Joe Murgia

Click below to hear the entire, “Edge of Reality Radio” show with host, Lee Speigel and guests George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell.

 

 

Lee Spiegel (LS): There’s one place in America where paranormal phenomena reportedly takes place and it’s been documented by different teams of investigators and scientists since the 1990s. That place is known as the Skinwalker Ranch in the Uintah County of Utah. It’s located on about 512 acres, and really everything from UFOs, unknown creatures, poltergeist activity, shape-shifting animals, and even a giant wolf that’s allegedly immune to bullets, have been reported at this paranormal hotbed of activity. For many years, people have said they’ve witnessed unexplained events in the area surrounding the ranch and after years of investigations, there still remains one important question: Is there an unknown intelligence operating at Skinwalker? Another question is: Are there similar locations in other areas around the world? There are also some misconceptions and behind the scenes stuff about the ranch that haven’t been made public, and we’re going to get into that tonight. It’s time to set the record straight.

I’ve been fascinated with this whole idea of Skinwalker ever since I read a book years ago, called “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” subtitled, “Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah.” It was co-written by a microbiologist, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp, the anchor and chief investigative reporter for KLAS TV, the Las Vegas CBS affiliate.

Jeremy Kenyon Lockyear Corbell is an investigative filmmaker with movies on Netflix, Hulu and iTunes. He documents ordinary individuals and their extraordinary beliefs. In fact, his website is www.extraordinarybeliefs.com. Now, where George Knapp’s book is “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” he and Jeremy, co-star in a film of the same name: “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” that Jeremy wrote and directed. The film, like the book, focuses on what could turn out to be the most paranormal hotspot in history.

George, tell me first, how and when did you first hear about the Skinwalker Ranch and when was your first visit there?

George Knapp (GK): My first visit was in the year 2000. I went there with Bob Bigelow and Colm Kelleher, just by myself. I think the first time I took a photographer there to work on what I hoped would be a documentary back then, was 2001. I’ve probably been there, I don’t know, close to thirty times, I guess, by now, over the years. Not a lot compared to some of the scientists and other people who’ve worked on the ranch over that time period. But far and away more than any other journalist. I was the only journalist allowed to be there during the NIDS period. Went there a lot with different photographers. Matt Adams has been my photographer for the last fifteen years. And he and I have been there a bunch. But, you know, I was not there during the period of the BAASS study at all because, you know, it was a classified project, and I didn’t have a security classification. I think the first time I heard about the ranch was when the rest of the world heard about it. There was a Deseret News article in 1996. The rancher, and I’m just going to call him the rancher – I know people know what his name is – he had just come forward. He thought that the government was trying to run him off his property for a while because of all these strange things that were happening/ It must be some sort of government plot, that they wanted to seize his land, and the activity just wouldn’t stop. It made no sense. It was so weird. His family was beleaguered. They’d been on the property since 1994. And the weirdness just got more sinister as time went by.

The rancher was a highly educated guy, a world class hunter. He was an expert in breeding of a special hybrid type of cattle that were very expensive. His wife was a vice president of a bank. His two kids were straight A students. They’re not prone to making stuff up. They bought that property. It was 480 acres back then. I think the new one has added to it. But they bought the property and then from the first day they moved in, weird stuff started happening. And by the time Bigelow arrived in 1996, he and his team, the family, they were so battered psychologically and emotionally, and to a lesser degree, physically, that they were all sleeping in the same room at night for protection. Because they were beaten up by the whole thing, worn out and wanted to get out of there.

There was a story in the Deseret News, Zack Van Eyck had written about it because the rancher had come forward and talked about it. There was a really weird incident where several holes appeared in the pasture. And if you know the ranch, if you’ve seen Jeremy’s film, there’s only one way to get into it. And somehow, something got in with the equivalent of heavy equipment, as if a backhoe had been used to dig these great, big, giant holes, a couple hundred pounds of soil in each of these holes. As if you had a giant cookie cutter from the sky, took the samples out. So, that was the point that the rancher went public. I think the local paper took a photo of the holes and then Deseret News came out and talked to him. The rancher had been talking to a couple of UFO guys. Ryan Layton was one of them. Chris O’Brien had come in to talk to him because there had been cattle mutilations and those guys that had had a specialty in that. But other than that, you know, he tried to talk to his neighbors asking, “Hey, did you know this was going on? Is the same thing happening to you?” He communicated with the Ute tribe. And everywhere he went, he realized, hey, this stuff really has been going on. It’s been going on in and around here for a long time. So, you know, that was my start.

LS: And you said almost thirty different trips or visits to the ranch. In all of that time, while you were there. did anything unusual happen to you? Did you experience anything?

GK: Not really. I mean, there was one of the trips that Jeremy and Matt and I took where we were doing a surveillance of the ranch where these strange lights appeared in the middle homestead, naturally, which is like sort of the beating heart of Skinwalker Ranch. But it was nothing too extraordinary except the fact that there are no lights there. I’ve told the story before and Jeremy has his own experience now, is…the first time I went there with a photographer, we did everything we could to sort of get its attention, whatever it is. There were certain activities, that when they happen, it would kind of generate some kind of a response from the phenomenon, from the intelligence that’s there. The arrival of a stranger, you make a bunch of noise out on the pastures, or especially digging. Digging in the ground would sometimes generate a response from whatever it is. Now, the response would always be different. It wouldn’t necessarily always happen and when it happened, it wouldn’t always be the same. But sometimes, that would get it going.

So for my first visit with a photographer, that’s what we did. We made a bunch of noise, made our presence known, built a campfire out there, shot some video, danced around this fire. And we got a big earth mover and moved around as much dirt as we could. And then they put me on a chair. They said, “We’re going to put a microphone on you, a couple of sensors and put you on a plastic chair out in the middle of homestead two and we’ll leave you there, in the middle of the night.” And so I’m thinking, well…because there’s some really bad things that happened in that exact spot. I sat there for about, I don’t know, thirty-five, forty minutes. The only thing that came to get me were some mosquitoes. But I had a lot of thoughts going through my head. I mean, UFOs? Yeah, let me see some. Lights, orbs? Great. That’d be awesome. But there’s a couple of these creatures that have appeared on the property that have interacted with humans in a very frightening way and I really wasn’t in a hurry to see them. So I’d like to tell you I was very brave and wasn’t worried about it at all, but that is not the case. I was wide awake.

LS: And Jeremy, how many times have you been to the ranch?

Jeremy Corbell (JC): I’ve been a handful of times to the ranch with George and as he said, Matt Adams. He’s been George’s right hand man for two decades now? So I’ve been able to go a few times. The thing about it is that I also haven’t seen anything other than those lights that George was talking about, where there aren’t any lights. Except other people around me have seen some stuff. I was introduced to Skinwalker Ranch, like most people, through George’s book. It’s the first time the world ever heard about what was going on at Skinwalker Ranch, in depth, from the inside. So that’s how I learned about it. How I was first introduced physically to going was being put as bait by George!

LS: (laughs) As bait! That’s good! And you know, that original book, “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” by George and Colm Kelleher, that’s what got me started on that interest as well. I couldn’t put the book down. There was like page after page of all this strange stuff going on there. I thought, wow, how can anything like this happen in one place? Either one of you, since you’ve both been there, what’s this area like? It’s known as the Unita basin. What about it, if anything at all, makes it unique, geologically?

GK: Well, it’s known as dinosaur country. There is a huge concentration of dinosaur bones. It is Stark. It’s beautiful. It’s an arid sort of part corner of northeastern Utah. The only strange mineral deposit that comes to mind is something called Gilsonite. It has some of the world’s rarest and biggest concentrations of Gilsonite. Other than that, it looks like a lot of other parts of Utah. But for as long as humans have been in the Uinta basin, they’ve been seeing weird stuff in the sky. As far back as Fathers Domiguez and Escalante, they crossed the Unita basin, the first Europeans to do it in the 1770s. They wrote about seeing these strange lights in the sky over their campfires. The Ute tribe, other native tribes, the indigenous peoples in that area, they have stories about, not only what we call UFOs, but other really weird phenomena going back at least fifteen generations. The early Mormon settlers, the U.S. cavalry folks who came in there, who were present in the 1800s…they’ve all seen this stuff, right up to the present day.

In the 1970s. there were so many UFO sightings that it came to the attention of a guy named Dr. Frank Salisbury, who was an academic at Utah State. He came to town and interacted with a guy named Junior Hicks. Joseph Junior Hicks is still alive. He’s been the go to guy about UFOs and other strange stuff in the basin for decades. He was a science teacher at the local high school and as people went through and cycled through his classes, he became a trusted figure. They’d see something strange, they’d call up their former teacher, Joseph Hicks. And so the activity got so intense over a period, Joseph Hicks became the unofficial UFO historian of the basin. And he’d get in his truck and go interview witnesses and collect statements and drawings and things of that sort…photos when they existed, but they’re pretty rare. So when Salisbury comes to the basin to start working on a book about UFOs, Junior Hicks provides all this data, and that became the basis of his book, it was called, “The Utah UFO Display.” But as you know, Lee, back in those days, scientists who were brave enough to take on UFOs, didn’t want to get it bogged down by other weird stuff. They thought that diluted their credibility, to have something else as weird as Skinwalker is, you know? Creatures, mutilations and abductions. Even in those days, abductions were still pretty far out and weird, so they wouldn’t touch that. So the book deals almost exclusively with UFO incidents, and none of the other weird stuff that Junior Hicks had been documenting for a long time.

