Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)[1] was an unclassified but unpublicized investigatory effort funded by the United States Government to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP).
[8] Initiated by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada)[9] as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) to study unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) at the urging of Reid's friend, Nevada billionaire and governmental contractor Robert Bigelow,[10] and with support from the late senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the program began in the DIA in 2007 and was budgeted $22 million over its five years of operation.
In the 1970s, after revived interest in the "1947 Roswell UFO incident", “Area 51” was rumored by ufologists and conspiracy theorists to be the US government's storage location for the crashed alien craft for study.
[12] AATIP, through a contract awarded to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), has generated a 494-page report that documents alleged worldwide UFO sightings over several decades.
[18] The release of those videos were part of a campaign by Luis Elizondo, then working for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, who said that he wanted to shed light on the program.
[28] According to Popular Mechanics, Senate Intelligence Committee Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified the mysterious objects being encountered by the military were not related to secret U.S.
[13] Several researchers including Benjamin Radford and Robert Sheaffer have pointed out that mundane explanations such as the misidentification of distant jets or ordinary contrails are probably behind the incidents reported.
[18] Astrophysicist Leon Golub has stated that those reports have a number of possible explanations such as "bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.
"[33] On January 16, 2019, the DIA released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.
[36] Yet another title, “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions,” was attributed to theoretical physicist Richard Obousy, director of the nonprofit Icarus Interstellar.
[42] On 26 May 2019, The New York Times reported that US Navy pilots fully briefed AATIP about encounters they had with unexplained objects during the summer of 2014 to March 2015 while flying at high altitudes off the East Coast of the United States.
According to Steven Aftergood, Director for the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, the AAWSAP contract "sounds like it was a good deal for the contractor.
"[8][44] News reports also repeated a claim made by Eric W. Davis, a former employee of Harold E. Puthoff (co-founder of UFO-promoting company To the Stars) that an "off-world vehicle" might be in the possession of the US government.
