Stereos, a Cold Grip and Puzzle Boxes: What the Ranch Staff Logged

The document: BAASS's November 2009 monthly report includes a Utah ranch section that reads like a guard log, a neighbor-interview file and an experiment notebook in one. Every account below is a report from staff or a witness, not a finding by the contractor. Released Oct 23, 2026, in PURSUE Release 07.

Primary source: DOW-UAP-D173 (PDF)

Key facts

• BAASS had guards on the ranch property around the clock from August 3, 2009, and the report prints selected nightly logs.
• One night a stereo switched itself on at 0025. Staff photographed nothing unusual and stayed to watch. No explanation is logged.
• A guard describes a "cold grip" on his ankle in his sleep, with fingers "extremely long, not a human hand."
• A neighbor says what felt like twenty minutes of watching a creature was nearly three hours.
• BAASS left locked puzzle boxes, including a Fibonacci tile box, for "any intelligence on the ranch." The report states no result.

What the document says

The guards. From August 3, 2009, BAASS kept officers on the ranch property around the clock, and the report prints selected logs. Many entries are routine: patrols, photos, no trespassers, no anomalies. The exceptions are why the logs are worth reading.

The stereo. At 0025 one night in Homestead 1, the stereo under the TV switched itself on, tuned to the local country station it had last played on November 4. Its power button has to be physically pressed. The room was 73 degrees, the photos showed nothing, and the officers stayed to watch. An investigator note adds that the pennies, a marker experiment staff ran that month, "were in the same configuration as they were left." No finding is stated.

In a separate entry, an officer found his own nightstand change disturbed: a dime moved up and the other coins pushed together. He wrote that he was "100 percent certain" his laptop had not caused it, and that he would monitor the coins another day.

The cold grip. Another officer wrote that he could not shake the feeling of being followed and watched. Asleep around 3:00 a.m. under three blankets, he felt a grip on his left ankle "almost like ice," could not fully wake, managed one kick, then could not move or speak. He describes a very slender hand reaching all the way around his ankle, with fingers "extremely long, not a human hand." He woke around 5:30 with his blankets off, and was advised to move rooms. No conclusion is stated.

The neighbors. One man, who has lived in the area his whole life, described an "invisible creature" he saw several years earlier: growling and howling, a feeling of being paralyzed, branches breaking east of his house. He went outside around midnight, watched for what ended up being nearly three hours, and came back near 0300. It felt, he said without hesitation, like twenty minutes.

A man told investigators a large dog-like creature had stood or run on its hind legs behind his property on three occasions over three years. On one, he and his uncle, target shooting, fired at it from about 75 feet with a .30-.30 rifle and appeared to hit it. It bled "thick black blood," the report says, and the shots "did not appear to kill or have any significant effect."

The Ute interview. On November 17, 2009, investigators interviewed a full-blooded Ute tribal member about local beliefs. He said the mesa is commonly known as Skinwalker Ridge, a name given generations ago, and that dog-like creatures and werewolves are "a completely separate and different entity" from a shape-shifter, a person with the power to change. The creatures can be killed, he said, but do not die where they can be seen. The investigators wrote that their understanding was that the dog-like creatures are spirits, and that more clarification was needed.

A resident described a hum like high-voltage power lines, so strong "you could feel it rather than hearing the noise," seeming to come from under the ground, most often at night. She does not know its source.

The experiments. BAASS's method included "brain teaser" games: locked briefcases left in a hotspot on the ranch for a month, then returned to Las Vegas, opened and checked for differences. One assumed "a low level of mathematical know-how on the part of any phenomenon on the Utah Ranch": dark tiles in a locked light box, arranged as a Fibonacci series, with the challenge for "any intelligence on the ranch" to assemble the next number. The boxes were padlocked, with keys kept in Las Vegas. The report states no result.

The website and the general. BAASS had monitored a website about the ranch since late summer 2009. A November 12 investigator report quoted a November 3 blog post: "There have been a three star general and two other important ranking officials to the property in the past year and the story goes they saw something that frightened them and caused them to run in opposite directions." The report passes that on as the blog's claim. It does not verify it.

The same report noted that the site's forum listed guard patrol times and equipment. BAASS later concluded the operator was "merely a skilled researcher" and that taking action against him "would only serve to harm BAASS by dramatically increasing publicity."

Projects on hold. The conclusion says important projects, including Northern Tier, entry into classified archives and Project Oral History, were on hold because BAASS "currently does not have the Need to Know for this information." Contacts with government organizations were "at much too a preliminary stage" to judge. The Utah ranch, meanwhile, remained a large part of its current investigations.

What the document does not say

It does not say what any creature, light, hum or grip was, and it presents no witness account as established. It states no finding for the stereo, the coins, the cold grip or the hum, and no result from the puzzle experiments. It does not verify the general story, identify the hum's source, or explain the missing time. It does not claim the ranch phenomena are anomalous.

Why it matters

This brief pairs with the D174 ranch brief. D174 is the contractor's spring 2010 field study. D173 shows the routine behind it: guards writing nightly logs, investigators visiting neighbors, a Ute tribal member explaining beliefs the team was trying to understand, and locked boxes left in homesteads for something to answer.

It also shows the contractor's limits in its own words. The same month BAASS logged a cold grip and a puzzle box, it reported that many of its important projects were on hold for lack of Need to Know. The document shows a contractor logging everything and stating almost no conclusions.

Source notes

• Guards and the stereo night: D173 pp.60-61. The cold grip: pp.67-68. The neighbors: pp.75 and 77.
• The Ute interview: pp.81-85. The hum: p.91.
• Puzzle briefcases and the Fibonacci box: pp.115-116. The photograph carries a 12/02/2009 time stamp.
• The website, the general and BAASS's decision: pp.117-119 and 126. Projects on hold: p.155.
• Page numbers are the original single-file PDF pages; the hosted copy is split into five parts.

Related files

• DOW-UAP-D174, BAASS Utah Ranch Investigation Report, 2010 (File Brief; the paired field study)
• DOW-UAP-D171, BAASS Monthly Report, June 2009 (File Brief; the vault plan)

Headlines and briefs on UAP Wire are editorial summaries of the published records. The primary source controls.