LS: Wow. So you just mentioned creatures. Tell me what kinds of non-human creatures have you heard about?

GK: Well, the first one that was seen on the property is day one of when the ranch family moves in. They buy this 480 acre ranch, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s dominated on one side by a place that we now know as Skinwalker Ridge. On the other side of these brushy-type trees, a lot of thick foliage, and then there’s a river that runs year round on one side. It’s three homesteads, used to be three separate ranches that were combined into one over the decades. And it’s beautiful. It’s a great pasture land, it’s well watered, it’s a perfect place to raise a family and raise cattle. And they thought they had their dream property. But they moved in on the first day, that’s the story of the bulletproof wolf. They see a big animal out on the western edge of the property and it’s coming toward them and they realize, that’s not a dog, that’s a wolf and it’s gigantic. This thing sidles up to them, sort of like as if…they thought it was somebody’s tame, pet wolf. It gets up to the family and they remember it had rained that day. And they could smell wet dog. And it’s kind of walking through the family and rubbing up against the family members.

And then it sees a calf. They had all their their calves in this corral, this metal corral. And most of the calves were reacting with horror to this wolf. They were crouched on one side, as far away as they could get from him. And one of them made the mistake of sticking its nose out through the bars. This wolf jumps out into the air, like twenty feet in the air, snaps down these powerful jaws on this calf’s snout, and tries to tear it out of the corral. The rancher leaps into action. He grabbed an axe handle, I think it was, and beats this wolf over the back. Now the back of the wolf comes up to the middle of the rancher’s chest. He’s beating it, beating it and it’s not making a sound, it’s not having any kind of sign of distress. His son brings up a pistol, a .357, which I own one of those. I know it’s a powerful gun. The rancher says, you know, he’s not responding…he shoots the wolf…he shoots it three times with this pistol and it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t make a sound. It’s still trying to get this calf out of the out of this corral. The father of the rancher runs into the house, he brings out a thirty-ought-six, hunting rifle. Very powerful. The rancher puts two more shots into this wolf. The fifth shot is the one that got its attention. It dropped the calf. The sixth shot went right into the middle of its chest. It blew a chunk of fur and flesh out of this wolf, out of its back and it fell onto the grass nearby. And then it just turned around and casually started walking its way back to where it had come.

The rancher looked at his family. They can’t believe what’s happening. They get another rifle. He and his son go after this wolf. They’re following it through the thick brush and there’s a river over there, so the ground gets kind of muddy. And they’re following it through the brush and they can catch a glimpse of it now and then, but they’re following the tracks. They’re like, two and a half inches into the mud, because this thing must have weighed 200 pounds. They get out to a clearing and they follow the tracks out in the middle of this clearing and they (the tracks) stopped, right in the middle of it, as if this wolf had just been sucked up into the air. They walk back to the family and wonder, “What are we going to say? We’ll just try to get over it.” They picked up the piece of flesh and fur and if they had saved that, we would have a lot more answers. I know. It smelled like rotten meat. So that was day one.

They tried to get over it and ignore it. But over the course of the next several months, things got even weirder. There were other creatures. There was something that looked like a heavily muscled hyena with a fox’s tail and big long claws that attacked their horses, that left wounds on the horses. There were strange birds that looked like they would be native to the Amazon that were only there once. They’d have animals that would fly over…ducks, these geese that would fly over the house, right over the house. The whole v-shaped collection of geese. It looks like they would run into some invisible pillar up there in the sky. There were other creatures to come that we would think of as something like Bigfoot. There were invisible beings, they could see them moving through water on the property. They could see the water move, they would see them walking through cattle, that would disperse the cattle, but they couldn’t see whatever it was that was doing it.

LS: Wow. Wow. That’s, amazing. And this next thing that I want to talk about, I know you both have an opinion about this, I’m sure. I’ll just give a little background to the audience. Back in December of 2017, The New York Times published a groundbreaking story which said that, beginning in 2007, and supposedly ending in 2012, a behind the scenes program, that was part of the Defense Intelligence Agency or the DIA, investigated UFOs. And the Times reported that this investigation cost $22 million. That was again, supposedly given to something called AATIP or the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. And that the money was funded by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. According to The New York Times, most of that money was given to entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. Now as far as I can tell, there was no mention in that New York Times story about anything to do with Bigelow’s interest in Skinwalker Ranch. Now, just last month, George, you had a story posted on your mysterywire.com site about different government agencies that investigated UFOs and other supernatural topics. So in addition to AATIP, that I mentioned, there was another one called AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program. I think I’ve got that right. This is all pretty fuzzy to me. How many hands did that $22 million pass through? And what does this have to do with Skinwalker Ranch?

JC: George’s and Dr. Kelleher’s book, “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” that was the first inside look to the scientific studies of Skinwalker Ranch, ever. That was the first look. My film, was the first, visual look, you know, with the first interview with the new owner, now, everybody knows, Brandon Fugal.

But George had been allowed to bring his TV cameras and a small crew into Skinwalker Ranch for decades. And a lot of that footage you can see in my film, But George was asked to hold back on letting that footage out, to protect the active, scientific investigations at the ranch, which was being used as a living laboratory. So that’s the history. Now I’m going to pose this question, which is: George, can you clarify for people? A lot of Twitter questions about this? Can you explain how AAWSAP was created in relation to the DIA agent that read your book, and the $22 million that wasn’t given to AATIP? Can you explain that process to people?

GK: Well, let me start back a little bit further. So NIDS: National Institute for Discovery Science. That was created as sort of a UFO, paranormal, consciousness, think tank by Robert Bigelow, Las Vegas billionaire and space entrepreneur. He had a world class science advisory board that was…I think they got together, the first time was 1995. And they were looking for projects. They funded a lot of UFO research by individuals, intrepid investigators that you and I and Jeremy all know, Lee. They gave money to UFO organizations. And then they created their own rapid response team that would go to the scene of UFO flaps, would interrogate witnesses, collect evidence. They would do the same thing with animal mutilations. They had a lot of boots on the ground-type experience and were looking for more.

When the 1996 newspaper article comes to the attention of Bob Bigelow, he goes there, meets with the rancher, buys the property, talks the rancher into staying on as sort of a manager, though he had moved his family away. And over the next couple of years, they had sort of a cone of silence over the property, as they put a team of scientists, veterinarians and others on the ground there, to investigate whatever would happen. They looked for prosaic explanations, in the sense of…if you’ve seen the TV show that I think we might talk about later, you know, you look for a way to explain this without it being aliens or ghouls or something…some kind of monsters. So they did surveys of the property geomagnetic anomalies, looking for electrical signals that might explain some of what was going on, psychoactive plants that might be creating hallucinations, none of that panned out.

And the team interrogated the family, they collected the stories and then they started experiencing this stuff themselves. They talked to the neighbors, to the tribe, they collected as much information as they could, and tried to verify what they could. Eventually, whatever it is that was out there would play games with them, as it has with everyone who has been on the property. And it seemed to be, they were on the breakthrough of maybe having communications. They tried different experiments, just creative stuff to try to make a breakthrough with whatever it was that was out there. They were convinced it was clearly intelligent, based on many of the really strange events that unfolded, but they never made that breakthrough. And eventually, whatever it is that’s out there, got tired. It wanted to take its ball and go home. So it kind of went underground and the level of activity really kind of petered out.

It wasn’t enough to keep Bob Bigelow’s attention so he maintained the property, he had caretakers on there. The team would make occasional visits when activity warranted it. But by 2002, it was basically dead. And 2002, I had been bugging Mr. Bigelow to let me let it loose. Let me tell a story. I had been shooting some video for a year by that point. And he said, nah, don’t do the…he didn’t want it to be a documentary, because he was worried that it would be overrun by…become the Area 51 of the Unita basin. And that was a fear that we now know was well grounded. So I talked him into letting me do a newspaper article. I did a series of articles in the Las Vegas Mercury, which was a little weekly paper that existed back then. And it was November 2002  and I laid out the story. And I remember the reaction from people who were familiar with the ranch. Some of the researchers, they were outraged. I had to be making this up because the rancher had never shared this information with them and NIDS certainly hadn’t shared it with anyone. They allowed me to sort of be a fly on the wall. Well, the hope was from Bigelow and Colm Kelleher, that by doing this article, we might get some other people to come forward, that there might be other locations, hotspots, similar to Skinwalker, that they could go and investigate. And in fact, that did happen.

