THE DOCUMENTS
DOW-UAP-D169, “BAASS Monthly Report March 2009”, and DOW-UAP-D170, “BAASS Montly Report April 2009”, two Department of War records from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 07, published at war.gov/ufo on 23 October 2026. Both titles are the release’s, taken from the file names, the second spelt as its file name spells it; the war.gov site titles are BAASS Monthly Report, March 2009 and BAASS Monthly Report, April 2009. The March cover reads March Report above the date April 10, 2009; the April cover reads April 2009 Monthly Report, with no date (p. 1 of each, read from the page images). Each Preface calls it a progress report for 1 to 31 March or 1 to 30 April 2009 (p. 3). DOW-UAP-D169, 42 pages, holds staff and clearances (pp. 4 to 6), position papers (pp. 7 to 9), a data warehouse (pp. 10 to 18), the MUFON purchase (p. 19), a university project (pp. 20 to 22), FAA reporting (p. 23), a summary on Brazil (pp. 24 to 40), foreign releases (p. 41) and a conclusion (p. 42). DOW-UAP-D170, 50 pages, holds staff and clearances (pp. 4 to 7), position papers (pp. 8 to 10), the MUFON purchase (p. 11), two MUFON reports (pp. 12 to 20), three case summaries (pp. 20 to 33), Project Northern Tier with six map attachments (pp. 34 to 47), foreign releases (pp. 48 to 49) and a conclusion (p. 50). Pages 1 to 3 are cover, title page and contents, and from p. 3 the printed numbers run two below the PDF page, which this briefing uses. Neither names an addressee or carries a signature, and no classification marking was found at the head or foot of any page. A proprietary notice stands at the foot of every page from p. 2, struck through on the page images viewed. Names lie under thin-outlined white boxes carrying substitution labels or the code 1843(a)(2); DOW-UAP-D170 also uses 1843(a)(3).
Why this one is worth your time
D169 and D170 are consecutive BAASS progress reports. A month apart, often in the same paragraphs, they record how many people BAASS had hired, what it had bought from MUFON and which papers it was waiting for. Each also carries work the other does not: March a data warehouse count, requests to the FAA and a summary of reported injuries and craft in Brazil from 1977 to 2003; April MUFON’s reports on its set-up and its first month of dispatch, three case summaries and the opening plan of Project Northern Tier.
What the documents say
What both reports carry. BAASS received 526 resumes in March and 281 in April, and both say their phone and face-to-face interviews were conducted “during the month of February” (p. 4 of each). It had thirty three full time and seven part time employees besides the administrator and deputy administrator on 31 March, and thirty five full time and six part time besides the administrator on 30 April (p. 4 of each); in each staff table every name is a substitution label, beside a job title in every row but one of April’s (p. 5 of each). Eight people in March and ten in April, under substitution labels, are said to have travelled to complete the security clearance process; no clearance level is named (D169 p. 6; D170 p. 7).
On 31 December 2008, both say, BAASS awarded a contract to a company the pages name for 24 to 30 position papers, expanding on 12 papers the subcontractor had delivered on twelve technical areas, among them lift, propulsion and armament, with delivery of all scheduled for July 2009 (D169 p. 7; D170 p. 8, the date read from the page image). The contributor tables list 25 rows in March and 24 in April, every contributor under a label, with topics from “Antigravity Studies” to “Statistical Drake equation” and due dates in May and June 2009 (D169 pp. 8 to 9; D170 pp. 9 to 10, dates read from the page images). In February 2009 BAASS executed a purchase order with MUFON for notification of significant reports within hours, investigators’ reports and physical evidence for analysis, and BAASS’s own ten investigators are said to be located in Las Vegas, trained to deploy anywhere in the United States (D169 p. 19; D170 p. 11). On the 329 pages Denmark’s air force released, March says “The translation will be complete by March 13”, a date inside its own period, and April “The translation has been completed” (D169 p. 41; D170 p. 48).
