George Knapp Congressional Record submission

order that UFOs should be left alone because, in the words of a top Air Defense official, “they
may have incredible capacities for retaliation.” Col. Sokolov also shared information about an
alarming incident at a Russian ICBM base in Ukraine. UFOs appeared over the base,
performed astonishing maneuvers in front of stunned eyewitnesses and then somehow took
control of the launch system. The missiles aimed at the US were suddenly fired up. Launch
control codes were somehow entered, and the base was unable to stop what could have
initiated World War 3. Then, just as suddenly, the UFOs disappeared, and the launch-control
system shut down.
Upon my return from Moscow, I shared much of this information with NIDS, with Senator Reid,
and with a senior staff members for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Russian MOD had
confirmed to me that they were studying UFO cases in the hope that they might understand
and eventually duplicate the technology that had allowed the UFO pilots to so thoroughly
dominate Russian airspace and weapons systems. The information made lasting impression on
Senator Reid and others and became a key factor in a secretive program that was launched a
few years later.
As the committee knows, the current wave of public and congressional interest in the UFO/
UAP mystery was kickstarted in December 2017 when a front page story in the New York
Times revealed the existence of an unknown, unacknowledged UFO study dubbed AATIP. The
Times story claimed that Sen. Reid and two colleagues in the Senate (Daniel Inouye and Ted
Stevens) had secured $22 million in black budget funds to investigate UFOs. AATIP was
launched from OUSDI, the office of the undersecretary for defense intelligence and was
managed by a career counterintelligence officer named Lue Elizondo. Elizondo’s statements to
the Times, including supporting testimony from Navy aviator David Fravor about the so-called
Tic Tac incident in 2004, were the core of the newspapers’ blockbuster story. That news piece
led to a new wave of media interest in UFOs, prompted private inquiries to Sen. Reid from his
former colleagues in Congress, and was largely responsible for the creation by Congress of
the UAP Task Force, which later morphed into AARO, the current UFO program approved by
Congress.
The NY Times report was accurate on many levels. AATIP as real. Lue Elizondo was the man in
charge of it. And it was an investigation of UFO encounters involving US military personnel.
But some parts of the story were dead wrong. The $22 million secured by Reid did not fund
AATIP. Rather, it went into an entirely different effort managed by the Defense Intelligence
Agency. The original program was dubbed AAWSAP, the Advanced Weapons System
Application program. The man who initiated and managed the program for DIA was a veteran
intelligence analyst and rocket expert named Dr. James Lacatski. The contract for AAWSAP
was awarded to a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, owned by Robert Bigelow. And the focus
of the study was much broader than the military-only encounters investigated by AATIP.
Years after the Times story, the public and members of Congress still have not learned much
about AAWSAP. It was likely the largest UFO study ever conducted with the use of
government funds. It began in Sept. 2008 and quickly ramped up. At one point, it employed 50
full time investigators, far more than Project Blue Book or the UAP Task Force, or AARO. The
team compiled what might be the largest and most sophisticated UFO data warehouse ever
created, with more than 200,000 cases catalogued. The data base included reports from
civilian organizations and foreign governments, as well as new investigations conducted by
boots-on-the ground teams dispatched by AAWSAP’s manager in Las Vegas, Dr. Colm