Estimated reading time: 5-6 minutes
BALLARD, Uintah County – In recent episodes of the History Channel’s “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch,” Cameron Fugal can be seen flying a helicopter while conducting experiments on the paranormal hotspot in eastern Utah.
His flight instruments aren’t reading accurately, while his craft is being buffeted by winds that don’t really exist. Fans of the show know that mechanical and technical devices often don’t work as they should on the ranch.
Fugal, CEO of Provo-based Aero Dynamic Jets, has been fascinated by airplanes and flight since the beginning. His parents had told him before he could speak, that he often looked up at the planes flying overhead.
“In retrospect, now more than ever, I see the important 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 general contractors and he and his brothers worked for both, but were also encouraged to follow their own dreams. Throughout Fugal’s childhood, his parents had limited means, but they 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 age 15. His goal was to take his first solo flight on his 16th birthday, before he even got his driver’s license. His early ambitions were to be a pilot in the US Air Force, or in 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 earning more flight hours.
After his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and after marriage, Fugal and his new wife Danielle sacrificed and saved themselves while working in construction so that he could get the qualifications he needed to become a commercial pilot, eventually becoming the youngest. and the least experienced person to receive an airplane pilot rating from a Kansas flight school.
Almost simultaneously, Fugal’s father’s construction company was growing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Niels Fugal Sons Co. began running fiber optic cables for growing internet and telecommunications related services, in addition to natural gas lines.
Leading to heaven
Travel for company employees was becoming a burden and a company jet made sense. Fugal went from overseeing a trenching crew and operating a backhoe, to flying a company airplane and eventually a company jet full-time.
Fugal’s six-year-old younger brother, Matt Fugal, has a passion for cars; he describes himself as a “cog” and his brother as a “wingnut”. Matt Fugal enjoys the financial side of running a business more and never had the desire to fly.
In 2005, the construction business had merged with a public company that didn’t see the value in maintaining an airplane: the Provo Municipal Airport hangar and the company’s jet were 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 partner of Aero Dynamic Jets, an FAA Part 135 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 aircraft as the company continues to grow. The jet is used for chartered passenger flights, business and personal flights; entertainers have also flown to Park City for the Professor of Rock Live concert series. The helicopter is used for cargo missions and short-range photography.
Cameron and Matt’s brother Brandon Fugal, a prominent Utah commercial real estate developer, is a customer and partner of 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 built a scientific team that includes nationally known physicist and defense contractor Travis Taylor. The team is trying to explain long-reported paranormal activity at the ranch, from poltergeists to UFO sightings to potential Skinwalkers of Ute and Navajo tribal lore.
The team’s efforts are often thwarted by technical glitches and device failures that don’t occur outside the ranch, including when flying drones and model rockets.
Aero Dynamic’s Airbus helicopter is state-of-the-art and designed for high-altitude flights in Utah. The helicopter is often used in experiments at the ranch, especially above the mysterious “triangle” where invisible physical objects in the sky have been observed using a variety of scientific instruments, including the helicopter’s radar.
If I had to fly over the ranch with only instruments I could trust to fly safely, well, I wouldn’t.
– Cameron Fugal, pilot
The obvious question is why a pilot would risk the helicopter, and everyone on board, given so many potential technical failures above and on the ranch. Matt and Cameron Fugal’s first trip to the ranch resulted in experiences that made them leave before the rest of their group—they’re no longer skeptical.
According to Cameron Fugal, the complexity of flying helicopters in Utah’s already thin air cannot be understated. Flying one when you can’t trust the instruments is another thing entirely.
While helicopters are no less safe than a plane, he said helicopters require constant input from the pilot, while a plane can fly straight and level when the pilot takes his hands off the controls.
“Unlike flying a plane at 40,000 feet, where I rely heavily on my instruments; in a helicopter, we have a lot of instrumentation, but I rely on it a lot less; my peripheral vision is what I use the most in hovering, for example “, he said. Cameron Fugal. “But if I had to fly over the ranch with only instruments that I could trust to fly safely, well, I wouldn’t.”
Whenever the helicopter experiences instrumentation or flight problems, including being pushed by an invisible force he describes as magnets repelling each other, he says the anomalies always end when the experiment ends. Cameron Fugal says that in fact, the team often verbally announces that an experiment is over.
It’s like something on the ranch just wants to remain unidentified.
