On January 31, 1994, a diplomat named Escudero filed a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe. It described something Tajik Air chief pilot Ed Rhodes — an American who had previously flown for Pan Am — had reported four days earlier: a bright object, moving at altitudes his crew estimated near 100,000 feet, executing circles, corkscrews, and 90-degree turns for forty minutes over Kazakhstan. Rhodes took photographs with a pocket Olympus camera and said he would send copies to the embassy and to the Tajikistan desk officer in Washington, a man named Lowry Taylor. The cable closed with a line that has aged into a kind of institutional shrug: "WE HAVE NO OPINION AND REPORT THE ABOVE FOR WHAT IT MAY BE WORTH."

That cable, now publicly released through the State Department under the designation DOS UAP D2 Cable, was routed simultaneously to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Whether either agency followed up — whether Rhodes's photographs ever developed and what they showed — is not recorded in any document that has been made public. Thirty years later, the DIA's relationship to UAP reporting has become a matter of considerable official and unofficial argument.

The argument centers on a program, a failed successor, and a research collective that operated in the space between them.

From AAWSAP to KONA BLUE

The Defense Intelligence Agency ran a program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program — AAWSAP, commonly conflated with its public-facing name, AATIP — from 2009 to 2012, funded through congressional earmarks. Bigelow Aerospace, the Nevada company founded by real estate developer Robert Bigelow, served as the primary contractor. According to an AARO document titled "History and Origin of KONA BLUE," released publicly by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the DIA eventually terminated AAWSAP/AATIP citing "a lack of merit and lack of utility in the products Bigelow produced for DIA's mission."

"a lack of merit and lack of utility in the products Bigelow produced for DIA's mission."

What happened next is where the paper trail gets interesting.

When DIA cancelled the program, people involved with it did not simply disperse. According to the same AARO document, several of them lobbied to have the work continued inside the Department of Homeland Security under a new code name: KONA BLUE. In 2011, the DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology formally established KONA BLUE as a Prospective Special Access Program — a PSAP, a kind of holding category for programs awaiting full approval — citing claims that relevant materials and information existed and required that level of protection. Six months later, the Deputy Secretary of DHS shut it down, finding the justification inadequate and the personnel and budget requirements insufficiently developed.

The AARO document is emphatic on one point: "No data or material of any kind was ever transferred to or collected by DHS under the auspices of KONA BLUE." Any materials or findings from the AAWSAP/AATIP period, it states, "remain within DIA's archived holdings."

That last sentence is load-bearing. It means that whatever Bigelow's teams produced for the DIA during those three years — reports, analyses, data from Skinwalker Ranch and elsewhere — is still sitting in a DIA archive. It has not been released. AARO's document notes the KONA BLUE proposal itself has been declassified "in partnership between DoD and DHS," but the underlying AAWSAP holdings are a different matter entirely.

There is a tension here worth naming. AARO's document states the materials are being released in accordance with both agencies' commitment to transparency. Separately, the Department of Defense has said it is committed to declassifying and sharing more UAP information publicly. Those statements are not contradictory on their face. But the DIA archive that actually contains the AAWSAP/AATIP work product has not been opened. The commitment to transparency and the act of transparency are not the same thing.

The Network That Kept Going

The official program ended. The people involved largely did not.

Jacques Vallee's sixth and apparently final volume of his "Forbidden Science" journals, published by Anomalist Books in January 2025 and covering the years 2010 to 2019, offers a ground-level account of what happened after AAWSAP wound down. Vallee is a scientist and longtime UAP researcher whose credibility within this space is difficult to dispute — he is neither a casual observer nor a government press release. But his journals are diaries, not verified primary-source documents, and the blogger analyses drawing on them — published at sites like ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com — are tier-four sources: careful and detailed, but not independently verified. What they describe should be read as reported claims from Vallee's contemporaneous notes, not established fact.

With that caveat in place, what they describe is striking.

