Skinwalker Ranch Isn't What You Think It Is
The owner's ancestry connects to secrets older than the ranch itself
Somewhere in the high desert of northeastern Utah, something has been happening for a very long time.
Before the cameras and scientists arrived, the land was already doing strange things.
Weird lights. Cattle mutilations. Objects that shouldn’t move, moving. Phenomena that seem to choose their witnesses carefully, as if the ranch itself decides who gets to see what.
A lot of people discovered Skinwalker Ranch through a television screen. It’s compelling enough, and strange enough, to keep you watching.
But here’s what the show doesn’t spend much time on.
The man who bought it.
In 2016, a quiet transaction took place. Robert Bigelow — Nevada businessman, government contractor, longtime funder of paranormal research, sold the ranch. The buyer was Brandon Fugal. Utah real estate mogul. Successful. Serious. By all public accounts, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Not exactly the profile you’d expect.
He didn’t go public for years. Never told the press. Never made an announcement. Just a devout businessman and a very strange piece of land, sitting together in the Utah silence.
People shrugged when they eventually found out. Rich guy buys weird ranch. Makes good TV. Cool.
I’d like to suggest we look a little closer.
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BEFORE WE START: WHAT SKINWALKER RANCH ACTUALLY IS
Most people think they know.
They watched a few episodes. They saw the lights. The UAPs. The guy with the equipment readings going haywire in a field at 2 a.m. They filed it under weird TV and kept scrolling.
That’s exactly what the framing wants you to do.
Because Skinwalker Ranch isn’t a television show with an interesting location. The television show is a wrapper around something that has been happening — documented, investigated, and funded at the highest levels of American government. And for longer than most people realize.
Let me give you the actual file.
WHAT IT IS — AND WHERE IT IS
Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre property sitting in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. Sherman Peak rises behind it. The surrounding high desert is remote enough that you can go days without seeing another vehicle on the road.
The Ute people have known about this land for generations. They called it the path of the skinwalker — a figure in Navajo and broader Indigenous tradition associated with dark shapeshifting, with things that cross between worlds, with a territory you do not enter if you can help it. The Ute didn’t avoid this land because of superstition. They avoided it because of what they had seen.
Whatever is happening here did not start with a TV camera.
WHAT MOST PEOPLE THINK IT IS
In 1994, a couple named Terry and Gwen Sherman bought the ranch and lasted less than two years. They reported cattle mutilations, lights, and a large wolf-like animal that couldn’t be killed by bullets. They even reported objects appearing and disappearing. Some of their children experienced things that would mark them for life.
They sold and didn’t talk publicly for a long time. When they did, they were careful. Not the profile of people chasing attention.
The ranch passed to Robert Bigelow in 1996. Bigelow is a Nevada real estate billionaire with a documented, decades-long interest in anomalous phenomena. He funded the National Institute for Discovery Science — a private research organization that spent years investigating the property. Physicists. Biologists. Former intelligence officers. People with clearances.
They documented hundreds of incidents. Most of it has never been published.
Then in 2008, the U.S. government got directly involved. The Defense Intelligence Agency funded a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — AATIP. Bigelow’s company, BAASS, was the primary contractor. Skinwalker Ranch was the study site. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars went into understanding what is happening on that 512 acres.
Read that again.
The United States Department of Defense paid for a classified investigation into a paranormal ranch in Utah. Not fringe researchers or conspiracy theorists with a podcast. The Pentagon.
WHAT THE SHOW DOESN’T TELL YOU
The History Channel show launched in 2020. It’s well-produced. The team is credible. Former military, scientists, and engineers. The phenomena they capture on camera are genuinely difficult to explain.
But the show has a structure. A narrative logic. A reason to keep you watching next week.
What it doesn’t have is the full story of why this land does what it does. Or who has been paying attention, at the highest levels, for far longer than the cameras have been rolling.
And it especially doesn’t spend much time on who owns it now.
A devout Mormon businessman. A real estate mogul from Utah. A man whose family tree runs deeper into American religious and esoteric history than most people would ever think to look.
