What If Skinwalker Ranch is a Warning System?
I don’t know how I missed it, but one of my favorite science fiction shows started its third season a few weeks ago. I had eagerly anticipated it since the ending of season two and throughout the COVID pandemic which delayed the third season shoot. Now I’m rushing to catch up.
I’m talking, of course, about The Orville. This sleeper sci-fi hit blends humor and homages to what we all loved about Star Trek: The Next Generation into a very entertaining and thought-provoking series.
Spoiler Alert
The rest of this article contains some spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it and intend to do so, you have been warned.
I’m a little behind in my watching as I just finished episode two. It has the crew of the Orville engaging in a temporary armistice with the Krill. The Krill is an analog species to Star Trek’s Klingons. They don’t like humans, the Union (akin to Star Trek’s “Federation”), or any other species, for that matter. Similar to how the Klingons see their mission of conquering the entire Universe as a warrior’s manifest destiny, the Krill see their mission of conquering the entire Universe as a religious believer’s call to action.
Well, almost the entire Universe. In this episode, we learn that there is one place the Krill absolutely will not go: a starless and empty void called the Kalarr Expanse.
One condition of the new treaty is that the Union will be able to pass through Krill territory and explore vast new regions that were previously off-limits. The Krill delegates, in this episode, are quick to warn the Union away from going anywhere near the Kalarr Expanse. The reason, which sounds ridiculous to the representatives of the secularist Union, is that the Expanse is full of demons and is a “domain of evil.”
When asked for clarification, a Krill delegate states matter-of-factly:
The Anhkana warns of Shadow Realms. Gateways to the depths of the underworld where demons lie in wait to possess the souls of those who dare to stray within their reach. They corrupt all that is holy. Within their grasp, even the most righteous can be forced to commit unspeakable acts of depravity.
When asked whether they had direct evidence of these demons, the Krill commander responds, “It is written in the Anhkana. That is all the evidence we need.”
A Union representative at the meeting, Admiral Paul Christie, who is barely hiding his contempt for their beliefs, states appreciation for the warning and that they’ll take every precaution. But the crew of the Orville will visit the Kalarr Expanse notwithstanding. “We are explorers. So, if it’s all the same to you, we’d like to see for ourselves what’s out there,” he asserts.
Following the typical Star Trek template, Admiral Christie, Captain Mercer, and the crew “boldly go” into the Kalarr Expanse almost immediately upon entering the new regions of space they intend to explore. Their first interaction with the Expanse is a distress beacon (of course) that they feel compelled to answer directly.
Upon arrival at the coordinates of the beacon, they find a large and terrifyingly imposing structure, unsurprisingly shaped like a huge spider. They fly a shuttle directly into its open airlock and begin exploring. They do so without knowing they’ll be able to exit, and without so much as a face mask as a precaution. They ignore the very basics of the xenobiological hazard protocols that undoubtedly have to exist for them to have gotten this far along in their fictional galactic explorations.
On cue, Admiral Christie (a former love interest of the Orville’s chief medical officer, Dr. Finn, and a decidedly throwaway “red shirt” character if there ever was one) pokes his snoot into an anus-shaped glowing flower embedded into a wall.
It opens up, makes a hissing noise in his face, and closes. Without even scanning him to detect infection of any kind, everyone skedaddles back to the Orville to regroup and decide what to do next.
Predictably, Admiral Christie is not quarantined properly and falls ill. His body begins to mutate and change into an entirely different species. After his metamorphosis completes, he escapes sick bay and begins to infect other members of the crew by vomiting some kind of CRISPR-Cas goo into their face holes. He takes over the ship by using his Level 9 access to disable every power source, causing the crew to scramble to find him and protect everyone else.
In the final scenes, Dr. Finn threatens the morphed admiral and erstwhile lover with infection by a virus. It will kill him and his transformed minions, but which will only give the rest of the crew the sniffles. To avoid that fate, the morphed admiral calls a truce. He agrees to leave the ship with his followers.
What Does This Have to Do with Skinwalker Ranch?
One of my theories about the phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch is that, much like the Krill religious teachings, the ranch is acting like an ancient hazard warning system.
Hear me out.
Most of what I’m referring to has been talked about at length in other articles, so I’ll summarize them. If you want to warn deep-future people away from an area, and you don’t even know what language they’ll speak or which symbols they’re likely to recognize, you have to be creative.
