseret News in Utah, who's been lucky enough to visit the Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| We'll discuss what she found there and also her meeting with the new owner, the current owner, of the Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| There have been a few. | |
| So those are the things that are going to be appearing on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| I'm going to get right into it now. | |
| This is Jaime Mozan. | |
| Mexican legislators held another hearing dedicated to the potential for extraterrestrial life forms on Tuesday. | |
| The small-bodied figures were described as being a new species of non-human being, as they were without lungs or ribs. | |
| Anthropologist Roger Zuriga of Ica Peru's San Luis Conzaga National University revealed researchers had come across five similar specimens over four years. | |
| He told Reuters, quotes, they are real. | |
| There were absolutely no human intervention in the physical and biological formation of these beings. | |
| This gets curious. | |
| So the man behind all of this, Jaime Massan, is online to us again. | |
| Jaime, thank you for doing this. | |
| How are you? | |
| Very well, Fauard. | |
| 11 scientists, one after the other, said they are real. | |
| Right. | |
| Now, that means that they're real in that they existed, they had a life once, and that life was probably here. | |
| That doesn't say they're real aliens, though, does it? | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| In two of the creatures were found pieces of metal in the little ones. | |
| In one of them, the University of Engineering of Peru found osmium. | |
| The osmium didn't exist a thousand years ago. | |
| In the second, we found silver, pure silver, so pure that you cannot find it in nature. | |
| 92, 95% pure with silicone, which means that it was a perfect communicator. | |
| The performance of this method for communications is incredible. | |
| In the other case, the big mommy Maria, she is a hybrid. | |
| We found in the DNA four different species, two eggs, bonobos, and chimpanzees, and also human genes and also unknown genes. | |
| It means that this creature was completely hybrid. | |
| How can you do a hybrid creature like that? | |
| That was 2,000 years ago, Howard. | |
| I think that's too proof. | |
| Utterly astonishing. | |
| I don't have an answer for it. | |
| I would be interested to hear the answer for it. | |
| So at the very least, then this suggests that there was some kind of advanced, totally unknown civilization living somewhere. | |
| I think some people maybe have suggested in caves, possibly because of their diminutive stature. | |
| So that those creatures maybe live here on Earth, or the other alternative is that they came here from somewhere else. | |
| What do you think? | |
| They live here, no question, because the people from Peru buried them. | |
| I mean, they didn't bury themselves. | |
| Somebody else did. | |
| Okay? | |
| And I think they were living there. | |
| And I think they have good relations with them. | |
| I mean, it's just a guess. | |
| I am not saying that I have the proof. | |
| But it's a very good possibility. | |
| And they came from somewhere else, I think so, because they had technology that we couldn't find, we couldn't have 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago. | |
| I mean, how can you create pure silver, the purest possible silver? | |
| And how can you create osmium? | |
| You know, I think it's irrefutable. | |
| They are from somebody else. | |
| I don't know if they came, they were born here, I don't know that, but it seems that this technology that was not available on Earth. | |
| So that seems to suggest, Jaime, that there are three connected questions now to be asked: number one, how did they live here? | |
| Number two, how did they die? | |
| Number three, how did they interface and interact with the people who were here, our ancestors? | |
| Excellent questions, my friend. | |
| There is so much to investigate this. | |
| You know, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to Peru because there were two congressmen here from Peru. | |
| They were witness to all of this. | |
| And now when they left, they said, we're going to make a big inform of what happened here. | |
| And we think we're going to change the law in Peru to protect these creatures. | |
| And we are going to work with scientists to be able to continue the investigation. | |
| And if everything is okay, then protect all these bodies. | |
| And as I said, create a museum or something. | |
| I think it's the beginning of something very big. | |
| Even though, my dear friend, the media almost didn't publish anything, very, very little compared to the first time when they said it was a hoax. | |
| I didn't see a lot of media coverage. | |
| I did see some in the United States. | |
| I didn't see anything very much here in the United Kingdom. | |
| You must be disappointed. | |
| Yes, I am. | |
| When you present the truth, you present the evidence, you present the scientists that they were asking for. | |
| They don't, when, you know, when it's against what they think, they just don't talk about it. | |
| They don't see it. | |
| It doesn't exist. | |
| It's very funny, my friend. | |
| It's very, very funny the way this works. | |
| I hope the people realizes this. | |
| The most interesting part of this then, now, I would think, is where we go next with this. | |
| Because if these creatures existed here, yes, well, exactly. | |
| You have to go to Peru because that's where it all started. | |
| But there are a couple of things that flow from that, aren't there? | |
| How did they live? | |
| And, you know, are there traces of how they lived in Peru or elsewhere? | |
| I have to motivate the government to take this seriously. | |
| I think the congressmen are going to do it. | |
| Probably the next audience will be there. | |
| They have that idea to do something very similar to what was done in Mexico. | |
| And my idea is to have the bodies of the three species. | |
| But I told you last time, there are more. | |
| There are more, my friend, and more species. | |
| What are they going to say about all of this? | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| This has not finished. | |
| This is just the beginning. | |
| I think now the government of Peru has to get involved. | |
| They are going to try to get involved, the government, the congressman. | |
