The Pentagon investigated poltergeists, animal mutilations, and consciousness

The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program was a Defense Intelligence Agency program funded through a $22 million congressional appropriation secured by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and two Senate colleagues. The DIA awarded the contract in 2008 to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, a subsidiary of Robert Bigelow's aerospace company. The program's director was DIA analyst Dr. James Lacatski. It ran until 2012, when the DIA cancelled it.

The official mandate described research into twelve areas of cutting-edge science relevant to aerospace threats. The AARO Historical Record Report published in March 2024, which reviewed all official U.S. government UAP investigatory efforts since 1945, describes what AAWSAP actually did: while the official purpose was to conduct research into those twelve scientific areas, the contractor team and at least one supportive government program manager also conducted UAP and paranormal research at a property owned by the private sector organization. That property was a 512-acre ranch in northeastern Utah called Skinwalker Ranch.

The scope of the paranormal research is documented in two books reviewed and cleared for public release by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon," written by program insiders James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and journalist George Knapp, was cleared Case 20-SB-0058 on May 11, 2021. "Inside the U.S. Government's Covert UFO Program," by the same authors plus Eric Davis, was cleared Case 22-SB-0151. The DoD clearance means these books were reviewed by the government for classified information and approved for publication. What they describe is not classified. The classification status of the underlying 100-plus technical reports delivered to the DIA is unknown.

The AAWSAP program, through BAASS and its subcontractors, investigated a suite of phenomena at Skinwalker Ranch that went far beyond aerospace threats. The cleared sources document the program's engagement with the following categories of phenomena, none of which involved conventional aerospace technology:

Poltergeist phenomena: spontaneous movement of objects, anomalous sounds, and apparent telekinetic events reported by personnel and documented by surveillance equipment deployed on the property. The program treated poltergeist activity as a category of phenomena warranting systematic study, not as a hoax or misperception.

Consciousness research: the program examined whether human consciousness interacted with the physical environment in anomalous ways. This research connected to a broader government-funded body of work on anomalous cognition that included the CIA STARGATE program and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory.

Precognition and anomalous cognition: the program investigated whether individuals could obtain accurate information about future events or distant locations through means other than conventional sensory channels. This is the same research domain the CIA funded for over two decades under STARGATE.

Cryptid encounters: personnel at and around the ranch reported encounters with large animals that did not match any known species. These were treated within the program as a category of potentially anomalous phenomena rather than misidentified known animals.

Animal mutilations: the program engaged with the long-documented pattern of livestock found dead with surgically precise wounds, no blood, and missing organs in patterns consistent across thousands of cases over decades. The FBI had investigated the same phenomenon from 1974 to 1978 without reaching a conclusion.

The most difficult category of AAWSAP findings to explain in conventional terms, and the one most extensively documented in the cleared sources, is what the program called the attachment phenomenon. The cleared description: encountering anomalies on Skinwalker Ranch often led to the attachment of strange phenomena to military personnel who visited the ranch and brought something home to their families, resulting in frightening eruptions of paranormal events in their households that terrorized and sometimes injured their children.

The program documented cases in which personnel who had no prior history of anomalous experiences began reporting poltergeist-type events in their homes after visiting the ranch. These events included objects moving without contact, auditory phenomena, and in some cases physical harm to family members. The program treated these reports seriously enough to document and study them as a potential contagion-like effect associated with proximity to the phenomena at the ranch.

This finding, if accurate, has implications that extend beyond any conventional threat category. The program appears to have concluded that whatever was occurring at the ranch was not confined to the property, and that personnel exposure created some form of ongoing connection to the phenomena. The nature of that connection, and whether the program reached any conclusions about it, is not established in the cleared public sources. The technical reports on this topic delivered to the DIA remain classified.

The FBI's investigation of animal mutilations is a separate primary source record, independent of AAWSAP, documented in files available at the FBI Vault at vault.fbi.gov. In the mid-1970s, reports of animal mutilations across western and midwestern states prompted the FBI to compile a case file. The Bureau was unable to conduct a full investigation due to jurisdictional limitations , it could only act when mutilations occurred on Indian lands or federal property , but did investigate fifteen cases on New Mexico Indian lands and compiled correspondence and press clippings from 1974 to 1978.