After AAWSAP ended, a core group of people associated with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies — BAASS, the operational arm of Bigelow's UAP work — continued meeting informally. The group, which Vallee records was given the self-deprecating nickname "Lone Stars," included figures like Kit Green, Eric W. Davis, Hal Puthoff, John Schuessler, and George Hathaway, with Garry Nolan joining later. They gathered at locations in Toronto, Austin, Las Vegas, and Vienna. According to the blogger's account of Vallee's journal, the Vienna meetings were funded by an unnamed European sponsor, with George Hathaway described as that sponsor's advisor. The identity of the European sponsor remains unknown and unverified.

The topics discussed at these meetings, again per the blogger's reading of Vallee's diary, ranged across crash retrievals, alleged physical samples from UAP encounters, abductions, and the nature of the phenomenon itself. In a diary entry Vallee reportedly made in May 2015, he wrote: "I now think it represents a global conscious system outside humanity, sharing the planet. It needs us for its function and works by imitating or anticipating us." That is a scientist's speculative conclusion after decades of investigation — not a finding, but not nothing either.

Vallee's journals also surface specific claims that resist easy categorization. One entry records that Robert Bigelow had organized MRI scans for Skinwalker Ranch security guards who reported unusual experiences — and that the results were described as "consistent with a new syndrome," with sixteen cases documented at the time of writing. BAASS guards Chris Bartel and Chris Marx, later interviewed by researcher Erica Lukes for the UAP Files Podcast, confirmed they had undergone brain MRI scans at a clinic in Reno at BAASS's request. Bartel recalled being told the scans were "to see if there were something in our brains which allowed us to have an experience." The scans were apparently organized at Bigelow's personal suggestion. Senator Harry Reid, along with two other unnamed senators, reportedly asked to visit the ranch during this period and were turned away on safety grounds, according to the same journal account.

A separate entry, dated September 2017, records Vallee noting that Chris Mellon — a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who had been involved with AATIP — had obtained "three official videos from friends in the DOD, showing UFOs, including recordings from the Nimitz encounter." A January 2018 entry adds that Mellon had "wisely sequestered the tapes from AATIP" and that only three would be broadcast. The implication, as the blogger reads it, is that Mellon may have had access to more than three videos before settling on which ones to release. Three DOD-acknowledged UAP videos were ultimately made public. Whether more exist in Mellon's possession or elsewhere is not established by any public document.

Vallee also records a journal entry from December 2017, around the time of the landmark New York Times story on AATIP by Leslie Kean and others, noting that associated projects included "Project Abel Gray, Project Sierra Doors-KIM, Project Orion and Project Flight Mock" — programs he says were, at time of writing, public. None of these names appear in any official document that has been released. Whether they describe AAWSAP subprograms, internal BAASS designations, or something else entirely is unknown.

What Dr. Kirkpatrick Said

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of AARO and a man who held senior positions across the CIA, DIA, National Security Council, U.S. Strategic Command, and U.S. Space Command over his career, gave an interview to the UAP Files Podcast in which he discussed AATIP, AAWSAP, and Skinwalker Ranch. The podcast, a tier-four source, reports that Kirkpatrick "remains unconvinced that any evidence points to non-human intelligence." That is a consistent position for Kirkpatrick, who was publicly skeptical throughout his tenure at AARO.

What makes Kirkpatrick's career history notable in this context is simple geography within the national security apparatus. He held positions at precisely the agencies — DIA, CIA — that received Ed Rhodes's 1994 Kazakhstan UFO cable, that ran AAWSAP, and that still hold the archived AAWSAP/AATIP materials AARO references but has not released. He led the office that produced the KONA BLUE history document. He has spoken publicly. What he hasn't done, as far as the public record shows, is address what specifically is in those DIA archives.

The document that would change the picture significantly is not another journal entry or podcast interview. It is the AAWSAP/AATIP work product itself — the reports Bigelow Aerospace delivered to the Defense Intelligence Agency between 2009 and 2012, which AARO confirms exist in DIA holdings and which no one outside that system has seen. If and when those records are formally declassified, the gap between what the informal Lone Stars network believed they were studying and what the government assessed it to be worth will either narrow considerably — or widen in ways that are harder to dismiss.