Brandon Fugal Reveals Subsurface Anomalies and New Evidence at Skinwalker Ranch, Describes “UFO Beneath the Mesa”

Brandon Fugal, the Utah real estate developer who purchased Skinwalker Ranch in 2016 and has since overseen one of the most ambitious private paranormal research programs in American history, is speaking with unusual candor about what his team believes lies beneath the property’s iconic mesa. In a wide-ranging conversation with journalist and filmmaker Jesse Michels, Fugal disclosed findings from ground-penetrating surveys and geophysical analysis that he says point to anomalous subsurface structures — including what he describes, carefully but unmistakably, as evidence consistent with a craft or artificial object buried beneath the ranch’s most active terrain.

Fugal has long maintained a posture of measured credibility, distinguishing himself from more sensationalist voices in the UAP community by insisting on scientific methodology and peer-reviewed engagement. That discipline makes his latest statements all the more striking. Speaking to Michels, he indicated that subsurface imaging has revealed unexplained voids and material densities beneath the mesa that do not conform to natural geological formations — findings that have been reviewed by credentialed scientists, including those with backgrounds in intelligence and defense-adjacent research programs.

Skinwalker Ranch, a 512-acre property in Utah’s Uintah Basin, has accumulated one of the most densely documented histories of anomalous activity of any location on Earth. The Sherman family, who owned the ranch through much of the 1990s, reported cattle mutilations, poltergeist phenomena, unidentified aerial objects, and encounters with entities that defied conventional explanation. Their accounts attracted the attention of aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, who purchased the property in 1996 and funded the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, to conduct systematic investigations. That research effort later fed into the Pentagon’s own Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, known as AAWSAP, through which the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly explored the ranch’s phenomena as part of a broader study of UAP-associated effects on human biology and consciousness.

Fugal acquired the ranch from Bigelow in 2016, initially keeping his ownership secret — a detail he addressed directly in the Michels conversation, explaining that the decision was driven by concerns about professional credibility in his primary business career. When he went public and partnered with the History Channel for the ongoing series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, some critics accused him of monetizing mystery rather than solving it. Fugal’s response to those accusations, delivered in this interview with notable firmness, centers on transparency: he argues that the television platform has enabled a level of documented, witnessed, and timestamped evidence collection that no purely private effort could have produced at equivalent scale.

Among the most significant elements of his disclosure is the discussion of what researchers have termed the “hitchhiker effect” — a well-documented phenomenon in which anomalous activity appears to follow investigators home after time spent on the property. Fugal described multiple cases among his own team members, including serious physical and psychological episodes that he connects to prolonged exposure on the ranch. The case of ranch superintendent Thomas Winterton, who sustained a dramatic and medically documented injury during filming, is among the most cited examples. Fugal framed these incidents not as entertainment fodder but as data points in a pattern that AAWSAP researchers, including those who contributed to the DIA program, had already identified and studied with clinical seriousness.

The conversation also explored the ranch’s relationship to a broader geographic and possibly historical pattern. Fugal referenced what he calls an “interstellar highway” hypothesis — the idea that Skinwalker Ranch is not an isolated anomaly but one node in a global network of high-strangeness locations, including Bradshaw Ranch in Arizona and other sites that share overlapping characteristics: intense electromagnetic disturbances, UAP sightings, effects on human cognition and biology, and deep historical roots in Indigenous oral tradition. The Navajo and Ute peoples have long regarded the Uintah Basin as cursed or spiritually dangerous ground, and Fugal suggested this generational knowledge deserves serious scientific consideration rather than folkloric dismissal.

The subsurface findings are perhaps the most concrete development. Fugal described a 1964 nickel recovered from an anomalous context on the property, GPS failures and time distortion events logged by multiple witnesses, and the results of physicist Erik Bard’s magnet experiments — all of which, he argues, form a coherent if deeply strange evidential picture. The suggestion that a structured object may be embedded beneath the mesa elevates the ranch from a site of recurring phenomena to something potentially more material and recoverable. Whether that claim can survive rigorous independent verification remains the central scientific question — and it is one that Fugal says he actively wants answered, not suppressed.

The involvement of figures such as Hal Puthoff, Kit Green, and Travis Taylor — all of whom carry significant credentials in physics, intelligence medicine, and aerospace science respectively — lends a degree of institutional weight to the ongoing investigation that is difficult to entirely dismiss. Taylor’s transformation from skeptic to convinced investigator, which Fugal discussed at length, mirrors the trajectory described by several scientists who have engaged seriously with the ranch over the decades. The pattern is consistent: initial disbelief, prolonged exposure to phenomena that resist conventional explanation, and a gradual, reluctant reassessment of foundational assumptions about the nature of reality.

As official UAP disclosure continues its uneven and contested progress through Washington — from the Schumer Amendment’s ambitious provisions to Sean Kirkpatrick’s public denials — Skinwalker Ranch remains the most visible private-sector pressure point on a subject that the United States government has spent decades officially ignoring and unofficially funding. Fugal’s willingness to speak plainly about buried anomalies, consciousness effects, and potential non-human technology represents a calculated escalation. Whether it moves the needle scientifically or politically may depend entirely on what the ground beneath that mesa ultimately yields.

If a structured, artificial object truly lies beneath the Skin