Brendan Jesus
Rather than continue my rambling from last week regarding Lue Elizondo’s book, or complaining about disclosure, we’re just going to get right into the meat of Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch. Honestly, the back and forth between the Elizondo and anti-Elizondo camps have made UFO Twitter incredibly frustrating. It’s become nothing more than mudslinging and name-calling. So, let’s jump right into this action-packed episode.
Worms!!!
“Someone Was Here” starts with Duane and Chad Ollinger using a drill at a part of the ranch, but we don’t get too many visual clues of which part of the ranch they are on. They mention how they’re still looking for a dry entrance to the cavern.
Later, we find out Chad sent the worms Charlie Boy found to a biologist. He video calls with biologist Forrest Galante. Forrest says the worms were larvae of either horseflies or deer flies. Get ready to be grossed out. Forrest tells Chad that adult horseflies lay eggs in the air. When the eggs hatch, they’ll drop into the water. That means what Charlie Boy found must have come from an open-air system within the cave. And this is corroborated by Forrest who says there is no doubt the horseflies are getting into the cavern and laying their eggs above water. When posed with the question of how Forrest would go about finding a dry entrance, Forrest doubles down and says the way to find the dry entrance is to follow the horseflies.
Pardon My Petroglyph
Eric Drummond, Chad, and Charlie Boy head out into the hills to look for any possible dry entrances to the cave system. Fairly shortly into their exploration, Eric finds a very fresh animal carcass. Charlie Boy points out a pair of indiscernible tracks near the carcass. Oddly enough, the carcass is all that is here. No skin, fur, or bones. What type of predator would take the skin and fur, but not the meat? There is a question posed about whether they might have scared off whatever predator this carcass belonged to.
We get a cutaway to local resident Shirley Lloyd. Shirley talks about how she and her husband had a 20-acre farm with cows. At around 3 A.M. she would hear an ungodly sounding creature scream. The cows would freak out. And she was damn sure the sound didn’t come from coyotes. Shirley posits this creature is what causes the mutilations around the Uintah Basin.
As Eric, Chad, and Charlie Boy continue looking around, they find more parts of this mutilated animal. It just so happens these animal parts lead toward an alcove that has an open-air entrance. Someone brings up the possibility of this hole being an entrance to a family of mountain lions. Of course, Chad is hell-bent on going in.
Luckily, Eric was well prepared. Eric pulls out a half-face respirator for Chad. The respirator has particulate cartridges and is used to protect the wearer from poisonous gasses and the transmission of hantavirus, which is an airborne disease caused by rodents. There is also an oxygen meter for Chad to monitor the surrounding O2 levels. They hook up Chad with a rope in case they need to assist with a hasty exit.
Chad gets onto his stomach and army-crawls into the hole. The hole is full of rodent bones and small prey bones. After about 20 feet in, the hole starts to descend. As it descends, it gets slightly bigger. Chad eventually gets about 100 feet into the hole. That’s when panic hits. The hole is now starting to close in on itself and his radio starts giving some extreme static. Then, the O2 meter starts beeping and Chad begins getting very dizzy. Eric and Charlie Boy realize something is wrong and begin extracting Chad as quickly as possible.
Thankfully, Chad is safely extracted, but it takes him a few minutes to catch his breath. He reveals what he saw, which was the cave coming to a dead end. This means they need to keep looking for an open-air cave entrance. The three men continue searching and find something incredibly intriguing: petroglyphs.
Petroglyphs etched onto the tall rock face show multiple, as they describe, Aztec-looking people, possibly multiple family units. Eric takes some photos of the petroglyphs and has Chad banana-for-scale their size. Simply put, the petroglyphs are large.
Eric, Chad, and Charlie Boy head back to the Miner’s Shack to reveal what they’ve found to Duane. This is where things get dicey. Duane ponders the possibility of these petroglyphs acting as a sort of epitaph for a Native American burial ground. If there do turn out to be bodies buried below, then their operation would, rightfully, be shut down. Later that night the four men sit around a fire. Eric discusses how, along with being shut down, Native American bodies on this land would mean a loss of some property, too.
A Deadly Sign
Everything changes in the early morning hours. In the middle of the site adjacent to the water pit, Duane finds a mutilated deer. I got chills. While finding a mutilated deer in the middle of the woods is strange and sketchy, it’s an easier pill to swallow. Finding a mutilated deer carcass in the dead center of your dig site… now that’s a sign.
The carcass’s head is sheered off completely in what looks like one singular slice; the deer’s stomach is sliced from neck to genitals. It’s clearly a sign. Chad pulls up in a Side-by-Side and is taken aback by what they’ve found. He thinks it’s odd that a predator would kill an animal, take its head, and leave the good meat behind. This prompts Charlie Boy and Chad to check some of their trail cams. One of the trail cams reveals the presence of a three-foot-tall wolf. Chad interjects that locals say the skinwalker’s natural form is… a wolf.
