Skinwalker Ranch

I am finally watching the season finale of 2; they claim to use the "scientific method", especially to support biblical conflagrations by asteroid.

Apart from conjecture and hypothesis I have yet to see one application of the "scientific method"; perhaps peer review might win them the Nobel Prize.?

I will force myself to watch ep 1 of season 3.

The first link gives all three seasons for free, no viruses. It is phoney science.

Okay, I finished watching Season 3 and it was more interesting, I suppose. I stopped trying to take any Science they were doing seriously and just watched it for the entertainment value ─ not the contrived drama, but their projects were at least more and more elaborate, large rockets, etc.

These old high-desert homesteads seem very familiar to me because my Grandmother lived just like that in the Utah desert in various places such as a cabin near the confluence of the Colorado River and the Dolores River near Moab, Utah. When I was a kid those old cabins where they lived were still there and they had cisterns to store fresh water after rains. They could fish for exotic species of fish ─ sturgeon maybe ─ in the Colorado River because there were no dams in place in those days. It was difficult to imagine living like that.

My Great-Grandfather, the one who mined the Uranium at Yellow Cat, actually made a coal-gas generator to run his truck, but I have never been able to find a picture of it. They also had a Ford Model T which they called Old Teddy. It would get buried to the axles in the clay mud when my Great-Great Grandfather would drive my Grandmother and her brothers and sisters to school on the primitive roads swearing the whole way ─ "Dad Gum the Dad Gum" ─ until they finally got there. This would have been in the late 1920s; she graduated from Moab High School in 1935 and is now buried in the old pioneer cemetery. I think the coal to run the coal-gas truck was basically free or scavenged somehow. One of the nearby counties is named "Carbon," and I assume for a reason.

At one family reunion in the 1980s, my Grandmother's elderly brother-in-law showed me how to build a fire with river gravel for fuel. It just looked like ordinary round stones from a river bed or stream. He cracked the rocks apart with a hammer and built a campfire with some twigs and then piled the rocks on and they actually burned. There is literally petroleum embedded in the rocks. The only problem with this kind of campfire was that it smelled like you were burning a pile of old tires, so I would not recommend it, LOL.

Speaking of petroleum or fossil fuels... Skinwalker Ranch is in the Uintah Basin. They have been hinting that this high-desert bowl in the Colorado Plateau may have been formed by a big primordial meteor strike. I don't know if that is the case or not.

When they were using a Skinwalker drill rig to provoke the evil spirits in Season 2, they pulled out some black gunk from the drilling that looked a little like coal. Dr. Taylor suggested that it might be Gilsonite. Well, Gilsonite played a big role on the other side of my Dad's family, which I will go into later.

It turns out that the black gunk would not burn, so it wasn't Gilsonite or any other hydrocarbon. They analyzed the stuff at a lab and it was mostly manganese dioxide, which is basically the stuff inside old dry cell batteries. There was also ample quantities of iron and silicon and other things.

Dr. Taylor said that if you took a modern jet aircraft and pulverized it, you would essentially have the same raw materials as their core sample. So that led to a bunch of speculation about some ancient flying saucer that might be buried under the Mesa that got hit by a giant meteor.

I'm not even kidding.

This is how Cargo Cult thinking works. I see the White Man with his ships and his planes and his Red Cross packages and his other "cargo" and government-issued largesse ─ and when the war is over the gravy train ends. Where da stuff? So the Chief asks himself, how do we get the magic planes to come back with more cargo?

Well, obviously we need to make bamboo idols that look like the planes and maybe perform blood rituals impressing the Gods ─ and the White man, he come back a-bringin' da cargo.

So the superstitious natives think that the "forms" are the reality, and they have no clue what "magic" it is that actually makes the things go.

Yeah, there is a big difference between a handful of sand and the latest silicon computer chip, even though the raw materials are basically the same. People talk an awful lot about technology but most of them really have no clue about how to "make the things go."

In the 1980 comedy The God's Must Be Crazy, a charming Kalahari Bushman finds a Coke bottle that landed undamaged in the sand at his feet when somebody carelessly tossed it from an airplane. Obviously it is a sign from the Gods ─ but it never really brings any luck for the natives. So the primitive man, he treks a great distance to "God's Window," in South Africa, what he thinks is the end of the Earth, to give it back to the crazy Gods ─ and he coolly tosses it off into oblivion.




Below is a map of the Uintah Basin. The Skinwalker Ranch is between Roosevelt and Fort Duchesne, and just a few miles below U.S. Highway 191.




The High Uintah Mountains are in the North-West above Vernal. Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River is to the North-East. Dinosaur National Park is in the North-East at the Colorado border. To the South are the Book Cliffs, and beyond that Interstate 70 running East and West.