But for a couple of years, there was so little activity that the study basically ended. Then we talked Bigelow into giving the okay for the the book, that Colm Kelleher and I wrote. We wrote it. He signed off on it. There was nothing that we left out, we’re not hiding any information. He didn’t censor anything. We put it out there and boom, it kind of exploded. It put Skinwalker Ranch on the map. Well among the people who read this…it was passed around in Iraq, in the green zone, as the military intelligence people were kind of killing some hours when the fighting wasn’t happening. And the book got passed around and one of the people who eventually got to read it was a…it’s a guy who works for the DIA. He’s a brilliant man, a scientist who worked on rockets and other really complicated stuff that’s way over my head. Read the book, was intrigued by the national security implications that the ranch represented, talked his bosses into okaying further inquiry. He contacted Bob Bigelow, came out to fly to meet Bigelow. Bigelow took him to the ranch. He was there for a couple of hours, had an experience of his own, went back to Washington, met with Harry Reid and he laid out what he thought a program, a study, could look like. The program he laid out, is what Reid and his fellow senators sponsored and it was a program that came to be known…that was initially called AAWSAP.

But AAWSAP, that is the program that got the $22 million. It all went to Bigelow, the contractor. He had to get security clearances, there were protocols to follow. The money was paid out, I think $10 million the first year. They actually had funding to keep it going beyond the three years, the funding was already approved. But for a variety of political reasons, it got killed after three years. But during that three years, they had a renewed interest in the property. They had scientists on the property. They had agents from different agencies and different military branches who would come in and they had a beefed up security presence as well on the property. And, again, there were remarkable events that were recorded. They investigated the history of the basin, that geological history. They fanned out and talked to neighbors, they ran down leads. There’s a great deal of information, I think, that was collected during the BAASS years, the AAWSAP years. That has never been made public. Hopefully it will be some day.

But, to reiterate, the impetus for what we now know as AATIP, was in fact, the book that we wrote. The DIA scientist who took the ball and ran with it, got Harry Reid to approve the money. Started a study called AAWSAP. That program interacted with a separate office on on the East Coast. These guys were the ones who were, what we now know as AATIP. And it was Lue Elizondo and some other folks who were essentially investigating military encounters. That is, UFOs interacting with military units like the Nimitz. They would collect that information, it was passed around in sort of a loose confederation of employees. Very sub rosa, very sort of on an almost unofficial level. When the money ran out for AAWSAP and Reid no longer had the muscle to get it refunded, he tried to get it placed as a special access program, but that failed. When that happened, the program sort of morphed from AAWSAP into AATIP. AATIP continued. It’s what the New York Times reported on. The New York Times stories is great, it was groundbreaking. It changed the whole dynamic of the UFO question. But it was not entirely accurate because the money for the $22 million went to AAWSAP, not to AATIP. AATIP existed basically, without a budget. They existed unofficially. They still exists now, although the Pentagon has denied that. The program exists and is much more robust in its current configuration than it was back then. But the program started as a contract with Bigelow and one of the focuses and the inspiration for the whole thing was Skinwalker Ranch.

LS: And one thing that’s always puzzled me about Skinwalker and Jeremy, I want to hear your take on this also. Every time I see or hear anything about it, there’s mention of how everything that Bigelow’s team came up with, any evidence of real paranormal activity out there on the ranch, everything has been under lock and key somewhere, presumably at Bigelow’s own research facility in Las Vegas. My question is: Okay, if there’s nothing really unusual going on at the ranch, and never was, why all the cloak and dagger security to hide everything? What’s being hidden and who’s it being hidden from?

GK: Well, it depends on what you consider evidence and proof to be. You know, evidence is what it takes in the eye of the beholder to convince them that something is true. Eyewitness testimony is evidence. The fact that you search the property for geomagnetic anomalies is evidence of a sort as well. A lot of what science does is the history of failure. Science only makes progress when it fails, after it fails and fails and fails. So they collected a lot of information during the NIDS era. A lot of it is just…is fleeting images, it’s glimpses of other realities as Linda Howe might call it. You see a creature…I mean, a lot of the things that the rancher saw, that his family saw…they didn’t carry around video cameras, they didn’t have cell phones. They weren’t UFO investigators, they’re ranchers. They’re not there trying to document that aliens are visiting or there’s some interdimensional portal. They’re ranchers trying to make sense of some really strange activity. You know, if they had saved that chunk of the wolf, we might know a heck of a lot more. If they had cameras following them around as the TV show now has, they might have a lot more.

But whatever it is that’s out there, is smart, it’s elusive, it’s canny. It does not want to be documented. So it made it as difficult as possible. Equipment would malfunction, batteries would die, vehicles would die in the same spot. Cameras that were set up…you set them up in one area where activity’s been happening and the activity would move somewhere else. Whatever this thing was, it seemed to know what the investigators would be doing before they did it and it was always one step ahead of them. That’s quoting Bob Bigelow directly. It was as if it was putting onto display. It wanted to give you glimpses of its real self, but it didn’t want to give you solid proof.

Now I know that is very frustrating for people to hear but that’s the nature of the UFO mystery, isn’t it? I mean, how solid is UFO evidence from all over the world after seventy years? You can put it all in a bucket. It doesn’t want to be found, it doesn’t want to be documented. It allows you to know something really is going on, that reality isn’t quite what it used to be, that it isn’t quite what we assume it to be, but it’s not going to make it easy for us. It was almost like a learning curve, like if wanted us to figure this out on our own. And I know people are frustrated about what Bigelow was hiding but all the information from NIDS, we told it. We didn’t hold back any stories in the book, we told the whole thing. There might be data somewhere about some compass reading that would not be something that I would put in a book for a general audience to read because I couldn’t understand it myself, but we told the story, we’ve shared it.

The BAASS/AAWSAP situation is different. That’s a classified program, it was a government program. And for that information to be coming out, I’ve released what I can along the way, over the last couple of years, contracts and such and documents related to how the program came to being. But the central pile of information, the case files and things that I have described in multiple public presentations, I’m not sure when or if that will ever come out. But again, if you are looking for a hidden flying saucer, or you want to know about the guards who were killed because they were in a gun battle with aliens, or other people who were exposed to radiation on purpose as part of testing some kind of secret government weapons, I don’t have that information. I don’t think it exists.

LS: Jeremy, what’s your take on the whole idea or the question of the information still being kept under lock and key from decades ago?

JC: Right, so let’s get to the crux of that because I want to stay true to everybody on Twitter that I asked to send him a question? So Laurie, Shane, Collin, all have the same question. And I’ll pose it to George, which is from Collin: Has the ranch garnered empirical evidence for the strange occurrences going on? Some are not satisfied with anecdotal evidence. So George, kind of touched on this. But all three of those people I just mentioned, talked about…so what is the empirical evidence, and George just explained how difficult it was. So, we had NIDS, then we had BAASS, under AAWSAP, the DIA program, all trying to do this. So George, what would you say…has there been empirical evidence that has been garnered from studying the ranch?

GK: While there is physical evidence, if you mean empirical. I mean, there’s certainly physical evidence this phenomena, which appears in many different shapes and forms at different times, totally unpredictable and seemingly intelligent and purposefully elusive, doesn’t want to be documented. So if you don’t want to accept that as a premise right off the bat, I don’t know why you’re listening to this show or reading the book or interested at all. That is just the way it is. It’s the same thing with UFOs in general. They appear to different people at different times, they give us a little glimpse here and there, then boom, they’re gone. And if you don’t have a camera, trained at it exactly [at] the right moment, you have nothing, you’re left with a story. And that’s what this is. Those are just the facts. However, this thing that would appear to be non-physical, a lot of the time and fleeting most of the time, would also be physical at times. It carved up multiple cattle.

There’s one of those incidents of a calf that was carved up, completely stripped of seventy pounds of flesh, nothing left but bone and hide, in the middle of the day. I mean, a bright sunny morning on a Sunday, while the rancher and his wife were right out there in the same pasture. There were dogs that were vaporized. There was big tracks that were left. There were cameras that were vandalized. They had cameras up on top of these telephone poles that were supposed to have these sweeping views of the ranch. Now look, this is twenty-four years ago so the cameras were not great, but they would have a twenty-four hour feed that went into the headquarters that the trailer that NIDS used back then for all their equipment and where the crew would stay. Those cameras record(ed) a lot of strange anomalies. Jeremy included some of them in his film. People are still not satisfied. I can’t help that. I don’t know what to tell you. But the things have been well documented. The people who are telling these stories are trustworthy. The scientists who saw them themselves, saw it.

