DOW-UAP-D169: BAASS Monthly Report, March 2009 - A 234,364-Report Data Warehouse, MUFON Data Purchase, the FAA and "The UFO Assault on Brazil"

Source file: DOW-UAP-D169-BAASS_Monthly_Report-March_2009.pdf Originating agency: Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), contractor to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for AAWSAP Document type: Monthly progress report ("March Report"), a contract deliverable under HHM402-08-C-0072 Date: Period 1 to 31 March 2009; cover dated 10 April 2009; the Brazil summary is dated 30 March 2009 Classification: No government classification marking; every page carries a BAASS "proprietary and confidential" legend, struck through on most pages. Publicly released in 2026 Page count: 42 VIRIN: 260508-D-D0360-1161 PURSUE Release: 7

Summary

The March 2009 report is the first of four BAASS monthly reports in Release 7 (followed by D170 for April, D171 for June and D173 for November 2009). Monthly status reports were already required by the program's Statement of Objectives (D110), and this one arrives four months after the December 2008 Project Management Plan (D168), so it can be read against the milestones set there.

The report has eight sections: staff recruitment, clearances, the Earthtech papers, databases, the MUFON purchase, the FAA, a research summary on Brazil, and work on files released by Britain, Canada and Denmark. The longest part, 17 pages, is an executive summary titled "The UFO Assault on Brazil, with its Epicenter at Colares", attributed to AAP Person 8, a BAASS "Senior Scientist".

The overall picture is of a fast-growing organisation turning itself into a report-intake centre. BAASS is merging existing databases, buying a live stream of reports from MUFON, and seeking to appear in FAA publications as the body pilots and controllers report to. As in the management plan, all staff appear only as labels.

Research Article

Staff, clearances and the "Utah Ranch"

According to page 4, in March 2009 BAASS received "a total of 526 resumes" from online job advertisements, and as of 31 March it had "thirty three full time employees and seven part time employees" besides the Administrator and Deputy. Full-time staff include "senior investigative personnel (backgrounds in law enforcement and AFOSI)", engineers, scientists in physics and biology, and security personnel. The section also says more than four dozen interviews took place "during the month of February", a puzzling detail in a report about March.

The staff list (page 5) shows AAP Person 4 as Administrator and AAP Person 7 as Deputy Administrator, followed by 29 rows of full-time staff, from a "Senior Analyst level V" (AAP Person 8) to security officers. The last row of the table is not a name but a place: "Utah Ranch", next to "Security Officers". The report does not explain what the ranch is. The list has six part-time rows, not seven as the text says, and the label AAP Person 95 appears in both columns. A "yellow legend" marking staff temporarily transferred from Bigelow Aerospace is not visible in the scan.

BAASS expects "50-60 personnel to begin the 2nd year". Page 6 reports that the Administrator, the Deputy, AAP Person 8, AAP Person 53, AAP Person 44, AAP Person 9 and two Earthtech people (AAP Person 57 and AAP Person 58) "all have travelled to Washington DC to complete the security clearance process". This is progress on the management plan's first recommendation, which had asked for the Administrator's clearance by the end of January.

The Earthtech papers: 25 topics

Page 7 says that on 31 December 2008 BAASS awarded Earthtech International a contract for "24-30 position papers", due in July 2009. The table on pages 8 to 9 lists 25 papers: for each contributor (an AAP Person label) it gives the institution, the topic and a due date between 1 May and 15 June 2009. Topics include "Antigravity Studies", "Warp drives", "Wormholes in spacetime", "Metallic glass materials" (Johns Hopkins University), "Programmable matter", "Novel biomaterials", "Statistical Drake equation", "Laser weapons", "FTL/quant entanglement communication" and even "Maverick vs. corporate inventor cultures". Several match DIRD papers published in Release 6, such as D117 (metallic glasses), D118 (programmable matter) and D119 (biomaterials), although the report does not use the term DIRD. AAP Person 81, listed on the Colares team in the management plan, appears here for Wayne State University on "Field effects/biological tissues".

Project Capella: the data warehouse

Pages 10 to 18 present the "BAASS Data Warehouse" under "Project Capella". It holds "234,364 unusual aerial phenomena reports of sightings occurring from 593 B.C. to present time", and the report concedes that "some ... are duplicated reports and some have received classical explanations". Reports are sorted into four groups: "fly by" (48%), "close encounters" (31%), "maneuver" (15%) and "anomalies" (6%), each divided into five levels, from a simple sighting to injury or death. The definitions (pages 16 to 18) are very broad: AN3, for example, "could involve reports of ghosts, yetis and other instances of crytozoology, or elves or spirits".

BAASS qualifies its own numbers: "BAASS does not believe that the breakdown of reports in the data warehouse accurately reflects the percentage of actual sightings", because witnesses are more likely to report a close encounter. Per the statistics, about 1.9% of reports came from military personnel, 0.6% from police officers and 0.3% from pilots; 0.8% involved physical traces and 0.6% correlated radar data.

The warehouse has five historical databases and an empty sixth: NIDS (1,570 reports, 1946 to 2004), a pilot database whose creator's name is redacted (485, 1942 to 2007), Sign/Grudge/Blue Book (13,123, 1942 to 1969), UFOCAT (203,805, with duplicates "on numerous cases"), and the MUFON Case Management System (15,381 as of 23 February 2009, excluding the 13,000 reports received from 1969 to mid-2003). The five figures add up exactly to 234,364. The BAASS database itself is marked "Total Reports: 0". By contrast, the classified totals (154,597) plus the 67,580 not yet classified do not reach the grand total, and the report does not explain the gap. The management plan (D168) had set 30 June 2009 as the target for acquiring databases; by March much of that was already in BAASS hands.

