The Uinta Basin had a record before the ranch had a name. A Roosevelt science teacher, Junior Hicks, logged more than 400 sightings from 1951, and Frank Salisbury wrote the wave up in The Utah UFO Display with a Hynek foreword. In 1995 the Sherman family reported craft, orange "doorways" in the air and cattle lost without tracks or blood.

Robert Bigelow bought the place in 1996 and put NIDS on it, with Colm Kelleher running eight years of watch. Kelleher and George Knapp's book reached DIA analyst James Lacatski, whose own sighting in the ranch kitchen in 2007 helped start AAWSAP. The ranch became the Pentagon program's field site, and visitors reported the effects following them home.

Under Brandon Fugal the ranch became a television laboratory. One of its scientists, Jim Segala, took sensors into Basin homes and counts about 600 events where several channels spiked within seconds of a reported sighting. The same Bigelow later carried a disclosure report into the Oval Office, days before the order that produced war.gov/ufo.