{"it":{"id":"REC-DIRD","name":"DIRDs (AAWSAP reports, 2010)","kind":"gov","sub":"Released record","place":"Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, USA","lat":38.84,"lon":-77.01,"date":"2009–2010","rep":"Titles range from \"Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy\" to \"Metallic Glasses\".","off":"AARO says AAWSAP's official purpose was research in 12 areas of advanced science. The DIRDs are commissioned contractor papers, not case files, and prove nothing about UFOs.","src":[{"t":"DIA FOIA reading room: DIRD \"Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues\" (11 Mar 2010)","u":"https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/"},{"t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"}],"tags":["Records"],"sum":"The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, the defence program of 2009 to 2012, paid its contractor to commission technical papers called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents. The Defense Intelligence Agency now lists 37 such files in its public reading room.\n\nTheir titles cover a wide range: antigravity for aerospace, warp drive and extra dimensions, traversable wormholes and stargates, negative mass propulsion, invisibility cloaking, metamaterials, high-energy laser weapons and a statistical version of the Drake equation. Several are on serious, mainstream topics; others go well beyond known physics.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is why an intelligence agency paid for papers on stargates under a program meant to forecast threats.\n\nThe program's official purpose, AARO says, was to look at next-generation aerospace technology in 12 areas, such as lift, propulsion and signature reduction, which is how its backers framed the papers. AARO's 2024 history says the program's papers were never thoroughly peer reviewed, and that the agency ended the program in 2012 for lack of merit. The papers on mainstream science read as ordinary reviews; the ones on wormholes and warp drive are, by their titles, speculation (single source).\n\nThe open question is whether paying for speculative physics was foresight or waste.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["A defence intelligence program paid for papers on speculative tech and its biological effects. Preparing for future rivals, or studying something already seen?","AAWSAP's stated purpose was research in 12 areas of cutting-edge science. If you were writing the cover story for a UFO program, would it sound different?","These papers came out only through FOIA requests. What should be public by default when it comes to UAP research?"],"yt":"Pick one of the 37 titles and judge whether it is about UFOs at all.","rel":["REC-AATIP"],"hook":"The Pentagon paid for papers on warp drive and wormholes. 37 files are now public.","why":"The written output of the Pentagon's secret UFO-era program, now public."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"REC-DIRD","qs":["Some papers are on lasers and materials, others on warp drive. How should a threat program choose topics?","The papers were never thoroughly peer reviewed. Does that matter for a forecast?","What would a useful forecast of far-future technology look like?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"DIA FOIA reading room: DIRD \"Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues\" (11 Mar 2010)","u":"https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/"},{"t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"}],"pts":[{"p":"DIRD on biological effects dated 11 Mar 2010.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"DIA FOIA reading room: DIRD \"Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues\" (11 Mar 2010)","u":"https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/"},{"p":"Released by DIA FOIA.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"DIA FOIA reading room: DIRD \"Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues\" (11 Mar 2010)","u":"https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/"},{"p":"Produced under AAWSAP.","g":"VERIFIED","b":"V","t":"DIA FOIA reading room: DIRD \"Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues\" (11 Mar 2010)","u":"https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/"},{"p":"HRR: AAWSAP's official purpose was research in 12 areas of cutting-edge science.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"}],"sum":"Three people, all of them fit and active, went through what the paper calls an anomalous aerospace-related event. Almost at once, the skin that had faced it turned hot and red. Over the next three days came fever, pain, headaches, numbness, diarrhoea, hair loss, boils and a racing heart, and later insomnia, nightmares and anxiety. Two of them could not bear the light, and the whites of their eyes turned an inflamed red. One developed a blood disorder and signs of radiation illness, and over the following years, signs of malignant change. The investigation that followed, which the author calls extensive but controversial, concluded that they had been exposed at a range of metres to a broad mix of radio-frequency and microwave energy centred around 785 megahertz. All three, the paper adds, were antenna engineers.