Original subtitles

-(excited chatter) -ERIK: You got it?

MATTY: Season Five

of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

continues to reveal strange happenings,

-both high... -TRAVIS: What is it?

There is absolutely electricity

-built up on this thing. -MATTY: ...and low.

-There shouldn't be any, should there? -TRAVIS: No.

MATTY: So tonight,

I'm meeting with principal investigator Erik Bard

and astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor...

...about how they are applying hard science...

TRAVIS: It's a very difficult task.

We just start trying everything we can think of.

MATTY: ...to solve a mystery

that defies everything we thought we knew...

TRAVIS: UAP right there!

ERIK: The very active observation may

have stimulated the appearance of these things.

MATTY: ...about the laws of nature.

It's completely unknown.

TRAVIS: Holy cow! Look at that.

♪ ♪

Guys, thank you for meeting me here at Homestead Two.

It's great to be back.

Season Five has been incredible.

You know, we've seen with each year of the investigation,

new manifestations of what we've been calling the phenomenon,

which, frankly,

I'm uncomfortable referring to it in the singular

because there are, in fact, many phenomena

that play out here on the property.

-Travis? -TRAVIS: We've looked across

different physics, chemistry, math, sciences,

everything you can think of. Engineering technologies.

And we seem to find

some aspect of whatever this phenomenon

is or are, across every measurement we make.

So that suggests that

if it's a singular phenomenon,

then it's extremely encompassing.

And if it's multiple phenomena,

then what in the world are we dealing with?

Because there's many of them.

-Right. -ERIK: I was initially

coming into this thinking that we might be dealing

with some kind of geophysics

or atmospheric physics that might be easily explained.

But we find that the deeper we dig,

or the higher we look, for that matter,

the more we find.

KALEB: Oh, right there. I see it.

BRYANT: Oh, yeah.

Is that something walking on the ground?

What is that thing that flew into the mesa?

Wow, it's unbelievable.

Holy crap. Look at this.

We've got a signal right now that's pulsing.

I think it's two things talking to each other.

That is crazy.

What is that?

Straight up, it's right there.

BRYANT: Right here. It's right above our heads.

TRAVIS: Right there!

Are you both confident that the scientific method

could potentially solve

something that's so ethereal and strange?

The scientific method tells us,

do your homework, study everything you can

about whatever it is you're looking into.

Then form a hypothesis

that you can actually test and falsify,

or verify

through a measurement or an experiment."

Conduct that experiment, collect the data,

then report on the data after you do some analysis.

And we're making measurements and experiments

-to test that hypothesis. -Got it.

Let's talk about the kinds of things we're measuring here.

-Please. -ERIK: We've seen

microwave radiation,

-gamma rays, even neutrons. -Even neutrons.

ERIK: And, Matty, we've all been advised

that we may be

sitting on top of something artificial,

technological.

In other words, you know, there is in the narrative

the idea of something underground.

-Yeah. -Like an alien base

-or something crazy like that. -Right.

-Right. -ERIK: But the fact is,

we're dealing with a transient phenomenon, which means

something that can be,

absent most of the time and present in an instant.

That is fascinating.

When we first got out here, the very first day,

we measured radiation signals that were disturbing.

And so, we had a sweep done for safety

to make sure that there's not a continuous,

always-on, uh, source of something dangerous.

And there was nothing here.

But then, we were picking up a-a microwave signal,

at 1.6 gigahertz.

And so, to put that in perspective,

your microwave oven that you

pop popcorn with is at 2.45 gigahertz.

And so is your Wi-Fi router.

-All right. -So we're at about half that frequency.

But we can't figure out where it's coming from.

I'm not sure when we're holding

these meters any particular way,

which direction the signal's coming from.

TRAVIS: So we developed

a high school science project level experiment

where you use coffee cans,

and you put a detector inside the can

so that the only way that a signal can get

to the detector is if it's coming

from the direction

of inside the opening in the can.

(detector squealing)

So I get my biggest readings when I'm like this looking up.

It's coming from up there.

Well, the strongest signal's coming

from this spot roughly 5,000 feet above the ranch.

And it turned out to be right over the triangle

where this signal seemed to be coming from.

And that's when I talked with Erik and said,

"Erik, we really need a way to map this."

So I took the initiative to-to create a map,

not only of the ranch--

where the radiation is coming from--

but in fact, of the entire Uinta Basin.

