LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — For 27 months, Las Vegas was UFO central. A secret program, known as AAWSAP, was created in 2008 with support from Nevada Senator Harry Reid and became the largest UFO investigation ever undertaken by the U.S. Government (so far as we know).

But the investigators for the program, all of whom had top-secret security clearances, encountered things that were far stranger than UFOs, phenomena that could be accurately described as “paranormal.”

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8 News Now Chief Investigator George Knapp was the only journalist allowed to know about AAWSAP, which stands for Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, and spoke to the government scientist who was the program’s director.

Back in that era, 2008-2011, Knapp heard the name Dr. James Lacatski a few times, mostly in hushed whispers. Knapp finally met him face to face on St. Patrick’s Day in 2018 at a meeting in Washington arranged by Senator Reid. That’s when Knapp received a full download about AAWSAP that stunned him.  

What they found in this sprawling UFO investigation is that these unknown craft, whatever they are, seem to generate spooky phenomena that seemingly shouldn’t exist.

“We heavily went into Skinwalker Ranch, a property of Robert Bigelow’s,” Lacatski said. “He offered a facility where we could see UFOs and the paranormal all at once.”

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So, how did this ranch in northeastern Utah, previously owned by Las Vegas aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, become a key part of the government’s classified UFO investigation?  

It started at DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, where rocket scientist and intelligence analyst Lacatski and a colleague, Jay Stratton, became both puzzled and alarmed by reports about UFO intrusions at many of our nation’s most sensitive national defense facilities.    

Residents of the Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah had been reporting frequent UFO incidents for decades, probably longer, and the Bigelow Ranch was deemed an epicenter of weird activity, not just UFOs, but also unknown creatures, things that presumably exist only in myths or movies.

Bigelow’s organization, NIDS, or National Institute for Discovery Science, moved onto the ranch, and its team of scientists and investigators began collecting testimony from residents, then started seeing the creatures and phenomena for themselves. Lacatski, Stratton, and the bosses at the DIA were intrigued, not repelled, by the wild stories. They wanted to know if UFOs and the seemingly related paranormal incidents might be considered a threat.

“I could see from my organization the threat potential, and we were uncovering many of the things you were observing, you know, strange creatures,” Lacatski said. “I mean, think of inducing what might be called delusions by some people into an enemy force. We wanted to learn what can be weaponized here.”

Lacatski and Stratton put together a program that DIA approved; the acronym was AAWSAP. Senator Harry Reid helped secure the funding, and Bigelow Aerospace was the contractor. Fifty full-time investigators were hired, obtained top secret security clearances, and went to work.  

The main focus was UFOs and UFO technology, but one smaller focus was measurable health effects on people who encountered a UFO and were physically harmed, or developed rare diseases, including psychological effects. That allowed AAWSAP to cast a wide net and to report seemingly outlandish stories about creatures, poltergeist-type activity, and other weirdness.  

Lacatski said that AAWSAP created a massive database of UFO accounts, but the witnesses were typically reluctant to admit that they also had paranormal experiences after encountering UFOs.

“We realized that people who openly say ‘I observed a UFO up close,’ maybe on the ground that they always seemed to have a paranormal connection in some ways, if you gently push them,” Lacatski said.

The connection between UFO encounters and paranormal experiences isn’t new. It traces back to the first big UFO event of the modern era. In 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine objects flying in formation over Washington State. His family said that for most of the rest of his life, Arnold’s home was bedeviled by inexplicable phenomena.  

Perhaps the strangest experience reported by nearly everyone in AAWSAP who visited the Bigelow Ranch is what is now known as the hitchhiker effect. At least five highly experienced intelligence officers who went to the ranch to check things out, came into contact with paranormal phenomena, and then took it home with them.  

They and their families would see balls of light inside their homes, shadowy figures, even creatures that were physical, not a mere mental image. After one investigator returned from the ranch to his east coast home, his entire family was bedeviled by orbs and what they described as a wolf that walked on two legs.

“The one here in the Washington area, that’s why you have to say paranormal,” Lacatski explained. “I mean, what, did it get on a train or a plane to come to Washington?  It left deep scratch marks on the tree it was resting against; there was physical evidence.”

Among those who have reported hitchhiker type events, Dr. Colm kelleher, the Las Vegas manager for AAWSAP, physicist Dr. Eric Davis, the DIA’s Jay Stratton, several security personnel, and the former owner of the ranch, Robert Bigelow.

After the existence of AAWSAP was first reported by us in 2018, and the full scale of the strange phenomena it had examined was made public by Dr. Lacatski in his books, including the newest one, “New Insights.” Skeptics claimed the DIA had killed AAWSAP at the end of 2010 because the reports it received were simply too weird. The man who oversaw every part of AAWSAP said weirdness had nothing to do with it, that DIA leadership was supportive to the end.

“Did they ever have the opinion that this is getting kind of weird?” Knapp asked.  

“No, they never did. They basically wanted it kept quiet, that’s all,” Lacatski explained. They didn’t want to see it in The Washington Post.”

Lacatski and others familiar with AAWSAP tried to find a new home for a spinoff version, something called Kona Blue. Harry Reid helped lead the charge, and the Department of Homeland Security initially said yes, then higher-ups killed it. Lacatski’s new book hints that some slice of Kona Blue did move forward, but he declines to spill further details about that for now.