His name is Brandon Fugal.
And his ancestry is the thread that changes everything.
THE MAN ON THE SURFACE
Brandon Fugal does not look like what you’d expect.
He’s not a eccentric. Not a conspiracy theorist with a YouTube channel and a tinfoil aesthetic. He doesn’t talk like a man chasing ghosts. He talks like a man who built a commercial real estate empire across the Mountain West and takes his responsibilities seriously.
Because that’s exactly what he is.
Fugal is the chairman of Colliers International in Utah. One of the most successful commercial real estate brokers in the state’s history. This is the kind of man other businessmen call when they need something done right.
He is also a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Not culturally Mormon. Devotionally Mormon. He served a two-year mission in Hawaii in the early 1990s. That sort of commitment shapes a man at his foundation, not just his Sunday mornings. He frames his investigation of Skinwalker Ranch not as a contradiction of his faith but as an extension of it. If God created the universe, he reasons, then understanding what’s in it is an act of reverence, not rebellion.
That’s a reasonable position. A thoughtful one.
It’s also the position of a man who has spent years standing on land that the United States Department of Defense spent tens of millions of dollars studying — and who has never once publicly suggested he regrets buying it.
He is not a villain in this story. Understand that clearly. He is something more interesting than a villain.
He is a man whose name, whose bloodline, and whose arrival at this particular piece of ground raises questions that deserve to be asked.
THE NAME BEHIND THE NAME
Here is where most profiles of Brandon Fugal stop.
Successful man. Strong faith. Interesting hobby. Good TV.
We’re not stopping here.
Because Brandon Fugal is a direct descendant of Lorenzo Snow.
If that name doesn’t land immediately, let me tell you who Lorenzo Snow was. And then let me tell you what Lorenzo Snow did. And then let me tell you why it matters that his bloodline now owns the most anomalous property in America.
LORENZO SNOW: THE FIFTH PRESIDENT — AND THE LODGE
Lorenzo Snow was the fifth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served from 1898 until his death in 1901. He was a visionary. A theologian. A man who claimed direct divine revelation and led one of the fastest-growing religious movements in American history.
He was also a Freemason. Not rumored to be. Documented. Confirmed. Historically recorded.
Snow joined the Nauvoo Lodge in Illinois in the 1840s. He walked through the same doors as Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS church, who was himself initiated into Masonic ritual in 1842. Brigham Young joined. John Taylor joined. Wilford Woodruff joined.
Read that list again.
The first five presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were all Freemasons. Every single one. Nearly 1,500 Mormon men joined the Nauvoo Lodge during that period, which was the largest single-site Masonic enrollment in American history up to that point.
And Lorenzo Snow didn’t just join and drift away. He remained a Mason for life.
WHAT FREEMASONRY ACTUALLY IS — AND WHY IT MATTERS HERE
Freemasonry at its serious historical level is a system of tiered knowledge. Degrees of initiation. Ritual designed to convey — gradually, to those deemed prepared — a framework for understanding the nature of reality, the structure of power, and the relationship between the visible world and what lies behind it.
That’s not a fringe description. That’s what Masons themselves have written about their own tradition for three centuries.
The Scottish Rite. The York Rite. The degrees ascending from Entered Apprentice to Master Mason to the higher mysteries. Each level a doorway. Each doorway opened only when the lodge decides you are ready.
HERE IS WHERE IT GETS DARK
Most people think Freemasonry is old men in aprons doing handshakes.
That’s the cover story. And it’s a good one.
Because if you spend five minutes actually reading what Masonic scholars — not conspiracy theorists, actual Masonic scholars — have written about their own tradition, a very different picture emerges. One that the aprons, charity drives, and the Shriner hospitals are very good at keeping out of frame.
Albert Pike wrote it plainly in Morals and Dogma, the most authoritative text in Scottish Rite Freemasonry, handed to initiates for over a century.
“Lucifer, the Light-bearer. Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness. Lucifer, the Son of the Morning. Is it he who bears the Light?”
