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This is a statement for the congressional record by George Knapp, chief investigative reporter for KLAS TV in Las Vegas, submitted to Rep. Burchett and his committee; the text gives no date. Knapp describes his UFO reporting since 1987, his work with Senator Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow's NIDS, and Russian military UFO studies he learned about in Moscow in 1993. He says the $22 million secured by Reid funded AAWSAP, a DIA program, rather than AATIP. He adds that AAWSAP's reports, including one on the 2004 Tic Tac case, have never been made public.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# STATEMENT TO CONGRESS # by George Knapp Rep. Burchett and members of the committee, Thank you for inviting me to share some information that hopefully will be useful to your pursuit of UAP/UFO transparency. The public appreciates your courage in tackling this still-controversial subject, especially in light of the inevitable pushback members of Congress have already faced for daring to ask basic questions and for refusing to accept the stonewalling, veiled threats, and overt ridicule that have characterized the position of our military and intelligence agencies for the past 75 years. My name is George Knapp. I am the chief investigative reporter for KLAS TV in Las Vegas. KLAS is Nevada's original television station and a CBS affiliate. As a journalist, my interest in UFO secrecy began in 1987. In the years since then, I have written hundreds of UFO-related news stories and series, probably more stories over a longer period of time than any other mainstream journalist in the country. (For the past 22 years, I have worked with photographer Matt Adams on these news reports.) From the beginning, it was apparent the subject has a steep learning curve. Initially, I was far more interested in the government's response to UFO questions than I was in the larger questions about intelligence life other than humans. The statements issued by various military spokespersons and government agencies were directly at odds with what those same military officials and intelligence agencies confided to each other behind the scenes. Since 1969, the position of our military has been that UFOs pose no threat to national security and are not worthy of further study. This dismissive attitude is directly at odds with what was revealed in documents, reports, and internal memos. High ranking military officers considered the UFO mystery to be "serious business." The paper trail revealed via FOIA requests documents how military leaders knew that UFOs were "real, not fictitious", that they were metallic craft, capable of incredible maneuvers far beyond any known technology on Earth, and that there were a disturbing number of incidents wherein UFOs seemed to demonstrate an intense interest in our military assets, in particular nuclear weapons. If this is not a matter of national security, what is? Yet the public was assured, again and again, there is really nothing to the UFO subject. In 1989, I started hearing seemingly-outlandish tidbits regarding crashed saucers, strange materials, and reverse engineering programs being carried out in secrecy in the Nevada desert by intelligence operatives and defense contractors. The first person I told about this—outside of our newsroom - was U.S. Senator Harry Reid, then in his first term in the Senate. Reid said he was interested in hearing more, and that began a private, two-way conversation that continued for the next three decades. I kept Sen. Reid in the loop about UFO developments I was pursuing as a journalist, and he helped me obtain information that I might otherwise be 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.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 4 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.