Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program

U.S. program to study UFOs (2007–2012)

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was a United States Government effort to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs), also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), which ran from 2007 to 2012 inside the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) with a $22 million budget. Established in 2007 under Senator Harry Reid's earmark and executed through a contract to Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), AATIP succeeded the broader umbrella effort Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) and was the direct predecessor to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) and, later, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The program's existence was revealed to the public on December 16, 2017, through coordinated reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico.

Although the Department of Defense states the program formally ended in 2012, former official Luis Elizondo — who has publicly described himself as AATIP's director from 2010 — says the effort continued informally under Navy and CIA sponsorship after his 2017 resignation, a claim partially corroborated by the 2020 acknowledgement of the successor UAPTF. Reporting in 2020 further connected AATIP to ongoing investigations by the Defense Department into retrieved materials allegedly of non-human origin.

History

See also:

Unidentified flying object § 20th century and after

Historical precedents: Early threat assessment (1940s–1950s)

Systematic assessment of potential extraterrestrial threats within classified US programs significantly predates AATIP's 2007 establishment. According to William Tompkins, structured threat analysis began as early as 1942 following the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, with Project RAND formally established in 1945 as a joint initiative between the United States Air Force and Douglas Aircraft Company to address "threatening alien agendas." RAND's dual mission included satellite research and functioning as "a highly classified, scientific research program" addressing "literally thousands of problems in various fields, many related to addressing the technological threats posed by the aliens, considered to be thousands of years more advanced than our own technologies."

This early threat assessment work reportedly produced systematic documentation including "Alien Threat File Number 44022," which according to Tompkins served as the baseline for designing countermeasures including kilometer-long Naval spacecraft carriers and defensive space platforms. The assessment framework included evaluation of "deep water space threats" and preparation for "battlefields in space against certain hostile alien enemies," with specific focus on entities reported to have "taken over our planet years ago."

According to Tompkins, threat assessment capabilities during this period operated under the working assumption that "different alien militaries have been warring for control of our planet, continually, for thousands of years," requiring systematic analysis to distinguish between friendly and hostile extraterrestrial factions. This foundational threat assessment work allegedly continued through the Cold War period, with defense systems designed not only for terrestrial conflicts but also "to reduce the alien threat to the entire planet."

Origins: Bigelow, Reid, and AAWSAP (2007–2009)

Senator Reid in 2002

The program was initiated by then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) originally as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a broader contract to study unexplained aerial phenomena and paranormal phenomena at the urging of Reid's friend, Nevada billionaire and aerospace contractor Robert Bigelow, with support from the late senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). The funding was awarded through the DIA in 2007 and totaled $22 million over five years. According to Elizondo, AATIP emerged as the UFO-specific core within the larger AAWSAP contract, with AAWSAP functioning as the administrative umbrella under which BAASS performed fieldwork including investigation of Skinwalker Ranch.

The United States Air Force facility known as "Area 51" is located in Reid's home state of Nevada; the site had long been rumored among ufologists and conspiracy theorists to be a storage location for crashed non-human craft retrieved during the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.

June 24, 2009 letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn regarding the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program (AATIP)

After publicity around AATIP, Reid expressed pride in his accomplishment, saying "I think it's one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I've done something that no one has done before." Explaining the rationale, Reid said "I'm interested in science, and in helping the American public understand what the hell is going on" and stated that "hundreds and hundreds of papers" had been produced, adding "I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it."

A 2009 letter by Reid, published by KLAS-TV investigative journalists George Knapp and Matt Adams, stated that AATIP had made "much progress" and recommended creation of a special access program for specific parts of the effort.

Leadership, methodology, and functions (2009–2012)

AATIP, through a contract awarded to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), produced a 494-page document — the so-called "Ten Month Report" — that allegedly catalogues worldwide UFO sightings over several decades. According to one former BAASS contractor, the Ten Month Report was only a sample of the material passed to the DIA, with "monthly reports being sent to the Pentagon, in addition to annual program updates, that were all about UAP or anomalous phenomena." The program funded and published 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) covering exotic aerospace topics from "Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities" to "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."

Elizondo has said he was brought in to run counterintelligence for the program in early 2009 and eventually became one of its senior members, allegedly taking over as AATIP director in 2010 and moving day-to-day operations from the DIA to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI). Internally, AATIP reportedly assessed cases against what Elizondo later called the "five observables" — anti-gravity lift, instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity without a signature, low observability, and trans-medium travel — treating them as signatures of non-conventional technology. Elizondo says investigators approached each encounter under the working assumption it was man-made "until I saw the compelling data that said otherwise."

