UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 06 · SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D153AAWSAP DIRD, Quantum Tomography of Negative Energy States in the Vacuum, January 2011
This January 2011 DIRD for the AAWSAP program is narrower and more experimental than most of its neighbors. It asks how scientists could detect and map “negative-energy” states — brief, tiny regions where a quantum field’s energy dips below that of empty space. The release’s summary of it mentions no sightings.
The measurement problem
Negative-energy states are not pure theory: the Casimir effect between closely spaced plates and “squeezed” states of light both involve them. The difficulty the paper identifies is mapping how these states are laid out in space and how they change over time. Its proposal is quantum optical homodyne tomography, a technique that rebuilds the full quantum state of a light field from many measurements, much as a medical scanner rebuilds a body from many angles.
The paper ties this lab-scale work to bigger ideas such as warp drives, wormholes and gravity control, but the release is clear that only microscopic, short-lived negative-energy effects have been produced, and that nobody knows whether larger or longer-lasting ones are possible, especially given the limits known as quantum inequalities.
Its place in the series
Several papers in the series assume large amounts of negative energy; this one is about measuring the small amounts that exist. See Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy and Concepts for Extracting Energy from the Quantum Vacuum.
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 how negative-energy, or “sub-vacuum,” states in quantum fields might be detected and mapped. Its practical scope is limited to the laboratory-scale measurement of minute quantum effects, though it extrapolates from those effects to consider theoretical relevance to concepts such as warp drives, wormholes, or gravitational control. By reviewing previously identified laboratory examples such as the Casimir effect and squeezed light states, the report identifies the core technical challenge as mapping their spatial and temporal structures reliably. To address this, it proposes quantum optical homodyne tomography as a method to reconstruct and quantify the vacuum fluctuations associated with these states. The document acknowledges that only microscopic, transient negative-energy effects have been realized in laboratory settings. It remains unknown whether larger or longer-lived distributions of such effects can be generated or stabilized, particularly given the experimentally unresolved constraints imposed by quantum inequalities. Overall, this DIRD functions as a measurement- and diagnostics-oriented review intended to lay experimental groundwork for a far more ambitious, highly speculative negative-energy research agenda.