Key takeaways
- The Skinwalker Ranch Pentagon report is DOW-UAP-D174, a 60-page 2010 BAASS file that never names the ranch: it calls it '[AAP Person 4] Ranch'
- The Skinwalker Ranch DNA test found dog hair on the fence and raccoon hair on a mesa rock, and BAASS accepted both results
- Seven game cameras went up at Skinwalker Ranch and the report contains no image from any of them
- BAASS planned 'games, puzzles' to contact whatever was at Skinwalker Ranch, including a padlocked Fibonacci tile box, and recorded no result
Jump to section 7 sections
- Did the Pentagon Release a Skinwalker Ranch Report?
- Skinwalker Ranch DNA Results: Dog and Raccoon
- Skinwalker Ranch Cameras: Seven Installed, No Image
- Skinwalker Ranch Puzzle Box: BAASS's Plan to Make Contact
- Skinwalker Ranch Radio Signal: What the Report Says
- Skinwalker Ranch Witnesses: Creatures, Lights and a Portal
- What Did the Pentagon's Contractor Find at Skinwalker Ranch?
The Pentagon's contractor went to Skinwalker Ranch in 2010 looking for creatures, lights and contact with whatever was causing them. It came back with dog hair, raccoon hair and a radio reading nobody had checked. That is the short version of the Skinwalker Ranch Pentagon report, DOW-UAP-D174, "Utah Ranch Investigation", a 60-page report by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), released by the Department of War on 23 October 2026.
Our Skinwalker Ranch Pentagon files page goes through the report section by section. This post is the quicker read: what the team went looking for, and what the laboratory sent back.
Did the Pentagon Release a Skinwalker Ranch Report?
Yes, though the report never uses the name. DOW-UAP-D174 calls the property "[AAP Person 4] Ranch" or "the Utah Ranch" throughout, with the name redacted. It is widely identified as Skinwalker Ranch because the places around it are left in clear: Fort Duchesne, Utah, the Bottle Hollow reservoir and "Skinwalker Ridge".
In the whole release, the phrase "Skinwalker Ranch" turns up only in a November 2009 BAASS memo about a website (DOW-UAP-D173), not in the ranch report itself. Our round-up of the Pentagon's seventh UFO file release covers the other documents in the batch.
BAASS held the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP contract from 2008 to 2010. The ranch report itself never mentions the DIA, AAWSAP or any contract. The link comes from the Department's AAWSAP tag on the file and from BAASS's own November 2010 capability report (DOW-UAP-D175), which cites the contract number and lists a "Utah Ranch Database" among eleven in its data warehouse. Everything in D174 is the contractor's account of its own work, not a government finding.
The "Utah Task Force" of two investigators and two scientists, plus a director, visited Fort Duchesne on 22 to 26 March and 19 to 23 April 2010. By 7 May they had spoken to "over twenty-five (25) people", mostly at home. The report lists four police officers, eleven Native Americans, twelve ranchers, six business owners and about fifteen members of the Mormon Church, but the groups overlap, so they don't add up to a total.
Skinwalker Ranch DNA Results: Dog and Raccoon
The Skinwalker Ranch DNA test found a dog and a raccoon. Of four hair samples sent to an outside laboratory, one matched raccoon and the other three shared a single canine sequence. BAASS concluded that the hair on the fence most likely came from a dog living on the same property.
The fence hair had a story attached. A couple of days before the March trip, a local man said a "Skinwalker" ran past his house in the dark, chased by his barking dogs, and hit his barbed-wire fence again and again. An investigator found fur on the wire where he said it struck.
The laboratory, whose name is redacted, received the samples on 2 April 2010 and reported on 27 April. Sample SU-01, hair stuck to a "red stained rock" found on the mesa in January, "matched reference Procyon lotor (raccoon) samples in GenBank". Samples SU-02 to SU-04 were two lots of fence hair and control hairs from one of the property's dogs. They "all exhibited the same canine HVI sequence", one the lab said occurs in 9.8% to 13.8% of random dogs.
