What Government Investigators Actually Found at Skinwalker Ranch — The Declassified Files

His entire family was bedeviled by orbs and what they described as a wolf that walked on two legs.

The people who take UAP disclosure seriously don’t take every alleged Pentagon program seriously. In fact, they’re often the first to call foul on the alphabet soup of programs that anonymous insiders claim exist.

So when the actual founding program manager of the actual classified Defense Intelligence Agency UFO program, a man whose name is on the contract, whose signature is on the deliverables, whose government clearance was active for 40 years, sits down on a podcast last November and says on the record that the United States has accessed the interior of a craft of unknown origin, you pay attention.

What started in 2007 as a single Pentagon scientist reading a book about a strange property in Utah turned into the largest UFO investigation ever funded by the United States government.

The program was real. It cost $22 million. It ran for two and a half years. It produced 115 thick technical reports. It built the largest UAP data warehouse in the world.

And what its founding director has now confirmed publicly 14 years after the program was shut down is that the original report his team filed, the one that triggered the funding cut, is the one the Defense Intelligence Agency has never allowed anyone to read.

Let’s follow the contract numbers into the classified dark and find out what was really happening on that ranch in Utah.

The investigation the Pentagon could not finish.

The man speaking on the podcast is Dr. James T. Lacatsky. He is in his late 60s, retired Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer and rocket scientist.

Doctorate in nuclear engineering. Career specialty: fusion plasmas and directed energy weapons.

He spent most of his working life inside the DIA’s Defense Warning Office, the unit responsible for figuring out which technologies America’s adversaries might one day use to win a war.

He had spent his career, in his own words, as a keeper of secrets. He had regarded his oath and his clearance, in his own words, as gospel.

He had also, in 2007, read a book.

The book was called Hunt for the Skinwalker. It was written by a microbiologist named Kelleher and a Las Vegas investigative reporter named George Knapp.

The book described a property in northeastern Utah, a small ranch in the Uinta Basin, owned at that time by a Las Vegas businessman named Robert Bigelow, where the previous owners and a series of subsequent investigators had documented what the book called “high strangeness”: unidentified aerial objects, cattle mutilations, apparitions, voices, physiological effects on visitors that lasted long after they had left the property.

Lacatsky read the book at his desk inside the DIA. He read it again on his commute. He read it a third time, according to his own subsequent account, with a yellow legal pad on his lap.

Because he had started taking notes in the margin of every chapter, what Lacatsky thought he was reading as a 40-year intelligence professional was not a paranormal book.

He was reading a description of what looked to him like adversary technology being tested on American soil.

The objects described in the book performed maneuvers that no aircraft on Earth was capable of in 2007. They appeared and disappeared in ways that suggested either an unprecedented stealth capability or an unprecedented signature suppression capability.

And the physiological effects reported by the witnesses, what the book called the “hitchhiker effect,” where people who visited the ranch reported anomalous activity continuing in their own homes long after they had left, looked to Lacatsky like a directed energy weapon test program operating in the open.

He decided to go see for himself.

In the summer of 2007, Lacatsky drove from his DIA office in Washington out to the Uinta Basin in Utah. He met the property’s owner. He spent several days on the ranch.

According to his own account, co-written with Kelleher and Knapp in their 2021 book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, cleared for public release by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review, Lacatsky had a close-range observation inside the ranch house kitchen of what he described as a yellow tubular semi-opaque device.

He came home from Utah a different man.

Within months, he had pitched the creation of a formal Pentagon investigation. The pitch went to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with whom Lacatsky met in a Washington hotel suite alongside Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye.

The three senators agreed to find the funding.

The funding was secured. The contract was solicited under the public number HHM4028R211. The contract was awarded in 2008 to a Bigelow-owned subsidiary called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS).

The program had a budget of $22 million. It had a team of approximately 50 full-time investigators.

It had a name.

The name was the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program: AAWSAP.

