DOW-UAP-D174: BAASS Utah Ranch Investigation Report -- Two Field Deployments, Witness Spreadsheets, Plant Biosensors and a Hair-DNA Result (March-April 2010)

Source file: DOW-UAP-D174-Utah_Ranch_Investigation_Report_April_2010.pdf Originating agency: Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), Las Vegas, Nevada, contractor to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under AAWSAP Document type: Field investigation report, "Utah Ranch Investigation / Utah Task Force Investigation", with photographs, witness drawings, a laboratory report, an internal e-mail and witness-description spreadsheets Date: Deployments March 22-26 and April 19-23, 2010; the abstract is current "to date, May 7, 2010", and the spreadsheets carry the date 5/7/2010 Classification: No classification banner on the released pages; heavily redacted (markings "1843(a)(2)" and "1843(a)(3)", with staff shown as "AAP Person" labels); released to the public in 2026 Page count: 60 VIRIN: 260508-D-D0360-1166 PURSUE Release: 7

Summary

DOW-UAP-D174 is the most detailed field record of the AAWSAP program released so far. It is not a research paper like the Release 6 DIRDs, but the contractor's own report of two trips to the Uintah Basin in north-eastern Utah. A team of four BAASS personnel, two investigators (AAP Person 41 and AAP Person 14) and two scientists (AAP Person 29 and AAP Person 28), led by a "Task Force Director" (AAP Person 7), traveled to Fort Duchesne "to continue an ongoing investigation surrounding [redacted] Ranch property" (PDF page 5). The ranch name is redacted on every page and replaced with the label "AAP Person 4"; the body of the report calls it simply "the Utah Ranch".

The report has three layers. The first is investigative: summaries of interviews with residents, mostly re-interviews of witnesses first contacted in September and October 2009, covering creatures, lights, sounds and a "portal". The second is scientific: game cameras, a sighting map, electromagnetic sweeps, plant biosensors, a seed-germination experiment and DNA testing of hair samples. The third is a set of witness-description spreadsheets (PDF pages 39-60) that turn each account into rows: height, weight, fur, eyes, odor, sound, speed, distance and emotion.

The file is useful precisely because it records both the accounts and the tests. Five photographs (Figures 1-5) are captioned "Hair Sample from reported 'Skinwalker' sighting", but the attached laboratory report found that all three fence samples carried the same canine sequence, one "frequently found in domestic dogs", and BAASS's own scientist concluded that the hairs most likely came from a dog living on the property.

Research Article

Structure and team

The report opens with a cover page carrying the BAASS logo, a landscape photograph and the team roster, followed by a table of contents and a list of 15 figures (PDF pages 1-4). It then runs: Executive Summary (p. 5), Map of Creature Sightings (pp. 6-7), Utah Ranch Report Abstract (pp. 8-10), Investigative / Scientific Summary (pp. 11-29, with every family heading redacted), Scientific Analysis (pp. 30-33) and an Appendix (pp. 34-60). The page numbers printed on the report run one behind the PDF page numbers used here.

The executive summary sets out the purpose of the March trip: "to locate evidence of the reported unidentified creatures and lights, gather additional detailed descriptions, locate and interview new witnesses", and to establish a network of game cameras. Seven Moultrie digital game cameras were installed on the ranch and on a neighbouring property, and the memory cards were to be secured weekly by "BAASS security personnel stationed on the [redacted] Ranch property" (p. 5). The report thus confirms that BAASS kept security staff on site. The appendix lists nine camera IDs, BAASS 0001 to BAASS 0009, five of them marked "no longer in service"; the GPS coordinates are redacted (p. 34).

The stated aims, including "communication"

The abstract (p. 8) lists four aims: to interview "a large number of people" around the ranch so as to compare their reports with "the ongoing reports of unusual activity on the ranch property itself"; to use portable sensors to measure magnetic fields, the EM spectrum, ionizing radiation and the chemical composition of the soil, with the explicit goal "to obtain definitive photographic, digital, sound and chemical evidence of purported anomalies"; to use plants, "including transgenic plants", as biosensors; and "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." The report does not describe any such game or puzzle actually being carried out during these two trips.

