Original subtitles

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

What is that? It definitely looks metallic.

MATTY: Of all the hot spots for high strangeness

on Skinwalker Ranch...

ERIK: This is not something I would've expected

to encounter hundreds of feet into the mesa.

Wow, look at all the metal.

MATTY: ...there is one, that by its very nature...

What is that thing that flew into the mesa? Wow!

MATTY: ...is the hardest for the team to investigate.

ERIK: What the hell are we looking at here?

TRAVIS: Whatever this is is as tall as the mesa.

MATTY: So, tonight, I'm meeting with them

to get a deep, insider's take...

Now we realize we've really got something special here.

MATTY: ...on just what...

What we found was absolutely amazing.

MATTY: ...lies buried in the rocky mesa.

It could be something incredibly important to mankind.

That's unbelievably fascinating.

MATTY: It's great to be back on Skinwalker Ranch,

in the command center, no less.

We all watch you do so much here.

This is where we bring it all together,

put it on the table, or on the screen,

and try to make sense out of what is going on here.

-Right. -Yeah, it's-it's incredible to watch you guys work here.

And if you could come up with one word

to define what you have discovered in season five,

what would that word be?

Validating.

Mmm! Excellent.

-Astounding. -(chuckles)

-I would say groundbreaking. -MATTY: Wow.

Look at that scapula!

That is a tooth that bit all the way through.

It would have to be larger than a wolf.

That is a dire wolf, which is an extinct species.

Watch what happens here.

-TRAVIS: Wow. -ERIK: We have several objects moving in unison.

TRAVIS: Look how fast they're moving.

That's not natural.

They got them coming down right on top of the tents.

-Yeah, they're coming at the tents. -(drone crashes)

(bleep)

THOMAS: Heads up, they're coming down!

PRESTON: Everybody stay back!

Well, all those words sum up what you have found

and I'm here tonight to really drill down on the mesa.

I'd like to go back if we could, and talk about its genesis

in your investigation of Skinwalker Ranch.

Well, you know, we inherited a-a legend

or a narrative of there being underground bases

or a vast tunnel system being under the ranch.

I have to say, from my very first experience

of coming out here on the property,

the first indication of anything strange that I observed

was on top of that mesa.

We saw regions of the mesa possibly illuminating.

And in the context of something technological,

potentially under the ranch,

this all starts to become very interesting.

We had a guard from the Bigelow era

that had indicated he'd found a spot

that could have been a caved-in entrance to a cave.

-You mean the visit by Chris Bartel? -Yes.

Hey, I found what looks like to be a cavern.

CHRIS: Let me take a look.

Oh, yeah.

I'm pretty sure this is it. Or it looks like it.

THOMAS: You can tell that at one time it was a lot larger.

And it's collapsed down in on itself.

CHRIS: You can tell that this whole area--

it looks like a sunken-in area.

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

So strange.

After Chris Bartel showed us the spot,

we started to explore the area around it

to see if we could find any clues

that might lead to more answers.

And we did find some pretty deep holes

that we couldn't see the bottom to.

And we determined that we'd take some smoke bombs

and drop 'em down these holes

and see if we could see smoke coming up anywhere else.

Maybe clues into where these holes

are going into the mesa.

Thomas and I have found a couple of holes up here.

I think we're gonna throw our, uh, smoke grenades in there.

So, keep an eye out, see if you see it

coming out anywhere on the mesa.

Copy that. Thanks.

Right here.

TRAVIS: It goes as far as you can see down.

Let it get smoking good.

Oh, that's good. Orange smoke, orange smoke!

Oh, I'm gonna step back.

Yeah, definitely we got smoke.

PETE: A little bit. Yeah.

TRAVIS: There should be a lot more smoke coming out.

THOMAS: Actually, look, look, it's getting sucked in.

TRAVIS: Yeah, the smoke's going down!

THOMAS: Look, it's completely gone.

