Mystery Wire: the Bigelow–Lacatski connection, AAWSAP and New Insights (8 News Now, January 2026)

0:00 All right, welcome back to Mystery Wire with George Knapp. I'm Ron Futrell, and we've got Carlos Sampson flipping the switches there once again, and John Forrest helping out with the production in all of this. We must have passed the audition, George. We're back. Painful young images of young George in that intro there. I'm going to have to deal with those. Those good-looking video from the Wayback Machine is what we got for you right there. But, okay, today's show, we're going to talk, as promised, we're going to talk about Dr. Jim Lekatsky and some of the stuff that he's done. This is more recent stuff that's happened right here, and the connection with Robert Bigelow.

1:02 Now, Robert, you introduced me, not personally, but at least I found out who Robert Bigelow was through you and your stories here on 8 News Now. Aerospace engineer, made a lot of money from a lot of money, from the hotel industry and love space, and Skinwalker Ranch is tied in. How does all that come together? Robert Bigelow is a friend of mine. He's the only Bigelow billionaire that I know and consider a friend, and I had met him when we first started out doing the Bob Lazar story. He was one of the first people to call after that series, UFOs, The Best Evidence, aired in 1989, and we struck up a friendship, and he started hanging out with Lazar. They had a little company together for a while. We became friends, and he had a lifelong interest in UFOs, so he had had some experiences in his family. His grandparents had had experiences, and he had started to dish out money to UFO investigators so they could continue their research, some of the really prominent names of that

2:03 time back in the late 80s and early 90s. And in 1996, he created something called NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science, put together this world-class science advisory board. It was physicists and philosophers and scientists of all kind, and they were to be the advisory group for NIDS, which was looking at UFOs and consciousness issues. Do we survive physical death? Eventually, for NIDS, the UFO topic kind of took over, but Bigelow became, over time, the single largest financier of UFO research in the history of the world. I mean, tens of millions of dollars, and one of the big purchases he made in 1996 was Skinwalker Ranch. He'd been reading about it. The Uinta Basin had been a hotbed of UFO activity for as long as humans had lived in that part of northeastern Utah. Native Americans, Mormon settlers, the oil industry, just about everybody who lived there

3:04 had seen a UFO or someone else in their family had seen one. And Bob Bigelow read a little bit about it, flew to the ranch, met the family that lived there. They stayed there only 20 months. They had planned to live on that property for the rest of their lives. It was the ideal property. They'd always sought. But within 20 months, they were done because of all the weird stuff that happened. So he bought the ranch. He installed a team of scientists with cameras and sensor systems on the property. And within a short period of time, they saw not only UFOs, but a lot of really strange phenomena. In 2000, I'd been pestering Robert Bigelow and Colm Kelleher, who was what, his chief of operations, chief investigator, pestering them for a long time. Hey, let me go to this ranch. I've been seeing this stuff about what's going on. And I'd really like to go to that property. And I think in the year 2000, I made my first visit. And then the following year, I came back and brought a cameraman. Eric Sorensen was my photog for the I-team back then.

4:04 We went to the property, shot some stuff, and interviews with people who'd been there and seen strange things with the plan of eventually producing a documentary. A couple of years and many visits later, Matt Adams and I had been there a number of times. Bigelow sort of nixed the idea of a documentary. He was worried that if the, all the notorious stuff that happened at the ranch got out and the location was known, that he'd be flooded with UFO conspiracy folks and tourists and partiers. And I had tried to assure him that's not going to be the case, but it's exactly what happened later. I put the documentary on hold and instead wrote a book co-authored with Colin Kelleher. In fact, today, 20 years ago today, that book first came out. And among the folks who read it were people at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Dr. Jim Lekatsky picked it up. He sees this stuff about holes in the sky that had opened and craft are coming in and out of that hole

