AAWSAP: What the DIA Actually Paid For

What Was AAWSAP?

AAWSAP was a Defense Intelligence Agency contract, awarded in September 2008 to Robert Bigelow's company BAASS, to study where breakthrough aerospace technology might go over the next forty years and what that would mean as a foreign threat. It ran on paper from September 2008 to December 2010 and cost $21,948,810. Its best-known products are 38 research papers, of which 37 are now public.

AAWSAP is usually described as a secret UFO programme, and the research papers include warp drives and wormholes. The documents the DIA itself wrote are about deliverables, invoices and contracting officers, and never mention UFOs. The contractor's documents are another matter. BAASS's plan and monthly reports, published in the Pentagon's seventh UFO file release, describe a UFO investigation with staff investigators, a sightings database and a team at a Utah ranch.

We read all 44 AAWSAP documents in the sixth release and the nine contractor documents in the seventh, and this page sets out what they actually contain. If you are new to this collection, our UAP research hub explains how we work with primary sources, and the news story on the sixth UFO file release covers the rest of the September batch.

How Much Did AAWSAP Cost? The $22 Million, Line by Line

AAWSAP cost $21,948,810.00. That figure is printed in the "total award amount" box of the contract's first page and repeated in Modification P00002, so the "$22 million" in news coverage is not a rounding guess. It is the government's own number, accurate to the dollar.

The base year was priced at exactly $10,000,000. In September 2009 the DIA priced the first option year at $25,000,000, but when it was funded in February 2010 the money came to $11,948,810, under half. The same modification asks the contractor to "identify impacts to deliverables as a result of reduced funding". On this evidence the programme was scaled back long before it stopped.

Sources: base year from the contract (D111), the priced option from Modification P00001 (D112), the funded option from Modification P00002 (D113). The six priced lines add up to exactly $25,000,000 and the funded lines to exactly $11,948,810.

AAWSAP Timeline: From Solicitation to Wind-Down

The whole contract life fits in seven documents. The striking part is the start: three weeks from solicitation to award, with nine days for bids.

What Was AAWSAP Asked to Study? The 12 Technical Areas

The statement of objectives lists twelve areas, in this order. Read cold, it looks like the contents page of an aerospace engineering textbook with a couple of odd entries.

It also asks for teams of experts with at least ten years in breakthrough aerospace research, with at least one PhD on each analytical team, and for work cleared up to Top Secret with access to compartmented information. The deliverables are monthly status reports, a management plan, research reports and a final integrated threat assessment.

What Did AAWSAP Actually Do? The UFO Investigation in BAASS's Own Reports

AAWSAP's contractor, BAASS, used the programme to investigate UFO reports, not only to commission research papers. Its own plan and reports, released on 23 October 2026, set out nine projects, and the papers were one of them.

The plan, dated 2 December 2008, says it "fulfills the requirement to submit a report as part of" contract HHM402-08-C-0072 (D168, page 7). Its nine projects:

Source: BAASS Project Management Plan, D168, pages 8–39.

Physics was the exception. The plan calls it "the DIA mandated Project Physics" and says that, apart from it, "BAASS's resources will not be devoted to studying the current 'state of the art'" (page 15). The Engagement project explains the alternative: "To successfully gather useful data from observations requires cooperation from the spacecraft" (page 20). These are BAASS's assumptions, and nothing in the release shows the DIA handing over the film, hardware or files the plan asked for.

BAASS grew fast. By its own count it had 33 full-time and 7 part-time staff on 31 March 2009, 35 and 6 on 30 April, and 45 and 6 on 30 June, including "senior investigative personnel (backgrounds in law enforcement and AFOSI)" and security guards (D169, D170 and D171, page 4 of each). One payroll row reads "Utah Ranch Security Officers", and from 3 August 2009 BAASS watched a ranch near Fort Duchesne, Utah, round the clock (D173, page 60). The documents never name it, but it is widely identified as Skinwalker Ranch: see Skinwalker Ranch in the Pentagon's UFO files for what BAASS found there.

In February 2009 BAASS bought a feed from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON): notice of significant sightings "within hours", investigators' reports and physical evidence including "samples of soil, insects, plants, and animals" (D169, page 19). MUFON did not spend most of it. BAASS wrote to it on 25 June 2009:

BAASS halved MUFON's monthly payment, then cut it by another $10,000, complaining of MUFON's "tendency to warehouse significant sums of money every month" (D171, pages 12–16; D173, page 4).

The database project built a "data warehouse" of 234,364 reports going back to 593 BC, 87% of them copied from the existing UFOCAT catalogue (D169, pages 10–15). By November 2010 it held eleven databases, including a "Utah Ranch Database", a "Post-Utah Ranch Effects Database" and a "United Kingdom Release Database" (D175, page 19). The 2009 reports describe BAASS reading the Ministry of Defence's released UFO files for "events with national security implications" (D171, page 132).

