George Knapp Congressional Record submission

unable to access on my own. That private conversation with Reid proved to be pivotal in the
long run, and is directly related to the current explosion of public interest in the UFO/UAP
controversy, including the inquiries now underway in both houses of Congress.
The other person I met in 1989 related to the UFO mystery was a billionaire businessman
named Robert Bigelow, who owned vast real estate and hotel properties in multiple states.
Bigelow began funding private UFO investigations as well the work of UFO organizations UFO.
To date, he has spent more of his own money on UFO investigations than any person in the
history of the world—tens of millions of dollars. In 1996, Bigelow created his own research
organization, the National Institute for Discovery Science, with a science advisory board made
up of PhD-level academics, two of the former astronauts who had walked on the moon, and
several scientists who had worked for or consulted with the U.S. military and intelligence
agencies. While working on the inside, they had learned bits and pieces about classified UFO
investigations and special access programs. The NIDS advisory board members put their
careers and reputations at risk in order to pursue truth and transparency.
After NIDS began its own investigations and projects, I informed Senator Reid about the
organization and arranged an introduction. Reid attended one of the first board meetings of
NIDS and was impressed by the professionalism he witnessed and the pedigrees of the world
class Science Advisory Board. The connection that was made between Reid and Bigelow
proved to be fortuitous in many ways and is directly related to the inquiry you have launched
27 years later.
One of the topics that was of interest to Reid, Bigelow, and NIDS was Russia’s ongoing interest
in UFOs. In 1993, there was a brief window of opportunity in the former USSR. The period
known as Glasnost offered the possibility that western journalists and researchers might be
able to learn about subjects that were previously off limits during the worst days of the Cold
War. With the assistance off former US Congressman Jim Bilbray, I met a Russian physicist
and national security advisor who was in the U.S. in order to speak about arms control issues
and nuclear detente at our national laboratories and nuclear weapons facilities. I asked Dr.
Nikolai Kapranov if he might be willing to find high ranking persons in the former USSR who
may have been in a position to know about any secret UFO programs or investigations in
Russia and whether any of those persons would agree to meet with me. He did just that. It
took 8 months to arrange an itinerary and to obtain a formal invitation to visit Moscow. In the
spring of that year, I traveled with two colleagues to Moscow, met and interviewed more than a
dozen military officials, intelligence operatives, and scientists who had knowledge of UFO
incidents and studies in the former USSR during the Cold War. As we learned, Russian leaders
commissioned an unprecedented UFO investigation. The order went out to all units in the vast
Russian military empire that any UFO incident or report must be fully investigated, witnesses
interviewed, evidence collected and then all of those materials were forwarded to an office
inside the Ministry of Defense.
The study lasted a full ten years and was likely the largest UFO investigation ever undertaken.
Thousands of case files were accumulated. Nearly all of the witnesses who were interviewed
were military personnel. Many of the incidents described to me by the program’s director Col.
Boris Sokolov were alarming. Sokolov said there had been 45 incidents in which Russian
warplanes engaged with UFOs, chased them, even shot at them. In most incidents, the UFOs
shot away at unbelievable speeds, but in three incidents, the Russian warplanes were dibbled
and crashed. Two of the pilots were killed. After those incidents, the MOD issued a nationwide