What Lacatsky, Kelleher, and the BAASS team did between 2008 and 2010, according to their published accounts and the partial FOIA releases that have come out since, was conduct the most comprehensive scientific investigation of UAP-related phenomena ever undertaken by the United States government.

They built 11 separate databases of UAP cases from around the world. They examined pilot reports, military and civilian. They documented several hundred cases of physiological effects in people who had encountered UAP.

They investigated the 2004 USS Nimitz “tic-tac” incident. They investigated UAP intrusions on two U.S. military bases.

They examined historical incidents at U.S. nuclear missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. They examined UAP cases in Brazil from the same era.

They produced 37 technical reports known as DIRDs (Defense Intelligence Reference Documents), covering everything from theoretical propulsion systems to consciousness-related effects.

And they ran a sustained instrumented investigation on Skinwalker Ranch itself.

It was on the ranch, “Project Ranch,” as the AAWSAP team designated it internally, that what Lacatsky has now publicly characterized as the most operationally important findings of the entire program were documented.

According to Skinwalkers at the Pentagon and Lacatsky’s subsequent on-camera interviews, the BAASS team working out of a dedicated command center on the property captured photographic evidence of two sets of barefoot human tracks merging into one.

They captured a separate set of barefoot tracks that walked through fresh snow, approached a 5-foot-tall barbed wire fence, and continued on the other side without disturbing the fence at all.

They documented the hitchhiker effect in operational terms. Multiple military and contractor personnel who visited the ranch reported, in the weeks and months that followed, what AAWSAP investigators classified as anomalous activity in their own family homes.

In some cases, the activity was severe enough to traumatize family members who had never visited the ranch and had no prior interest in the subject.

And according to Lacatsky’s 2023 follow-up book, Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, also cleared by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review, they documented something else.

In 2011, after AAWSAP had been officially shut down, Lacatsky stated to a sitting United States senator and an under secretary of an intelligence agency, in a meeting whose existence is now in the public record, that the United States possessed a craft of unknown origin, that the United States had accessed the interior of that craft, and that the craft had no observable propulsion systems and no observable control surfaces.

He has since restated this on the record on multiple occasions, most recently and most directly in a two-part appearance on the Weaponized podcast with Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp in November of last year.

In part one, Knapp framed the conversation explicitly as: what would Lacatsky say to Congress under oath?

Lacatsky stayed inside cleared language. He confirmed the access. He confirmed the description in his book. He stated that what he had written was exact.

Sharing what he had documented wasn’t an option for Lacatsky during the program’s active years.

He held a security clearance higher than most U.S. senators. He could not write papers. He could not give interviews. He could not even tell his own family what he was working on.

So he did the only thing a man in his position could do once the program was shut down.

He spent 14 months, 14 full months, submitting a draft manuscript through the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review process, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, until he had cleared everything he was legally allowed to say.

Then he published it. Then he published the second one. Then he started giving interviews.

Then he started saying on the record things that nobody at his clearance level had ever said in public before.

The response was immediate and explosive.

Believers hailed Lacatsky’s books as the most authoritative insider account of a U.S. government UFO program ever published.

Skeptics dissected every paragraph, searching for signs of confabulation, late-career narrative building, or unverifiable insider claim.

Debates raged across the disclosure community.

Was this finally the institutional confirmation people had been waiting for?

The Senate-funded contract, the public solicitation number, the cleared-for-release manuscripts, the named program manager going on the record, all matched the pattern of what disclosure researchers had been arguing for years existed inside the U.S. government.

Skeptics, however, weren’t convinced.

They pointed to the Pentagon’s own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which in March 2024 published a historical record report stating that AARO had found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government possesses extraterrestrial technology, and characterizing AAWSAP’s deliverables as having drifted into paranormal research.

To AARO, the program had not been a UFO investigation in the strict sense. It had been a broad-spectrum anomaly study whose outputs lacked operational utility for the DIA’s mission.

