The Navajo Believe that the skinwalkers are shapeshift witches that pose as disfigured animals such as wolves and bears.
Traditions claim that skinwalkers were formerly healers and medicine men who became corrupted by their own power and turned evil. It’s also been said that breaching tribal taboos and committing social offenses can turn anyone into a Skinwalker.
Skinwalkers are very powerful creatures that are sometimes depicted as enormous coyotes, wolves, and bears. They are thought to be nearly hard to kill. However, a bullet or knife rubbed with white ash, according to widely circulated belief, might just work.
The story of the Skinwalker, a shape-shifting creature, has mostly been written off as a hoax. After all, it is hard to believe that a humanoid figure would turn into a four-legged animal to terrify people in Southwest America.
When The Deseret News published a piece titled “Frequent Fliers?” in 1996, the rest of America got its first substantial taste of the Navajo myth. The account detailed a Utah family’s traumatic encounter with the alleged monster, which featured crop circles, livestock disappearances and mutilations, and UFO sightings.
But only 18 months after moving onto the ranch, the family had their most upsetting experience. Father of the family Terry Sherman came upon a wolf while walking his dogs late at night on the ranch.
But this wolf wasn’t just any wolf. It was possibly three times larger than a typical one, had bright red eyes, and didn’t flinch when Sherman fired three close-range rounds into its hiding place.
There were other people traumatized on the land beside the Sherman family. The ranch was renamed Skinwalker Ranch because multiple subsequent owners had uncannily similar encounters with these animals after they left. As a result, it is now a center for paranormal research.
Seven of Terry and Gwen Sherman’s cows either died or vanished after they initially noticed UFOs of various sizes floating above their property.
The Shermans did discover two dead cattle, and the area around them both smelled strangely chemical. One of the missing cows left prints in the snow that stopped abruptly.
“If it’s snow, it’s hard for a 1,200- or 1,400-pound animal to just walk off without leaving tracks or to stop and walk backwards completely and never miss their tracks,” Terry Sherman said. “It was just gone. It was very bizarre.”
The voices Terry Sherman heard one day while walking his dog in the night were possibly the most disturbing. The voices, according to Sherman, talked in a tongue he didn’t identify. He estimated that they came from a distance of around 25 feet away, but he was unable to see anything. His dogs raced wildly, barked, and hurried back to the house.
These episodes persisted even after the Shermans sold their property.
Are Skinwalkers Real?
Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas realtor and UFO enthusiast, purchased the property in 1996 for $200,000. On the property, he founded the National Institute for Discovery Science and erected a strong surveillance system. The objective was to determine precisely what had been occurring there.
Dr. Colm Kelleher, a scientist who worked at Bigelow, noticed a sizable humanoid figure perched in a tree on March 12, 1997. The creature, described in detail in his book Hunt for the Skinwalker, was 20 feet in the air and roughly 50 feet away.
Kelleher wrote:
“The large creature that lay motionless, almost casually, in the tree. The only indication of the beast’s presence was the penetrating yellow light of the unblinking eyes as they stared fixedly back into the light.”
Kelleher opened fire at the alleged Skinwalker, but it ran away. On the ground, it left imprints and claw marks. The markings were those of a “bird of prey, possibly a raptor print, but big and, from the depth of the impression, from a very heavy creature,” according to Kelleher.
Bigelow and his study team eventually experienced over 100 encounters on the property, but they were unable to gather enough proof for a scientific journal to accept it as credible. For $4.5 million, Bigelow sold the ranch to Adamantium Holdings in 2016.
However, the investigation into Skinwalker Ranch is still ongoing but more advanced and secretive than ever.