Original subtitles

Hey, we got something on the FLIR.

We got something on the FLIR.

ERIK: I could be convinced that we're looking

-at something formation flying. -Really?

Our team keeps witnessing

shocking phenomena in the skies above Skinwalker Ranch.

Yeah, that don't look like an airplane.

What the hell is up there?

TRAVIS: But as our investigation

of this 512-acre property continues...

That thing is moving fast!

...we've encountered something buried in solid rock...

-THOMAS: Look at that. -BRYANT: This thing

-is just straight-up metal. -Oh, yeah.

TRAVIS: ...that just may be the key

to solving a centuries-old mystery.

It looks a lot like you would think a debris field would be.

So, tonight, we're taking a good, hard look

at some of the most compelling discoveries we've made so far...

What the hell is that?

ERIK: What do you got, Bryant?

I don't know what the hell that is.

TRAVIS: ...deep inside the mesa.

BRANDON: In 2016,

I purchased Skinwalker Ranch and assembled

our team to carry this investigation forward

into the next level.

And what is that?

We've started deploying technology

devised by Erik Bard,

our principal investigator,

related to monitoring

and recording the events happening on the ranch.

TRAVIS: In 2019, I accepted Brandon Fugal's offer

to join his team's investigation of Skinwalker Ranch

because I was intrigued by all the eyewitness reports

of UAPs that had been made

in recent decades on the 512-acre property.

After all, the federal government partially funded

a previous investigation that was led

by billionaire aerospace mogul Robert Bigelow

from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

One of the first things that we captured--

a 500-foot section

of the mesa became totally illuminated.

That's-that's wild.

But I was equally stunned

by the surveillance images they captured

of a large section of the mesa

appearing to glow in the middle of the night.

BRANDON: We have also

seen several instances

of compact light pillars.

TRAVIS: That's interesting.

ERIK: The results of Robert Bigelow's investigation

have never been fully released.

There are rumors

about some kind of base

or perhaps an alien artifact beneath the property.

TRAVIS: We searched, but couldn't find any large openings

or underground entrances leading into the mesa

to help us investigate that incredible legend.

CHRIS: So, it's gonna be

in this little area right here

where I was walking down from the top of the mesa,

and I found a cave.

Then I suggest maybe we just all climb up there

-and see if we can find it. -Yeah.

TRAVIS: But then, in 2021,

retired Air Force veteran and former Bigelow team

security officer Chris Bartel came to the ranch and showed us

where he claimed to have actually found a cave entrance.

CHRIS: Oh, yeah.

I'm pretty sure this is it.

THOMAS: You can tell that at one time,

it was a lot larger, and it's collapsed down in on itself.

You can tell that this whole area

looks like a sunken-in area.

-Like it was all caved in. Yeah. -CHRIS: Yeah.

Yup. This is the area we're looking at.

THOMAS: After our meeting with Chris Bartel,

we brought Jake Huffman out

who has spent his career building oil well sites,

and as part of that, uh, has used a lot of explosives

and done a lot of blasting.

We wanted to get his eyes on the mesa

and see if he could tell

if this was a natural cave-in or a purposeful one.

Looking at it,

do you see anything that would indicate to you that

this was collapsed on purpose?

JAKE: Actually, yeah.

-Hmm. -Usually, if you have a slough,

then you're gonna have material that's built up somewhere,

you know, and I'm not seeing anywhere

where softer material

-or mud or anything... -That was pushed out?

...pushed out from underneath it.

THOMAS: That's a good point.

JAKE: I believe, at some point,

there was blasting done, and

-perhaps that was done to hide something. -Hmm.

TRAVIS: We don't know what or who might have purposely covered

that reported cave entrance,

but after Jake Huffman's stunning assessment...

You're all good to go, huh?

Okay.

TRAVIS: ...Thomas arranged for Aaron Blunt

and his team from Straight Shot Drilling help us investigate

if something important

that's related to all the ranch phenomena

might be buried inside there.

-What's going on? -Aaron: Well, it looks like

we're in a ledge that's holding us from coming up.

And I'm just hitting it and riding it.

TRAVIS: After drilling with ease

for nearly 300 feet inside the mesa,

the drill bit hit an impenetrable object of some kind

and was just scraping along its surface.

THOMAS: Okay.

TRAVIS: So, we decided

to search through the drilling spoils

for any clues that might help us figure out

what the obstruction could be.

