Hunting UFOs and the Paranormal

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
What does an Oregonian man with failing health, a report of a gray creature with spindly legs and a werewolf-like animal have in common? The answer is that they were all investigated by a secret Pentagon program.

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The Pentagon has investigated a connection between the paranormal and UFOs

The basis for the Defense Intelligence Agency's investigation is trailing a connection between UFOs and the paranormal.

The Pentagon has rebranded the phenomena of unidentified flying objects to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Linking the paranormal with UFOs is an unusual turn of events, especially after decades of disavowing in the strongest terms the existence of extraterrestrials by the government.

Others believe the cover-up is the government's attempt to hide advanced technological inventions, which having nothing to do with extraterrestrials.

There is a leaked video dating back to 2004, but released in 2017, where Navy fighter pilots on the USS Nimitz  spy a flying "TicTac" shaped object that zips away at blazing speeds off the coast of California.​ The object was also seen on radar. The pilots had been scrambled to encounter an "oblong white object that flew without any visible propulsion system or wings."

The report summarized the sighting this way:

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An initial report on the military UFO situation, ordered by Congress and released in June 2021 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provided some context and left many questions unanswered. The investigation was 'largely inconclusive,' with 144 cases of objects reported since 2004 that couldn't be identified, and 18 that seemed to include unusual flight, such as moving against the wind or at high speeds without visible means of propulsion.

UFOs, remote viewing and the paranormal have all been investigated by the US government

The program also explored the ability of remote viewers to spy on people and places thousands of miles away. An earlier program was allegedly closed down in 1995, however it is believed by many to have kept on operating. 

Colm Kelleher a contractor, worked with James Lacatski, a now-retired DIA intelligence officer who set up the UFO program that ran from 2008 to 2010. Kelleher would go on to work with Robert Bigelow, a wealthy aerospace company owner with an interest in the afterlife, and UFOs. The nexus for these interests stem from a UFO encounter Bigelow's maternal grandparents, Tom and Delta Thebo had in 1947.

From an early age Bigelow also had to deal with unexpected death to those around him. When he was 18, his father was killed in a private airplane crash. In 1992, his 24-year-old son Rod Lee died by suicide. Rod's son also killed himself with a drug overdose in 2011, at the age of 20. In 2020, Bigelow's wife Diane, age 72, died from cancer.

In 1995, Bigelow established the National Institute of Discovery Science, and bought the 480-acre Skinwalker Ranch in the Uintah basin in Utah from the previous owners, Terry and Gwen Sherman. The Shermans experienced a slew of inexplicable sightings of UFOs and paranormal creatures. The ranch's name dates back to stories told by the Ute and Navajo tribes, who believed witches known as skinwalkers would traverse through the land.

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Uintah Basin along Hwy 191 (Source - A. Zharkikh|Flickr)

Bigelow placed Colm Kelleher as the head of the investigative team he established to find the source of the anomalies sighted throughout the years. Kelleher would go on to co-write a book with Lacatski titled Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), and with Las Vegas reporter George Knapp, The Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005).

Eventually a sailor and two Marines who were involved in the Nimitz investigation were sent to Skinwalker Ranch. They supposedly saw a "black void on the land that filled them with fear." After leaving the ranch, the three men experienced paranormal activity at their homes that ranged from orbs, strange noises to dark figures or "shadow people" seen at night in their bedrooms.

The sailor's wife and two children who lived in Virginia, claimed to have seen a werewolf-like creature that walked on two legs staring at them through a window in their home. They had this experience twice.

Members of Bigelow's team related their own strange experiences this way:

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On one occasion, they write, investigators peering through night vision goggles watched an expanding tunnel of light disgorge a large hominoid creature that then walked away and disappeared. A sudden fissure in the sky seemed to open a vista onto another dimension. Cattle were found crammed into a closed trailer with no sign of how they got there. And a closed-circuit video camera trained on the grounds had its wiring torn out, while another camera, focused on it, recorded nothing.

Mr. Bigelow said he saw “interdimensional” forces at play through portals at certain paranormal hot spots like Skinwalker. But he also said he had frequently visited the ranch without experiencing the kind of chilling events others reported, as if some intelligence were selecting the people to act upon.

“I slept like a log every single night,” he said. And no human was physically harmed, but he said he and other visitors often carried strange things home, like a sulfurous stink in a certain part of his house. His wife felt the presence of a faceless creature pressing down on her side of bed.

