Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch’ Season 3 on Netflix, Where Those Who Want To Believe In Aliens, Conspiracy Theories, and Alien Conspiracy Theories Continue To Do So 

Season 3 of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch originally aired in 2022 on History, which is currently airing season 5 of this reality series, where the focus is on a group of self-styled paranormal researchers at Skinwalker, “considered the epicenter of the strangest and most disturbing phenomena on earth.” (The name comes from a story out of Navajo folklore.) Beyond the hosts of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, it’s not clear that anyone actually considers this 500-acre Utah ranch as ground zero for anything, let alone alien conveyances. But they will require season after eleven-episode season to not share any real findings and talk around saying anything factual about whatever’s going down at the ranch.  

THE SECRET OF SKINWALKER RANCH – SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A guy bounces down a road amid the cliffs and mesas of northeast Utah. “I’m Dr. Travis Taylor. As an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and optical scientist, I’ve always been intensely curious about the unknowns in the universe.”

The Gist: Taylor is one of the regular hosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and as he returns to the remote property for a new round of investigations, he’s joined by Erik Bard, Thomas Winterton, and Bryant “Dragon” Arnold. They’re all at the helipad to greet Brandon Fugal, a corporate type who has owned Skinwalker Ranch since 2016, and with Fugal on the chopper is Gary R. Herbert, the former governor of Utah. Fugal says Herbert is there to provide “another level of oversight,” which could mean a lot of things or absolutely nothing. But that’s how most things are explained on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.

Going into season 3 of the show, Taylor is super excited about “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, and a report by the federal government that acknowledged their existence. While the report includes research into all kinds of potentially weird things in the air – hysterics over the Chinese spy balloon incident come to mind – the guys at Skinwalker have narrowed the report’s focus in order to prove��.well, something. They’ve got video of a lot of little pinpricks of light appearing in the sky over the ranch, and an important-enough-looking control room full of flat screen TVs and electronic monitoring equipment. They casually throw around phrases like “thermal imaging anomalies that might even be explained as wormholes, as Albert Einstein described,” and love to gas each other up about what “the data” may or may not show. Shocker: it’s always the latter.

The people who gather at Skinwalker Ranch are on the hunt for aliens. The people on a show like 28 Days Haunted, well, they’re on the hunt for ghosts. And while both sets of these people are fully committed to their research, at least for the purposes of television, it’s not a spoiler to say that nobody’s uncovering anything concrete, whether paranormal or extraterrestrial. The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is selling the power of belief. Which is a force with stronger pull than anything they’re monitoring in any of the ranch’s fabled mystery spots.  

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? History also has a show called The Curse of Oak Island, which shares a format and occasional cast member with The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. (Over 11 seasons of Oak Island, and its mysterious treasures have somehow never been uncovered.) And did you know History is still airing new episodes of Ancient Aliens? The 20th season of the basic cable pseudoscience mainstay premiered in January.  

Our Take: Why are these guys wearing sidearms? That’s just one of strange phenomena occurring on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, where a group of awfully self-serious white men stand around and “take readings,” “record radiation spikes,” and say a version of the word “anomaly” every thirty seconds. Their endgame is always the same. To uncover any insight they can into the ranch’s reported occurrences and recorded disturbances. Or, failing that, to blather incessantly about the same random crap using the language of pseudoscience. The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is like if AI wrote a show using only the most conspiratorial and scientifically brainwormed subreddits. But hey, good on them for managing to squeeze it out for five seasons. Nobody else should be making time for any of this.     

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “As we move into this year’s investigation, the ranch is a dangerous place. What’s in store for us? When we start pushing further and poking the hornets’ nest harder that we’ve ever poked before, how’s the ranch gonna kick back?” This is a quote from Tom Winterton, whose official title on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is “ranch superintendent.” With a job like that, it seems like he’d have already poked those nests? At the very least, Winterton should be familiar with how a ranch kicks back. 

Sleeper Star: Helicopter as legitimizer. For some reason, the guys on Skinwalker Ranch consider a chopper’s involvement proof for their cockamamie research. Because everybody knows that if you bring such an aircraft into a hover over the ranch’s “infamous triangle area,” the GPS devices you toss out of it will automatically sense an alien presence.   

Most Pilot-y Line: “Between 2008 and 2013,” current owner Brandon Fugal says, “when Robert Bigelow was the owner of Skinwalker Ranch, there was a black-budget Pentagon-funded program that studied many of the claims associated with the ranch.” Big if true! But this is a Wendy’s.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Ain’t nobody got time for a pretentious, humorless series like The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and its circular pursuit of what it considers facts.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.