We should be seeing smoke everywhere, there's no smoke.

(laughing): There's nothing here.

-Yeah. -No smoke?

BRYANT: I don't see anything.

TRAVIS: Where did it go?

There's a opening underneath the mesa out there.

The interesting thing is

when I dropped the smoke bomb in,

the smoke started to come out and then almost instantly,

as if someone turned on a vacuum,

it sucked all the way down, and-and disappeared.

And we repeated that multiple times.

-Sure did. -Yeah.

Yep. And then that led to the exercise of,

okay, well if there's truly a void in there,

-can we get a camera down there? -Right.

-The hole's right here. -Okay.

So we got one of these snake cameras, actually...

I think we're live. I'm gonna hit record.

...and we did get some really interesting footage.

A good 30 feet down in the mesa...

What the hell is that?

BRYANT: ...we saw some metallic object down in there

that absolutely shouldn't be there.

-Nope.

The rocky mesa on Skinwalker Ranch

has been shrouded in mystery and rumor for years,

but when this team literally looked into it,

what they found in this imposing feature

might just be out of this world.

Gentlemen, let's go back to the very first

drill operation you did at the mesa and how it went.

Our idea was to bring in this horizontal drill

and actually drill into the mesa

where we approximated this cave to be.

Right.

THOMAS: We brought out a driller

who is probably one of the top drillers of the United States.

So, he's had a lot of experience

drilling through landscapes that are almost identical to this.

And he gets into the mesa

and immediately encounters something that will not let

his directional drill bit start to turn upwards.

I'm up against something pretty hard right now.

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

It was-it was directing you downward

and now you're still on it,

but it's allowing you to go upwards?

-Right. -ERIK: So, that-that tells us something

about whatever this impenetrable thing is.

So, it sounds like you're describing kind of a V.

May not even be a V, it could even be...

maybe a dome.

-We're looking for a void. -Right.

We weren't looking for anything else.

And he hit something hard, shaped like a dome,

-that would not allow his drill to turn up. -That's incredible.

And of course, we hit the-the metallic material

-that appears in flakes. -Yeah.

Those drilling spoils...

THOMAS: Okay.

-What is that? -what are you seeing?

Oh, my.

-THOMAS: It's brittle. -ERIK: This is really thin.

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

That's exactly the same impression I got.

So, was it a fact of that drill bit knocking

pieces off of whatever this object is?

We don't know, but it does correlate

in the timing as to when the driller hit something

that was hard enough that it drove his drill bit down

and he could not turn it to go up.

THOMAS: 180 feet in is where

we first started bringing those spoils up.

How'd they get there?

-That's the question. -ERIK: Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Matty. We took those spoils to the University of Utah

to have analysis done on them.

And what we found was absolutely amazing.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

The way I understand it, there was also trace elements of, uh,

europium and tellurium in the sample?

Okay.

This material was manufactured,

as opposed to a natural occurrence?

Yeah.

ERIK: Well, That's interesting.

That's actually very interesting.

When you get scientific corroboration

like that from a lab, that it is something strange...

Historically, do we know

of any space shuttles parked in the mesa? Anyone?

Uh... not that I know of.

-No. -TRAVIS: How did it get in there?

That's the big thing.

How did that material get into the mesa

and to what purpose?

And that set you up for a second drill attempt.

Literally and figuratively,

you guys were looking for a breakthrough.

First, we're looking for a tunnel.

The second time, we were looking

for a metal object inside that mesa.

And so we actually

did the GPR on top of the mesa

and discovered that, in fact,

there was some type of anomaly. So, whatever it was

that we were getting pushed down by, maybe we could

-come in and catch it above. -Right.

And this second one, the goal was to go into the mesa

and as soon as he got into the mesa,

his instructions were to turn that bit and go up.

TRAVIS: We set up our spectrum analyzers

and we're watching the frequency that they were using

on their drill bit beacon.