Pike was not a fringe Mason. He was the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction for 32 years. The most influential Masonic figure in American history. His book was the official manual.
Read that quote again.
THE SYMBOL ON THE MESA
Brandon Fugal found it. Brandon Fugal named it. Brandon Fugal said it out loud on the Shawn Ryan Show, one of the most widely listened to independent podcasts in America, in front of millions of people.
“There’s also a strange Masonic symbol carved into the face of the mesa, symbolizing as above so below.”
Read that sentence slowly.
The owner of Skinwalker Ranch, a direct descendant of Lorenzo Snow, confirmed Freemason and fifth president of the LDS Church — just told you there is a Masonic symbol physically etched into the rock of the most paranormally active property in America.
And it isn’t just any symbol.
As above so below.
WHAT “AS ABOVE SO BELOW” ACTUALLY MEANS
This is not decoration or ancient graffiti. This is one of the most theologically and occultically precise phrases in the entire Western esoteric tradition.
The phrase originates from the Emerald Tablet — an ancient hermetic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the mythological fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. It is the foundational document of hermetic philosophy. Alchemy. Astrology. Ritual magic. Every Western occult tradition from the medieval period forward traces its intellectual lineage through this text.
The full phrase: “As above, so below. As within, so without. As the universe, so the soul.”
Translation for those not steeped in esoteric tradition: what happens in the spiritual realm mirrors what happens in the physical realm. The two worlds are not separate. They are permeable. What you invoke above comes below. What you open spiritually manifests physically.
This is not peripheral Masonic theology. This is the spine of it.
The symbol that represents this phrase — two interlocking triangles, one pointing up, one pointing down — is the Star of David in Jewish tradition. In occult tradition it is the Seal of Solomon. In Freemasonry it represents the perfect union of the earthly and divine realms. In hermetic ritual it is the diagram of invocation, the visual grammar of calling something from one realm into another.
It is carved. Into rock. On a mesa. On Skinwalker Ranch.
Permanently.
LOCATION IS EVERYTHING
Now consider what has been documented at this specific location. The same area where the Masonic hermetic symbol is carved into the rock face. UAP activity. Anomalous phenomena. Experiences that researchers describe as intelligent, responsive, and escalating.
A symbol calling for the merging of above and below. Etched permanently into the high ground. On land where something has been responding for decades.
THE CHAIN THAT CONNECTS
Let’s lay it out plainly.
Lorenzo Snow, Brandon Fugal’s ancestor, walked through Masonic initiation in the 1840s in a lodge that drew on hermetic tradition, including the very philosophy that produced the phrase as above so below.
Skinwalker Ranch sits on land with that exact phrase carved in Masonic symbology into its most elevated geological feature.
The United States government spent classified money investigating what happens at that location.
The phenomena documented there — intelligent, selective, responsive, escalating — mirrors precisely what Christian demonology describes as the behavior of entities operating through opened spiritual doors.
And the man who now owns and investigates the property is a blood descendant of the man who walked through the lodge door in the first place.
None of these facts require the other to be true. But they are all true simultaneously.
And they form a shape.
WHAT THE BELIEVER DOES WITH THIS
Take seriously what the owner of this property has already told you. He found a hermetic Masonic symbol on his land. He named it precisely. He said it on the record. He did not appear troubled by it.
Think about it.
A devout Latter-day Saint, descended from Masonic founding fathers of his own church, standing on land etched with occult invocation symbols, investigating phenomena that the Pentagon couldn’t explain — and framing all of it as consistent with his faith.
“And no wonder, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.” — 2 Corinthians 11:14
The most dangerous spiritual territory is never the territory that feels dark. It is the territory that feels like discovery.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
ON BRANDON FUGAL AND SKINWALKER RANCH
Fugal, Brandon. The Shawn Ryan Show, Episode #70 — “Owner of the Mysterious Skinwalker Ranch Reveals UAP/UFO Encounters.” August 14, 2023. Available on Spotify, YouTube, and shawnryanshow.com. (Primary source for the Masonic symbol statement and Fugal’s own words.)