Lacatsky, in his subsequent interviews, has strongly disputed AARO’s framing.

He has said that AARO relied on incomplete archives. He has said that the BAASS material listed in the appendix of his book, the material that the AAWSAP team produced over two and a half years of work, has, with the exception of the 37 DIRDs, never been released to AARO or to anyone else.

The largest UFO investigation ever funded by the U.S. government produced approximately 115 thick reports.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has, 14 years later, released approximately 37 of them.

68% of what AAWSAP produced is still classified.

Lacatsky’s account wasn’t an isolated claim.

The AAWSAP investigation engaged dozens of personnel at every level, and many of those personnel have, in the years since, given interviews and made statements that align with the picture Lacatsky has been painstakingly clearing for public release.

Among them is the story of a former program contractor whose career put him in the same compartmented spaces.

His name is Cyrus Bowen. He is in his early 50s.

Retired Lockheed Skunk Works engineer. Six issued patents on stealth coatings.

He came forward following his wife’s death in 2023.

Bowen had worked classified airframe materials projects through several major prime contractors over the course of two decades, and had been delivered at various points to facilities that were not on any public organizational chart he had ever seen.

In 2009, the second year of AAWSAP’s operation, Bowen was sent on what he has now characterized as a one-week consulting visit to a big aerospace facility outside Las Vegas.

He was not told why.

He was given a pass. He was escorted to a workspace where a small group of scientists was working on what he was told was materials analysis of recovered fragments from an unknown vehicular source.

He was shown a small piece of metal.

He was told it was approximately 50 years old. He was told it had been recovered from the New Mexico desert.

He was asked, as a coding specialist with extensive experience in advanced alloys, to examine it.

He did.

The piece was the size of a quarter. It was, in his words, unlike anything I had ever seen before or since.

It had a layered internal structure that he could not explain by any process available to U.S. industry.

He told the team so. He was thanked. He was escorted off the property.

He never received a follow-up briefing. He has never been told what the piece of metal was.

He has since, coming forward, told two interviewers that he believes the piece he examined in 2009 was a fragment of the same material the AAWSAP team was investigating in parallel, and that the BAASS investigators were getting their materials data from a recovery the public still has not been told about.

Bowen’s account mirrors others who have spoken since.

In April of this year, the longtime UAP investigative journalist D’vorah Eizen published a draft analysis of what she has been calling “the AAWSAP exhaust pattern,” the documented behavior of personnel and contractors leaving Pentagon UAP work in the years since the 2010 shutdown.

The analysis, while still in draft, identifies multiple individuals whose post-AAWSAP careers diverged from where the public record would predict: quiet retirements, unexplained job changes, sudden moves, and in a small number of cases, deaths.

These accounts share common threads.

The Pentagon ran a serious, large-scale, scientifically staffed UFO investigation between 2008 and 2010. The program produced a vast amount of material.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has not released most of it.

The program’s founding manager has now spent four years carefully, through cleared channels, telling the public what he is legally allowed to say, and has in those four years said enough to make clear that what AAWSAP found was qualitatively different from what AARO has subsequently been willing to acknowledge.

Until last year, the skeptics had a strong argument that the AAWSAP narrative was the work of a small group of motivated insiders telling stories the rest of the institution had moved on from.

Then a journalist did the cross-reference.

The mystery only deepened when Eizen, working her own UAP mortality dataset, decided to overlay AAWSAP’s published deliverables list against the other classified Pentagon programs that have been disclosed in the post-rush era.

The next chapter takes us to a small office in Washington, D.C.

Where, on a quiet Tuesday morning in mid-April of this year, Eizen sat down with the AAWSAP DIRD list, the partial AATIP successor program records that have been released since 2017, and a third list that has not yet been published anywhere except in a draft she has been circulating to a small group of researchers.

What she found is going to change everything.

The investigation the Pentagon could not finish, and the program that quietly continued after AAWSAP was shut down.