| And if we can do it, I think it's going to be great. | |
| And I think when the government of Peru recognizes these bodies as real, I think it's all over for so many people. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Now, another assumption, and you should never make assumptions, first rule of journalism. | |
| I know that, Jaime, and I'm sure you know too. | |
| But another assumption you might make is if they lived in Peru, they must also have existed somewhere else. | |
| In Japan, we have found little statues with very identical, with three fingers and all. | |
| The Dogu culture, I think, look for it. | |
| You will find it in the internet and they are very similar. | |
| And probably in Mexico, too. | |
| Remember, it's two or three or six or seven different species, my friend. | |
| Are they all related? | |
| You know, all of them are tridactiles. | |
| That I can tell you. | |
| I saw it. | |
| I have seen it. | |
| And all of them are tridactiles. | |
| That's very, I mean, I don't know what it is, you know, because different species with the same kind of feet and hands, you know, it's something very strange. | |
| How are you going to galvanize attention from the media, Jaime, when your event on Tuesday was not very well reported? | |
| Well, I think when we do it in Peru with all the bodies on the stage for all the media to see them, and when we have big, important authorities from Peru talking about all of this, I think the media has to respond. | |
| If they don't, then they are not fulfilling their obligation, my friend, to communicate what is important because this is very important. | |
| That was Jaime Massan, and we'll get an update from him as soon as we can. | |
| Story, what do you think that's getting more intriguing all the time? | |
| Now, Thomas Jane, who's part of the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, which is a group of people involved in the film industry, in the media generally, who are pushing for greater transparency and also providing a database and a resource for Hollywood filmmakers in particular to consult so that they get the right end of the story whenever they talk about anything to do with UAPs or UFOs. | |
| This is Hollywood movie actor Thomas Jane. | |
| Essentially, in America, we've got something called the Science and Entertainment Exchange. | |
| The goal of that organization is to bring more believable and accurate science into the entertainment industry. | |
| So if you're a producer, if you're a screenwriter, if you're a director, and you've got a show that deals with any kind of science, not just science fiction, but anything that has something to do with the scientific world, | |
| you can go to the Science and Entertainment Exchange and they will hook you up with specialists who are experts in any of the particular fields that you are dealing with and guide you to create something that's much more believable and informative so that when people go to the movies or they go to watch their favorite television show, they're not just getting a bunch of gobbledygook. | |
| And we're all familiar with that. | |
| You know, these fantastical Sort of nonsensical scientific ideas that were so prevalent in movies and televisions of years past. | |
| Now you have this real, and I've actually utilized that service myself. | |
| I was doing a graphic novel called Bad Planet that I was writing about an extraterrestrial who breaks out of a prison and comes down to Earth to take revenge on some other aliens. | |
| And so I had some questions about space travel, about how you can survive, can you survive, how long you can survive in space without a spacesuit, stuff like this. | |
| And they hooked me up with different scientists, and I was able to make my story more believable. | |
| And that's what the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance aims to do. | |
| Only they aim to do it in the world of extraterrestrials and UFOs. | |
| You know, we've got, geez, I mean, basically since 1947, if you go back to Donald Kehoe's book, which is called The Flying Saucers Are Real, or at least in 1951, I think, he was trying to get a grip on the things that were being reported all over the country and all over the world. | |
| And he talked to Air Force personnel and did his own sort of on-the-ground reporting. | |
| And people have been trying to get a grip on this since it, you know, since 1947, really. | |
| Our actual knowledge of what we really know is actually quite a bit deeper than what you would assume having if you've just come to this subject and in 2017, these revelations started coming out with the crazy videos, Kimball video and all that. | |
| To believe the U.S. government right now, we're still back in 1950 where the Air Force is going, well, maybe they're from China. | |
| Maybe Russia has created some fantastic breakthrough that we don't know about. | |
| It seems that not a whole lot has changed. | |
| But Thomas, I was always led to believe, and maybe I've been wrong about this, that Hollywood was actually almost back engineering information to us for decades, that stuff in science and stuff in this field, in space and aliens and all the rest of it, was actually being fed into movies anyway, through movie scripts and perhaps through secret back channels to Washington, stuff like that. | |
| Are you telling me that that's not happening? | |
| Well, now you're getting into a different subject. | |
| You know, you're touching on Project Mockingbird and stuff like that, where the CIA started infiltrating newspapers, using journalists and, yes, script writers to create propaganda that was favorable to the government's position. | |
| And yes, that's going on. | |
| I mean, we're still dealing with that. | |
| I mean, first example I can think of is the movie they made about killing Osama bin Laden. | |
| You know, that's basically a script that was engineered by the CIA. | |
| Not completely, but you know what I'm talking about. | |
| The advisors will come in and they'll, you know, and the story will get sort of bent one way or another, depending on which way the government wind is blowing. | |
| Right. | |
| I completely understand. | |
| So if, say, for example, I'm making the 2023 version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you know, different title, different storyline, different outcome, probably. | |
| I think it probably have to be. | |
| But I need to get some information. | |
