Per Luis Elizondo on The Diary of a CEO (October 2024): the long-standing US government UAP effort that predates AATIP. “More robust and much more well funded than AATIP.”
Decline
“There were some distractions in the early 2000s that lifted and shifted resources away”: Elizondo’s coded reference to 9/11 and the GWOT diverting funds.
What the claim covers
Imminent gives the fullest account. A contractor-held effort said to hold recovered material, with Hal Puthoff cited on four bodies recovered at Roswell, senior officials naming Lockheed Martin, TRW, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems and the Aerospace Corporation, a contractor describing its holdings to Jay Stratton as “an expensive liability”, and biological samples said to have moved so often that some may now sit at Fort Detrick or the FDA with their chain of custody lost. Every one of these reaches the reader as something the author was told; the book reproduces no document and names no first-hand witness for them. The one document in the chain, the Wilson Memo, is denied by its subject.
The official counter
The AARO Historical Record Report 2024 concluded that the alleged reverse-engineering programmes “either do not exist; are misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to an unwarranted and disestablished program”, and the office’s then director traces the claims to a small long-connected group. Both sides are parties to the dispute, and this wiki carries them side by side rather than adjudicating.
Connections
AATIP · AAWSAP · Project Blue Book · Luis Elizondo · Crash Retrieval Program · Imminent · AARO Historical Record Report 2024 · Wilson Memo · Hal Puthoff · Jay Stratton