The Skinwalker Ranch 2013 Film and the Real Utah Ranch

What Is Skinwalker Ranch 2013?

When people talk about Skinwalker Ranch 2013, they usually mean the feature film titled simply Skinwalker Ranch, released that year. It is fiction. It is loosely based on the folklore that had built up around a real property near Ballard, Utah, rather than a record of any documented event.

That single fact matters more than any plot detail. A story set on a real, named place invites viewers to read it as a dramatization of things that actually happened there. The Skinwalker Ranch 2013 film is not a documentary, and its characters and events are invented. What it borrows is a name, a setting and a body of rumor that had circulated for nearly two decades by the time it was made.

Why the film arrived when it did

By 2013 the ranch was no longer an obscure local tale. Claims about the property first appeared in 1996 in the Salt Lake City Deseret News, and later in a series of articles by investigative journalist George Knapp in the alternative weekly Las Vegas Mercury. In 2005 Knapp and co-author Colm Kelleher published a book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, which gave the story national reach. Television was taking notice too: in the same year as the film, the ranch featured in the fifth episode of the TV series Joe Rogan Questions Everything. The legend was ripe for fiction, and the film picked it up.

The Folklore the Film Borrowed From

Anyone who watches Skinwalker Ranch 2013 hoping to learn what happened on the property should start with the stories the ranch was actually known for. The area was popularly dubbed the “UFO ranch” because of an ostensible 50-year history of odd events. According to Kelleher and Knapp, they saw or investigated evidence of close to 100 incidents. The reported phenomena included:

• Cattle mutilations and disappearances. Livestock reportedly found dead with unusual injuries, or simply gone. Cattle mutilation stories had been part of the area’s folklore for decades.
• Lights and objects in the sky. Unidentified flying objects and glowing orbs. In modern terms these would be called UAP, short for unidentified anomalous (formerly aerial) phenomena.
• Large animals with red eyes. Witnesses described big creatures with piercing red eyes that were said to be unharmed when struck by bullets.
• Invisible forces. Accounts of unseen objects emitting destructive magnetic fields.
• Ground and plant traces. Strange impressions in grass and soil, sometimes compared with crop circles.
• Poltergeist-style activity. Reports of objects behaving oddly, the kind of thing usually filed under hauntings.

Fiction is free to stack elements like these into one escalating story: something takes the animals, something watches from the dark, something cannot be killed. The record is not so tidy. On the real ranch these were reports gathered over years, often from a small number of witnesses, and the investigators themselves admitted difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication.

Where Things Stood at the Real Utah Skinwalker Ranch in 2013

To understand the year of the film, it helps to see the ranch’s full timeline. The property, once known as Sherman Ranch, covers roughly 512 acres southeast of Ballard in Uintah County, bordering the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. The exact acreage is uncertain, since later records may include the approach roads. For a deeper look at the geography and why the public cannot simply drive in, see where Skinwalker Ranch is and how access works.

The ownership record

• Before 1934: Benton McMillan Locke and Ona Ora Bryant are listed as owners, though this early record is thinly sourced.
• 1934 to 1994: Kenneth and Edith Myers.
• 1994 to 1996: Terry and Gwen Sherman, whose family’s accounts launched the modern legend.
• 1996 to 2016: Robert Bigelow, founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDSci).
• 2016 onward: Adamantium Real Estate LLC, associated with real estate developer and tech investor Brandon Fugal, who announced his ownership publicly in March 2020.

So when Skinwalker Ranch 2013 appeared, the property belonged to Bigelow. He had bought it in 1996, reportedly after being convinced by the Sherman family’s stories of mutilations, strange lights and marks in the ground. The price is usually given as $200,000, although skeptic James Randi cited a purported $230,000, so accounts differ slightly.

The Pentagon connection

This is where the story stops being merely local. After the 2005 book came out, it was read by James Lacatski, an official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He contacted Bigelow, obtained permission to visit the ranch and had what was described as a supernatural experience there. Bigelow relayed that to his friend Harry Reid. Reid and Ted Stevens agreed the ranch deserved attention and inserted a line into the Department of Defense budget appropriating $22 million to study unidentified aerial phenomena.