The FBI Animal Mutilation Project explored multiple theories for the incidents: satanic or witchcraft cults, UFO-related activity, pranksters, natural predators, and covert government programs. None of these theories was confirmed. No individuals were identified as responsible for any of the mutilations investigated. The FBI formally closed the cases unresolved.

In 1979, retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel was hired as director of Operation Animal Mutilation, a separate federal investigation funded with a $44,170 grant from the U.S. Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Rommel's investigation concluded that most mutilations were consistent with natural decomposition and predation, though he did not address the full body of cases or the specific forensic anomalies documented in some incidents, including bloodless carcasses, apparent surgical precision, and the presence of sedative compounds found in some animals.

The FBI files remain in the vault and document what the Bureau was told, what it investigated, and what it failed to determine. They do not establish a cause. They establish that the phenomenon was reported at sufficient scale and with sufficient consistency that the federal government investigated it formally, found the cases unresolved, and closed them without explanation.

The CIA's STARGATE collection, released through the FOIA reading room at foia.cia.gov, includes peer-reviewed scientific research on consciousness and its apparent interaction with physical systems. Two documents are particularly significant for what they confirm in primary source language.

"Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems," document CIA-RDP96-00789R002200520001-0, was published in Foundations of Physics in December 1989 and filed in the CIA STARGATE collection. It presents a meta-analysis of over 800 relevant experiments from the parapsychology literature and a review of more than 25 million binary trials conducted over seven years at Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory. The findings show unequivocal non-chance effects in experimental conditions and chance-level results in control conditions: a pattern consistent with genuine anomalous correlation between conscious intention and physical systems. The document concludes that there is persuasive, replicable evidence of an anomalous correlation between conscious intention and the output of random number generators.

"The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World," document CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020033-4, is a second CIA STARGATE document addressing the theoretical framework for understanding how consciousness might interact with physical reality. Both documents were funded through channels that connected to the government's classified research programs on anomalous cognition.

What the STARGATE collection establishes is that the CIA funded and filed peer-reviewed scientific research showing statistically significant effects that conventional physics does not explain. Whether those effects reflect genuine anomalous cognition, systematic experimental error, or something else is a question the documents raise but do not settle.

The AARO Historical Record Report describes a follow-on proposal to AAWSAP called KONA BLUE. After the DIA cancelled AAWSAP in 2012, supporters of the program proposed to the Department of Homeland Security that a new version be created under a Special Access Program designation. The AARO report states: KONA BLUE was brought to AARO's attention by interviewees who claimed that it was a sensitive DHS compartment to cover up the retrieval and exploitation of non-human biologics. The DHS proposal failed. The program was not established. Whether KONA BLUE would have studied consciousness, poltergeist phenomena, animal mutilations, or other AAWSAP research areas is unknown from the public record. What the AARO report confirms is that the AAWSAP community attempted to continue the program under DHS auspices and sought Special Access Program status specifically because the subject matter was considered sensitive enough to require it.

The combined primary source record , AAWSAP confirmed by AARO, the FBI mutilation files, the CIA consciousness documents, the DoD-cleared accounts of what happened to personnel at the ranch , describes a government that studied phenomena it could not explain using the frameworks it had, treated those phenomena seriously enough to spend $22 million over four years, delivered more than 100 technical reports to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then cancelled the program and classified most of those reports.

The phenomena AAWSAP studied do not have official names in the government record. They are described in the cleared sources, documented in the FBI vault, and addressed in CIA-filed scientific literature. They are not UFOs. They are something the government found at the intersection of consciousness, the physical world, and what personnel described encountering , and bringing home , from a patch of land in northeastern Utah. Whether that something is explainable by known science, unknown science, or something else is a question no government report has answered. The classified technical reports that might address it remain unavailable.