My wife told me I should call. She's tired of hearing about this. Twenty-two years at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Retired now. TS/SCI clearance. I spent seven years working on something you might've heard about, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. AATIP. Most people know the acronym. Not many know what actually happened inside the program. I was there from 2008 until it officially ended in 2012. And that's the thing, 'officially ended' doesn't mean what people think it means.
The program started in 2007. Senator Harrison Blake from Nevada pushed for it. He'd been talking to a contractor friend, Robert Chen, who ran an aerospace company and had this intense interest in unexplained aerial phenomena. Blake got support from two other senators, one from Alaska, one from Hawaii. They carved out $22 million from the defense budget. Black money. No public debate on the Senate floor. The Defense Intelligence Agency put out a contract solicitation in August 2008. Only one bidder responded by September. Chen's company, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. They got the contract. That's documented, you can look it up. The entire $22 million over five years went to one contractor.
I joined in early 2008. Started working under the program director, a guy named Victor Santos. My job was threat assessment and analysis. When military pilots reported encounters with unidentified aircraft, we investigated. And I mean investigated properly. Not Project BLUE BOOK's 'it was probably swamp gas' investigations. Real analysis. DIA contract and $22 million budget stand out - Nathan' The official mission was to assess foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years. That's what the paperwork said. But from day one, we were looking at UAP encounters. Military encounters. Fighter pilots, radar operators, surface vessels. Objects that accelerated beyond anything in our inventory. Objects that turned at G-forces that would pulverize any human pilot.
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