DOW-UAP-D167: Project CAPELLA -- A Proposed Data Warehouse for Unusual Aerial Phenomena for BAASS, with the SVP Code and the Six-Layer Model (December 2008)

Source file: DOW-UAP-D167-Project_Capella-December-2008.pdf Originating agency: Documatica Research, LLC (San Francisco, California), for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS); released in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) AAWSAP file Document type: Proposal report ("Report no.001") with three appendices and a data exhibit Date: 10 December 2008 Classification: No classification marking on the pages; released to the public in 2026 Page count: 42 VIRIN: 260508-D-D0360-1159 PURSUE Release: 7

Summary

The cover page (PDF page 2) carries the Documatica Research, LLC logo and the heading "Report no.001 to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS)", and, in a box: "Project CAPELLA: Towards the development of a data warehouse in support of research on unusual aerial phenomena and related anomalies". The author's name is replaced by the label AAP Person 5, followed by "San Francisco, California" and the date 10 December 2008. The label also appears at the foot of almost every page.

The report consists of a ten-page overview proposal (pages 3-11) and three appendices: A, a classification method and reliability indicators (pages 12-19); B, a paper on a "six-layer model" for anomalous phenomena (pages 20-35); and C, the data structure and software, with an example from the NIDS catalogue (pages 36-42). According to the introduction, two of the appendices "summarize previously-published work".

The central claim is that the study of aerial phenomena suffers from dozens of overlapping catalogues with no standards or validation, and that the answer is not another giant catalogue but a "data warehouse" over the existing ones, with uniform coding and simple commercial software. The proposal includes a priority list, a policy for access to foreign and private catalogues, five staff roles and a two-year budget.

Research Article

Background: half a century of catalogues

The historical survey (pages 3-5) is one of the most detailed parts. It begins in 1953, when the Air Force tasked the Battelle Memorial Institute with analysing Project Blue Book reports on punched cards, work that produced "Report 14", but "this work was not pursued and the cards were not kept." The author writes that he and his wife compiled their own punched-card version of the Blue Book files, using a scheme first used in France in 1962 and expanded at the University of Texas and Northwestern University in 1963-1967, and that the database was turned over in 1968 to the Condon study at the University of Colorado, eventually becoming the basis of the UFOCAT catalogue now maintained by CUFOS. He also mentions a 1968 catalogue of over 700 landing cases reported between 1868 and 1968, a catalogue of physiological effects assembled by AAP Person 8, the 1980s UNICAT catalogue, a private DOS-based catalogue that reached almost 20,000 entries, and the GEIPAN database of the French space agency CNES, holding the full text of over 3,000 reports to the French Gendarmerie as scanned images. Most researchers' names are redacted under the marker "1843(a)(2)".

The author counts "at least 30 active catalogues" with obvious overlap and widely varying standards. His diagnosis is blunt: newcomers start their own files hoping to "solve" the puzzle quickly, but "rarely have the financial wherewithal or professional staff necessary to conduct field investigations"; every group indexes its own way, making data exchange "impractical, if not impossible"; and as the implementers get older, "the files get abandoned" (page 5). Later he adds a charge of bias: many files carry the "(unstated) assumption that all cases involve spacecraft from extraterrestrial origin, to the exclusion of any other hypothesis" (page 7).

Requirements and platform

The requirements section (page 5) sets four goals: to support a family of catalogues of observations "whose nature or behavior suggest the presence of an unrecognized threat", to be running within a short time, to extend the search to as many regions of the world as possible, and to allow data mining and correlation with physical, environmental, biological or socio-political factors. This is the only point where the proposal explicitly connects to AAWSAP's threat language. The system must serve "a closed community of physicists and analysts" testing theories and counter-theories, because "the phenomenon is so diverse that any theory of it can be proven, provided one is free to select the 'right' observations - and ignore the rest!" (page 6).

The technical recommendation is deliberately modest: do not merge databases, each of which carries its own social and cultural bias, but build a data warehouse over them (Figure 1, page 7), using Excel, which, although "not a database system", makes it "very easy to find, sort, replace and tabulate" data across flat files. The author estimates the total number of cases that have produced reports at only about 100,000, so even triple that is a small file (pages 7-8). Extensions such as a collaboration system with instant messaging, or "an artificial intelligence screening program (using a rules-based engine)" to prioritise field investigation teams, are deferred because they "would only distract the staff" (page 8).