Homestead at Skinwalker Ranch

The Uintah basin is the site of a massive sea of oil. Between 1996 to 2014, 13,847 drilling permits were issued; 92% of those were in Uintah, Duchesne and Carbon Counties. Skinwalker Ranch is at the epicenter of all this activity. Things died down in 2015, when Bigelow sold the ranch to real estate mogul, Brandon Fugal.

Fugal claims to have closed on his first deal as a teenager, when he was a brand new missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Under his ownership The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch a docuseries from the History Channel has been filmed onsite. 

In 2020, Fortean researcher, Lon Strickler received the following story from two young Mormon missionaries assigned to the Navajo reservation:

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I finally turned 19, the big age for Mormons, where I got to leave for two years of my life and share my gospel as an LDS missionary. I got my calling, (where and when you'll serve) opened it up, and saw that I'd been called to serve in the Farmington, New Mexico mission. My best buddy, (who happened to be Navajo) got super excited for me because my area covered all of the reservation. I got stoked as well and got ready to leave in a few months. Within that time period, my buddy, gave me some heads ups about what I'd witness on the reservation, and one of course had to be of skinwalkers. The white men, for good reason albeit, still aren't that liked on the reservation. So he warned me to be humble and kind, and to try and not warrant any bad juju in my direction. So I agreed and left for 2 years.

The first month was pretty uneventful, I prepared in Utah, then flew out to Farmington where I met my mission president, and where my first area would be. I got assigned to the town of Tohachi, a tiny dot of a place on the reservation. We lived in a trailer behind the local church because there weren't really any houses for rent out in the middle of the reservation. Here is where things got weird on my first week. Seriously my first week I'm there, and this happens to me. 

Missionaries have a strict schedule during the day, we pray, eat, go teach, and come home to do a few push ups and in bed by 9. So me and my companion, I won't share his name because I'm not sure if he'd enjoy being mentioned. We started to do our little work out when all of a sudden, we heard some footsteps outside, which creeped us out a little bit, but sadly the reservation has a lot of drunk residents that'll stumble around until they are eventually picked up by cops or family members. We brushed it off and kept on with our routine, that is until the steps were right outside our door.

Now mind you, I'm 6 foot, semi athletic, 160 pounds, so I'm definitely not gonna try and pick a fight with anyone. But my companion was a 6'5, 280 pound Tongan. Let's just say I felt a bit safe. Then the person started pounding on our door. I looked over to my friend and he looked a little worried, more cautious than anything. Like I said, non-natives aren't very popular on the reservation, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for someone to try and rob, or frighten us. Kind of a "get the hell out of here" message. Here is the freaky part, the pounding of fists turned into scratching almost instantaneously. Our first thoughts were, 'oh shit, he has a dog.' We came to the conclusion to grab our weights, and just try to sleep through this crap.

Well, nothing else eventful happened that night. It was rough falling asleep, but once I did everything seemed fine. We walked outside to see if we could Sherlock Holmes together some evidence to see if we knew who it was, or if there were any beer cans to verify our suspicions. What we found was terrifying and shocking to say the least. We were right, boot prints leading to our door. But where we should find boot prints leading away, were paw prints. I remember them like it was yesterday. A bit bigger than a dog's, I figured they were a coyote or wolves. We couldn't understand what we were seeing. Why weren't there boot prints leading away, or these paw prints leading too? We didn't say it out loud, but I think we came to the same conclusion. Whatever knocked on our door, changed shape right then and there.

The day went on uneventful. We told our bishop, and he knocked it off too just a drunkard bugging us. He said to pray and to stay safe by being indoors before dark. Nothing crazy happened, until that night. Where I had one of the worst night terrors of my life. I had my back to our door, when I woke in my dream, I didn't even have to turn around to feel the unholy energy that was gravitating from whatever was inside our trailer. I had no voice. I silently plead "in the name of Jesus Christ" but nothing helped. It stepped on the corner of my bed and it felt as if my entire mattress was lifted. Whatever it was, my best way describing it is like a dementor from Harry Potter. It then drove me into my bed, ripping the breath from my lungs. I start crying, praying to my God to protect me from this thing. Then in a second, wham! I'm awake in a cold sweat, crying and waking my companion up. This happened to me the next week, every night without fail.

Long story short, I ended up going home early. It was mentally taxing reliving that every night, and they instantly went away when I got home. If anyone has any experiences with skinwalkers and the curses they can hex people with, I'd like to hear from you. Maybe that's what I was experiencing, but it scared me half to death, and was the most dreadful two months of my life. B.