Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) is the name under which the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program formally called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP) became public in December 2017. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) found in 2024 that "the names AAWSAP and AATIP have been used interchangeably for the name of this program, including on official documentation," but that "unlike AAWSAP, AATIP was never an official DoD program." Luis Elizondo, who has described himself as the program's later head, presents AATIP as a clandestine Pentagon program that investigated Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) from 2007 to 2012.¹²

Appropriation and contract

AARO's account: "At the direction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the Defense Appropriations Acts of Fiscal Years 2008 and 2010 appropriated $22 million for the DIA to assess long-term and over-the-horizon foreign advanced aerospace threats to the United States. In coordination with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, DIA established AAWSAP in 2009, which was also known AATIP. The contract for this DIA-managed program was awarded to a private sector organization." Its stated purpose was "to investigate potential next generation aerospace technologies in 12 specific areas," among them advanced lift, propulsion, unconventional materials and controls, and signature reduction.² The solicitation and statement of work for the contract, HHM402-08-R-0211, are listed with the date August 22, 2008, and the original order with the date September 1, 2008.³ The order form (Standard Form 1449) gives a solicitation issue date of September 1, 2008, an offer due date of September 10, 2008 and an award date of September 22, 2008, and a DIA talking paper dates the request for proposals August 18, 2008.⁴⁵

Elizondo wrote that the program was established at the behest of Reid, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, who funded it (the 22 million dollar figure and the year 2008 appear in the foreword by Christopher Mellon, not in Elizondo's own chapters); that it was run out of DIA under James Lacatski, a rocket scientist; and that its primary contractor was Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), owned by Robert Bigelow, whose chief scientist was Hal Puthoff. He wrote that he was recruited in early 2009 to handle counterintelligence and security and later took over leadership after Lacatski was forced to step down under internal pressure.¹ Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists wrote in 2019 that "from 2007 to 2012, the DIA spent $22 million on the activity," which "was apparently initiated at the behest of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with most of the funding directed to a Nevada constituent of his."⁶

On June 24, 2009, Reid wrote to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn asking that AAWSAP/AATIP be made a Defense Department Special Access Program. Lynn declined on the recommendation of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, James R. Clapper, Jr., that such a designation was not justified.²

Research

"Although investigating UFO/UAP was not specifically outlined in the contract's statement of work, the selected private sector organization conducted UFO research with the support of the DIA program manager," AARO found: reviews of new cases and of older Project Blue Book cases, debriefing and investigatory teams, and proposals for laboratories to examine recovered UFO materials. The program also investigated "an alleged hotspot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah," then owned by the head of the contractor, examining reports of "shadow figures" and "creatures" and exploring "remote viewing" and "human consciousness anomalies," and the contractor planned to hire psychics to study "inter-dimensional phenomena" there. "DIA did not seek, nor specifically authorize, this work though a DIA employee set up and managed the contract with the private sector organization."² The Utah property is Skinwalker Ranch.¹

Elizondo's account of the program's work is broader. He wrote that it established five performance characteristics, the Five Observables (hypersonic velocity, instantaneous acceleration, low observability, transmedium travel and antigravity), with biological effects as a sixth; that it investigated the 2004 Tic Tac Incident involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, the USS Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group encounters of 2014 and 2015 (including a near collision with an object described as a "sphere encasing a cube"), and the 1977 Colares Incidents in Brazil; that it studied the "hitchhiker effect" at Skinwalker Ranch and the medical consequences of encounters, including radiation-like burns, neurological damage and alleged implants.¹

The contract produced 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs). DIA provided the list of titles, marked For Official Use Only, to Congress in January 2018 and released it under the Freedom of Information Act on January 16, 2019. Aftergood described many of the titles as "highly conjectural" and beyond the boundaries of current science, engineering or military intelligence; one, "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy," was prepared by Eric Davis.⁶ Elizondo attributes the commissioning of the DIRDs to Puthoff.¹ AARO found that the contract "produced exploratory papers addressing the 12 scientific areas tasked in the contract's statement of work. These scientific papers were never thoroughly peer reviewed," and that it "has yet to uncover any other substantive UAP case work conducted by AAWSAP/AATIP."²

Termination

"Just prior to DoD's cancellation of the program," AARO wrote, the contractor proposed a series of "intellectual debates" at academic institutes "to influence the public debate, which included hiring supportive reporters and celebrity moderators"; the campaign was to assume that "E.T. visitations are true" and to steer debate away from "dead-end discussions" and the "morass" about discussing "evidence." AARO found that the program "was terminated in 2012 upon the completion of its deliverables due to DIA and DoD concerns about the project."²

