AAWSAP

Good evening. I'm calling from a secure line. Twenty years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, TS/SCI clearance, worked in threat assessment. I need to talk about AAWSAP. That's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. Most people have never heard that name. They know AATIP, the one that made headlines in 2017. But AAWSAP came first, and what we were really studying, what we actually found, that's the story nobody's telling. I was brought in during the operational phase. August 2008, the contract went live. Twenty-two million over five years. Black budget, authorized by three senators in a closed session. The thing is, what the public thinks this program was about and what it actually investigated, those are two different things entirely. And I'm tired of watching the sanitized version get repeated.

The program started because of a meeting in early 2007. One of our senior analysts, Dr. Kevin Chen, met with Robert Martinez at a technical conference. Martinez owned an aerospace company, had been funding private research into anomalous phenomena for years. He'd been documenting incidents, collecting data, running field investigations. Chen saw what Martinez had compiled and realized we had a national security problem. By June 2007, Chen wrote a formal letter to Martinez asking to visit a research site in Utah. Not for tourism. To assess potential threats. The phenomena being encountered there, the technology being observed, we needed to understand it. That letter kicked everything into motion. And that's the thing, Chen wasn't some fringe believer. He was a rocket scientist. PhD in nuclear engineering, expertise in directed energy weapons and fusion plasmas. He'd spent his career at DIA working on the most advanced threat assessments we had. When someone like that says 'we have a problem,' people listen.

Chen took the Utah findings to three senators. Harrison Blake from Nevada, they called him the most powerful man in the Senate back then. He was majority leader. Then Thomas Garrett from Alaska and David Wong from Hawaii. All three controlled defense spending, including black programs. Chen explained what we were seeing, what it meant for aerospace security. They gave him the authorization that same day. Twenty-two million, hidden in the supplemental appropriation. August 18, 2008, the official solicitation went public. Document number HHM402-08-R-0211. You can still find it. The contract specified eleven technical areas we needed to study. Lift, propulsion, control, power generation, materials, signature reduction, human interface. But here's what most people miss when they read that solicitation. There's a line in there. 'The focus is not on extrapolations of current aerospace technology.' Not current technology. We were looking at breakthrough applications, revolutionary systems, things that shouldn't exist based on what we know. The contract went to Martinez Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. They were the only bidder. Some people say that's suspicious. I say it makes sense. Who else had the infrastructure? Who else had been running field investigations for a decade? Who else had top secret clearances and the personnel to staff a program this size?