Chris Bartel is an American photographer and former security professional who worked at locations central to modern UFO mythology. He served in security roles at the Nevada Test Site and at Skinwalker Ranch during the period when the Utah property was owned by Robert Bigelow and studied through BAASS. His job placed him on the ground during a private investigation that remains only partly documented in public.

Bartel’s working life placed him around two locations burdened by secrecy and legend: the Nevada Test Site and Skinwalker Ranch. At the ranch he served in a security role that required ordinary patrol, observation, and incident reporting rather than laboratory leadership. Afterward, photography became a way to document landscapes and process the psychological weight of the assignment. His later public criticism also complicated the polished television image of the property by foregrounding employee experience and health concerns.

Bartel has described unusual events, medical concerns, and a workplace culture in which guards recorded observations while receiving limited information about the larger research purpose. He has also questioned how personnel were treated and whether employees themselves may have functioned as subjects within the study. Those are Bartel’s recollections and interpretations, supported in part by photographs and contemporaneous associations but not by a complete released program archive.

Bartel is a firsthand institutional witness to Skinwalker Ranch from the period before the property became a television production. His testimony links private defense research, security practice, and reports of the hitchhiker effect, while his criticism of former employers provides an uncommon internal counterpoint. That combination has made him significant to UAP history and to discussion of the personal consequences reported by people who worked at the ranch.