THE BOOK
Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Future Visions, by James T. Lacatski, RTMA LLC, 2026. Signed January 2026; cleared for public release by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review on 26 February 2025 (Case 24-SB-0182).
What the book is
James T. Lacatski was the Defense Intelligence Agency officer who ran the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, the $22 million, 2008-to-2010 Pentagon UFO contract the world learned about through the December 2017 New York Times story. Future Visions, signed January 2026 and DOPSR-cleared in February 2025, is the fourth and final volume in his series. It closes the technical map (signature reduction, armament, human interface, human effects), publishes twelve previously unseen field investigations, and ends with the most consequential claim in the AAWSAP literature: that the programme did not end in 2010, but converted into a follow-on effort inside the Department of Homeland Security called Kona Blue. This briefing is evidence tier 1, the label this site uses for a firsthand account; the empirical claims summarised inside the book carry whatever support the book gives them.
Who wrote it
Lacatski was the contracting officer’s representative for AAWSAP. He wrote or reviewed every Defense Intelligence Reference Document, every Project Management Plan Addendum, every monthly report and every BAASS Special Report the programme produced. He sat across the table from the Tic Tac aircrew in 2009, years before David Fravor’s name was widely known. He briefed two senior Department of Homeland Security officials in a SCIF for three and a half hours on 7 February 2011 and, on his telling, planted the seed that became Kona Blue. This is the closest the public has been placed to AAWSAP’s inside, told by the man in the chair.
Future Visions is the capstone of a four-book project: Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (2021), Initial Revelations (2023), New Insights (2024), and now this. The earlier books covered the Pentagon and Skinwalker Ranch story (book one), the programme’s first nine months and the “engineering” technical areas of lift, propulsion, spatial/temporal translation and power generation (book two), and the next three technical areas of control, materials and configuration/structure (book three). Future Visions completes the technical inventory with the remaining four areas, then turns the second half of the book over to the case studies, the things BAASS investigators saw, photographed, sampled and wrote up between September 2009 and June 2010.
The Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review cleared the book for public release on 26 February 2025 (Case 24-SB-0182). That clearance confirms nothing in the book leaks classified information. It does not validate, endorse, or vouch for any of the claims inside.
The headline claim, AAWSAP became Kona Blue
The most newsworthy material in the book is in its final chapter, “What’s Next?” Lacatski walks the reader through 7 February 2011, when he sat down in a Washington SCIF with two DHS officials he names as Jim Bell and “Sacha Mover.” The briefing was scheduled for one hour. It ran three and a half. Lacatski describes giving them the full data dump, the Tic Tac, the orbs, the Skinwalker creatures, the poltergeist activity, the lot. The two officials, he writes, “passed through the security gates and headed home for what was later described by both as sleepless nights.”
His conclusion, as stated in the book:
“AAWSAP never ended, but converted to Kona Blue!”
The public record on Kona Blue is sparse and contested. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s December 2024 memo “History and Origin of KONA BLUE” describes it as a 2011 prospective Special Access Program proposed within DHS by individuals connected to AAWSAP, evaluated for six months, and disapproved by the Deputy Secretary for “insufficient justification and lack of credible supporting information.”
Lacatski’s framing is the opposite. He treats Kona Blue as the continuation of work AAWSAP had begun, paused by a bureaucratic decision rather than by any failure of evidence. Both accounts are on the record: AARO’s December 2024 memo and Lacatski’s chapter. Future Visions puts the AAWSAP-internal seed of that story into print for the first time.
The most contested sentence in the book
In chapter 1, Lacatski writes a single sentence that has been argued about inside the UAP-research community:
“Without disclosing confidential information, we can say that this pattern also applied to pilots who encountered the Tic Tac object described in the New York Times article in December 2017, as well as to select members of AAWSAP.”
The “pattern” he is referring to is the pattern observed at Skinwalker Ranch, bizarre paranormal and psychic aftereffects experienced by witnesses to UAP encounters, sometimes persisting for years after the event, sometimes “hitchhiking” home with the witness.
Read in context, the sentence states that the Tic Tac aircrew, Fravor, Dietrich, Slaight and the fourth backseater whose real name has still never been publicly released, experienced ongoing paranormal or psychic aftereffects of the same kind documented at the ranch. Lacatski offers no evidence for the claim, citing “confidential information.” It is the largest unification claim anyone in the AAWSAP camp has put in print, the “nuts-and-bolts” Tic Tac tradition and the “high-strangeness” Skinwalker tradition declared one subject, carried on his word.
Many UAP researchers, including some who have testified before Congress, have spent years trying to keep those two traditions separate. Lacatski states in print that they are not separate.
What the case studies document
The bulk of Future Visions, twelve Project Management Plan Addenda and twelve BAASS Special Reports, has not been published before. A few are summarised here.