MUFON, rapid-reaction teams and UNLV

According to page 19, in order "to become the central information source on UAPs in the United States and around the world", BAASS executed a purchase order with MUFON in February 2009; MUFON, it says, has "approximately 1000 volunteers" in all 50 states. The order entitles BAASS to (a) notification of significant reports "within hours", (b) reports from MUFON investigators, and (c) "physical evidence (including photographs, digital recordings, samples of soil, insects, plants, and animals)". BAASS adds that it has hired "a small team of ten high quality top investigators", based in Las Vegas and trained to deploy as "special forces" teams anywhere in the United States.

Pages 20 to 22 describe a research program with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) to study the social, military and religious consequences of "increasingly intrusive demonstrations of UAP activity", rising to a "seven figure level of cost" in the second year. The report lists ten scenarios, from a government release of files covering 1947 to 2008 to an Air Force statement "that the both crashes in 1947 involved spacecraft of non terrestrial origin". Some are marked as real events: Phoenix, "the night of March 13 1997", and a September 2007 event near the restricted airspace over "the residence of a sitting President". Part of this text is copied almost word for word from Project Campus in the management plan, "giggle factor" included. The last sentence on page 20 is cut off by a redaction.

The FAA and foreign sources

Page 23 says that in January 2009 BAASS approached the FAA to submit, under FAA Order 7000.5C, changes to three publications: the Aeronautical Information Manual and Orders JO 7110.65S and JO 7210.3V. The change replaces "National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS)" with BAASS as the body reports are referred to; the BAASS contact details are redacted. On 4 March 2009 AAP Person 128 of the FAA's Procedures Development Group said the FAA "would be pleased to co-ordinate the changes". This is the point at which the switch is documented: not final approval, but agreement to coordinate.

On page 41 BAASS reports downloading some 7,297 pages released by the UK Ministry of Defence plus about 2,000 more pages (1,200 cases) released on 21 March 2009; 9,500 Canadian pages covering 1947 to 1980, many investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and 329 pages released by the Danish Air Force on 29 January 2009, whose translation "will be complete by March 13, 2009", future tense in a report written after that date.

"The UFO Assault on Brazil": the Colares summary

The summary (pages 24 to 40) is a first realisation of Project Colares from the plan. It opens bluntly: "The terror comes from Unidentified Flying Objects and the beings that operate them." It says the material fills eight binders "amounting to several thousand pages", drawn from "more than 370 on-site investigations, involving 514 victims" conducted by AAP Person 127 from the late 1970s to 2003 and verified by AAP Person 5. The summary presents these as other people's investigations; BAASS summarises them and adds no investigation of its own.

The data are given as tallies: "10 humans died after periods of prolonged illness", more than 300 dead animals, 54 people burned, 14 cases of unconsciousness, 23 puncture wounds within burned areas, 423 cases of "Extreme fear" and 18 abduction claims. The geography covers 371 locations, including 121 in Rio Grande do Norte and 92 in Para. The reported shapes are mostly "Lights" (279) and "Orbs" (120), and in many cases a light engulfing the victim was reported (184). The summary also quotes a redacted member of the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) investigation team who described "a big disc-shaped object thirty meters in diameter" hovering over him and his men, and a redacted physician in Belem who treated about 40 injured people and found "low levels of hemoglobin".

The summary twice refers to an "attached map (Exhibit 1)", but the map is not in the released version, whose 42 pages end with the report's conclusion. The number of photographs from AAP Person 127's investigations is only seven, while the military team spoke of "about 300 photographs"; none is attached. The conclusion (page 40) recommends "a renewed on-site examination" using "high technology remote sensing equipment".

Significance

The report shows BAASS in its first months and the direction it actually took: not engineering research on the 12 areas, but infrastructure for collecting reports. It contains three elements not found in the management plan: the Capella data warehouse with concrete numbers, the MUFON purchase order that turned a civilian volunteer organisation into a data supplier for a defence contractor, and the effort to enter FAA publications in place of NIDS. Alongside them come a first mention of a "Utah Ranch" in the staff list, and the Earthtech table that ties Release 6's DIRD papers to specific due dates. The score stays at 6: the report is rich in administrative and numerical detail but contains no original investigation, and the Brazil summary condenses earlier work by others.

Key People

Locations

Incidents

Notable Quotes

"In order for BAASS to best serve the government it needs to become the central information source on UAPs in the United States and around the world." -- page 19

"The data warehouse currently includes 234,364 unusual aerial phenomena reports of sightings occurring from 593 B.C. to present time." -- page 10

"BAASS does not believe that the breakdown of reports in the data warehouse accurately reflects the percentage of actual sightings." -- page 10

"These investigators are currently located in Las Vegas and are trained to deploy as "special forces" rapid reaction investigative teams that are deployable anywhere in the United States" -- page 19

"On March 4, 2009, BAASS received word from [AAP Person 128] of the Procedures Development Group at the FAA stating that the FAA would be pleased to co-ordinate the changes that BAASS had requested." -- page 23

"The world is full of many terrors. This study is about one of them, a terror that comes from some place other than Earth." -- page 25

"Consideration should be given to a renewed on-site examination of the situation as it appears today with the goal of using high technology remote sensing equipment to record as many operational parameters of the craft as possible." -- page 40