March: the data warehouse, a university and the FAA. The warehouse is said to hold 234,364 reports from 593 B.C. to the present, 48 per cent of them fly-bys, 31 close encounters, 15 manoeuvres and 6 anomalies, a breakdown BAASS says it does not believe accurately reflects the percentage of actual sightings (p. 10). Its six databases are the Air Force’s Sign, Grudge and Blue Book cases (13,123), MUFON’s web-based cases (15,381), a pilot database whose name is boxed (485), two other historical databases (1,570 and 203,805) and BAASS’s own, with 0 reports (pp. 11 to 15); the five totals add up to the warehouse figure, on this briefing’s arithmetic. A research programme with the University Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), as printed, is to examine the consequences of scenarios of UAP activity, ten of which are listed, and to grow to a seven figure level of cost (pp. 20 to 22). In January 2009 BAASS contacted the FAA to recommend that three FAA publications replace another organisation’s name with BAASS’s and add its contact details, which are boxed; on 4 March the FAA was said to be pleased to coordinate the changes (p. 23).
March: the Brazil summary. An executive summary dated 30 March 2009 covers events in Brazil from 1977 to 2003 that began in the town of Colares, in the state of Para (p. 24); its author is a label above the title Senior Scientist (p. 25). It draws on more than 370 on-site investigations involving 514 victims (p. 27), counts human effects by kind without names (pp. 29 to 30), and counts craft by shape, among them 279 lights, 120 orbs and 46 discs (p. 34).
April: MUFON’s reports and three cases. BAASS introduces MUFON’s reports with an underlined note of concern (p. 12). MUFON’s report of 6 May 2009 counts 319 United States cases in April, nine of them category two, with deployments on four, three in April and one in May, and a decrease of almost 150 to 200 reports against the first three months of 2009 (p. 17). No page defines the categories. The summaries that follow are “NOT final case reports” (p. 20). Their three cases are Scammon, Kansas, about 1:23 am on 4 April 2009; Dardanelle, Arkansas, about 5:20 am on 20 April; and Pasadena, Maryland, about 3:15 am on 16 April (pp. 21 to 33). In the first, a woman and her son described an orange light as large as a small house, about 200 feet over the tree tops; a local law enforcement officer spoke of Chinese lanterns, which the investigator does not believe they saw (pp. 21 to 24). In the second, a woman driving on a highway described a triangular craft with three rotating lights on each of two sides, a flash that lit the road, and a fully charged phone gone dead (pp. 25 to 27); a team member found the phone battery’s internal fuse blown, which the page calls “usually the result of a high voltage insult” (p. 29). In the third, a resident was woken by loud humming and woke the other, who saw a very large triangular craft, totally black with no lights, about 300 feet in wingspan, which took about 17 minutes to pass over (p. 31).
April: Project Northern Tier. A living document addresses events of September to November 1975 at U.S. military facilities, often reported as helicopter sightings, most of them at Malmstrom, Wurtsmith and Loring Air Force Bases (p. 34). For one of the areas, the analysis credits most of its information to a local law enforcement officer’s records (pp. 35, 36). At Wurtsmith, Michigan, on 30 October 1975, ground personnel reported an airborne unidentified near the perimeter, and an aircraft tasked on radar confirmation is reported to have made contact over Lake Huron (pp. 36 to 37); at Loring, Maine, a helicopter crew could not see the object ground personnel reported (p. 38). Base roles and security posts are given here only in general terms (pp. 35 to 38, 45). The six attachments are satellite map images whose labels are not in the text layer (pp. 39 to 44, read from the page images), and the plan proposes witness lists, interviews and considering Freedom of Information requests (pp. 45 to 47).
What the documents do not say
Neither report names a sponsoring programme, agency or contract: AAWSAP, HHM402 and Defense Intelligence each return zero in both, DIA occurs only inside other words, and sponsor returns zero. Neither prices the purchase order or the paper contract. D169 never prints Monthly; D170 prints it only on its cover, read from the page image. The Brazil summary twice cites an attached map, Exhibit 1 (pp. 27, 31), which is not in D169. D170 calls two items attached that are not in it: MUFON’s statistics for 2007 to 2009 (p. 17) and the April expense report (p. 20). It also calls detailed reports of the three deployments attached (p. 18); the record holds BAASS’s preliminary summaries of those cases, which no page says are or are not those reports. Its conclusion says BAASS has begun to acquire significant information on UAP activity in Brazil and that its case database is larger than any other owned by UAP organisations in North America (p. 50); the April report holds no Brazil section and no figure for the BAASS database or data warehouse (Capella and data warehouse return zero). D170’s cover is undated and no page dates the report. That it was put together on or after 6 May 2009, the date of the MUFON report inside it, is an inference; the report does not say.