\n\nThat account opens a 38-page paper titled Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues, dated 11 March 2010 and stamped as a Defense Intelligence Reference Document. The author's name is blacked out. A note inside says it is \"one in a series of advanced technology reports\" produced for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The agency's public reading room now lists 37 of these files, with titles that run from metallic glasses and high-energy laser weapons to antigravity for aerospace, warp drive and extra dimensions, invisibility cloaking, negative mass propulsion, a statistical version of the Drake equation, and \"Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.\"\n\nThe program behind them began with money. At the direction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the defence appropriations acts for the 2008 and 2010 fiscal years set aside $22 million for the agency to assess long-term, \"over-the-horizon\" foreign aerospace threats to the United States. The agency set up the program in 2009, and it was also known as AATIP. A private-sector organisation won the contract. According to the Defense Department's 2024 history of government UFO investigations, the program's main purpose was to examine next-generation aerospace technology in 12 specific areas, such as advanced lift, propulsion, unconventional materials and controls, and signature reduction, and the papers were written to address those areas.\n\nThe same history describes much else. Although UFOs were not part of the contract's statement of work, the contractor researched them with the support of the agency's program manager: reviewing new cases and old Air Force files, running teams to debrief witnesses, and proposing laboratories to examine any recovered material. It also investigated reported \"shadow figures\" and \"creatures\" at a property in Utah then owned by the contractor's head. In June 2009 Reid asked the deputy secretary of defence to make the program a special access program; the request was declined. The history concludes that the papers \"were never thoroughly peer reviewed,\" and that the program ended in 2012, when its deliverables were complete, because of agency and departmental concerns about the project.\n\nRead on its own, the biological-effects paper sets out a precise task. Its subject is injury to people from \"unintended exposure to anomalous systems,\" meaning advanced aircraft, whatever their origin, within a few tens of metres and for less than ten minutes. The wider program, it says, aims to understand aerospace weapons \"from now through the year 2050.\" It focuses on the frequencies that affect human tissue, from about 300 kilohertz to 300 gigahertz, and draws on the medical literature on microwave heating, burns and nerve effects, which it calls mature for decades. Beyond the three engineers, it reports 42 less dramatic cases from peer-reviewed medical journals and some 300 unpublished ones. An appendix summarises a 1996 catalogue by John Schuessler, MUFON's past director, of 356 selected close-encounter cases from 1873 to 1994 in which witnesses reported paralysis, shocks, heat, burns and other effects.\n\nThen it takes a further step. Sufficient incidents have been \"accurately reported, and medical data acquired,\" it says, \"as to support a hypothesis that some advanced systems are already deployed, and opaque to full US understanding.\" The injuries, it insists, need no alternative biophysics. They \"do indicate the use of (to us) unconventional and advanced energy systems.\" The author compares the three engineers with the case known as Cash-Landrum, involving three other people, and finds no significant differences in their symptoms or in the signs doctors observed. \"Something,\" the paper says, is causing these injuries.\n\nThe paper also tells a story against itself. A man who believed the government was attacking him with electromagnetic weapons walked into an FBI office with a threatening letter, and was later found to be psychotic; in court he showed a pair of shoes whose heels, he said, had been vaporised by a beam. The heels looked simply worn out. Yet the document he had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act was real: a formerly secret 1998 Army intelligence assessment of field-effect weapons. The author, who says he once ran the effort that produced it, draws the lesson that even people who are sometimes delusional are not necessarily poor reporters of what lies outside their delusion.\n\nThe mainstream reading is straightforward. These are contractor papers commissioned for a forecasting program, not case files, and by the Defense Department's own account they were never thoroughly peer reviewed. Several cover serious, ordinary science; others go well beyond known physics. Nothing in them proves that any craft exists.\n\nWhat remains unusual is the framing. An intelligence agency paid for a clinical study of injuries from craft whose builders it did not claim to know, and the author wrote it as a medical problem rather than a mystery, with diagnostic codes, frequency tables and exposure limits. The cover still reads Defense Intelligence Reference Document, Acquisition Threat Support. Where the author's name should be, there is only the redaction code (b)(6), and beneath it a warning that the photographs inside may not be shared any further."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/REC-DIRD-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Illustration: setting associated with DIRDs (AAWSAP reports, 2010), Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, USA","by":"Illustration made for The Nommo","lic":"","lu":"","p":"","g":true,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}