Secret Medical Experiments at the Skinwalker Ranch?

Most readers of this Blog are familiar with the so-called "Skinwalker Ranch" near Ft. Duchesne, Utah. Supposedly haunted and filled with all kinds of paranormal phenomena, it was purchased in 1996 by the wealthy investor and UFO buff Robert Bigelow of AATIP fame for study of its alleged phenomena. Members of Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) stayed on the ranch for careful first-hand study. One of them was Colm Kelleher, PhD, co-author of the book Hunt for the Skinwalker. Another was Dr. Eric Davis, an astronomer who now works at Dr. Hal Puthoff's Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, studying weird physics. Despite Bigelow's funding and the investigators' unfettered access to the alleged phenomena,

after several years of Gorman family trauma and of focused NIDS investigation, we managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena, at least no physical evidence that could be considered as conclusive proof of anything (Hunt for the Skinwalker, p. 209).

So, all the King's Horses and all the King's Men and all the King's cameras and electronic recording devices could not document anything paranormal occurring at the Skinwalker Ranch, in spite of spending several years on-site trying to do so. NIDS never did find anything much anywhere, so Bigelow shut it down in 2004, and in 2016 he sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate, LLC, whose owner has still not been publicly named. 

Chris Marx, former security guard at Skinwalker, being interviewed by John Greenewald.

Chris Marx is a US Army veteran and certified military police investigator, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan. Returning from Iraq in 2009, he was hired by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) as an investigator and security guard at the Skinwalker Ranch. This was five years after NIDS had been disbanded, so Bigelow's PhD investigators were long gone by this time. Marx' claims of employment at the ranch by BAASS have been checked out and are not in dispute. 

Marx claims to have witnessed many unexplainable events at the ranch (see below), but that is not his most significant claim. Marx says he believes that the purpose of his being hired at the ranch was to make him an unwitting subject of secret medical experiments, whose alleged purpose is unknown. This might just seem like another paranoid conspiracy story, except for one thing: Marx says that BAASS required him to get an MRI brain scan as a condition of employment, and he produced a consent form documenting that fact.

Bigelow required Marx to submit to an MRI brain scan (first posted by Erica Lukes)

This fact has astonished a lot of people, including me. I cannot think of a single reason for an employer to require an employee to submit to a brain scan, and I cannot think of any other employer who has previously required this. Recently Marx has been working with Erica Lukes, former MUFON State Director for Utah and now independent researcher with her own podcast, to investigate this matter. ( I was a guest on Erica's podcast in 2017. )

When Marx's MRI scan documentation was first posted by Erica Lukes on her Facebook page on November 10, Eric Davis (formerly of NIDS) stepped in to say, "they signed consent forms and no medical testing was done on them." ("They" presumably includes Christopher Bartel, who also formerly worked for BAASS at the ranch.) Davis added,

the AAWSAP [AATIP] was not about the ranch! It was about the Nimitz encounters and other Navy/USAF encounters. The ranch became a subordinate issue of interest because Bigelow owned it. There was no AAWSAP tasking for the ranch.

When Bartel insisted that "medical testing was done on us," Davis replied,

 I worked on that ranch for five years when I was the Director of Aerospace and Astrophysics Research at NIDS. I investigated (on the ranch and all over the Uintah Valley) and personally experienced A LOT of phenomenon on the ranch including the shooting of a possible cryptoterrestrial, one very violent calf mutilation, orbs, telepathic contact, UFOs, powerful musky odors, etc. I was never mentally or physically injured or medically tested after five years or much later after leaving NIDS. All of my work on the ranch was documented in Kelleher & Knapp’s book followed by Knapp & Corbell’s documentary film released in Sept. 2018. You and Mr. Marx are misleading Erica with your “false narrative” of being military vets who were medically tested without your consent. I’ve read all of the ranch reports during the AAWSAP. You weren’t “medically tested”. You two come off as disgruntled, fired ex-security guards looking for a big payoff.

Marx was not "fired." He left the ranch for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and upon his return continued to work for Bigelow, although not at the ranch.

On November 15, John Greenewald, Jr., tireless researcher at The Black Vault, did a very interesting YouTube interview of Marx. In it Marx explained that when he went for his first interview with BAASS in Las Vegas, he walked in a side door of the building and was greeted by his interviewer pointing a handgun at him (!!). They asked him if he had ever had any previous paranormal experiences, experiences he could not explain. He replied "Yes," and apparently that was the answer they wanted to hear. He got the job.

Marx told Greenewald that according to some unnamed physicist, James T. Lacatski was seen at the ranch, implying that AATIP was involved. Lacatski is the only person we know to have been the head of AATIP/AAWSAP, despite Elizondo's claims to have run that program. The only thing that AATIP is known to have produced are 38 papers in weird physics, like anti-gravity, wormholes, and negative mass propulsion, and Lacatski's name appears on all of them. Everything else is just rumor, unsupported by any documentation. Greenewald noted that Hal Puthoff, as well as the Pentagon, say that AAWSAP and AATIP were the same program, while Luis Elizondo of To The Stars Academy insists they were not. (I am wondering if perhaps Elizondo may have 'padded' the resume he gave DeLonge? 😉)

Marx went on to say that there was practically no research equipment at the ranch, and so they used their own cameras and such when needed. However they were not, he says, given any directives about what to do at the ranch in terms of research. He portrayed Bigelow as being very stingy with necessary expenses for food, transportation, etc. "The whole time I was at the ranch I never saw Bigelow or any scientist."