In January 2009 BAASS also asked the FAA to replace the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) with BAASS as the UAP reporting contact in three air traffic manuals. On 4 March the FAA said it "would be pleased to co-ordinate the changes" (D169, page 23). The report shows the request and that reply, not a published change.

The June 2009 report adds a design for a 5,000 sq ft underground vault in North Las Vegas, because "there was no highly secure facility at BAASS to store exotic material or tissue that the organization could obtain" (D171, page 7). It was "subject to building permits", and nothing in the release shows it was built.

Two BAASS teams went to Brazil in late May and early June 2009, told to "maintain a very low profile". The northern team brought back about 70 GB of local investigators' files and recommended surveillance at Colares, the town in Brazil's secret service file on Colares (D171, pages 101–116).

Project Northern Tier chased 1960s and 1970s reports over US missile and bomber bases such as Malmstrom, Minot and Loring, which also feature in our page on UAP reports at nuclear weapons sites. The plan also listed RAF Bentwaters, scene of the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident. A June 2009 memo by a BAASS investigator called it "one of the sponsor's top priorities" (D171, page 121), "sponsor" being BAASS's word for its customer. By November it had stalled: Northern Tier, entry into classified archives and Project Oral History were "on hold because BAASS currently does not have the Need to Know" (D173, page 155). Our page on Project Northern Tier tells that story in full.

A year later, four weeks before the contract ran out, BAASS's own summary said it "was contracted to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2008 to investigate and analyze the possibility of a credible threat posed by UAPs" (D175, pages 10–11). That is the contractor's account, not the DIA's, and it comes without a single count of cases investigated.

The AAWSAP DIRD List: All 37 Papers in the Release

The sixth release contains 37 of the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) the programme produced, dated December 2009 to January 2011. Those are the dates the DIRDs were issued, not when they were written. BAASS's reports show that on 31 December 2008 it contracted EarthTech International for "24-30 position papers", due between May and July 2009, and that by the end of June 2009 EarthTech had "taken delivery of approximately 24 papers" (D169, page 7; D171, page 9). D122 and D124 appear only on the March 2009 list, and the eleven DIRDs dated November 2010 to January 2011 (D143 to D153) are on none of the 2009 lists, which points to a later round. The Department of War's own notes call them "reference and synthesis products" rather than original research, and that is how most of them read. The speculation rating is ours, from reading each paper in full: 1 is a mainstream literature review, 5 is fringe. Page counts are the PDFs as released, covers included.

Add up the ratings and the shape is clear. Ten papers are straight literature reviews (rated 1) and twelve more are serious science with modest speculation (rated 2). Only four are fringe: the injury paper, the warp drive, the wormholes and negative-mass propulsion. Even those tend to argue against themselves. The warp-drive paper's own table says a 50-metre bubble moving at light speed needs −3.03 × 10⁵⁰ joules of negative energy, and invites the reader to compare that with the rest energy of the Sun, 1.79 × 10⁴⁷ joules. That is about 1,700 Suns. Even crawling along at 3 km/s needs −3.03 × 10⁴⁰ joules of something that has only ever been made in tiny amounts in a laboratory. The wormhole paper needs about 0.71 times the mass of Jupiter, in negative mass, per metre of throat. The antigravity paper concludes it is "highly unlikely, if not impossible" that anyone will soon build a technology that taps enough dark energy for propulsion. And the second fusion paper closes with a line worth framing: "The future needs to be focused more on science and engineering and less on science fiction."

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Which AAWSAP Papers Actually Mention UFOs?

Only two of the 37 released AAWSAP papers, D128 and D153, mention anomalous craft in their own text. Everything else in the set is about materials, propulsion, power, sensors or people, with no reference to unidentified craft at all.

D128, the injury paper, is the one openly about UFO witnesses. It says its purpose is to argue "that data exists to 'reverse engineer' propulsion systems of anomalous aerospace vehicles, independent of origin, based on biology". It compares a real 1997 case of three engineers injured by radio-frequency exposure with reports from people who say they were hurt near unknown objects. The radio-frequency medicine in it is mainstream; the leap from that to UFO case reports is the whole argument. Our full read of the DIA UFO injury study takes it apart section by section.

D153 is mostly a physics review of how negative energy is produced and measured in the laboratory. Twice, near the end, it suggests that the same detectors could be built into "a sensor array for surveillance and detection of any anomalous aerospace platforms that might use engineered spacetime effects for propulsion". That is the closest any of the propulsion papers comes to naming what the programme was interested in.

D144, on cockpits for "breakthrough flight", describes vehicles that shrug off inertia, which is how people describe UAP behaviour, but it never makes that link itself. We have left it marked "no" on the same rule as the rest: what the paper says, not what readers bring to it.

Does the AAWSAP Contract Mention UFOs?

