Whether or not we’re alone in this universe is a question everyone ponders at some point. It’s not surprising: the possible existence of extra-terrestrial beings is a concept that’s both fascinating and slightly creepy. But while we currently have no concrete evidence of aliens, there have been numerous bizarre encounters that might make you think twice about their existence, like the incredibly creepy happenings in a place in the USA known as Skinwalker Ranch. Let's blast off into some of the most believable alien encounters of all time.
Skinwalker Ranch
Over the years, the Uintah basin of eastern Utah has developed a reputation as one of the most active paranormal hotspots in the entire United States. Everything from unidentified lights in the sky, to weird humanoid figures have all reportedly been spotted in the region. But of all the locations incapsulated in this geographical area, none have a reputation quite like Skinwalker Ranch.
©Google Maps
Situated about 100 miles east of Salt Lake City, Skinwalker Ranch was originally named after an ancient curse rumored to have been placed on the land during a territorial dispute between two Native American peoples: The Navajo and Utes. The legend tells of the Navajo calling forth Skinwalkers, witches with the ability to disguise themselves as animals, to torment their enemies and their descendants.
As centuries passed, and the natives departed, the latter part of the 20th century saw Skinwalker Ranch under ownership of Kenneth and Edith Myers. The couple mostly kept to themselves, and never publicly reported any unusual activity on the ranch. It was only in 1994, when the Sherman family bought it from them, that things took a bizarre and terrifying turn. Terry and Gwen Sherman moved to Skinwalker Ranch with their two children, convinced they’d found the perfect home. Especially since the farmhouse, bordering a high ridge, overlooked the ranch’s sprawling green pastures, thick woodland, and bubbling creek to the south. Terry, as a cattle breeder, was thrilled to finally have enough space to take his business to the next level, and Gwen couldn’t wait to spend time exploring with their children.
The entire estate seemed the picture of tranquility, until the Shermans had the chance to take a closer look. All around the house, both inside and out, they found an ominous excess of deadbolt locks securing the doors and windows. And that wasn’t all. At both the front and rear entrances, they also found heavy duty chains attached to huge metal rungs embedded into the walls, clearly having been used to chain large, powerful guard dogs in place.
Slightly unnerved as to what kind of local wildlife would require such excessive defenses, Terry and Gwen concluded that Edith Myers, having lived alone after her husband, Kenneth, passed away, had simply been paranoid. But they soon came to realize that there might’ve been other reasons for these safety measures. Not long after moving in, the Sherman family were unloading a truck in front of their new home, when Terry spotted a wolf in the pasture behind them. But not just any wolf. The beast of an animal was at least three times the size of an average wolf, and it behaved awfully strange. The wolf approached them rather nonchalantly, friendly even, and didn’t seem frightened or cautious. It wagged its tail, almost like a dog, and even let Terry pat its head. For a moment, he thought the wolf might’ve been someone’s pet, until, suddenly, it spun around and attacked a wandering calf at the edge of the pasture.
Instinctively, Terry grabbed his .357 Magnum from the back of the truck and shot the wolf three times, but the animal didn’t appear hurt in any way. It simply released the calf, turned, and ran off. Terry couldn’t believe his eyes. Three shots from a .357 Magnum at such close range should’ve been enough to put it down, and there it went, without so much as leaving a crimson trail. But that was only the beginning.
The next few weeks went by relatively normal, except for a few strange things that happened around the farmhouse, all seemingly targeted at Gwen. She didn’t report any of it to her husband until much later, because she genuinely thought she was losing her mind. For starters, Gwen would come home from shopping, unpack the groceries and put them away, only to return moments later to find them all back in the bags. Additionally, Gwen would get out of the shower in the mornings to discover her towel, which she always brought with her, had gone missing. Time and time again, it would show up hours later in some random part of the house. Things continued like this for some time, and Gwen was getting increasingly worried about her memory. That was until one evening, when Terry came home demanding to know who had taken his fence-post digging tool. He had been using it to repair a fence in the pasture, and had turned away for barely a moment, when it just disappeared. The family searched everywhere for it, but it was only found a few weeks later, hanging in a tree on the other side of the ranch.
