George Knapp Hunt for the Skinwalker Interview Transcript

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http://www.openminds.tv/george-knapp-hunt-for-the-skinwalker-interview-transcript/42039

Alejandro Rojas: I am here with George Knapp. Thank you so much for joining us.

George Knapp: Always good to talk to you, Alejandro Rojas and it was great to see you in our little secret soiree in Las Vegas last weekend; you’re a traveling guy.

Rojas: I am. I am all over the place, but when Jeremy let me know that you all were going to be screening the film, there was no way I was going to miss that, and especially to see you all who were there which was a lot of fun.

Knapp: Well, it was an interesting crowd. You’ll have to admit there was some interesting faces in the mix.

Rojas: Yeah, definitely. Some of the names we can’t share, but that makes it even more fun and intriguing for the audience, I think.

Knapp: That’s okay, you can say it. Oh, there is one you can’t say, but we’ll get at that, we’ll get at that.

Rojas: Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about that. I guess to begin with is the fact that really this documentary was the format you wanted to share information about the ranch with in the first place.

Knapp: That’s true. I mean, I started shooting video at the ranch late ’90’s, of course, I’de learned about the ranch around the time the rest of the world did in 1996. There were a couple of newspaper articles that came out about the weird happenings of the property; mostly focused on UFO activity and of course the Uintah Basin already had a reputation well-earned of, has been a UFO hotspot for as long as people have lived there. So, when Bob Bigelow and his team went to the ranch, bought the place, set up shop, installed detection equipment and cameras and the team of scientists this on the property, I got to learn little bits and pieces about what was going on under the condition that I not talk about it until they gave the okay to go forward. In 1999, I finally got my first visit to the property, and then, started going back periodically with photographers. Matt Adams has been my most frequent collaborator on the property, and we were shooting video for what I hope would one day be a documentary project, maybe more than one. After a couple of years of making this business though, Bob Bigelow was concerned, he sort of changed his mind about the direction I was taking. He was concerned that if we came out with the film, the place might be overrun by UFO enthusiasts and other kinds of paranormal researchers. And in fact, it turned out he was right.

So, I put the documentary on hold, at least plans of any kind of distribution, but I continued to visit the property over the years, a couple of times a year, at least once a year, and would always bring a photographer and record what I could. And when we couldn’t go on the ranch itself which in particular during the vast of period which we’ll talk about, I would interview other people in the basin, talk to the witnesses, I got to know some of the Utes and some of the long-time residents, and continued to collect information. And I didn’t know if it would ever come out. I really didn’t if it would ever bear fruit because once Bob Bigelow gave me the okay, Colm and I to come up with a book, there was no turning back. I mean, we did our best, we used different names for the rancher family because NIDS had made that promise to him. We didn’t identify the location, we didn’t use any photos, but of course, people figured it out and started blocking to the property anyway; and it caused a lot of problems.

I think, Mr. Bigelow regretted ever allowing the book to go forward. In fact, I know he did. And again, I still made the promise to him that I wouldn’t go forward with the footage, and so, I didn’t. There were tiny, little bits of it that I used in public presentations a couple of times, but that was it; little tiny slivers. And then, when the property was sold in 2016, it occurred to me, maybe I don’t want to cause problems for the owner, but maybe there’s a chance that I could go forward with this and the new owner said yes, and Jeremy Corbell had been bugging me about it, I see you Skinwalker stuff. And so, that’s how it came together.

Rojas: When it came to the book, the book was a pretty big hit. I mean, it sold well, it got the word about Skinwalker out there. Were you all, including Bigelow, maybe not expecting the book to be as popular as it was?

Knapp: No. I thought it would be pretty popular because it carved a new niche in the field. There was no place quite like it and certainly has never been a study quite like that. I mean, it is the most intensively studied paranormal hotspot ever. You never had seen a scientist on the ground, boots on the ground doing that kind of research. Now, I know there are a lot of criticisms of the study and justifiably so, but there is no template for it; there is no sort of a guide book to follow for something like this because there just aren’t any places like it. Hessdalen is a long-standing study, but it’s mostly looking at lights in the sky, not the kinds of things that the NIDS team had to deal with.