Elizondo gives a different account. He wrote that the program faced opposition from a group he calls the Collins Elite, religious fundamentalists within the Pentagon who believed the phenomenon was demonic, and from the Legacy Program, an effort within the military-industrial complex that he says controlled recovered UAP materials; that a controversy he describes as manufactured, over the investigation of civilian reports cost it official support and funding; and that he absorbed its remnants into his own portfolio of programs.¹

AARO's note on program names states: "after AAWSAP was cancelled, the AATIP moniker was used by some individuals associated with an informal, unofficial UAP community of interest within DoD that researched UAP sightings from military observers as part of their ancillary job duties. This effort was not a recognized, official program, and had no dedicated personnel or budget."²

Names, offices and dates in Elizondo's account

Elizondo wrote that Stratton told him in early 2009 that he had helped create AAWSAP and that the program reported "directly to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to Congress"; that James Lacatski handpicked "a small cadre of intelligence officers" to oversee the contractors; and that the program's backers at DIA included the director, Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, and Deputy Director Robert Cardillo, whose memoranda "initially referred to the effort in positive terms," some bearing a handwritten note reading "Excited to see the results."⁷ He wrote that Hal Puthoff commissioned the thirty-eight DIRDs on subjects including invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes and stargates, antigravity, brain/machine interfaces and warp drives, and "made sure these studies could be applied to any conceivable weapon system, not just UAP" as a layer of protection.⁷ AARO's account of the same papers is given above.

He wrote that the program's position at DIA changed within thirty to forty-five days after a senior official he calls "Devon Woods," formerly of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, became a senior director or deputy director at DIA in 2010 on the departure of James Clapper to become Director of National Intelligence, and brought colleagues from the CIA; that Lacatski then spent most of his time "defending his efforts"; that in the fall of 2009 Elizondo and Stratton had urged Lacatski to drop investigations "that many considered to be dealing with the paranormal," including the work at Skinwalker Ranch, in favor of UAP threats, and Lacatski declined; that in spring 2010 Lacatski told him he was being pressured to stop and was to meet Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn; and that "Woods" told him that day, "It's demonic," in a hallway in the Pentagon.⁸ He identified the Collins Elite as a circle of religious fundamentalists in the Defense Department whose existence he had at first doubted, and wrote that he later learned several members were former colleagues and "even a former supervisor of mine."⁸

Elizondo wrote that Robert Bigelow "spent much of his own money fronting some of the costs for AAWSAP," which detractors in the Defense Department counted against the program, and that AAWSAP "gained access to a database of civilian eyewitness accounts" whose names had allegedly been stripped before the records were uploaded to Defense Department databases "by someone in AAWSAP's government chain of command," which he wrote would, if true, violate Defense Department regulations and possibly Executive Order 12333; he described the resulting "oversight nightmare" as "largely manufactured by the enemies of AAWSAP at DIA."⁹ He described a physician he calls Will Livingston as a medical advisor to AAWSAP/AATIP and to Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science.⁹

On the end of the contract, he wrote that the original money "was programmed for the years 2008 to 12"; that in 2010 he, Stratton and the engineer he calls John Robert decided to "move the remnants of the effort away from DIA" into his own portfolio of national programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with Puthoff, Livingston and Eric Davis as the only contractors retained; that he asked Michael Higgins, then the DIA Director of Operations, to protect Lacatski; that Stratton drafted appropriations language, as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance work, that obtained a further 10 million dollars from Harry Reid, which "another DoD program had absconded" because the bill language was ambiguous; and that Neill Tipton's superior John Pede told him the money was "being used to pay for some academic studies."¹⁰ He wrote that he, Stratton and a few others continued to run AATIP "under the proverbial radar" from his portfolio, that in 2017 Tipton agreed to take over its duties, an arrangement Elizondo documented with emails released in May 2024 after a FOIA appeal, and that the Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood denied in 2019 that he had any AATIP responsibilities; AARO's 2024 finding that AATIP was "never an official DoD program" is stated above.¹¹

KONA BLUE

After the cancellation, the program's supporters proposed to the Department of Homeland Security a new version under a Special Access Program, codenamed KONA BLUE, which would restart UAP investigations and paranormal research, including "human consciousness anomalies," and reverse-engineer any recovered off-world craft. A Prospective Special Access Program was officially requested; according to AARO, the proposal package and its originator stated that Senators Joseph Lieberman and Reid had asked for it "with the promise of additional funding." DHS leadership rejected it "for lacking merit," and "no data or material was transferred to DHS." AARO wrote that more modern claims of hidden recovered spacecraft "largely stem from a consistent group of individuals who have been involved in various UAP-related endeavors since at least 2009," many of them "involved in or supportive of a cancelled DIA program" and of KONA BLUE.²

