BAASS-MUFON Agreements

There is a section of the Expanding Frontiers Archive titled the Barry Greenwood Special Collection. It hosts records brought to us by the longtime archivist and researcher. Within the section is a pdf titled AAWSAP-BAASS-MUFON Document Collection, 2008-2009, a compilation of information received by researchers Curt Collins and Roger Glassel to support their co-authored blogpost, The Pentagon UFO Program’s Secret Partner, as explained per Glassel.

The 70-page document collection contains two contract agreements (see page 3 and page 33) apparently drawn up between Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a now disbanded government contractor, and the Mutual UFO Network, a 501(c)(3) public charity ostensibly dedicated to the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity. Much evidence exists to challenge the effectiveness of that mission statement.

A precarious BAASS-MUFON collaboration was undertaken during the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program, or AAWSAP. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the project is now conclusively known to have been a Pentagon-funded initiative under the direction of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but that information was not always public knowledge (Learn more about the AAWSAP in the FOIA Documents section of our archive).

BAASS acted as a funding conduit for the DIA and, arguably more importantly, did not disclose the source of the funds to the vast majority of people involved either directly or indirectly. This fact is omitted from the narratives sown by many latter day historians for what are probably a number of reasons.

Moreover, many of the people who voiced concerns MUFON was under the influence of the intelligence community, even including then-director James Carrion, were shunned and criticized. This writer knows that to be the case not only as a researcher, but as someone who was regularly interacting at the time with members of MUFON and its rapid response team organized to investigate reported UFO sightings. There was much talk of issues ranging from discrepancies with chain of command to disappearing case files. To know people in MUFON circles was to know the organization was strongly suspected of being an intelligence asset. Carrion resigned as International Director and went on to write that John Schuessler was aware of the source of the funds negotiated from BAASS to MUFON but would not disclose that source to Carrion or the rest of the governing board, only describe it as a “sponsor.”

That means the MUFON investigators leveraged by BAASS and the AAWSAP were unaware the collection of reports they were compiling was under the auspices of the DIA. Witnesses who were interviewed would never have been informed the information was being collected for Uncle Sam.

Furthermore, it appears at least some writers of research papers done at the time were not informed they were submitting work to the DIA. This becomes interesting in light of the fact a great deal of speculation contained in those papers would eventually be propped up as AAWSAP research interests and deliverables, leaving many reasonable questions about where the $22 million project budget went. Answers to such questions are not apparent in the FOIA releases provided by the DIA in 2022.

From the BAASS-MUFON agreement pertaining to research papers:

The second agreement includes the acquisition of the existing MUFON CMS (Case Management System), the organization's tool for collectively tracking and managing UFO reports and related research. The agreement also stipulated field investigation services would be provided by MUFON, along with all information and material derived from those services:

For whatever reasons, authors who describe themselves as AAWSAP project personnel and journalists typically fail to address the above considerations while purporting to inform the public about the program. They tend to offer personal narratives in lieu of documents and contracts that give us tangible, verifiable circumstances to contemplate. Salient questions present themselves in the wake of such tactics and omission of information.