So, I think that Mr. Bigelow probably regrets ever allowing it to go forward, but I knew it would be a hit. And a hit is a relative term because that book, although it’s sold well compared to other paranormal books, it never really pierced the veil into the larger public. And that’s we’re hoping to do with the film, is to attract a larger audience beyond the UFO paranormal field to even if it seems sort of rudimentary to bring people along step by step on how the story unfolded. We want to try to appeal to a much broader audience.

Rojas: I wonder, it sounds like you really sympathize with Bob Bigelow’s concerns with people coming to their ranch. However, you’re a journalist and I’m sure that you’re also, you have this compulsion to share information. So, how did you feel about it? You probably understood his concern that between the time of course you wanted to share information.

Knapp: Well, first and foremost, I made a promise to him. I know there are other journalists who operate differently, but look, this was a long-term study; there was no hurry, there was no reason to sprint. Of course, I wanted to tell the story and I would bug him and bug Colm about it periodically since I started learning what was going on there, and saying, “Look, we need to tell the world about this.” Eventually, Bob came to the conclusion himself and I think at the urging of Colm that after a period where this activity went underground, the Skinwalker, whatever you want to call it, this intelligence that’s there, it didn’t want to be hunted, and it made its intentions very clear in very dramatic ways. And it took his ball and wanted to go home, and when that happened, my arguments that maybe the world should know about it became more persuasive.

And Bob Bigelow figured, “Look, if I let you tell some of the story, maybe people will come forward with other hotspots that we could go study.” So, I wrote a series of newspaper articles in 2003 which means I kept my word for those seven years, didn’t say anything to anyone about Skinwalker. And I did a couple of newspaper articles and bam! they went all over the world. And after that, it became a little easier the cat was out of the bag. It became easier to convince Bob to let us do the book; again, without any photos and specific information about the location and without really identifying the Ranch family either.

And so, the book came out. And of course, he was right. I mean, as soon as the book came out, the place was overrun. I mean, not just the locals who would go out there in Friday night and take their girlfriend and have a little scare fest, or the UFO hunters who would really get obnoxious and go up to the property in the middle of the night, flash bulbs into the windows of the house, or the vandals who would rip off the fence post and steal things, or others who would go out there and have beer parties or whatever really caused some problems.

I remember being with Bob and having a conversation about that and I said, “Look, I’ll volunteer. I’ll go there, I’ll camp out, I’ll chase people away, I’ll be a security.” And he said, “No. We’ll do something else.” So, we flew on his jet, we took his chief of security and went out there on a particular weekend. And he had a bunch of equipment on me and I was in this camo gear and had like a million candle-powered spotlight and I was stationed at the front gate, and his security guy was positioned at the back gate, and we were chasing people off. And I wasn’t there 10 minutes at the front gate when the first truck full of people came up, and I thought they saw me sitting in the bushes in this lawn chair, but they have noticed me, so I jumped up and they were coasting down the road, they turned off their lights, and turned off the engine, just coasted right up to the gate. I jumped out with this million candle-powered spotlight and turned it on and man you could hear them shriek, they fire up this truck and peel it backwards down the road. And I figured by the time that story gets told online, it will be a nine foot tall bigfoot with a laser beam attacking me off the back.

Rojas: Right. It will be Gort, like the big alien.

Knapp: Yeah.

Rojas: That’s really funny.

Knapp: But after that, Bob could see he had a problem, so that was when he started to have round-the-clock security and he had teams from Bigelow Aerospace who would rotate in and out for 10-day shifts. And a lot of those guys, if not most of those guys had their own dramatic experiences, and some of them, as tough as they are, ex-cops, ex-commando, ex-military police, those kind of people, they wouldn’t go back.

