The Paranormal Roots of the Pentagon’s UFO Program

by Alejandro Rojas                    May 15, 2019                     (denofgeek.com)

• The Pentagon’s five-year, $22M ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP) UFO study program, headed by Luis Elizondo, which The New York Times revealed in a December 2017 article (see here), did not begin with interest in UFOs. It began with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s interest in the paranormal activities going on at billionaire Robert Bigelow’s ‘Skinwalker Ranch’ in Utah. The original name for the secret project was the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP).

• Soon, the fundamentalist Christians within the various US intelligence agencies began to raise their religious concerns. “They’re basically high-level people in different intelligence agencies… who think that anything involving UFOs and the paranormal is satanic,” said George Knapp (the I-Team Las Vegas television journalist who has been closely following this story). “Certain senior government officials thought our collection of facts on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) was dangerous to their philosophical beliefs,” said Elizondo. “[T]he data was a threat to their (Christian) belief system.”

• By 2008, the pressure from the Christian right to end these demonic “paranormal investigations” caused them to create a sub-group inside of AAWSAP that focused only on military UFO cases. This was AATIP. When Elizondo took over as the head of the program in 2010, he only worked within the AATIP UFO division while the DIA closed the AAWSAP paranormal division. By 2012, the AATIP was closed down as well (so they say), and Elizondo left the government to work with Tom DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars Academy’.

• The DIA had initially approached Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow “to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in the Uintah Basin of Utah, where he conducted research”. The original AAWSAP Paranormal division’s investigations included “bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light, animal and human injuries and much more,” according to a senior manager on the project.

• Bigelow’s first significant foray into the unknown was an organization created in 1995 called the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). Its purpose was to conduct scientific investigations of the paranormal. Bigelow bought the Skinwalker Ranch in 1996. By the time the DIA official had approached him, Bigelow had already spent decades and large sums of money researching the paranormal.

• Among the paranormal manifestations at the Skinwalker Ranch were floating orbs and a giant wolf-like creature that attacked cattle, could withstand multiple point-blank gunshots, and seemed to disappear into thin air. On one occasion, NIDS investigators were observing the ranch from the edge of a bluff when one of them noticed a light in the forest below. The light began to grow. Once it became a couple of feet wide, they say it looked like a tunnel opening up, and they saw a creature within. It was large and black with no face. It crawled out of the light and into the dark forest. The light then began to disappear until it was gone.

• After the DIA began investigating the Skinwalker Ranch in 2007, DIA officials met with Nevada Senator Harry Reid about starting a paranormal research program. Senator Reid, a friend of Bigelow’s, shared Bigelow’s interest in the topic and found bipartisan support from a couple of fellow members of Congress to secure funding and get the project launched in 2007. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) won the government contract to manage the project.

• John Alexander, a retired Colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence, helped organize NIDS investigations. “What we learned was that the events were real and tangible, and definitely occurring,” Alexander explained. “These weren’t figments of someone’s imagination, or folklore or any of these sorts of things.”

At the end of 2017, The New York Times broke the story of a secretive Pentagon program with a budget of $22 million to investigate UFOs called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The man who exposed the existence of the program, Luis Elizondo, was the former head of the project. Elizondo’s ongoing efforts to investigate the UFO mystery with his new employer, the To the Stars Academy (TTSA), will be featured in a History Channel series premiering May 31 called Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

However, what The New York Times apparently did not know when they published their story is that the program went by a different name at its inception, and the scope of the program was much broader than just UFOs. In fact, according to a senior manager on the project, the investigations included “bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light, animal and human injuries and much more.”

It is unknown whether Undisclosed will cover the paranormal aspects of the program. Although Elizondo did work with this paranormal project, he only worked in the UFO division. By the time he was the head of the entire program, the UFO division was all that was left. The rest of the program had been shut down, and you will never guess why. It wasn’t because people inside the Department of Defense (DoD) thought the program was too weird, although some did. It was shut down because of demonic forces.

Don’t worry, demons didn’t attack the Pentagon, but apparently, some people inside the government were afraid the potentially paranormal incidents being investigated could be demonic, especially scary occurrences taking place at a ranch in Utah, and they wanted no part of it. They didn’t want the government messing with demons either, so they lobbied for the program to be ended and it was.

This may sound extremely odd, but according to those involved, it’s true.

The New York Times story that broke the Pentagon UFO program began when an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow “to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.”

That sounds innocent enough, but what the article did not cover is what Bigelow researched at this ranch in Utah. Bigelow was known for his interest in the paranormal and UFOs, and by the time the DIA official had approached him, Bigelow had already spent decades and large sums of money researching the paranormal. Bigelow’s first significant foray into the unknown was an organization created in 1995 called the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). Its  purpose was to conduct scientific investigations of the paranormal.

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