The war.gov site gives both records the Incident Location Las Vegas, Nevada, the Incident Dates 4/10/2009 (the March cover date) and 4/1/2009 (the first day of April’s period), and the tag AAWSAP, and opens each description on AAWSAP as a DIA-administered programme: that framing is the site’s. Neither report names a place of writing, and neither says what the 1843 codes mean.
From the record
The data warehouse currently includes 234,364 unusual aerial phenomena
DOW-UAP-D169, p. 10, the opening line of the data warehouse’s statistical executive summary; the sentence continues: reports of sightings occurring from 593 B.C. to present time
laboratories that are ready to conduct forensic, photographic, metallurgic,
DOW-UAP-D169, p. 19, the MUFON purchase section, a line that D170 p. 11 repeats; the sentence begins: BAASS has multiple
The three FAA publications that will contain the wording that nominates BAASS as
DOW-UAP-D169, p. 23, the FAA reporting section, before the list of the three publications; the sentence continues: the reporting agency are
follow-up investigation of the current UFO situation in that region is
DOW-UAP-D169, p. 40, the first paragraph of the Brazil summary’s conclusion; the sentence begins: Since the activity may be continuing in some form, a
level of productivity from MUFON, especially what appears to be a significant
DOW-UAP-D170, p. 12, BAASS’s underlined note before the two MUFON activity summaries; the sentence continues: decrease in cases during the month of April
Conclusion: UAV unknown
DOW-UAP-D170, p. 24, the close of the Scammon, Kansas case summary, as printed; UAV occurs nowhere else in the record
Our conclusion at this point is that this was a real event.
DOW-UAP-D170, p. 29, the interim report on the Dardanelle, Arkansas case, a complete sentence
verification of the unidentified makes this one worthy of additional attention.
DOW-UAP-D170, p. 37, the end of the Northern Tier account of the 30 October 1975 event at Wurtsmith; the sentence begins: The aircrew having visual and electronic
Where the case connects
DOW-UAP-D168, BAASS’s project management plan of 2 December 2008, in Release 07 Briefing 5, says the company both reports name delivered 12 Technical Studies on the twelve areas in November 2008 (p. 16) and plans approximately 24 position papers by 31 July 2009 (p. 17); its projects include Project Northern Tier and Project Colares, on the 1977 events in Brazil (p. 9). DOW-UAP-D167, in the same briefing, is a December 2008 report to BAASS on Project CAPELLA, towards a data warehouse (p. 2).
MUFON’s fourth deployment, made in May, “will be included in the May” report (D170 p. 17); no May 2009 report is in the release. DOW-UAP-D171, the June 2009 report and the subject of Release 07 Briefing 7, carries write-ups under the same three case numbers (pp. 17, 22, 63). Its conclusion repeats D170’s sentence on the size of the BAASS database (p. 134), as does that of DOW-UAP-D173, the November 2009 report in Release 07 Briefing 8, which lists Northern Tier among projects on hold (p. 155).
Release 06 Briefing 10, on the AAWSAP contract file, outside these records, reports that the contract’s deliverables included monthly status reports; neither report names that contract or calls itself a status report.
The Northern Tier pages of D170 print unboxed the name of that law enforcement officer, with his office and county, while the project’s investigative plan boxes a name. The name is not repeated here.
Read it yourself
DOW-UAP-D169, “BAASS Monthly Report March 2009”, and DOW-UAP-D170, “BAASS Montly Report April 2009”, are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 07. The data warehouse is pages 10 to 18 of the DOW-UAP-D169 PDF and the Brazil summary pages 24 to 40; the MUFON material is pages 12 to 33 of DOW-UAP-D170 and Project Northern Tier pages 34 to 47.
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and publisher behind this briefing, and on the subjects it touches.
- PURSUE
- Department of War
- BAASS Monthly Reports 2009
- MUFON
- Project Northern Tier
- BAASS Project Management Plan 2008
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-D169, “BAASS Monthly Report March 2009”, PURSUE Release 07, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- DOW-UAP-D170, “BAASS Montly Report April 2009”, PURSUE Release 07, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 07 Briefing 5, on DOW-UAP-D166 to DOW-UAP-D168, the BAASS records of 2008
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 07 Briefing 7, on DOW-UAP-D171, the BAASS monthly report for June 2009
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 07 Briefing 8, on DOW-UAP-D173, the BAASS monthly report for November 2009
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 06 Briefing 10, on the AAWSAP contract file