By then, the Shermans were starting to suspect that something wasn’t quite right about the property. Especially since, one night the week before, when a nephew of theirs came to visit, they were showing him the ranch, only to notice strange, glowing objects in a nearby field.
Thinking it might be unsolicited hunters, Terry and the boys approached the lights. But as they entered the field, the lights lifted off the ground and travelled soundlessly across the treetops, out of sight.
By the time Autumn rolled around, the lights had become a frequent occurrence, especially after Terry began transporting his prize-winning Angus cattle to the ranch. Pretty soon, matters took a turn for the worse. As Winter arrived, severe snow pummeled the ranch, and Terry found himself rounding up astray cattle at all hours. One evening, he was out searching for a cow that had been missing for almost a day, when he noticed fresh hoof prints in the snow. He followed the prints for twenty yards into the woodland, and soon reached a wide clearing. The tracks continued out into the middle of the open space, before abruptly stopping. The cow was nowhere to be seen, and there were no returning tracks. It was like it had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Terry searched for a little while longer, but in the end, he returned home with a heavy heart, and little idea of what was still to come.Over the course of the winter, four more of Terry’s prize-winning cows all disappeared in a similar fashion. Terry tried to stake out the fields in an attempt to catch the thieves, or any predatory animals that might be responsible, but it seemed whoever, or whatever, had been taking them, was always two steps ahead.
When Spring came, the family began to lose even more cattle. Only now, they suddenly started to reappear, sometimes dead from no apparent cause, and other times lacerated in oddly precise ways. Terry started to examine these deaths more closely, and quickly realized that many of the deceased cows had all suffered the same injury: a peculiar hole in one of their eyes. What’s more, all of the cows reeked of chemicals. Almost, Terry suggested, as if their wounds had been disinfected. And as bizarre as that already was, it was only the tip of the iceberg.
One morning, Terry woke up to find huge crop circles carved into his fields, with no resulting piles of grass or dirt, which may have suggested the entry or exit of any pranksters responsible, anywhere to be seen. On another occasion, Gwen claimed to have encountered the monstrous wolf again that greeted them early in their residence at the ranch in the middle of the road one night, where it climb onto the hood of her car before running off.
Additionally, Gwen had been noticing strange orange lights emanating both above the trees and low on the ground. They were different to the ones Terry often witnessed, as they were larger, brighter, and completely stationary, which seemed to rule out certain possible explanations like the reflections of distant vehicle-lights; though, being so isolated, that vehicle explanation was already quite unlikely. However, when they began noticing dark, shadowy figures crawling out of these lights into the surrounding fields before disappearing, the Shermans’ minds fully departed from any attempt to frame these occurrences in regular-world terms.
Instead, the family began considering the lights as portals, and Terry and Gwen would later describe seeing disk-shaped crafts entering and exiting them above the trees.
The most active of all phenomena, though, were the orbs, or bright, blue balls, that zipped across the fields at night. About the size of tennis balls, these fiery orbs would harass the livestock by hovering in their faces before shooting straight past them.
For a while, the orbs seemed harmless, until one day, three of the Shermans’ dogs chased after one. They growled and barked, and followed it into the trees. Shortly, Terry heard three distressed yelps, followed by silence. He hurried into the woods after the dogs, but what he found made him sick to his stomach. On the ground were three scorched circles, each with a blob of hairy, greasy, flesh-colored goo in the middle of it. The family’s dogs were never seen again.