According to the abstract, by May 7, 2010 "over twenty-five (25) people" had been interviewed in person, mostly at home. The breakdown it gives, four local police officers, eleven Native Americans including a Shaman, the director of the local Fish and Wildlife office, twelve ranchers, six business owners and about fifteen members of the Mormon Church, adds up to far more than 25, so the categories clearly overlap; the report does not reconcile the numbers. Witness ages ranged from fifteen to seventy-seven, and the reported events span "from twenty years ago to as recent as April 2010" (p. 9).

What the residents reported

The abstract condenses the accounts into six findings (pp. 9-10): eleven independent witnesses describing a large "dog" or "wolf"-like creature able to "walk and run at speed on two legs", six to seven feet tall when upright, with "at least three separate types"; four witnesses to small, hairy, three-foot "troll"-like creatures that run like chimpanzees; more than two reports of "worm"-like creatures (one described as a maggot about 8 feet long), a "pterodactyl"-like creature and "little people"; reports of unidentified aircraft and "balls of light"; photographs of unidentified tracks in the snow, including tracks that "appear to walk 'through' a barbed wire fence"; and the electromagnetic results. The report adds its own caution that "the vast majority of reports detailed in points 1-3 have allegedly occurred within the last five to seven years."

The investigative section gives the details, always with names redacted. One family described a "growling roar" outside the house at about 2300 on March 22, 2010, and two human-shaped shadows of about nine and eight feet (p. 11). A young woman described a hunched female figure in "old 'rags' clothing" jumping between rooftops about a year earlier, which she said is known in Ute culture as the "Basket Lady" (p. 11). A man described an arm with three-inch black hair and four ten-inch fingers reaching through his bedroom window in the winter of 2003 (pp. 11-12). Two teenagers described a bird with a 2-3-foot beak and a wingspan of about twelve feet landing in trees across the street (p. 12). A woman described a transparent, stationary "portal" 30-40 feet high, "rippling like water", seen about twenty years earlier, and said she had not known what a portal was "until she read the 'Skinwalker' book" (pp. 13-14).

In a structured interview whose questions were designed by biologist AAP Person 29 "to aid in the identification of the type of energy", a man said a red ball of light had come within about four inches of his face, causing high-pitched ringing, warmth and numbness "from the tip of his nose over to the left side of his face"; the report notes that he was fixing his car radio during the interview "and was unable to give his full attention" (pp. 15-16). Other residents described a blue ball of light near Bottle Hollow Lake followed about thirty minutes later by three helicopters, an aqua-blue light hovering in a tree in February 2010, and floating lights compared to "Glenda the Good Witch" in The Wizard of Oz (pp. 17-18, 25). On April 21, 2010 one witness drew two creatures for the team: a pale, furless "shape shifter" and a dog-like creature with a pig-like snout (Figures 7-8, pp. 28-29). He also handed over two recordings of howling from other reservations which he said were identical to the sounds of "Skinwalkers" and "Shape shifters" (p. 29).

The map of creature sightings

The map on PDF page 7 is the image the war.gov release uses as its thumbnail. BAASS plotted each creature sighting and the creature's last known direction of travel on a Google Earth image, drew straight lines along those directions, and circled the points where the lines crossed. The text is unusually frank about the method: "In a sense, these intersection points could be construed as arbitrary, particularly since it is recognized that the creatures may have changed their direction of travel once out of sight of the eyewitnesses" (p. 6). Even so, it notes three convergence points, one just west of the ranch and two near Bottle Hollow reservoir, and proposes them as the top locations for "sustained and continuous night watching". Labels on the map include Fort Duchesne, Bottle Hollow Lake, the Pow Wow Grounds, Turn Key Housing, Ballard, a Gravel Pit and two homesteads; every witness label is redacted.

Sensors, plants and seeds

The electromagnetic sweep is reported in a quotation from a separate, unreleased report: "Location D2 recorded two large signals in both the horizontal and vertical positions. These signals were not present the day before when measurements were taken at D0" (pp. 9-10). The signals were at 1210, 1213 and 1216 MHz and at 1232.5, 1235.5 and 1238.5 MHz, in the 1164-1215 and 1215-1240 MHz bands, which the report says are allocated to satellite navigation, Earth exploration, radiolocation and space research and are "primarily for military purposes". BAASS concludes that further research "into satellite transmitting frequencies and times will be required to identify the origin of these signals" (p. 10). In other words, the report itself points to a possible ordinary source.

