A Pentagon-funded team hunting for a “Skinwalker” near Utah’s Skinwalker Ranch in 2010 sent the creature’s hair for DNA testing. The lab found dog DNA, and the team’s own scientist concluded it most likely came from a dog that lived on the witness’s property.
That result sits in a 60-page report the Department of War released on October 23 in its seventh batch of UFO files. Claims that the Pentagon paid to study the paranormal at the ranch have circulated for years. This is the field report itself, and it shows how thin the physical evidence was.
What the new Skinwalker Ranch file is
The report is one of eight documents in the latest release on the department’s UFO records page, which has posted batches since May 8. The same batch included the black triangle sighting by federal agents we covered on Saturday.
The department says the files are “unresolved cases,” where the government can’t make “a definitive determination” about what people saw. That label describes the paperwork. It isn’t a finding that anything unexplained happened.
Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), a Las Vegas company, wrote the Utah Ranch Investigation report. A four-person team of two investigators and two scientists visited Fort Duchesne, Utah, from March 22 to 26 and April 19 to 23, 2010. The report calls this team the “Utah Task Force,” so the task force and BAASS are the same group.
The file redacts names, including the ranch’s. The Pentagon’s UFO office has said the program’s Utah work took place on a property owned by the contractor’s chief. That was Robert Bigelow, who owned Skinwalker Ranch until he sold it in 2016, The Debrief reported.
What witnesses told investigators
By May 7, 2010, the team had interviewed more than 25 people in person, mostly at home. They included four local police officers, 11 Native Americans including a shaman, 12 ranchers and the director of the local Fish and Wildlife office.
The claims in the report are vivid, and nobody has verified any of them. Eleven people described a “dog-like” creature that ran on two legs or glowing balls of light. Those who saw it standing put its height at six to seven feet.
Four witnesses described “three-foot tall” hairy creatures with long arms. Other witnesses reported “little people,” a bird like a “pterodactyl” with a 12-foot wingspan, and a maggot “about 8-feet long.” The accounts span 20 years, though most creature reports dated from the previous five to seven years.
The team plotted the sightings on a map and drew lines along each creature’s reported direction of travel. The lines crossed near the ranch. The report itself warns that those crossing points “could be construed as arbitrary,” since the animals may have turned once out of sight.
The ‘Skinwalker’ at the fence, and what the lab found
The hair came from one encounter in March 2010. A man told investigators he was inside his house at about 8 p.m. when a large shadow he believed was a “Skinwalker” ran past. His dogs chased it, and he heard it hit his barbed-wire fence repeatedly.
He didn’t go outside. He said it moved so fast he “could not see more than a black shadow,” and he estimated it was six feet tall. An investigator later found a patch of fur on the fence that matched the color he described.
A lab received four hair samples on April 2 and sequenced their mitochondrial DNA. Only the fence hairs had any link to the creature. One sample was a “control” hair from one of the property’s dogs, and another was a hair stuck in a red-stained rock found on a mesa in January.
The three dog samples, including the control, shared an identical DNA sequence. The lab said that sequence is common in domestic dogs and shows up in roughly 9.8% to 13.8% of them.
In an email filed with the report, a BAASS scientist wrote that this suggested “(but not 100% definitive)” a single dog. Given how alike the hairs looked, and that the dogs ran freely on the property, he concluded they came from the same animal.
The raccoon hair was the one in the rock. Residents had reported raccoons near the ranch house, so the scientist wrote the result “would not be out of the ordinary.” Some coverage, including Newsweek’s, described all four samples as creature hair, but the lab file doesn’t support that.
The cameras, plants and radio signals
The team set up seven motion-triggered game cameras on the ranch and a neighbor’s land, with security staff collecting the memory cards weekly. The report includes no camera images of a creature. The report lists photos of snow tracks that seem to pass “through” a barbed-wire fence as unidentified.
The scientists also placed spiderwort and tobacco plants on the ranch on April 6 as “biosensors.” The plants change color when radiation or chemicals damage their DNA. After two weeks, the report says, “no observations or analysis can be drawn.”
One radio sweep picked up strong signals near 1.2 GHz that weren’t there the day before. The report notes that satellite positioning systems and the military use those bands, and it called for more research into satellite transmissions.
The plans went further than sensors. One stated goal was to use “games, puzzles, and other strategies” to establish communication with whatever was behind the reports.
What the Pentagon has since said about this work
The program behind the contract was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) reviewed it in its 2024 historical report.
AARO said Congress set aside $22 million in 2008 and 2010, at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s direction, to study future foreign aerospace threats. DIA set up AAWSAP in 2009 and gave the contract to a private company.
The ranch work wasn’t what DIA asked for, according to AARO. It said “DIA did not seek, nor specifically authorize” the Utah investigation. It also described that work as “unrelated work on alleged paranormal activities.” The program ended in 2012 over what AARO called “DIA and DoD concerns about the project.”
The ranch’s name borrows the skinwalker of Navajo legend. Its reputation dates to 1996 newspaper reports about the family that owned it then, according to its Wikipedia entry.
The 2010 file adds detail, not proof. It records what people said they saw and what the investigators tested, and the one sample traced to a reported creature matched a local dog. We explained how these releases work when the first batch came out in May.
The department says it will keep posting new batches every few weeks. It hasn’t given a date for the eighth.