But that did not stop Marx and his colleague(s) from doing their own investigations and recording their own observations. He claims that he and Bartel independently identified thirteen "hotspots" on the ranch. They wrote questions for the supposed paranormal 'entity,' placing them in tamper-proof evidence bags. They then used a Ouija board to try to get answers to the questions. However, he says that no answers were received, and the Ouija planchette repeatedly just flew toward his chest. Other reported strange occurrences were:

• On the day he arrived at the ranch, his gear was tossed all around. (I have long suspected that the Ranch indeed had a trickster. A human one.)
• An "invisible person," a very heavy one, allegedly walked around their trailer. He suspects that this may have to do with an AATIP experiment in "cloaking." (AATIP's weird physics paper #7 is titled "Invisibility Cloaking".)
• They reportedly saw a very bright light in the night sky lasting a few seconds, so bright that Marx said he could still see the light with his eyes closed, and with his hand in front of his eyes.
• Strangest of all is Marx's tale about the bulletproof wolf. He says he went outdoors one night to see why the dogs were barking so fiercely. He allegedly saw the dogs being held at bay by three large wolves, who then came after him. (Supposedly there are no wolves in the wild near the ranch).  Holding his 12-gauge shotgun, he fired eight rounds at one wolf from close range. The weapon had a red dot laser on the animal, it was impossible to miss. Yet there was supposedly no effect, and the wolves slowly walked off. (Marx's story of the bullet-proof wolf is not the only such account from Skinwalker. At other times it was apparently seen regularly, and was named "Toby.")

Google Map's aerial view of the Skinwalker Ranch. (Just plug "Skinwalker" into the search box.)  I don't see any Cryptids, do you?

Marx referred to an anonymous Ranch employee, "Chip," whose concerns about possible medical testing of employees was supposedly told on Jack Brewer's Blog The UFO Trail in 2012. Nobody picked up on it, Marx said. I went looking for that piece and didn't find it, however I did find a comment left there pointing to an article on the Daily Grail by "Red Pill Junkie" that in turn references a Paracast podcast from Sept. 2, 2012 in which "Chip" discussed his experiences at the Ranch. Mr. Red Pill writes that "Chip" said in 2012 that

whenever the personnel saw or felt something strange, they were required to have urine tests and bring the vials back to Vegas by the end of their shift (!). Chip also mentioned ‘brain scans’ performed on the individuals, although they were never informed of the results of such tests.

This last part of his job convinced Chip that he was there at the Skinwalker ranch more as a ‘guinea pig’ than as a security guard. “They were testing us,” he said to Gene, Chris, David and Ryan on that Paracast episode. He thought that perhaps the military was trying out something new at the remote rural location, and he and his colleagues were used as lab rats without their consent.

Las Vegas is over 500 miles from the Ranch, so it's obviously not possible for employees to 'bring the vials back to Vegas' at the end of a shift. "Were we exposed to radioactivity?" Marx asked. He noted that "fuel rods," described as about six inches long and made of very tough material, were supposedly found on the ranch, and given to Bigelow. Actually, that claim was made as far back as 1997, when they were described as five jet black "alien fuel rods" about six inches long that were "extremely hard."  One suggestion is that the rods were simply graphite rods, possibly from a lantern battery. It is extremely implausible that radioactive fuel rods would simply be left lying about the ranch, even if they had been somehow used there, which they almost certainly had not. Nobody has any real information about this now, although I suspect it's Much Ado about Nothing.

Marx closed his Black Vault interview with the admonition to be skeptical of Knapp and Corbell. Actually, Marx had earlier let off some steam in an open letter he gave to Skinwalker researcher Ryan Skinner, to be posted on Facebook:

While Mr. Knapp knows better, he is frequently on the forefront of selling snake oil to the masses, and Mr. Corbell seemingly can’t resist to pose in front of a fictitious blackboard with “data” scribbled all over it. While Mr. Corbell has absolutely zero historical involvement or relevance to anything “Ranch”, he displays himself as an expert and frequently gives wrong information on the Ranch.... Mr. Knapp, there are no “predator monsters” living on the Ranch, and there are no people tied to chairs in expectations to be killed or devoured. How do I know this? I actually worked the Ranch for 6 years, day and night. Often without any artificial illumination and by myself. There also has never been any documentation of “Big Foot”.
You guys are going as far as calling the Ranch a “mental and emotional torture chaimber”; clearly, you know better. Stop your artificial hype and disinformation nonsense.

Were Marx, Bartel, or anyone else subjected to medical experiments at Skinwalker Ranch? I don't think so, and here is why:

Greenewald asked Marx, "You were told, the reason you had to sign it was that they were going to be looking for effects on your body by this phenomena, whatever it was. So you were told that up front?" Marx replied, "Correct. And also, it was not negotiable. Because if we wouldn't have signed it, we would have lost our jobs." So one interpretation is that Bigelow believed that the Skinwalker "phenomenon" itself might have effects on someone's body, and he wanted to document it. And if BAASS were carrying out any such experiments, they would have periodically checked up on the effects of those experiments on their employees, which does not seem to have happened. So I don't think there was any attempt to monitor the health of those working at the ranch.

But why the brain scan? I have a suspicion: old-timers in UFOlogy will recall the mini-controversy raised over whether or not Whitley Strieber might have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, causing him to hallucinate his "visitors" (as opposed to, "just making them up," which is far more likely). Supposedly, Strieber had a brain scan showing that his brain was just fine, so he doesn't hallucinate. So the "visitors" are real, take that you skeptics! Bigelow would surely remember this isssue being raised, and (I suspect) wanted to rule out any of his employees being likely to "hallucinate" anything at his ranch. That way, if they reported that they saw a Cryptid, it would be because some Cryptid was really there! 😉

Perhaps someday Mr. Bigelow will explain all this to us. But that doesn't seem very likely.