On April 6, 2010 six spiderwort and six tobacco plants were placed in the living room and bedroom of a trailer on the ranch under grow lights cycling sixteen hours on and eight off. The tobacco is heterozygous for the sulfur mutation (Su/+), so DNA damage shows as dark-green or albino spots; spiderwort stamen hairs turn from blue to pink when the dominant allele is knocked out (pp. 30-31). After two weeks no spots had appeared, and the April trip was "too soon to perform microscopic analysis". On April 22, 2010 a seed experiment with Stokes sugar snap peas and green beans began at two trailer locations and at a control site at BAASS, with distilled water, "cone-tainers", Jump Start T5 grow lights and light-tight enclosures (pp. 32-33). No results are reported.

The hair samples and the DNA result

The most consequential pages are the last of the narrative. After a resident reported that a "Skinwalker" chased by his dogs had run repeatedly into his barbed-wire fence, Investigator AAP Person 41 searched the fence line and found "a patch of fur" on one of the barbs (p. 17). Figures 1-5 show the fence and the tuft of hair; Figure 6 shows an "unknown hair sample" in a dish; Figures 12-13 are digital-microscope images (10x and 40x) showing a hair follicle that "can be analyzed for nuclear DNA for species identification" (pp. 19-24, 35-36).

The laboratory report (Figure 14, p. 37), dated April 27, 2010 and stamped received May 3, 2010, states that four hair samples were received on April 2, 2010 and tested for mitochondrial tRNA, cytochrome b and the canine HVI region. Sample SU-01 matched "Procyon lotor (raccoon)". Samples SU-02, SU-03 and SU-04 "all exhibited the same canine HVI sequence. This sequence is frequently found in domestic dogs and would be expected to occur in 9.8% to 13.8% of random dogs at the 95% confidence interval."

The BAASS e-mail that follows (Figure 15, p. 38), from AAP Person 18 to AAP Person 7, decodes the samples: the raccoon hair was embedded in a "red stained rock" found on the mesa during a January deployment; one sample was control hair from one of the dogs on the property, collected by AAP Person 41 on the previous trip; and two were the white and black hairs from the fence "near where the 'creature' was spotted". Its conclusion: the identical sequences suggest "(but not 100% definitive) the same canine individual", and the physical similarity to the control hairs and the fact that the dogs "run at will on the property strongly argue that the hairs are from the same individual." On the raccoon: "this finding would not be out of the ordinary." The abstract, written earlier, still describes the hair samples as "currently undergoing scientific DNA analysis" (p. 9); the report was evidently assembled without updating that sentence.

Significance

DOW-UAP-D174 is the clearest window yet into what AAWSAP's contractor actually did in the field. It shows a DIA-funded team treating folklore-laden community accounts as data: indexing them in spreadsheets, mapping them, measuring the environment, and planning biological and "communication" experiments. It also shows the limits of that work in the contractor's own words: an admittedly arbitrary map, signals that may come from satellites, plant experiments with no results yet, and the one physical sample that went to a laboratory identified as dog and raccoon hair.

The report sits in a sequence. BAASS's November 2009 monthly report (DOW-UAP-D173) describes the Utah ranch database these spreadsheets belong to, and the report itself refers back to September and October 2009 investigative reports and a January 2010 deployment that are not in this file. Read next to the contractor's 2010 self-assessment of its UAP-analysis capabilities (DOW-UAP-D175) and the Release 6 contract records (DOW-UAP-D110 to D116), it shows how much of AAWSAP's effort, beyond the technical DIRD papers, went into this one Utah property. The report records reported accounts; it does not claim to have confirmed any creature or anomaly, and none of its released results does so.

Key People

Locations

Incidents

Notable Quotes

"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." -- page 8

"It goes without saying a primary purpose is to obtain definitive photographic, digital, sound and chemical evidence of purported anomalies." -- page 8

"In a sense, these intersection points could be construed as arbitrary, particularly since it is recognized that the creatures may have changed their direction of travel once out of sight of the eyewitnesses." -- page 6

"It should be noted the vast majority of reports detailed in points 1-3 have allegedly occurred within the last five to seven years." -- page 9

"Location D2 recorded two large signals in both the horizontal and vertical positions. These signals were not present the day before when measurements were taken at D0." -- page 9

"This sequence is frequently found in domestic dogs and would be expected to occur in 9.8% to 13.8% of random dogs at the 95% confidence interval." -- page 37

"However, 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." -- page 38