Local resident Tonia Steffey reveals something ominous, and potentially criminal. Tonia talks about some strange experiences she had at her house. A tribal member would walk up and down in front of her house. He would lean on her fence and dance around it. This led Tonia to reach out to a shaman friend, who quickly said she needed to do something about this man. According to the shaman, this tribal member was trying to suck the good out and let the evil in.
Then, Tonia started seeing a big dog. (I laughed out loud at this part.) Tonia says she never saw the guy and the dog at the same time. After some time, the dog would start getting deeper and deeper onto her property. One morning, all four of her horses were standing butt-to-butt while the dog circled them. That’s when Tonia grabbed a gun and stared down the dog. She pulled the trigger and the dog fell over, dead. Her husband went to check on the dog but couldn’t find and blood or bullet holes. (I’ve heard stories of outside cats getting shot and due to their size and amount of hair, their owners didn’t realize until days later, so I really just think she killed a random dog.) Two days later, news came out that this tribal member was found dead in his house. Tonia ends by saying the dog (tribal member) was a skinwalker.
At the very least, Tonia killed an innocent dog. If the tribal member WAS a skinwalker, then she killed a tribal member. Neither option is really good.
Back at the ranch, Chad thinks out loud and wonders if the mutilated animals are just a distraction. And I kind of believe it. They’re at the Miner’s Shack and Duane has an idea. He says if he were to hide treasures, he’d make sure he did a damn good job of hiding it. They need to think like them. Even though they haven’t figured out why those petroglyphs are there, they will continue looking for a dry entrance, while making sure to not disturb any ground.
Dry Entrance FOUND
Chad jumps in his Side-by-Side and embarks with the camera crew. They head south of the dig site with the hope of finding a dry entrance before the sun goes down. After some searching, the sun goes down and they mutually decide to head back to base camp. As they head back to the Side-by-Side, Chad finds something monumental. A gigantic cave opening.
Bats fly out at Chad, but it doesn’t faze him. He found it!
The music gets incredibly intense as Chad calls Duane, Eric, and Charlie Boy. He tells them to get out here NOW. The three men show up. Eric’s initial impression is that this entrance looks like it was dug a long time ago. Interestingly, there are no drill holes for dynamite, which implies this was dug by those who didn’t have access to explosive materials. Eric is fairly certain this was hand-dug.
They gear up and head into the cave entrance. Eric has an idea and tells everyone to shut their lights off. He pulls out a UV light and shines it on the wall. Part of me was hoping they’d find evidence of the dyed water from Episode 3 “Mormon Gold.” No dyed water is found, but they do find a healthy amount of bat guano lining the cave walls!
The crew heads deeper into the cave and gets roughly 200 feet in. At this point, Eric is hesitant to go forward while Charlie Boy thinks they’ve come this far and shouldn’t stop yet. With the most comedic timing of all comedic timing, Eric is face-bashed by a bat! The whole team has a good laugh at this. They decide to call it a night at this point.
The next day, Charlie Boy heads to the county records office in town. He speaks with a nice lady who takes him to the information he needs. She pulls out a book of records that date back to 1880. It turns out, this land was transferred to a private buyer from the government, meaning at one point this was all government land. (Technically, it’s Native American land, but for brevity, I’ll just assume we all know this.) Unfortunately, they do not keep tribal records at this office, which is laughable. I mean, why would the government keep records of the mass execution of Native Americans and the theft of their land?
For some reason, Charlie Boy takes this as a blanket ‘no’ to whether or not there is a Native American burial ground on Blind Frog Ranch. The records lady also pulls out the black cap mining book, which shows something very interesting. Mining plans revealed a concerted effort to dig on the ranch with the hopes of finding gold and other precious metals. Who were these mining plans signed by? None other than GALE RHOADES. That last name might ring a bell as in Episode 3 we learned the lore of Thomas Rhoades and the Lost Rhoades Mine. Could Gale Rhoades have been helping a family member hide their gold? Or, could Gale Rhoades be trying to FIND her family’s gold? Who knows.
When Duane hears this news, well, you could bet he’s damn happy.
Final Thoughts
What a jam-packed episode! While we didn’t get anyone chased by unseen woodland animals as previously, we did get some intriguing finds. The cave entrance could be the find to bust this whole thing wide open! We don’t really know how far it goes back, but the cave they walk through heads TOWARD the water pit. So it’s clearly plausible that this could be heading right toward the cavern.
What I find most educationally interesting is the Gale Rhoades connection. There’s a probability it could just be another person with the last name Rhoades, but that would be a bit too convenient. I have been on the fence about whether or not there truly is anything in the caverns, but everything we find just makes it seem more and more clear.