And when they hit whatever they hit inside there-- wow.

It changed the signal and rebroadcast it.

What's going on, Thomas?

The drill has encountered a hard object

that it cannot penetrate.

Wow.

Whoa, what is that?

Hey, Thomas.

Tell Erik that when the drill bit hit

whatever you guys hit up at the top,

that the 33 megahertz signal coming from the drill bit

amplified and spread out

all around it like something was rebroadcasting it.

So, let me just put this another way.

It sounds to me like you're saying that

y-your drill hit the object and every time

you hit the object, it... it was responding.

That's one interpretation.

That is one way to look at it, sure.

And that drill bit was not damaged.

And you're sitting there grinding that bit

against some immovable something.

Right.

-It's-it's weird.

Does the mesa on Skinwalker Ranch

contain the ultimate answers

to the bizarre phenomena that happens on the property?

Thus far, your efforts in the mesa have been incredible.

Talk to me about your approach this season.

This time we got much more

of that ground-penetrating radar data that

gives us a partial three-dimensional image

of something quite large.

Something that runs quite deep.

TRAVIS: You've probably seen this before, where they take

-the ballistic jelly. -Yes.

And they'll fire a bullet at it.

And it shatters and creates

-a shrapnel field inside the jelly. -MATTY: Yes.

TRAVIS: That's exactly what this three-dimensional,

ground-penetrating radar image looks like in the mesa.

It's almost as if something had come...

down really fast and hits the mesa,

goes into it,

gets stuck in there and creates a debris field on the inside.

Something that happens to be saucer-shaped.

Something that happens to be saucer-shaped.

MATTY: I know with your science minds

and everyone here is very rational,

this could be natural.

We're not gonna throw that possible solution out.

But the ground-penetrating radar expert told us

that this is not a naturally

occurring fissure

or object that he's ever seen before.

And you can't get away from the fact

that we pulled metal

-out of the mesa. -That's a great point.

So, Matty, the emphasis has shifted.

You know, whereas before we were trying to drill into something.

-Right. -Now we realize we've really got something special.

-Yeah, yeah. -ERIK: Clearly, this is

something not to be destroyed

if we can avoid it, but to be studied.

So to study whatever this is in the mesa,

we drill boreholes that go right up beside it--

not into it, but beside it--

so that we can insert instruments

that are side-looking that may give us

a more complete picture of what it is

we're dealing with in the mesa.

And almost right off the bat,

when you guys begin this operation,

things get weird again.

Absolutely.

TRAVIS: What's going on?

So we keep losing communication

with our transmitter.

-TRAVIS: Wow! -THOMAS: We start having

equipment failures. And by that, the beacon

that should be transmitting the drill bit location,

that's how we steer this thing around.

JARED: When you start drilling,

I lose all communication with him,

and he loses communication, also.

-Yeah. -THOMAS: Quits transponding to the receiver.

And so that caused us to have

to stop work and try to figure out what's going wrong.

And they were attributing it to a dead battery,

but we pulled the battery out.

And what did you guys find?

I put a volt meter to it, and it was

completely full as if it were new.

There was something else that was causing them

to lose signal between that beacon and that receiver.

And things got even more shocking.

I mean, what happened with the cow?

We were, uh, looking at the spectrum analyzer.

What?

What is that signal?

There's a signal at 919...

megahertz that's going nonstop on every antenna.

What?!

And while we're watching it,

we saw a strange signal just appear, and that's

when we all turned around and we saw the calf.

(cows 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's wrong with that cow?

Literally 45 minutes or less before that,

these calves were coming

toward the operation we were doing.

So I went over to shoo them back to their mothers.

I specifically looked at this cow.

It looked perfectly normal.

And then, within 45 minutes,

we see this calf just absolutely spinning circles,

like as if it doesn't know where it is.

And then, Thomas, you tell 'em what else you witnessed.

This calf's eyes were white,

like almost solid white.

