Brandon Fugal's conviction

Brandon Fugal's conviction

Person	Brandon Fugal, owner of Skinwalker Ranch; chairman of Colliers International in Utah
Date	October 2022 (per the testimony)
Venue	The Basement Office, New York Post video series
Claim	UAP are real, and so is reverse-engineering of non-human technology
Influences named	Gen. Wesley Clark, Hal Puthoff, Kit Green
Counterpoint	AARO (2024): no verifiable evidence of reverse-engineering programs
Topics	Propulsion & physics (topic)
People	Brandon Fugal, Robert Bigelow, Wesley Clark, Harold Puthoff, Christopher "Kit" Green
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 212
Year	2022 in UFO history
Timeline	2022 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	16

Brandon Fugal, the Utah businessman who owns Skinwalker Ranch, has said that conversations with senior figures convinced him that UAP are real and that efforts to reverse-engineer non-human technology are real.^[1][2] The testimony this article draws on dates the remarks to October 2022, in a video interview with the New York Post's The Basement Office series. It names retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the physicist Hal Puthoff and the former CIA physician Kit Green among those who helped convince him.^[1] None of the claims about reverse engineering has been confirmed. In 2024 the Pentagon's UFO office said it had found no verifiable evidence that such programs exist.^[10][11]

Fugal

Fugal is chairman of the Utah office of the real-estate firm Colliers International, and one of the most prominent developers in the Intermountain West.^[2][4] He says he has been fascinated since childhood by the question of whether humanity is alone.^[2][4] In 2016 his company, Adamantium Real Estate LLC, bought the 512-acre Skinwalker Ranch near Ballard, in Utah's Uintah Basin, from the aerospace businessman Robert Bigelow, reportedly for about $500,000.^[2][3] After the sale, roads to the ranch were blocked and the perimeter was fenced with barbed wire and watched by cameras.^[3] Adamantium registered "Skinwalker Ranch" as a trademark for entertainment and media in 2020, and for mugs, shirts and hats in 2022.^[3] Fugal revealed his ownership in March 2020.^[3]

He describes himself as having bought the ranch as an "open-minded skeptic" who had never seen a UFO or an orb. He wanted to bring "a new level of scientific rigor" to what he calls the most scientifically studied paranormal hotspot on the planet.^[2] Since March 2020 he has appeared in the History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which follows a team of investigators led by the aerospace engineer Travis Taylor and had reached its seventh season by 2026.^[2][14] In 2022 he announced a partnership with the Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi, Utah, to study the ranch's environment and history.^[3]

His remarks

In the Basement Office interview, part of a series on Skinwalker Ranch made by the Post journalist Steven Greenstreet, Fugal discussed his experiences at the ranch, his religious background and his views on UFOs.^[1][9] According to the testimony, he said that Clark, Puthoff and Green had helped convince him that the phenomenon was real and that reverse engineering of recovered technology was real.^[1]

Fugal has said similar things in other interviews:^[2][4]

• In 2021 he told We Are The Mighty that the evidence suggested "we are not alone in the universe, or at least that our reality is not what it seems".
• He said drone surveys had ended in "the total destruction of very expensive equipment", with no conventional explanation.
• He described the ranch as having the highest concentration of everything from UFO activity to electromagnetic anomalies and "acute medical episodes".
• He said anyone entering must sign a liability waiver.
• In 2022 he told the Strange Paradigms podcast that several television crew members had refused to return to the ranch, and that some surprising evidence had not made it into the show.