There are not many paved roads through the interior of the Uintah Basin. From "Crescent Junction" with Interstate 70 near the Green River town ─ where you can buy the "UFO Jerky" ─ the U.S. Highway 191 comes up from the Price and Green River, Utah area in the South-West and goes North and East through Roosevelt and Vernal and runs by the Skinwalker Ranch.

There is also U.S. 40 from Colorado to Vernal and parts West towards Salt Lake City. And in the East, there is the "Bonanza Highway," a paved state road, plus some old railroad and narrow-gauge lines that do or formerly connected the Dragon mine in Eastern Utah that once brought Gilsonite to a refinery which was built near Fruita, Colorado in the middle part of the 20th century. The American Gilsonite Company refinery operated from the 1950s until the 1970s, I think.

My Grandfather, Dad, and Uncle were born in Fruita, Colorado, which is on the Colorado River and Interstate 70 not far from the Utah border on the West, and Grand Junction, Colorado to the South-East.

There are literally more fossil fuel deposits in the Uintah Basin than in Saudi Arabia, but for the most part it has not been economical to extract it until modern times. Currently environmentalists are a bit butt-hurt about all the fracking going on in the area now and the traffic and air pollution that this is causing. I would rather see nuclear power developed instead but that is a bit off-topic.

Gilsonite put Fruita, Colorado on the map, as I said. My Grandfather only had an 8th grade education and some background in mining and prospecting. He could do his own fire assays from scratch, for example. In the 1950s he was able to start his own contracting firm and build needed houses for the Gilsonite workers because of the refinery that was built near Fruita. He did not get rich building houses, but he made enough money to put a couple of kids through college, and my Dad and Uncle learned carpentry and how to be home electricians. They both became Aerospace and Nuclear Engineers ─ with my Dad specializing in statistics and reliability engineering and my Uncle in mathematics and computer programming.

A lot of Mexican migrant workers picked fruit and worked the farms along the Colorado River, and once a guy my Grandpa had hired was amazed because he was putting in house wiring that was live and he was not wearing rubber gloves or rubber boots or anything like that. I think he was standing on a wooden ladder.

Anyway, the Mexican touched the wire himself and was knocked on his butt. "Ay, Señor," he said, "you must really be strong." However, there was no "ancient Chinese secret" to it other than that an electrician learns how to be cognizant of not being grounded anytime he touches something that might be "hot." You also check your grounding with a small neon-bulb tester light that you keep in your pocket. As long as you took the necessary precautions, and did not get careless, home wiring was not too dangerous, even with the lines "hot."

Anyway, real Gilsonite is interesting stuff. It is kind of like a specialty black resin or lacquer, and it is used for making electrical insulation and bitumen or asphalt and various other high-quality things. You can even make gasoline and diesel fuel out of it.




Coming up next. When I was a kid we were travelling through the Uintah Basin, probably on the Old Bonanza Highway in the middle of nowhere, maybe near the photo below ─ nobody around for a hundred miles ─ and we had an encounter with the Hoodoo.

What was it?

Not an oil pump ─ not many of them around there in those days.

Alrighty then. I have been going through some of the family photos that I have, and trying to find some that I can use, but the pickings are a bit thin because I didn't get the best scans and my Photoshop program is not working all of a sudden, so I can only do the simplest of tweaks. I guess I need to reload the program but I can't seem to find the CD-ROM so I dunno.

In any case, I am putting some stuff together that I think might be interesting about Pioneer history and how it relates to my family. I am reluctant to post any pictures of myself, as the last time I did that Balmoral accused me of narcissism. This is a bit far afield from Epistemology but you can tell me whether it is interesting or not.

Finishing the above story about the strange knocking sound in the Badlands when our family was going down the Bonanza highway or thereabouts in the Uintah Basin, it was probably in the late 1970s, and we were a hundred miles away from anything like a town. We camped for the night not too far from the paved road.

As the sun goes down in the high desert, the heat almost immediately begins to wane in the dry air, and in a few minutes you are wearing a sweater. Sometimes you can see the waves of heat still shimmering as the last direct rays are breaking somewhere behind the ridge line and the sky remains iridescent.

We had a real quiet spot picked out to camp for the night and were unloading the car and setting up the cots and tent, and my Mom was getting together something hot and hearty to eat with the gasoline camp stove sputtering.

Then we noticed a strange reciprocating sound.

The sound wasn't the camp stove or the gentle hiss of the Coleman lantern that my Dad had started. In the distance you could still see the ravines and shrubs of the desert, the colors still alive but the fine details on the ground increasingly lost. There was nothing and nobody anywhere around.

How to describe the sound?

