Let’s get it out of the way up front: this commentary involves what hundreds of podcasters, YouTubers, television shows, and TikTokers are calling “high strangeness” and a name you in all likelihood have heard: Skinwalker Ranch.

That’s a 512-acre expanse of fetching mesa in northern Utah that some believe is the ultimate in “paranormal” activity.

It is not quite that. But it is a spiritual beehive.

A skinwalker was a Navajo shaman—warlock or witch—who, through incantations, managed to take on the eternal, ephemeral, and sometimes more than vaporous form of various entities, especially animals. It was called “shape-shifting” and rituals included wearing the hide of whatever animal the witch or “medicine man” wanted to take the guise of.

Often, in lore, it was a werewolf. It was also a coyote, a bird, or really any creature (including perhaps “bigfoot”). According to legend, a person became a skinwalker (yee naaldlooshii) through grave acts of sacrilege such as killing a family member.

We call them what they were/are: demons, often associated with eerie stories of encounters on remote roads or in rural areas, where their unnatural speed, glowing eyes, or mimicked human voices terrify witnesses.

Now part of modern folklore,  the phenomena associated with them are particularly well-known, due to television shows.  We’ve had “Special Reports” about a number of such places.

Skinwalker Ranch is in eastern Utah. According to legend, as a form of retribution, Navajo spiritual leaders cursed the land, unleashing the malevolent, shape-shifting witches upon Utes, a competing tribe that lay claim to the territory.

Archaeological evidence of ancient peoples, such as the Fremont culture, exists at the site. They lived there between 1,000 and 1,300 years ago. Petroglyphs found in the region depict humanoid figures, animals, and shapes that some interpret as evidence of early spiritual or extraterrestrial experiences. These ancient rock carvings have fueled speculation about whether the region has long been a hotspot for paranormal or unexplained phenomena.

You get the picture.

The land is owned by Brandon Fugal, a multimillionaire real estate mogul (number one broker in the world for Coldwell Banker Commercial) from Salt Lake City who purchased it 2016 from a Las Vegas billionaire. No occultist, Fugal was co-founder and owner of Coldwell Banker Commercial Advisors, where he led the entire brand globally and “grew” his firm to thirty offices in ten states with nearly six hundred professionals.

He is both reserved and well-spoken, and started out as a total skeptic before witnessing plenty of phenomena for himself, until he became an eyewitness.

We’re not here to discuss that. Rather, let us note a peculiar item from a recent interview of Fugal.

“The Native American history and the fact that the Navajo cursed this property as a result of conflict with the Ute tribe [is behind the paranormality],” he claims. “There’s rock art. There’s a megalithic site. There’s a lot of rock art and evidence of the ancients.

“There’s also a strange Masonic symbol that is etched into the face of the mesa that many have said symbolizes ‘as above, so below.'”

A Masonic symbol, amid Indian occultism—right there at infamous Skinwalker?

We don’t pretend to know who put that there and the implications. We do know that investigators, who usually focus on the “UFOs” there, have suffered strange afflictions, as did the family of the billionaire who had owned it.

The site has even attracted Pentagon investigators who likewise recorded inexplicable events.

Whether or not one believes in the paranormal, the issue here is that symbol. One notes that Mormons and Freemasons share a link, in that Mormonism was founded by a man who had been a Mason and Mormons of course dominate Utah.

The issue is the question: How did the Masons have a presence there deep in Indian spiritual territory, what does it mean, and does it not tell us something about how such things (witchcraft, Indian mysticism, paganism, psychic phenomena, “aliens,” ghosts, shamanism, the occult in general, and Masonry) are linked?