This field of study has a name: nuclear semiotics. The study of nuclear warning signs or symbols and their use or interpretation.
As one article proposed, and presuming our present-day language could be adapted to make sense to people 10,000 years from now, a warning might read:
“This place is not a place of honor…No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
Or, how about this, which seems very relevant to what we see at Skinwalker Ranch, particularly concerning the 1.6Ghz signal transmission, or the injuries that occur each time they poke the hornet’s nest?
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
Or even better, this:
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Other methods might include universally-recognized symbols or diagrams. By “universally recognized”, the experts mean drawings that indicate danger by the use of figures of people having trouble around sharp edges, skulls, or other Very Bad Things™ in nature. They could include usual human activities interrupted by danger or some other physical realities that are likely to still exist thousands of years hence.
Consciousness as a Watchman
An even better method of warning people away from a dangerous area would be to have an actual watchman. In materialist terms, this might be a successive “changing of the guard”, where a system is set up whereby human beings are posted perpetually to stand watch. That might work for a few decades if nothing like war, famine, or boredom interrupts it. Add some strong religious ritual elements to it and you could keep the watch going for centuries. Maybe millennia.
Indeed, such a system might explain dozens of puzzlingly large and sophisticated megalithic monuments from the Pyramids of Giza to Stonehenge to Puma Punku. Perhaps those are set up to serve as both astronomical observatories and markers of places best not dwelled upon for too long.
Still, that’s a stretch, because the point of such an exercise would be to make a message very clear, not as utterly mysterious as we currently find them to be. Their watchmen have long since disappeared into the mists of time — taking the clarity of their messages with them — and leaving us to stitch together the true meanings of cryptic hieroglyphics. We are stuck trying to interpret them however we see fit.
So, what if some previously-advanced civilization managed to create a way for some kind of “eternal” consciousness to forever guard the hazard they wanted future humans to stay far away from?
For example, they could have found a way to digitally transfer a living being’s mind into a computer system running on an infinite power source of some kind deep under Skinwalker Ranch. Maybe it’s using zero point energy or nuclear power.
Or, they could have had access to communication with non-corporeal, sentient entities with whom they made a deal to keep the humans away through scare tactics.
Alternately, what if they created a sentient AI with a means to interact with the world around it to look after the place once they had escaped or died in an extinction-level event?
Could there also be an interdimensional factor, where that civilization moved to a parallel dimension and keeps a constant vigil over the 512-acre ranch (or, as some assert, the entire Uinta Basin)?
What Kind of Danger?
If Skinwalker Ranch and its seemingly conscious phenomenon are indeed a warning of danger, what kind of danger are we talking about?
When I was telling one of my adult children about the latest happenings at Skinwalker Ranch, she asked me what I thought it could be.
The ones we know could exist, because we’ve personally created them, are biological, radiological, and chemical hazards.
The ones we speculate on, but that materialists scoff at without further investigation, could include spiritual, alien, or even interdimensional hazards.
She then asked me if it’s not just better left alone because of bad things it could unleash into the world.
I didn’t have an answer. My courageous side wants to dissect every molecule of Skinwalker Ranch. My cautious side wants to leave it all alone, or leave that task to others. Personally, because of the reported hitchhiker effect and some bad experiences I had as a young man with what I can only describe as an “entity”, if Brandon Fugal invites me to visit, I likely won’t accept.
But what if we, humanity, decide that it’s worth the risk to excavate a tunnel into the mesa. Or, what if we simply remove the face of the mesa altogether? What are we likely to find once we do?
If it’s a large metal container, will we try to drill into it? Blow a hole in it? Find an opening? If you’ve ever seen the hit TV series Lost, with its mysterious and curiosity-attracting Dharma Initiative hatches, you know that there can be a lot of possibilities.
Like the intrepid and somewhat foolish crew of the Orville, will we just say “screw it” and dive right into what could kill the explorers or all of mankind?
Was the Library at Alexandria Part of a Global Warning System?
Throwing our minds back many centuries, we can only wonder at what was lost when the Library at Alexandria burned to the ground. Perhaps there were answers there. Maybe there were maps to sensitive locations around the globe, including Skinwalker Ranch.