As if there was a lens or a cover over 'em.

TRAVIS: That's a telltale sign

of being exposed to microwave radiation.

Where the calf was running around in circles,

all of our compasses were off.

-North was moved off by about 20 degrees. -MATTY: Wow.

That's weird.

THOMAS: Hey, Travis, you seeing any elevated readings over there?

I've got a, uh, an old-school compass standing right here

where that cow was running around in circles.

North is about, oh, I'm gonna say 20 degrees to the east.

THOMAS: That's interesting.

TRAVIS: It was weird.

ERIK: And all of this is happening

just feet away from where we were stationed

-during our drilling activity. -Yes.

But it does correlate in the timing

as to when the driller hit something.

Yeah.

Do we have an update on the calf?

Yeah, we immediately removed the calf and its mother

from the property as soon as the vet got done doing

an examination, and...

it's doing much better.

Great.

Could the legends of a secret base

or otherworldly object buried deep in the mesa

on Skinwalker Ranch actually be true?

Guys, I put the question to you.

It sounds unbelievable,

but given everything we've talked about,

but given everything we've talked about,

everything we've seen in season five,

it might not be that crazy.

You know, we're taking the data,

we're being led by those data.

And the further we progress in this work,

the more we find seems to align with the idea

of something technological.

You know, for every underground base,

there has to be an entryway somewhere.

-Right. Oh, right. -Right?

BRYANT: Could that possibly be

what we're tapping into in the mesa? We don't know.

If that's where a base might lie,

is this dome structure, um,

what other plans for that?

Will that be in play moving forward?

You know, we've described, uh, a strategy for studying that.

Uh, you know, we want to get in as close as we can

to whatever that structure is so that we can insert instruments

into the mesa and build a more complete map

to characterize whatever that artifact,

perhaps, whatever that structure turns out to be.

This is essentially, like, uh, what you do

when you're trying to gather information on, say,

if you're in the military and you're trying to get

more information, you do recon.

-Right. -And we're trying to get as much information

as we can before we make a really big decision

about what we're gonna do with that object

inside the mesa.

TRAVIS: Right now,

we really only have a few data points here.

We have the data points of a drill going

under the bottom profile

of whatever this is and...

-a drill profile going over the top... -Right.

...of at least something.

We don't know that they're even connected because they're

80, 90 feet apart from each other.

But we also have the ground-penetrating radar

that suggests that the top profile

looks like something and it's so wide.

But it's hard to say from that

if it's a solid object that goes all the way to the bottom.

And until we can look through this, this pathway,

now that we're drilling alongside,

and-and put instruments side-looking,

as Erik's talked about,

only then will we be able to really start

looking at what this thing might actually be.

BRYANT: And I really appreciate

the approach that Erik and Travis and the team

has taken of...

really doing it very carefully

with the biopsy type of approach.

You know, we've heard so many people just say,

"Well, why don't you just blow the mesa up,

or just go in there and demolish it?"

Well, first off, we don't know what's in there.

-Right. -It could be something

incredibly valuable or incredibly important to mankind.

And by demolishing it, you could ruin whatever's there.

I'll tell you, our intent obviously is

to find out as much as we can.

But whether the ranch lets us or not is another question.

Our drilling exercises have proven over and over

unforeseen obstacles that keep us

from achieving what it is that we're wanting to do.

It's amazing how many roadblocks are

constantly being thrown in our way

in our efforts to find more information.

But I can tell you, Matty,

there's a lot in store, and I can't wait for you

to see what else we find

-as we're moving forward on this. -ERIK: Yeah.

Well, we can't wait to see what you guys discover.

Thank you so much for letting us in the command center.

It's been very exciting.

-Thank you, man. -Thanks for joining us.

Is the mesa simply testing

our understanding of nature,

or will it ultimately change

our understanding of the nature of our world?

Maybe the next episode

of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

will reveal that and more.

Thank you so much for watching and have a great night.

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