Saddened by their loss, the Shermans decided they’d finally had enough. Terry and Gwen put the ranch up for sale, ready to get the heck out of there. But they weren’t out of the woods just yet. On their last night in the farmhouse, the Shermans packed the last of their things and went to bed. When they woke up the next morning, Terry and Gwen were disturbed to find what they described as a scoop mark on their right thumbs, as if a sample of their skin had been harvested. Stranger still, their skin smelled faintly and inexplicably of disinfectant, much like the aroma that had surrounded their dead cows. Whatever had happened while they were sleeping, they were never going to let it happen again. The Shermans left the ranch without looking back.
With Terry having previously gone to the local news with their story, Skinwalker Ranch caught the attention of Vegas multi-millionaire and avid paranormal investigator, Robert Bigelow, who ended up being the Ranch’s buyer. Deeply curious to figure out what was going on at the ranch, Bigelow set brought along a live-in scientific team with the sole purpose of investigating
paranormal anomalies on the ranch. What’s more, Robert actually ended up hiring Terry as a foreman on the ranch, and bizarrely enough, Terry accepted! The ranch was subsequently fenced and locked, and signs were posted all around that warned people to keep out.
Under the name of the National Institute for Discovery Science, Robert set up around-the-clock surveillance of the ranch, hoping to get to the bottom of the Shermans’ paranormal claims. Consecutive months of surveillance yielded a book, titled Hunt for the
Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah, in which several of the researchers claimed to have experienced similar anomalies to those the Shermans described. So, did they capture proof? Well, not exactly. Bigelow’s team reported endless technical issues while researching, and even equipment being mysteriously mangled and shredded. They’ve yet to share the photographic evidence they did claim to acquire with the public, leaving the burden of proof unsatisfied.
Skinwalker Ranch (Pt 1) NIDS, Robert Bigelow, Werewolf, UFOs, Bigfoot | The Basement Office by New York Post
As for potential explanations regarding the phenomena, many locals still cling to the Skinwalker curse supposedly cast upon the land years ago, blaming shape-shifting, supernatural creatures for the occurrences. Others attribute the phenomena to interdimensional extra-terrestrials, whose presence is enabled by the allegedly unusual geological layout of the area. More grounded theories, meanwhile, suggest the strange sightings may be mass-delusions; an extreme form of the power of suggestion, with people convincing themselves they’re seeing what they expect to see. All while the cow deaths could be attributed to some kind of illness or parasites spread among the herd. Those mysterious cattle disappearances, meanwhile, could indeed be all-natural predators, or hunters seeking the profit of premium beef. But, of course, many questions remain unanswered, and if nothing else, Skinwalker Ranch remains a place of genuine strangeness, human or otherwise.
Hopkinsville Encounter
On Sunday August 21st, 1955, Billy Ray Taylor, and his wife were visiting their old friends the Suttons on their farm in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. At 7 PM, Billy was fetching water from the backyard well, when he saw a round, silvery object in the sky. It passed over the house, stopped in the air, and seemingly plummeted to the ground in the distance.
Billy ran into the farmhouse to relay his story, but no one inside took him seriously. An hour later, in the middle of dinner, one of the Suttons’ dogs started to incessantly bark outside. Billy and the Suttons’ eldest son, Lucky, went to the back door, where they noticed a strange glow, in the middle of which, they saw a
small, humanoid creature. About three-and-a-half feet tall, the creature had an oversized head with pointed ears, arms that hung to the ground, and brownish-green skin that shimmered like metal. Terrified, the men grabbed a 20-gauge shotgun and fired at it. Astonishingly, the little being simply flipped out of the blast’s way, scrambled upright and fled into the dark. Still scared out of their minds, the men then noticed similar creatures appearing in the side of a window.
After firing another shot outside, these creatures likewise disappeared. At this point, the entire household had come to check out the racket, which was when the real madness began! One of the women screamed and pointed to the back door, where another creature was slowly approaching. Billy, not seeing it, stepped outside, and as he stood under the small overhanging roof, those behind him all witnessed a claw-like hand reaching for his hair.
