Skinwalkers at the Pentagon

About the Author

James T. Lacatski holds a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Doctor of Engineering in nuclear engineering, with early technical work in the mid-1980s on plasma engineering in Torsatron fusion reactors and a stint in Duke Power Company's Nuclear Design Section. He built a career at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and in 2007, while working within the DIA's Defense Warning Office, he became convinced that a subset of "high strangeness" case reports warranted directed scientific study; that year he met Nevada businessman Robert Bigelow and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a connection that led directly to AAWSAP's 2008 launch. Lacatski served as the program's DIA program manager, contracting officer's representative, security coordinator, and counterintelligence coordinator until its 2010 funding lapse — giving him, by his own account and by public contracting record, more direct institutional authority over AAWSAP than any other named source publicly writing about the program.

Dr. Colm A. Kelleher earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Trinity College Dublin before relocating to the United States, where from 1996 to 2004 he served as deputy administrator and research director of Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), overseeing its Skinwalker Ranch field research and other anomaly investigations. In 2005 he co-authored Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah with George Knapp — a real, verifiable prior collaboration between two of this book's three authors, published sixteen years before Skinwalkers at the Pentagon and covering the same property under NIDS's earlier, privately funded research phase. When BAASS won the AAWSAP contract in 2008, Kelleher became its deputy administrator, running the contractor's day-to-day execution of the DIA program and giving him continuity across both the private (NIDS) and federally contracted (BAASS/AAWSAP) phases of Skinwalker Ranch's investigative history.

George Knapp, born in 1953, has been chief investigative reporter for KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, since 1981 (with a brief early-1990s stint away from the station), and his decades of reporting have earned him Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Peabody Award, and more than twenty regional Emmy Awards. He broke the Bob Lazar/Area 51 story in 1989, and his June 1996 Las Vegas Mercury articles were the first public reporting on the Sherman family's experiences at what became known as Skinwalker Ranch — making him the single reporter with the longest continuous public record on the property, predating even NIDS's own involvement. He was also the only journalist NIDS permitted to directly observe its research there, a level of access that carried forward into his reporting on AAWSAP and, later, this book.

The book itself underwent an unusually protracted version of the Pentagon's standard prepublication security review: Lacatski submitted the manuscript to the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) in March 2020, and clearance, coordinated across the DIA, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Homeland Security, was not granted until May 11, 2021 — a fourteen-month process that Lacatski publicly described as frustrating and that resulted in a "cleared as amended" determination requiring redactions of personally identifiable information, protected health information, and the names of government employees, including a pseudonym for one of the pilots involved in the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac encounter. As with Elizondo's later Imminent, this review process confirms only that the manuscript's classified content was properly handled, not that its substantive factual and interpretive claims are accurate.

Historical Context & Origins

AAWSAP's 2008 origin traces directly to the same Nevada political and financial network that would later fund AATIP: Senator Harry Reid secured the program's initial appropriation with support from Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, at the urging of his friend and longtime UFO-research patron Robert Bigelow, whose BAASS then won the resulting DIA solicitation. Skinwalker Ranch was already a known quantity to that network — Bigelow had purchased the property in 1996 specifically to study it through NIDS, and Kelleher had already run NIDS's investigation there for eight years before AAWSAP formalized a federal research relationship with the same site under a new contractor.

The book arrived into a UFO-literature landscape already reshaped by the December 2017 New York Times story that first disclosed AATIP's existence, a story Knapp himself had been independently pursuing for years before stepping back and letting Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper publish it under the Times's byline — the same disclosure this site's own breakdown of Elizondo's Imminent covers from AATIP's other side. That 2017 story focused almost entirely on AATIP's conventional aerial-encounter analysis and said little about AAWSAP's earlier, broader Skinwalker Ranch work; Skinwalkers at the Pentagon was the first insider account to put that specific, far stranger dimension of the government's UFO research on the public record under real names and DIA credentials.

The book also followed, by roughly eighteen months, the March 2020 premiere of History Channel's The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the documentary series built around current ranch owner Brandon Fugal's continuing investigation. The show had already made Skinwalker Ranch's high-strangeness reputation a mainstream television subject before the book's October 2021 publication; what the book added was not new popular exposure but a specific, named, government-credentialed institutional history — the DIA contract, the program's chain of command, the size of its budget — that the television series could reference but not itself supply.

