Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
BALLARD, Uintah County — On recent episodes of the History Channel's "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch," Cameron Fugal can be seen flying a helicopter while conducting experiments over the eastern Utah paranormal hotspot.
His flight instruments aren't reading accurately, while his craft is being buffeted by winds that don't truly exist. Fans of the show know that mechanical and technical devices often don't work as they should on the ranch.
Fugal, CEO at Provo-based Aero Dynamic Jets, has been fascinated by planes and flying from the beginning. His parents had told him before he could even speak, he was frequently looking to the sky at planes flying overhead.
"In hindsight, now, more than ever, I see the significant role my parents and grandparents played in developing my work ethic, my interests and my sense of entrepreneurship," Fugal recalled.
His grandfather and father were self-employed as general contractors and he and his siblings worked for both, but were also encouraged to follow their own dreams. For all of Fugal's childhood, his parents had limited means but sacrificed what money and time they could to help their children pursue those dreams.
For Fugal, that meant starting work on his pilot's license at the age of 15. His goal was to have his first solo flight on his 16th birthday, prior to even getting his driver's license. His earliest ambitions were to be a pilot with the U.S. Air Force, or with the Navy like his grandfather, or to become a commercial airline pilot.
Destined to fly
Throughout high school, virtually every dollar Fugal earned went toward gaining more flight hours.
Following his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then marriage, Fugal and his new wife Danielle sacrificed and saved while he worked construction in order for him to obtain ratings he needed to become a commercial pilot, eventually becoming youngest and least experienced person to receive a single pilot jet rating from a Kansas flight school.
Nearly simultaneously, Fugal's father's construction company was now growing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Niels Fugal Sons Co. began running fiber optic cable for burgeoning internet and telecom-related services in addition to natural gas lines.
Taking to the skies
Travel for the company's employees was becoming burdensome and a company plane made sense. Fugal went from supervising a ditch-digging crew and operating a backhoe, to piloting a company plane — and, eventually a company jet — full time.
Fugal's younger brother of six years, Matt Fugal, has a passion for cars; he describes himself as a "gearhead" and his brother as a "wingnut." Matt Fugal most enjoys the finance side of running a business and never had a desire to fly.
By 2005, the construction business had merged with a public company that didn't see the value in maintaining a plane — the hangar at Provo Municipal Airport and the company jet needed to be repurposed. Aero Dynamic Jets was born.
Matt Fugal left his career in commercial real estate lending in 2011 and is currently the COO and a partner at Aero Dynamic Jets, a Part 135 FAA-certified charter company, one of only two in Utah.
Today, the company operates both a Cessna Citation CJ3 jet and an Airbus H130 helicopter and the hangar will accommodate more planes as the company continues to grow. The jet is used for chartered passenger flights, business and personal flights; entertainers have also flown on the jet to Park City for the Professor of Rock Live concert series. The helicopter is used for short-range cargo and photography missions.
Cameron and Matt's brother, Brandon Fugal, a prominent Utah commercial real estate developer, is a client and a partner in the helicopter. They use it to provide potential real estate clients with aerial views of a property.
Which brings us back to Skinwalker Ranch, located east of Roosevelt, in the Uintah Basin.
Unexplained occurrences
Brandon Fugal has owned the ranch since 2016 and has put together a science team including nationally known physicist and defense contractor Travis Taylor. The team is attempting to explain paranormal activities that have long been reported on the ranch, everything from poltergeists to UFO sightings, to the potential Skinwalkers (shape-shifters) of Ute and Navajo tribal lore.
The team's efforts are often thwarted by technical glitches and device failures that don't occur off the ranch, including while flying drones and model rockets.
Aero Dynamic's Airbus helicopter is state-of-the-art and designed for high-altitude Utah flights. The helicopter is often used in experiments at the ranch, particularly above the mysterious "triangle" where unseen physical objects have been observed in the skies by a variety of scientific instruments, including the helicopter's radar.
If I had to fly over the ranch with only instruments to rely on to fly safely, well, I wouldn't do it.
– Cameron Fugal, pilot
The obvious question is why a pilot would risk the helicopter, and all onboard, considering so many potential technical failures above and on the ranch. Matt and Cameron Fugal's very first trip to the ranch resulted in experiences that caused them to leave sooner than the rest of their group — they are no longer skeptics.
According to Cameron Fugal, the complexity of flying helicopters in Utah's already thin air can't be understated. Flying one when the instruments can't be relied upon is another thing, entirely.
While helicopters are no less safe than an airplane, he said helicopters require constant inputs from the pilot, whereas an airplane can fly straight and level when the pilot takes his hands off the controls.
"Unlike flying a jet at 40,000 feet, where my instruments are depended upon heavily; in a helicopter, we have great instrumentation but I rely on it much less — my peripheral vision is what I use most in a hover, for example," said Cameron Fugal. "But if I had to fly over the ranch with only instruments to rely on to fly safely, well, I wouldn't do it."
Whenever the helicopter experiences instrumentation or flight issues, including being pushed off course by an invisible force he describes as magnets repelling one another, he says the anomalies always end when the experiment ends. Cameron Fugal says, in fact, the team often announces verbally that an experiment has ended.
It's as if something on the ranch simply wants to remain unidentified.