The cross-reference wasn’t built for AAWSAP alone.

Eizen had been compiling since 2023 the most complete public list anyone has assembled of Pentagon and intelligence community UAP-related programs over the last 70 years.

Her list included AAWSAP, AATIP, UAPTF, AARO, the pre-Roswell Sign and Grudge programs, Project Blue Book, the classified special access programs that David Grusch named in his 2023 sworn testimony, and more controversially, a series of program fragments that have surfaced through FOIA requests and inspector general complaints over the last two decades.

By February of this year, the cross-reference was returning a pattern Eizen had not initially expected.

The 37 DIRDs that AAWSAP did publicly release between 2008 and 2010 were not random.

They clustered around three specific technical themes: propulsion, materials, and biomedical effects.

The remaining 78 reports, the ones that AARO has stated do not exist or do not have utility, clustered by Lacatsky’s own published table of contents and appendix descriptions around themes that AAWSAP investigators internally referred to as “Project Ranch” and “Project Consciousness.”

Project Ranch was the sustained instrumented investigation at Skinwalker.

Project Consciousness was AAWSAP’s effort to characterize what the team called “the human element”: the interaction between UAP phenomena and the consciousness, perception, and physiology of human witnesses.

There are six findings Eizen has flagged in her preliminary draft, a draft that has, as of this recording, been circulated only to a small group of researchers and one congressional staff member.

I’ll walk you through them in the order she ranked them, most certain to least.

The first one, the most definitive: AAWSAP’s most consequential investigative output was Project Ranch and Project Consciousness, and almost none of it has been released.

By Eizen’s count, of the 78 unreleased AAWSAP reports, 63 are believed, based on titling conventions in Lacatsky’s published appendix, to be Project Ranch or Project Consciousness deliverables.

AARO’s 2024 historical record report does not separately address those specific deliverables.

It treats the entire AAWSAP corpus as having drifted into paranormal research without operational utility.

By doing so, it sidesteps the program’s actual core findings.

The second finding: the 37 released DIRDs do not address Skinwalker Ranch directly.

They are theoretical physics and engineering papers written by external academics like Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis on topics like warp drive, traversable wormholes, and metric engineering.

They are not field reports.

The field reports are the unreleased ones.

The third finding is the one Eizen asked her source on Lacatsky’s appendix to verify three separate times before she would write about it.

The numbering convention used in the AAWSAP DIRD series suggests at least three additional unreleased reports whose titles begin with the prefix PR, which Lacatsky’s published material identifies as the Project Ranch designator.

The last publicly inferable PR-series report number is PR014.

The next one in sequence, PR015, is referenced by number in Lacatsky’s appendix, but its title is partially redacted.

The redacted phrase contains, by character count, approximately 22 characters.

Eizen has not been able to confirm what those 22 characters say.

She has confirmed with one source close to the BAASS team that PR015 was the program’s final field report, the one filed in late 2009, the one that, according to her source, triggered the bureaucratic action that led to the program’s funding being cut.

The fourth finding: AAWSAP’s funding was cut at a peculiar moment in its operational arc.

The contract was originally written with multi-year option years that, if exercised, would have continued the program through at least 2014.

None of the option years were exercised.

The program’s final fiscal year was its third.

The decision to terminate occurred shortly after PR015 was filed.

The fifth finding.

I want you to think about this one for a second before I tell you what it is.

After AAWSAP was terminated in 2010, several of its core personnel, including individuals named in Lacatsky’s published acknowledgements, moved into what has now been publicly identified as Kona Blue.

A follow-on special access program proposed, but according to AARO never formally activated.

AARO’s position is that Kona Blue was a paper exercise that received no funding and produced no work product.

Lacatsky’s position, stated on the Weaponized podcast in November 2025, is that Kona Blue was not paper.

He has declined, in cleared language, to elaborate.

If Lacatsky is right, then the institutional response to PR015 was not to bury the program.

