THE BAASS MONTHLY REPORTS

WHAT THESE FILES ARE

Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, was the contractor behind AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The four files are DOW-UAP-D169 (March, 42 pages), D170 (April, 50 pages), D171 (June, 134 pages), and D173 (November, 155 pages). Each opens with a table of contents and closes with a short conclusion, and most of the page count is attached case reports. Staff appear as numbered "AAP Person" labels, and many other names and passages are redacted.

One thing governs how to read all of them. These are a contractor's own progress reports to the customer paying for its work. They record what BAASS said it was doing and planning, in BAASS's own confident voice. They are not findings by the DIA, and the released files contain no government evaluation of them. The set is also incomplete: nothing here covers January, February, May, or July through October 2009.

THE UNDERGROUND VAULT

The June report (D171) lists "Underground Vault" under progress on new facilities. It gives the reason in plain terms: the need arose from "a BAASS priority to pursue and acquire recovered hardware and biological samples from the corporate world and/or from private individuals and groups located elsewhere, including in Brazil." The BAASS administrator, the report says, recognized there was no highly secure place "to store exotic material or tissue that the organization could obtain."

The plans were specific: 5,000 square feet, walls, ceiling, and floor three feet thick, a concrete access tunnel leading to multiple security doors, at least one a thick steel vault door, and 15 to 20 feet of earth overhead, at the Bigelow Aerospace site in North Las Vegas, with any surface structures "extensively camouflaged." Occupancy was anticipated by late 2009 or early 2010, subject to building permits.

Three limits matter, and they are the difference between a real document and the headline it invites. The language is about what the organization "could obtain," so the passage describes a plan to store things, not an inventory. It does not say BAASS held any recovered hardware or tissue. And this is the only place the vault appears: a text search of the other three monthly reports and the November 2010 self-assessment finds no mention of it, so nothing in the released record shows it was ever built. The same report says five office buildings had gone into escrow, including a planned 5,000 square foot laboratory and secure evidence storage, which is the more ordinary half of the same real-estate push.

The December 2008 project management plan (D168) supplies the background. It says BAASS-affiliated personnel had "a list of about ten individuals" said to have worked on or been affiliated with "programs involving retrieval of advanced aerospace hardware or of associated biological material," and urges DIA to contact them. That is a contractor's claim about what those people could say. The file does not record what any of them said.

BRAZIL

Brazil runs through all of this paperwork. The project plan asks DIA to contact the Brazilian Air Force by February 1, 2009 for the full Colares files, including medical records. The March report includes an executive summary titled "The UFO Assault on Brazil," written in alarmed language and treating deaths and injuries from the 1977 events as established. Compare Operacao Prato, where the released Brazilian record does not carry those mass-casualty claims. They come from later accounts, and a BAASS summary repeating them does not make them documented.

The June report then describes an actual deployment. A north team left for Brazil on May 25, 2009 and worked Fortaleza, Sobral, and Cachoeira until June 2, while a second team met contacts in Sao Paulo and Brasilia. Personnel carried pre-approved talking points and had "strict instructions" to keep a very low profile. The trip summary is the most candid thing in the file. The Fortaleza group CPU had some 3,418 cases and let BAASS copy them, but the files were "in total disarray." It held items of evidence, but with unknown chain of custody, and it had not authorized BAASS to analyze anything. The Sobral group was judged "too commercial," using its investigations to sell newspapers. The trip brought back documents and more than 65 GB of footage. Its summary lists no recovered hardware or biological sample.

MUFON, THE FAA, AND THE FILES OF OTHER GOVERNMENTS

In February 2009 BAASS signed a purchase order with the Mutual UFO Network for fast notification of sightings, investigator reports, and physical evidence. The relationship soured quickly. April says case numbers were "considerably lower than expected," June says the same and that the relationship was "closely monitored," and November records BAASS cutting MUFON's monthly stipend by $10,000, unhappy with its "tendency to warehouse significant sums of money."

The March report also shows BAASS working to become the FAA's published UAP reporting contact, replacing the National Institute for Discovery Science in three FAA publications, and says an FAA official agreed on March 4, 2009 to coordinate the changes. The released files do not show the outcome. Elsewhere analysts worked through newly released foreign archives: 9,500 pages from Canada, 329 from Denmark, and about 100,000 from France's GEIPAN. BAASS repeats in three reports that its database is larger than that of any other UAP organization in North America, a claim the files do not test.

NORTHERN TIER AND THE NEED TO KNOW

Project Northern Tier, staffed from late April 2009, targeted the autumn 1975 reports around Malmstrom, Minot, Loring, and Wurtsmith, the nuclear-site cases long cited in this field. What stands out is how ordinary the method was. The June status list is FOIA requests, open-source searches, local newspapers, and looking for a subject expert on KC-135s, the same public tools any outside researcher had.

The November report explains why. Its conclusion says many important projects, "including Northern Tier, entry into classified archives, Project Oral History," and contacts with key military and private-sector people were on hold "because BAASS currently does not have the Need to Know for this information." That sentence deserves as much attention as the vault. Whatever else it shows, a DIA contractor funded to study this subject, about fourteen months after its contract award, reports that it could not get into the classified holdings it wanted. Nothing in these files shows it ever found what it was looking for. By then, the report says, much of its effort had moved to the Utah ranch, under round-the-clock security officer surveillance since August 3, 2009.

READING THE MONTHLY REPORTS IN UMBRA

War.gov lists these files by catalog number among 28 documents. Umbra keeps the AAWSAP record together across Releases 06 and 07, with each official description and its source metadata intact, so the contractor's claims can be read beside the government's own summaries of them.