He has also recounted an incident in which he believes an intelligence left a message on a computer screen.^[1]

The people named

• Wesley Clark is a retired U.S. Army general. He was NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1997 to 2000, commanding the alliance during the Kosovo War, and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.^[15] The testimony does not say what he told Fugal.^[1]
• Hal Puthoff is an electrical engineer who in the 1970s turned to promoting remote viewing, work that was widely criticized. He later published theories on gravity and zero-point energy, and has been active in ufology since the 1990s.^[16] He was a consultant and contractor to Bigelow's company during the Pentagon's AAWSAP program, which studied the ranch.^[9]
• Christopher "Kit" Green is a medical doctor and longtime CIA employee and intelligence contractor, with a particular interest in military medicine.^[5] He is not to be confused with the English performer of the same name.^[12] The Stanford pathologist Garry Nolan has said Green was in charge of studying about 100 defense, intelligence and aerospace personnel with unusual injuries. A subset of them reported UAP encounters, and about a quarter died. Nolan said one case "happened on the Skinwalker Ranch", but attributed that injury to a state actor's electromagnetic weapon, not to UAP.^[13] Nolan has also described CIA personnel whose brain scans looked "fried".^[6][7]

The ranch

Skinwalker Ranch, formerly the Sherman Ranch, was publicized in 1996 through articles in the Deseret News and by the journalist George Knapp, describing a family's frightening experiences there.^[3] That year Robert Bigelow bought it for $200,000. His National Institute for Discovery Science monitored it for years, but its investigators admitted "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication".^[3] The 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker, by Colm Kelleher and Knapp, drew the Defense Intelligence Agency official James Lacatski to visit. That visit led Senator Harry Reid to secure $22 million for the Pentagon's AAWSAP program, which Bigelow's company won as the sole bidder.^[3][9]

Lacatski, Kelleher and Knapp told that story in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021). Its Defense Department prepublication review took about 14 months and ended on 11 May 2021 with the verdict "cleared as amended", with names of serving personnel changed.^[8] The book describes a wide range of phenomena at the ranch:^[9]

• Lacatski's sighting of a yellowish tubular "device" hovering in a kitchen
• hostile blue orbs
• poltergeist effects that witnesses said followed them home

Criticism and official findings

The skeptic Robert Sheaffer has argued that the phenomena are "almost certainly illusory". He points out that years of monitoring found no proof, and that the family who owned the ranch for 60 years before the Shermans said nothing supernatural ever happened there. In his view the simplest explanation is that the Shermans invented the story before selling to "the gullible Bigelow".^[3][9] In 2023 the ufologist Barry Greenwood criticized AAWSAP for producing no documentary evidence from the ranch, and called Skinwalker "always in the business of selling belief and hope".^[3]

In March 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released Volume I of its historical review. It said it had found no verifiable evidence that the government or private companies have access to, or are reverse-engineering, extraterrestrial technology.^[10][11] It judged that the alleged hidden programs named by interviewees either do not exist, are misidentified ordinary national-security programs, or trace to disestablished programs. It attributed many claims to "circular reporting" among a group of believers.^[10][11] Critics of the report, such as the former defense official Christopher Mellon, replied that many witnesses had refused to speak to AARO.^[10] None of the claims about reverse engineering made by the people Fugal names has been publicly confirmed.^[3][10]

People and topics

• Skinwalker Ranch — A Utah ranch known for reports of strange events, studied by NIDS and AAWSAP.
• Brandon Fugal — Owner of Skinwalker Ranch.
• Robert Bigelow — Businessman who founded NIDS and Bigelow Aerospace and ran the AAWSAP contract.
• Wesley Clark — Retired general and 2004 presidential candidate who spoke about faster-than-light travel.
• Harold Puthoff — Physicist who co-founded the SRI remote-viewing research and later worked on AAWSAP and To The Stars Academy.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Christopher "Kit" Green — CIA physician and analyst who became a long-time contact of Jacques Vallée and studied UAP-related injuries.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• NIDS — Robert Bigelow's research institute (1995–2004) that studied UFOs and other anomalies.
• AAWSAP — The Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP research program of 2008–2010, carried out by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies.

On the Timeline

• Hughes Aircraft painting (20 October 2022) — Cameron shares photos of a painting inside the old Hughes Aircraft building.
• FY2023 NDAA UAP provisions (6 December 2022) — The UAP sections of the 2023 defense bill are published with late changes.

See every 2022 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Skinwalker Ranch”, “Kit Green”, “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch”, “Wesley Clark”, “Harold E. Puthoff”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.