DOW-UAP-D166: MUFON Reports Prepared for BAASS -- Five Research Proposals on Lift, Power, Control, Human Interface and Propulsion (November 2008)

Source file: DOW-UAP-D166-MUFON-Reports_Prepared_for_BAASS-November_2008.pdf Originating agency: Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), "MUFON Advanced Technology Establishment", for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS); released in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) AAWSAP file Document type: Compilation of five technical papers in research-proposal format, with a cover page Date: November 2008 (every page footer reads "Nov-08") Classification: Footer "BAASS CONFIDENTIAL", a contractor proprietary marking rather than a government classification, struck through on many pages; released to the public in 2026 Page count: 26 VIRIN: 260508-D-D0360-1158 PURSUE Release: 7

Summary

The cover page is printed in large type: "MUFON Reports Prepared for BAASS", "November 2008", and below it the word "Copies". Five separate papers follow, each with its own pagination ("Page 1 of 5" and so on) and each headed by the authoring body, "MUFON Advanced Technology Establishment", and a city: Lift (Newport Beach, California, pages 2-6), Power Generation (Newport Beach, pages 7-13), Control (Fort Collins, Colorado, pages 14-16), Human Interface (Delafield, Wisconsin, pages 17-21) and Propulsion (Austin, Texas, pages 22-26).

The titles match five of the 12 technical areas set out in the AAWSAP Statement of Objectives (DOW-UAP-D110): lift, propulsion, control, power generation and human interface. Each paper is built as a proposal: abstract, technical approaches and concepts, a "Prospects for research payoff" section, a proposed team and a milestone schedule, usually of six months. The official description mentions "at least a paper on Lift"; the file actually holds five complete papers.

The common thread is the use of UFO reports as engineering data. The Lift paper infers from reports of silent, humming hovering that the reported craft "do not move air around"; the Propulsion paper lists nine sighting characteristics and proposes testing interstellar-travel theories against them; and the Human Interface paper proposes studying "implants" allegedly removed from people. Names of researchers, authors and one company are redacted throughout under the marker "1843(a)(2)".

Research Article

The document and its structure

The file is a scan of printed copies. The first four papers carry the MUFON logo and the words "Mutual UFO Network"; the Human Interface paper opens with its title only. Every page carries the footer "BAASS CONFIDENTIAL" beside "Nov-08", and on many pages the marking is struck through with a horizontal line. There is no cover letter, contract number, named BAASS recipient or dollar figure, and the file does not explain how the papers were commissioned. The official description calls them materials prepared "under a separate supporting contract"; the text itself never mentions such a contract.

The redactions are consistent: every personal name, and the name of at least one company ("partly owned by" followed by a redaction), sits under a box marked "1843(a)(2)". The reference lists at the end of the Control, Human Interface and Propulsion papers are redacted in full, so the sources the papers rely on cannot be checked from the document.

Lift: a toroidal craft in the Earth's magnetic field

The Lift paper defines lift as the force that lets a vehicle hover or hold altitude "without expelling fluids as with a jet engine or rocket" (page 2) and examines five ways to produce it. The first three are conventional: buoyancy (balloons, with a reference to the late-1890s "airship" wave presented at a 2008 Society for Scientific Exploration meeting, speaker redacted), wings, and vertical rotors or ducted fans. Here the central argument appears: most hovering reports describe craft that "make little or no noise other than a humming sound, which suggests they do not move air around to stay afloat, since rapid air motion always makes a lot of noise" (pages 2-3).

The fourth way is a magnetic dipole, for example a superconducting ring, acted on in the Earth's field by a force F=M*gradB. The paper argues that if such a ring spins, gyroscopic effects would produce a wobble, so that "falling leaf" or conical motions observed in the past "can be easily explained as a gyroscopic response", and adds that there have been "several reliable reports of compass disturbances associated with UFO flyovers" (page 3). The fifth is electrostatic levitation in the natural fair-weather field of about 100 volts per metre, which the paper says would be accompanied by coloured glows around the vehicle.