The Tic Tac (B-001)
Three pages, dense with previously undisclosed detail, and the most heavily sourced material in the book. The timing: AAWSAP found and interviewed the four pilots between January and June 2009, years before the 2017 Times article. The Naval Intelligence assessment Lacatski reproduces states that the AAV “was not a known aircraft or air vehicle currently in the inventory of the United States or any foreign nation” and “exhibited advanced low-observable characteristics across multiple radar bands, rendering US radar-based engagement capabilities ineffective.” That paragraph has a named institutional author. Lacatski also discloses for the first time that the fourth aircrew member is being referred to by a pseudonym (“Lt. John Agnelli”) at DOPSR’s request because the pilot is still active duty.
The blue orb that allegedly passed through a man’s body (PMPA #7)
This is one of the BAASS medical cases. “Ron Becker” (pseudonym) and his daughter were driving on Highway 20 southeast of Bend, Oregon, on the night of 1 May 2005. The daughter saw three bright blue orbs in a field beside the road. Two of them flew into the car. One of them, on her account, passed through her father’s upper left arm, across his chest, and out his bicep. Within days, Becker was nauseated, losing hair from the left side of his head, swelling, and progressively unwell. In February 2007, he was diagnosed with Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, a vanishingly rare breast cancer in men, and underwent a mastectomy in May 2007. BAASS’s contracted physicians documented dramatic shifts in his white blood cell counts in the years after the event, and concluded the symptom complex was consistent with a radiation insult.
BAASS itself notes the case is unique: “BAASS is not aware of other similar cases.” The medical documentation is unusually detailed for this kind of literature, which is the material a future investigator would have to re-examine. The case rests on that documentation and the daughter’s account; the book offers no independent corroboration of the orb itself.
The Georgia triangle and the men in the black sedan (PMPA #6)
“Derek Jones” was alerted by his dogs on 8 May 2009 to a large triangular craft hovering silently over his north Georgia backyard. He shone a million-candlepower flashlight at it. A bluish beam fired back, enveloped him, burned his neck and shoulders. The next morning he was bedridden, nauseated, with a metallic taste in his mouth. Within months, two dozen lumps had grown across his groin, abdomen and back. A BAASS-contracted physician hypothesised exposure to “approximately 300 Gy” of non-ionising radiation.
The morning after the encounter, on Jones’s account, two men in suits, one of whom introduced himself as “Mr. Michael,” knocked on his door at 7:30 a.m., interrogated him for 40 minutes, took copious notes, and left. A week later, the same men in the same black Ford sedan tailed Jones to a gas station. He recorded the plate. Lacatski writes:
“After some legwork by BAASS investigators and one of their senior managers, the license plate of the Ford sedan was unambiguously linked to a specific Department of Homeland Security (DHS) carpool.”
The claim, if true, would have DHS operationally tracking a UAP witness in 2009. No documentation is offered for it; Lacatski reports it and moves on.
Skinwalker Ranch, a correction against the author’s own side (PMPA #2)
PMPA #2 is the on-site scientific analysis of Skinwalker Ranch. The post-2016 era of the ranch, owned by Brandon Fugal and televised on the History Channel as The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, has featured highly dramatic on-camera claims, including the detection of hazardous gamma radiation on the property.
Lacatski went back to his 2009-2010 BAASS Canberra Colibri Geiger Counter readings and re-examined them. His finding:
“The AAWSAP found no evidence of gamma radiation in any location on Skinwalker Ranch.”
He writes this knowing it contradicts the most dramatic radiation claim made by the team currently running the ranch, a team he separately thanks in the Acknowledgments. A correction published against the author’s own side, in his own capstone book, is rare in this literature.
The Russian parallel programme (PMPA #8)
BAASS spent months in 2009-2010 translating and analysing more than 100 pages of Russian-language documents that George Knapp obtained on two trips to Moscow in 1993 and 1996. The documents describe the Soviet Ministry of Defence’s 1991-1995 “Thread III” study of Abnormal Aerospace Phenomena, run by Military Unit 73790 (decommissioned in 1997). The parallels with AAWSAP, as the book sets them out: both programmes sought to identify UAP, both did biological threat assessments, both tried to extract “non-traditional propulsion” concepts, both ran on limited time horizons, and both were terminated by their host institutions.
Lacatski’s framing is that “the AAWSAP Thread III report highlights the intense concern that Senator Harry Reid had about other countries gaining a technological advantage in UAP research over the United States.” The same data also reads as two well-funded national-security UAP programmes, separated by twenty years, both producing inconclusive results.
