The Sherman ranch story goes public — and Bigelow's NIDS buys the property

Terry and Gwen Sherman bought the roughly 512-acre ranch in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah, bordering the Ute Indian reservation, in 1994. Over the following eighteen months the family reported a sustained series of anomalous experiences on the property: silent lights and orb-like objects, large unidentified animals, voices with no visible source, and the deaths and mutilation of several cattle under circumstances they could not explain. The surrounding basin carried decades of similar local lore — Ute accounts of the area long predate the Shermans — but the family's experience remained private until reporter Zack Van Eyck told it in the Deseret News on June 30, 1996.

The article changed the property's trajectory. Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow — already funding anomalies research — purchased the ranch from the Shermans within months and transferred operations to his newly formed National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), which installed observation posts, instrumentation, and rotating scientific staff. NIDS studied the site from 1996 until the institute wound down in 2004. Its researchers documented transient events they could not explain but concluded the phenomena resisted controlled, repeatable observation — a finding summarized in the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker by NIDS biochemist Colm Kelleher and journalist George Knapp.

The property's second act — as the field site of a Defense Intelligence Agency-funded program — is covered in the companion entry on the 2008 AAWSAP contract. The ranch was sold in 2016 to Adamantium Holdings, a shell company later revealed to belong to Utah real-estate executive Brandon Fugal, and has been the subject of a History Channel series since 2020. Skinwalker Ranch remains the most-searched named property in the UAP record.