KRQE News 13. “Skinwalker Ranch, UFOs, and Life After Death: Exclusive Interview with Robert Bigelow.” January 21, 2021. krqe.com (Confirms Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016 and his connection to the DIA/AAWSAP program.)
ON THE GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION
South Florida Media. “Government Program AAWSAP: The Pentagon’s Secret Skinwalker Ranch Investigation.” May 2026. sfl.media (Documents the DIA contract, BAASS involvement, and the ranch as primary research site.)
Stranger Than Fiction. “Bob Bigelow, AAWSAP, and the Years the Pentagon Investigated a Haunted Ranch.” March 19, 2026. strangerthanfiction.org (Confirms the $22 million DIA contract to BAASS under AAWSAP, 2008–2012, and the 38 technical reports produced.)
Headcount Coffee. “Skinwalker Ranch Explained: Sightings and Investigations.” February 16, 2026. headcountcoffee.com (References FOIA-released program documents citing the ranch as producing “anomalous events of interest.”)
Snead, Justin. “Timeline of Modern UFO Investigations: AAWSAP to AARO.” December 2024. justinsnead.substack.com (Comprehensive documented timeline of government UFO programs tied to Skinwalker Ranch.)
ON LORENZO SNOW AND FREEMASONRY
BYU Library Special Collections. Nauvoo Masonic Lodge Minutes, 1841–1842. archives.lib.byu.edu (Primary archival source confirming nearly 1,550 LDS men joined the Nauvoo Lodge, including the first five LDS presidents — Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow.)
University of Utah Libraries Special Collections. Nauvoo Masonic Lodge Minute Books, 1841–1846. archiveswest.orbiscascade.org (Secondary archival confirmation. Physical originals held at the Church History Library.)
Joseph Smith Papers Project. “Masonic Hall, Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois.” josephsmithpapers.org (References the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge Minute Book and documents Joseph Smith’s initiation on March 15–16, 1842.)
British Columbia Masonic Grand Lodge. “Freemasonry and the Church of Latter-Day Saints Founders.” freemasonry.bcy.ca (Confirms all five founding LDS presidents were made Freemasons in the Nauvoo Lodge.)
MormonR.org. “The Temple Endowment and Freemasonry.” mormonr.org (Documents the historical parallel between early LDS temple endowment ceremony and Masonic initiation ritual. Includes Lorenzo Snow biographical detail.)
ON ALBERT PIKE AND MASONIC THEOLOGY
Pike, Albert. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. 1871. Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. (The authoritative Masonic text referenced in the article. The Lucifer passage appears on p. 321, 19th Degree — Grand Pontiff. Readers should note that the passage is disputed in its interpretation; the article presents it as a theological curiosity, not a settled indictment.)
Pike, Albert. Morals and Dogma, p. 104–105. (The source for the tiered revelation quote: “Masonry...conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages...and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled.”)
ON “AS ABOVE SO BELOW” AND HERMETIC TRADITION
Mysterium Academy. “As Above So Below: The Meaning of the Esoteric Phrase.” mysteriumacademy.com (Documents the origin of the phrase in the Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and its role as the foundational principle of Hermeticism.)
Shadow Grimoire. “As Above So Below: The Hermetic Principle That Changed Western Magic.” March 14, 2026. shadowgrimoire.com (Traces the phrase’s transmission across alchemy, astrology, and Freemasonry.)
Wikipedia. “Hermeticism.” en.wikipedia.org (Overview of the hermetic tradition rooted in teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — the syncretic fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.)
Mystic Ryst. “The Emerald Tablet: Complete Guide to Hermes Trismegistus’ Sacred Text.” December 27, 2025. mysticryst.com (Full textual breakdown of the Emerald Tablet and the “as above, so below” principle.)
A comprehensive view. I've never seen the show, but it sounds like a demonic fire trying to be put out with a heretical mormon puddle.
On a separate note: UTE MENTIONED 🪶🐻