It was to move it out of DIA visibility, out of congressional oversight, into a compartment with a different name and a different cover.

AAWSAP was the program everyone was eventually allowed to talk about.

Whatever Project Ranch became after 2010 may have been the program nobody was allowed to talk about, ever.

The sixth finding is the one Eizen has not released, and the one I will not speculate on.

What I can tell you is this.

One of the BAASS investigators who worked Project Ranch on the property between 2008 and 2010, a former police officer with extensive field experience, agreed three years ago to give Eizen an interview about his time at the ranch.

The interview was scheduled, then postponed, then rescheduled, then postponed again.

The investigator stopped responding to Eizen’s emails in early 2024.

Eizen’s most recent attempt to reach him in February of this year was returned by a family member.

The family member said the investigator had retired and was unavailable. The family member did not give a forwarding address.

The family member asked, before ending the call, whether Eizen would mind not calling again.

Eizen has not added the investigator to her missing list.

Yet, the story of AAWSAP continues.

But to understand what really happened on that ranch in northeastern Utah, we need to go back further. Much further.

Long before Lacatsky drove out from Washington in 2007, the Uinta Basin had a reputation that was anything but ordinary.

This stretch of high desert isn’t just another beautiful corner of Utah. Its history is layered, suppressed, and, according to the Ute people whose homelands it overlaps, older than any of the buildings on it.

The Ute oral tradition describes the area as a place of long-standing strangeness.

The word “skinwalker,” for the record, is not originally a Ute term. It is a Navajo term for a specific type of malevolent shapeshifter in their own tradition.

The Ute have a separate set of stories about the Uinta Basin, and they involve different beings, different rules, and different warnings.

The most relevant of those warnings to the question of what AAWSAP found there is the long-standing Ute prohibition against living on the land that became Skinwalker Ranch.

Ute elders, when asked, have said for decades that the land belonged to other beings already, and was not safe for human habitation.

The first non-native owners of the property, the Sherman family, who bought the ranch in 1994, left within 22 months.

They reported during their short tenancy the same broad set of phenomena that the AAWSAP team would later document with instruments: cattle mutilations, voices, apparitions, UAPs, effects on visitors that continued after they had left.

The Shermans sold the ranch to Robert Bigelow.

Bigelow funded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) to investigate the property between 1996 and 2004.

The NIDS team was led by the same Colm Kelleher who would later co-write Hunt for the Skinwalker and become deputy administrator of BAASS.

NIDS produced its own internal reports. Most have not been released.

In 2005, Hunt for the Skinwalker was published.

Lacatsky read it in 2007. AAWSAP was funded in 2008. Project Ranch ran until 2010.

PR015 was filed. AAWSAP was terminated. Kona Blue was proposed.

The pattern was unmistakable.

From the Ute oral tradition, through the Sherman family’s documented experiences, through the eight years of NIDS investigation, through the two and a half years of the largest UFO investigation ever funded by the U.S. government, the same property has been generating the same kinds of phenomena and the same institutional pattern of cataloging them, classifying them, and refusing to release the conclusion.

Lacatsky did not know all of that institutional history when he first read Hunt for the Skinwalker in 2007.

Or rather, he knew most of it as a senior intelligence analyst capable of reading the open-source literature, but he had not yet stood in the kitchen of the ranch house and seen what he stood in front of.

By the end of his first visit, he had.

For decades after the AAWSAP termination, the topic of Project Ranch fell into the silence the rest of the field also fell into.

Investigators were retasked. Reports were sealed.

The figures, when they appeared in public discourse, appeared rarely.

But the stories didn’t end.

In 2017, the New York Times published the first major mainstream reporting on what the article called the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, the program then incorrectly identified as AATIP.

The reporting brought AAWSAP into the public conversation for the first time.

Within weeks, multiple AAWSAP-era contractors, scientists, and advisers began giving interviews.