What is that?

Oh, my.

THOMAS: I wondered if it was, like, metal flakes or something.

TRAVIS: We had no idea where metal flakes would come from

nearly 300 feet inside the mesa.

We just knew for sure it wasn't anything natural.

-(high-pitched whirring) -BRYANT: Boy, that thing sounds

like it's hitting something hard.

ERIK: What the heck is...?

TRAVIS: So, in order to find out,

Aaron kept drilling to see if he could penetrate

the obstruction.

Uh, I'm up against something pretty hard right now.

So, we're coming up about 11 inches every ten feet.

It was directing you downward, and now,

you're still on it, but it's allowing you to go upwards?

Right.

So, we've got kind of a V

that your bit is sitting there bumping up against,

trying to find a place to start drilling up.

-Is that right? -Yeah. May not even be a V.

It could even be... maybe a dome.

TRAVIS: A massive, possibly dome-shaped, metal object?

Given the legends we'd heard

about what might be hidden below the ranch,

we didn't know what to think.

I know it sounds crazy.

But that was just the beginning of strange things to come

But that was just the beginning of strange things to come

as our investigation of the mesa continued.

THOMAS: So, are we ready

-to drill again? -Yeah.

TRAVIS: In 2022, we conducted

ground-penetrating radar scans

that confirmed a large, possibly

metallic, dome-shaped object

was buried in the mesa on Skinwalker Ranch.

Would this drill-- would it drill

through steel-reinforced concrete?

-Yes. -It would?

Yeah, we do it quite a few times.

TRAVIS: So, we had Aaron Blunt and his team

from Straight Shot Drilling

return with an even more powerful rig

to see if they could penetrate the top of the object

and figure out just what it could be.

Did you get that one working?

Yeah, I got 'em all working now.

And as the drilling operation progressed,

Erik and I were using our spectrum analyzer

to monitor the 33-megahertz signal

coming from the drilling beacon.

That's a device inside the drill head that communicates

with a receiver on the surface that enables the drillers

to track its location underground.

When we try to approach that point,

our bit is getting pushed down or it's getting pushed up.

ERIK: So, he's hitting resistance right now.

THOMAS: You can hear that.

-Drill's hitting something hard. -Oh, yeah.

What's going on, Thomas?

After drilling more than 270 or 280 feet

of going through sandstone like butter,

the drill has encountered a hard object

-that it cannot penetrate. -Wow.

Once, again, the drill bit couldn't penetrate

the dome-shaped object,

and was just spinning on its surface,

several hundred feet inside the mesa.

I'm looking for the beacon signal

at 33 megahertz right now.

Whoa. What is that?

Something's going nuts there.

And then our spectrum analyzer

showed that every time the bit made contact

with the dome-shaped object,

something was amplifying the drill beacon's signal

and rebroadcasting it back at us.

There's a phenomenon occurring right now

that we don't understand.

ERIK: What could cause

the RF spectrum to suddenly change

as the drill bit encounters

this apparently impenetrable object?

Is this an attempt to communicate?

It is certainly very suggestive

that we're dealing with something

that isn't native to that mesa.

AARON: See, and we're at 8,000 pounds of push.

-(high-pitched whirring) -Hardly any rotation off of it.

So, either my bit's broke off,

or it's just spinning on something smooth.

TRAVIS: We retracted the drill bit

so that we could find out how damaged it was

from grinding on the surface of the dome-shaped object.

THOMAS: Getting this cleaned off,

these teeth are all perfectly intact.

-It's not missing a single tooth. -Yeah.

It looks like it's in perfect condition.

TRAVIS: You'd think if you were grinding that against something

for a half hour that it would dull it, at least.

It should have heated up and at least wore it down, flat.

-TRAVIS: That's crazy. -AARON: Yeah, that is.

TRAVIS: It was as if the drill bit had been spinning

on a protective force field,

like something out of science fiction.

Erik and I were in total disbelief.

Ultimately, even with this more powerful drilling rig,

we weren't able to uncover any more answers

as to what we were dealing with inside the mesa.

KALEB: All right, so, Jan,

I'm assuming we would just want you to go back and forth

-JAN: Yeah. -as much as we can,

and really see how far back

and how deep this anomaly is, by chance.

-Let's give it a go, for sure. -Yeah.