Lucky fired another shot, almost injuring Billy in the process, and they quickly locked the door before spending the next three hours hiding in the dining room. At 11 PM, when the coast seemed clear, all eleven of them hightailed it to the Hopkinsville police station, where the police were left utterly bewildered. A team of officers was dispatched to the farm, but other than the shell casings from Lucky’s shotgun, they found no evidence to support the incident. But nor did they find evidence of heavy drinking or substance usage, which made eleven different people all having observed the same thing all the more baffling. So, what was going on? Well, in 2006, Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow on the International Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, reviewed the original police reports, and came up with some intriguing theories. Nickell matched Billy’s original UFO sighting with reports of a small meteor strike in the area, which seemed to explain that aspect. As for the little men, he floated an explanation often heard in other alien encounter stories: owls. In particular, the Great Horned Owl, whose long wings could easily be mistaken for arms in the twilight, and whose ears match those of the little men. As for their metallic shine, Joe suggested the owl’s feathers could’ve merely been reflecting in the moonlight.
That said, even though Great Horned Owls are known to be active at dusk and boldly aggressive when defending their nest, some eager paranormal investigators still argue owl’s aren’t a satisfactory explanation for those strange happenings on the Sutton farm. Whatever the truth was, the story is certainly a hoot!
The Flatwoods Monster
At 7:15 PM on September 12th, 1952, two young brothers, Ed and Freddie May, spotted a pulsing red light passing over their quiet, little town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. The boys followed the light with their eyes, all the way to a nearby hilltop, where it seemingly crashed to the ground.
The May brothers ran home to grab their mom, and together they all hiked up the hill to check out the crash-site. Several other boys also showed up to investigate, among whom was 17-year-old Gene Lemon, a National Guard member. Gene promptly took the lead, and with the group close on his heels, they clambered to the hilltop. The first thing they noticed was a sulphur-like stench, and pretty soon the group couldn’t see a thing through the fog. Slowly, however, there emerged that same, pulsating red light the boys had spotted previously, now eerily illuminating the fog. Then, they spotted it. There, in between the trees, a 10-foot-tall entity with long, grasping fingers, a metallic body and bright-red eyes stared at them without blinking. Gene screamed and fell backward, but one of the boys yanked him to his feet and the group barreled down the hill in terror.
Soon afterwards, a local sheriff, who had been investigating reports of an aircraft crash in the area, was called to the scene, but examining the hilltop, didn’t hear, see, or smell anything. But that didn’t stop the media picking up the story, and it spread like wildfire through the USA.
As a matter of fact, the keenness of Americans in 1952 for tales of extra-terrestrials may well be what brought this whole incident into being in the first place. In the 1950s, most Americans were feeling pretty anxious about the newfound, potentially-apocalyptic power of the recently-invented atomic bomb. The Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb only three years prior, and as a result, the US Air Force was regularly scanning the skies for bombers. With this unstoppable threat from the heavens weighing heavily on the public consciousness, historians have argued that it had an impact on the culture of the time, leading to tales, fictional, imagined, or otherwise, involving abstract versions of this same fear. Some have argued that UFO-and-alien-invasion-related hysteria was just one of these symptoms of atom-bomb-mania, resulting from a generalized fear of technologically-advanced, horrifically-destructive unknown enemies.
With that, and the fact that LIFE magazine, the most popular national publication at the time, had just a few months earlier published a story about flying saucers, it’s possible that the residents of Flatwoods were merely observing natural phenomena through a very specific lens. An alien lens, if you will. And it just so happens that subsequent research backs this idea up. After investigating the case in 2000, paranormal myth-buster, Joe Nickell, who also examined the Hopkinsville case, concluded that the bright light the May brothers had seen was most likely the pulsating light of an aircraft passing overhead, or a meteor, given that a visible meteor was confirmed to have passed over the area that night. It didn’t crash like the boys had witnessed, but probably appeared to from their vantage point below the hill. As for the Flatwoods Monster itself, you can probably guess what Nickell concluded it was: another Owl!
