I would argue it's more likely the BAASS people BELIEVED access would come. Nobody led them to believe this besides themselves.
Just my take, but don't underestimate Hal Puthoff's involvement here. He was a big part of Bigelow's previous endeavor at Skinwalker Ranch, NIDS and by some accounts was influential in both Bigelow's and later Fugal's purchase of the ranch. His company, EarthTech, was contracted by BAASS to produce the 36 DIRD papers, the only official product of the AAWSAP contract with BAASS. Puthoff accompanied Lacatski to the meeting with DHS that resulted in the failed AAWSAP follow up, KONA BLUE (see link below). He played a big part in BAASS. In addition his sidekick Eric Davis was also involved in BAASS.
Puthoff often characterized himself as "Ex-CIA". To my knowledge, he was never in the CIA or part of the CIA. He and Russel Targ did contract to the US Army and later the CIA through the Stanford Research Institute in the '70s with their failed remote viewing experiments and were fooled by spoon-bending huckster Uri Geller.
According to Vallee, Puthoff, along with Davis and Ex CIA Dr, Kit Green, was constantly on about crashed UFOs in the possession of defense contractors going back to the '90s or earlier. Puthoff himself has repeated these claims in recent podcasts, including Joe Rogan. As does Davis, while at the same time admitting he never had the needed clearance for access to the supposed crashed UFOs.
Puthoff convinced the BAASS people that various defense contractors had UFOs and that if AAWSAP or KONA BLUE worked out right, BAASS would gets some material from these contractors. He is the main source of this belief within BAASS.
Big discussion of this claim here:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/cl...er-of-meta-materials-from-crashed-ufos.13773/
Puthoff's sidekick Davis making the claim again to some Congress people and claiming to be a source to David Grusch. Warning, Davis is extremely long winded and rambles a lot:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ua...ith-house-oversight-committee-may-2025.14218/
On the first point, I would also add that, if the BAASS leaks are accurate, we know why they had this presumption! They were running a campaign to influence government executives into giving them access into what they believed existed. I mentioned it before but, while technically an influence campaign from that angle, it was also seeking to conduct espionage. The plan outright states they A) had NTK material they did not have access too, B) had active sources that gave them this information, and C) were attempting to influence executives into giving them official access to this NTK material to expand their access too it.
Then just sprinkle in, for any respective individual, they already think/lie about it containing something that is misperceived or doesn't exist.
Correct also, Puthoff was never an actual CIA employee, nor an independent contractor (nor a contractor acting independently through a contracting company). He was a participant through SRI.
This also gets into the "core" bit I mention with the larger social network. A lot of these guys who haven't passed away are still around. Hal Puthoff, Kit Green, Vallee etc are part of the core group. This is the 'first generation' in the broader social network and primarily comprises scientists and government/military executives (eg Stubblebine). Coincidentally, nearly all of these people, including those deceased and the rare outliers, are near wholly participants in esoteric or new age religions. Puthoff, Targ, and quite a few others were Scientologists. Vallee is a Rosicrucian as were quite a lot of the other scientists. These peoples specific theories, notating they are framed scientifically, we all kind of know them, have roots in a lot of the theories and narratives out and about today.
The second gen started to involve more professionals in other career fields. Think people like Ed Dames and Rick Doty. These individuals largely altered the original theories from the first crew into the more woo stuff. Eg Ed Dames and his features on Coast to Coast (also the facilitator for a lot of the whackier remote viewing cases like the alien bases lol). Or Doty and his pet disinformation projects have perhaps IMO had the highest gravity impact on most current theories. Just as an isolated example, his Project SERPO was responsible for pretty much grandsizing the theories about the US govt interacting with the aliens (which he was also largely behind that alone too), Dulce, etc.
In nearly every case, these people were recruited or mentored by, or otherwise worked in some professional regard with the first gen.
The 'third gen' comes about, as far as I can tag, around the late 90s-early 2000s. This would include people like Elizondo and co who directly interacted with say BAASS, and that was their "introduction" into the broader social network at play here. Much like the second gen, this also near entirely includes professionals in non-scientific fields, but rather fields such as counterintelligence, counterterrorism/COIN, etc. Much like the second gen, these people at some point either were recruited or mentored by, or otherwise professionally worked with people in the first gen, generally 'the core' of the first gen. Outside mil/gov types, this gen also saw a wider capture (note: concerted effort to do so eg BAASS leaks) of people in the entertainment industry, journalism, tech companies, academics, etc into the social network. This does NOT mean they didn't exist before, just not enough in quantity
within the social network to be a defined group.
I use "capture" here, and in the next paragraph, to reference defined concerted efforts to introduce these folks rather than it being incidental.
The fourth, and what we are currently in, started around the 2010s. This genhas actually mostly been brought into the social network through third gen participants
although have still generally worked professionally, or alternatively have personal relations with members of the core group of the first gen. This, like the third gen, includes a healthy mix of different types of participants. We see the mil/gov types, although this has changed more towards executives (think Mellon), Nell did a lot relating to COIN so kinda falls in the above but he was an executive also - otherwise it's more guys like Grusch who did things like Space Ops rather than CI types, etc.
In this gen, we have also seen widescale capture of politicians and corporate executives. "Capture" aligned to the above reference to identify this has been a self-admitted concerted effort from these participants. We know of at least two "projects" they conducted attempting to do this (ref BAASS leaks) that directly included administrative participation of the core group of the first gen.
In re the overall social network, this has also caused a lot of fracturing we somewhat see elements of. For example, Thiel is a powerful actor in this social network now, but he is not part of "the core" of the first gen. His interests, and those who are in his part of the network directly compete with the others. His seems to entirely comprise fourth generation folks, I'm not aware if they were introduced/captured or just injected themselves in (it would be grandly funny if they just injected themselves), not confident enough for an assessment based conclusion on that yet either.
Now, this, we have less direct sourcing on. Although going back to 'the core' at the time of the first generation/era. We do have plenty of references in books and articles to their expressed efforts to spread these theories. I'll have to re-find the quote to present, but as an example, there was a time Kit Green and one of the others supposedly gave either one or a series of speeches at the CIA cafeteria w/r/t UAP subjects, with the intent to spread the theories. At one of these they apparently made the joke that they were turning out CIA folks to spy on the CIA itself for UFOs, which seemingly would appear to be accurate based upon an abundance of other aligned references to their behavior and personal statements.
Then consider with the esoteric types specifically this absolutely spread around the government in wider ways than actually known. I mention it sometimes, usually as a case of how the output isn't always whacky when the govt toys with it. One of the gentlemen that also worked with Uri Geller - in fact, the very gentleman that brought him over here and introduced him to Puthoff and all that, was Andrija Puharich. Andrija (also a member of the first gen, just not part of the UFO types nor part of the core) would later go on to do some of the foundational research on the potential to leverage ELF for biophysical effect. This would later go on to develop the entire field of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations/other buzzwords referencing it, alongside being a critical root to some of the research that'd relate to other things such as acoustic weaponry.
