Skinwalker Ranch Deaths and the Hitchhiker Effect

The Skinwalker Ranch is a property of approximately 512 acres (207 ha), located southeast of Ballard, Utah, that is reputed to be the site of strange (Fortean) and UFO/UAP-related activities. Its name is taken from the lore and sightings of skinwalkers of Ute and Diné legend.

Various parts of documentaries and programs have chronicled the mysteries of the site. As of 2020, a television series, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, on History channel, has featured "a team of scientists and experts" that uses science and technology such as lasers, ground-penetrating radar, and drone thermography, as well as lots of rockets. It have shown the cast members searching the property, and attempting to explain claims of UFO/UAP sightings, animal deaths, and unusual events. By April 2024, five seasons of multiple episodes have been filmed and planned for broadcast.

Chief Deputy Brian Fletcher

In March 2024, breaking news was released by the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office. They reported the recovery of a deceased individual around February 29, 2024, near the Skinwalker Ranch.

Chief Deputy Brian Fletcher confirmed the finding, stating, “Our agency did locate a deceased individual south of Fort Duchesne; however, the circumstances are not suspicious, and no further information will be released out of respect for the family,” in an email to Expanding Frontiers Research on March 4, 2024.

Expanding Frontiers Research received information indicating that the body may have been found in the vicinity of 4500 East and 2800 South after an abandoned motorcycle was reported to the sheriff’s office several months earlier. The motorcycle’s discovery was reported on November 24, 2023.

According to an inside informant familiar with the incident, the deceased individual might have been in the area due to an interest in the purported paranormal phenomena linked to Skinwalker Ranch. When asked about this possibility, Chief Deputy Fletcher declined to provide further details.

Members of the investigative teams of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch have told of the "Hitchhiker Effect" involving how the ranch impacts visitors and scientists who visit and work there. Dizzy spells, headaches, and hospital visits have resulted from the apparent electromagnetic side effects from the ranch.

Former Skinwalker Ranch owner Robert Bigelow’s wife Diane, 72, died on February 19, 2020, of myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia.

“The reason Bigelow got rid of the place was he was convinced that it killed his wife.” ~ Travis Taylor, said, re: the “hitchhiker effect” at Skinwalker Ranch. 

The number of “mysterious deaths” associated with the Skinwalker Ranch seems nil. Or the tip of the iceberg is merely being demonstrated, as shown via Diane Bigelow. And Kevin Burns, 65, executive producer of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, who died of a cardiac arrest, September 27, 2020.

Skinwalker Ranch,

Uintah County, Utah, U.S.

Prehistory to 1934 - Utes/Diné

1934–1994 – Kenneth and Edith Myers

1994–1996 – Terry and Gwen Sherman

1996–2016 – Robert Bigelow

2016–Present – Brandon Fugal

Current owner, Brandon Fugal

The danger of fans of the program being attracted to the physical location of the Skinwalker Ranch then ending in death has been seen due to other reality programming.

Savanna Bright, 15, died after being hit by a Norfolk Southern train on Sunday night, May 26, 2019, near Pope Lick Park, on the train tracks near the Pope Lick trestle, while searching for the Pope Lick Goat Man. Louisville, Kentucky media has confirmed that two adolescent females on the Pope Lick Train Trestle were stuck by a train near Pope Lick Road, and Taylorsville Road, in Louisville, Kentucky.

The area is known to be “notoriously dangerous” as it is alleged to be the home of the Pope Lick Monster. The creature is said to be part human and part goat.

The Pope Lick Monster is the subject of an urban legend and popularized in YouTube videos, as well as a 1988 film, The Legend of the Pope Lick Monster (director Ron Schildknecht); and a 2013 episode of Destination America’s Monsters and Mysteries in America (in “Ozarks”). There is also a haunted attraction themed after the tales surrounding the Pope Lick monster called the Legend at Pope Lick located at Pope Lick Park in the Parklands of Floyds Fork.