They have some physical evidence. There was an incident, for example, with the with the corral, where the entire corral was magnetized. There were four, big bulls that were…the rancher was worried that he’d lost so many cattle, if something happened to these bulls, he might go under. So he had all these these four, giant 2000 pound bulls, in the corral, for greater protection so he could keep an eye on them. And he and his wife drive to town, they remark to themselves as they’re going past the corral, “Boy, if something happens to these bulls, we’ll go under, we’ll be in big trouble.” They come back a half hour later, all four of the bulls are gone. They’re gone. They do this frantic search…they find them inside the trailer that’s in the corral. It’s this metal trailer that they used to store tools and such. It has a big thick wire around the only door, the only way to get in. There is no way in hell you can get one of these bulls in with a forklift, let alone all four of them. And they’re all crammed into this trailer. The wire on the door is still wrapped around it. Whoever got them in there didn’t use the door. It was like they dematerialized inside this thing. So how do you prove that?

Now the rancher has this story, he calls the NIDS guys who are in Las Vegas. They come out. They take measurements around, they see the bulls, they take photos of the bulls who are still pretty ticked off about the whole thing. And they measure that the entire corral, the metal corral, was magnetized, heavily magnetized. What does that? What is the reading that you want…that will convince you that that’s true? The same part of the ranch, they’d go over it again and again and the batteries would die. Now what is the data that would convince you that that really happened or the data that convinces you that a compass spins around in the same spot on the ranch every time they walk over it? Or they see beams of light that come out of the ground, or the whole pasture would light up at night, as if there’s a source in the sky? They’d hear voices, disembodied voices over their heads. Where’s the data on that stuff? They weren’t a TV show, they were scientists trying to figure this out. They didn’t carry around TV cameras. They did have cameras for a couple of these events, and the cameras would die. Now, I know that’s very unsatisfying. It’s unsatisfying to me as well. But that’s the way it is. And I can’t make it something that it isn’t.

LS: In case our listeners don’t know, and we’ve alluded to this, the History Channel is currently halfway through presenting a weekly series and it’s called, “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” with the new owner of the ranch, who assembled a relatively recent, scientific team. And their goal is to find answers to more than 100 years of alleged, paranormal activity there. So I’m curious…my first question is: How successful do either one of you think they will be? And if they find something unusual there, how forthcoming will they be?

Transcript: Skinwalker Ranch Owner & Real Estate Mogul, Brandon Fugal – Part 1 – “I Think We Truly May Have The Greatest Science Project Of Our Time Here”

JC: You know, first of all, I want to congratulate Brandon Fugal and his team and Dragon and all the guys, Caleb, that are out there doing it. We know them. Tom Winterton. They’re great people, we consider them friends. They’re running into the same problems that NIDS ran into, in their investigation, that BAASS, the government funded program, ran into. So to see it dramatized or not dramatized, but to see it, you know, real TV, seeing them run into the same problems, it’s showing the frustration of…everybody thinks we can just solve this by bringing the right equipment. Well, you can see the problems they’re running into. So I think it’s amazing that they’re doing it, that they’re putting it on TV. I mean, I love it! TV gets the attention of people. It lets them have the debate. So I think it’s just amazing that they’re doing it. It’s wonderful. Now, I want to squash this thing that like, you know, Bigelow is hiding everything and he never released anything. That’s just bullshit. That’s total bullshit. He was trying to use a living laboratory, respect the neighborhood and respect people from messing up the scientific studies. He has done more for the UFO topic than any sole individual. He has funded so much. I think we should be grateful for what Bob Bigelow has done. I think George has said that, so he would agree. But I love the attack. The way in which this is being done for television right now. Look, it’s an entertaining show but they’re trying their damnedest, and they’re running into the exact same problems as NIDS as BAASS and all that.

I have another Twitter thing I want to throw at George, because this is something that there’s been a lot of bullshit around. And I just want to know, the question came from both Nathan Hendrickson and also John, who was, IWantToKnow2020, on Twitter. They were asking, basically the same kind of thing, which is, and we really want to clear this up, if we can: Were Skinwalker Ranch security guards used as test subjects without their knowledge? A real nefarious, kind of rumor going around. George, can you talk on that?

GK: Well, I mean, I don’t think I could ever say 100% for sure, no, but I’d say almost positively, absolutely not. That would be highly illegal. There was no…in all the information that I have gleaned about the BAASS operation and what they were trying to do. I mean, they weren’t on the property the whole time. The security guys were there more than anyone but there was no secret military program using them as guinea pigs. I think that the ranch itself makes everybody a guinea pig. You never know how it is going to react to somebody’s presence. Brandon Fugal has said the same thing that Jeremy, you and I have said, in different presentations and that Colm Kelleher taught me a long time ago. This thing sizes you up. When you get on the property, it sizes you up. The people who have had the worst experiences are those who go in with sort of a cocky attitude. I’m not afraid of this thing, let’s get it on. People who are often packing guns, gung ho military folks, security guys, who think that they’re not afraid of anything, they’re the ones that have the worst time of it. You go in with a more respectful attitude, you’ll kind of gird your mental loins and let it know you’re ready to learn something, that seems to be the best way to approach it. Because at a minimum, you don’t have as many negative consequences.

But, you know, I see that the TV show that’s going through a lot of the same kind of things that NIDS investigators went through at first and that BAASS people went through. And I see the complaints from people saying, “Well, that doesn’t prove this. And that doesn’t prove that.” And oh my gosh, it’s a TV show. Well, yeah, you sit down in front of your TV, and you click the remote and you put on the History Channel, and you’ve got a bowl of popcorn and you’re watching television. And what comes on? A TV show. What do you think it’s going to be? Of course, it’s a TV show. These guys are doing something unique that NIDS and BAASS did not do in that they have a team of scientists that are floating around there, and they got TV cameras trailing after him so that there’s a way to document what happens to them. And I wish them all the luck in the world. I mean, you know, the ranch is the single most studied paranormal hotspot in the history of the world through NIDS and BAASS and now Brandon Fugal and his team, and hopefully they’re gonna get some answers. I don’t know if that’s possible or not.

LS: And I’ve noticed in the first three episodes of the series, I haven’t seen either of you on screen. Why not? (laughs) Quiet silence.

GK: Well, you know, I work for a TV station. So it’s kind of…they asked me to be part of it, and they wanted my input. It just becomes a conflict for me and maybe down the road, I can work that out or something, but I support ’em. I wish them all the best in the world. I think Travis Taylor’s a nice addition to the team. He comes in as sort of the resident skeptic. I think his skepticism is rapidly eroding as the weeks roll by and I think they’ve got some good stuff coming.

JC: There’s no conspiracy why we’re not on the show. I mean we are friends with Brandon. Brandon has been so gracious. We support Brandon, we support Dragon, Caleb, the whole team, Tom Winterton. As I said, you know, we haven’t been part of it. We haven’t been part of the show. Maybe we will in the future? But we support…I support what they’re doing. I’d like to say it’s super interesting, like on the second episode, and this comes from Eric on Twitter. second episode, the team had discovered a high EMF and 5g signal that presents itself above the ranch is what they’re postulating. So we see them kind of hunting this down. And Eric on Twitter asked, you know, could this anomaly be part of the Skylink program or the internet Loon program, which is a program to get Wi Fi to the rest of the world? And the thing is, we don’t know. That’s what’s so cool about the show and about them trying to figure it out. Look, it is a 5g signal. They think they’ve triangulated it, you know, a mile above the ranch. I want to know, if it is just internet, hopefully they’ll figure it out. But that’s what’s cool about something like the show. When you do movies, and you make these TV shows, it takes a lot of work, trying to bring information to the public about this. You’re going to see the ups and the downs and the I don’t knows, sometimes, because that’s the truth. So I really like their trajectory of trying to figure this stuff out. And I agree.

LS: One of my favorite parts of the show is when they show you the new, highly cool, technical command center, that they’ve got a built up there. They have a lot of equipment that, I guess, the Bigelow staff didn’t have years and years ago, but I’m hoping they get something. What do you guys think?

GK: Well, we’re talking about twenty-five years ago when the Bigelow team first came in there. There’s equipment that exists now that did not exist then. There’s cameras that exist, you know, that didn’t exist then. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff they didn’t have then that is available now. Over time, there was a lot of equipment that was put in that was top notch for its era. And then during the BAASS era, I know there isn’t much left of what was done there but there was a lot of stuff that was brought in that was government property that was sensor-type equipment, that didn’t stick around. It didn’t come with the ranch when it was sold. So, you know, I’m glad these guys got it. I’m glad that they’ve got cameras following them around to document it. It’s great to see.

I wanted to go back to the the issue of testing and whether people have worked on the property were used as guinea pigs. I remember, after the book came out in 2005, we were all kind of holding our breath about what the effect on the ranch would be, and it was as bad as we thought it was. Suddenly it was overrun by drunken teenagers and people having beer parties and trespassers and folks walking up to houses in the middle of the night taking photos, flash photos in the windows and tearing off gates and ripping up stuff to take away as souvenirs. It was bad. Bigelow, I flew with him in 2006 to the property where we checked it out for ourselves and we weren’t sitting out there twenty minutes when we saw it for ourselves, people coming up. Like date night, like going to a haunted house. So he started, from that point, having security personnel on the property. You take them from Bigelow Aerospace, send them out there. A lot of these guys are former military, former Special Ops, former police officers. And they would rotate. Ten days on at a time.

