The Mutual UFO Network, founded in 1969 as the Midwest UFO Network and renamed in 1973, the largest and longest-running civilian UFO reporting and investigation body in the United States. It trains and certifies field investigators, runs a public reporting form and a case management database, and has been the default destination for American witness reports for half a century.
Why it appears in the government record
In February 2009 BAASS entered a formal partnership with MUFON on behalf of AAWSAP, which gave the Pentagon-funded contractor access to MUFON’s incoming case flow and put its investigators in the field under a rapid-response arrangement. The relationship was contentious inside MUFON and ended in 2010. Future Visions records it from the programme’s side; it is the clearest documented instance of a government-funded UAP effort buying its case flow from civilian volunteers.
PURSUE Release 07 publishes the arrangement from BAASS’s side. A purchase order of February 2009 entitled BAASS to notification within hours of significant UAP reports from anywhere in the United States, timely reports from MUFON investigators and physical evidence for analysis; the 2009 monthly reports (BAASS Monthly Reports 2009) carry MUFON’s activity reports and case write-ups, witnesses’ names replaced by MUFON’s own typed asterisks. From March through June 2009 MUFON provided fewer cases than first agreed and spent only about half its stipend, so BAASS proposed to cut it by half, its letter setting a level of $25,500 a month for July to October, and MUFON accepted the reduction. In November BAASS reported that, after appraising MUFON’s performance during October, it would reduce the monthly stipend by $10,000 for the remainder of the contract. The release also holds five research proposals that MUFON prepared for BAASS in November 2008, on lift, power generation, control, human interface and propulsion, one of them an implant removal study (BAASS Project Management Plan 2008).
What it is and is not
It is a volunteer organisation with variable investigative standards and no laboratory of its own, and its database has never been released for independent statistical work. It is also the only continuous archive of American witness reports across the decades when the government had no programme at all, which is why serious researchers keep going back to it.
Connections
BAASS · AAWSAP · Future Visions · James Lacatski · John Schuessler · Robert Bigelow · Project Blue Book · Anomalous Field Effects on Human Tissue · BAASS Monthly Reports 2009 · BAASS Project Management Plan 2008