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Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: What the Declassified Utah Ranch Report Really Says

November 6, 2026

Dog-like creatures up to eight feet tall running on two legs. A red ball of light stopping four inches from a man’s face. A tuft of fur pulled from a barbed-wire fence and sent to a DNA lab. On October 23, 2026, the Pentagon declassified the field report from a 2010 investigation at Utah’s infamous “Skinwalker Ranch.” We read all 60 pages, transcribed every table, and turned it into an interactive report. Here is what the document contains, where it came from, and what it does and does not prove.

Explore the interactive report

Key takeaways

The report is real: document DOW-UAP-D174, “Utah Ranch Investigation,” written in 2010 by Bigelow’s contractor BAASS for a Defense Intelligence Agency program, and released officially in October 2026.
Investigators interviewed more than 25 local residents, including police officers, ranchers, Native Americans and the local wildlife director.
16 witnesses describe a dog-like creature 6 to 8 feet tall that walks or runs upright; about 20 accounts describe orbs and balls of light.
The only hard evidence tested was hair. The lab identified a domestic dog and a raccoon.
The Pentagon’s own UFO office later concluded that the DIA never asked for or authorized this paranormal research.

A short history of Skinwalker Ranch

The ranch sits in northeastern Utah’s Uintah Basin, near Fort Duchesne and the Ute Indian Tribe’s Uintah and Ouray Reservation. Locals had told stories about strange lights and animals in the area for decades, but the property became famous in 1996, when the Deseret News published the account of the Sherman family. They had bought the ranch in 1994 and described glowing orbs, cattle mutilations and a giant wolf that bullets could not stop.

That same year, Las Vegas real-estate and aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow bought the ranch. His National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) studied it until 2004. Two people close to that work, biochemist Colm Kelleher and journalist George Knapp, then published Hunt for the Skinwalker (2005), the book that turned the ranch into a fixture of American UFO culture. Bigelow sold the property in 2016 to Utah businessman Brandon Fugal, and since 2020 it has been the setting of the History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.

How the Pentagon ended up paying to study it

In 2008, at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Defense Intelligence Agency funded the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). On paper, it was meant to study breakthrough aerospace technologies that could threaten the United States in the coming decades. The roughly $22 million contract went to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), a company created for the purpose, whose founder still owned Skinwalker Ranch.

According to the program’s own leaders, the ranch angle started almost by accident. DIA scientist James Lacatski, who launched AAWSAP, had read Hunt for the Skinwalker with colleagues and wondered whether the phenomena described there could be a threat, or an opportunity, for national defense. He later told the story in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), co-written with Kelleher and Knapp. The program, and its better-known offshoot AATIP, became public when The New York Times revealed it in December 2017.

The report we analyzed was released as part of PURSUE release 07, the seventh batch of UAP files published by the Department of War (the renamed Department of Defense). The same batch includes two other BAASS documents: a November 2009 monthly report and a 141-page self-assessment of the program.

Inside the investigation

The report covers two field deployments, from March 22 to 26 and from April 19 to 23, 2010, by a team of four: two investigators and two scientists. Their goals are spelled out plainly:

interview as many residents as possible to measure how widespread and varied the sightings were;
survey the ranch’s magnetic field, electromagnetic spectrum and radioactivity;
use plants as “biosensors” for mutagenic radiation;
set up game cameras to photograph creatures or lights;
and, most surprisingly, try to “establish communication” with the source of the anomalies using “games, puzzles and other strategies.”

By May 7, 2010, the team had interviewed more than 25 people in their homes, all lifelong residents living within two miles of the ranch. The report lists four local police officers, eleven Native Americans including a shaman, twelve ranchers, six business owners, about fifteen members of the Mormon church and the local Fish and Wildlife director (one person can belong to several groups). Witnesses were between 15 and 77 years old, and the events they described ranged from about twenty years earlier to April 2010. All names are redacted in the released version.

The “skinwalker”: a dog-like creature that walks upright

The heart of the report is a large table compiling the descriptions of 16 witnesses. The composite picture is strikingly consistent: a dog- or wolf-like animal standing 6 to 8 feet tall on its hind legs, able to walk and sprint upright, often linked to a smell of sulfur or rotting flesh and to a howl. BAASS suggests there may be up to three distinct “types.”

