UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 07 · OCTOBER 23, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D174Utah Ranch Investigation Report, April 2010
This report covers two trips by a four-person Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies team — two investigators and two scientists — to Fort Duchesne, Utah, on March 22–26 and April 19–23, 2010, as part of the DIA-funded AAWSAP work. The ranch’s name is redacted throughout, as are witnesses’ names; staff appear as numbered “AAP Person” entries. One witness table does say a creature ran toward “Skinwalker Ranch,” and witnesses refer to a “Skinwalker Ridge.” We read all 60 pages, though the later spreadsheet pages are partly illegible in the scan.
What witnesses told the team
By May 7, 2010, the report says, more than 25 people had been interviewed, mostly at home, including police officers, ranchers, business owners and Native American residents. The accounts are recorded as told: bipedal “dog-like” creatures six to seven feet tall, a hairy arm reaching through a bedroom window, a “Basket Lady,” a pterodactyl-like bird with a 12-foot wingspan, small hairy “troll” figures, a rippling “portal” seen twenty years earlier, and balls of light, including a red one a man said came within inches of his face and left it numb. An early map extends creatures’ reported paths to three crossing points near the ranch and Bottle Hollow reservoir; witness drawings and tables of creature and light descriptions fill the back half.
Instruments and results
The team set up Moultrie game cameras (seven at first, nine listed by the end, five of them marked out of service), noted strong radio signals near 1210–1238 MHz on the mesa — a band the report itself says is allocated to satellite navigation and military use — and placed spiderwort and tobacco plants as radiation “biosensors” plus a seed-growth trial. It was too early for any plant results.
The one hard result undercuts the story it was meant to test. A laboratory dated April 27, 2010 found that the hair pulled from a fence after a reported “Skinwalker” chase was dog, with a sequence common in domestic dogs; a BAASS email notes that three samples, including a control hair from one of the property’s free-roaming dogs, share an identical sequence, and argues the fence hair came from that same dog, and a hair stuck in a red-stained rock as raccoon. The report draws no wider conclusion. For more on this program, see our coverage of the AAWSAP files and the BAASS monthly reports such as DOW-UAP-D169.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released October 23, 2026, quoted in full
This document is an administrative, programmatic, or contractor-produced record related to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-administered program active from 2008 to 2012. AAWSAP’s official scope of work identified 12 technical research areas relating to potential aerospace threats over a time horizon of more than 40 years. As part of the broader program record, the file documents how AAWSAP was scoped, organized, tasked, funded, executed, or described at a particular point in time.
This April 2010 Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) investigation report documents field deployments to a Utah property and surrounding communities during March and April 2010. The report states that BAASS personnel interviewed local residents, law enforcement officers, ranchers, business owners, and tribal community members about reported anomalous events; used handheld sensors to collect environmental measurements; planned plant-based biosensor experiments; and sought photographic, acoustic, and chemical evidence of purported anomalous phenomena. It also records extensive reported accounts involving “dog-like bipedal creatures,” orbs of light, “little people,” “prehistoric-looking” birds, among other phenomena, and states that BAASS intended to use interactive methods to attempt communication with the presumed source of reported anomalous activity.