It was a slightly metallic knocking sound that shimmered in the air with a reverberation of sorts. It was impossible to say whether it was close or far away. It sounded too natural to be man-made and too unnatural to be something ordinary.

The closest analog would be a truck engine idling in the distance, and that must be quite some distance indeed, or maybe it was a pack of motorcycle engines idling while outlaw bikers drank beer and swapped scary women.

My Dad didn't know what it was ─ and I can't remember when the sound stopped exactly, if it ever did. Finally we just ignored it and there was never any sense of dread.

But just to be on the safe side, my Dad slept with his pistol underneath the pillow that night (like I always do).



Here is a painting done by my Grandmother:

I get the hum at my place, which is not like the sound of large logging trucks that traverse the nearby highway Where I am, the hum increases with a high water table, after heavy rain. This with a "kast" system with underground springs, the most likely cause. Water pops up out of the ground where I live. However, I look out the window often thinking a car is idling; nothing is there and I am in the wilderness.

This video could give an explanation.
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I think the following video gives the sound Scott described in the desert.



Thanks for sharing your grandmothers painting Scott, it is stunning. Sleeping with a piece under the pillow might be good for "Injuns" and coyotes but not so good for "skinwalkers" or "windingo".

Well, given the state of my tinnitus and hearing those Anchorage trumpets would have to be right next door before I heard them. At any rate, what I was asking was do you know of any historical reports, claims from previous centuries about the hum? Has it been going on for a long time or is it a recent phenomena?

Well, the photos seem to have turned out better than I expected them to without tweaking with Photoshop first, so I guess I will just continue. The next part does not really have anything to do with epistemology or spooky stories ─ but it might nevertheless be interesting since I said that my family were pioneers in the area.

There is so much information that I am not quite sure what to include, but I'll try to keep it interesting. A lot of the facts can be found from the family history and official Utah Pioneer websites, and a lot of times the names just come up with Mr. Google.

This is the old Moab Bridge, built in 1915 next to the boat launch which was operated by my Great-Great-Grandfather Richard "Dick" Westwood, who was the town Marshall and later the Deputy Sheriff for Grand County ─ and who as an elderly jailer was murdered by outlaws in 1929. (More about him later.) The old Moab Bridge has been preserved and is still standing. The Northbound traffic across the Colorado River for U.S. Highway 191 now goes over a newer concrete bridge next door. I don't know who the guy is with the car or who colored the photograph.






Just outside of Moab on State Road 128, which splits off of US-191 if you don't cross the river, there is a place called Grandstaff Canyon. It was a place where a Mulatto named Nïgger Bill holed up when he was not bootlegging or rustling. He eventually had to give it up. In the 1960s, the crusading First Lady, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson decided that National Parks and Monuments with politically incorrect labelling should be changed, so Nïgger Bill's Canyon was renamed Negro Bill Canyon. In 2017, it was renamed to (William) Grandstaff Canyon.





Moving along State Road 128, we come to the nearby Castle Valley area. I'm not exactly sure when the photo below was taken, probably the early 1930s. The photo is of Castleton Rock on the right and the rock formation on the left is called the Rectory or "the Priest and the Nuns."




I didn't think the above picture was going to look too good so I went on Google Maps and took a street view of Castleton Rock and the Priest and the Nuns. This is visible from SR 128 along the Colorado River North from Moab, and you can get a closer look if you take one of the paved roads a short distance into the Castle Valley area.





Moving along to the Dewey ford (or later bridge), this is a 1934 picture of the one-room schoolhouse near Dewey where my Grandmother went to school. Earlier I said that she graduated from High School in 1935 in Moab, but it might have been Grand Junction, Colorado. I don't have access to a lot of records right now to check. This is not the best photograph, and unfortunately I'm sorry that I can't tweak it right now. My Grandmother was not impressed by the quality of education that she got in the one-room schoolhouse. The teacher was some dumb girl that barely knew anything and was probably sent there just to keep her out of trouble.




A bridge was built at Dewey (ford) to take the traffic from State Road 128 which branches at the Moab bridge to follow the Colorado River NE to the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad line ─ which parallels I-70 at the small ghost town of Cisco, where agricultural and mining freight was loaded and taken to market. Farther West along what is now I-70 is the railroad watering hole of Thompson Springs, and (to the South from there) the mines at Yellow Cat and then "Crescent Junction," where U.S. 191 going North meets I-70 going West to Green River (the river and the town). If you crossed the Colorado River at the Moab bridge going North, this is where you would be after you passed by Arches National Park. So we have made a full circle with Arches National Park and Yellow Cat flats inside the loop.

