Skinwalker ranch

In the first and second episode there is much talk about glowing ridges and microwave radiation.  One would think that this ranch is is the wop wop which it is but only 4. 5 km south from the small settlement of Fort Duchesne.  Mobile phones work by transmitting and receiving radio frequency microwave radiation.



Duchesne (46 km west of the ranch and Fort Duchesne) has a registered mobile tower site 2.5 km south of the airport (link).  

9 km North West of the ranch is the town of Roosevelt, a modern looking town with a pop of just over 7 thousand; no doubt the locals will have resplendent internet and mobile coverage.   

4km north of the ranch is SH 191 running from East to West.  I really think the lights in the sky and the microwave radiation can be clearly accounted for.  

These "scientists" use duct tape and emf directional finders with tin cans. One would think they would use a "beam antenna". One the basis of this crude and pathetic gear they make profound conclusions that the source of the 9 GHz frequency is some mile high.

Of course 9 GHz is satellite communication. I think the source is much higher than 1 mile . The "star link" Satellites would be a good starting point.

The idiots use a weather balloon filled too much which would have exploded a few hundred metres above the launch. They of course attribute this to the "paranormal"; no ever told them that these balloons expand with altitude.

Very interesting story, Scott. I, too, am from Mormon stock with my grandparents being married in the Temple at Salt Lake City. My great grandfather was one of the contingent of Mormons who moved to Mexico after polygamy was outlawed. One of my grand uncles became rather well known in the Mexican revolution and his brothers were razzing him about it. They were giving him the hoorah about becoming as famous as their neighbor, Billy the Kid. According to family history, Billy the Kid (William Bonney) wasn't killed by Pat Garret but moved to Mexico and became a cattle rancher.

At any rate, I'm particularly fond of Tony Hillerman's books which mention skin walkers quite often. A rather fascinating concept. Also the Navajo concept of "hozrah" and their curing ceremonies. Quite different from our western sensibilities. On one of my trucking treks through that part of the country I had stopped for a rest break at a convenience store and found myself looking at the name plates of some Navajo police to see if any were named "Jim Chee" or any other fictional characters from Hillerman's books. Had to have a stern little conversation with myself about confusing fiction with reality.

Amen to that.

I just finished the second episode and would agree that this is purely entertainment.

For one thing, regarding the downwind atomic bomb fallout from the 1950s, that is complete nonsense.

Their techniques for examining RF fields are stupid too, but I will get into that more after I have watched a few more episodes.

And as far as the Geiger counters ─ um, this is the Utah-Colorado Plateau, some of the richest areas in the world for URANIUM deposits. You are going to have a blast rock-hounding with a Geiger counter is this area. You will find all kinds of interesting "hot" things: thorium, uranium, radon gas in caves and mines, etc. In the TV show, running around with handheld radiation detectors like they are the Ghost Busters is really dumb.

I still have a black-colored rock which is very high-quality thorium ore ─ and when I was a kid in school I loved to show it off in class to my chemistry and physics teachers from Junior High School to College, and they would always have the same reaction: bored disbelief and then mortal terror, LOL, as the Geiger counter exploded. My pet rock is very "hot" but more or less safe. Thorium is one of the oldest radioactive materials, with a half-life of 14 billion years ─ about as long since the Big Bang or the age of the Universe. Thorium has been with us for a very long time, and it will still be here long after we are gone.

Just after I graduated from High School in 1979, we would go out into the desert around Crescent Junction and Green River ─ my cousin, my Dad and Uncle, and a mining engineer and his Dad ─ and we would dig little pilot holes and take samples for mineral assays. In this case they were looking for low-grade gold because there was this new assay method called XRF or X-Ray Fluorescence that the Mining Engineer friend was evaluating.

My late Grandfather did his own chemical assays in his own homebrew laboratory and was convinced just before he died in 1974 that low-grade gold ores existed there but were very hard to detect with a standard fire-assay. So years later we were testing his hypothesis with new methods and an expert friend. My Grandfather's hypothesis proved to be true ─ but when the numbers were more clear, we found that without a massive strip-mining operation it didn't seem profitable to actually mine this, so the idea was eventually dropped.

In any case, we did not see anything spooky on the desert that year other than when digging one pilot hole there was a couple of scorpions that were burrowed at least a foot into the Mancos Shale. It looked like they had been hibernating there for a very long time, as the ground was packed hard and undisturbed. This was a weird surprise.

The approximate location was Crescent Junction, where U.S. 191 meets Interstate 70. That is also where the Green River Launch Complex is, and where you turn off to go to Yellow Cat Flats.

Below is one of the uranium mines at Yellow Cat. My Great-Grandparents' mined uranium near here in the 1940s and 1950s. I visited with some family in the 1980s and my Grandmother's brother, who had worked there and then gone in the Navy in WWII pointed out an old abandoned truck at Yellow Cat like the one below that they used for the mine, and he said that this was the vehicle he learned to drive with. That was over forty years earlier. I would not be surprised if this is in fact the same truck.




A contemporary of my Great-Grandfather from Moab was another Uranium prospector named Charlie Steen who, unlike my family, struck it big. Steen became a multi-millionaire and a local celebrity. But he was a big-spender and eventually lost it all. Steen had some academic training in geology so that probably gave him a huge advantage over my progenitor. They made some money in the diggings but hardly enough to make it worthwhile.



Later, I've got some amusing stories repossessing cars in the Roosevelt area with my college roommate from New Zealand, and camping with my family in the Vernal dinosaur area and hearing the strange knocking sounds on the desert.

Here is an interesting gas station and convenience store called "Jackass Joe's Twilight Zone Jerky" at Crescent Junction. I assume the UFO angle comes from the nearby Green River Launch Complex, and they are trying for an Area 51 vibe.