Some accounts are remarkably specific:

The red creature. A witness and his uncle were target shooting when they saw a creature covered in 3-inch red fur, with round, slanted red eyes. It ran faster on two legs than on four. They shot at it and it fled.
The white dog. In the winter of 2005, a man hit a pure-white, 140-pound animal with a pellet gun. He says the pellet bounced off. Because of his spiritual beliefs, he refused to look at its face.
The arm through the window. In 2003, a man sleeping with his window open woke to a hairy arm about 3 feet long reaching into his bedroom, with four monkey-like fingers about 10 inches long and no thumb. He yelled, and it withdrew.
The horse shelter. On September 11, 2009, a woman saw a hairless, muscular, 8-foot creature crouched on her horse shelter. It bounded away in three or four zig-zag leaps. Her four-year-old daughter said it “looked like a kangaroo.”
German shepherd head, human nose. One witness described a 250-pound creature with a German shepherd’s head but a more human nose and human-like hands. He said a skinwalker must never be looked at directly.

On April 21, 2010, one witness asked for a pen and paper to draw the two creatures he says he saw. Both drawings appear in the report.

Witness drawing of a pale, hunched, hairless creature with a long tail, described as a shape shifter — The “shape shifter” seen by a witness and his grandson (report D174, p. 27).

Witness drawing of a large seated creature with black fur and a pig-like snout — The “shape shifter” seen by a witness and his grandson (report D174, p. 27).

Shadows, a “Basket Lady” and a giant bird

The interviews also mention rarer figures. On the night of March 22, 2010, a family heard a “growling roar” twice outside their house, then saw two human-shaped shadows about 8 and 9 feet tall outside the bedroom window. An 18-year-old woman and her mother saw a hunched female figure with black hair and ragged clothes jumping from rooftop to rooftop, known in Ute tradition as the “Basket Lady”; the mother called 911 and police responded. Two young men describe a black, “prehistoric” bird with a 12-foot wingspan landing in trees across the street. Others mention “little people” 2 to 4 feet tall who walk on their knuckles like gorillas, and a maggot-like worm about 8 feet long.

Orbs, balls of light and a “portal”

The second major part of the report deals with lights. Every witness answered a grid of more than 25 questions: size, color, distance, speed, reaction to stimuli, emotions felt. About twenty accounts are compiled, including:

a golf-ball-sized cobalt-blue orb that paced a car at 3 to 4 feet off the ground, then shot away;
basketball-sized white lights that “float like Glinda the Good Witch” from The Wizard of Oz and hide behind objects when noticed;
a blue orb that vanished near Bottle Hollow reservoir at dawn, followed 30 minutes later by three helicopters that seemed to be searching for it;
a light the size of a Volkswagen Beetle that changed from red to yellow to green to white and moved the branches of a tree.

The most detailed account involves a red ball of light the size of a tennis ball, with a black ring at its base. When a man shone a flashlight at it in the summer of 2009, it zoomed toward his face and stopped about four inches away, then shot straight up. He reported numbness from the tip of his nose across his left cheek and chin for several minutes, warmth, a high-pitched ringing in his ear and a smell of rotten mud. BAASS’s biologist designed a dedicated questionnaire to try to identify the type of energy involved. With unusual candor, the report notes that the witness was fixing his car radio during the interview and was not fully paying attention.

Finally, a woman described a “portal” seen around 1990: a still, transparent wall 30 to 40 feet high, rippling like water or a heat wave, which left her with nothing but a feeling of peace.

The evidence: a dog and a raccoon

This is the most revealing part of the report. On March 22, 2010, a resident said a dark, hunched shape ran past his house “like a track star,” chased by his dogs, and slammed into his barbed-wire fence several times before fleeing toward an abandoned farmhouse. He heard a high-pitched howl for about 30 minutes, answered by coyotes. Investigators found a tuft of fur on the fence matching his description.

Close-up of a tuft of light-colored fur caught on a strand of barbed wire — Fur collected from the fence after the March 22, 2010 “chase” (report D174, p. 21).

Four samples went to a lab for mitochondrial DNA sequencing. The result, dated April 27, 2010, is unambiguous: the hair on the fence carries the same canine sequence as a control hair from one of the property’s own dogs, a sequence found in roughly 10 to 14 percent of domestic dogs. BAASS itself concludes the hairs very likely come from the same animal. The fourth sample, a hair embedded in a red-stained rock on the mesa, belonged to a raccoon.

The other measurements produced nothing conclusive:

Game cameras: seven Moultrie cameras were installed on the ranch and a neighboring property; the report presents no images.
Biosensor plants: spiderwort and mutant tobacco were placed on the ranch on April 6, 2010, too recently to give results.
Tracks in the snow: photos show two sets of tracks merging into one, and tracks that seem to pass “through” a barbed-wire fence; they remain unidentified.
Radio signals: two strong signals were picked up on the mesa between 1210 and 1238 MHz that had been absent the day before. Those bands are used for satellite navigation and military purposes, which offers far more ordinary explanations than an unknown source.
Sightings map: plotting each creature sighting with its direction of travel, BAASS found the lines crossing at three points near the ranch, while admitting those points “could be construed as arbitrary.”