This is a three-dimensional model of the Uinta Basin.

We're basically talking about a very shallow bowl.

And of interest to us, of course, is

what's the origin of that bowl,

and the kinds of things we're measuring here?

Well, one of my PhD dissertation topics was actually

on impact crater sites.

And it got us to looking at this,

and I realized the Uinta Basin looks a lot like it was

a, uh, impact site

sometime in the distant past.

So it's possible that there's something impacted here in Utah.

Uh, it could have been a comet, an asteroid

or even a crashing alien spacecraft,

UAP, who knows?

We don't know what it was, but it does look like

something impacted here, created this bowl shape

that is causing these reflected energy signals

that we're measuring.

Incredible. The notion of a impact site from a UAP.

And that's exactly what I want to talk about next--

aerial phenomena, and how you might use science

to track, categorize,

and maybe even stimulate them.

And I want to do that next.

What could possibly explain

all the incredible aerial phenomena

that's being experienced here

on Skinwalker Ranch?

Well, here to tell us once and for all

exactly what UAPs are,

are Erik Bard and Travis Taylor.

-That's a tall order. -Yeah.

You're not asking for much.

I'm kind of kidding, of course.

But maybe you two are closer than anyone ever has been

to using science to explain

-what it might be. -TRAVIS: Yeah.

UAP originally coined as, uh,

"unidentified aerial phenomena,"

then "aerospace phenomena,"

and now it's "anomalous phenomena."

Indeed, you know, obviously,

the "U" part of UAP plays a big role here.

There's a lot of stuff we see that we cannot identify.

Things that appear to be at very high altitude,

and in some cases, only a few hundred feet

above the earth here.

In some cases, actually inside the Earth.

(exhales)

ERIK: Recently, as you've seen,

something that may, in fact,

be what we call a transmedium phenomenon.

Something passing through the earth itself

and emerging here on the property

not far from the triangle.

Watch what happens in the sky

just above the mesa.

TRAVIS: Whoa.

-Okay, look, look. -TRAVIS: Look at that.

ERIK: Right there. This is the feature of interest.

BRANDON: Right. I'm seeing it.

TRAVIS: It went behind the mesa.

BRYANT: Where'd it go? Where'd it go?

Did it go right behind the mesa?

Yes. And on closer inspection,

it appears as if there's a corresponding light

and illuminated area on the mesa itself.

-Right there. Right there. -TRAVIS: Yeah.

Now, watch what happens as we play through.

-TRAVIS: Oh! Right there. Look. -BRANDON: Oh, my gosh.

-Oh, my gosh. -There it goes. Oh, my gosh.

We ask ourselves all the time, why here?

Why in the middle of Utah?

Why in the middle of nowhere are we seeing

so many of these phenomena that we can't determine

what they are and why they're here?

ERIK: Matty, when I came into this work,

I was searching for what we would call a prosaic answer,

-a mundane answer. -Sure.

Maybe something out of nature and ideas

like ball lightning or so-called earthquake lights.

Things that could have geophysical causes

were high on the list of possibilities.

-Sure. -ERIK: But as we've continued,

what I would call the observational science,

which includes things like

surveillance cameras,

monitoring and measurement systems,

we've seen that we've got

more than just meets the eye going on here.

We have things that, right here where we sit,

I captured something that appeared to be

-undergoing a kind of searching behavior. -Yeah.

Right over this road.

TRAVIS: We would call it an orb, probably.

ERIK: I think, I think it would've been

categorized as an orb.

We've seen all sorts of things that could range from possibly

a nuts-and-bolts craft that we saw last year

over the east canyon field

to energy manifestations, like flying into and out of the mesa.

It was hard to tell if that had any physical structure to it.

And even UAP that seemed to have

some sort of energy field or bubble around them.

Like, I'm thinking of the one,

unfortunately, where the cow died.

In this case, I was studying what was happening

with this cow that passed away there at the fence line...

The surveillance cameras captured the ordeal

that this animal went through over a period of several hours.

TOM: Is that black object the cow?

ERIK: Yeah, that's it, Tom.

The cow is right here.

What we'll do is

go forward very slowly and watch what happens with her.

Now, you see the cow starts to get up.

So here,

I can't help but also notice

that there's something happening here.

-TRAVIS: Oh, whoa, look at that. -TOM: Right there.

TRAVIS: Look at that.