Priorities, access and visibility

The first two steps are spelled out (page 8). First, convert the NIDS catalogue, developed in the 1990s by AAP Person 7 and colleagues in Las Vegas, as staff training and a system test. Second, "starting on January 1st, 2009, all cases coming to the knowledge of BAASS would be recorded in the new format" by a dedicated staff member, who would also keep paper files for newspaper articles and photographs. The system would use the secure servers "already installed for other user groups" at BAASS and "does not require an elevated system of security" as long as the database administrator controls access.

Section 4 (page 9) addresses foreign and private catalogues. Some are "jealously guarded" or bound by intellectual property agreements; the author argues that their owners cannot claim ownership of the cases themselves, only of their computer representation, so restrictions on non-commercial conversion are "debatable" and should be examined case by case. He puts a "major decision" to BAASS about CAPELLA's external visibility: keep it in-house, "if only to prevent leaks of private information such as the names of witnesses or the conclusions reached by BAASS about certain cases", or publish the data structure and invite other groups to use it. He plans two trips to Western Europe, with emphasis on France, Switzerland, Spain and Italy, later extending to Scandinavia, Germany, Russia and the U.K.

Staff and budget

Section 5 (pages 9-11) defines five roles: a database administrator; a data analyst who would interview witnesses by phone and keep a paper filing system, possibly "from the military"; a quality control coordinator whose job is to challenge the data, who "must not report to others" on the team and must be protected from criticism; and in year two a statistician with at least an M.S. and experience with hard field data "as opposed to economics, marketing or astronomy", plus a second analyst for the literature who reads French and Spanish. Whether the team should hold clearances is "open to question": most information is open-source and sensitive only for privacy, "unless BAASS has special access to recent military data".

The budget (page 11) is given to plus or minus 30 percent:

Appendix A: 20 codes and the SVP rating

Appendix A (pages 12-19) traces the history of classification systems. The author writes that his work in Paris in 1961-1962 divided French sightings, "notably those from the 1954 wave", into four types: landings, "cloud cigars", objects with a discontinuity in trajectory (including "falling leaf" motion) and objects in uninterrupted flight. In 1972 a colleague, whose name is redacted, built the "close encounter" system CE1-CE3 and the categories NL, DD and RV (nocturnal lights, daylight disks, radar-visual), which the author says overlap and leave many cases out.

The new proposal is based on the behaviour of the phenomenon rather than the observer's position, because "one person's 'disk' is another person's 'ball of light'" (page 15). It has four families of five grades each: AN1-AN5 for anomalies other than UFOs (from amorphous lights to poltergeist phenomena, near-death experiences and unexplained injuries), CE1-CE5 for close encounters (with CE5 for permanent injury), MA1-MA5 for "maneuver" and FB1-FB5 for "flyby". An MA2 example is an official French report of an object that hovered near a town's photocell and switched off the street lighting; an FB5 example is a medical incident near Houston, Texas, in which, according to the text, two women and a boy were hurt. Instead of CE4, the abduction category, the author prefers the term "reality transformation" (pages 14-17).

Alongside the classification comes the SVP reliability rating: three digits from 0 to 4, for Source, site Visit and Probability of a natural explanation, where a 4 in the last digit means "no natural explanation is possible, given the evidence". A rating of "222 or better" marks a reliable source, a site visit, and a natural explanation requiring "the gross alteration of at least one parameter" (pages 18-19). According to the appendix, the system has already been used in UFOCAT, in the NIDS private database and in a French study of pilot sightings connected with GEIPAN.

Appendix B: the six-layer model

Appendix B (pages 20-35) is a paper by AAP Person 5 and AAP Person 58, based, according to its footnote, on a presentation at the Forum on "Science, Religion and Consciousness" at the University Fernando Pessoa in Porto on 24 October 2003. It criticises two "orthodoxies": the SETI program and its "assumption of mediocrity", and ufologists who assume that real phenomena must be space visitors. In the authors' view, "current hypotheses are not strange enough", and "no experiment can distinguish" between visiting extraterrestrial intelligence and entities in a parallel universe, other dimensions or time travellers (pages 21-23).

