Defense Intelligence Reference Documents
TopicDocument CollectionDefense Intelligence Reference Documents
TopicDocument CollectionDefense Intelligence Reference Documents are 38 technical papers on future aerospace technology written for the DIA's AAWSAP program; 37 were released in 2022 and reissued in PURSUE Release 06 in 2026.
Defense Intelligence Reference Documents are 38 technical papers on future aerospace technology written for the DIA's AAWSAP program; 37 were released in 2022 and reissued in PURSUE Release 06 in 2026.
Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, or DIRDs, are 38 technical studies produced for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, the 2008–2012 Defense Intelligence Agency effort run through Robert Bigelow's contractor BAASS to forecast future aerospace technologies. Their subjects range from metamaterials, high-energy lasers and hypersonic tracking to warp drives, traversable wormholes, antigravity and the statistical Drake equation, plus a paper on injuries to people near "anomalous" aerospace systems. Authors included Eric Davis of EarthTech International, who wrote on wormholes and, with Richard Obousy, on warp drives; EarthTech's founder Harold Puthoff, on vacuum engineering; the physicist Ulf Leonhardt, on invisibility cloaking; and the physician Christopher "Kit" Green, on biological field effects.
The papers were written during the contract years; the injury study is dated March 2010. Interest grew after AAWSAP became public in December 2017. Davis described them on Coast to Coast AM in January 2018, and The Black Vault filed a FOIA request for all of them within days. On January 16, 2019, DIA released a list of the 38 titles to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. After Popular Mechanics published Green's paper in February 2020, DIA completed The Black Vault's request on March 25, 2022, releasing 37 of the 38; the missing one is a classified version of the laser-weapons study.
On September 18, 2026, the Department of War reissued all 37 in PURSUE Release 06, now unredacting the names of the DIA offices that produced them. The department said the papers are "best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research" and "should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed." Aftergood said of the BAASS contract that "it would be hard to argue that either the military or the public got their money's worth," and the physicist Max Derakhshani noted that a figure in the wormhole paper came from Kip Thorne's 1994 popular book on black holes.
The DIRDs remain the most visible output of AAWSAP, read by supporters as proof of serious DIA interest in advanced propulsion and by critics as speculative literature reviews. The reissue sharpened a records dispute. Researcher Joe Murgia stressed that the papers had been public for years, while Jeremy Corbell called them "just the tip of the iceberg" and asked why the program's other reports and files had not been released. Colm Kelleher, a senior BAASS manager, said in September 2026 that he had sent DIA 8,000 to 10,000 pages of that work, which, unlike the 37 papers, remain unpublished.
[Retweeted] Two officially released AAWSAP reports vs. "AAWSAP reports" that appeared in the PURSUE 7 release. See the difference? It is clear to me there is a stark difference (classification markings, formatting, contract number references etc) between the two. Why is this important? It shows a clear difference between what AAWSAP was officially (with the exception of 1, no DIRD talks about UFOs) and what it was for BAASS... then later framed erroneously by those spreading stories and outla...
Two officially released AAWSAP reports vs. "AAWSAP reports" that appeared in the PURSUE 7 release. See the difference? It is clear to me there is a stark difference (classification markings, formatting, contract number references etc) between the two. Why is this important? It shows a clear difference between what AAWSAP was officially (with the exception of 1, no DIRD talks about UFOs) and what it was for BAASS... then later framed erroneously by those spreading stories and outlandish UNPROV...
The obsession within the peanut gallery never dies. I stand by what I've said. Recent document releases only support what I've said that AAWSAP veered off from its intended purpose. I will let the public judge whether taxpayer funds were appropriated properly when it came from the original AAWSAP mission statement vs. what the DIA got in return. I find it very telling that many of the BAASS reports have no government markings, proper formatting, classification markings, etc., while the DIRDS...
Probed ingest of: DIA Says it Finally Located the Missing AAWSAP Files | Bigelow Podcast Ep.10
Probed ingest of: Joe Rogan Experience #2560 - David Grusch
[Retweeted] Highlight reel for folks that don’t have time to watch Bigelow podcast episode 8. 👇🏼 Kelleher says the DIRDs started because UFOs were doing right-angle turns at 5,000 mph — then the White House can’t find the 8–10k pages he FedEx’d to DIA. https://t.co/OoUdw94JGM
[Retweeted] Highlight reel for folks that don’t have time to watch Bigelow podcast episode 8. 👇🏼 Kelleher says the DIRDs started because UFOs were doing right-angle turns at 5,000 mph — then the White House can’t find the 8–10k pages he FedEx’d to DIA. https://t.co/OoUdw94JGM
Probed ingest of: The New Space Race, AI Threats, and National Survival | Bigelow Podcast Ep. 8
They are now only viewable at https://www.war.gov/UFO/ and on https://archive.org
[Retweeted] Figure 7 in this DIRD (Einstein and the T-Rex looking at each other through a wormhole) is lifted straight from Kip Thorne’s popular 1994 book, Black Holes and Time Warps (“Reference 9” in the figure caption). And all of the concepts discussed in this DIRD written by Eric Davis were freely available in the technical and popular physics literature (scattered among different sources) for decades prior. The only novel (and admittedly cool) thing here is that the Defense Intelligence...