In 2021, Lacatsky, Kelleher, and Knapp published Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, cleared by Pentagon Prepublication Review.

The book described, for the first time on the record, the program’s investigations on the ranch and the hitchhiker effect on personnel.

In 2023, Lacatsky, Kelleher, and Knapp published Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations.

The book described the 2011 meeting in which Lacatsky stated to a senator and an under secretary that the United States possessed a craft of unknown origin and had accessed its interior.

In 2024, AARO released its historical record report, concluding that AAWSAP’s deliverables had drifted into paranormal research without operational utility, and that no verifiable evidence existed that the U.S. government possesses extraterrestrial technology.

AAWSAP principals strongly disputed the framing.

In November of 2025, Lacatsky sat down on the Weaponized podcast and stated on camera that what he had said in his books was exact, and that what he would say to Congress under oath, if he was asked, would be the same thing.

He has not been asked.

In April of 2026, Tim Burchett, founder of the bipartisan UAP caucus, told the Daily Mail that he believed Major General William Neil McCasland, who disappeared from Albuquerque on February 27th of this year, leaving his phone, his glasses, and his wearable devices on his kitchen counter, had been “in charge of all of the stuff.”

McCasland’s career as commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson overlapped in time and in some specific personnel with the years that AAWSAP and Kona Blue were operating.

Wright-Patterson is the base where, by every retelling available account, the recovered Roswell material was transferred in 1947.

Burchett has said publicly that he believes the recovered craft is still there.

Lacatsky has said publicly that the United States accessed the interior of a craft of unknown origin.

McCasland has not said anything publicly.

McCasland, as of this recording, is still missing.

Whoever inherited PR015, whoever continued the work after AAWSAP was shut down, has been there the whole time.

Lacatsky has been asked in five separate podcast interviews since November of last year: what is in PR015?

He has answered in every interview with the same six words.

He has not added any. He has not subtracted any. He has not elaborated.

He has said: “Read the book. Read every word.”

He said it the way a man finally gets a verdict on a question he has been carrying for nearly 20 years.

Not relieved. Not vindicated. Tired.

A man who had hoped somewhere in the back of his head that the institution he had served for 40 years would, at the end of his career, allow him to tell the truth in his own words.

It hasn’t. It won’t.

He has now spent four years saying everything he is legally permitted to say in cleared language on the record.

And he has not been able to say everything he knows.

He has stopped pretending he ever will.

Even skeptics struggle to explain what is now in the public record.

Many continue to point to AARO’s 2024 conclusion that AAWSAP’s outputs lacked operational utility and drifted into paranormal research.

But AARO did not have access to the full AAWSAP corpus.

AARO has acknowledged this.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has not released the unreleased reports.

68% of what AAWSAP produced is still in DIA storage.

Others suggest that Lacatsky is mistaken.

That what he saw in 2007, and what he has been carefully describing in cleared language ever since, was a misperception or a confabulation.

But Lacatsky’s career history is in the public record. His doctorate is in the public record. The contract number is in the public record. The Senate funding letter is in the public record.

The 37 released DIRDs are in the public record, and the books, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, were cleared by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review.

The Department of Defense itself has signed off on the words in those books.

The most common skeptical explanation today is that AAWSAP was a real program that found nothing worth releasing.

But a real program that found nothing worth releasing does not file a final report whose title is partially redacted in its successor program manager’s published appendix.

A real program that found nothing worth releasing does not get its option years canceled midstream.

A real program that found nothing worth releasing does not produce a follow-on special access program whose existence is then disputed for 15 years.

Could the United States Defense Intelligence Agency have spent $22 million between 2008 and 2010 to scientifically document a phenomenon on a single ranch in Utah that was qualitatively different from anything the institution had ever cataloged before?

Could the original PR015, whose title nobody outside a small classified compartment has ever seen, be the document that explains why AAWSAP’s funding was killed within months of being filed?

And could the program that has, in everything but name, continued the…