| I need to build in a little bit of fact about Triangular Craft, maybe. | |
| You're saying that through the Alliance, I will be able to go to a database. | |
| I'll be able to go through a portal and reach people who know about this stuff so that my movie is more accurate. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| You said it better than I could. | |
| That's exactly what we're doing. | |
| So we've got researchers that have been doing this for decades, and their wealth of information is a hell of a lot more detailed than you will find on the internet or you'll find just sort of digging around in modern news articles. | |
| You know, these guys are experts. | |
| You've got Richard Dolan, who's one of the premier UFO researchers in the world right now. | |
| You've got Steve Bassett, who is leading, he runs the Paradigm Research Group, is leading the charge for official disclosure. | |
| You've got Paul Hynek, J. Allen Hynek, who worked for Project Blue Book. | |
| He was the astronomer for Project Blue Book, his son, Paul. | |
| You got Nick Pope, who ran the British. | |
| Well, you know Nick. | |
| You must know Nick. | |
| I know Nick very well. | |
| The Ministry. | |
| What was it? | |
| The Ministry of Defense or something? | |
| It was part of, well, he was part of the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom. | |
| They employed him at a time when they were investigating some very strange things, as indeed the U.S. government was. | |
| But, you know, the UK government are pretty good at secrecy. | |
| But then your government is too. | |
| So, Thomas, looking at your friends in Hollywood, I know that you're very well connected there. | |
| You know a lot of people. | |
| Are they going to be on side with this? | |
| Do you think? | |
| Are they going to be doing this? | |
| I'm thinking about Hollywood directors, producers, and they say, I don't want interference in my movie. | |
| Now, this isn't interference. | |
| This is input. | |
| But, you know, I wonder if not everybody will get it. | |
| Hollywood and Aliens, you basically, you know, for every ET, the extraterrestrial, there's at least 20, you know, independence days, right? | |
| So, you know, we like bad guys in our movies and that's not going to go away. | |
| I don't foresee that going away. | |
| But what we can do is start to influence some of these projects and hopefully inspire people to start telling stories that have a basis in reality and something that we can actually learn about what we know about UFOs and ETs. | |
| And I do think that there will be projects like that coming out. | |
| Up until very recently, UFOs and aliens were strictly science fiction to the vast majority of the population. | |
| But now the door is cracked open to, wait a second. | |
| Oh my God. | |
| What if there's some reality to see? | |
| Last question, Thomas. | |
| What do you believe? | |
| Is this something that is new to you or is it a lifelong interest? | |
| Well, I first got into this when I was a kid. | |
| There was a show. | |
| They actually did a TV show called Project Blue Book, where they would take a case from Project Blue Book and they'd have these two Air Force guys go and research them. | |
| At the end of every episode, they always, it was total propaganda. | |
| They always debunked every sighting at the end of the episode. | |
| But that sparked my interest as a kid. | |
| I grew up and I kind of, you know, believed like everybody else that that was a bunch of nonsense. | |
| And then I had a couple of experiences and which reignited my interest in UFOs probably at least a decade ago. | |
| And I started doing the research and really diving in. | |
| So it's been nice for me because I've got to experience the world when you were a tinfoil hat wearing nut if you believed in UFOs to now, which has been this incredible sort of sea change over the last five centuries. | |
| Just quickly, what were they? | |
| I'm writing a book right now. | |
| It's called A Human's Guide to Visiting Aliens. | |
| And I touch on that in the book. | |
| I don't like to, you know, talk about this kind of stuff right now, but I've had experiences that really opened my eyes to. | |
| And I think if you look at UFO researchers or people who go to UFO conventions, a great many of those got into the subject because of personal experience. | |
| You know, it's kind of like if you haven't had a real personal experience, you don't really have a hell of a lot of reason to get into it. | |
| People do, but I found so many of us who have been researching this subject have seen something, you know, and experienced something. | |
| And we want answers, you know, because it is, it's a life-changing thing. | |
| Let me tell you, you're never quite the same. | |
| And you, you view reality, you view the news media, you view the government with completely different eyes. | |
| Thomas, good to talk with you. | |
| Thank you very much for giving me your time. | |
| Just again, very quickly here, your biography told me that you were in Boogeymat. | |
| That was a hell of a movie. | |
| Yes, yes, that was. | |
| That was a lot of fun. | |
| We were young and a lot of great actors in there. | |
| Burt Reynolds would sort of hold court over these us young actors and tell stories about what it was like to be an actor in the 50s in New York City and getting mistaken for Marlon Brando and stuff like that. | |
| It was a great experience. | |
| Well, we'll see how that goes too. | |
| Thomas Jane, film actor, and thank you to him for giving me his time to talk about the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, which has now been in existence, I think, for about two weeks. | |
| Lastly, a fascinating conversation with Meg Walter, reporter for Utah's Deseret News, who had the great good fortune recently to get invited to and tour the Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| Talk to me first then about you and about this publication that has quite a history to it, the Deseret News. | |
| Oh, yeah, I'm a features writer at the Deseret News. | |
| I've been at the Deseret News for about a year and a half. | |
| As you said, it's the oldest newspaper in Utah. | |
| It has managed to adapt considerably well to the changing landscape of print journalism. | |
| It's primarily online now, but we do send two actual newspapers out twice a week. | |
| And it's been a dream job, honestly. | |
| The things I get to write there and do for the Deseret News is really special. | |