The sizing for a 100-foot craft calls for 10^11 amps and a superconductor carrying 10^9 amps/cm2 (page 3); the appendix gives a "design noted" point of about 500,000 pounds of force for a 10-metre-radius craft if superconductors of 10^6 amps/cm2, such as yttrium barium copper oxide, are available, and warns that a field of about 10^6 tesla would require shielding for people (page 5). Six slides accompany the appendix (page 6). Among its recommendations, the paper suggests supplementing superconductor research by "studying a variety of 'leaked' documents of earlier possible classified real research for the purpose of idea stimulation, such as notes allegedly involving Einstein", and declines to recommend investment in ducted fans. The milestone list for a three-person team (physicist, superconductor engineer, technician) includes the line "Week 17: Results surprise everyone, require redesign" (page 4).

Power Generation: a proposal to buy a cold fusion reactor

The longest paper (seven pages) never mentions UFOs. Its abstract proposes "the purchase and subsequent use of an already-designed research facility" to develop the principles of cold fusion (page 7). It reviews the history of the field with researchers' names redacted (although the abbreviation "F&P" survives in the body text, and the Figure 1 legend spells it out in full names that were not redacted) and describes a 1985 experiment in which a one-cubic-centimetre palladium cube "ran dry" over a weekend, reached its 1554 C melting point and "vaporized a hole in the marble-like lab table and created a depression in the floor by vaporizing the concrete" (page 9). Figure 1 (page 8) plots power density against temperature and concludes that operation above about 600 C is needed; Figure 2 (page 10) is a deuterium-palladium equilibrium diagram, from which a concentration of 0.7 at 500 C would require 20,000 atmospheres.

The concrete proposal is a "scanning reactor" from EDTEK Corporation, based on "gas loading" rather than electrolysis. Its drawing (Figure 3, page 11) is stamped "Proprietary", and the paper says MUFON was "given verbal permission" to use it. According to the text, the reactor was built but has "never had enough funding to perform any experiments yet", and its builder is reportedly willing to sell it at cost, about $10K for materials only. The paper adds cost figures (palladium at $750 an ounce, 50 litres of deuterium for $250) and mentions an SRI researcher in Menlo Park "reported to be enthusiastic" about using the facility. Only one paragraph returns to aerospace: it might be possible to scale such a plant down into a self-contained package for aerospace vehicles, but "feasibility needs to be proven first" (page 12).

Control: modulating current in a superconducting craft

The three-page Control paper continues the Lift concept. If a future vehicle is designed "to nullify or counteract gravity", traditional controls could be replaced by "non-airfoil manipulation technologies that maneuver the vehicle using the lift/propulsion field itself" (page 14). It describes a two-ring craft: a non-rotating inner ring holding the occupant compartment, power generation and navigation, and a superconducting outer ring rotated by maglev-style push-pull and powered after start-up by "microwave beaming". Control would come from phase shift (PSM), pulse width (PWM) and frequency (FM) modulation and is divided into five systems, including one to prevent G-forces harmful to occupants and a fail-safe anti-collision system (pages 15-16). The proposed team: a pulse power engineer, a mechanical engineer, a physicist and an electrical engineer with maglev experience.

Human Interface: telepathy, virtual reality and "implants"

The Human Interface paper is the most speculative. It proposes five future directions: direct telepathic interaction with a computer (while conceding that psychokinesis studies "have yielded little in the way of statistically significant, repeatable results"); "synthetic telepathy" through scalp electrodes, citing subjects at Wright-Patterson's Aeronautical Systems Center who learned to control a flight simulator; a biologic interface, based on statements by "some abductees" who saw a place inside a UFO for the operator's hands to rest; virtual reality; and biologically powered "implants" (pages 17-18).

