AATIP

Opening

On 16 December 2017, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon had quietly run a programme to study unidentified aerial phenomena. The programme was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP. It had been funded at about $22 million over five years, from 2007, and its appropriations ended in 2012. The same article released two Navy cockpit videos, which the Navy confirmed were genuine.

The story has been disputed ever since, over who ran the programme, what it actually studied, and whether it went on after the money stopped. The documented part is that a United States senator got money into the defence budget for a contractor to study UFOs, that the contractor produced thirty-eight technical studies, and that the Defense Department confirmed a UFO programme existed. Almost everything else is argued.

Timeline

2007The programme begins in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Two DIA officials, James Lacatski and Jay Stratton, are credited by one account with pitching the idea, with Skinwalker Ranch in Utah proposed as a living laboratory.

2008The Defense Intelligence Agency funds the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, AAWSAP, at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is a friend of the billionaire Robert Bigelow. Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye support it.

24 June 2009In a letter to Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, Reid says the programme has made much progress and recommends a special access programme for parts of it.

21 December 2010By Lacatski's account, the contract ends after just over two years, including a three-month extension.

2012The appropriations end. The Defense Department says AATIP ended that year.

16 December 2017The New York Times story makes the programme public. The Pentagon spokeswoman, Dana White, describes the former intelligence official Luis Elizondo as AATIP's director.

January 2019The DIA releases a list of the titles of the thirty-eight studies, in response to a Freedom of Information request from Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

May 2019A Pentagon spokesman, Christopher Sherwood, says AATIP did pursue research and investigation into the phenomena.

June 2020The Pentagon acknowledges a successor, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, at a Senate hearing.

Key figures

Harry Reid started it. Reid later said he sponsored it to help the public understand what was going on, and described it as one of the good things he did in Congress. In 2020 the Times reported that Reid believed crashes of unknown objects may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied, though he did not say crashes had occurred.

Robert Bigelow's company, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, known as BAASS, held the contract. James Lacatski ran the programme for the DIA. Hal Puthoff, who had worked on the earlier Stargate programme, and his colleague Eric Davis wrote some of the studies. Christopher "Kit" Green, a former CIA officer, wrote one on the medical effects reported by people near unidentified aerial phenomena.

Luis Elizondo publicised the videos and says he ran the programme. The Pentagon has given conflicting accounts, and I cover him in the Luis Elizondo profile.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the Reid letter, the DIA's list of titles, the Navy's confirmation of the videos, and the Pentagon's statements. The studies included Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy by Eric Davis, Invisibility Cloaking by Ulf Leonhardt of the Weizmann Institute, Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions by Richard Obousy, and Kit Green's medical paper, which Popular Mechanics published in February 2020. Others covered metamaterials, metallic glasses, hypersonic tracking and high-energy lasers.

BAASS also produced a Ten Month Report of about 494 pages, documenting alleged sightings over several decades, which has not been released. A former contractor said monthly and annual reports went to the Pentagon. The DIA has released the titles but not the contractor's investigative material, and one account says it spawned more than a hundred technical papers.

The scope is the main dispute. One account says the BAASS team investigated monster, paranormal and UFO reports in Utah. The researcher John Greenewald argues that the official DIA programme was different from what BAASS did on its own, and that there is no indication in official reports that anything paranormal was part of the DIA's work.

Things you might not know

• The name changed. The money went to AAWSAP. AATIP became the name that was public in 2017, and the two are often confused.
• The studies sound like science fiction. One was titled Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy.
• It was never classified. It was unclassified but unpublicised, which is why the titles could be released through a Freedom of Information request.
• The contractor was a friend's company. Bigelow was a friend of the senator who got the money.
• The Navy confirmed the videos. It said they were made by naval aviators and tied them to a rise in training-range incursions.
• A critic called it a good deal for the contractor. Aftergood said it was hard to justify as value for taxpayers.

Competing explanations

A real but small studies programme. The documented reading: a modest contract that produced thirty-eight papers, mostly on advanced physics, and a collection of reports, run by the DIA with Congress's backing. It ended in 2012.

A programme with a much larger hidden role. Elizondo and his supporters say the work continued after 2012 under the Office of the Secretary of Defense and with Navy and CIA support. The Pentagon's statements on this have changed over time.

A programme with little to show. Sceptics such as Mick West say there is no good evidence of anything new to science. Others, including Leon Golub and Don Lincoln, suggest ordinary explanations for the videos, such as imaging artefacts and instrument glitches.

Later life of the case

AATIP opened the door for the congressional hearings, the Pentagon's UAP task force and the later All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. It also set off a long argument about who had run it, which still divides the people involved. On 23 October 2026, PURSUE Release 7 published the contractor's own paperwork from the program: BAASS's December 2008 project management plan, monthly reports from 2009, the Project Capella database proposal, MUFON papers prepared for BAASS and a 2010 self-assessment. Related reports include Gimbal and GoFast and Skinwalker Ranch.

Finding

AATIP and AAWSAP existed, they were funded by Congress, and they produced a set of studies that the Defense Department has partly confirmed. That much is settled. What the programme found, whether it continued after 2012, and what Elizondo's role was are not.

What still will not resolve: what is in the Ten Month Report and the other contractor material, which has not been released.