In January 2011, someone inside the Department of Homeland Security decided that the United States needed a special access program to protect the retrieval and exploitation of, as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office would later put it, non-human biologics. The proposal was given the code name Kona Blue. Six months after the DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology formally established it as a prospective program, the Deputy Secretary of DHS shut it down — citing, according to AARO's declassified account, concerns about the adequacy of the justification and the sufficiency of information central to the proposal.

No materials were ever transferred. No data was collected. By AARO's own accounting, nothing exists under the Kona Blue name beyond the proposal itself.

But the paper trail leading to that proposal tells a more complicated story — one that connects a Defense Intelligence Agency contract, a Nevada aerospace entrepreneur, a decade of privately funded shadow research, and a specific network of scientists and intelligence officials who kept working after the government programs ended.

The story starts with AAWSAP. According to AARO's published history of Kona Blue, the DIA managed the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program from 2009 to 2012, funded through congressional earmarks. Bigelow Aerospace, headquartered in Nevada and controlled by Robert Bigelow, served as the primary contractor and delivered multiple reports during the contract period. The DIA terminated the program, AARO states, due to a cited lack of merit and lack of utility in the products Bigelow produced for the agency's mission.

When AAWSAP ended, the people running it didn't stop. According to AARO, several individuals involved with the program then advocated for DHS to absorb the effort under the Kona Blue framework. That advocacy failed. But the informal network around Bigelow apparently continued operating outside any government contract — a detail that would not be visible in any official document had Jacques Vallee not published his journals.

The Network That Didn't Dissolve

Vallee's sixth volume of diaries, Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles, published by Anomalist Books in January 2025 and covering the years 2010 to 2019, provides what may be the most granular on-the-record account of what happened after AAWSAP ended. Vallee is a named participant in much of what he describes, which gives his account a specificity unusual in UAP literature — though these are personal journals, not official records, and they carry the limitations of any single narrator's perspective.

According to blog analysis published by Australian researcher Bill Chalker in March 2025, and a separate February 2025 post on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena research blog, Vallee describes a core group of former BAASS personnel — the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies entity that executed the AAWSAP contract — who continued meeting under a name they called the LoneStars. The group included Kit Green, Eric Davis, Hal Puthoff, John Schuessler, George Hathaway, Bob Bigelow, and later Garry Nolan. Between November 2011 and May 2018, they held eleven meetings across Toronto, Austin, Las Vegas, and Vienna.

The Vienna meetings were funded by an unnamed European sponsor. Vallee's journals note that George Hathaway served as advisor to this sponsor, and that the sponsor's funding — which had also supported a group called Earthtech since 1989 — was winding down as of 2018 due to the sponsor's age. The identity of this individual remains unconfirmed in any primary source.

This is not a conspiracy. Researchers meeting privately to continue work after a government contract ends is not inherently remarkable. What is worth noting is the structure: a DIA contract funds Bigelow; Bigelow's team delivers reports the agency ultimately finds lacking; the government shuts the program down; the same core personnel reconstitute informally, with private European funding, and keep going. The continuity of personnel across the official and unofficial phases is the connection that has not been fully examined in print.

Vallee's diaries, as analyzed in those blog posts — which are tier-four sources and should be read as secondary commentary on a primary text — add several details that the official Kona Blue documents don't address. One is the effort, apparently described by Kit Green in conversation with Vallee and Colm Kelleher, to find a new institutional home for the program after DHS failed. Green is quoted in the February 2025 blog post as saying: "We thought it would happen with DHS (Homeland Security) after we lost our primary home, and then with Arete, but a third group is involved..." Vallee separately notes an attempt involving a Navy sub-entity. Neither of these is confirmed in any official document reviewed for this article.

"We thought it would happen with DHS (Homeland Security) after we lost our primary home, and then with Arete, but a third group is involved..."

Here the official record and the journal record diverge in a way that matters. AARO's published history describes one failed transition attempt — to DHS — and nothing further. Vallee's account, if accurate, suggests the effort to rehouse the program continued through at least two additional institutional targets. That discrepancy is not resolved by any source currently available.

What the Official Record Still Doesn't Show

There's a second tension in the Kona Blue documentation that AARO's release doesn't fully address. The document states that the PSAP proposal and associated materials have been declassified in partnership between DoD and DHS and are being released publicly in accordance with both agencies' commitment to transparency. Separately, the record notes that information associated with AAWSAP/AATIP activities remains within DIA's archived holdings.

Those two statements are not contradictory on their face. But together they raise an obvious question: if the DIA still holds the archived products from the Bigelow contract — the reports the agency ultimately found lacking — what do those reports actually say? The Kona Blue disclosure tells us the government shut down a program that was trying to continue AAWSAP. It does not tell us what AAWSAP found.

Vallee's journals gesture at this gap from a different angle. According to the February 2025 blog analysis, Vallee describes a BAASS team of six investigators who traveled across Brazil, interviewed seventeen officials including a General Uchoa, and produced a report that led to a conference at the Brazilian embassy in Washington attended by members of his network under Air Force sponsorship. Vallee writes, according to the blog's account, that he could have flagged errors and misquotes in that report, that his colleagues confessed it didn't reflect reality, and that he couldn't even access the full document. The blog post quotes Vallee directly: the BAASS report on Brazil is among the materials that, in Vallee's telling, don't accurately represent what was found.

If that account is accurate, it raises a straightforward question about the DIA's archived holdings: do they contain that report, and does anyone currently responsible for UAP oversight know what's in it?

There's also the matter of the physical materials. Chalker's March 2025 blog analysis of Vallee's diaries describes conversations about UFO samples analyzed by Lockheed — a material study colleague apparently told Vallee that Lockheed analysts had observed what the journals describe as highly unique nano-structures in recovered samples, with the structures convincing analysts the material was not from here. Separate isotopic analysis, conducted at Stanford, indicated terrestrial elements. These are directly contradictory characterizations of the same category of material, surfaced in Vallee's own account, and neither claim has been confirmed by any named institutional source in any primary document reviewed here.

Fr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran AARO from its founding until late 2023 and whose career spanned the CIA, DIA, National Security Council, U.S. Strategic Command, and Space Command, told the UAP Files Podcast earlier this year that he remains unconvinced that any evidence points to non-human intelligence. That is a significant statement from the most senior official to have formally reviewed the evidence base. It does not, by itself, tell us what the DIA's archived AAWSAP holdings contain, or whether the materials Vallee describes were ever presented to AARO's review.

Meanwhile, a wholly separate thread in the declassified State Department records released earlier this year includes a 1994 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, signed by an official named Escudero, reporting that American pilots flying a Tajik Air Boeing 747 over Kazakhstan observed an unidentified object maneuvering at an estimated altitude of 100,000 feet for forty minutes. The cable was routed simultaneously to the State Department, the CIA, and the DIA. The embassy's closing line: "We have no opinion and report the above for what it may be worth." Whether any follow-up analysis exists in DIA's holdings is unknown.

The document that would clarify the most here is not a new one. It already exists, in archived form, inside the Defense Intelligence Agency. What AARO's Kona Blue disclosure confirms is that the DIA holds the product of the Bigelow contract. What it doesn't address is whether any of that product has been reviewed in connection with more recent whistleblower claims — or whether the second volume of AARO's historical records report, still overdue as of this writing, will address the gap.