My Great-Grandfather helped build the Dewey bridge, and they lived in a nearby set of cabins at Sager's Wash on the banks of the Colorado River. There is a modern concrete bridge there now, and the old Dewey bridge was ultimately torn down for safety reasons; it was blocked off but still standing when we had our family reunion there in 1987.

Below is the homestead at Sager's Wash on the banks of the Colorado River near the Dewey bridge and close to the confluence of the Dolores River and the Colorado River. It was pretty primitive. They had a cement cistern to store rain water. The picture is taken in the 1920s in the Winter, I guess, and the man at the left is my Grandmother's paternal Grandfather, Quintus Cato (1857-1930). I don't know who the other guy is. Quintus Cato is the one I told you about who had the Model T named Old Teddy and took the kids to school plodding axle-deep in thick clay.




This is pretty much all that was left at Sager's Wash in 1987 when we visited. My Grandmother showed us the cement cistern and some other haunts. There are a lot of fancy fishing cabins built along the area now.




Briefly I will give you some of the background of one side of my paternal Grandmother's family before we move along to other Moab area pioneers such as the Westwoods.

So the Cato ancestor came from Scotland in the 18th century and he got a Revolutionary War service land grant from General Washington and settled in Tennessee. In Tennessee the family did some carpentry work for General Andrew Jackson's home, the Hermitage, but I don't know too many details. I don't think the Tennessee land was too fertile so eventually my ancestor bought land and settled in Southern Illinois and died in 1864. Before that, three Cato brothers left Illinois and bought land together in Arkansas in what is now the Cato Springs area, just outside of Fayetteville. There is an engineering school there now. One of these three Cato brothers was John Henry Cato, born in Tennessee in 1824.

So John Henry Cato (1824-1865) who settled at Cato Springs, Arkansas was my Great-Great-Great-Grandfather. He was Quintus Cato's father ─ who was my Grandmother's paternal Grandfather, Quintus (in the picture above).

John Henry Cato was a blacksmith and did not own slaves. However, he did own land so when Mr. Lincoln sent an Army to invade the South, John Henry Cato was conscripted to defend the Confederate State of Arkansas, and he served as a Gunsmith and Private soldier in Colonel Gordon's Regiment.

When Union troops were bivouacked near the area, Pvt. Cato was captured on his farm in November of 1864. Pvt. Cato was sent to the Gratiot Street PoW camp in St. Louis, Missouri for registration and then transferred to the Alton, Illinois Pow camp where he died on February 8, 1865 of starvation and smallpox. The Union did built a hospital at Smallpox Island on the shores of the Mississippi River at Alton, Illinois but it was too little, too late.

I might go into some background on Pvt. John Henry Cato at some time in the future (not in this thread). He was buried in a mass-grave at Smallpox Island, and there is a nice Confederate memorial for the PoWs today at North Alton, Illinois. I wonder how long it will be before Brandon's minions take it down.





John Henry Cato's wife, Elizabeth attempted to take him some food, and brought the whole family up North on the steamship from Arkansas ─ but by the time she got there he was dead. Elizabeth Cato died of consumption working in a cotton mill in 1872, and their son Quintus Cato (1857-1930), now a teenaged orphan, went to Colorado to work as a blacksmith in the gold mines. Another orphaned son of John and Eliza became a police officer in Los Angeles. I used to have a photograph of him in his "keystone cop" uniform taken around the turn of the 20th century but I can't find it.

Anyway, Quintus settled in Colorado, and his son was my Grandmother's father, Charles Urias Cato (1883-1958), who became the Uranium miner at Yellow Cat in the 1940s-50s. Charles was born in Longmont, Colorado and may have been a gradeschool classmate of the Washington, DC socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose father, Thomas Walsh famously "Struck it Rich" with the Camp Bird Mine near Silverton, Colorado. She was famous for owning the Hope Diamond. Charles "Uranium" Cato never wanted to farm ─ and all his life he hoped to strike it rich in prospecting (but he never did). He met and married a Mormon girl from Moab, Utah named Mary Ellen "Ella" Westwood.

I'll leave the story for the next installment and take up the Westwood side of the tales later. Richard Dallin or "Dick" Westwood (1863-1929) was the Moab town marshal and later the deputy sheriff who was murdered by two outlaws.

Below is a 1928 photo of the Westwoods at a cabin in Moab. Dick and Martha Westwood helped found the town. Dick is the Lawman with the mustache standing at the top left. And his wife Martha is in the middle row in the middle.

Martha Westwood is flanked on her left by her daughter, Ella (my Great-Grandmother). And on Martha's right is her mother, Mary (Young) Wilcox, who crossed the plains in 1847 at age 16. I'll elaborate some more later.





More later. Hope you enjoyed the pictures and stories. Questions and comments welcome.