THE 2010 UTAH RANCH REPORT

THE FILE

DOW-UAP-D174 is one of nine AAWSAP contractor files in Release 07, the tranche that added the paperwork of Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, to the 44 program files published in Release 06. War.gov’s catalog entry dates the incident to March and April 2010, gives the location as Las Vegas, Nevada (BAASS’s home, not the ranch’s), and marks the file as redacted. The description calls it “an administrative, programmatic, or contractor-produced record” of AAWSAP, the Defense Intelligence Agency program active from 2008 to 2012 whose official scope named 12 technical research areas on aerospace threats over a horizon of more than 40 years.

By that description, the report documents BAASS field deployments to a Utah property and the surrounding communities during March and April 2010. 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 what the description calls “purported anomalous phenomena.” The file also records, in the government’s words, extensive reported accounts of “dog-like bipedal creatures,” orbs of light, “little people,” and “prehistoric-looking” birds, among other phenomena, and states that BAASS intended to use interactive methods to attempt communication with the presumed source of the reported activity.

WHAT REPORTERS FOUND IN THE PDF

Newsweek, which read the released document on publication day, reported that the ranch’s name is redacted throughout, that a Utah task force had looked into the reported sightings before BAASS visited the site twice, in March and April 2010, and that investigators interviewed 25 people, among them police officers, church members, Native Americans including a shaman, and a local fish and wildlife director. The witness accounts it describes include close-range balls of light, the bipedal “dog-like” creatures, the “little people,” and a very large maggot-like creature, with witness drawings reproduced in the file. On physical evidence, Newsweek reported that four hair samples were collected and DNA-tested: three came from a dog and one from a raccoon. The proposed methods it lists match war.gov’s summary, with cameras, sensors, transgenic plants used as biosensors, and games and puzzles intended as a way to communicate with whatever was causing the reports. Those details are Newsweek’s reading of the PDF, not war.gov’s description, and this page relays them as reporting.

WHY EVERYONE SAYS SKINWALKER

The property the file withholds is the one popular culture has already named. A roughly 500-acre ranch southeast of Ballard in Utah’s Uintah County, it was owned by Terry and Gwen Sherman from 1994 to 1996, and their accounts of unexplained events reached print in the Deseret News in 1996. That year Robert Bigelow bought it, for a reported $200,000, through his National Institute for Discovery Science, which monitored the site for years. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker described close to 100 incidents and conceded “difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication.” In September 2008 the DIA awarded the AAWSAP contract to BAASS, a Bigelow company, and the 2021 book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, by the program’s DIA manager James Lacatski with Kelleher and Knapp, argued that the ranch was central to what the program actually did. Bigelow sold the property in 2016 to Adamantium Real Estate, whose principal Brandon Fugal went public as the owner in 2020, the year the History channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch began.

Until this release the public account of BAASS’s Utah field work came from the participants’ own books and interviews. DOW-UAP-D174 is the government’s copy of a field report from inside the program, redacted and published through an official channel, which is a different kind of source even where it says the same things.

WHAT THE FILE DOES AND DOES NOT ESTABLISH

It is a contractor’s report, not a DIA finding. It records what witnesses told BAASS investigators, what instruments BAASS carried, and what experiments BAASS planned; nothing in war.gov’s description says any measurement captured an anomaly, and the one piece of physical evidence reporters describe, the hair samples, resolved to a dog and a raccoon. PURSUE publishes the file under the same “Unresolved” label it gives every case, meaning the department does not assert what was observed. Skeptics have long argued the Uintah Basin phenomena are, in Robert Sheaffer’s 2020 phrase, “almost certainly illusory,” and that many of the most extraordinary claims trace to a single witness; the released report, read against its own description, neither confirms nor refutes that, because it catalogs reports rather than resolving them.

What the file does settle is narrower and real: a Defense Intelligence Agency program whose contract named advanced aerospace threats funded field interviews about bipedal creatures and plans to communicate with a “presumed source” through puzzles, and wrote it up. How a program scoped the way AAWSAP’s July 2008 Statement of Objectives describes came to do that is the question the Release 06 and Release 07 paperwork now lets readers examine from the documents rather than from the books about them.

THE OTHER EIGHT CONTRACTOR FILES

The ranch report sits inside a run of BAASS records that follow the contract through its life: topical papers the Mutual UFO Network prepared for BAASS in November 2008, the December 2008 Project Capella proposal for a data warehouse of “unusual” aerial phenomena, BAASS’s project management plan from the same month, monthly reports for March, April, June, and November 2009, and a November 2010 self-assessment of the company’s analysis capabilities that, in war.gov’s words, appears intended to reinforce the case for continuing the program. Read together, they are the inside view of how the contractor organized the work; the AAWSAP page covers the full set and the 37 reference papers from Release 06.

READING THE RANCH REPORT IN UMBRA

War.gov hosts the PDF as one cryptically named file among 28. Umbra indexes every PURSUE release by agency, type, date, and location, keeps each file’s official description intact, and makes the whole archive searchable, so the Utah report can be read beside the contract it was produced under and the program papers that surround it.