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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.
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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 Kelleher. It was an astonishing effort that also produced more than 100 highly detailed research papers, many of them more than 100 pages long. The very first case investigated by AAWSAP was the Tic Tac incident from 2004. An initial report was compiled by DIA personnel then shared with AAWSAP. A much larger 140-page report, packed with detailed analysis of the Tic Tac and its capabilities, was written by AASWAP scientists and engineers. Neither Congress nor the public has ever seen the Tic Tac report or any of the other 100-plus research papers. One of the things that led to the demise of AAWSAP was the pursuit of certain exotic materials rumored to exist within special access programs. One condition of the Bigelow contract with DIA was that Bigelow's Aerospace plant in Las Vegas must be engineered so that it could accept, store, and study certain exotic materials. AAWSAP managers believe these materials were collected from sites where unknown aircraft had crashed. When Dr. Lacatski began
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