Terry Sherman, a Utah rancher, owned the Uintah Basin property now known as Skinwalker Ranch with his wife, Gwen, from about 1994 to 1996. The family's accounts of lights, craft and cattle deaths, first published in a Utah newspaper in 1996, gave the ranch its modern reputation and drew the buyer who turned it into a long-running site of private anomaly research.

According to the Deseret News, Sherman moved to the Uintah Basin from Arizona at 17, and Gwen grew up there. The couple bought the roughly 480-acre ranch south of Fort Duchesne after it had stood empty for seven years, looking for a quiet place to live. In a June 30, 1996, story by Zack Van Eyck, the Shermans said they had repeatedly seen three kinds of craft, from a small box-like object with a white light to a huge ship, and had videotaped two sightings. They described three flattened circles of grass arranged in a triangle and the loss of seven cows, four of which vanished and three of which were found dead and partly mutilated. Sherman also said he had heard male voices speaking an unfamiliar language overhead while he was in a field with his dogs. "I don't know really what to think about it," he told the paper.

Within months, Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow bought the ranch, reportedly for $200,000, and ran round-the-clock observation there through his National Institute for Discovery Science. Sherman stayed on as a caretaker after the sale, according to the skeptic Robert Sheaffer. The 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker, by NIDS biochemist Colm Kelleher and journalist George Knapp, retold the family's experiences under pseudonyms, with Sherman appearing as Tom Gorman. History.com later reported his account of firing a rifle at close range at a wolf several times larger than normal, with no apparent effect.

Sherman's accounts have been both retold and challenged. The best-known later story, recounted by Knapp in an August 2026 conversation with Bigelow, describes Sherman watching a blue-turquoise orb lead his dogs across a pasture, after which three of the dogs were killed. Writing in Skeptic in 2020, Sheaffer argued that the family made up the supernatural claims before selling, said many of the strangest incidents in Knapp and Kelleher's book were witnessed only by Sherman, and wrote that the family who had owned the land for 60 years before them denied that any phenomena occurred there. The book itself acknowledged that the investigators obtained very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena.

The ranch's current owner, Brandon Fugal, has credited the Sherman family's experiences with first bringing public attention to the property, and their story resurfaced in 2026 as Knapp and Bigelow revisited the NIDS years in public conversations. Three decades after the 1996 newspaper story, Sherman's account remains the starting point of the Skinwalker Ranch narrative.