| And I feel really lucky. | |
| They let me do things like visit Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| What sorts of other, before we talk about Skinwalker, which is what we're here to do, you know, what sorts of things have you done with them? | |
| I've done a lot of funny little conferences around the state, reported on those. | |
| I do a lot of humor columns. | |
| I profile a lot of our more notorious, I guess, figures in Utah, the people who tend to get a lot of attention. | |
| Brandon Fugal was one of those profiles that I was able to write and really loved working on that. | |
| So yeah, that's a summation of my work. | |
| It ain't easy. | |
| I know this from personal experience to get an inn at the Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| It is a very secretive place even now. | |
| And I have tried over the years, especially with the current ownership, and I didn't get anywhere. | |
| How come you did? | |
| At the time, so I've been to Skinwalker Ranch twice. | |
| The first time I went, I was associated with the lobbying firm for the tech sector, which is pretty big here in Utah. | |
| I was writing for that nonprofit lobbying firm. | |
| So I managed to develop relationships with a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs around the state. | |
| And Brandon Fugal happened to be one of them. | |
| And I was very interested in doing a story on Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| And so I reached out and it took me reaching out probably 5,000 times before we could finally find a time where it was okay for me to go visit. | |
| And part of that, too, was that they filmed the History Channel series there. | |
| And the production does not like to have anyone outside of production on the property while they're filming. | |
| So it needed to be a time when cameras and a crew wasn't there. | |
| It happened to be October of 2020 in the midst of COVID when we were able to go out the first time. | |
| But the long story short is it took a lot of persistence on my end until I finally got on that ranch. | |
| Okay. | |
| And what about Brandon Fugar? | |
| Because I've tried to find out about him. | |
| And most of the stuff that I read about him is, and as you say, his business primarily is property, but most of it is about real estate. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So it is interesting to drive around the streets of Utah because nearly every commercial real estate sign features Brandon Fugal's name. | |
| He is involved in seemingly every commercial real estate deal in the state. | |
| And that's what he's primarily known for and Has been known for a long time. | |
| He's really developed this reputation as a real estate mogul, maybe the real estate mogul in the state. | |
| So when news broke in 2020 that he was the owner of Skinwalker Ranch, it was a bit of a shock to everybody who knew who Brandon Fugal was and what his business is. | |
| Once you meet Brandon Fugal, it's a lot less of a shock. | |
| He very much fits the profile of someone who would buy a seemingly paranormal hotspot just for kicks. | |
| But it is an interesting juxtaposition that his business on paper is pretty boring. | |
| Like commercial real estate is pretty boring. | |
| And then there's this other side of him that is searching for aliens out in the Uinta basin. | |
| So he's a guy who's been successful at his core activity. | |
| And by the sounds of it, filling in the blanks here, he's now able to exercise his interest in other things, like you just said. | |
| Yes. | |
| And, you know, I think a lot of that is due to the amount of money that he's been able to make in the commercial real estate space. | |
| And good for him. | |
| He's been very successful. | |
| This place has a reputation that we will talk about. | |
| Did you have to give him and them any assurances before you went there? | |
| I signed a contract. | |
| I believe I signed a liability waiver as soon as we stepped foot on the ramp. | |
| Hang on, a liability waiver. | |
| So if anything had happened to you, you wouldn't have been able to do anything about that. | |
| Is that right? | |
| That's right. | |
| Okay. | |
| The risk I was willing to take. | |
| No, listen, I've done things in my career, like climb chimneys for a broadcast, which was a crazy thing to do when I was 23. | |
| You know, you do these things because you have to. | |
| So you got in there. | |
| I think we should wind it back then now. | |
| And tell me at the point at which you went there, I know you've been twice, what your perceptions of Skinwalker Ranch were. | |
| What did you think it was and is? | |
| Before stepping on the ranch, you know, I had heard all of the stories or most of the stories about the different legends, the urban legends that surrounded the ranch, things that people who have lived in the Uinta Basin have seen. | |
| So many UFO sightings. | |
| There's even legend of the skin walkers who walk the ridge of the lanch, portals to other dimensions, dire wolf sightings, mutilated cow, so many different unexplained phenomena. | |
| So that was what I was taking with me into the ranch. | |
| They call it, Brandon Fugal and his team call it the inherited narrative that there is something going on on this ranch that is unexplainable. | |
| While I was there, I was hoping so badly to have any sort of paranormal encounter. | |
| And to my disappointment, I didn't see any UFOs over the Mesa. | |
| I didn't see any portals open up in either of the homesteads. | |
| No dramatic temperature drops. | |
| No one had an acute medical episode. | |
| All of our technology worked fine. | |
| These are all things that I was expecting to happen on Skinwalker Ranch because those things had happened to people in the past. | |
| I will say both times when I left the ranch, I had a real feeling of heaviness, a real exhaustion and some sort of, I don't want to say presence, presence is too dramatic a word, but there was just a vibe of I had been weighed down by something. | |
| And I attribute that to whatever is going on at the ranch. | |
| But you didn't see anything. | |
| Were there signs of anything that had reputedly happened there in the past? | |
| We saw the triangle. | |
| The triangle is the spot on the ranch that they have identified as a point of high strangeness is a term that they use. | |
| And as we were standing in the triangle, they told us all the stories of things that they've experienced there. | |
