It's possible my father-in-law has just come up with an explanation for some of the phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch.
For some background my father-in-law is a retired High Voltage Electrical Engineer, he used to be chief Electrical Engineer at Carrington Powerstation near Manchester. More recently, although he's supposed to be retired (86yrs old) he's been consulting on various MOD projects and designed the electrical systems for a large container port and chemical manufacturer. I mention all this to show that he KNOWS electricity.
After watching a recent episode of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch I called my father-in-law because something seemed off about an experiment the team performed. In the episode previous to the one I was watching, the team at the ranch had discovered that there were some areas of the ground that showed very high conductivity readings. Much higher than you would normally expect.
They decided to perform an experiment at one of the sites that was showing high conductivity in the magnetometer survey. The experiment consisted of two metal rods hammered into the ground 50ft apart (approximately the size of the anomaly). The top of one pole was connected to the positive of a 12V car battery, the negative of the battery was connected to the positive of a multimeter and the negative of the multimeter was connected to the other pole, with the ground completing the circuit to the first pole.
The way the team were talking, they weren't expecting to see anything on the multimeter. This is where I started getting suspicious, as the earth does conduct electricity. Then I realised that to us in the UK, having an 'Earth' wire is normal, where in the US it is not. Only Travis, the NASA Engineer, seemed to know what he was talking about. When they hooked up the battery and made the circuit LIVE, the multimeter started showing 0.3amps, much higher than what Travis expected to see. Travis was asked if the high conductivity could cause some of the electrical phenomena people have experienced. His answer was "possibly, but where is the battery"?
It was this experiment I told my father-in-law about, as I thought he must have something to explain this. And boy I was right. He spent the next hour and a bit explaining how electrical circuits work, and how very high-voltage circuits work from the Power Station to the Sub-Station to your house. He explained that every electrical circuit needs a return and that the return from the sub-station to the Power Station is the Earth. He explained that the experiment they did worked as it should and that the results they were seeing are what he would expect. When questioned about the battery, he asked where the ranch was located again, I explained that it was in northern Utah, he asked about the climate, hot and dry for most of the year. He asked about the geology, lots of conductive metals in the dirt. This is when it all started to slot into space.
My father-in-law explained. The hot dry climate causes lots of lightning storms, but before it gets to the point of actual lightning the ground and air will become highly charged with electricity; Here is your missing battery. In the areas of high conductivity such as the ranch this can be concentrated and can cause the plasma to ignite and/or glow; Much in the same way as lightning is the charged air coming up from the ground to the clouds, then igniting. I asked the following questions:
Could this cause glowing balls of light - Yes
Could this cause the mesa to glow - Yes
Could this cause lights high up in the sky that appear then disappear as quickly as they came - Yes
Could this cause nausea and headaches - Yes
Could this cause rapid changes in temperature in an area - Yes
He then asked me if I had ever heard of St Elmo's Fire; At first I said "yes it's a film from the 1980's", then admitted that I had heard the term, but didn't know what it was. He gave me an explanation which I then looked up
Here.
So my father-in-law's explanation for the electrical phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch is intense St Elmo's Fire.
He then went on to tell me about how it was common for farmers in hot dry areas to get electrocuted from touching a cows horn. And that back in the day when farmers made haystacks, they would put a thinly thatched roof on it and push pitch-forks in to let the rain run off. Apparently these haystacks would build up a charge and electrocute the farmer when they touched the pitchfork.
Of course, none of this explains the other phenomena at the ranch such as the high Gamma radiations spikes, cattle mutilations, teleportation of cattle, poltergeist activity, and sightings of criptids.