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 dated August 22, 2008, and the original order September 1, 2008.³

Elizondo wrote that the program was established at the behest of Reid, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, who secured the 22 million dollars; 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."⁴

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.⁴ 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

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 accompanied the release of three UAP videos.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