BAASS investigations

BAASS investigations

Organization	Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), Las Vegas
Client	Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Warning Office
Program	Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP)
Contract	Awarded 22 September 2008; funded for fiscal years 2009 and 2010
Program manager	James Lacatski (DIA)
Key staff	Robert Bigelow (administrator); Colm Kelleher (deputy administrator); Lt. Col. Douglas Kurth
Outputs	More than 100 reports, including 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents
Released	37 of 38 DIRDs (March 2022) and some contract records
Date	2010
Topics	Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 171
Year	2010 in UFO history
Timeline	2010 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	14

Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) carried out investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) from 2008 to 2010. It built a large database of UFO reports, sent investigators to individual cases, studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, and commissioned technical papers on advanced aerospace physics.^[1][2][8] Much of what is known about its work comes from Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), written by the DIA program manager James Lacatski with Colm Kelleher and George Knapp. The book was cleared for publication by the Defense Department in May 2021.^[10][13] The full results of the investigations have not been released.^[1]

Background

AAWSAP came about through Senator Harry Reid and Reid's friend Robert Bigelow, the Nevada billionaire. Its backers in the Senate also included Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye. It was budgeted at $22 million.^[6][7] In July 2008 Reid briefed the DIA director, Lieutenant General Maples, on $10 million in start-up funds.^[4] Lacatski, of the DIA's Defense Warning Office, wrote a small-business solicitation asking for studies in twelve areas: lift, propulsion, control, power generation, "spatial temporal translation", materials, configuration, signature reduction, human interface, human effects, armament, and supporting areas.^[3][8] Lacatski later said it was a UFO program from the start, and one meant to look at how UFOs might fit with the paranormal.^[8]

Bigelow formed BAASS as a sister company to Bigelow Aerospace. It was registered in Nevada in January 2008.^[2][8] It was understood to be the only bidder, and on 22 September 2008 it won the contract, with Lacatski as program manager. First-year funding was about $10 million, renewable annually.^[4][8]

Staff

By early November 2008 Bigelow had hired Colm Kelleher, a biotechnology manager in San Francisco and a former scientist at Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). Kelleher became the first full-time employee and deputy administrator, with Bigelow as chief executive and administrator.^[4][8] The second hire, in December 2008, was Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kurth. He had commanded the "Red Devils", a Marine Corps F/A-18C squadron in the USS Nimitz strike group, during the November–December 2004 "Tic Tac" encounter.^[4][8] The earlier version of this article called Kurth a retired Air Force colonel; the BAASS account describes him as a Marine squadron commander.^[8]

Over the program's roughly 27 months BAASS employed about 75 people, including some 50 full-time investigators, scientists and analysts, several of them from NIDS.^[2][3] The physicist Hal Puthoff, who had led the CIA-funded remote-viewing research, was a senior adviser.^[8]

Investigations

The database and MUFON

BAASS gathered UFO reports from around the world into what insiders called the largest UFO data warehouse ever assembled.^[2] In February 2009, with the help of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) co-founder John Schuessler, BAASS signed a purchase-order contract with MUFON.^[8] It entitled BAASS to:^[8]

• notification within hours of significant sightings anywhere in the United States
• timely reports from specially trained MUFON investigators
• physical evidence, from photographs and recordings to soil, plant, insect and animal samples

BAASS said it had laboratories ready for forensic, photographic, metallurgical, chemical, isotope and biological analysis.^[8] MUFON's rapid-response "STAR" teams carried out paid field investigations from April 2009 to January 2010.^[2][3] The money also paid to upgrade MUFON's case management database and catalogue its archives. MUFON's tax filings for 2008 and 2009 recorded a total of $344,667 from BAASS as "contributions".^[8] One researcher who documented the arrangement wrote that only three of the people involved knew who they were really working for.^[3]

The Tic Tac investigation

Kurth wrote up his memory of the 2004 encounter and listed the witnesses. Kelleher passed the list to Lacatski, who brought in a colleague called "Jonathan Axelrod" in the book, widely believed to be the later UAP Task Force head Jay Stratton.^[8] Within months Axelrod's team had interviewed more than a dozen pilots, radar operators and other witnesses from the Nimitz and USS Princeton.^[8] Axelrod's 13-page report, filed on 24 June 2009, said the object had no counterpart in the inventory of the United States or any foreign nation and showed advanced propulsion capability.^[4] The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies released its own 270-page analysis in April 2019, which the BAASS side says confirmed the main points of Axelrod's report.^[8]

