Pentagon Releases a 2010 Utah Ranch Report on Creatures, Lights and a 'Portal'

A woman recalled standing roughly 100 feet from a clear, stationary formation some 30 to 40 feet high that rippled like water and resembled a heat shimmer; it gave her a peaceful feeling and, she said, stayed visible after she walked away. Only later, after reading a book about Skinwalker, did she come to see it as a doorway to another world. Her account sits in a 60-page report titled Utah Ranch Investigation, part of a batch of declassified Pentagon UFO documents released on 23 October 2026. The file belongs to the disclosure stream that has carried witness testimony about unexplained phenomena into public view, yet its physical evidence pointed elsewhere, and publication does not mean the US government has verified paranormal activity.

The report was compiled in 2010 by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a private contractor involved in US government-funded research into unidentified phenomena. Its personnel visited the Fort Duchesne area of Utah's Uintah Basin twice, in March and April 2010, and interviewed more than 25 people, among them ranchers and law enforcement officers. They installed seven digital wildlife cameras, which the Daily Mail describes as motion-triggered. Identifying details are heavily redacted, but a map places the investigation around Skinwalker Ranch, a 512-acre property in the Uintah Basin.

Residents reached for the word themselves. In Navajo tradition, a skinwalker is a malevolent witch said to be capable of taking animal form. One man described a hunched creature he estimated at six feet and about 250 pounds in an encounter in January 2010. “The head was described as looking like a German shepherd dog without the pointed nose,” the report states; “The nose was described to be more similar to a human nose.” Light falling on the figure showed short black fur mixed with grey, pointed ears and a short tail, and “It ran like it was leaping.” Two nights before his 24 March interview, he said, a large shadow raced past his house around 8pm; his dogs chased what he believed was a skinwalker, which repeatedly struck a barbed-wire fence and moved “like a track star” before fleeing toward an abandoned farmhouse. The report records that other interviews concerned different figures, which were not all explicitly identified as skinwalkers.

Investigators recovered fur caught on a barb and submitted it for laboratory analysis. Two unidentified fence samples shared the same canine DNA sequence as a control sample taken from a dog on the property; BAASS said the matching results, the similar appearance of the hairs and freely roaming dogs strongly suggested they came from the same animal, although the DNA match alone was not definitive. A further sample, recovered from a rock, matched raccoon DNA. The report offered no photographic confirmation of skinwalkers and no evidence that an interdimensional gateway had appeared.

The file holds stranger things still. Witnesses describing towering shadows said they heard a “growling roar” outside their home around 11pm on 22 March 2010, twice, each lasting five to 10 seconds. Another man recalled a three-foot-long, hairy arm with four long fingers and dog-like nails reaching through his bedroom window in winter 2003; a young woman described a hunched, female-looking figure with shoulder-length black hair and ragged clothing jumping between rooftops around 2009, which she identified as the “Basket Lady” known in Ute culture and which prompted a 911 call. A separate woman reported an eight-foot, hairless creature crouched on a horse shelter in September 2009, seen only briefly from behind. Lights run through the testimony: a blue orb hovering near Bottle Hollow Lake before moving toward Skinwalker Ridge, a small aqua-blue light in a tree outside a home in February 2010 that disappeared “in the blink of an eye” without illuminating the tree. What remains is a barbed-wire fence and the hair caught on a barb. Without verified photographs, biological specimens or repeatable observations, researchers cannot determine whether witnesses met unfamiliar wildlife, misidentified ordinary animals, or experienced something else entirely.