TRAVIS: To help us change our luck, in 2023,

ground-penetrating radar expert Jan Franke

brought out a specialized device

to scan back and forth across the mesa.

That day, he and Kaleb gathered the best data yet

related to the dome-shaped object.

JAN: So, we did a total

of 12 total passes.

I got 12 hits for this same anomaly

as I went further and further back.

What this all adds up to is probably a metallic object

that could be buried inside there,

measuring, well, at least 300 feet long,

and it might be even larger.

-Yes. -So, it is repeatable.

Whoa.

So, let me show you what

that looks like in 3D.

This is our target in the same space.

So we can really see how that lines up.

-Really? -There is

an absolutely obvious target

that extends across this entire area.

I still don't know how far back it goes.

THOMAS: Can you tell us what the distance was

between that first line

and the last line that you did?

We're looking at...

at least 100 meters.

300 feet?

-Yeah. -Wow.

TRAVIS: It looks a lot

like you would think a debris field would be.

ERIK: Just think about what circumstances

would produce a debris field

inside of a mesa.

TRAVIS: Jan not only confirmed

the approximate size of the massive dome-shaped object,

but he also detected a number of smaller,

possibly metallic anomalies all around it.

Could it be something...

man-made? Perhaps.

But why, in the middle of nowhere?

I can't see

a natural phenomenon that we could

explain easily causing

this sort of anomaly.

TRAVIS: Okay, now we had evidence

of a huge debris field in the mesa.

We recovered metallic fragments

that possibly came from the dome-shaped object,

which may be related to spacecraft.

And we might have even detected a communication signal

coming from inside the mesa.

Could the legend about what might be buried

under Skinwalker Ranch be true?

What we soon discovered

made it an even more compelling possibility.

ERIK: So, guys,

sounds like you're bringing some capabilities

that we've never had out here

in terms of the horizontal drilling.

Yeah, so we'll-we'll have the capabilities

to about 60,000 pounds

-of force. -60,000 pounds? -TRAVIS: Wow.

After we obtained ground-penetrating radar data

that showed the dome-shaped object buried in the mesa

on Skinwalker Ranch might be surrounded

by several smaller anomalies,

we met a drilling team from Mark Construction

to devise an ambitious new investigation.

ERIK: We expect to be able to punch through

right up beside. We don't want to go into this thing.

-TRAVIS: What if it's something important? -MIKE: Yeah.

ERIK: We've decided rather than to drill into the structure,

we should create boreholes on both sides of the anomaly

that will provide instrumentation access

inside the mesa,

very near to but not penetrating into the anomaly itself.

I have in mind to insert active and passive instruments--

some of which simply measure,

others of which may even broadcast signals

into the anomaly in order to study its response.

This will give us an opportunity

to better understand whether it is of natural

or possible technological origins.

TRAVIS: As the new drilling operation got underway,

we were all hopeful to finally get some definitive answers.

BRYANT: They've got

the bit to the right level,

and they're gonna-- about to punch into the main wall

to go up into the mesa.

TRAVIS: But very quickly,

things got strange

and only got stranger from there.

-(static) -Look over here.

Holy crap. Look at this.

First, we detected a mysterious signal at 31 megahertz

that was coming from inside the mesa

and possibly from the dome-shaped object.

I don't know what that is.

'Cause I've never seen a signal like that before.

ERIK: I don't see any movement here.

ALEX: Uh, it's not moving in the pit here, so it's broke.

TRAVIS: Then, nearly 130 feet in,

the drill bit hit something it couldn't penetrate,

causing the drill pipe to break into pieces.

Boy, you can hear that below us, can't you?

Yeah.

TRAVIS: A couple weeks later,

after fixing that problem,

the team was able to drill nearly 180 feet into the mesa...

Jared, are you going through something real hard right now

or what?

...when they suddenly hit

another impenetrable obstruction.

TRAVIS: Big signal, right here.

-ERIK: What are you tuning into there, Travis? -There's a signal

at 1.6-ish.

And just a couple seconds later, we detected

a radio frequency signal at 1.6 gigahertz

coming from somewhere directly above Homestead Two,

which is several hundred yards away.

I'm going.

Now, since we had detected

that kind of signal many times during our experiments,

I rushed over there with Kaleb and Dragon.

KALEB: Rocket is hot,

and we're gonna be launching in five,

four, three,

two, one.