In 2016, Roquel Bain and her boyfriend Dave Knee decided to go to a "paranormal event" at the nearby Waverly Hills Sanatorium, a well-known haunted location often highlighted on “ghost hunter”-type reality programming. But with some time to fill, the couple decided to explore the Pope Lick Trestle and actively see if they could see the Pope Lick Monster. Bain met her tragic fate there.

The "Hitchhiker Effect" can be said to have had some grave links to this location as well as it seems to have to the Skinwalker Ranch.

Kurt Cobain Killed Himself 28 Years Ago

Although Kurt Cobain's body was found on the 8th day of April 1994, official records indicate he took his life on the 5th of April 1994. (See here.)

Excessive coverage of grunge suicides and deaths has occurred on this blog: here, here, and here. I have even examined the overlap between grunge, pugs, and suicides here.

Now, for 2022, the year has begun with two grunge deaths.

Taylor Hawkins and Chris Cornell

Taylor Hawkins, 50, drummer of the Foo Fighters, was born February 17, 1972. He was found dead in his hotel room while on tour, on March 25, 2022. 

Before joining the Foo Fighters in 1997, he was the touring drummer for Sass Jordan and for Alanis Morissette, as well as the drummer in the progressive experimental band Sylvia. He was a big fan of Chris Cornell.

On March 25, 2022, emergency services were called to the Casa Medina hotel in Bogotá, Colombia, where Hawkins was suffering from chest pain in his hotel room. Health personnel arrived and found Hawkins unresponsive; they performed CPR, but he was declared dead at the scene, at the age of 50. No cause of death was given.

The following day, Colombian authorities announced that a preliminary urine toxicology test indicated that Hawkins had ten substances in his system at the time of his death, including opioids, benzodiazepines, tricyclic antidepressants, and THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis.

On April 3, 2022, the 64th Grammy Awards paid tribute to Hawkins with a brief montage of blended interviews and backstage home videos with live footage, ending in an audience singalong of the Foo Fighters' 1998 single "My Hero". Billie Eilish also wore a t-shirt with a picture of Hawkins while she performed her song "Happier Than Ever" as a tribute to him.

Mark Lanegan and Kurt Cobain

Grunge legend Mark Lanegan, 57, Screaming Trees singer/writer, was born November 25, 1964, in Ellensburg, Washington State, and died February 22, 2022, in Killarney, Ireland. 

Lanegan saw Kurt Cobain a few hours before his death. Lanegan was one of the last people to see Cobain alive and regretted that he did not do more to help his friend.  He was also a buddy of the late Anthony Bourdain.

Others have passed away down through the years. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was born on June 27, 1958. On March 25, 1996, Pierce, a founding member of The Gun Club, 37, was found unconscious at his father's home in Salt Lake City, Utah. He remained in a coma until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 31, 1996, at the University of Utah Hospital.

In March 2012, Nick Cave gave an interview to Gun Club biographer Gene Temesy, researching for a book on the history of the Gun Club, which was published on the Australian web-based magazine Mess and Noise, noting Pierce's obsessions with the Vietnam War, dinosaurs, and Japanese horror movies. He went on: "with Jeffrey, you pretty much entered his world when you saw him. His obsessions crawled all over him. But in Jeffrey's world, sometimes it was very inspiring and illuminating and other times it was painful and depressing. But Jeffrey did make efforts to stay on top of all that sort of stuff. But I think it was very difficult for him ... Jeffrey very often didn’t make sense. That was part of his charm. Jeffrey was full of digressions. I think that was very much part of his character. Jeffrey digressed a lot. One minute he'd be talking about the fall of Saigon and the next minute he’d be talking about the size of a dinosaur's brain."

June 24, Brian Keith, Hollywoodland, and Charles Fort

While researching the individual stories of those who have died on past June 24ths, I ran across the following series of syncs that gave me a Fortean surprise.