And some of the guys didn’t want to go at all. They’d read the book, they all knew the stories, they knew what was going on out there. Some didn’t want to go. Some were willing to go and check it out and then would never go back. And a few of them took to it. They wanted to go there all the time. Those guys, I respect them for having the courage to be out there and a few of them took it further than just being security guards because that was their primary responsibility. They also became investigators. They’d get little assignments from Mr. Bigelow, they’d report to him about what was going on. And I think they had some really strange experiences that affected them in profound ways, like so many people have had on the property. But the idea that the U.S. government was using them as guinea pigs to test out secret weapons is preposterous. It is illegal. If it happened, Bigelow would be putting his entire fortune at risk, and could go to prison. I certainly wouldn’t cover something like that up. But what you got is, Skinwalker Ranch is such a great big, fat juicy story. You got a lot of people on the periphery who want to get in on it somehow, who want to carve out their own piece of the turf. So the way they do it is they attack what has come before them. They’re gonna deride anything that’s happened before, dismiss any evidence that may have existed, insult any of the researchers who’d been there before them, so they can stake out their own turf. I think that’s sort of what’s happened.

These allegations about military testing are absolutely preposterous and totally unfounded. Now I think the guys who have been out there, who’ve had some reactions and medical and physical effects from the ranch? Yeah, I think that’s entirely possible. You know, one of the options that Colm and I looked at when we’re looking at – what could the possible explanations be when we first wrote the book – was, you can’t, you know, it could be aliens, interdimensional, whatever, innerspace, something like that. But you couldn’t entirely rule out the military. They have had an interest in that property for a long time, before BAASS, before AAWSAP and before NIDS was even there, the rancher family would say they saw military folks, that looked like military folks, snooping around. So it’s entirely possible that the military has an interest but using it to test secret weapons? Show me the evidence. You show me the evidence for that.

LS: I agree. You know, most people, whoever read about or know even a little of the history of UFOs in this country, are probably aware that in 1969, the United States Air Force closed its two decade long, official UFO investigation known as Project Blue Book. When they ended, or supposedly ended that study, they said there was nothing of any scientific value to be learned from UFOs. That nothing indicated that UFOs were a threat to our national security, and that no information gathered, pointed to the possibility that some UFO could be extraterrestrial. Fast forward to the present and now we know that, at the very least, we were lied to all those years ago. There has been, in fact, a government and military interested in UFOs. So here’s the question I would pose to both of you: Do you feel that there is an ongoing UFO investigation that we’re not being told about?

GK: Well, yes, and no. I mean, I’ve reported it. Jeremy has reported it. There is, in fact, a program, in fact, I have pretty good indications there’s more than one. And there’s at least one of them that’s pretty old. I don’t know if you can even call it a program anymore. I think there are some goodies that are out there, physical goodies that have been shared with people outside the government. And I don’t even know if the government could get them back if they wanted to. But yeah, there are programs, plural, right now. And they are studying this. And we all know that the idea that there’s no implications for national security is baloney, that there was, even after Blue Book was canceled, you know, that there was the Bolender memo and any cases involving national security goes somewhere else. Well where is somewhere else? Hopefully, all that information is being collated somewhere and that there is some ability of our government investigators to also interact with the true keepers of the secret, who might be outside of government by this point. But yeah, there are programs.

I want to reemphasize, I didn’t want to be too harsh about that testing thing a moment ago, because I believe that the people who say they’ve had physical effects from the ranch are telling the truth. And I know there are many other people who have had the same kinds of effects. And that we know from studies that we’ve all read, that there are, there’s empirical evidence that’s been collected by our government or other governments, that people who come into contact with these strange craft, have physical effects, have deleterious physical effects. That is true. So it would not be surprising to me for some of the guys who’ve worked on the property to have lasting physical effects. And for somebody to be interested in trying to measure those things and to help them. I hope so anyway.

JC: I can confidently state to you, Lee, a source of mine, highest ranking military individual and official that I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak with on this topic, told me point blank, every branch of our military, every single one, currently has ongoing, UFO study programs. Every branch. So the question is, we find out this little piece about AAWSAP, about AATIP. How many more programs? What are the nature of those programs? Why are there special access programs that there is knowledge about? Why would Harry Reid try, and George released this document, why would Harry Reid try to get SAP, Special Access Program status for AAWSAP, in order to exchange information with other SAP programs dealing with the UFO topic? Everything from materials, material science, to whatever you can imagine. So yes, there are programs – and I trust my source. But it’s not the only source – that within all branches of military and intelligence. I mean they’d be idiots not to study this.

You know, this is the craziest thing to me. Commander David Fravor engages a UFO. Seeks after a UFO. I brought him on the Joe Rogan podcast. He told the world his story, did his first long form interview with me, went on camera with George Knapp. Here’s Commander David Fravor, right? Obviously, whatever he engaged, it outpaced, it actively jammed his optics and weapon systems. It actively jammed the the greatest technologies that we have. Now this is something we don’t want people to know. This is something that definitely we want to be able to defend against. Of course, we have active programs in all of these fields. Going back to what Bob Lazar told us about physical craft. I think that’s pretty well established now. I’ll let George talk more about that if he wants to. But yes, there are many more programs and I hope that more information will be coming out about those and I suspect with the people that brought you news before. they’ll bring the news again in the future.

LS: Is there at least a consensus within the government or within the governments of the world and the military forces of the world, some kind of consensual agreement that it’s not any other country that’s responsible for what we’re talking about tonight? That’s the point.

GK: Yeah, absolutely.

JC: Yes.

GK: Yeah, beyond any question.

LS: And yet, no one, no leader of almost any country that I can think of, is willing to make a statement to that effect, saying, “Hey, folks, listen. Thanks for gathering in the country. I just wanted to let you know tonight that one of the reasons why we’ve had to close down airports, it’s not just because of the Coronavirus, but because, well, we realize that there are things operating in our skies with impunity that we have no control over. We can’t force them down. We’ve tried shooting at them and they can’t be shot at. They outmaneuver all of our conventional aircraft. So we don’t think that there’s any hostility involved because we are the ones who initiate the aggression, before anybody else does.”

JC: Lee, how can a world leader say to everybody, “There are craft of unknown origin, flying with impunity in our airspace, that are technologically more advanced, can maneuver at will, can check out our weapon systems, including nuclear weapons.” How can a president or a world leader say that when they’re not read in, when they’re not briefed on this? When they might have the classification needed to understand or view or get access to these SAP programs and their understanding, but they don’t have the other side to the coin of intelligence to classification to compartmentalization, which is need to know. Which reminds me of when Bill Clinton himself had Webster Hubbell try to find out about the UFO stuff. George can speak on this a lot more than I can. But my point is, how can you disclose something which you don’t have access to? This reminds me of the Wilson memo. That was a real meeting. It reminds me of what was said in that meeting about private industry, maintaining control over that information above a military individual who should have had access, should have been running that program. So maybe George can speak on that more. But I think that’s the problem more than it is making that admission by a world leader who has access, who has control over this data, this information that’s so stove-piped and compartmentalized. What would you say, George?

GK: Let me address it this way. It’s sort of like…the people that I know who’ve been involved in this stuff, they still operate in sort of the general paradigm that we’ve always operated under. That whoever these things are, it’s aliens, you know, meaning extraterrestrials. But when I hear that term, it’s more like used like a placeholder. Because the deeper you drill on this thing, the less you know about it. A place like Skinwalker Ranch, it doesn’t behave like aliens that we’ve ever heard of. Aliens doing poltergeist-type stuff, moving around the frying pans and hair brushes and things of that in the house or appearing in the window. That doesn’t sound like aliens that we’ve come to know. As if we know what aliens are. Whatever it is, it’s alien to us. No government’s going to come forward and say, “Yeah, these things are real. We don’t know who they are, where they’re from, or what their intentions are”. They’re just not going to do it. Like again, with the ranch. I think everybody who’s ever been there has been a guinea pig. I know that the first time I went, as I told you before, they took me there, in part because of my inherent weirdness quotient. They were hoping that my inherent weirdness quotient would stimulate something and get a reaction. That’s why we did all those things and moved the dirt and put me in the middle homestead.

And I think some of the people who have worked there, I sympathize with them in that sense is that they were guinea pigs like everyone who visits the property because you don’t know what it is and you don’t know what it’s gonna do to you. Most of the time, it’s nothing. But sometimes it does some things to you that really mess with your head. And very rare times, it affects you in a physical way. And of course those kind of people have a right to know what’s going on but everybody that I know of – and maybe there are exceptions – who worked there from Bigelow, knew what was going on, going in. After 2005, the word on the Skinwalker Ranch was out. There’s not many people that were going there that didn’t know what was going on, or what might be in store for them. I don’t know that anybody was forced to work there. But yeah, if there’s something that happened to them, it certainly seems like they should get some answers. But what those answers are, I don’t think anybody has them. Same as our government. I don’t think they’ve got an answer for it and I don’t know that it’s something we can ever solve.