Structurally, the book functions as a direct sequel to Kelleher and Knapp's own 2005 Hunt for the Skinwalker: where that earlier book described NIDS's privately funded, pre-2004 investigation without disclosing any federal government involvement (because none of the authors could yet discuss AAWSAP, which did not begin until 2008 and remained classified for years afterward), Skinwalkers at the Pentagon retroactively reframes that same property's story as one with a documented Pentagon funding stream running through it — a genuinely different institutional claim than the 2005 book ever made.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's first and least controversial argument is institutional: AAWSAP was a real, congressionally funded, roughly $22 million Defense Intelligence Agency contract awarded to BAASS, and its mandate, per the authors' account and the underlying statement of work, explicitly covered both conventional aerospace-threat analysis and directed study of "anomalous phenomena" at private research sites — a dual mandate later independently confirmed, in general terms, by the Pentagon's own 2024 AARO Historical Record Report, which acknowledged AAWSAP/AATIP conducted "unrelated work on alleged paranormal activities at a private sector organization's property in Utah."

The book's second argument concerns the roughly 140 military UAP encounter reports the authors say AAWSAP collected and analyzed, of which they state only one description was assessed as potentially terrestrial in origin. These figures anchor the book's more conventional "nuts and bolts" chapters and connect directly to cases this site covers independently, including the USS Nimitz Tic Tac encounter and the broader body of military-witness testimony that also underpins Leslie Kean's earlier reporting.

The book's most extraordinary and least independently verifiable claims concern Skinwalker Ranch itself: reported cattle mutilations, unexplained lights and orbs (including an account of an orb the authors say incinerated a family dog), poltergeist-type disturbances, a large wolf-like creature resistant to gunfire, structures the authors say instrumentation detected underground, and a phenomenon Kelleher terms the "hitchhiker effect" — the claim that anomalous experiences followed some investigators home from the ranch to their own residences elsewhere in the country. This article does not treat any of these as established fact: they are relayed in the book as witness testimony and investigator recollection, not as claims accompanied by physical evidence, photographs, or instrument data a reader can independently examine, and the authors themselves acknowledge that key photographic and video evidence was repeatedly reported lost, corrupted, or otherwise unavailable at the moment it might have been most probative.

A related, heavily scrutinized thread connects AAWSAP's Skinwalker Ranch work to the older Cold War-era Stargate remote-viewing program: the book presents sessions by remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle, among others, as a legitimate analytical tool AAWSAP used to help characterize the ranch's phenomena, positioning consciousness research and "anomalous cognition" as a serious, related subject rather than a separate fringe pursuit — the same broad framing critics of Elizondo's Imminent single out as that book's weakest material.

The authors' overarching argument is that this entire portfolio — aerial encounters and high-strangeness ranch phenomena alike — deserved and received serious, well-funded scientific attention from a real federal intelligence agency, and that the program's early 2010 defunding, rather than any negative finding, is what actually ended AAWSAP's work rather than any conclusion that the phenomena were not worth continued study.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Skinwalker Ranch (Case File #296, 1994–Present) is this book's central subject and receives this site's own Disputed rating for exactly the reason this article treats the book's paranormal claims with caution: the property's ownership chain and the AAWSAP contract's existence are independently documented public record, but none of the specific anomalous claims — the Sherman family's mutilations, the individual light sightings, or any incident this book relays — has cleared independent scientific scrutiny in three decades of investigation by multiple well-funded parties, this book's own AAWSAP-era claims included.

This site's own Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (Case File #243, 2007–2017) is AAWSAP's better-known institutional successor, sharing key personnel and the same original DIA contracting relationship with Bigelow's companies; this book supplies the earlier, more esoteric half of that same institutional lineage that Elizondo's Imminent picks up from the AATIP side.

This site's own USS Nimitz / Tic Tac Encounter (Case #003, 2004) is discussed in the book as one of the encounters AAWSAP's analysts reviewed after the fact, and the authors describe redacting the identity of one of the incident's pilots as part of the manuscript's Pentagon-mandated privacy amendments — a detail that connects this book directly to the same underlying video and witness record Robert Sheaffer's critical reviews of both this book and Imminent separately scrutinize.

This site's own St. Clair County Triangle Sightings (Case File #242) fall within NIDS's own pre-AAWSAP investigative lineage under Kelleher's directorship, illustrating the direct institutional throughline this book traces from NIDS's 1990s field investigations into BAASS's federally contracted AAWSAP work at the same organization, under many of the same personnel.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The most substantive skeptical review came from Robert Sheaffer at his long-running Bad UFOs blog, who called the book "the most important thing that has yet been written on the subject of AATIP" for its institutional detail while remaining pointedly unconvinced by its paranormal content. Sheaffer noted the book offers "no actual evidence of paranormal phenomena…only reports," singled out the recurring pattern of witnesses claiming to have photographed anomalous events only for the images to be lost or for devices to malfunction, and wrote bluntly of one such account: "when I hear such an account, I say to myself, 'this story is completely fabricated.'" He also questioned the credibility the book extends to remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle, noting McMoneagle's own much-criticized earlier claim to have remote-viewed Mars "one million years B.C."