5:06 and strange creatures and UFOs of every description that have been seen not only on the ranch but all over the basin, all over that particular circle of property which is kind of like an island amid the, it's an island of private property inside and surrounded by this huge Indian reservation, the Ore and Uinta Basin, Ore and Uinta Reservation. Northeast Utah. It's way up there in Northeast Utah. Roosevelt, Bernal, Ballard, Fort Duchesne, that area. Beautiful area, by the way. And we've got, you'll see some video of it here in some of the interviews that we've got. But it's, we've got to take a quick break, but it's interesting. He was aerospace. He started out with the aerospace interest. Certainly we saw some of the videos. Who knew that was in North, real quick, we've got to go to break, but who knew that was in North Las Vegas? He was building this, all this aerospace stuff. Well, we did because he allowed us to document it every step of the way. We were there at every step

6:06 and got video of each step of the process and what he was doing. He's got dozens and dozens of patents that he created for that, had big plans. He has three spacecraft up in the air, by the way. One of them is attached to the ISS right now as we speak. Okay. Dr. Jim Lekatsky is going to, we're going to have your interview, your exclusive interview with him coming up. Where he talks, disclosure is coming. Disclosure seems to be one of the things the government for years has been sheltering, but now they want to disclose more. They still haven't disclosed enough, but we'll have that when we come back. Mystery Wire with George Knapp returns. Alright, welcome back everybody.

7:08 putting all these pieces together is sort of interesting to do and it gets a little, it gets a little complicated. I get that. But, from what I understand now, a new book is out by Dr. Jim Lekatsky who writes about secret new insights. It's called secret government programs that were secret at one time. Maybe not secret to you, but to everybody else they were. But he was running, he was inspired by you and the book that you wrote on Skinwalker Ranch and he understood the importance of this and said, whoa, let's go to, do I have this right? Let's go to the feds and let's get, basically got a few senators together, bipartisan, to say, let's build a program to find out the threat potential. Dr. Lekatsky was a career intelligence analyst. He was a specialist. He was literally a rocket scientist for the DIA and he studied potential threats of enemy rocket systems that were being constructed. Smart guy, brilliant engineer,

8:09 PhD, of course. And he read the book. He read Hunt for the Skinwalker. Here's these stories about holes in the sky, unknown craft coming in and out. And he also saw all the paranormal activity at the ranch as a potential threat. Maybe it's a byproduct of whatever these machines are that are flying around in the sky. Maybe it's a byproduct or it's done on purpose. So he read the book. He passed it on to a colleague of his at DIA, Jay Stratton, who went on to bigger and better things in the UFO world and again, a career intelligence guy. Stratton was in Iraq as he read it. He was in the green zone while the Iraq war was going on. I thought, this is pretty interesting. So Lekatsky writes to Robert Bigelow, says, hey, can I go visit this ranch? Bigelow says, sure, come to Las Vegas. I'll take you there myself, which he did. Lekatsky's on the property, this 480-acre ranch, for less than an hour and within that time period, he has an experience. He has his own paranormal experience sitting inside the ranch house

9:09 with the two caretakers of the property. He sees something really weird in the house floating in the air a couple of feet away from himself. He doesn't say anything at the time until he gets off the ranch and then he tells Bigelow what he saw, this real weird, kind of like tubular bells on an old Mike Oldfield album, a figure like that, glowing inside the house. He goes back to D.C. He writes up an outline for a possible UFO investigation, a program that becomes OSAP, and then he takes that proposal to his bosses who said, yeah, go for it. He meets with Senator Harry Reid who called a meeting with two other colleagues, bipartisan committee of three who oversaw a lot of the black budget programs, and they said, yeah, let's do it. Let's get some money. They came up with $22 million worth of new money, $22 million that would fund the program for two years. They gave a contract to Robert Bigelow and they were off and running. Within a matter of a number of weeks, under Colin Kelleher and Jim Lekatsky,

10:09 they had hired 50 full-time investigators, ex-cops, ex-intelligence guys, got them all top-secret security clearances and sent them to work. And one of the places that was a focus of that work was this ranch we're seeing pictures of. It was not the only focus. Skinwalker Ranch was a unique opportunity to sort of have a living laboratory, but their focus was a much larger cross-section of UFO studies around the world. They created the world's largest UFO database with more than 240,000 cases. They went to Brazil and Canada and the UK and got their UFO files and put it into those databases. They were the first to study the Tic Tac. That very first case that was studied by OSAP was what's now known as maybe the most important and influential UFO case of all time. The Tic Tac case where U.S. Navy pilots and U.S. Navy sensor systems encountered this thing off the coast of Southern California and then they were off and running. Yeah, David Fravor has testified of what he saw there certainly.