In other words, a story told by one ranching family traveled all the way to a line in the defense budget. For how earlier US government UFO studies handled similar reports, the history of Project Blue Book offers useful contrast.

The Skin-Walker Legend Behind the Name

The ranch takes its name from the skin-walker, a figure that originated in Navajo (Diné) legend in the American Southwest. It belongs to a living culture, and describing it only in outline, rather than treating it as a costume for horror, is the respectful approach. The tradition existed long before any ranch, film or television series borrowed the word.

The Navajo name was attached to a property in northeastern Utah, which says something about how the modern legend was assembled: from regional fears, retellings in newspapers and books, and the pull of a memorable name. That name has since traveled a long way. Adamantium Real Estate filed a trademark application for “Skinwalker Ranch” in 2017 covering entertainment, media and recreation services, and it was registered in 2020. A further filing for cups, mugs, shirts and caps followed in 2021 and was registered in 2022.

The skin-walker is often confused with other North American figures, especially the wendigo of Algonquian-speaking peoples. Our guide to how the skin-walker and wendigo legends differ sets them side by side, and the folklore section covers how such traditions travel and change.

Ordinary and Stranger Explanations

A horror film like Skinwalker Ranch 2013 is free to show whatever it likes. The real record is far less certain, and the case for and against deserves a fair hearing.

The case for something unusual

• A wealthy, well-resourced owner thought the reports serious enough to buy the land and fund long-term monitoring.
• Retired US Army Colonel John B. Alexander, among those involved, characterized the NIDSci effort as an attempt to get hard data using a standard scientific approach, not a ghost hunt.
• A defense intelligence official reported a personal experience there, and that account helped lead to real federal funding.
• The Uintah Basin had a documented reputation for UFO reports going back to at least the 1970s, well before the Shermans arrived.

The case for ordinary explanations

• The investigators themselves admitted difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication.
• Skeptical author Robert Sheaffer argued in 2020 that the phenomena were almost certainly illusory. He noted that NIDSci found no proof after several years of monitoring, and that the previous owners, who had lived there for about 60 years, said nothing supernatural had happened there.
• Sheaffer suggested the explanation needing the fewest assumptions was that the story was invented before the sale, with many of the most extraordinary claims coming solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after Bigelow bought the land.
• In 1996 James Randi gave Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award, partly for funding the ranch purchase, in a category for the most useless study of a supernatural or paranormal claim.
• In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million program and the lack of documentary evidence from the ranch after decades of exploration, describing Skinwalker as always in the business of selling belief and hope.

Greenwood is not a debunker by trade; he writes from inside the UFO research community. When criticism comes from both skeptics and ufologists, it carries extra weight. Still, no one has documented a full explanation for each reported incident either. If you want to weigh this in more depth, our piece on whether Skinwalker Ranch is real or fake goes through the evidence claim by claim.

From the 2013 Film to The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

The 2013 movie sits in a longer line of screen appearances. Placing Skinwalker Ranch 2013 on that timeline shows how the ranch moved from local rumor to franchise.

The biggest shift came after Bigelow sold the property in 2016. Roads leading to the ranch were blocked, the perimeter was guarded with cameras and barbed wire, and warning signs went up. In 2020 History channel launched The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, known as Curse of Skinwalker Ranch in the UK, from the producers of The Curse of Oak Island. The show follows a team using lasers, ground-penetrating radar and drone thermography to probe claims of UFOs, cattle mutilations and paranormal events. In 2022 Fugal also announced a partnership with the Hutchings Museum Institute in Lehi, Utah, aimed at better understanding the ranch’s environment and historical significance.

Readers tracking the series can find season-by-season coverage in our guides to The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the wider list of Skinwalker Ranch TV shows, and the spinoff Beyond Skinwalker Ranch.