A sequence carried by roughly one dog in ten can't pin hair to a single animal on its own, and BAASS said so. In an email of 3 May 2010 it noted that the control dog's coat was black and white like the fence hair, and that the property's dogs ran loose. The identical sequences suggested one dog, "(but not 100% definitive)". Then it gave its verdict:
"...given the strong physical similarity of the control hairs to the unknown hairs and that the dogs on [redacted] property run at will on the property strongly argue that the hairs are from the same individual."
BAASS email, 3 May 2010, DOW-UAP-D174 p.37
On the raccoon, BAASS added that residents had reported raccoons near the homesteads, "so this finding would not be out of the ordinary." None of this proves there was no creature that night. It shows the hair collected afterwards came from a dog, most likely one that lived there. The report's own summary still says the samples "are currently undergoing scientific DNA analysis": nobody went back and updated it.
Skinwalker Ranch Cameras: Seven Installed, No Image
BAASS put seven game cameras on Skinwalker Ranch and a neighbouring property in 2010, and the report contains no picture from any of them. Nor does it give any radiation, magnetic or soil reading, though all of those were listed as aims.
The executive summary describes "seven (7) Moultrie digital game cameras", set up to catch "either anomalous creatures or lights", with BAASS security staff living on the ranch collecting the memory cards every week. The appendix lists nine camera IDs, five marked as no longer in service. The report also says BAASS had photographs of snow tracks that "remain unidentified", including some that seem to walk "through" a barbed-wire fence. Those photographs aren't in the file.
The plant experiments got no further. Six tobacco and six spiderwort plants went into a trailer on the ranch on 6 April 2010 as "biosensors" for radiation. By the April visit they'd been there two weeks. The tobacco leaves showed no tell-tale dark green spots ("none are present at this time"), and for the spiderwort the visit was "too soon to perform microscopic analysis". The aims mention "transgenic plants", but the tobacco test described relies on a naturally occurring mutation.
Skinwalker Ranch Puzzle Box: BAASS's Plan to Make Contact
The Skinwalker Ranch puzzle box was a padlocked box of tiles laid out as a Fibonacci series, left on the ranch by BAASS in 2009 for "any intelligence" there to complete. BAASS didn't only want to record whatever was at the ranch. It wanted to talk to it. The fourth of the report's four aims reads:
"To initiate a variety of games, puzzles, and other strategies in order to establish communication with the source/origin of reported anomalies on the ranch property."
Utah Ranch Investigation, DOW-UAP-D174 p.7
Nothing else in the 2010 report describes a game or a puzzle. The detail is in BAASS's November 2009 monthly report, D173. Puzzles were "assembled in Las Vegas, photographed, locked in briefcases" and left in a "hotspot" on the ranch for a month, with the keys kept in Las Vegas. A padlocked light box held dark tiles glued to graph paper in a Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on), and the challenge for "any intelligence on the ranch" was "to assemble the next number of tiles". The report says the experiment "assumes a low level of mathematical know-how" on the part of whatever was there.
Neither report records a result. BAASS was also running round-the-clock security on the ranch from 3 August 2009, and its officers logged moved pennies and odd moments at night. BAASS's own verdict on those logs was that "they can be easily explained by (a) fraud perpetrated by the officers, (b) trespassers, (c) animals etc." The plan for "games, puzzles" is the clearest sign in the release of how BAASS saw the ranch, and it sits in a project that by November 2009 was, in BAASS's words, where "A large part of the current investigations at BAASS" were focused.
Skinwalker Ranch Radio Signal: What the Report Says
The Skinwalker Ranch radio signal is the only instrument result in the report: two strong signals around 1.2 GHz at one measuring point on the mesa. The report itself says the source still had to be checked against satellite transmissions.
The figures are 1210 to 1216 MHz and 1232.5 to 1238.5 MHz, at a point labelled D2. The report notes these bands are allocated to satellite navigation, Earth observation satellites, radar and space research, then ends:
"Further measurements and research, particularly into satellite transmitting frequencies and times will be required to identify the origin of these signals."