11:10 But looking at weapons systems was important to him and that's the OSAP, the acronym is they're looking for weapons systems and trying to do a threat assessment. You did an exclusive interview over Zoom with Dr. Lukaski and here's a portion of that where he talks about the threat potential there and he went there to Skinwalker Ranch to find out what that threat potential could possibly be. because I could see from my organization the threat potential and we weren't covering many of the things you were observing. You know, strange creatures. I mean, think of inducing these, what might be called illusions by some people into an enemy force. You know, we wanted to learn what can be weaponized here and that basically that was our job at DIA. When you hear there's people seeing holes in the sky and craft coming in and out, that must have got your attention too.

12:12 Yes, and it still does in regard to, well, I'll mention it now, the follow-on program Kona Blue because that seems to imply a physical effect and we've seen it elsewhere. It was reported near the ranch. by the ranch manager at the time. It's been seen elsewhere. It's not a unique phenomenon, but it seems to be more physical in nature. In later shows, we're going to hear about some of the specifics of what those ranch managers saw. Fascinating stuff. And you, okay, I'm sitting here just living in Las Vegas, having no idea that all these federal workers are here in Las Vegas running this program, going back and forth to Utah to the Skinwalker Ranch. You had a pretty good idea. You knew what was happening at the time but couldn't say anything. Am I right? That was hard.

13:12 It was hard to not say anything, but that was the deal. I mean, I was allowed to know that the program was up and running. I didn't know all the details because so much of it was classified, but because of a friendship with Bigelow, with Colm Kelleher, with Dr. Eric Davis, and more importantly with Harry Reid, I would get enough bits and pieces here and there to know that it was really some exciting stuff they were doing. And it was big. It was a worldwide study. I was asked twice to join it. to get a security clearance and they promised that if I got a clearance, they could tell me a lot more. I always figured, look, if I sign a national security oath, I'll never be able to report this. And even though I have to wait maybe years and years, which is how it ended up being, before I can release any of it, eventually I plan to report it, you know, as long as it didn't violate any promises I had made to Bigelow and to the other people involved with it. But eventually we were able to report a heck of a lot of it. And now

14:12 more of that information is coming out through the efforts of Dr. Colm Kelleher and Jim Lekatsky. The book that you showed there is the latest book. The first one that was written and I was part co-authored of that was Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, kind of a follow-up to Hunt for the Skinwalker, which is our original book about the ranch. And this is the new one inside the U.S. government covert UFO program New Insights in which Dr. Lekatsky reveals more from the documents that were submitted to DIA. Now, if you file a FOIA request today and ask DIA for the files from the OSAP program, they'll say, we don't have any. We can't find them. So either they were burned or disposed of in the years since the program ended or they've been stashed somewhere in such a deep, dark hole that they really, genuinely can't find them. Whatever, though, the only direct information we have about what OSAP did and what it accomplished is from Dr. Lekatsky. The first book at Skinwalkers at the Pentagon took 14 months to get approval from what's called

15:12 the Dobser process. It took a number, several, about half that time to get the second book approved and this one took about seven months or so as well. Okay, we're going to talk about the government's role in this. Certainly you played a role in what happened here with some of the senators and how they wanted to keep things confidential and how difficult it is to keep things confidential nowadays and how people want disclosure. That's what people are asking for now is disclosure. The government's becoming more transparent but perhaps not enough when we return here to Mystery Wire with George Knapp. We'll start with George Knapp. Yeah, I don't care what you say, George. I love those old school