PART ONE

Brian Keith played the role of Mullibok in the 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Episode 1:15 episode, "Progress," May 9, 1993,

On June 24, 1997 (exactly 50 years after the birth of the Age of Flying Saucers), Brian Keith, American actor (Family Affair, Loneliest Runner, The Parent Trap), died by suicide at 75.

From 1927 to 1929, Keith's stepmother was Peg Entwistle, a well-known Broadway actress who leapt to her death by jumping from the "H" of the famous Hollywood(land) Sign on September 16, 1932, at 24. The Hollywoodland Sign (installed in 1923), and the restored Hollywood Sign, is located on the southern side of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, north of the Mulholland Highway, and to the south of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) cemetery.

Entwistle appeared in only one film, Thirteen Women, which was released posthumously. Entwistle had won her first and only credited film role with Radio Pictures (later RKO).  Entwistle played a small supporting role as Hazel Cousins. It premiered on October 14, 1932, a month after her death, at the Roxy Theatre in New York City, and was released in Los Angeles on November 11, 1932, to neither critical nor commercial success. By the time it was re-released in 1935, 14 minutes had been cut from the film's original 73 minute running length. In 2008, Variety magazine cited Thirteen Women as one of the earliest "female ensemble" films.

Thirteen Women also starred Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne in the pre-Hays code, high-budget thriller produced by David O. Selznick and drawn from the novel by Tiffany Thayer. Tiffany Thayer? Whoa.

Born in Freeport, Illinois, Tiffany Thayer (picture above right with Cary Grant) quit school at age 15 and worked as an actor, reporter, and used-book clerk in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. When he was 16, he toured as the teenaged hero in the Civil War drama The Coward. Thayer first contacted American author Charles Fort in 1924. In 1926, Thayer moved to New York City to act, but soon spent more time writing.

In 1931 Thayer co-founded the Fortean Society in New York City to promote Fort's ideas. Primarily based in New York City, the Society was headed by first president Theodore Dreiser, an old friend of Fort who had helped to get his work published. 

Early members of the original Society in NYC included such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, and H. L. Mencken. Other members included Vincent Gaddis, Ivan T. Sanderson, A. Merritt, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. 

The first 6 issues of Doubt, the Fortean Society's newsletter, were each edited by a different member, starting with Dreiser. Thayer thereafter took over editorship of subsequent issues. Thayer began to assert extreme control over the society, largely filling the newsletter with articles written by himself. He also excommunicated the entire San Francisco chapter (including Miriam Allen deFord who never considered herself a nonmember, in spite of Thayer's action), reportedly their largest and most active, after disagreements over the society's direction, and forbidding them to use the name Fortean. 

During World War II, Thayer used every issue of Doubt to espouse his politics. In contrast to the spirit of Charles Fort, he dismissed not only flying saucers as nonsense but also the atomic bomb as a hoax by the US government.

Thayer also wrote several novels, including the bestseller Thirteen Women which was filmed in 1932 and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Many of his novels contained elements of science fiction or fantasy, including Dr. Arnoldi about a world where no-one can die.

On June 24, 1997, Brian Keith, who lived in Hawaii for a few years beginning in 1970, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his home in Malibu, California, two months after his daughter Daisy died by suicide.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA)

1-800-273-8255

+++

PART TWO

June 24th Deaths

Kenneth Arnold began the "Age of Flying Saucers" on June 24, 1947. The list of strange ufo-aligned deaths starts with that date of note.

Here is a quick overview of the notable ufo-related deaths on or near June 24:

June 24 or 23, 1964, Frank Scully, 72, author of one of the first crashed-saucer books, Behind the Flying Saucers (1950), dies.

June 24, 1967, two British UFO contactees, Arthur Bryant, a contactee, and Richard Church, an author and chairman of CIGIUFO, die.

