Project Capella, December 2008 — Department of War File
This December 2008 report developed for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) outlines Project Capella, a proposed data warehouse framework for the capture, processing, classification, and retrieval of information relating to “unusual” aerial phenomena and related anomalies. The…
Incident Overview
This report was produced by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), the Las Vegas contractor that ran the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), and is dated December 10, 2008. It was declassified and published on October 23, 2026 as part of the seventh tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The released copy carries redactions.
What the government released
This document is an administrative, programmatic, or contractor-produced record related to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-administered program active from 2008 to 2012. AAWSAP’s official scope of work identified 12 technical research areas relating to potential aerospace threats over a time horizon of more than 40 years. As part of the broader program record, the file documents how AAWSAP was scoped, organized, tasked, funded, executed, or described at a particular point in time.
This December 2008 report developed for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) outlines Project Capella, a proposed data warehouse framework for the capture, processing, classification, and retrieval of information relating to “unusual” aerial phenomena and related anomalies. The report describes a methodology for integrating existing catalogues, standardizing classification and reliability measures, reviewing foreign and private databases, and building personnel and software capacity to support analysis, literature review, and potential future field investigations. It presents the project as a means of consolidating disparate historical and contemporary case materials into a structured research system capable of supporting multiple BAASS initiatives. By proposing a data architecture centered on unusual aerial phenomena and related anomalies, the document helped lay the groundwork for later BAASS efforts, seeking to formalize UAP-oriented data collection and analysis within BAASS’s execution of AAWSAP.
The case in this archive
This record is a primary source for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, written up here at length from the contemporary record. The file and the case history are worth reading against each other: the document is narrower and more cautious than the account that grew up around it, which is usually the point.
Status of the case
This is a contractor’s report to the government, written by a firm that was paid to study the subject and had its own reasons to show that the work was worth continuing. Its statements are the contractor’s claims, not Defense Intelligence Agency findings, and the Department of War’s release carries no endorsement of them. Where the report relays witness accounts, many of them taken from the Mutual UFO Network’s case files, those accounts were not independently checked in any way the pages show. Its value is as a record of what the program actually did month to month, which is the question public argument about AAWSAP has most lacked documents to answer. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no determination about this record.