According to Joe, the witnesses likely had their perception distorted not only by the surrounding fog, but also their heightened state of anxiety, possibly leading them to perceive an owl’s claws, feathers, and eyes as bigger and brighter than they really were.
The Warminster Thing
At 1:25 AM on Christmas Day, 1964, Mildred Head, resident of Warminster, England, awoke to the strange sounds of something scraping against her roof. It initially sounded like twigs brushing against the tiles, but got louder and louder until it reverberated like giant hailstones.
A confused Mildred got out of bed to look out the window, but it wasn’t even raining. Suddenly, she heard another noise. It sounded like loud, electronic humming at first, but quickly faded to a whisper before entirely disappearing. But that didn’t mean the night’s incidents were over. A few hours later, soldiers at the Knook Camp army base nearby were awoken by what sounded like the chimney stack from the main block being ripped from the roof and scattered across the campsite. Only, when the soldiers piled outside to check, it hadn’t moved an inch. The yard was immaculate.
What’s more, at 6:30 AM, Warminster resident Roger Rump and his wife were stirred by a similarly-loud noise, only this time, it sounded like their roof-tiles were being torn off and put back with an enormous clatter. In total, more than 30 individuals around Warminster reported hearing bizarre noises that Christmas morning, and no meaningful explanation has ever been given, even to this day. But there was still much more to come!Strange things continued to happen in the town, which happens to be located just over 15 miles from Stonehenge. In February the next year, an entire flock of pigeons suddenly died, and the following month, three more families reported hearing their roofs shake in the early morning hours.
In June, the residents of Warminster began reporting unidentified objects flying across the sky. The descriptions of these objects varied from person to person, with one describing their sighting as being cigar-shaped and covered with blinking lights, and another claiming it looked like a red-hot fire-poker hanging downward.
Pretty soon, these unusual occurrences started to receive national attention. People flocked to Warminster, hoping to get a glimpse of the mysterious “Warminster Thing”, whatever form it may take for them. Toward the end of 1965, long-time resident, Gordon Faulkner,
captured a photo of an alleged UFO in the skies above Warminster. The supposed UFO picture became highly popular, and sightings and unexplained noises continued intermittently over the coming years, ranging from floating balls of crimson light to terrible droning sounds that made floors and beds tremor. Interest in the mysterious phenomenon remained strong, especially when, in 1967, a flying saucer was reported over Clevedon, a town just west of Warminster. Only this time, the saucer didn’t just pass overhead. It was found, having crashed to the ground. A local engineer, Reg Willard, was summoned to examine the small, beeping, silver object where it was found in a field by a schoolboy. He dissected the mystery object, and was certainly surprised at what he found inside.
Unidentified Flying Objects (1967) by British Pathé
Instead of out-of-this-world technology, the fiberglass flying saucer’s interior consisted of two large batteries, a transmitter, and a loudspeaker. Turned out, the crashed craft was a hoax, pulled off by Royal Aircraft Establishment apprentices, Chris Southall and Tony Bedingfield. The two men, having hoped to garner a few laughs, had rigged the device up, the batteries providing enough power for it to bleep away ominously until discovered by a passer-by. Putting aside pranks that somewhat diminished the Warminster occurrences’ authenticity, by the early 1970s, sightings of the Warminster Thing began to decline, which could suggest that, like the Flatwoods Monster, the phenomena were merely a product of the time. But for many, that argument simply isn’t enough to negate the strange sounds and sights experienced by so many residents, and today, Warminster is still regarded by some as the UFO capital of the UK. Whatever was responsible, be it minor earthquakes, local pranksters, or something genuinely otherworldly, one thing’s for sure: it’s a little hard to blame this one on the owls! If you were amazed at these believable Alien encounters, you might want to read about the best evidence proving
aliens exist. Thanks for reading!