We know that the highly-disputed Piri Reis map existed anachronistically in comparison to what should not have been known at the time of its alleged creation. If that map, or one like it, was in use more anciently, could it have come from the Library at Alexandria? Might it have been used within a collection of other records to show additional places to avoid?
Some speculate that the Library at Alexandria was burned on purpose. If so, was someone deliberately trying to usurp the system of controls that would have warned humanity of biological, radiological, or even paranormal dangers across the globe? What else went missing that we might want to know about? Are Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) a modern attempt to explore and map the dwellings of more ancient inhabitants, or their waste dumps?
Did I miss any possibilities? Tell me in the comments.
Religion as a Warning System
Skipping back a bit in the episode of The Orville I spoiled for you above, there’s a scene with a bit of dialogue between Captain Mercer, his crew, Admiral Christie, and Admiral Halsey that is key to understanding the erroneous assumptions they made going into their adventure. It’s too poignant to summarize, so I’ll quote it in full:
HALSEY: The question is, do we take their warning seriously?
CHRISTIE: Tom, you’re kidding, right? I mean, consider the source.
HALSEY: I’m just suggesting the possibility that their claim, absurd though it may be, could indicate the presence of some real threat. And, because they’re Krill, they process it through the lens of their religion.
GRAYSON: Which still doesn’t give us much of a road map. I mean, their religion is…confusing…to say the least.
CHRISTIE: All religions are confusing. How do you think the priests stay in business?
HALSEY: Did they offer any concrete evidence to support their claims?
CHRISTIE: No. In fact, from what we gather, none of their ships have ventured into the Expanse in more than a century.
MERCER: The copy of the Anhkarra we have in our database has a few passages about “Shadow Realms.” Lots of colorful language about soul-sucking demons with eight eyes and huge fangs. Horror movie stuff.
HALSEY: And, if this were a horror movie, I’d say don’t go into the house. But obviously their religion has a powerful influence over their perception of reality.
CHRISTIE: Agreed. But it should not stand in the way of Union exploration. We need to seize the opportunity while we can.
HALSEY: Ed, what do you think?
MERCER: Visions of horror always have mortal origins. If there is something out there, it’s not supernatural.
GRAYSON: Could still be dangerous.
MERCER: Exploration always carries risk. I say we risk it.
I quoted that dialogue to emphasize the fact that we live in a highly materialistic, post-post-modern, and secular world. One of the biggest frustrations experiencers of The Phenomenon in general feel is that skeptics and “normies” will always treat our claims with derision. They intone the “X-Files” theme music, roll their eyes, wave their fingers, and mention “little green men and flying saucers” mockingly. Even when presented with solid proof in the form of metamaterials, video, mass sightings, and highly-qualified eyewitnesses.
And those experiencers who happen to also believe in Deity, particularly the Judeo-Christian God — or, more expansively, the Abrahamic God — get a double portion of humiliation for our beliefs. Sometimes, even, from other experiencers!
What if our discounting of skinwalker lore as a purely fictional myth is a grave error on our part? What if Skinwalker Ranch is a gateway. What if there are demons, of a sort, in the underworld below the mesa on Skinwalker Ranch?
Just because one person, or a group of scientists, doesn’t happen to believe in the Ute or Navajo legends of a man-beast who made a pact with the Evil One to transform from a human to a predatory animal doesn’t mean it’s not true on some level. All myths are based on someone’s lived reality. Or, as Captain Mercer put it, “Visions of horror always have mortal origins. If there is something out there, it’s not supernatural.”
What if the skinwalker legend was an echo of mortal origins in a multi-millennial game of telephone? What if its telling and retelling was meant to keep us away from some kind of biogenetic or interdimensional experiment gone horribly wrong?
Humans Are Explorers First, Believers Second
I expect that sometime soon the crew at Skinwalker Ranch will mirror the crew of the Orville. They will listen to the deeply-embedded cultural and adaptive programming of the homo sapiens sapiens mind, cast caution to the wind, light up their torches, scream “UGGABUGGA!” into the abyss, and charge forward to explore the void that the shamans said was full of evil, demonic entities. It’s what we do as a species and there’s no stopping us once we get started. We cannot help but prefer to consider the consequences of our actions in the harsh light of reality and certainty versus the gray dimness of speculation and doubt.
What’s in there?
Let’s go and see.
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