Watching Skinwalker Ranch 2013 Today: Expectations and Common Mistakes

If you plan to watch Skinwalker Ranch 2013, treat it as a horror film first and a doorway into the real story second. Where it can be streamed or rented changes over time, so a current listing is the easiest way to check.

Mistakes people make

1. Treating it as a documentary. Because the film shares its name with a real place, it is easy to read it as a dramatization of real events. It is fiction loosely based on folklore.
2. Confusing it with the History series. Skinwalker Ranch (2013) and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (2020 onward) are different productions with different aims. One is a horror film; the other presents itself as an investigation of the property.
3. Mixing up the names. Skinwalker Ranch in Utah has nothing to do with Skywalker Ranch, a similarly named but unrelated property.
4. Assuming the legend is settled. A film can end with an answer. The real case offers competing accounts, a famous book, government money and no confirmed proof.
5. Trying to visit. The ranch is private, fenced and monitored. Approaching it without permission is trespassing, and the remote terrain carries its own risks. Watch from your couch.

A worked example: reading one claim two ways

Take one of the ranch’s most famous claims: a large, red-eyed animal said to be unharmed after being shot. In a horror story, an idea like that can become a monster with no further questions asked. In the record, it is witness testimony, and a careful reader asks practical questions. Was the animal ever recovered? Was the shot confirmed to hit? Were there tracks, blood or a second witness? No published account answers those questions with physical evidence. That does not prove the witnesses wrong, but it shows how a single reported moment can grow, in retelling, into an entire mythology.

What Remains Unexplained About Skinwalker Ranch

More than a decade after Skinwalker Ranch 2013 put the legend on film, the core questions are still open. No one has published hard data showing that anything beyond ordinary causes was behind the reported incidents. Equally, no one has documented a full, incident-by-incident explanation for every account the Sherman family and later investigators gave. The most striking documented fact remains the human one: a story from a remote Utah ranch persuaded a businessman to buy it, an intelligence official to visit it, and lawmakers to fund a study partly because of it.

That gap between what people reported and what anyone could prove is exactly what filmmakers, television producers and late-night storytellers keep returning to. The ranch has become a mirror for whatever its visitors bring: hope of contact, fear of the dark, or skepticism about how belief gets sold.

For more cases like it, browse the journal’s UFO and UAP coverage and its paranormal accounts. And if you prefer your mysteries spoken aloud late at night, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s long-form conversations about the unexplained.

Questions and answers

Are there any movies about Skinwalker Ranch?

Yes. The best known is Skinwalker Ranch, a 2013 horror film loosely based on the folklore surrounding the Utah property. It is fiction, not a documentary. The ranch has also appeared in many television programs, including an episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything in 2013, the drama Project Blue Book in 2020 and History channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, which began in 2020.

Is the 2013 Skinwalker Ranch movie a true story?

No. The 2013 film is a work of fiction loosely based on folklore about the real ranch. That folklore includes claims of cattle mutilations, strange lights and animals said to survive gunshots, reported by former owners and later investigators. None of those claims has been confirmed with evidence suitable for scientific publication, and the film's characters and events are invented.

What was found under Skinwalker Ranch?

Nothing extraordinary has been documented. The History channel series uses tools such as ground-penetrating radar, lasers and drone thermography to probe the property and explain reported phenomena, but no finding from the ranch has been established in the scientific record. Critics point out that years of monitoring under Robert Bigelow's institute produced no hard proof.

Where is Skinwalker Ranch?

Skinwalker Ranch is a property of roughly 512 acres southeast of Ballard in Uintah County, in northeastern Utah. It borders the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation. The ranch is private land owned since 2016 by Adamantium Real Estate LLC, with roads blocked, cameras, barbed wire and signs warning people away, so it cannot be visited without permission.

How much do the people on Skinwalker Ranch get paid?

There are no reliable public figures for what the investigators or crew on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch are paid. Television contracts are private, and neither the network nor the ranch's owners have published pay details. Any specific numbers circulating online should be treated as speculation rather than documented fact.

Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.