BAASS

Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) was the Las Vegas company created by Robert Bigelow in 2008 to bid on the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP solicitation, which it won as sole bidder. For roughly two years it was the operational arm of U.S. government-funded UFO investigation.

When Senator Harry Reid's appropriation produced the DIA program, Bigelow stood up BAASS as a dedicated entity, hiring at its peak around 50 staff: scientists, intelligence analysts, and former law enforcement investigators, many inherited from the NIDS era.

BAASS investigated UAP cases nationwide, contracted MUFON's case flow through the Star Team arrangement, deployed rapid-response investigators, studied Skinwalker Ranch under the government contract, commissioned the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents through subcontracted scientists, and built what insiders describe as substantial databases of cases, biological effects, and materials claims, including the "Project Physics" and medical-effects work later described in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. When AAWSAP funding ended in 2010, BAASS shrank and eventually dissolved along with Bigelow Aerospace's broader contraction.

Bigelow owned it; Colm Kelleher administered the program; Douglas Kurth, a Marine pilot connected to the 2004 Nimitz events, was an early hire; James Lacatski ran the government side.

Defunct. Its data remains largely unreleased, in private or classified-adjacent limbo, with fragments surfacing through books, FOIA, and PURSUE-era files.

The MUFON partnership drew accusations that a private billionaire had bought exclusive access to civilian reports under confidentiality terms members never agreed to. The unreleased databases are the deeper grievance: government-funded findings that neither the public nor, reportedly, much of the government ever saw. Skeptics add that what has emerged (hitchhiker effects, dino-beaver stories from the ranch literature) suggests the archives hold folklore, not physics. Veterans maintain the case data was real and substantial.