The six layers are physical (position, motion, thermal effects, landing traces), "anti-physical" (sinking into the ground, splitting, vanishing and reappearing, seen visually but not on radar), psychological, physiological (burns, partial paralysis, metallic taste, bloody nose), "psychic" (poltergeist effects, levitation, premonitory dreams, healing) and cultural (pages 24-27). The conclusion is a single statement: "Everything works as if UAPs were the product of a technology that integrates physical and psychic phenomena" and primarily affects cultural variables through "manipulation of physiological and psychological parameters in the witnesses" (page 27). The paper moves on to semiotics and to a fly that mimics the wing-beat sound of a wasp, suggesting that the "absurd" elements of abduction cases may be a camouflage defence mechanism (pages 30-33).

Appendix C: ten screens and the NIDS exhibit

Appendix C (pages 36-42) turns the two previous appendices into an Excel structure of ten "screens": "When-where-what" (date, place, summary, classification, time and duration); witnesses and references; quality control (region and country codes, Julian date, time zone, coordinates, location accuracy in kilometres and SVP rating); two screens for the physical layer (weather, shape, size in metres, sound, lights, electromagnetic effects, ground traces, radar returns); one screen for each further layer; and a hyperlinks screen. Its conclusion says the files will be small enough to send by e-mail.

The exhibit on pages 41-42 lists 48 entries from the NIDS catalogue, from San Rafael in 1946 (FB1, a "10X plane disk with hump") to Myton in 1967, including entries from Mountain Home AFB (1952), Hanford (1953, "blips circular on radar screen"), the Gulf of Tonkin (1965, "At 20,000 Ft, 200 Mi Fm" a carrier) and F.E. Warren AFB at Cheyenne. The "WHO SAW IT?" witness column is redacted in full, and the source columns list radio programmes, TV news items, e-mail, surveys, an "FBI seminar" and the labels AAP Person 7 and AAP Person 58.

Significance

Project CAPELLA is an early work plan for building UAP data infrastructure inside BAASS, written about three months after the AAWSAP contract award (DOW-UAP-D111). It sets out concrete steps such as converting the NIDS catalogue and logging every new case from 1 January 2009, and supplies the vocabulary, classification codes and SVP rating that may help in reading other BAASS documents in this release. Unlike the MUFON papers of a month earlier (DOW-UAP-D166), which used UFO reports as engineering clues, CAPELLA is almost entirely about data quality: validation, independent quality control and selection bias. Appendix B adds a dimension that is not technical at all, the hypothesis of a phenomenon that is "both physical and psychic".

What the document does not say: it contains no approval, decision or response from BAASS, and no evidence that the project was funded or implemented. It does not tie the catalogues to any of the program's 12 technical areas, and mentions an "unrecognized threat" only once. Names of authors, colleagues and witnesses are redacted or replaced by labels throughout, and the Appendix B reference lists (pages 34-35) are redacted in full.

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"The phenomenon is so diverse that any theory of it can be proven, provided one is free to select the "right" observations - and ignore the rest!" -- page 6

"It should be noted that the total number of available cases that have given rise to sighting reports is estimated to number only about 100,000." -- page 7

"For instance the project could decide that, starting on January 1st, 2009, all cases coming to the knowledge of BAASS would be recorded in the new format by a staff person dedicated to this task." -- page 8

"Most importantly, this person must not report to others in the data warehouse team and must be protected from criticism when challenging the integrity of the data in the files." -- page 10

"It is more relevant to know such stable facts as whether or not the object presented a discontinuity in flight or came close to the ground, items for which there is more consistent agreement." -- page 15

"In the view of the authors, current hypotheses are not strange enough to explain the facts of the phenomenon, and the debate suffers from a lack of scientific information." -- page 21

"Everything works as if UAPs were the product of a technology that integrates physical and psychic phenomena and primarily affects cultural variables in our society through manipulation of physiological and psychological parameters in the witnesses." -- page 27

"The resulting files, in most cases, will be small enough to be transferred via e-mail attachments." -- page 40