A newly released government file says investigators spent weeks in 2010 chasing a tall, dog-like creature that walks on two legs near the Utah property many people know as Skinwalker Ranch.
The document is labeled DOW-UAP-D174 and titled “Utah Ranch Investigation.” It was written by a team from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, also called BAASS. The ranch’s name is blacked out. But the setting points straight at Skinwalker Ranch: the Uintah Basin, the town of Fort Duchesne, Bottle Hollow Reservoir, and a blue light that flew off toward “Skinwalker Ridge.”
The story reads like a classic dogman case file, with one big difference. This one has lab results attached.
Who Was Investigating and Why
BAASS worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2008 to 2010 under a program called AAWSAP, reportedly worth $22 million. The company turned out dozens of reports, and the Utah ranch was one of its field projects.
A four-person BAASS team went to the ranch area from March 22 to 26, 2010. It included two scientists and two investigators. A second trip followed from April 19 to 23.
Their plan was simple. Talk to everyone nearby, measure everything they could, and try to catch something on camera. By May 7, 2010, they had interviewed more than 25 people, mostly at their homes. The list included four local police officers, eleven Native Americans (one of them a shaman), the director of the local Fish and Wildlife office, ranchers, business owners, and members of the local church. Those groups overlap. But the report says every person interviewed had a firsthand encounter with something strange.
What the Witnesses Described
Eleven people, interviewed separately, described a dog-like creature, glowing orbs of light, or both. They ranged in age from 15 to 77. Some sightings were 20 years old. Others happened as recently as April 2010. Some happened in daylight and some at night. Witnesses said the creature stood six to seven feet tall on its hind legs, and the team thought there might be at least three different kinds.
One family near Fort Duchesne told the team about the night before the investigators arrived. Around 11 p.m. on March 22, they heard a growling roar outside the house, twice, each lasting five to ten seconds. It sounded like a large animal standing still. Then two shadows showed up at the bedroom window. They were shaped like people, but the family guessed they stood nine feet and eight feet tall.
A woman described two evenings in September 2009. On the first, she noticed a shadow lurking in her backyard. When she went to tend the horses, their water was completely empty, which almost never happened. Then she glanced back and saw a creature crouched on top of her shed. She guessed it was about eight feet tall, with hairless, dark brown or gray skin and a muscular body. It leapt out of sight. Her four-year-old daughter said it looked like a kangaroo. The creature came back the next night.
A man remembered the winter of 2003. Around 3 or 4 a.m., a hairy arm reached through his bedroom window. It was about three feet long, covered in thick black hair about three inches long, and ended in long fingers. He yelled, and the arm pulled back.
Another man had a run-in just two days before the team’s March 24 visit. He was inside his house around 8 p.m. when his dogs went wild. He saw a dark shape race past “like a track star,” heard it run into his barbed wire fence again and again, and watched it head for an abandoned farmhouse across the road. He said it was about six feet tall, and its howl set off the coyotes. He never went outside. The investigators later found a clump of fur snagged on a barb.
The same man described an encounter in January 2010. That creature was hunched over, about six feet tall and roughly 250 pounds. It had short black fur mixed with gray, pointed ears, a short tail, and a head like a German shepherd, but with a more human-looking nose. He added that you should never look at one directly.
An older witness drew two creatures for the team. One was pale, furless and hunched. He called it a “shape shifter.” During an encounter with his grandson, it jumped a fence and ran using its hands like a chimpanzee. The other was black-furred with a fur-covered snout, about the size of a big man, and it sat and stared at him. He told investigators that dogs go quiet when these creatures are close.
A young woman told of a figure leaping from rooftop to rooftop in her neighborhood about a year earlier. It looked like an old woman in rags with shoulder-length black hair. Her mother called 911. She said Ute culture calls it the “Basket Lady.” The witness tables also mention smells such as wet dog, swamp mud, sulfur and rotting flesh.
[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER 3: Witness drawings, Figure 7 and Figure 8 (report pages 27 and 28), the two creature sketches by the older witness. Use both side by side. Suggested alt text: Witness sketches of a hunched shape-shifting creature and a black-furred dog-like creature]
Lights, Odd Tracks and a Strange Signal
The lights were just as strange. One man described a red ball of light that came within about four inches of his face. He heard a high-pitched whistle the whole time, felt warmth, and smelled rotten mud. When it passed, part of his face went numb, from the tip of his nose across the left cheek, for a few minutes. He had no redness and no eye damage.
Another man saw a blue light rise from the lake, hover for about ten seconds, and arc away toward “Skinwalker Ridge.” He believed three helicopters were chasing it.
The team also got photos of tracks in the snow. In one set, two trails merge into one. In another, tracks appear to walk straight through a barbed wire fence. A radio sweep on a mesa picked up two strong signals near 1210 to 1216 MHz and 1232 to 1238 MHz that had not been there the day before. Those bands are used mostly for military and satellite purposes, so the team said more work was needed to trace the source.
The investigators also mapped every sighting and the creature’s last direction of travel. Three of those lines crossed near the ranch, one just west of it and two near Bottle Hollow Reservoir. The authors admit the crossing points are somewhat arbitrary, since a creature could change direction once out of sight.
The Hair Samples and the DNA Result
The team set up a series of seven game cameras on the ranch and a neighbor’s land, with security staff pulling the memory cards every week. The report does not describe a clear photo or video of any creature from them.
What they did collect was hair. Samples came from barbed wire and from near the tracks. The team looked at a hair follicle under a microscope, then sent four samples to a lab for mitochondrial DNA testing. The lab report is dated April 27, 2010.
Three of the four samples carried the same canine DNA sequence. It is a common one in domestic dogs, expected in about 10 to 14 percent of random dogs. The team’s own note says this strongly suggests, but does not prove, that the three samples came from one dog.
Fans of the creature might point out that a dog-headed animal could carry dog DNA. Skeptics will answer that dogs were chasing something along that very fence line, so dog hair is no shock. The report also describes early plant and seed experiments meant to detect radiation or other harmful energy, but it says it was too soon for any results.
Skeptics Have Plenty to Say
Reporting by The Debrief quotes a former BAASS team member who said the team was never convinced that monsters or aliens were in Utah, and who dismissed many of the stories. When a dead animal and blood trail turned up, the likely answer was coyotes. A former guard said some guards exaggerated incidents, which made it harder to know what was real. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer has long argued that the Sherman family, the ranch’s owners in the 1990s, made up the early stories.
The report itself shows how a legend can spread. One witness said she did not know what a “portal” was until she read the “Skinwalker” book. And dark nights, barking dogs, coyotes and fast shadows are a tricky mix for anyone’s eyes.
Skinwalker Ranch and the Wider Dogman Story
Terry and Gwen Sherman owned the ranch from 1994 to 1996 and reported strange lights and marks on the land. Robert Bigelow bought it in 1996, and his research group studied it for years. In 2005, Colm Kelleher and George Knapp wrote Hunt for the Skinwalker, which made the place famous. Bigelow sold it in 2016, and Brandon Fugal announced he owned it in 2020. A History Channel series followed.
The name comes from Navajo tradition, where skinwalkers are treated as dark and serious. The ranch borders the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, and the “Basket Lady” story shows local Ute accounts are part of the picture too. Many people prefer not to talk about these beings lightly, and that is worth respecting.
Now compare it to the better-known dogman hot spots. In Michigan, a radio host named Steve Cook recorded a song about the Michigan Dogman in 1987 as an April Fools’ joke. He has said he made it up. Yet older stories exist. A 2007 book by Julie Albrecht Royce points to an 1887 report of two Wexford County lumberjacks who saw a creature with a man’s body and a dog’s head. In 1937, a man named Robert Fortney claimed that one of five attacking wild dogs near Paris, Michigan, walked on two legs.
In Wisconsin, reports of the Beast of Bray Road near Elkhorn led reporter Linda Godfrey to write a book on the subject in 2003. She started out skeptical. Witnesses there describe a furry creature six to seven feet tall with a wolf-like head and glowing eyes, seen on all fours and on two legs. Skeptics suggest wolves, big dogs, a mangy bear, or hoaxes.
The Utah accounts match on height and on that odd switch between running on four legs and standing on two. But they add extra layers. There are shadow figures, floating lights, ringing ears, foul smells and talk of shape shifting. One witness even described a see-through wall that rippled like water, 30 to 40 feet high, which she saw about twenty years ago. She said it gave her a peaceful feeling.
What Do We Make of It?
The file does not prove a creature. It has no clear photo, no body, and the lab test it reports mostly points to a dog. But it does show something interesting. Eleven people kept describing the same kind of animal, and a government-funded team took them seriously enough to build a plan with maps, cameras, sensors and DNA testing.
Was it dogs and shadows, a legend feeding itself, or something we do not have a name for yet? The report leaves that open, and so do we.
Have you had an encounter with a Dogman? Email me your experience to Reports@ParaRational.com
