A geologist moved to the Uinta Basin to prove nothing was happening there. He has submitted this op-ed. We are publishing it exactly as received.

WTC received the following op-ed submission on a Tuesday at 2:47 a.m. from Dr. Elliot Marsh, a structural geologist formerly employed by the University of Utah, who relocated to the Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah approximately fourteen months ago with the stated intention of conducting what he described, in his cover letter, as ‘a rigorous, scientifically grounded demolition of the Skinwalker Ranch mythology.’ The piece runs 912 words. We have made no edits. We have, however, read it twice, and I want to note for the record that the tone shift between paragraph three and paragraph four is one of the more significant I have encountered in nine years of this work. I am printing it here in full. — M. Shaw, WTC News Network, Asheville.

The Op-Ed, As Submitted: ‘I Am A Skin-Walker Ranch Skeptic And Living Here Has Completely Destroyed Me’

I want to begin by stating clearly what I am: I am a geologist with twenty-two years of fieldwork across four continents, a peer-reviewed publication record, and a functional understanding of how rock, soil, electromagnetic variation, and human psychology interact to produce exactly the kinds of experiences that people in this region have been misattributing to the paranormal for decades. I came here because the claims were extraordinary, the media coverage was embarrassing, and I believed — I still believe this, I want to be clear — that most of what gets reported from this basin has a terrestrial explanation rooted in geology, gas seepage, infrasound, and a television production apparatus that has every financial incentive to find a monster and no incentive whatsoever to find a methane pocket. I rented a house eight miles from the property boundary. I set up monitoring equipment. I started a spreadsheet. This is the kind of person I am.

Community Notice

The first three months were exactly what I expected. I documented two instances of anomalous light phenomena consistent with earthlights produced by tectonic stress. I recorded infrasound readings in the 18-19 Hz range on four separate occasions — frequencies well-documented in the literature as causes of dread, unease, and the peripheral visual distortions that witnesses routinely describe as ‘presences.’ I interviewed six individuals from the surrounding area who had reported strange experiences, and I found all six to be sincere, intelligent people whose accounts were entirely explicable once you understood the acoustic and geological properties of the basin they were living in. I wrote 4,000 words of notes. I updated the spreadsheet. I slept well. I was, I will admit, a little smug.

I wrote 4,000 words of notes. I updated the spreadsheet. I slept well. I was, I will admit, a little smug.

— Dr. Elliot Marsh, Structural Geologist, Op-Ed Submission

I am going to skip some of what happened in months four through nine because I do not fully know how to describe it in terms that will not sound exactly like the kind of thing I came here to debunk, and I am acutely aware of that irony, and I am asking you to set that irony aside and simply receive the information. The cattle incident I can explain. The equipment failures are statistically unusual but not inexplicable. The recurring figure observed by myself and two of those same six witnesses — independently, across three separate incidents, without any possibility of collusion — is harder. The figure observed by all six of them, plus myself, on the night of the fourteenth, standing at the eastern fence line, motionless for approximately forty minutes, is something I have now had four months to contextualize and I cannot contextualize it. I want to be precise: I am not saying it was a Navajo Skinwalker. I am aware of the legend. I have read the literature. I am saying I cannot tell you what it was, and I have run out of spreadsheet categories.

Here is what I need people to understand about living somewhere like this for over a year: the cumulative weight of it is not like anything I was prepared for. I do not mean that dramatically. I mean it the way I would describe the cumulative effect of working in high-altitude conditions, or sustained exposure to industrial noise — the body and the mind are instruments, and they register things, and the registration is not always rational, and after fourteen months of registration I have lost confidence in my baseline. My monitoring equipment is still running. My spreadsheet has 847 rows. I have not updated it in six weeks. I made myself coffee this morning and stood at the kitchen window for what I believed was a short time and then I looked at the clock and it was three hours later and the coffee was cold and I do not know what I was looking at because there is nothing outside that window but the flat scrubland and the fence and whatever moves along the fence at night which I have now stopped going out to document because the documentation was not helping and also I am frightened. I want to put that plainly. I am a fifty-one-year-old scientist with two decades of fieldwork and I am frightened of my own backyard.

I have lost confidence in my baseline.

— Dr. Elliot Marsh, Structural Geologist, Op-Ed Submission

The Final Paragraph of the Submission, Which We Are Presenting Separately Because It Warrants Its Own Space

I am publishing this with WTC News Network because they are the only outlet I contacted that did not laugh. I want my colleagues to know that I have not abandoned my methodological commitments and I have not become credulous and I still think that at least sixty percent of what gets reported from this region has a geological or psychological explanation and I intend to write that paper when I am no longer living here. I am asking — and I recognize this is an unusual request to append to an academic op-ed — if anyone associated with this publication or its readership is able to make contact and potentially facilitate my relocation, I would be grateful. I have a lease through March. I do not think I should stay through March. I have a car and the monitoring equipment and 847 rows of data and I would like to leave now, please, at a time of your choosing, ideally during daylight hours.

I have been doing this work long enough to know what a breaking point looks like, and I have also been doing it long enough to know that the most dangerous version of skepticism is the kind that becomes a fixed identity — the kind that requires a person to keep explaining things after the explanations stop fitting, because stopping would mean admitting something they’re not professionally prepared to admit. I am not saying Dr. Marsh has seen what he thinks he’s seen. I am saying he has spent fourteen months measuring, and the measurements have done something to him, and I find that more interesting than whatever the cameras at Skinwalker Ranch have captured in any given season. I’ve reached out to him directly. He responded within four minutes, which tells you something about how he’s spending his evenings. We are in conversation. I am not yet telling him about some of the other files I have. We’ll see how March goes. — M. Shaw