Rojas: And one of the reason I’m curious about this is because I kind of put myself into his shoes. If I was in that situation, would I feel guilty. I wonder if you did at all? Now, personally, I feel like getting the information out is so important that it would justify it in my mind. Did you have a tinge of guilt?

Knapp: A little bit, but I’ll have to admit that something even worse is that I got a little quite curious thrill out of being able to know stuff that nobody else knew.

Rojas: Oh, yeah.

Knapp: And of course, you’ve had, I’m sure you’ve had this mental conversation with yourself Alejandro, what if somebody came to you and said, “We’ll let you in, but you can’t tell anybody.” That’s a tough decision to make. Now, I didn’t have that kind of agreement. My agreement was I couldn’t tell anybody until they gave the green light. These were people that I have known for a long time that I trusted and I wanted them to trust me, and I wanted to get around with other people who can trust people. I’m in an information business. I want people in that particular field and others who work on those topics and in sensitive positions to feel they can trust me; and it’s worked out pretty well. I mean, it worked out pretty well.

Rojas: Yeah. I mean, I am the same, and I think that is why I get in a lot of things, because I’m, of course, very careful about sharing information when they ask me not to, but I think you’ll find this interesting, is that the only time I’ve been in this situation was with MUFON with the Bigelow Project because they asked us to sign non-disclosures and at that time I was representing MUFON on PR, so I said no, I said it’s better, I feel for myself, if I don’t know because then if you don’t tell me what I’m not supposed to share, I won’t accidentally share it, if somebody’s asking questions, and little did I know, this was during the time that Bigelow was working with the government doing investigations.

Knapp: Yeah. I know how you feel. I mean, as journalists, we have to sort of figure out whether we’re crossing a line. I never felt I crossed the line because the promise I had made, I kept and I never revealed information. I knew someday I’d be able to record it and I wasn’t in a hurry because this was a long-term study, a long term project. And because they didn’t have any conclusions, there was no impending timeline, a critical point at which we needed to go forward with something. And Bigelow kept his word. When he finally gave me the green light, I was allowed to report it all. There was no restriction that I couldn’t report anything about NIDS. Now, there were–it becomes more complicated a little bit later, but I’m sure we’re going to get into that.

Rojas: Yes, we will. Before we get into that though, another fun story that you told us the other day was how you were used as bait; that you didn’t have your own experiences, but you were in the situation where you possibly could have, so I was wondering if you could share that story.

Knapp: That would have been 1991, I think. So, it was the first time I went to the ranch with a photographer to start shooting on the documentary. And so, I’ve been hearing about the property for over six years at that point, about the kinds of experiences that it happened both to the rancher family and to the NIDS personnel who’ve been on the ranch for a long time by that point, and there were some spooky stuff. The UFOs, wow, I’de love to see a UFO, orbs that they were talking  about, yup, would love to see those, I’m not really crazy about seeing a cattle mutilated in front of me. There was a story about a giant cloud, a dark cloud that sort of step over the mind of businesses, but we can get into that a little bit later; that was kind of spooky. The 8-ft tall, 9-ft tall creature that crawls out of the worm-hole looking tunnel; that was kind of spooky. And then, in the middle homestead, which is where most of the really weirdest and most disturbing stuff happen, there had been a visitors to the property when the rancher family, the Gormans I’ll call them, had still been there before NIDS was there.

And he was, said he was drawn to the property, big Grizzly Adams type dude, drawn to the property, didn’t know what it was, he wanted to meditate and the rancher let him out into the pasture. He and his son said, “Alright, fine. You can spend a couple of minutes, we’ll take out in the middle homestead.” And they went off to the side and kind of kept an eye on the guy chuckling to themselves. And he was there in the field for a couple of minutes, his head to the sky, his eyes closed, his arms lifted up, and his palms on the skies as well. And they hear that cowbell off in the distance and the rancher realizes, “Hey, you know what, I don’t have any cowbells on my cows.”