No. We searched the full text of all seven contract documents for UFO, UAP, anomalous, paranormal and Skinwalker, and none of those words appears even once. The statement of objectives talks about "advanced aerospace weapon system applications" and the "foreign threat". The modifications deal with funding, dates and who the contracting officer's representative is.

That does not settle what the programme was really for. It does mean that anyone who says "the contract shows" a UFO purpose is wrong about the contract. In the September release the UFO link came only from D128, from D153's one sentence, and from reporting and testimony outside it. Since 23 October 2026 it also comes from the contractor's own deliverables. BAASS's plan says it "fulfills the requirement" of the contract (D168, page 7) and sets out a search for craft and their operators. Its November 2010 summary, citing the contract number, describes the job as investigating "the possibility of a credible threat posed by UAPs" (D175, pages 10–11). The contract is silent; the contractor's paperwork is not.

Who Wrote the AAWSAP DIRDs?

The authors of the AAWSAP DIRDs are officially anonymous: every byline is redacted to a code like "AAP Person 58". BAASS's 2009 progress reports do give each code's organisation, from EarthTech International to Wayne State and Johns Hopkins universities, but not the person. The one exception is D127, the statistical Drake equation paper, which reproduces its author's signed 2008 conference paper as an appendix: Claudio Maccone.

The codes recur, which tells you something. Person 58 appears on antigravity, warp drive (as co-author), wormholes, vacuum energy, laser lightcraft and negative-energy tomography. Person 73 wrote the brain–machine interface, quantum computing and pilot-workload papers. Person 75 wrote both the superconductor-gravity history and the maverick-inventor essay. Several papers cite their own author's earlier work heavily, and names have been attached to them elsewhere on that basis. Those identifications are inference from the text, not something the release confirms, so we do not repeat them here.

The June 2009 progress report lists every commissioned paper with its author code, organisation, topic and due date (D171, pages 10–11), and the March 2009 report has two more rows (D169, pages 8–9). The DIRD column is our match by author code and topic.

So the injury paper, D128, came from an author listed at Wayne State University, and the Drake equation paper from the International Academy of Astronautics, which fits the signed appendix. The same Wayne State code turns up elsewhere in BAASS's records, on its Colares team and in a 2009 witness interview, which our injury-study page covers.

Robert Bigelow's own name does appear in the paperwork: he is listed as the BAASS contact on the distribution list for Modification P00002. Elsewhere in the contract file the company contact is redacted to "AAP Person 4".

When Did AAWSAP End: 2010 or 2012?

The AAWSAP contract ends on 21 December 2010. That is the date set by Modification P00005, a no-cost extension "by mutual agreement", and it is the last action in the file. Option years 2, 3 and 4 were never exercised.

The Department of War's release notes describe AAWSAP as "active from 2008 to 2012". Nothing in the released AAWSAP documents supports the 2012 date. The contractor's own November 2010 summary dates the work the same way the contract file does:

That speaks only for BAASS's contract, so it cannot rule out DIA work after 2010. Some DIRDs are dated January 2011, a few weeks after the contract's end, which fits papers being finished and delivered during wind-down rather than a programme still running. The 2012 date remains the Department's; if it comes from other records, they have not been published.

How to Read the AAWSAP Files Yourself

The 44 AAWSAP documents in the sixth release are US government work and public domain. The nine BAASS-side documents in the seventh were written by a contractor and released by the Department of War, so credit them to the release rather than treating them as public domain. You can open all of them in our PURSUE files browser (search D110 to D116 for the contract, D117 to D153 for the papers and D166 to D175 for BAASS's own documents), where every record links to a download from our own mirror. Our guide to the US PURSUE releases explains how the designations work, and the wider UAP document archive lists every collection we have catalogued.

The sixth release also carries the Air Force's file on the 1952 Tremonton film, which makes an instructive contrast: a case where the paperwork is far more interesting than the headline. Our Tremonton film analysis and the post on how the Air Force settled on "balloons or gulls" cover it.

Seen Something Odd? Check the Sky First

Most of what AAWSAP published was theory, but its contractor also paid people to go out and look. Some of what they found had ordinary answers: a light over Kansas that the local sheriff put down to Chinese lanterns, and blue lights in California that MUFON reclassified as radio-controlled gliders (D170, page 23; D173, page 10). If you have seen a strange light yourself, the quickest answers are free. Many reports turn out to be the International Space Station, a bright planet or a string of satellites, and you can check ISS passes tonight or see what you can see in the sky tonight in a few seconds. Our UK night sky this week lists the bright planets and when they rise, and if you want to learn the sky well enough to spot the odd one out, start with stargazing for beginners.

Related Reading

Header image: an illustration generated with Google Gemini, not a photograph of any AAWSAP site or document. Contract pages: DOW-UAP-D110, D111 and D113, US Department of War, public domain. BAASS pages: DOW-UAP-D168, D171 and D175, released by the US Department of War, PURSUE Release 7.