June 23, 1967, Frank Edwards, 55, popular UFO author and radio personality in the 1950s, dies a few hours before Arthur Bryant. James Moseley stunned the delegates assembled for the 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists at New York City’s Hotel Commodore on June 24th, with the news of the sudden death of Frank Edwards.

June 24, 1969, Willy Ley, 62, a rocket scientist and Fortean author, dies. Willy Ley was one of the first respected modern scientist to attempt to answer the question of what is a flying saucer. In 1952, he was one of the first, if not the first person, to say that 85% of UFO sightings are misidentified craft, leaving the other 15% open to notions of "interplanetary travel," that he began writing about in 1926.

New Addition:

How did flying saucers' occupants and creatures become enculturated with 1950s' Americans? Drive-in theater movies employed make-up artist Bud Westmore's reinforcing imagery of ufo aliens and giant monsters as the template for society's view of how these things might appear. The Age of Flying Saucers had dawned. No wonder Westmore died on the date of June 24.

June 24, 1973, Bud Westmore, 55, dies of a heart attack. 

Bud was a renowned Hollywood make-up artist of the famed Westmore family, and has been credited with doing make-up for 592 films, including It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and scores of mainstream films, like Spartacus (1960).

The Westmore family has dominated make-up departments in Hollywood since Bud's father George created the business in 1917. They have kept visible in recent years due to McKenzie Westmore, who since 2011, has served as the host of the Syfy original series Face Off, a reality competition featuring makeup artists. Bud was the uncle to Michael Westmore, famed for his Star Trek work and the father of McKenzie.

June 24, 1978, Robert Charroux, 69, the best-known pen-name of Robert Joseph Grugeau dies. Charroux was a French author known for his ancient astronaut theories and writings on other Fortean subjects, in such books as Masters Of The World: Groundbreaking New Revelations About The Ancient Astronauts (1979).

June 24, 1987, Jackie Gleason, 71, the actor, who was an early advocate of flying saucer research, dies. Gleason's known interest in UFOs allegedly prompted President Richard Nixon to share some information with him and to disclose some UFO data publicly.

June 24, 1997, Brian Keith (see above), who starred in Meteor (1979; with Sean Connery and Natalie Wood), dies by suicide. 

June 24, 2006, Lyle Stuart, 83, the renegade publisher who published anomalist writer Frank Edwards’ Fortean book, in 1959, Stranger than Science, a paperbook full of information on ufology and other unexplained accounts, dies.

June 24, 2013, James Martin, 79, a former rocket scientist, computer scientist, and author of After the Internet: Alien Intelligence (2000), is found floating dead in the waters off Agar's Island. Dr. Martin bought Agar’s Island in 1977 and made his home in Bermuda. The multi-millionaire kept a relatively low profile in Bermuda.

June 24, 2013, Alan Myers, 58, the most prominent drummer (1976-1987) of the band Devo, dies of stomach cancer in Los Angeles. Devo played punk, art rock, post-punk and new wave music, and performed stage shows that mingled kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humor, and mordantly satirical social commentary. Devo recorded at their own self-named "UFO Studios." More.

June 24, 2015, Mario Biaggi, 97, dies. The former Bronx congressman was involved in the "UFO disclosure" movement, and was once pictured on the cover of Ideal's UFO Magazine, December 1978, Number 4. Within the periodical, there appears the article, "Interview: Mario Biaggi 'There Is A UFO Cover-Up By The Government.'" On the cover, an image of Biaggi is shown with President Jimmy Carter. More.

June 24, 2018, Roswell, X-Files, and The Shining television guest star Stanley Anderson dies.

June 24, 2018, the Voice of New York radio during the Great Northeast Blackout (caused by UFOs?), Dan Ingram dies.

See further information on Anderson, Ingram, and others who died in 2018, here.

June 24, 2019, news reporter Sean Dunleavy, dies. The journalist was a witness to and a participant in the famed Linda Cortile UFO abduction case of November 30, 1989, Manhattan, New York. Read more.

June 24, 2020. ???