The moment that that object appeared

above the cow, the cow was reacting.

Yes.

ERIK: At that moment, as the cow raises her head

in what were probably the last moments of her life,

we see something moving at very high velocity,

over that fence line.

Potentially very fast. Hypersonic, even.

-Incredible. -You know, that particular thing

we saw there, Erik, hovering over the cow,

and then, that darted off, when we do analysis into it,

it's not unlike the Gimbal video that everybody's aware of.

There seems to be an artifact around whatever this object is

that looks like sort of a halo or a bubble around it.

Now, it's unclear,

with the one that we measured over the cow,

if it was an artifact of encoding in the camera

or if it was real.

But since it looks very similar to what we saw,

we can't say 100% that there is some kind of halo or bubble

around what we saw, but it is possible.

And if it is, that could be a telltale sign

of whatever its propulsion mechanism could be,

like the warp bubbles from science fiction.

Incredible.

We've talked about aerial phenomena

that you happen to catch,

but I'd like to talk about the ones that maybe

you've perhaps stimulated using science and experiments.

And it's that I want to focus on, coming up.

Yeah, let's do it.

captured

on film unexpectedly, and they're incredible.

But there's many times, following your journey,

that you have used experiments to maybe draw these things out.

Yeah, so that's called a-a dog whistle.

You know, you blow the dog whistle

and the dogs come running.

-Right. -Well, we kind of also

refer to it in a vernacular

that my, uh, grandmother gave us,

and it was "poking the hornet's nest."

-Mm. -And so, we often poke the hornet's nest

to see what flies out.

I suppose one scientific question would be,

are those UAPs always there

or are your experiments directly causing them to appear?

That is really the question for me.

You know, we often say to each other,

-"correlation is not causation." -Absolutely.

-Ah, right. Right. -ERIK: We don't know

the answer to your question.

But there's so many ways in which we may have stimulated

the appearance of these things.

We've seen things as if stimulated,

above the ranch when we've launched swarms of drones.

-Drones are armed. -TRAVIS: All right, drones are going,

the drones are going.

Wow, look at that.

ERIK: Oh, wow.

TRAVIS: You did see something in the FLIR?

ERIK: Yep, moving up here from the center

up towards the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

Oh, what is that?

ERIK: And when we have directed

very powerful lasers into the space

directly above the triangle...

Travis, you-you got to see this.

-Okay... -Well, there's the lasers.

Yeah, I'm doing an instant playback.

-You see this? -Oh. Yeah.

TRAVIS: Wow. It's moving

way too fast for it to be a satellite.

ERIK: This thing's really clipping along.

BRANDON: Oh, my gosh.

It disappeared. That's insane.

We've heard people say, "Oh, when you launch

the rockets, the UFOs show up."

Well, we don't know that for 100% accuracy.

-What we do know... -Smoke's hot.

...is that a lot of times, when we fire rockets,

that correlates

with the sighting of some sort of phenomena.

-Hey, look! UAP right there! -KALEB: Yep,

-I see it. -BRYANT: Yep, there it is, you got one.

Now, we fire the rockets for scientific purposes.

They're a-a cheap way

to put a sensor 1,000 feet in the sky.

You've seen these things, you've done the experiments,

you've seen them appear.

What does your scientific gut tell you if that's a thing?

You've both been doing this a long time.

I-I think right now, you could say

we have so much, uh, data

that there's certainly something strange occurring here.

Right now, we're trying to overlay,

does it occur more when we poke the nest

-than it does just at random? -Mm-hmm.

-Yeah, I'd agree with that. -You have described

various types of aerial phenomena,

but there's also something in the mesa behind me.

Can you speak to that possibility,

and what science might be telling you about that?

-Well, I can begin to speak to it. -Okay.

You see us drilling into the mesa

looking for these anomalies that we see coming out

in ground-penetrating radar, or GPR.

This is something that is without precedent.

Here's what we know.

The profile of the drill bit that went in got pushed down,

and then came up on the backside of it...

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

TRAVIS: ...making an arc shape or a dome shape

or the bottom of a saucer.

What's going on, Thomas?

The drill has encountered a hard object

-that it cannot penetrate. -Wow.

TRAVIS: We came back and drilled higher up,

and something pushed it up and then it went over.

What if it does turn out to be something fantastic and amazing?

We don't want to destroy it by just blowing up the mesa.

