The modern understanding of the Pentagon’s relationship with unexplained flying phenomena has become remarkably more pointed in the last six months since the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was uncovered. Its disclosure came in between our own exclusive reporting on two very strange and well-documented encounters with strange aircraft operating in U.S. airspace. Now, new documents are coming to light that show the Department of Defense’s own spy agency was also interested in subjects that border on science fiction and the even the paranormal, including warp drive, extra-dimensional manipulation, dark energy, and other highly exotic forms of space travel.
The documents were first discovered by George Knapp’s I-Team, part of Las Vegas CBS affiliate Channel 8 News, which has been investigating the government’s supposed connection with ‘UFOs’ for decades.
Author’s note 5/14/18: It has come to our attention that the documents were in fact first posted by Corey Goode late last year shortly after the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was first disclosed.
Recently Knapp has been digging deeper into Bigelow Aerospace—which is located in Las Vegas—and its starring role in the previously classified program. It is no secret that Robert Bigelow, a former real estate developer turned inflatable space station entrepreneur, has been highly interested in UFOs, but the depth of the company’s official relationship with the Defense Department regarding the topic was something entirely unheard of before the disclosure of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program occurred in December 2017.
Abbreviated AATIP, that effort, and its funding, sprang from Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s interest in the topic, along with that of a Defense Intelligence Agency official. The program, which eventually cost $22 million and ran roughly between 2008 and 2012, began after Bigelow won the contract, apparently to investigate UFO sightings, along with pretty much everything else that goes along with the topic for better or worse, on behalf of the military.
A team of nearly 50 scientists, analysts, and investigators were assembled to work on the program, which was originally and very cryptically dubbed the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program before gaining its more recent moniker. The contract between the DIA and Bigelow made sure not to spell out its focus, instead referring to exotic technologies without mentioning UFOs. The I-Team writes:
“The agreement with DIA did not mention UFOs at all. It used more generic terms such as future threats and breakthrough technologies, and specified 12 focal points including, lift, propulsion, materials, versions of stealth as well as human interface and human effects.”
It was under the AAWSA name that the organization funded at least two studies into advanced propulsion and space technology research that border on the fantastical. The first of these studies, dated March 29, 2010, deals with “advanced space propulsion” for faster-than-light travel, discussing theoretical physical constructs such as “spacetime-altered regions” and “gravity/antigravity” forces. The second study, which the AAWSA program published on April 2, 2010, covers similar ground, but also includes discussions about “dark energy” and “extra dimensions.”
The AAWSA experts did this work under the auspices of DIA’s Defense Warning Office, which makes good sense, at least conceptually. This organization first came into being in 2002 and is “charged with identifying sources of increasing threats to U.S. interests in critical regions,” according to an official briefing.
“This office will also identify opportunities to affect adversary behavior prior to and in the early stages of a crisis.” that presentation notes. In 2003, these tasks expanded to also include work “to provide the earliest possible warning of technological developments that could undermine U.S. military preeminence.”
UFO sightings are often indications of advanced and secret military aircraft research and development projects. Having a team of experts try and determine if any of the reports translated to real programs, especially those that potential opponents such as Russia or China might have been working on, would be well with DIA’s mandate for the office.
That AAWSA team would have delved into known developments in associated fields would also make sense in this context. If America’s adversaries were rapidly advancing toward practical warp drives and other advanced propulsion and space research, DIA would definitely want to know in order to help inform U.S. policy responses.
“These studies are so loaded with information,” Senator Reid reportedly said at one point, according to Las Vegas’ Channel 8. “One thing we learned is over the decades a lot of things happen there’s no explanation for. Well there are now.”
But the applicability of these studies to the Defense Warning Office’s core mission seems dubious, as do portions of the underlying research itself. Neither report suggested that the technology they described was anywhere near practical or that any foreign government was close to achieving a relevant breakthrough.
“This paper has considered the possibility—even likelihood—that future developments with regard to advanced aerospace technologies will trend in the direction of manipulating the underlying spacetime structure of the vacuum of space itself by processes that can be called vacuum engineering or metric engineering,” the March 2010 study says in its final discussion section. “Far from being simply a fanciful concept, a significant literature exists in peer-reviewed, Tier 1 physics publications in which the topic is explored in detail.”
“The idea that a sufficiently advanced technology may interact with, and acquire direct control over, the higher dimensions is a tantalizing possibility, and one that is most certainly worthy of deeper investigation,” the second document concludes. “Of course, this may not be actualized until many years in the future, but consider the many spectacular physical phenomena that are believed to be true at this early point in the 21st century.”
What these statements do clearly reflect is the vision of the primary “contractor” for these studies, EarthTech International, Inc., a small firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. This company no longer has a functional website and otherwise has a virtually non-existent presence on the internet. “We strive to translate these ideas into laboratory experiments,” according to an archived copy of the company’s website from 2017.
Here’s a clip from a 60 Minutes segment with Bigelow that was filmed before the revelations about his involvement with the Pentagon’s Aviation Threat Identification program were exposed:
A cursory internet search on EarthTech’s CEO Harold Puthoff, Ph.D., who authored the March 2010 study, and Eric Davis, Ph.D., another employee who co-authored the other report, quickly turns up a web of links to Bigelow and his other fringe scientific and paranormal investigative endeavors, including the now defunct National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDSci. You can find a mirrored copy of that entity’s website, circa 2008, here. Independent consultant Richard Obousy, who helped produce the April 2010 document, also has connections to the Nevada businessman.
Puthoff is now Vice President of Science and Technology at To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a non-profit organization that reportedly is, at least in part, continuing the AAITP’s work independently. Luis Elizondo, who was the government head of AAITP and its follow-on guise, is its Director of Global Security and Special Programs.
The full extent of the AAWSA effort, including how many similar studies it funded and at what cost, as well as the later AAITP, still remains unclear. So far, two videos the latter iteration of the group examined in detail have captured the most public attention through the media. F/A-18 Hornet Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) targeting pods shot both of these clips and they feature small “tic-tac”-like objects racing around at high speed over the water.
But the main video and pilot account wasn’t new when news of the existence of AAITP first broke. It had been floating around in defense circles for over a decade, but more open disclosure about the origin of the video on an official level, as well as subsequent interviews with the pilot that took it, certainly elevated it to mainstream news.
Beyond that, accounts of Bigelow’s special unit’s investigation include claims that mysterious material from downed objects was being stored in storage lockers and that the program went far beyond documenting and evaluating eyewitness reports of UFOs. Instead, it took a holistic approach, which may have included evaluating the impact on human biology in association with sightings and other unexplained events and even seemed to have delved into other paranormal domains.
This would seem to match up with the picture of the program’s work we now have based on the documents Knapp’s I-Team obtained. What we know for sure, beyond the basic facts surrounding the project and information that Elizondo, the guy who led the program on the DoD side, has given to the press, is that some very strange studies resulted from its mandate. Once again, the studies Las Vegas’ Channel 8 uncovered are official DIA documents that the United States Government paid EarthTech and other Bigelow associates to produce and kept on file for its own internal use.
If nothing else, the existence of these studies supports the perception that this program went far beyond just trying to interpret and document eye-witness accounts of UFOs and trying to identify what was buzzing around in earth’s atmosphere. And they are bound to leave just about anyone wondering if this is what has been released, imagine what else exists that hasn’t, whether out of fear of embarrassment or risk to national security.
Update: 7:25pm PST—
Here is another one titled “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.”
Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com