| They've dropped things out of helicopters that have fallen outside of the triangle when they should have fallen exactly in the triangle. | |
| They've tried to shoot things up above the triangle that have immediately been shot down. | |
| People who have had severe headaches and had to be taken to the hospital when they've explored in the triangle. | |
| I can't say that I saw any remnants of any of those events. | |
| Most of the evidence I was gathering was anecdotes from Brandon Fugal and his team. | |
| Okay, and there are many, many of those. | |
| And we both know as journalists that quite often it's, you know, a place doesn't gather a reputation from numerous people over a long period of time for no reason. | |
| So there must be something going on there. | |
| So before you went there, did you go into newspapers, maybe your own newspaper archives, other media, just to take a look at the reputation? | |
| I did. | |
| Yes. | |
| Deseret News actually broke the story about the Sherman family living on the Skinwalker Ranch, which at the time was not called that. | |
| At the time it was called the Sherman Family Ranch. | |
| In 1996, a staff writer named Zach Snyder, I believe his last name was, broke the story. | |
| He interviewed the Sherman family about the things they had seen, balls of fire flying through the sky. | |
| They lost 10 of their cattle. | |
| Four of them disappeared. | |
| Six of them had been mutilated with surgeon-like precision. | |
| They saw doorways that opened up in the sky, seemingly leading to nothing. | |
| They saw a number of different types of UFOs. | |
| A fireball actually incinerated their family dog. | |
| And they reluctantly, I know, so dark, they reluctantly gave this interview to Deseret News, mostly in a way to be like, we want to offload this ranch. | |
| A couple years later, same writer interviewed Robert Bicelow, who had purchased the ranch to conduct some experiments of his own, who is the owner before Brandon Fugl. | |
| So in that space between Robert Bicelow owning it and Brandon Fugal buying it, there isn't a lot of information that came out of it, but there's a lot of the before things that residents in the Uinteb Basin had seen. | |
| And now we're getting a lot of the after Things that Brandon Fugel and his team are reporting. | |
| Let's wind back to the Shermans then before we get to Bigelow, who's a big character for a vast array of reasons. | |
| And of course, the current owner, Brandon Fugel, who sounds like a really interesting guy. | |
| I mean, the Shermans had a teenage son, 10-year-old daughter. | |
| They saw three different types of UFOs, they said. | |
| A box-like craft with a white light, a 40-foot-long object, a huge ship, the size of not one, but a number of football fields. | |
| They've seen one craft with a wavy red ray of light beam as it flew along, airborne lights, circular doorways, like you said, crop circles, mutilated cattle. | |
| That wouldn't have made me, I don't know what impact it had upon them, whether you've had a chance to speak with them at all, but that wouldn't have wanted to make me stay there. | |
| I'd have wanted to go. | |
| Right. | |
| That was very much the Sherman's attitude. | |
| We bought this property. | |
| We thought we were going to have a nice cattle ranch out in a peaceful spot of land. | |
| And instead, we are being harassed by who knows what, by aliens, by some sort of being from another dimension. | |
| And it seemed very malicious toward the Shermans. | |
| These, whatever entity it was, seemed to really want to make their life miserable. | |
| So they were ready to get out. | |
| How long did they last there? | |
| I believe it was around five years, but I would have to double check on that. | |
| And what do we know of them now, if anything? | |
| Nothing. | |
| I hope they're happily living somewhere where aliens from other planets aren't haunting them, but I haven't heard. | |
| Was it when they lived there that it got the name Skinwalker you implied it was? | |
| And why would that be? | |
| You know, I do not know the answer to that. | |
| I believe it became Skinwalker again after Robert Bigelow took it over. | |
| And then I think Brandon Fugal and his team have really leaned into that because they named the History Channel program that. | |
| But the Skinwalker is a Navajo legend about shape-shifting creatures who are capable of all kinds of malicious intent and can cause harm. | |
| And that is one of the phenomena people have reported experiencing on the ranch. | |
| And that is why it has been called that at times. | |
| And either through Brandon or through your own research or the way that you checked out the place, do you know much about its history before the most recent times, before the 1980s? | |
| Do you know whether it had any kind of reputation for stuff way before that? | |
| I mean, I would hate to misrepresent the people of the Uinta Basin, but I know that there have for years and years and decades been reports of strange things happening on the ranch. | |
| And I would hate to misquote them on any of those phenomena, but I believe that UFO sightings have always been a big one and just a general bad energy. | |
| A lot of people who live on the Uinta Basin and the Ute tribe that resides there won't go anywhere near Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| And I wonder why. | |
| Is it like a confluence? | |
| You said bad energy. | |
| But whether it's something to do with, you know, we have ley lines here, lines of force that converge in places like Stonehenge. | |
| Is it something like that? | |
| Could it be the, you know, the spirits of ancestors maybe? | |
| But if it's got an ET dimension to it, then it's much more than that, it seems, and always has seen. | |
| Yeah, I think that it is much more than that. | |
| I think it's like we have seen things with our eyes that freak us out enough that we're going to stay away. | |
| As normal people, people like you and me will be like, I want to check that out. | |
| But I think most people are like, I think I'm best to not go near that and keep myself safe. | |
| Well, in the next segment of our conversation here, after we've taken some commercials in a minute or two, we'll get into the Bob Bigelow era and also the Brandon Fugo era, which is ongoing. | |