-Right. -ERIK: Now famously,

we've brought these shards

of material out that have all kinds

of interesting layering.

We're talking about iron and aluminum,

but also some other interesting elements like

vanadium and tellurium.

TRAVIS: And when we took that

to the University of Utah,

and had the, uh, metallurgy department look into it there,

they assured us that this was a manufactured material,

there is no natural phenomena that could create it

and that it is centered like a ceramic material,

just like the materials

that are the reentry tiles on the Space Shuttle.

Uh, so, what on earth is that, and why is it

300 feet inside the mesa here at Skinwalker Ranch?

-Awesome. -ERIK: And when you put that

in the context of things we've been told about the mesa

and things flying into it,

I mean, all of that together tells a fascinating story.

Well, the mesa continues to astound.

I don't know if you've mentally allowed yourself

the possibility of pulling a craft out of the mesa, but...

we can't wait to see what happens next.

Everything you've done scientifically might be pointing

to exactly where this phenomena is coming from,

and I want to talk about that next.

All right.

Is there an explanation for all the high strangeness

on Skinwalker Ranch or maybe

a virtual doorway to the answers?

Erik Bard, Dr. Travis Taylor.

You're talking about the idea of all of this

originating from an elsewhere

or a point of origin that is, if you will,

outside of our space.

That may be something's coming through as we've been told,

through portals, wormholes, that kind of thing.

Travis and I share a fascination with the Indigenous record

about things affecting space and time,

potentially in the same ways that we're observing today

with our exquisitely sensitive instruments.

In fact, we've found evidence

that could possibly support the idea.

I'm not saying we have the-the smoking gun yet,

but we actually have lidar data that vanished.

And the way a lidar works, it's a laser with a spinning mirror,

so it's sending laser beams out all over in a hemisphere.

And when the lidar beam went to a certain spot

here on the ranch near the triangle,

the data vanished,

like it went somewhere else, through a doorway

-and it didn't come back. -Wow.

Uh, so, so, is this just

missing data or are-- do we find the data somewhere else?

-Where it wouldn't normally be expected to be found... -ROYSTON: The only data we see

in this area, you know, it's pretty dense.

So you go from, like, really dense scan to nothing.

Wow.

It's like it absorbed

the lidar lasers.

TRAVIS: Can you zoom way out?

Whoa.

-ERIK: Look at that. -That's interesting.

ERIK: Yeah.

What is that red circle?

It's a, it's a shadow of something.

What did-- what are we looking at?

-THOMAS: Black hole? (chuckles) -Could be--

-well, that could be... -I mean...

...a shadow of a wormhole.

We have that data repeated now multiple times.

And we have even more significant data

that we found this summer that...

w-we can't explain, 'cause here's the problem.

Our current understanding of physics

is that if there were a traversable wormhole,

some sort of portal or doorway,

it would've ripped us apart, being that close to it.

It would've destroyed a big chunk of the planet,

-if not the whole planet. -Right.

So, we need to understand physics better.

If this truly is some sort of magic portal or doorway,

it's gonna be within the laws of physics.

Mm. How about when GPS data, for example,

goes wonky when it shows you being...

underground, wildly off what you think it would be?

What-- could that fit into this theory?

-Absolutely. -Absolutely does.

You know, GPS is really quite straightforward.

We've got these constellations

of satellites in middle Earth orbit

broadcasting signals down to receivers at our level.

-Right. -And if we plant receivers

at fixed locations

on the property and we see them undergoing

some kind of phantom movement,

it invites speculation as to what could be

in that space between the satellites and the ground

that is warping space and time.

Well, the one thing I would add to it

is that we continue to make measurements

that suggest there's something real

to these ancient legends and myths.

And we are going to continue to make measurements,

and we don't know right now if this is a portal,

is it going to somewhere else or some when else?

Mm. (chuckles)

Wow. Amazing.

I just want to thank you guys, and thank you on behalf of fans,

'cause I hear from people that say, "I've learned so much

about science," which is very exciting.

And I think you two

are a credit to the scientific community

because of your open-mindedness to this topic.

-Thank you. -Thank you.

-Keep going. -We will.

So, are we getting closer to the answers on Skinwalker Ranch?

Only time will tell.

Stay tuned as this team continues

to poke that hornet's nest with incredible operations.

Thank you so much for watching,

and as always, have a great night.

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS