Field deployments: 22–26 March and 19–23 April 2010. Accounts include earlier observations. Released through PURSUE on 23 October 2026; UKPX source review: 6 November 2026.
In spring 2010, a four-person team from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) travelled to the Fort Duchesne area of Utah to investigate reports of unusual lights and creatures around a ranch and neighbouring homes. The resulting report brings together interviews, photographs of collected hair, laboratory correspondence, experimental plans and tables comparing witnesses’ descriptions. It is a working investigation record, with results at different stages of completion.
The 60-page file, released as DOW-UAP-D174, is particularly useful when read beyond its opening claims. Hair associated with reported encounters was analysed as ordinary animal material. Plant experiments were still too early to yield conclusions. Lines drawn across a sightings map depended on an explicitly acknowledged assumption about how the reported creatures might have travelled. Those details are as much part of this case as the striking accounts.
A Utah investigation, despite the catalogue location
The PURSUE catalogue lists Las Vegas, Nevada as the incident location. The report itself places the field deployments at Fort Duchesne, Utah, and describes surrounding communities and Bottle Hollow reservoir. A reproduced BAASS email carries a Las Vegas business address, but that does not place the reported encounters there. UKPX therefore locates this case in Utah, using the fieldwork described in the original document.
The modern catalogue places the file within the records of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). The document is a BAASS investigation report. Its presence in a government release preserves the contractor’s work and accounts; it should not turn every witness interpretation or research proposal into a government finding.
What the team set out to collect
The executive summary describes two investigators and two scientists returning to the area on 22–26 March and 19–23 April. Their aims included more detailed interviews, new witnesses, environmental measurements and digital game cameras. The report says that more than 25 people had been interviewed by 7 May 2010, among them residents, police officers, ranchers, business owners and tribal community members. These categories overlap and should not be added together as separate witness totals.
Seven cameras are described in the executive summary, with memory cards to be secured weekly by ranch security personnel. A later section describes four cameras operating at one neighbouring property. The appendix lists nine equipment identifiers and marks four as no longer in service. These are snapshots of an evolving deployment, rather than evidence of nine simultaneous cameras or nine successful recordings. The released report supplies no resulting camera image that identifies an anomalous creature.
The March encounter and the hair samples
One resident told the investigators on 24 March that two nights earlier he had watched a fast-moving dark figure outside his home. He associated it with a Skinwalker, reported that his dogs chased it, and said it repeatedly struck a barbed-wire fence. The account is recorded twice with additional detail, including howling and the witness remaining at his doorway. The investigators subsequently found fur on the fence and submitted material for analysis. Finding hair established that a sample could be tested; it did not by itself identify what the resident had seen.
The strongest material result appears in the appendix. A laboratory report dated 27 April records four samples received on 2 April for mitochondrial sequencing. One matched raccoon reference sequences. The remaining three shared a canine sequence commonly found in domestic dogs. The laboratory gives an estimated occurrence of that sequence in random dogs of 9.8–13.8% at the stated 95% confidence interval. A shared mitochondrial sequence was therefore not a unique identification of one individual animal.
A BAASS email dated 3 May explains the sample grouping: hair embedded in a red-stained rock, control hair from a local dog, and two fence samples. Its author considered the matching sequence, physical resemblance and the dog’s unrestricted access to the property strong reasons to associate the fence hair with that dog, while recognising that the sequence alone was not definitive proof of individual identity. The rock sample was interpreted as raccoon hair. The released scientific material does not establish an unknown animal species.
Different creatures, different kinds of account
The interviews do not describe one uniform figure. Accounts range from furred dog-like animals moving on two legs to pale, apparently hairless forms and a brief view of an arm at a bedroom window. A resident re-interviewed on 20 April described two September 2009 encounters. In one, she saw a crouching figure on a shed for only seconds from behind; her young daughter compared its movement or appearance to a kangaroo. In another interview on 21 April, a witness drew two different forms to supplement his verbal descriptions. These drawings are witness illustrations, not photographs of an animal.
The comparison tables preserve useful differences and gaps: estimated heights, hair colour, posture, sound, smell, lighting and features not observed. Some episodes were recent, while others were childhood recollections or dated only approximately. Repeated rows and a later interview about the same event are not automatically new encounters. The report also records a witness explicitly acknowledging that an unseen creature frightening horses was his own speculation.
Two howling recordings are mentioned, supplied by a witness who thought they resembled sounds familiar from Fort Duchesne. The report attributes those recordings to other locations, in Wyoming and Oklahoma; it does not establish them as recordings made during the Utah encounters. No playable audio is contained in this PDF. A reader should not mistake a reference to sound recordings for an attached, authenticated recording of this case.
Lights, a remembered portal and changing descriptions
The light accounts include blue, white and red objects, some described as moving near homes or vehicles. One witness reported warmth, ringing ears and temporary facial numbness after a red light passed close to him. A question-and-answer interview records those experiences, including several effects he denied. It provides a reported history, rather than a contemporaneous clinical examination or a measurement of the light’s energy.
Another witness described a transparent, rippling appearance seen roughly twenty years earlier. The report says she came to understand it as a portal after reading a Skinwalker book. That sequence distinguishes the remembered visual impression from a later interpretation. The tables also include light observations assigned to 1966, 1974 and the 2000s. The March–April 2010 deployment dates must not be presented as the dates of every incident collected in the report.
What the experiments had—and had not—shown
Six spiderwort plants and six tobacco plants were placed at the ranch on 6 April to explore their use as biological indicators. During the April visit, the report says it was too soon to draw conclusions about mutation levels. No dark-green tobacco leaf spots were observed at that stage, and microscopic spiderwort examination was deferred. The accompanying plant photographs illustrate the proposed assays; they are not presented as images of mutations caused at the ranch.
A separate seed experiment was set up on 22 April, comparing peas and beans at two ranch-trailer positions with a BAASS control location. The report describes distilled water, timed lighting, enclosures and planned germination records. It does not supply the completed comparison. Likewise, unusual radio-frequency readings noted in the summary were explicitly left for further measurements and research into satellite transmissions. A proposed experiment, an unexplained reading and a completed identification belong to different stages of investigation.
The sightings map warrants the same care. Investigators extended reported directions of travel as straight lines and circled intersections near the ranch and Bottle Hollow. Their own text recognises that the intersections could be arbitrary because a creature could change direction after leaving a witness’s view. The circles were suggestions for further watching, not independently measured tracks or demonstrated convergence points.
Reading the released record
This file documents a serious attempt by its investigators to gather accounts and test selected material, while preserving important limits. Interviews and comparison tables retain the witnesses’ experiences; the hair analysis supplies a specific result for submitted samples; the cameras and plant work describe methods whose final outcomes are not established here. None of those strands needs to be omitted to make the case interesting.
The original is DOW-UAP-D174, Utah Ranch Investigation Report, April 2010, in PURSUE Release 07. Use the official catalogue’s Download button for the 60-page PDF. Useful references are PDF pages 5–10 for scope and mapping, 11–29 for interviews, 30–33 for experiments, 34–38 for equipment and laboratory material, and 39–60 for comparison tables. Printed page numbers differ from PDF page positions.
UKPX checked the complete extracted document and visually checked the key maps, figures, laboratory correspondence and comparison tables, alongside the official catalogue notes. The report includes contractor-produced material, private laboratory correspondence, witness drawings and third-party imagery; UKPX links to the official release rather than assuming unrestricted rights to mirror those items.
Map location
The pin is an approximate Fort Duchesne area reference, using the US Census Bureau’s 2024 Utah places Gazetteer. It represents the community and surrounding investigation area, not a precise encounter, private residence or ranch entrance. Individual witness identities and residential positions remain omitted. Browse the Other Mysteries collection or return to Cases.