The core section concerns implants. The paper hypothesises that they are "bi-directional communication devices" and that, if they could be reverse engineered, "we very well may have a direct mind-to-vehicle interface". It states that MUFON holds copies of x-rays and reproduces two image crops of a bright oval object "about the size of the tip of a pen", said to have been found in a 16-year-old female and a 76-year-old male from different parts of the United States (page 19). The plan: a team of six numbered roles (seven people), including a physician or dental surgeon, an RF engineer, a biochemist, a biophysicist and two mental health professionals, one of whom would discuss the pros and cons with the "experiencer" before a consent form is signed; capture of the implant's waveform using CT, MRI, EEG and an RF spectrum analyser; and a schedule of 18 to 24 months (pages 20-21). It refers to two internal MUFON documents, an "Implant Investigation Proposal" and an analysis of equipment needed for field investigations, neither of which is in the file. It contains no measurements, laboratory results or source for the images, and claims of magnetic properties and transmission are attributed to "UFO literature" (page 20).

Propulsion: nine characteristics and an anti-gravity theory

The Propulsion paper opens with the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus, NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project (1996-2002) and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (1998-2007), then proposes, "although controversial", to test whether the properties of unidentified aerial phenomena witnessed over the last 50 years can be explained by current theories (page 22). It lists nine characteristics, among them rapid acceleration and deceleration, objects "over 400 meters in size" hovering or moving slowly, no air turbulence, no sign of the sound barrier being broken despite claimed speeds above Mach 1, and electromagnetic fields suggested by plasma glows and interference with electronics (page 23). The very next sentence refers to "the seven conditions noted", an internal inconsistency left uncorrected.

According to the paper, the comparison was first made by a former NASA and Langley Research Center scientist in a 1995 book (name and title redacted), who concluded that "a controlled repulsive field such as anti-gravity" best explains the characteristics. The paper draws on the Gertsenshtein Effect, a 2001 experiment with a ceramic superconductor reported to exert "a short repulsive force on small movable objects", and a proposal to generate high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) with a pair of tabletop X-ray lasers, with all researchers' names redacted (page 24). The business case recurs: even if the research fails, superconductor investment would benefit plasma thrusters, maglev trains and power lines. The proposed team includes materials scientists, physicists, an electrical engineer and a patent attorney, plus a manager able to use "brainstorming techniques"; members "will need to be very open minded" (page 25).

Significance

The document records MUFON's involvement in BAASS work as early as November 2008, about two months after the AAWSAP contract award (DOW-UAP-D111). It shows BAASS using the Statement of Objectives' list of areas (D110) as a framework even for material from a civilian UFO research organisation, and shows that at this early stage the areas were read through UFO reports: silence and humming as a clue to non-aerodynamic lift, "falling leaf" motion as a clue to a spinning magnetic dipole, and sighting characteristics as a yardstick for choosing a propulsion theory.

The papers are uneven. Lift and Control offer order-of-magnitude estimates and equations, Power Generation is essentially a proposal to buy a specific piece of equipment, and Human Interface rests on "abductee" testimony and unsourced images. Compared with the Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs, DOW-UAP-D117 to D153), written by scientists at research institutions, these are far shorter papers with no visible bibliography. The file does not show whether BAASS accepted, funded or carried out any of the proposals.

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"We examine five ways that lift can be generated on our planet and have concluded that the use of the magnetic field of the earth for propelling vehicles using superconductors has merit." -- page 2

"There have been several reliable reports of compass disturbances associated with UFO flyovers, strongly suggesting large magnetic fields involved." -- page 3

"Week 17: Results surprise everyone, require redesign" -- page 4

"This proposal suggests the purchase and subsequent use of an already-designed research facility to develop the principles of cold fusion to permit a breakthrough in the planning of full-scale development for low temperature nuclear power." -- page 7

"This reactor has actually been built and has never had enough funding to perform any experiments yet." -- pages 10-11

"It is hypothesized that the implants noted above are bi-directional communication devices." -- page 19

"MUFON is in possession of copies of x-rays which may provide evidence of implants in unsuspecting U.S. citizens." -- page 19

"Although controversial, it is worth considering whether the properties of unidentified aerial phenomena that have been witnessed over the last 50 years could be explained by any of the current theories for interstellar propulsion." -- page 22