And then, they see this thing moving through the trees, it’s like a predator, like in the movie Predator; a camouflage opaque sort of a critter, large, moving through the trees, it comes out of the trees, it goes right at this Grizzly Adams dude, the rancher was just about to warn him that something was happening and this creature gets right up to the guy and roars, and it’s a roar like a lion roar, you can hear it a mile away. This guy just about crapped his pants, he jumps backwards, falls on the ground, this thing, whatever it was in camo mode goes back into the trees and disappears. And the rancher comes rushing over and the guy was petrified, the rancher had to pry himself off this guy. They let him off at the front gate and he left screaming, yelling, “This is Satan, it’s the devil, it’s evil.” And they kind of laughed about it because they didn’t know what that creature was. Well, that is the spot where they stopped me to be used as bait.

So, we’re out there the first night that I spent on the property and we tried to do all the things that had historically attracted the attention of whatever it is. The arrival of strangers would be one thing that would do it. We made ourselves, our presence known in multiple ways. We built a fire out in the middle homestead, and did interviews, and made a bunch of noise, made our presence obvious. And then, we dug in the ground. We got an earthmover and dug in the ground just to move things around because that had been the most effective way to get the attention of whatever is there, at least, during the time that NIDS was there.


 
So, we did all that stuff, and then, Colm says, “I got an idea. Let’s put you on a chair in the middle homestead and we’ll leave you there and see what happens.” So, they hooked up like a couple of microphone, and a Geiger counter, and a couple of other things, put me on this little white plastic chair in the middle homestead where the predator thing had come out where the black cloud had come out, and they left me there and went a couple of 100 yards away with the cameras and the telephoto lenses to watch to see if something came to get me. And I told that story in the film. I was trying to be brave and everything, but I couldn’t quite get it out of my head. There were some bad stuff that had happened out there and I don’t mind seeing UFOs and couple of other things, but I really didn’t want to run into predator and have it roar like that. But nothing came to get me other than mosquitoes.

A lot of people haven’t been so lucky, I think it is an interactive quality, we can get into this later if you want, but whatever it is that’s there, it kind of sizes you up. The people who’ve had the worst experiences are those who’ve had a cavalier attitude or defiant attitude or confrontational. The people who bring guns, for example, and are going to take this on, I’m not afraid of anything, like commando, a gung-ho kind of attitude; those are the ones who’ve had really, really had some bad experiences that extend beyond the ranch. So, yeah, I was bait, I didn’t like it, and I don’t really want to do it again.

Rojas: That’s interesting what you said just there, about how the attitude has–it may have an effect. What was your attitude, I guess, what was your mindset as you went through this? Do you think you’ve, maybe, had more of a respect for what happens at this place?

Knapp: Absolutely. I mean, Colm had prepared me. He had told me that he always makes mental preparations when he’s going to the ranch. He would always do it even though when he was going there all the time, is that he sort of girds his loins in a mental sense, but it is a respectful attitude; we’re hear to learn kind of a thing, you show us what you’ve got if you want to show it to us, but I’m not going to push the idea. Now, the result for me has been I’ve never seen anything. I mean, I never see anything dramatic anyway. I’ve seen some lights on one of the trips that Jeremy and Matt Adams, and I made in the middle homestead that we couldn’t really explain. They weren’t natural source that we know of and not electronic in any way, it’s not gear that was there. And there’s some other tiny, little things that have happened during my business, but nothing anywhere close to the kinds of things that we described in the book.

So, I don’t know why that is. It frustrated me greatly because I don’t know of anyone else, who’s gone as many times as I have who has not seen something for, who has not have experience, but I hope that I have conveyed to whatever it is that I am respectful and maybe it’ll show me, at some point, when I’m worthy. but I’m kind of glad that some of the things that have happened to other people have not happened to me. And yeah, the people who have gone in with a bad attitude are the ones who’ve had the worst experiences.

Rojas: Yeah. I do want to get into it, because like you said, we’re all interested in this field, and want to experience something or see that what we’re looking into is a real phenomena. So, like you said, some of this is kind of scary and I was wondering if you could share the story of the black cloud that affected the researcher.