UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 06 · SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D132AAWSAP DIRD, Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering, March 2010
This March 2010 DIRD for the AAWSAP program tackles “metric engineering” — the notion that a future technology might reshape spacetime itself for travel, power or other uses. It is a theoretical exercise grounded in Einstein’s general relativity. The release’s summary of it mentions no sightings.
Effects without a mechanism
The paper deliberately avoids saying how spacetime might be altered. Instead it assumes the alteration could be made and works out what an observer would then see. The list is striking: clocks running at different rates, objects behaving as if their mass had changed, light bending or slowing, gravity-like forces, and warp-drive motion. Because general relativity describes these outcomes whatever causes them, the author treats it as a framework that does not depend on any particular model.
The release underlines the limits. No method for producing the effects is proposed, the consequences are taken as given rather than engineered, and present theory puts the energy needed far beyond anything available.
Why the idea interested the program
Part of the program’s remit was to imagine what very advanced aerospace vehicles might be able to do. A framing of this kind describes what a hypothetical spacetime-bending craft would look like to an observer, without saying how it could be built. Companion papers include Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions and Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released September 18, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed.
This DIRD examines the idea of vacuum or spacetime-metric engineering: the possibility that an unspecified future technology might alter the structure of spacetime in ways useful for propulsion, power generation, or extremely rapid long-distance travel. Using general relativity as a model-independent framework, it explores the physical effects that would theoretically follow if such metric changes could be artificially induced, including altered time rates, changes in effective mass, modified light propagation, gravity-like effects, and warp-drive propulsion. The document does not propose any mechanism for generating these effects and treats these physical consequences as an assumed result of spacetime manipulation rather than as the outcome of a practical engineering pathway. It also emphasizes that the energy requirements predicted by current theory to create such effects are far beyond existing technological capability.