Elizondo has said a formative moment for him came at a Washington, D.C. dinner hosted by Bigelow around 2009, attended by figures already working under the AAWSAP umbrella, at which a Brazilian general he identified as "General Ochoa" presented photographs and reports from the 1977 Colares incident in Brazil.

Among the material released publicly were three short gun-camera videos of military aircraft encountering unidentified objects. Release of the videos was part of a public campaign by Elizondo, then working for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, who said he wanted to shed light on the program. The Navy disclosed the authenticity of the videos and described the objects as "unidentified aerial phenomena." The Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough stated that the three videos were made by naval aviators and described them as "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years."

Alleged biological-sample and human-effects work

Among the 38 DIRDs published by the program was "Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues", written by Christopher "Kit" Green, a former CIA analyst, forensic clinician and neuroscientist, who described it as "focused on forensically assessing accounts of injuries that could have resulted from claimed encounters with UAP." Elizondo has said AATIP and its successor efforts also examined what he describes as biological samples — purportedly human tissue exposed to UAP, and in some cases non-human biological material — held under separate chain-of-custody arrangements outside AATIP's primary reporting line.

Another DIRD, "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy," was led by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc., founded by Harold Puthoff, formerly of Project Stargate. Another, "Invisibility Cloaking," was led by Ulf Leonhardt of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The warp-drive paper was attributed to theoretical physicist Richard Obousy, director of the nonprofit Icarus Interstellar.

Disclosure and aftermath (2017–2024)

While the Defense Department stated AATIP was terminated in 2012, its actual status following the 2017 disclosure remained unclear. Elizondo claimed that, while government funding ended in 2012, the effort continued under Navy and CIA sponsorship even after his 2017 resignation. Reporting in 2020 supported Elizondo's claim and announced the existence of the UAPTF as AATIP's successor.

On January 16, 2019, the DIA released the list of 38 DIRDs in response to a FOIA request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. In February 2020, Popular Mechanics published "Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues" in full.

Successor programs

In June 2020 the Pentagon disclosed the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), formed under Navy auspices as AATIP's successor; its existence was made public during a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. UAPTF was itself folded into the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022. Former Senator Reid stated of the successor program, "It is extremely important that information about the discovery of physical materials or retrieved craft come out."

Reaction and analysis

The materials studied by AATIP have been the subject of classified congressional hearings aimed at identifying potential threats to aviator safety. In response to inquiries by members of Congress, the Navy has provided a series of briefings by senior naval intelligence officials along with testimony from "aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety." Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for further research into "unexplained interference in the air." According to Popular Mechanics, Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified that the objects encountered by military aviators were not secret U.S. technology. President Donald Trump has also been briefed and has stated "I did have one very brief meeting on it. But people are saying they're seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly."

Skeptical voices have been less persuaded. Mick West, a science writer and skeptical investigator, has said public availability and confirmation of rigorous empirical studies by AATIP could change the UFO dynamic: "It would be fantastic if there was some good evidence of something new to science. So far there isn't." Researchers including Benjamin Radford and Robert Sheaffer have argued that mundane explanations — such as misidentified distant jets or contrails — probably account for the incidents. Astrophysicist Leon Golub has listed possible explanations including "bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight." Physicist Don Lincoln has argued that "what these pilots were seeing is something with a more ordinary explanation, whether it be an instrumental glitch or some other unexplained artifact."

In June 2019, Reid defended the program's legacy: "When I was contacted by the New York Times, they said they wanted to do a story on UFOs and the money you got, the $22 million. And I said I am happy to do that story, as long as we are not talking about little green men. If you want to talk about science, I'm all in."

Media reporting

Although the program was not named specifically, Elizondo was quoted in The Huffington Post in late October 2017. Several days earlier, Elizondo had announced his involvement in founding To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science.

AATIP came to broader public attention on December 16, 2017, through three simultaneous news stories in The Washington Post, Politico, and The New York Times:

• The Times reported doubts about alien visitation from James Oberg and Sara Seager, but also noted "Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid, received most of the money allocated for the Pentagon program."
• The Washington Post story reported that Elizondo was responsible for the public release of footage taken by US fighter jets that appears to show aerial objects maneuvering inexplicably during the USS Princeton aerial object incident; the paper conducted interviews with Elizondo and Christopher Mellon.
• The Politico story quoted Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White that Elizondo had been AATIP's director. It also published an anonymous former congressional staff member's assessment that "after a while the consensus was we really couldn't find anything of substance."