LS: Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, George. And by the way, I wouldn’t agree that you have an inherent weird quotient. I just wouldn’t think so. I’ve been accused of the same thing. We have in the upcoming film, a documentary that I helped produce called, “The Phenomenon.”

We have a segment of Bill Clinton, several years ago, when he was giving a speech, I believe in Hong Kong, and he and someone asked him from the audience…what’s your take on or what did you ever learn about Area 51? Or, things like that, and UFOs in general, or what happened at Roswell. And normally, presidents that I’ve heard, who have been asked the same question, they’ll always give a flippant answer. Say, “Yeah, there’s nothing to it. No, I don’t know what’s going on there. You can’t really believe everything you hear.” But at this location, Clinton said to the audience and it was very serious, he said, “Look, I tried to find out information about UFOs. And to me, I wouldn’t be the first president whose underlings would have kept information from him. And in fact, all that the underlings or other people, all of the the lifetime bureaucrats had to do, was just wait it out, wait for me to leave office, and then just get ready for the next guy to come in.” And I thought, wow, I’ve never heard any president actually say that basically, he was saying, “I didn’t have a need to know.” That’s what it sounded like. And I appreciated hearing him say that. And I never forgot that. So we’re showing that in the film, because I think that’s an important moment for him or any president to admit something like that. Why would a president say, or former president, I wouldn’t be the first sitting president who wasn’t told stuff. That’s important.

JC: I think a lot of presidents know that they’re lied to. A lot of presidents know that they are not briefed on this. They don’t even know the questions to ask. It’s like new information to them. Remember, this information has been safeguarded through private industry. This information has been safeguarded through a separate, auxiliary type of government. I don’t know how better to say it. But it’s very clear that everybody is fighting over this information because whoever gets the technology to function, wins. I mean, this is a game changer. I wish we had antigravitics. One of the individuals who would have known, who is a source of mine over the years, would have known, was in command of most of the military items that we’re talking about here and did not have these technologies that we see in the skies. Would love that. It’s a game changer. So I think part of the reason why a lot of this is held back, you know, from public scrutiny, because we want a technological advantage. And if we get that advantage, we win.

LS: You know, part of my frustration with this whole thing, including the Skinwalker story, is this: I really always have to keep questioning, who’s really in charge there? Is Skinwalker just a privately owned piece of property whose owner wants to find the answers to the centuries old mysteries there? Or, is there maybe some government interest or reason to be concerned about what may be discovered there? Who’s who’s running the ship, is what I want to know.

GK: I think that government will always have an interest in Skinwalker Ranch, no matter who owns it, and who’s running the ship. Right now, Brandon Fugal is running the ship. He bought it. He used his own money, same as Bob Bigelow bought it and he used his own money. For a period of three years there, there was a government funded program to study, not only the ranch. I mean, look, that $22 million was not spent at Skinwalker Ranch, it was spent elsewhere. There was a lot of it that was spent in the Uinta basin, around the ranch that the people at the ranch never saw. And again, hopefully some of that information will come out at some point. But they cast a much wider net. They were making deals with governments around the country to get what information they could. With private interest. They had their own sort of rapid response team like NIDS did, traveling around the world to gather information, investigate cases, collect videos, things of that sort. There’s a huge database that’s been collected there. That program is gone but there’s another program that’s replaced it. I think those folks are probably interested in Skinwalker Ranch and keep abreast of it. To my knowledge, there’s no active government study of the ranch, but you never know. I’m sure they’re monitoring it to some degree.

JC: And there were foreign nations monitoring what was going on during the time of NIDS and BAASS and whatnot. Maybe you could mention that.

GK: That’s true. There were two other nations that were interested in it. One of them even proposed a deal, hey, let’s do this together. And they were told…no. There was espionage involved that and hopefully, those details can be made public. But there were other folks, once the story got out, other governments, who were interested as well. But I don’t think anybody has the answer, not about the ranch and not about the larger UFO question. And again, as I said before, I’m not sure we will ever know. It’s always seems to be just tantalizingly out of our reach to figure it out and nail it down.

LS: A couple of years ago. And, George, you were very instrumental in setting this up. Director James Fox and I, we had the opportunity to sit down with Senator Harry Reid at his office in Las Vegas, followed by you sitting down with us at the same location for our documentary. And I remember, we weren’t even planning to ask him about Skinwalker because it wasn’t in keeping with everything else we were talking about in the film. And so it just didn’t come up on our list of questions. And during the interview, Senator Reid said, “You know, there’s this ranch in Utah.” And when he said that, I went, “Uh oh, here we go.” But he didn’t mention the name of it, and I wasn’t going to kind of call and say, “Oh, do you mean Skinwalker?” He said, “There’s this ranch in Utah, and where we do believe that almost every single kind of paranormal phenomena, phenomenon has occurred. And, and don’t you think we should be studying this scientifically? I think we should, because there’s also a belief that there are other places like this, geographically located around the planet. Shouldn’t we be studying these things, from country to country?” And I couldn’t disagree with him. I mean, I was amazed that he would say that but we didn’t put that in the film. And I’m glad. But what an interesting thing to hear Senator Reid saying, since he brought it up, and we didn’t. I appreciated that. What do you think?

Read My Interview with Senator Reid

GK: Well, [Senator Reid’s] been fascinated with the ranch since the beginning. I mean, it was in the back of his mind. He went to one of the first, earliest NIDS meetings. I had told him about NIDS, and this amazing panel of people who were gathered for the science advisory board. Two astronauts, a U.S. Senator, esteemed scientists in all kinds of different fields. And we’d already been having a conversation about UFOs for a couple of years, secretly, you know, on the side, because he didn’t want to be the UFO senator. And he asked about going to a meeting and he went to one and sat in on a meeting and I think he was hooked from that point on. And when the book came out and I was working on different things about the ranch, I kept Senator Reid in the loop. He had toyed with the idea of sending some of his staff members to the ranch, but after they read the book, they wanted nothing to do with it. I know that not only did he sponsor what became AATIP, the AAWSAP program, but he’s had an ongoing interest.

And you mentioned Bill Clinton a couple of minutes ago. Harry Reid talked to Bill Clinton about UFOs. And may have taken this topic further than that. Yeah, I know, he talked to him in a conversation in the Rose Garden, while Clinton was still president and then they had talked since then. But Reid got sick two years ago, he’s still still hanging in there. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton came to Las Vegas for a presentation at a strip arena and they stopped by to see Harry Reid. And I planted a UFO question with him and I believe he asked him but he hasn’t shared me the answer with what he was going to ask him.

So, Reid’s been interested in this for a long time. I know people have their own suspicions, it’s some kind of conspiracy, it’s a scam, he’s helping out his buddy Bigelow. Bob Bigelow doesn’t need $22 million. He’s a multi-billionaire. He spent more than $22 million on NIDS. He spent millions beyond that on other research. He spent all of that $22 million and more during those periods of BAASS. The last year he funded it pretty much entirely out of his own pocket. He had close to fifty employees at one time and that was money he spent himself to keep it going because he was hanging on, hoping that the government would keep the program authorized. But that didn’t happen. At least his part of it didn’t happen.

LS: I wanted to mention that the last time that Mrs. Clinton was running for president, and she appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show, he asked he, he said, “When your husband was here previously, and I asked him about UFOs. He said that he couldn’t find anything about it when he when he first tried to put out some feelers.” And he said, “Now I’m gonna ask you. If you become president, will you release information about UFOs?” And she made what I thought was a tactical, critical error. She said, if I become your President, and I know, she was also talking to all of those millions and millions of voters out there, who were probably watching her, and she knew that many of those people were pro-UFO. And so she said something like, “You know, I will do my very best. I will put my work to it and I will get the information, and I will release the documentation, as long as it doesn’t have any interference or threat to our national security.” I thought, well, wait a minute, Mrs. Clinton, you just killed it right there. Because, as I think of it, everything about UFOs, Skinwalker, paranormal in general, has something to do with national security. I think. Am I wrong about that? What do you think George? Jeremy?

JC: Yeah, I think it’s really, really simple. Anything that can disarm our nuclear weapons, anything that can outpace our greatest fighting machines, turn off our optics, that is, of course, national security. Again, this is for a technological advantage. Absolutely, 100%. This all deals with national security. However, I echo what Bob Lazar once said. I can understand not explaining what we know of all technologies and this sort of thing. But the basic premise, the basic premise, that not only are we statistically not alone in this vast Universe, but there have been visitations of craft of unknown origin that are technologically advanced from civilizations not here on Earth, or at least it appears. To at least tell the public that this UFO reality is real. Which they basically did in December pf 2017. However, it needs to be a little bit more bold. People really need to hear it straight.

