AAWSAP Contract Records and DIRDs – PURSUE Files

The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) was a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) contract, pushed by Senator Harry Reid and run by Robert Bigelow‘s company BAASS, to study possible future aerospace threats, including UAP. PURSUE Release 06 publishes 44 of its documents: the original contract paperwork and the 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) written for the program.^[1]

Contract records

Seven files trace the contract itself: the July 2008 Statement of Objectives describing what DIA wanted studied, the September 2008 solicitation and original order awarded to BAASS, and five contract modifications from September 2009 to September 2010 that adjusted the work and funding. Some of these pages are redacted.^[1] Together they confirm the program’s official framing as a study of future foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats out to about 2050, the description given by its DIA program manager James Lacatski in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.^[2]

The 37 DIRDs

The DIRDs are survey papers by outside scientists on far-future technologies, written between December 2009 and January 2011. Topics range from mainstream (high-energy lasers, ultracapacitors, metamaterials, hypersonic tracking) to highly speculative (warp drive, traversable wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion). Well-known authors include Hal Puthoff (vacuum/spacetime-metric propulsion), Eric Davis (traversable wormholes) and Kit Green, whose paper on Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues reviews reported injuries to people after close encounters and drew much of the media attention to this release.^[3]

Analysis

What these documents do and don’t show. The DIRDs show what a small Pentagon-funded effort was asking about in 2009–2010; they are literature reviews and forward-looking speculation, not reports of recovered technology or confirmed UAP performance. Critics argued at the time that much of the money went to fringe topics, while supporters say AAWSAP was a reasonable, low-cost look at technologies that could explain reported UAP flight characteristics. The Pentagon’s own statement with this release cautions against reading the papers as validation.^[3]

The Kit Green paper. The injury study collects case reports of burns, radiation-like symptoms and other effects attributed to close encounters. It is a compilation of claims and medical observations, not a controlled study, and it does not establish what caused the injuries.

New or previously released? The DIRDs are previously released. A list of 38 titles was given to Congress in 2018, and DIA released 37 of the 38 through FOIA by early 2022 (one is still withheld). The Pentagon itself said they had been “publicly available for years”.^[3][4] The contract records are partly new. The September 2008 bid solicitation was posted publicly on the federal contracting website at the time (and archived by The Black Vault), and reporting has put the total paid to BAASS at about $22 million over two years. The Statement of Objectives and the five contract modifications, however, appear to be published officially for the first time.

Released files

See also

• AAWSAP
• AATIP
• Defense Intelligence Agency
• James Lacatski
• Colm Kelleher
• Robert Bigelow
• BAASS

Further reading

• James T. Lacatski, Colm A. Kelleher & George Knapp (2021). Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (Amazon)
• James T. Lacatski, Colm A. Kelleher & George Knapp (2023). Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations (Amazon)

References

1. ^ U.S. Department of War (2026). PURSUE Release 06, DOW-UAP-D110 to D153. war.gov/ufo.
2. ^ Lacatski, J. T., Kelleher, C. A., & Knapp, G. (2021). Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. RTMA.
3. ^ CBS News (Sept. 2026). Coverage of the sixth PURSUE release, including the Pentagon statement that the DIRDs were already public and are “reference and synthesis products”.
4. ^ The Black Vault and Metabunk (2022). Reports on DIA FOIA release of 37 of 38 AAWSAP DIRDs.