On May 22, 2019, Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood confirmed to the New York Post that AATIP "did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena," dispelling suggestions the program only funded theoretical physics.

On May 26, 2019, The New York Times reported that U.S. Navy pilots had fully briefed AATIP on encounters with unexplained objects during the summer of 2014 to March 2015 off the U.S. East Coast. President Donald Trump, who said he had a short briefing on AATIP, said he was skeptical of the Navy sightings.

On June 1, 2019, The Intercept published an article with an email excerpt obtained via FOIA that disputed Elizondo's leadership role. Sherwood told The Intercept that AATIP existed and "did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena," but added that "Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked for OUSDI." To the Stars responded that "the program was initially run out of the Defense Intelligence Agency but when Lue took it over in 2010 as Director, he ran it out of the Office for the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI)."

A February 2020 Popular Mechanics article by Tim McMillan reported that BAASS was contracted under AATIP's auspices to study UFO reports and purported paranormal phenomena. According to Steven Aftergood, the AAWSAP contract "sounds like it was a good deal for the contractor. But it would be hard to argue that either the military or the public got their money's worth."

On July 23, 2020, The New York Times reported that Reid "believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades." Reports also repeated a claim attributed to Eric W. Davis, a former Puthoff employee, that an "off-world vehicle" might be in the possession of the U.S. government.

Elizondo's Imminent (2024)

In August 2024, Elizondo published Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs, a memoir describing his work at AATIP and the successor efforts. In promotional interviews, Elizondo publicly shifted away from the word "alien," saying "we don't call them aliens anymore... NHI, non-human intelligence" is the Pentagon's preferred terminology. On The Joe Rogan Experience #2194, Elizondo elaborated on AATIP's investigative methodology and said the program operated under the default assumption that every case was man-made until disproven by data, particularly on the "backdrop of the five performance observables."

See also

• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) – Task force of the US Department of Defense
• Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program
• Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies
• Condon Committee – University of Colorado UFO Project
• Colares UFO flap
• Identification studies of UFOs
• Immaculate Constellation
• List of UFO sightings
• National Institute for Discovery Science
• Lua error in Module:GetShortDescription at line 33: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
• Project Blue Book – American systematic study of unidentified flying objects (1952–1969)
• Project Grudge – U.S. Air Force investigation of UFOs (1949–51)
• Project Sign – First U.S. Air Force UFO investigation (1947–1949)
• Robertson Panel – 1953 CIA-convened scientific panel to evaluate UFO evidence
• Skinwalker Ranch
• UFO sightings in outer space – UFOs reported by astronauts while in space
• Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force

References

Further reading

The Department of Defense funded research under AATIP. Of the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, several have been publicly released via FOIA requests or leaks:

• "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions" Archived March 18, 2023, at the Wayback Machine ― Richard K. Obousy, Eric W. Davis
• "Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering" Archived June 6, 2023, at the Wayback Machine ― Harold E. Puthoff
• "Invisibility Cloaking: Theory and Experiments" ― Ulf Leonhardt
• "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy" ― Eric W. Davis
• "Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues" ― Kit Green
• "Biomaterials" ― Bruce Towe
• "Metamaterials for Aerospace Applications" ― G. Shvets
• "Metallic Glasses: Status and Prospects for Aerospace Applications" ― T. Hufnagel
• "Metallic Spintronics" ― M. Tsoi
• "Materials for Advanced Aerospace Platforms" ― J. Williams
• "Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities" ― W. Culbreth
• "Negative Mass Propulsion" ― F. Winterberg
• "State of the Art and Evolution of High Energy Laser Weapons" ― J. Albertine

Elizondo's memoir of his time at AATIP:

• Elizondo, Luis (2024). Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0063307469. ＋

External links

• 60 Minutes segment featuring Luis Elizondo – May 2020
• Fox News interview with Christopher Mellon – March 23, 2018
• MSNBC interview with Luis Elizondo – December 26, 2017
• New York Times link to related story – December 16, 2017
• To the Stars Academy Archived August 7, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
• Video (92:50): U.S. Congressional Hearing on UFO/UAP (May 17, 2022) on YouTube

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program", as of 2024-12-01, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Closing remarks

A summary recollection on the program's outcome: "And that is how I looked at this." After all of that there was really nothing there that we could find. We only did it for a couple of years."