And speaking of that, this reminds me of a Huffington Post article that actually you wrote Lee, which is about Bob Bigelow, and his interview on “60 Minutes.” And I have a question for George. This comes from Twitter. I loved that interview. Bob Bigelow goes on to “60 Minutes” and ends up talking about UFOs.

And she says, “Aren’t you worried about people thinking you’re crazy man?” And he says, “I don’t give a damn! He cuts her off before she finishes the question. I mean, balls, right? It’s like, he doesn’t give a damn, he was talking straight. So MickleInAPickle on Twitter, “Bigelow stated on ’60 Minutes,’ that he knows that the UFO phenomenon is real, and is right under our noses, is this because of Skinwalker Ranch or something else?” I think maybe George can can tell us more?

GK: Well, it’s a combination of things. Some of it is from Skinwalker Ranch, for sure. You know, he sold the property in 2016. There’s been a lot of speculation about the reasons why. It’s a combination of factors. One is he wanted to get it off his plate because he had put so much money, $350 million, into this aerospace effort. It was at a critical stage. He wanted it to have his full and complete focus. He didn’t want to just sell it to anyone though. At one point, I was I had enough money to buy it myself, but I couldn’t come up with the money to keep it going or to improve the property and protect it. So Brandon was the guy. He was looking for somebody who was willing to take it on and would be a good caretaker and steward of the property and maybe reignite the study and Brandon Fugal came along and the deal was done.

You know, Mr. Bigelow has had some experiences that stem from Skinwalker Ranch, as have many people who have visited. It was an intelligence person assigned to a military outfit that was on the property, I think in 2010, who had an experience along with two other intelligence folks, and it followed them home. It followed all three of them home. It followed multiple people home. And it basically was an explosion of poltergeist trickster-type activity at their homes, thousands of miles away from the ranch. That phenomena was was dubbed hitchhikers. It sort of attaches itself to people who visit the property. Not everyone, but if you go there enough, it happens. It has happened to me. Now, I haven’t seen anything on the ranch. I haven’t seen anything at my house. But it spreads to loved ones. So my wife has experienced it. Bob Bigelow’s wife, who just passed away a couple months ago, experienced it multiple times. Colm Kelleher’s wife experienced it in the early days of NIDS. And these other people who were there during the BAASS era, same thing. It’s scary. And it messes with you. And so I think Bob wanted it off his plate both for business reasons and to protect his family. He just didn’t want to go there. Colm Kelleher probably won’t go there again. I’m not sure I want to go there again. Because it’s like you’re rolling dice.

You know, the guys that we’ve heard from, the guys who worked on the ranch who’ve had physical effects, I mean, you know, I feel for them. And like I said before, anybody who goes there, you’re a guinea pig and Bob Bigelow wanted it off his plate. But he saw enough evidence, both through the experiences at Skinwalker Ranch, through his personal experiences, and then with the data that was collected both by NIDS and by BAASS, that this is real, that it’s a legitimate issue for inquiry, that it certainly has national security implications and in addition, it’s fun. I mean, it’s fun to pursue this just for its own sake, to figure this stuff out, if we can. So far, we’re not able to answer it, but hopefully someday we will be.

LS: Well, I would really like to get both of your takes on this. Your separate opinions on what you think the underlying truth is of what’s happening at Skinwalker Ranch. Take all things under consideration, all the things that have been reported, that you’ve read about, that you’ve researched. What do you both think is happening? I’m asking for your personal, gut-wrenching belief, please.

JC: You know, it’s so perplexing, Lee. I consider myself a very nuts and bolts person, initially. When it comes to the UFO topic, it was the Bob Lazar story. I just wanted to know, was Bob Lazar telling us the truth? Craft? Awesome. The biggest misconception I think, with the UFO topic, if you’re talking nuts and bolts, is that distance between time and space is an issue for these advanced civilizations, if this is indeed the case. That the concept of. “Oh, there’s life out in the Universe, but it ain’t visiting here. It’s just too far. You can’t break the speed of light.” Well, we know that to be wrong. Five different ways. As a nuts and bolts person, this concept of distance, this concept of…we can’t be visited by other…extraterrestrial, technological, you know…this, to me, is a false sense of pride within our own physics. There’s more that we don’t know, than we know.

So, look, it could be elements of extraterrestrial intervention, that maybe that’s what these craft are. Or, and this is what Skinwalker Ranch has really taught me, that the UFO nuts and bolts aspect is deeply intertwined with a much more, I guess, sociological aspect of interpretation, where these other events are occurring. From disembodied voices, to apparitions, to this trickster-like element. So when you really look at Skinwalker Ranch, and you back away from your preconceptions of physics and science, and whatever else, and you just look at the raw data, what is going on there, it begs you to expand your concept of possibility to include that what’s going on at the ranch, it’s far beyond just extraterrestrial civilizations coming to look at our, you know, cupcakes and top hats and they like our jazz. I don’t know.

So, you know, my gut feeling, and that’s all that it really is, is the pantheon of different phenomena that occur, like at Skinwalker Ranch, that they are interrelated, that they’re connected in some way and it could be as far-fetched as some sort of artificial intelligence playing with a simulation, to interdimensional. We don’t know! And anybody that says they know, run away. Run away. They’re about to start a cult. They don’t know. So the real answer is, I have no idea. Not even a clue.

LS: But the safe thing…can we safely all agree that something is happening there, that has yet to be explained?

JC: Oh, there’s no doubt. 100%, no doubt.

GK: So I guess you could we could boil it down to this. You could ask yourself when you look at all the different phenomena that’s been reported there: UFOs, physical craft and non-physical craft, structured craft and then ethereal, wispy things in the sky. Orbs, different times, different types that seem to have different personalities. Poltergeist-type activity, things moving around in the house. Shadow creatures, Bigfoot, other crypto-creatures, big, like the bulletproof wolf. Things of that sort. Cattle mutilations, crop circles, physical manifestations of things. And then the trickster stuff where it’s always one step ahead of you, that it plays games, it seems to know what you’re thinking before you’re thinking it. And is that all related? Is that all the same phenomena in different forms, in different guises? Or, is the ranch sort of like a freeway interchange. Like a, you know, a highway where…a portal, where different phenomena come in from different places. A poltergeist universe and the parallel world world of aliens or not. Seems to me that the lesson from the ranch is suggesting that all these things are related in some way that we haven’t quite figured out yet. Whether it’s all the same thing or not, that’s another question. But it’s all related and it’s up to us to try to figure it out. My guess is that, you know, it’s an intelligence that lives here. It’s not alien, it lives here. It’s always been here. Maybe it lives somewhere else as well. But it seems like we’re the newcomers. We’re the interesting subjects. That it lives here, has always lived here and we’re the entertainment, at least for now.

LS: My late friend, Stanton Friedman, nuclear physicist, used to say all the time, at every place that he would lecture, he would say, “Debunkers and hard-nosed skeptics about UFOs,” this is pretty much their mantra. He would say, “When it comes to UFOs, don’t bother me with any evidence, my mind is already made up.” That would be the first part. And then he would go on to say, “When somebody says that bit of UFO behavior is impossible, what they’re really saying is, I don’t know how to do that. So it must be impossible.” And he would always say that that’s just a non-scientific approach to it. And I always agreed with him about that. Just because we don’t know how to do it, doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t figured it out already.

GK: Exactly. It goes back to the question of whether there’s a national security implication here. Of course there is. The names of these programs AATIP, it’s got the word threat in it. AAWSAP, it’s got the word weapon in it. That upsets a lot of people. They think, “Oh, this is just the Pentagon trying to gin up some big spending program.” Well, you know what? It deserves a big spending program. $22 million over three years isn’t enough to get the job done. Clearly. It deserves a lot more of our resources. John Alexander, our mutual friend, Lee, has said it many times, it deserves sort of a Manhattan-level Project to figure this out, all the different aspects of it. There are national security implications. These things, as you said, do things that we can’t do. So, what happens if the Russians get it first? If the Chinese get it first? The first person to crack this technology, that’s the ballgame. You know, that was [what] Senator Reid confided from the beginning, that was his primary interest…the national security implications of an adversary getting this technology and figuring it out before we do

LS: If we’re smart enough to have the knowledge to figure it out, which I’m not sure that we are. Both of you have been to the ranch, many times. I’m curious. Have you spoken to any local, law enforcement authorities in the area and what do they have to say about the reports of so many paranormal experiences?

JC: We’ve spoken with a number of law enforcement. Go ahead, George, I’d like to hear your point of view.