Reviewer Stephen Hunt, writing at SFcrowsnest in January 2022, gave a more measured but still pointed assessment, praising the book's use of specific, named military witness testimony (the roughly 140 encounter reports, of which he notes only one was assessed as potentially terrestrial) while flagging real analytical gaps: no comparative data situating Skinwalker Ranch against other reported anomaly sites worldwide, no seismographic verification of the underground vibrations the book describes, and no clear explanation of why Bigelow ultimately sold the ranch in 2016 if AAWSAP's investigation had been as productive as the book suggests.

Reader response has been broadly consistent with the professional reviews. On Goodreads, reviewer J.R. criticized the book's reliance on anecdotal testimony without independent scientific verification, noted inconsistencies across witness accounts ranging from wolf-like creatures to claimed dinosaur sightings, and questioned whether BAASS's own financial incentive to justify contract renewal colored its reporting; reviewer Reid Brooks made a related, simpler point — that despite substantial government funding and the authors' genuine credentials, the book contains no photographs of any injured witnesses and no clear record of a serious, sustained attempt to document the alleged encounters with equipment capable of producing verifiable evidence.

The Pentagon's own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) directly engaged with AAWSAP's Skinwalker Ranch work in its March 2024 Historical Record Report, confirming the program's paranormal research mandate existed but concluding that individuals connected to that research "have not provided any empirical evidence" to substantiate the claims — the same evidentiary gap this article treats as central to evaluating the book, delivered not by an outside critic but by the federal office that inherited AAWSAP's own institutional lineage.

The harshest published assessment came from skeptic Brian Dunning, who argued in a 2024 analysis of the AARO report that the original $22 million AAWSAP appropriation and the later, failed "Kona Blue" proposal to revive similar work under the Department of Homeland Security amounted to a pattern of government funding secured on the strength of unverified paranormal claims, naming Lacatski, Kelleher, and Knapp alongside Bigelow, Elizondo, Chris Mellon, Hal Puthoff, Leslie Kean, and Eric Davis as part of a network he characterized as engaged in mutually reinforcing "circular reporting." This is Dunning's own strongly stated opinion rather than an established legal or journalistic finding, and this article presents it as such — but it reflects a level of institutional skepticism, from a named critic willing to put his name to the accusation, that few other books on this site's Essential Reading list have drawn.

Influence & Legacy

The book's most concrete, independently verifiable influence is documented on this very site: this exact 2021 RTMA edition, under ASIN B09HR54GQF (ISBN-13 9798487639653), is cited across resources.html in connection with seven separate case-file pages, including David Grusch Whistleblower Testimony, USS Theodore Roosevelt: The "Gimbal" & "GoFast" Encounters, and the 2019 Navy Destroyer Drone Swarm, and it is separately cited by name in this site's own Skinwalker Ranch case file, reflecting its standing here as the default primary-source memoir for AAWSAP's institutional history specifically.

The same three authors returned in October 2023 with a direct sequel, Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, also published by RTMA LLC, which extends the first book's institutional claims — including Lacatski's account of a 2011 Capitol Hill briefing at which he says he was told the U.S. possessed a craft of unknown origin whose interior had been accessed — further into exactly the crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering territory that David Grusch's 2023 congressional testimony, covered in this site's own David Grusch case file, would bring to mainstream attention within months of the sequel's publication.

Within the broader UAP disclosure movement, the book has become AARO's own institutional reference point for AAWSAP's paranormal-research dimension: the office's March 2024 Historical Record Report explicitly acknowledges the program's Skinwalker Ranch work while declining to validate any of its specific claims, effectively making this book — rather than any classified government record made public through other means — the primary documentary source AARO itself cites for that specific chapter of AAWSAP's history.

The book's reception also illustrates a genuine split within ufology's own research community: figures like Knapp and Kelleher retain substantial credibility for their institutional access and decades of consistent, named reporting, while their specific paranormal claims from this book draw sustained skepticism even from researchers otherwise sympathetic to the broader UAP disclosure project — a distinction this site's own Skinwalker Ranch case file treats as the property's defining, unresolved tension rather than a settled question in either direction.

The Book

As an Amazon Associate, OverClassified may earn from qualifying purchases made through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Related Cases & Theories

Essential Viewing