BAASS Project Management Plan, December 2008 — Department of War File
This December 2008 Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) Project Management Plan is an overview paper setting out the contractor’s proposed strategy, priorities, and milestones for executing contract HHM402-08-C-0072 (AAWSAP). The plan states that BAASS would address the program’s 12…
Incident Overview
This report was produced by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), the Las Vegas contractor that ran the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), and is dated December 2, 2008. It was declassified and published on October 23, 2026 as part of the seventh tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The released copy carries redactions.
What the government released
This document is an administrative, programmatic, or contractor-produced record related to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-administered program active from 2008 to 2012. AAWSAP’s official scope of work identified 12 technical research areas relating to potential aerospace threats over a time horizon of more than 40 years. As part of the broader program record, the file documents how AAWSAP was scoped, organized, tasked, funded, executed, or described at a particular point in time.
This December 2008 Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) Project Management Plan is an overview paper setting out the contractor’s proposed strategy, priorities, and milestones for executing contract HHM402-08-C-0072 (AAWSAP). The plan states that BAASS would address the program’s 12 technical areas through a smaller number of selected projects, including initiatives focused on physics research, project cooperation with government-held information, academic engagement, database development, oral-history interviewing, and collection or review of materials described as excluded from Project Blue Book. The plan argues that the most productive approach would be to study “craft” or events already believed by BAASS to demonstrate novel behavior across the 12 technical areas, rather than concentrating primarily on then-current academic or industrial state-of-the-art research.
Primary-source excerpt
Drawn directly from the released document: “The purpose is to directly observe and measure advanced aerospace vehicle performance. Project Cooperation requires the full cooperation between the DIA and BAASS and lays out the expected frameworks and specifics of this cooperation. This necessitates the help and cooperation from the DIA in assisting BAASS to obtain the high value film, hardware, relevant materials and information that are essential to the successful completion of this project. Project Campus will seek to stimulate, motivate and encourage the senior levels of the academic community in the United States to seriously study advanced aerospace vehicles and their performances.”
The case in this archive
This record is a primary source for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, written up here at length from the contemporary record. The file and the case history are worth reading against each other: the document is narrower and more cautious than the account that grew up around it, which is usually the point.
Status of the case
This is a contractor’s report to the government, written by a firm that was paid to study the subject and had its own reasons to show that the work was worth continuing. Its statements are the contractor’s claims, not Defense Intelligence Agency findings, and the Department of War’s release carries no endorsement of them. Where the report relays witness accounts, many of them taken from the Mutual UFO Network’s case files, those accounts were not independently checked in any way the pages show. Its value is as a record of what the program actually did month to month, which is the question public argument about AAWSAP has most lacked documents to answer. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no determination about this record.