UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 07 · OCTOBER 23, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D167Project Capella, December 2008
This 42-page file is “Report no. 001” to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies from Documatica Research, LLC of San Francisco, dated December 10, 2008. The author’s name is withheld throughout. It contains an overview proposal and three appendices, two of them earlier published work.
The proposal
The report surveys half a century of sighting catalogs: Battelle’s punched-card analysis of Blue Book reports in the 1950s (the cards, it says, were not kept), UFOCAT, MUFON’s files, a French official database of more than 3,000 Gendarmerie reports, and pilot-sighting collections. It counts at least 30 active catalogs with clashing standards and warns that the field’s selection bias means any theory “can be proven, provided one is free to select the ‘right’ observations.”
Rather than merge everything into one master list, it recommends a common coding scheme laid over separate files, kept deliberately simple in Microsoft Excel, since it estimates only about 100,000 sighting cases exist worldwide. First steps: convert the NIDS catalog built in Las Vegas in the 1990s, and log every case reaching BAASS from January 1, 2009. It proposes trips to researchers in France, Switzerland, Spain and Italy, a five-person team including an independent quality-control checker, and a rough budget (±30%) of $610,000 for the first year and $830,000 for the second.
The appendices
Appendix A sets out a behavior-based scheme of 20 codes — anomalies (AN), close encounters (CE), maneuvers (MA) and flybys (FB), each graded 1 to 5 — and a three-digit “SVP” rating for source reliability, site visit and the probability of a natural explanation. Appendix B is a co-authored 2003 conference paper proposing a six-layer model of UAP reports, from physical traces to “psychic” and cultural effects. Appendix C maps the fields onto Excel screens, with sample pages from the NIDS catalog.
This is a design proposal, not an analysis: it reaches no findings about any case. Its codes reappear in the March 2009 monthly report (DOW-UAP-D169), where the warehouse already held 234,364 reports.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released October 23, 2026, quoted in full
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.