The red spheres that turned out to be resin beads (PMPA #12)
In 1993, Knapp brought back from Russia a vial of small red spheres that the Soviet biologist Yuri Simakov claimed were “seeds” containing “the building blocks of life,” recovered from two purported UAP landing sites. BAASS sent samples to the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at UNLV. The conclusion: the spheres superficially resembled commercial ion-exchange resin beads in shape, size and pore structure. Their chemistry was not identical to any control resin, but no anomalous or exotic properties were detected, and Simakov’s “seed” and “building blocks of life” claims were not supported.
This is a negative finding, published in the book alongside the gamma-radiation negative at the ranch.
What the book documents
Working through all 296 pages, the line between what the book documents and what rests on the author’s word is sharp enough to draw.
The book documents that AAWSAP existed and was extensive. The $22 million contract, the September 2008 award to BAASS, Lacatski’s COR role, Colm Kelleher’s programme-management role, Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis leading the technical-study work, John Schuessler leading the indicator-cataloguing, Jacques Vallée advising on the data warehouse, all of this is documented and cross-checkable against the FOIA-released contract record. AAWSAP produced 38 DIRDs, 24 monthly reports, 12 PMPAs, 12 BAASS Special Reports, an 11-database data warehouse, and a comprehensive threat assessment. AAWSAP was the first US-government-funded entity to investigate the Nimitz Tic Tac incident. AAWSAP partnered formally with MUFON in February 2009. Lacatski briefed DHS on 7 February 2011 and Kona Blue was proposed shortly thereafter. AAWSAP found only background gamma radiation at Skinwalker Ranch. The “red spheres” were not anomalous.
What rests on the author’s word
That the Tic Tac aircrew experienced paranormal aftereffects: this is asserted in chapter 1, citing “confidential information,” not demonstrated.
That orbs are objectively real intelligent entities capable of entering and injuring human bodies: the Becker case is unique and unreplicated, and BAASS itself records no similar case.
That DHS was operationally tracking UAP witnesses in 2009: the carpool-plate claim carries no documentation.
That the Tennyson Indiana, Buckeye Arizona “Grey aliens with samurai swords,” or Bigelow Building B “shadow” cases represent genuine paranormal phenomena: BAASS did not directly observe paranormal activity in any of them during the investigation window.
That UAP constitute a quantifiable threat to US national security: Lacatski’s own phrasing records “a correlation.”
The book also carries features worth noting as fact. The most consequential factual claims, the DHS-carpool linkage, the “300 Gy” radiation hypothesis, the pseudonym for the fourth Tic Tac aircrew member, are presented without footnote or supporting document. Outside the red-spheres negative and the Skinwalker gamma negative, the book contains almost no case concluded as a probable misidentification; Lacatski has said in interviews that AAWSAP routinely disposed of cases as conventional, and the book does not represent that part of the case-load. The Indicators sections of chapters 4-7 are long lists of anecdotal cases from 1948 onward, presented as a cumulative argument for various UAP technological signatures. Witnesses are pseudonymised throughout. The narrative voice is flat and declarative, without recorded internal disagreement or change of mind.
The wider record, insider account and AARO account
Two interpretations of AAWSAP are in public circulation.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s March 2024 Historical Record Report Volume 1 concluded that AAWSAP deliverables “lacked utility” for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s mission and that the programme drifted into paranormal research.
Lacatski’s four-book series, of which Future Visions is the capstone, is one of two principal counterweights to that conclusion. His argument is that he was the COR, he wrote and reviewed every output, the data warehouse was built, the case investigations were conducted, the threat assessment was delivered, and the programme achieved what it was contracted to do.
Future Visions strengthens the existence-and-output side of Lacatski’s account, and does little to address AARO’s deeper criticism, that the outputs lacked the rigour that would have made them actionable intelligence products. Both positions are on the record in their authors’ own words: the AARO report, and the book.
What the book establishes, and what it leaves open
As a first-person record of what AAWSAP was, who ran it, what it produced, and how its principals understood the UAP problem, Future Visions is the most complete account in print, and a primary source about a national-security programme that operated almost entirely outside public view between 2008 and 2010. The existence-and-output facts in it are cross-checkable against the FOIA-released contract record. The specific empirical claims it summarises, the paranormal aftereffects, the orb-through-body case, the carpool linkage, rest on the author’s account and the cited “confidential information,” not on documents reproduced in the book.
The dispute with AARO is on the record on both sides and is not settled here: the report holds that the deliverables “lacked utility,” and the book holds that the programme did what it was contracted to do.
Read the book. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Future Visions, James T. Lacatski, RTMA LLC, 2026
- AARO, Historical Record Report Volume 1, March 2024, media.defense.gov
- AARO, History and Origin of KONA BLUE, December 2024, aaro.mil
- Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, Lacatski/Kelleher/Knapp, RTMA 2021
- “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon”, Reason
- “Kona Blue Insiders Reveal How Agencies Involved In UFO Programs Rattled DHS”, Liberation Times