I came across this quite by accident of a blog by Frank
Warren and it relates to an interview by the esteemed Frank B. Salisbury, Ph.D.
and Garth Myers that appeared in the book, The Utah UFO Display (Devin-Adair
Publishing-1974). Garth is the brother of the late Kenneth John Myers, who with
his wife Edith (Childs) bought the ranch in 1933, and all told occupied it for
60 years. That it was a reputable source confirming what I had found out
(having looked into several “Ranch” cases) I thought it worth showing here.
You can see the posting at Frank Warren’s The UFO
Chronicles.
From Frank B. Salisbury’s The Utah UFO Display, pgs 218-222
(Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, Inc., 2010).
“By an amazing coincidence, I found myself in contact with
Myers. It turned out that Myers lived only a few blocks from me and after
talking with him on the phone. I recorded my first interview with him on
September 3, 2009. In our first telephone conversation, Myers cleared up a few
things and told me the location of the ranch. After the interview, there were
follow-up visits as we got to know each other. Here is a summary of the ranch’s
history from our interviews.
“Garth’s brother and sister-in-law, Kenneth John Myers and
Edith Childs had purchased the ranch around 1933 (not in the 1950s). Garth who
was eighty-eight-years old at the time of my interview, was much younger than
his brother; he had actually worked on the ranch for three summers as a
teenager. Kenneth and Edith began with about 160 acres and accumulated other
parcels until they had formed the 480-acre ranch, living in quite primitive
conditions at first but improving things through the years. They had one child
who died in infancy before they moved to the ranch. There were no other
children. Kenneth died in 1987 at age eighty-six, but his widow continued to
live on the ranch for five years, until she was taken to a rest home. For two
years the ranch was vacant but always leased out to other ranchers to farm and
run cattle, even before Kenneth died. Then when Edith died on March 3, 1994,
the ranch reverted to Garth Myers and his sisters, Helen M. Baxter and LaPriel
Poulson. Less than three months Later, Garth, as executor of the Kenneth and
Edith Myers estate, negotiated sale of the ranch to the witness family [The
Sherman's]. But after nearly two years, they ran into difficulties, losing
several prize cattle, as recorded in Skinwalker. (This was when Junior Hicks
first visited the ranch, witnessing some of the cattle mutilations and other
phenomena: Junior had not visited the ranch when it belonged to the Myers.) But
by then the UFO rumors were circulating wildly, especially after the two
articles about the ranch in the Deseret News. Along came Bob Bigelow and the
ranch was sold to him.
“What about the important statement that the “greatest
concentration of high strangeness has always taken place at what became the
[Skinwalker] 480 - acre ranch?” Garth Myers vigorously denies it! Here are the
important parts of the interview that I recorded:
“Garth: I can tell you right off that my brother died in
April of 1987. My sister-in-law lived alone there until about 1992. She died in
March 1994. And I can tell you unequivocally that up to 1992 there had never
been and there never were any signs of that [UFO and similar activity.] [My
emphasis–FW]
“Now, the ranch was vacant for about two years after she
[entered a rest home]. I went to it occasionally just to check the house. Then
we sold it to [the witness (Terry Sherman)] about six months after she died
[actually, about three months]. I don't know what happened while it was vacant,
but I don't think anything went on. There was nothing, unequivocally,
absolutely nothing that went on while she and my brother lived there. [My
emphasis–FW] She lived there alone from 1987 to 1992, five years. And part of
the time she had a dog. Before my former brother died; he had a dog that got
caught in a trap and had one hind leg partially amputated. He lived for about
three years, and then she was alone without a dog….
“FBS: I think that they make a statement in the book [Hunt
for Skinwalker] that things had been going on since way back to the Indians,
and so on.
“Garth: See, this is [the witness (Terry Sherman)]. That's
the story he made. But it's not the right story!
“FBS: That's why I'm here to talk to you, because you are
somebody who knows.
“Garth: ... The next thing I knew I get this information
that there were UFOs, and he was scared to death, and then this man in Las Vegas phoned in and
was going to buy it. . ..
“All I know is, about a month or six weeks after he bought
it, Bigelow called me on the phone and wondered why we hadn't told anybody
about the UFOS. I told him they didn't get there until [the witness] got there,
and he said "UFOS were coming there and you had dogs keeping the people
away." And I said all they had at most were two dogs, and the last time my
sister-in-law lived there five years with a three-legged dog and part of the
time with no dog at all, and there were no UFOS. And he said "Oh, you're
not telling me the truth." I said, "If you don't believe it, I guess
we don't need to talk anymore," and that was about it. So, after about six
months I got another call from somebody, and they kind of told the same story.
The last caller was maybe five or six years ago-don't know who. He said he wanted
to have lunch with me. I said "On one condition: That you'll show me the
ranch." He said: "Can't do it." I said: "Okay, I guess no
lunch." That's the last I've heard. You probably have the articles in the
Deseret News.
“At this point, I told him about my scientific interest in
UFOS, that I was a professor emeritus at Utah
State University, and a bit more of my history. I told him that I don't
"believe" in UFOS; I investigate UFOS. I told him that I was working
on The Utah UFO Display, originally published in 1974. I said, I must have a
chapter on the ranch, so that makes this interview very valuable to me, because
I can say there is another side to it that isn't known."
“Garth replied, "My brother had 480 acres, if I
remember. My brother bought that ranch in about 1933. Just a little house, an
outdoor privy, and no water, electricity, telephone. They had to haul water
from Fort Duchesne. They were essentially hermits.