Utah Ranch Investigation, DOW-UAP-D174 p.9
Two more limits. The "not present the day before" comparison was made at a different spot (D0, then D2), and no date, instrument or signal strength is given. Our note, not the report's: the 1215 to 1240 MHz band carries the GPS L2 signal at 1227.60 MHz and long-range air-traffic radar. GPS satellites are too faint to see, but plenty of others aren't, and our guide to spotting the ISS and other satellites shows you how. One reading with no source attached is a loose end, and the report treats it as one.
Skinwalker Ranch Witnesses: Creatures, Lights and a Portal
The Skinwalker Ranch witnesses described two-legged dog-like creatures, small "troll"-like figures, balls of light and even a "portal". The report records them as allegations: it says most creature reports "have allegedly occurred within the last five to seven years", and it confirms none of them.
Eleven people separately described a "dog-like" creature walking on two legs and/or orbs of light. One man said a red ball of light came about four inches from his face and left part of it numb for a few minutes, the kind of claim our page on the DIA's UFO injury study looks at. The interviewer noted he was fixing his car radio at the time and "was unable to give his full attention". The woman who described the portal "was not sure what a portal was until she read the 'Skinwalker' book".
Two witness sketches drawn for the investigators on 21 April 2010 show a crouching, tailed figure on a fence rail and a seated, black-furred "dog-like creature" with "a pig-like snout". Our Skinwalker Ranch Pentagon files page shows both.
"Skinwalker" is the witnesses' word, and it comes from Navajo tradition, while the report links a figure called the "Basket Lady" to Ute culture. BAASS's November 2009 report said this knowledge "must be gathered while maintaining the highest level of respect for the tribal members and Native American culture." We agree, and we don't repeat anything that could identify the people who spoke to the team.
What Did the Pentagon's Contractor Find at Skinwalker Ranch?
On the evidence in the released file, the Pentagon's contractor found testimony, dog hair, raccoon hair and one unchecked radio reading at Skinwalker Ranch. It went looking for photographs, radiation readings, plant responses and contact, and none of those appears in the report.
That doesn't make the file worthless. It shows a contractor on a DIA programme guarding a Utah ranch around the clock, building databases around it and planning to make contact through puzzles. And when it sent hair to a laboratory and got back a dog and a raccoon, it accepted the answer in writing. The same November 2009 report records that other projects, including Project Northern Tier, were "on hold because BAASS currently does not have the Need to Know".
Most strange lights have an ordinary answer, and you don't need a ranch to find one. Before you report something, check what you can see in the sky tonight, look up ISS passes tonight and scan the UK night sky this week for bright planets. A brilliant planet such as Venus is one of the commonest things ever reported as a UFO.
Check the light before you call it strange
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You can read the full report in our Pentagon UFO file browser, along with BAASS's November 2009 report. Our line-by-line look at the AAWSAP contract explains what the $22 million paid for on paper, and the UAP document archive shows how all seven releases fit together.
Sources:
- DOW-UAP-D174, "Utah Ranch Investigation", BAASS, April to May 2010: US Department of War, PURSUE Release 7
- DOW-UAP-D173, BAASS Monthly Report, November 2009: US Department of War, PURSUE Release 7
- DOW-UAP-D175, "Summary Report on BAASS UAP Analysis Capabilities", BAASS, 23 November 2010, pp.10 to 20: US Department of War, PURSUE Release 7
Header image: Figure 4 of DOW-UAP-D174, hair on a barbed-wire fence after a reported "Skinwalker" sighting, March 2010. Released by the US Department of War, DOW-UAP-D174. Quotes from the laboratory report and BAASS's email were read from the page scans, because the file's text layer is garbled there.
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Ian ClaytonAmateur astronomer and founder of WatchTheStars.co.uk, dedicated to helping others explore the wonders of our universe. Full profile →