| But just to stay with the site in this segment of the program for the moment, I've heard and only half heard and really half noted in my brain, tales of people saying, for example, the radiation levels there are anomalous. | |
| Have you heard that? | |
| I haven't heard radiation levels. | |
| I've heard them reference gilsonite, which is a mineral that is found there and has been at times known to cause hallucinations. | |
| And for a while, that was a working theory as to why so many people were experiencing so many unexplainable things on the ranch. | |
| But they seem to, Brandon Fugal and his team currently seem to believe that there's something much more tangible and real happening than mere hallucinations. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| They must have a reason for feeling that way about that. | |
| You don't just feel that way for nothing. | |
| And you would have got a sense of the sincerity with which that is expressed. | |
| Yeah, I would say I've been flabbergasted by the sincerity. | |
| When Brandon Fugal talks about the things that he has seen on the ranch, he talks about them as though he were talking about another real estate deal he's done, as though he were talking about what he ate for breakfast. | |
| These things are so real to them and so much a part of their everyday life that it almost feels mundane when they talk about it. | |
| They'll say, I had oatmeal for breakfast and then I saw a UFO above the Mesa and then I signed some paperwork. | |
| It's pretty crazy. | |
| And as an outsider, you're like, I'm sorry, you saw what? | |
| But these things have happened to them so many times that it's just become commonplace for them, which is super fascinating. | |
| It's super fascinating. | |
| Last question for this segment. | |
| Why is it so secretive? | |
| Why is it so hard to get in there? | |
| First of all, I think that they don't want it to be overrun by spectators all the time. | |
| Robert Bigelow had an interesting quote in the interview he gave to the Deseret News in, I believe, 1998, where he said: if you have a place that's packed with spectators selling popcorn eating hot dogs, there's not going to be any activity to observe. | |
| That's not how these phenomena work. | |
| They don't necessarily want to be observed. | |
| So they're kind of shy. | |
| Exactly. | |
| I think that's one reason. | |
| I think the second is also the liability factor. | |
| You know, you don't want people coming into the ranch. | |
| There's a lot of expensive equipment there. | |
| There's a lot of potential for someone to get hurt. | |
| And so they want to play it safe there. | |
| And then also they're filming a show there a good portion of the year. | |
| And they don't want distraction from that. | |
| And they want to stay on schedule. | |
| Well, I get that part of it. | |
| Where do we go with this now? | |
| And I think after the Sherman family, the ownership of Bob Bigelow. | |
| Bob Bigelow, I've read about and know about and know people who know him and have known him over the years. | |
| A lot of us associate him with the development of strange and unusual and secret technology. | |
| What was he doing getting involved with Skinwalker? | |
| Exactly that. | |
| He was using his research to try and figure out what was going on, what other beings might be here on Earth without us knowing about, essentially. | |
| He was never, as far as I read, he was never willing to say what he thought was going on, but he was willing to say there's so much more at play here than we can even comprehend. | |
| And it sounds like he's just spent so much money and so much time researching the phenomenon on Skinwalker Ranch. | |
| But to this day, I'm still not exactly sure what it was that he found. | |
| And no one seems to be. | |
| It was kind of like he did all of this research for a really long time. | |
| And then it was never fully reported on, which feels pretty mysterious to me. | |
| And in that period when he was there, did local people, I don't know how isolated that place is. | |
| I think it's fairly isolated. | |
| Did local people report seeing odd things? | |
| I think those reports have always gone on. | |
| They've always been consistent. | |
| It never stopped after Bigelow took over the ranch from the Shermans. | |
| He just, he wasn't willing to be very public about what he was doing. | |
| So press-wise, there wasn't a lot of information about it. | |
| But for locals, the phenomena they experienced persisted. | |
| I might be way off beam here, but was Bob Bigelow working with the U.S. military, the U.S. government? | |
| That is a really good question, Howard. | |
| And I don't know the answer off the top of my head, except that he did receive a grant from someone to conduct this research. | |
| Are there signs of? | |
| That's interesting, isn't it? | |
| Sorry, I stopped you speaking there. | |
| You know, you're fine. | |
| Okay. | |
| It's interesting, and it might have been the government, but I can't say that for sure. | |
| No, that's fine. | |
| But it was a fascinating and very secretive period for the Skinwalker march. | |
| Are there any signs of scientific facilities there now? | |
| There are some lookout points that, if I recall, were put in by Bigelow's team to do observation on the ranch that the fugal team is not currently using, but there's definitely, they left their mark there on the ranch. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| So there's a kind of there's a period in the history of Skinwalker Ranch that is less public, less well known about, and that's the bit in the middle. | |
| That's the Bob Bigelow part. | |
| Am I right there? | |
| That's right. | |
| And the Brandon Fugal portion, he claims, was also meant to be secretive. | |
| He bought the ranch and had no intention of revealing that he was the owner of the ranch until he was talked into it by the producers of the History Channel. | |
| And what was he planning to do with it then? | |
| If, you know, he wasn't planning to make a big deal of it. | |
| You know, that's a really good question. | |
| The question or the answer remains a little murky for me, but from what he's told me is he was really excited at the opportunity to do business with Robert Bigelow, who was himself a real estate mogul and had made his billions doing that. | |
| And so Brandon was excited to be able to make a deal with a fellow real estate mogul. | |
| And he bought the ranch believing that there was a prosaic, wildly uninteresting reason for all of these reported phenomena. | |