They only established relationships with two people in Randlett, but other than
that, they had no communication with their neighbors. Hard worker, honest, hard
man to work for. I worked for him awhile."
“Garth Myers practiced with his M.D. in pediatric neurology.
He spent much of his career at the LDS Primary Children's Hospital but also worked
for the State Department of Health. In his discussions with me, it became clear
that, like most educated people with a scientific background (and no real
knowledge of the extent and evidence of the UFO accounts), Garth simply rejects
any idea that there might be some reality to the UFO phenomenon. I told him a
few Uintah Basin stories, but he said: "That's
fine. As long as you know they are just stories!" This being the case, in
all honesty we must consider the possibility that Kenneth and Edith Myers were
experiencing UFO visits on their ranch, but knowing that their brother was such
a skeptic, they decided not to share this information with him. Remember,
however, that he was there himself (as a teenager) for three summers without
seeing any UFOS. Yes, that was long ago, but the Skinwalker statement says the
UFO activity goes back even to the time of the Native Americans.
“In a telephone conversation on September 5, 2009 (sadly,
not recorded!), I asked him if it were possible that his brother and sister-in-law
didn't tell him about UFO activity they were experiencing. This he vehemently
denied. He said he was very close to his brother (in spite of the age
difference), knowing every detail of their lives. [My emphasis–FW] After his
brother died, he kept in very close touch with his sister-in-law-many visits
and close emotional ties as he worried about her living there alone. He feels
totally confident that his brother and sister-in-law would have told him about
any strange activity, especially under the circumstances. Nevertheless, the
point is so important that we'll return to it several times in this chapter.
Did the Myers couple have a secret life that was not known even to their
brother? There are those who keep making that suggestion.
“Later, I called Garth Myers from the Uintah Basin
to ask him a few more questions.
“First is the matter of locks inside and outside the house
when the witness bought it. Garth has said that this simply was not true. When
he visited the ranch, it took one key to enter the home, and if that key didn't
work, a sharp kick on the door would let him in! There was no profusion of
locks. (The witness, however, told me that there were small sliding locks on
cupboards inside.)
“Second is the matter of no digging being allowed on the
ranch. That rumor might have been fortified by Charles Winn, who said he was
digging something for Kenneth Myers with his backhoe when Kenneth told him for
sure not to dig in a certain area. That doesn't sound very sinister. If I owned
a ranch, I might not want someone with a backhoe to dig in certain places. So
what? Garth said that the only stipulation in the real estate contract was that
the previous owners retained the oil rights to the property! Since oil has
become important in the Basin, such a stipulation is common when a ranch is
sold. So the real-estate contract stipulated that if the new owners dug for
oil, they must notify the previous owners. Does this sound like "a
meaningless clause crafted by elderly eccentrics"? Further, as noted in my
interview with Garth, he denied that his brother had ever used large guard
dogs. The widow Edith had only the one three-legged dog, and he died a couple
of years before Edith left the ranch for the rest home. And what about the
following statement in Skinwalker with its ominous implication?: "The
previous owners had bought the property in the 1950s but now seemed glad to
unload it. Does it sound ominous that an elderly brother and his two sisters
might like to unload a ranch that they had no way of keeping up? When the
witness wanted to buy the ranch, it offered Garth and his sisters a chance to
settle Kenneth and Edith's estate.
“But doubts persisted, so as the three of us-Junior, James
Carrion, and I-made our Uintah
Basin visits, we
considered the question over and over, discussing it among ourselves and with
many of those whom we interviewed: Was the Myers ranch plagued with UFO
activity for over half a century while the Myers established their ranch?
Junior had only one story to support this: He seemed to remember that a clerk
at a drugstore told him that Edith Myers had UFO stories to tell. But that is
very tenuous evidence. Memories long after the fact, especially of such
trivialities as a brief conversation while counting out the change, tend to be
distorted–and perhaps influenced by the extensive publicity that followed the
Deseret News articles and then publication of Skinwalker.
“We had a long conversation with John Garcia (called Mr.
Gonzalez in Skinwalker), whose ranch adjoined the Myers/(Skinwalker) ranch on
the cast, and with Charles Winn, whose ranch adjoined it on the northwest. Each
rancher had some wonderful UFO stories to tell, as I'll relate at the end of
this chapter, but again and again we asked if this activity occurred while the
Myers were living on the property. Time and again they would search back in
their memories and come up blank as to activity on the ranch before the Myers
left. Garcia's account, the one related below, did go back to the Myers' time,
but he didn't think the Myers were aware of his sighting. Except for Garcia's
account and various cattle mutilations, most of the Garcia and Winn stories
were generated by experiences after Robert Bigelow bought the ranch. The cattle
mutilations were confirmed by Pete Pickup, who had been a deputy sheriff and a
tribal policeman starting during the Myers' occupancy. He had investigated at
least a dozen cattle mutilations at various ranches, going back to the 1970s,
and he was employed by NIDS and Bob Bigelow, but he could not confirm UFO
activity prior to the witness's purchase of the ranch.
“So according to Garth Myers, and there certainly is good
reason to think that he should know the basic facts about the history of the
ranch, and with the backing of Junior's memory plus the comments of John Garcia
and Charles Winn, the Skinwalker version of the ranch's history is badly
distorted.”
THS: Skinwalker Ranch has been a massive cash-cow for TV as well as various authors who make wild claims while telling you "The phenomenon won't let us prove it". What was Bigelow's angle? I'll let you guess that one.