Public disclosure

The program's existence was reported by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean in "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," published by the New York Times on December 16, 2017, after Elizondo's resignation; the article carried two Navy videos, "FLIR1" and "GIMBAL"; "GOFAST" followed in March 2018.¹⁶¹² The Department of Defense stated on April 27, 2020 that it authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos that had been circulating in the public domain after "unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017," and Politico reported in 2021 that Washington Headquarters Services had approved them "for unlimited distribution" within the government.¹²¹³ The Office of the Secretary of Defense file released to The Black Vault under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2019 contains an August 23, 2017 email in which Luis Elizondo asked Michael Russo of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review to "consider our request for unrestricted release"; an August 24, 2017 reply from Russo that if the service-level classification authority verified that removing the metadata made the videos unclassified, "please feel free to move forward with release"; and a DD Form 1910 whose publication-data block reads "Not Applicable. Not for publication. Research and analysis ONLY and info sharing with other USG and industry partners for the purposes of developing a database to help identify, analyze and ultimately defeat UAS threats." Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said in 2019 that neither the cognizant Navy offices nor the review office had a record of correspondence responding to a request for unrestricted release of the videos in 2017.¹⁴ AARO's Historical Record Report, Volume I, dated February 2024 and cleared for publication on March 6, 2024, dates the modern era of UAP investigation from "the standup of" AAWSAP and AATIP in 2009, after a gap of about forty years since the end of Project Blue Book in 1969.²

Placement chain and disputed dates

Politico's December 2017 article names the program the "Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program"; the Times placed the program's start in 2007; Politico's same-day article dated the appropriation to 2009; Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote that the 22 million dollars were set aside in the 2008 Supplemental Appropriations Bill, with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies the only bidder on the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, and that Luis Elizondo took the program over from 2010. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told The Black Vault in June 2019 that AATIP was administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency and that Elizondo "was never assigned to DIA"; Hal Puthoff told the same outlet he had worked under the program as contractor and senior adviser.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

The article was placed after an October 4, 2017 meeting arranged by Christopher Mellon between Leslie Kean and Elizondo, Puthoff and Jim Semivan, and after Mellon, a paid adviser to To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, had shown the story to several outlets; Politico and the Times published on December 16, 2017. The Times carried two videos (FLIR1 and GIMBAL), GOFAST was published in March 2018, and the Department of Defense, in its April 27, 2020 statement, "authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos" that had been "circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017"; Politico (2021) reports that Washington Headquarters Services had approved them "for unlimited distribution" within the government. See December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report for the sequence, the Pentagon statements of Dana White (2017), Christopher Sherwood (June 1, 2019) and Gough (June 13, 2019), and the denials beside each.¹⁸¹²

Contract number and structure

DIA's own briefings identify the awarded contract as HHM402-08-C-0072; the solicitation, HHM402-08-R-0211, is the number used in the Black Vault's index and in DIA's FOIA response letter. A DIA talking paper of May 4, 2009 states that DIA published its request for proposals on August 18, 2008 and "received only one bid." The order, signed September 22, 2008, is firm fixed price with one base year and one option year and names the NSA Finance and Accounting Office as paying office; block 26 gives a total award amount of 21,948,810 dollars on the copy released in FOIA-00269-2018 and 10,000,000 dollars on the copy attached to modification P00001. DIA's talking points describe the funding as a 10 million dollar supplemental appropriation sponsored by Senators Reid and Inouye in July 2008 and a 12 million dollar add in the fiscal 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.⁴⁵ USAspending.gov, which carries contract records from fiscal 2008, returns no award for this contract number or for the contractor, and the first-year payments were "equal amount monthly payments."¹⁹

Planned Special Access Program

Attachment 1 to Reid's June 24, 2009 letter proposed program length "FY09 to FY13 (Preliminary)," with funding "FY09 O&M, FY10-FY13 TBD." An August 24, 2009 DIA briefing slide lists as a program management issue that "program will likely become SAP by June 2010."²⁰²¹

Funding of the option year

Modification P00002 (February 2, 2010), which funded option year 1, directed the contractor to identify "impacts to deliverables as a result of reduced funding for Option Year 1." The contract was extended without added funds to December 21, 2010 by modification P00005 (September 28, 2010).²²