Skinwalker Ranch and "collocated" effects

BAASS investigators kept watch at Skinwalker Ranch and studied people said to have been affected by encounters. The book describes what it calls high-strangeness events, from a camcorder found switched out of record mode to poltergeist-like effects that people said they had brought home after visiting.^[5][8] Interviews collected accounts of a two-legged, dog- or wolf-like creature, and BAASS mapped the creatures' supposed "migration routes".^[8] A 360-page report on plant and seed experiments at the ranch, meant to test whether plants could act as biosensors for unknown radiation, went to the DIA in April 2010.^[8] In March 2010 BAASS asked the remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle to describe a blind target that was in fact the ranch.^[8] The skeptical Bad UFOs blog reviewed the book as a story about "ghosts and werewolves".^[5]

Legacy cases and the Air Force

BAASS also sought information on earlier military UFO investigations. It tried to set up a relationship with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations' special-projects unit (AFOSI-PJ). The plan was to share redacted sighting data so the Air Force could flag cases that were really its own secret aircraft, leaving BAASS to focus on true unknowns.^[8] It also wanted AFOSI's data on the October–November 1975 intrusions over Wurtsmith, Loring, Malmstrom and Minot Air Force Bases.^[8] According to the book, an AFOSI contact said the unit had closely watched UFO reports and organizations during the development of the F-117 and B-2. He said a substantial number of sightings from the 1970s to 2000 had turned out to be Air Force secret programs.^[8] These accounts come from participants, and the underlying records have not been released.^[5]

Reports

BAASS produced a 494-page "Ten Month Report" in July 2009.^[3] For "Project Physics", it contracted Puthoff's EarthTech International to commission about 38 position papers by outside experts across the twelve technical areas. These became the Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs), covering topics from metallic glasses to warp drives. Lacatski published the last on 11 January 2011.^[1][8] In all, according to the program's account, more than 100 separate reports went to the DIA in just over two years.^[8]

The physicist Eric Davis confirmed the 38 DIRDs on Coast to Coast AM on 28 January 2018. The Black Vault filed for them within days, and on 25 March 2022 the DIA released 37 of the 38. The missing one is the classified version of a paper on high-energy laser weapons.^[1] DIA has also released contract records, Reid's 2009 request for special-access-program status, and its review of the program's deliverables through FOIA.^[1][9] In November 2009 a DIA review found insufficient grounds to classify the program as a special access program.^[4]

End of the contract

Congressional funding was not available for fiscal 2011, and the contract ran out at the end of 2010.^[3][8] Lacatski then tried to move the work elsewhere:^[8]

• On 7 February 2011 he briefed the Department of Homeland Security, but its leadership declined the new funding.
• In fiscal 2014 and 2015, with Representative Steny Hoyer's help, he and Reid tried again to fund it through the Defense Department, and failed both times.
• He retired on 13 May 2016.

The name AATIP, created for Reid's 2009 letter, later became attached to Luis Elizondo's separate efforts, and the 2017 New York Times story made it famous.^[6][7][8] In its March 2024 historical report, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office said it found no verifiable evidence that any government investigation had confirmed extraterrestrial technology.^[11][12] Some page references for these events come from Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (pp. 94–98, 102).^[13][14]

People and topics

• BAASS — The Bigelow Aerospace division that carried out the AAWSAP contract.
• Defense Intelligence Agency — The Pentagon's military intelligence agency, which ran AAWSAP.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• AAWSAP — The Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP research program of 2008–2010, carried out by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies.
• Skinwalkers at the Pentagon — A 2021 book about AAWSAP by Lacatski, Kelleher and Knapp.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Freedom of Information Act — The 1966 U.S. law that lets the public request government records.

On the Timeline

• Hill AFB glowing disc (2010) (15 December 2010) — Two alleged Hill AFB workers report a glowing disc above the flight line.
• Kit Green's autopsy tissue package (2011) — Kit Green says he received an anonymous package of supposed alien autopsy tissue.

See every 2010 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP/AAWSAP)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.