| He wanted to debunk it. | |
| He wanted to debunk it, essentially. | |
| He said 99% of him believed there was that prosaic explanation. | |
| 1% of him was open to the possibility that there was something paranormal, unexplainable at play. | |
| And he held that belief for the first six months that he owned the ranch. | |
| And then one day he brought a VIP guest, whose name he won't disclose, to the ranch just as a tour. | |
| And they were looking around and Brandon looked over at the mesa, which borders the east side of the ranch and saw in the middle of the day an unidentified flying object about the length of a football field, oval in shape, just hovering above there. | |
| And he said everything changed as it would as soon as he saw that. | |
| And he knew the entire direction of the rest of his life was about to change. | |
| And there was a little bit of begrudgment of that, a little bit of like, wow, now that I have experienced this, I have to be a witness to this. | |
| I have to tell people about this. | |
| And that is going to come with a cost to my reputation. | |
| No one wants to be the real estate mogul who goes around talking about UFOs, but he felt he had a responsibility to do that, to let people know that there was something going on on this ranch that could have significant consequences for our entire existence. | |
| So his research is ongoing. | |
| Ongoing, very much so. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They have, if you've watched the show, they have just barely begun to hone in on what they think Might be going on. | |
| They've spent a lot of time studying the triangle because of all the high strangeness they've experienced there. | |
| But when I pressed him on it and said, So you think that what's happening is happening in the triangle, everything's being caused from whatever's going on in the triangle, he said, that's our area of focus now. | |
| But we believe there are all kinds of entities doing all kinds of things on this ranch, and we are going to study all of them. | |
| So their research has really just begun. | |
| As far as you know, and you probably couldn't press him too far about this, but I'm sure you did. | |
| Who's going to be helping him with the research? | |
| Is he getting people from Stanford, Harvard, or is he doing it himself? | |
| I mean, he's funding it. | |
| He has his team. | |
| He has a ranch manager. | |
| He has a principal investigator, a lot of security. | |
| They bring in a scientist named Travis for the show to help with the research. | |
| They've invested millions of dollars into the best surveillance equipment, all kinds of monitoring systems. | |
| And then, you know, the history channel is there documenting all of it. | |
| You kindly sent me a list of a couple of things that have happened in more recent times there, in Brandon's time there. | |
| And there was, and as you say, the place is heavily cameraded up, as we say here in the UK. | |
| So there's a lot of surveillance going on there. | |
| But there was a point at which a mysterious voice said the words, you need to leave now. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Thomas Winterton, who is the ranch manager, is the one who experienced this. | |
| And his wife actually experienced the same thing. | |
| And they said it was a telepathic voice. | |
| It wasn't, I think we say hearing voices and that means audibly. | |
| We're hearing it with our ears. | |
| But he said it was very much a telepathic voice telling them, you need to leave now. | |
| He and his wife ran off the ranch, drove away, and were feeling very much a presence with them until they got off the property of the ranch. | |
| But the Wintertons obviously stick in with it, even though it's strange and scary. | |
| It's interesting, right? | |
| It's almost like they're addicted. | |
| And I hate to put words in their mouth, but this team has experienced so many things that I think would, you'd get to a point where you think this is too much. | |
| I've done too much. | |
| And they talk about hitchhiker spirits who follow them home and torment them at home. | |
| But I think that they're so curious and so anxious to find out what's at play here that they suffer through the hard parts to keep going. | |
| Have they ever tried, and maybe it's an idea that could be put to them, getting somebody to go there if this hasn't happened before who claims that they can almost summon up UFOs, can conjure them up whenever they want to by using certain protocols. | |
| I think you'll know of the work of people like Stephen Greer, people like that. | |
| It seems to me that that would be a great place to go if it hasn't been done already and try that out. | |
| Yeah, I have no idea if they've tried that or not. | |
| That is a really interesting idea. | |
| I know that they've invited all kinds of guests, spiritual, scientific, to have, to be on the rant and report on what they're feeling. | |
| But I don't know specifically if they've tried a UFO summoner, a job I didn't know existed until right now. | |
| Well, you know, I might have that all entirely wrong and my listener will tell me, you know, otherwise, but there are people who use these so-called protocols that they say mean that they can go to a place and actually summon these things to appear. | |
| Seems to me that might be a great place to do it, but maybe they have already and you and I don't know. | |
| 2021, a singer called Post Malone went there with the permission of Brandon, bought, according to the account, brought some black SUVs, four-wheel drives, as we call them, to the ranch where he met Brandon and the team. | |
| And something weird happened with him, I think. | |
| Yes. | |
| He got a couple of hours into the night and Dragon, who is the security on the ranch, reported seeing, first hearing very loud scream coming out of Homestead 2, where Post Malone and his crew were spending the night, witnessed them running out of the property, piling into their SUVs and driving away. | |
| And they won't say specifically what happened, but they will say that Post Malone had an encounter with a malevolent spirit who drove him off the ranch. | |
| Boy, I mean, that's a lot more then than just a voice saying you need to leave here. | |
| This is something that scared him off. | |
| Something scared him off. | |
| And, you know, it was interesting because I, at the end of my second visit, I was disappointed that I hadn't seen anything paranormal. | |