Putting it in perspective

A cultural figure before a “phenomenon”

The word comes from Navajo tradition, where the yee naaldlooshii is a person, usually a malevolent witch, able to take the form of an animal. Many Navajo people consider the subject taboo, and the popular use of the term has long been criticized as cultural appropriation. The report does not hide this context: several witnesses interpret what they experienced through it, speaking of “shape shifters,” “werewolves” and the Ute “Basket Lady,” and following rules such as never looking the creature in the face. For an outside reader, that matters. Consistent descriptions can reflect a shared culture passed down since childhood as much as independent observation.

Night, fear and memory

Most encounters happen at night, often in a split second, sometimes years before the interview. Several witnesses saw only a “shadow.” Perception research shows that in low light the brain fills in shapes with what it expects to see, and that memories of frightening events are rebuilt each time they are told. In a community that has talked about skinwalkers for generations, a large dog glimpsed in the dark can easily become something else. The fence-hair episode is an almost textbook illustration.

What the Pentagon says now

In March 2024, the first volume of the historical report by AARO, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, addressed AAWSAP directly. It found that the DIA had neither requested nor authorized research into paranormal topics, even though a DIA employee managed the contract, and that the program ended in 2012 because of DIA and Defense Department concerns. The program’s leaders dispute that account and say the agency supported their work. Either way, document D174 mostly tells the story of a public contract that drifted from aerospace forecasting into investigating local folklore, using real scientific tools (DNA sequencing, electromagnetic surveys) that ended up undermining the stories more than confirming them.

Not the only strange file in the archives

Older DIA intelligence reports, also available through FOIA, show that US attachés abroad collected similar stories for decades. One 1974 cable from the US Defense Attaché Office in Madrid lists 28 Spanish sightings, including a truck driver near Valdehijaderos who said two-meter-tall figures chased him off the highway. Those files, like this one, record what people reported, not what was confirmed.

Summary

Item	What the report says	Status
Document	DOW-UAP-D174, 60 pages, written by BAASS for the DIA’s AAWSAP, declassified October 23, 2026	Authentic, officially released
Investigation	2 field trips in March and April 2010, 25+ residents interviewed	Documented
Bipedal dog-like creature	16 witnesses, 6 to 8 ft, sulfur or rotting smell, howling	Unverified accounts
Lights and orbs	About 20 accounts, including a red ball 4 inches from a face	Unverified accounts
Fence hair	Same DNA sequence as a dog on the property	Domestic dog
Red-rock hair	Mitochondrial sequencing	Raccoon
Cameras, plants, tracks	No results presented	Inconclusive
Radio signals	1210 to 1238 MHz, satellite and military bands	Unresolved
Paranormal research	Neither requested nor authorized by the DIA (AARO, 2024)	Program ended in 2012

Explore the report as data

We transcribed every table in the report into a free interactive report, available in English and French. You can compare the reported heights of the creatures, filter all 25 creature accounts by type, browse the 20 light reports, follow the timeline from 1966 to 2010, see the convergence map and every photo from the report, and check the DNA results yourself.

Open the interactive report

Frequently asked questions

Is the Skinwalker Ranch report real?

Yes. Document DOW-UAP-D174 was published by the US Department of War on October 23, 2026, in its seventh batch of UAP files. It is a genuine contractor report. What it records, however, are residents’ statements, none of which were independently verified.

Did the Pentagon confirm that skinwalkers exist?

No. The report documents what people said they saw. The only physical evidence tested, hair samples, came from a domestic dog and a raccoon, and the Pentagon’s AARO later said the DIA had not authorized this line of research.

Who wrote the report?

Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), the contractor for the DIA’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). Its founder, Robert Bigelow, owned Skinwalker Ranch from 1996 to 2016.

What is a skinwalker?

In Navajo tradition, a skinwalker (yee naaldlooshii) is a person, usually described as a malevolent witch, who can transform into an animal. In the report, several residents use the term to interpret the dog-like creature they describe.

Where can I read the original document?

The full PDF is available on the Department of War’s UFO page (link in the sources below). Our interactive report reproduces its tables, drawings and photos with source page numbers.

A note on method: this document records statements collected by a contractor; none were independently verified. Witness and ranch names are redacted in the source, and the positions on our interactive map are approximate. Tables were transcribed by hand from the scanned report; images are cropped from its pages without retouching.

Sources

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