GK: Well, I was gonna say the first person I interviewed, on the ranch itself, the first person who went on camera, was a guy named Pete. I’ll leave out his last name. He had been a deputy in the region. He had investigated cattle mutilations and UFO sightings as an active deputy. And then after the rancher left, he became sort of the ranch manager. He had multiple experiences. He said that everybody in the area pretty much knew that it was true, that it was it was real, and that either they had had experiences or someone else in their family had had experiences. In addition, the NIDS guys, I have transcripts of these interviews that they had done with other law enforcement folks in the area, including tribal police, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, who had all said that this stuff is true and shared some stories that are blood curdling about creatures and Skinwalkers. It’s where the Skinwalker legend and name came from. So yeah, law enforcement takes it seriously. They’ve been called in and around the ranch, many times over the years by ranchers, certainly when the expensive cattle are mutilated or carved up or stolen. They don’t know what to make of it either.

JC: I’ve got two things to add to the law enforcement aspect. You know, one of the women…so George and I and Matt Adams, we’ve done a lot of interviews in the community, in the Uinita basin, not just on the ranch, because obviously, the phenomenon doesn’t care about property lines. It’s all throughout the Uinta basin. And one of the families that we interviewed was Janice, and her son Gary, and I actually just put that up on my YouTube.

Gary has MS. Both he and Janice were hit with this beam of light from above. You can see their testimony on my YouTube, how it happened to them. They also had a neighbor who got hit with this beam of light and was irradiated, died of a cancer, face was burned so red…deep, deep layers. So they had this amazingly, deep fear. Are these physical effects, that Gary is having of MS, was that somehow related to the beam of light that hit them? Whether there is a correlation, or there’s not, it still creates this deep sense of…is this government where we can take action and say, “Hey, you know, what’s going on here?” Or is this something else?

So, interestingly enough with law enforcement, she had another experience and this is where she has this…and she showed us, that metal wall, that was where one of her horses was on one side. She was braiding its hair, fifteen minutes prior. She goes out, by the way, she lives right next to Skinwalker Ranch and she finds the horse dead. However the horse, was dragged. You can see the drag marks on the ground, from one side of the metal fence to the other. How do it get through the fence? It was so bizarre. Her horse, that she loved, she was just braiding its hair, it’s dead. She calls the police, the police come over. They won’t touch it. They won’t talk about it. They were freaked out. She had another experience where she called law enforcement.

So here’s the deal. The law enforcement we spoke with, George and I had another opportunity, spoke with the current, I can’t say who, but you know, one of the heads of the current law enforcement there. And they say, “You have to understand, when we get a call for something…these lights in the sky, every single call we have to take seriously because we know these things happen. We’ve seen them.” And he whips out his cell phone and he says, “In fact, here’s a video.” And this is of a UFO that’s hovering over a house and he shows it to me. It was one of the coolest UFO videos I’ve ever seen. And obviously I said,  “Can I have that?” And he goes, “No, not right now.” I mean, I’d love to get my hands on it. It’s a great piece of content. But again, the local law enforcement…and they shared a further story. A further story about protecting ourselves. I mean, with all seriousness, the guy pulled me aside and said, “I’ve seen people like you. You come out here. You think you’re hunting something. Don’t think for a second that it’s not hunting you back.”

And he was genuinely concerned. Because of what had happened to his coworker, who was also on the police force, who had a dramatic experience of seeing a sort of creature, of a big creature. I said, “Well, how big?” He points to his SUV about that big. And after seeing it, had this kind of hitchhiker effect. It was so bad…in their tradition, they got a local shaman to try to help. So to answer your question. law enforcement on a daily basis is aware, that in the Uinta basin, in general, that these experiences are happening, and that they can be devastating. And so yes, they take it very seriously. This isn’t just, you know, South Central LA. These are very bizarre occurrences.

LS: Well, based on everything you just said, I have to wonder, what’s the overall the risk factor at the ranch? They even talk about this topic on the current tv series…of the risk factor of just being there. There have been stories, through the years, of people showing up, like even unannounced, to try and get onto the ranch. What what’s up with that, in terms of risk?

GK: Well, as Jeremy said, the phenomena isn’t limited just to the acreage of the ranch itself. It happens throughout the Unita basin. They’ve had mutilations and UFO sightings throughout that basin for as long as humans have lived there. So it’s not just just the ranch. I understand the attraction of the ranch itself now that it’s famous. But yeah, people show up all the time. They trespass all the time. I think Brandon Fugal’s security is a lot better than what existed before. He’s got cameras and sensors all over the place that will alert him to when people are trespassing on the property. And he’s on it. I mean, he’s got Dragon and his security team, they’re on it. And they don’t allow it to happen. And there’s consequences if they catch you.

But yeah, people have shown up and have reported experiences. I am not in the game of determining whether people who post something online had a genuine experience or not. And I don’t dismiss it, because I I’ve talked to enough people that I find to be credible, even though they’re describing experiences that are truly in-credible, that I would not say now that can’t have happened. In the same way, though, that I mentioned before about some of the the peripheral figures who figure their only way to get a stake in the game, to carve out some turf, is to dismiss or disparage the work that’s gone on before them or stories told by others. They’ve decided that all the experiences told during the Bigelow era, both NIDS and BAASS, that’s untrue. What’s happening now is true. What happened before Bigelow is true. What’s happened throughout the basin is true. But what happened during Bigelow, that can’t be true, because we don’t trust him. It’s ridiculous.

LS: You know, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left here. I wanted to just ask both of you to tell me if you think that…well, let me ask you: What would you like to see happen regarding a more transparent, global openness about UFOs, paranormal in general, not just Skinwalker – but that’s included with it. What would you like to see happen? And this could involve, I don’t know, the United Nations or government leaders. Just what’s your take on that transparency?

JC: I’m gonna have to talk separately from George because I’m mad as hell, as the saying goes. I mean, at this point, we need to kick the door down. We need to rage against the machine, we need to take the power back. In my opinion, honestly, at this point, we need to press our government for answers. We need to press our officials, we need to be as loud as possible. We need to have fun doing it, of course, but in my point of view, this is no longer acceptable. We have Commander David Fravor, he’s come out. We have these programs. They’re announced. We have other fighter pilots who’ve engaged UFOs, they put their lives at risk and they’re being denied. They’re being told, be quiet. Still, to this day, there’s a disinformation attempt to make a laugh back that is infiltration from different intelligence agencies, even within the UFO community. At this point, I feel like we need to show that we are mad as hell. We need to ask questions and we need to rile shit up. And that’s where I’m coming from. But I speak only for myself.

GK: You know, I don’t know. I mean, you know, I’m in the news business, it’s my job to dig into stuff and to tell people what I find out. And that’s always been my approach to the the overall topic and to the ranch. And there’s some stuff that shared with me that in the interest of continuing a relationship, so I can continue to get information, I agree to conditions on it at times. But it has paid off for me. I’m in it for the long game, you know, and sometimes, like with the ranch, it was seven years, six years before I could say anything about what had gone on during the NIDS period. But eventually, I knew I’d get it out. And then a couple years later, the book came out after that. The same thing with the BAASS study. So, I knew about it from the from the day after the contract was signed, and then Bigelow went on the radio with me and talked about it in very general terms, telling the world basically that he was partners with somebody that very much sounded like a government agency. So I’m in favor of telling it as much as you can, as soon as you can.

But then you have to go back to the question: What is it? So we don’t know what it is, we don’t know why it’s here, we don’t know what its intentions are. It could be not a good thing. You know, it could be something…you know, Charles Fort, who thought we were somebody’s property. Some people suspect that we’re food or they need something from us. I don’t know what the answer is. So before we disclose a lot of stuff, we better get some answers before we just spill it on out there. Because, you know, people think they’re ready for UFO disclosure. Well, yeah, that’s one thing. Aliens are visiting us from some other planet. We’re accustomed, we’re conditioned to accept that. But the idea of invisible beings that see everything that we do, that they’re around us all the time, they watch us in the shower when we sleep, that they can play with our minds and manipulate physical realities and kill our animals and vaporize our dogs and they can do all this kind of stuff and there’s not anything we can do about it. I’m not sure people are ready really to deal with that as reality from their government.

LS: Thank you, George and Jeremy for a long time I’ve wanted to do a definitive show about Skinwalker Ranch. I thank you both so much for giving it to us. For more information about George Knapp, check out his online site at mysterywire.com and look for his book, “Hunt for the Skinwalker.” Jeremy Corbell. His website is extraordinarybeliefs.com. It’s also where you can find his film, coincidentally titled, “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” as well as other unique and exclusive films and stories. Thanks again, guys. I hope we’ve provided our audience with really good incredible information about Skinwalker Ranch past, present, and future. I appreciate it.

To find more visit: www.leespeigel.com or find him on Facebook and Twitter. Edge of Reality radio is broadcast every Thursday night at 8pm. Eastern exclusively on kgrradio.com.

#ufos, aatip, aawsap, aliens, bigelow, colm kelleher, corbell, extraterrestrial, kelleher, knapp, lee speigel, nids, portal, skinwalker, skinwalker ranch, speigel, uap, ufo, uinta

By admin

---

---