| I had nothing supernatural to report on. | |
| And Brandon said, well, it's because we came onto the ranch with a spirit of optimism today. | |
| These forces respond to the energy you bring to the ranch. | |
| And that's not to say that Post Malone went onto the ranch with any sort of bad spirit or negativity, but he said that these entities, whatever they are, really tend to manipulate the consciousness and respond to people however they show up to the ranch. | |
| And I don't know specifically what that means and why it happened to post Malone the way that it did and why he was driven off the ranch, other than maybe it just didn't like the pomp and circumstance that he was bringing with him. | |
| And you went on with an optimistic feeling, but you said you sensed something there. | |
| So even though you didn't observe anything, maybe did you feel that something was observing you? | |
| Yeah, I think it's, I don't not think that. | |
| A lot of people have asked me, you've been to the ranch. | |
| Do you believe? | |
| Do you think there's anything at play there? | |
| And I don't not believe. | |
| And I think there's a lot that I don't know. | |
| And both times I left the ranch thinking, I feel different than when I got there. | |
| So yeah, I think it's possible that something was observing me for sure. | |
| Some people would be put off by that. | |
| I think we're birds of a feather, as we say here in the UK. | |
| I think you do in the US too. | |
| It would encourage me to want to go back. | |
| Are you going back? | |
| I mean, I would love to go back in another couple of years. | |
| I feel like for now I've worn out my welcome. | |
| They're busy people, and I've taken multiple days of their time to have them show me around the ranch, but I'd absolutely love to go back and do a follow-up story a couple of years from now. | |
| And you say that Brandon and his people are doing a bunch of research that he is funding because he can afford to do that. | |
| He's a man of resources, so he can put some resources in and bide his time while the research takes root. | |
| Do you know when we might be hearing more on the outcome of that research? | |
| Yeah, I had a lot of questions this visit to which I received the answer. | |
| Stay tuned for season four. | |
| So I think that this next season of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch on, or season five, excuse me, season four just concluded. | |
| Season five is about to come out and they said they're making all kinds of discoveries that will be revealed on that season. | |
| And I'm not saying this for a moment, but you know, there are those who say about ghost shows and other shows of that kind that the people producing these things are under pressure to be able to deliver something. | |
| Did you get that feeling? | |
| Or did you get the feeling that everybody's very laid back about it all? | |
| The latter. | |
| I got the feeling that they're very laid back about it. | |
| I mean, they do want to make an entertaining TV show, obviously. | |
| And I think a lot of that comes down to the editing and the producing of it. | |
| But one of the conditions that Brandon Fugal had when he agreed to do the show with the History Channel was that nothing could be faked. | |
| He felt very strongly that they weren't going to add any sort of special effects for the sake of making an entertaining TV show. | |
| Everything that was shown happening on the ranch had to actually be happening on the ranch. | |
| And this material Gilsonite that is there, this naturally occurring material, is anybody doing tests upon that? | |
| I guess that's going to be part of that whole process. | |
| I think that's maybe something we'll see in season five. | |
| Okay. | |
| And when do you think it'll be decent for you to approach Brandon Fugel again and say, I'd rather like to come back? | |
| I mean, Brandon Fugel is the nicest guy. | |
| I think that we can set a date for a year or two from now to go back out. | |
| And I'm looking forward to doing that. | |
| But like I said, I was just there. | |
| I just took up so much of their time. | |
| So I'm going to give them a minute. | |
| You wrote a very nice piece, which is online from the newspaper, which I've been lucky enough to read. | |
| You know, nice piece of writing, if I may say so, as a lifelong journalist, for what my view is worth. | |
| It's quite an experience to have had. | |
| What are you going to be doing next? | |
| Is there anything else weird going on in Utah? | |
| Or is the rest of the state peaceful? | |
| Right now, I'm going to enjoy the peace and quiet of my not supernatural life in Utah, but I'm always keeping my eye out for the strange and the unexplained that I can write about. | |
| Well, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. | |
| How do people access you? | |
| Have you got your own website? | |
| I know you've got a lot of people. | |
| I have a Twitter. | |
| That's probably the best way. | |
| I'm Meg Morley Walter. | |
| Excuse me, it's X now. | |
| I'm Meg Morley Walter on X. That's where I share most of my work, and people can find me there. | |
| And we've got to give your podcast a plug. | |
| I do have a podcast. | |
| My podcast is Hype Mind. | |
| It is a silly podcast, but we do talk about a lot of fun things going on in Utah. | |
| So people can find that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever podcasts are found. | |
| Meg Walter, a pleasure to speak with you. | |
| And I'm very jealous. | |
| And, you know, if you can possibly get me an introduction to Brandon Fugal, I'd love to speak with him. | |
| I'm sure he'd love to. | |
| Thank you so much, Howard. | |
| Meg Walter from the Deseret News. | |
| I greatly enjoyed my conversation with her. | |
| And I'm very jealous that she got to go there and very keen to be able to get a conversation with Brandon Fugal. | |
| So I hope we can make that happen. | |
| Before that, of course, Thomas Jane, film actor, talking about the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance. | |
| Before that, Chaimie Mossan talking about the mummies and what they might be. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained online. | |
| So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| Still in the sunshine. | |
| Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm. | |
| And above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |