Terry Sherman's Bulletproof Giant Wolf at Skinwalker Ranch

The ranch lies south of Fort Duchesne in Uintah County, Utah, bordering the Ute reservation. The Myers family owned it from 1934 to 1994 and reported nothing strange. In the autumn of 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman bought it. They had just moved from New Mexico. The homestead had stood empty for almost seven years.

It came after rain. The grass was wet. Terry Sherman, called "Tom Gorman" in the book that later told the story, saw an animal loping toward the family from about 400 yards away. His father, his wife Gwen, their teenage son and their 12-year-old daughter were with him. It was a wolf. Nearly three times the size of any wolf he had seen. About 200 pounds, its head level with his father's chest. "Massive muscles rippled beneath its shiny gray-silver coat." Its eyes were "a shocking shade of light blue that penetrated the soul."

"The animal began walking casually toward the family, unconcerned but obviously determined to make some kind of contact." It looked tame. Terry's father petted it. Then, without warning, it clamped its jaws on a calf's head through the corral bars.

Terry kicked it in the ribs, again and again. His father beat it with a baseball bat. Nothing. Terry fired a .357 Colt Magnum into its ribs, then twice into its upper abdomen. On the third shot it let go of the calf. A fourth, near the heart, and it backed off about 30 feet. His son had fetched the guns. A .30-06 round near the shoulder. Then one into the chest. "A sizable chunk of flesh detached from the exit wound and lay on the grass."

"It didn't yelp, didn't pause, and didn't bleed." Then, with a last unhurried look at the stunned family, the wolf turned slowly and began to trot away across the grass.

They followed. Across the field, through cottonwoods and Russian olives, toward the creek. The prints were clear in the wet ground, some an inch deep. There was no blood. Terry put the chase at about a mile. About 25 yards from the water the tracks sank nearly two inches into mud. They went on five yards. Then they stopped, with about 60 feet still to the river. "The tracks simply vanished." It was near sundown when the family headed back.

No casts of the tracks or analysis of the flesh have been reported. The wolf is absent from the family's first press interview, Zack Van Eyck's "Frequent Fliers?" in the Deseret News on 30 June 1996. It first appeared in George Knapp's 2002 series "Path of the Skinwalker", then in Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005) by Colm Kelleher and Knapp. Frank Salisbury held lengthy phone conversations with Terry Sherman, who reportedly contended that many things in the book "only resembled a true account of his experiences." Retellings disagree on the bite, the weapons, the number of shots, and the smell, which later became sulfur or rotting flesh.

Robert Sheaffer, writing in Skeptic, called the parsimonious explanation a family inventing claims before selling the ranch. Barry Greenwood said the ranch was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

In 1996 Robert Bigelow bought the ranch and kept Terry Sherman on as caretaker. His National Institute for Discovery Science monitored it until 2004, though the wolf had come and gone before NIDS arrived. The book later drew DIA official James Lacatski to the ranch, a visit that fed into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The bulletproof wolf has since been retold in documentaries, podcasts and comics, and it remains the opening chapter of the ranch's legend.