TRAVIS: We launched two rockets, hoping to either hit

whatever was broadcasting that signal

or stimulate it to appear. But then

something we never would have expected happened.

KALEB: Almost looked like it stopped right there for a second.

TRAVIS: As it was descending,

our rocket literally froze in midair

for several seconds,

like something invisible was holding on to it.

Was there a connection between that

and whatever the drillers hit inside the mesa?

The timing was beyond intriguing.

Just like what would happen the following day.

(mooing)

KALEB: Hey, guys.

You see that?

TRAVIS: Look at this cow, guys!

Hey, guys!

Look at this cow!

ERIK: What's going on?

BRYANT: It's spinning in circles.

What the hell is wrong with that cow?

TRAVIS: As the drilling operation proceeded

with a larger and stronger bit,

suddenly, a calf in the nearby field became seriously ill...

THOMAS: Its eyes are pure white.

...and even showed signs of exposure

to a high dose of microwave radiation.

What's going on?

JARED: So, we keep losing communication

with our transmitter.

TRAVIS: Wow.

The drilling beacon mysteriously

stopped communicating with its receiver.

But when we pulled it out and inspected it,

it was working perfectly.

So, was the dome-shaped object and the smaller anomalies

somehow connected to all of these bizarre events?

And if so, what the hell are they?

The next discovery we'd make in the mesa

offered a crazy possible answer.

♪ ♪

ALEX (over walkie): Okay, Jared.

Go in with this next rod.

Still got him, so...

that's a good sign.

A week after all that craziness happened

with the rocket and the calf,

the drillers fixed their beacon

and were close to getting beyond 180 feet inside the mesa.

That gave us a lot of hope that, soon,

we'd get at least one of our boreholes completed.

-Listen to that. He's struggling. -KALEB: Yeah.

He's trying to push that thing in right now.

(loud rattling)

TRAVIS: What the hell is in that mesa?

But then the drill slowed way down again...

We have no idea where this, uh,

drill head is up in this mesa.

...and the beacon failed,

meaning we had no way of knowing

if they were drilling upwards like we needed to

for our plan to work.

So, at that point, they shut the drill down

and we decided to check the spoils again

for any clues as to what they hit this time.

We weren't prepared for what we found.

What the hell is that?

Hey! Erik!

ERIK: What do you got, Bryant?

BRYANT: Uh...

-it's gelatin. -What?

BRYANT: It looks like what Kris Porritt was alluding to.

TRAVIS: Are you kidding me?

It's green jelly.

Finding that green jelly substance

in the mesa spoils was unbelievable.

KRIS: There was part of a wreckage.

Yeah.

Uh, some-some type of,

uh, aircraft or some-some kind of flying saucer

or alien craft.

TRAVIS: Because, before that, retired Sheriff Kris Porritt told us

that he saw wreckage from an alien spacecraft

near the south field on Skinwalker Ranch

back in the 1980s.

Well, I'll tell you,

he found a liquid substance.

But it wasn't liquid.

It was more of a gelatin-type stuff.

Jelly.

And it was green.

It was pretty much scattered all over in here.

TRAVIS: He described seeing a substance

very much like what we had just found.

And, uh, the jelly sample, uh, is kind of interesting.

Doesn't really match with what I see

in terms of the-the geological history of the area.

TRAVIS: So we had botany expert Dr. Mitchell Power

analyze the jelly

to see if it might be something natural

or something else.

TRAVIS: You mean like something caused a fire

deep inside the mesa?

Absolutely. Yeah.

TRAVIS: Wow.

We found more evidence

of a massive fire or explosion deep inside the mesa,

right where we've identified a massive dome-shaped object

that may be covered with spacecraft-related materials.

It's still too soon to know for sure what it is,

but I can guarantee we're not gonna stop investigating

until we uncover it.

ERIK: We're seeing things

that are very hard for us to explain

inside the mesa.

This part of the ranch continues to defy our efforts

to characterize it.

At least it's gonna make us work for the answers we get.

BRANDON: The mesa continues to be one of the most challenging

areas of the ranch to explore.

My hope is to find answers,

gain new insights,

be able to understand the nature of what

we are dealing with at the ranch.

The deeper down the rabbit hole that we travel,

the more complex that it appears.

There are no easy answers at Skinwalker Ranch.

♪ ♪

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