The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch
Season Premiers April 18 at 10PM ET/PT
By Dale Nickey
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 4/15/23 – The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch heads into its fourth season. Ufology is hot and has emerged as a legitimate field of scientific study. UFO witnesses are no longer part of the tin foil hat brigade. Indeed, the term UFO has been swapped out for UAP to remove previous stigma. Cell phone technology has turned the entire world into sky watchers; and empirical data has become so compelling, even our military and intelligence communities have felt the pressure to ‘fess up” and admit there are UAP (un-identified ariel phenomena) that can’t be explained, and that the military has been proactively investigating them for some time (despite previous denials).
These circumstances backdrop the new season of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. It starts with its star Dr. Travis Taylor, revealing to his Skinwalker team that he was co-opted by the Pentagon in 2019 to be chief scientist for the UAP Task Force that researched ariel phenomenon and reported the results to the U.S. Congress. His retirement from the task force allowed him to reveal his involvement to the Skinwalker team. It also conferred credibility for the team’s findings because it was their discoveries that prompted the Pentagon to enlist Taylor’s services. Spoiler alert: The Military’s interest in the research on Skinwalker Ranch didn’t end with Dr. Taylor’s retirement from the program.
Thus, with scientific cred established, the premier episode recaps previous experiments and episodes to bring new viewers up to date. The primary focus of interest on the ranch remains “The Triangle”, an area where UAPs appear regularly, and the laws of science are malleable. For long time Skinwalker fans, the cast of characters are familiar and carry with them their own back stories. Dragon (Skinwalker’s Security Chief) is longtime friend of Skinwalker owner Brandon Fugal, a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, who swoops in on his private chopper periodically to pep talk the team and lavish more cash and resources on the enterprise. Erik Bard is the tech-head/researcher who mans the phalanx of computers at home base and collates the data.
However, the show’s rock star is Dr. Travis Taylor. He comes armed with a steamer trunk full of PHDs in science and astrophysics, as well as an impressive resume as a researcher for the U.S. Government and the military. With his weightlifter physique and good ole’ boy Alabama drawl, Taylor provides the perfect gateway for the layman not acquainted with Lidar mapping, radiation signatures, metallurgy, and wind vortexes. Taylor is our generation’s Carl Sagan, with an uncanny ability to plain speak weird science in a way that makes horse-sense and makes you believe.
The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is the real deal. Its companion series (Ancient Aliens), advances exotic theories that have the ring of truth but still lack the knock-out punch of hard evidence. In contrast, The Skinwalker Team are data junkies first and foremost. Interesting results are just that and serve only to raise more questions. The team’s mission is to “poke the nest” and duplicate anomalous results with different technologies and methods. No easy conclusions are drawn as the mysteries deepen.
In the past, scientific discovery was disseminated to the public through newspapers, and network news. Now you can view the process yourself on The History Channel every Wednesday night. Don’t lump The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch with our media culture’s glut of reality-lite fare. It’s miles apart and a cut above.