16:12 pictures of you, okay? I remember them here in town. Because I've been here long enough as have you certainly. But let's talk about the role that Congress played in this and you've got three senators now involved. Senator Harry Reid who we both knew well. Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, a Democrat and then also a Republican Ted Stevens from Alaska who all got together in bipartisan fashion to say let's have some disclosure on this because people were people quite frankly were begging for it wanted it to happen it's never enough it's still not enough to this day but at least and here's what Dr. Lukaski told you about how he was trying to get disclosure and these senators were involved. we don't want to see my name in the Washington Post while the contract is running. Afterwards it's fine because the project was very successful but we were always I would say

17:14 running pretty fast. Bob Bigelow ran and his program manager Dr. Colm Kelleher ran the program very quickly. we had clearances at the highest level processed and this is hard to believe in 30 days. It was just amazing how quickly that was up and running. I was asked to condense briefings to the higher ups so they always got the straight scoop they knew what was going on they didn't themselves have any external contact except for those in charge of monitoring funds because Congress was very insistent you are spending this money and you're spending it on what you're supposed to be spending it on and DIA followed the straight narrow path and successfully

18:14 completed the project in a record time. Okay so from what I understand this money $22 million earmarked for this and it took those senators to find special funds didn't they had to keep them away from nobody take it from us right it was new money nobody knew about it Jim Lekatsky says he'd be sitting in the DIA and the person the desk next to him didn't know the only people who knew at DIA were the two top administrators and you know the reports got very weird and I know in the years since this program ended it lasted 27 months and was done for sure in early 2011 in those years since then and as weird stuff that they found came out a lot of people have suggested DIA killed it because it was worthless they were chasing poltergeists and werewolves and things like that not not true like Lekatsky says everything that they found as weird as it got went straight up to DIA they knew what was going on all they were worried about is don't let it get out don't tell anybody

19:14 I know that for years after Senator Reed approved the money for this program every time I'd see him no matter what story I was covering I'd pull him off to the side we'd have a little conversation about UFOs skinwalker ranch he used to drive his staff crazy what are they talking about and they would warn him don't talk to that guy about UFOs of course I did I never said anything about it I mean he had been interested in the topic since 1989 that first series was done but I never reported about ASAP at all and kept it quiet until 2018 when I went to see Senator Reed at his invitation in DC and it was on St. Patrick's Day 2018 he introduced me to Dr. Lekaski the first time I ever met him and that's when I got the lowdown on ASAP the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program and wow my mind was blown are you happy with disclosure now what the feds are doing we always want more but they've got stuff

20:14 that they haven't revealed yet and Lekaski says that he knows stuff our next show we're going to talk about that a little bit yeah I mean there's a ton that they have not revealed you know we still don't know for sure where the crash saucers are and bodies may be and I think those do exist and they're stashed away in defense contractors the hands of companies that don't have comply with FOIA I think those are there I know that the public says we can handle the truth I'm not entirely sure that's true because we don't really know what the truth is you know a lot of folks think it's ETs from other planets and we can handle that we've seen enough movies and TV shows over the years but I foresee some strange possibilities that might be upsetting to people's religious beliefs to their fundamental beliefs about how humans evolved so yeah we think can handle the truth and yeah we think that our government knows the truth I'm not sure either of those are true okay our next program we're going to talk about some of the specifics

21:14 lekatsky saw that when he talked to people there fascinating stories from the ranch manager what she saw there and also some of the native americans involved they went beyond just the ranch 500 almost acres they went beyond the ranch and talked with some of the Indians I believe Paiutes out there in the area and got some interesting reactions from them real quick before we go on yeah the Ute tribe has been there forever they had revised their members don't go onto that ranch because of strange things that had happened there really frightening things and the further out that the investigators went from the ranch stranger things got it it's not just people on that property people have been seeing monsters animals that don't exist and you know I think they were worried that if got out it would destroy the credibility of program and would also create enemies there at the Pentagon who thought it was a waste of time and thank you Matt Adams for these great aerials there with the drone that he took out there to get some of the shots and some trips that you took so George that's

22:15 today's show we got more coming up we do this weekly so you can check it out and be able to see some of the greatest stuff when it comes to mystery wire thanks for joining us here George bye for now