Just following up a bit on some themes from the last page or so of this thread. While the title is the Origins of AAWSAP, it could also be something like the Results of AAWSAP in relation to the ongoing influence of this small 2 year program. It could also be about the Origins of the Origins of AAWSAP, or what was in the UFO/paranormal community that led to AAWSAP.
As noted, one of the key aspects of AAWSAP along with the stuff at Skinwalker Ranch was an attempt to acquire what the leaders of the program thought were materials from crashed UFOs, specifically ones held by Lockheed-Martin.This was something barely hinted at in the book, but came out in more detail with some of the congressional hearings and AARO. See this thread for a more in depth discussion:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/cl...er-of-meta-materials-from-crashed-ufos.13773/
The idea of Lockheed, other defense contractors or the government even having so called meta-materials, as pieces from crashed UFOs are often incorrectly referred to in the UFO world, is in turn linked to the idea of a secret government crashed retrieval and reverse engineering program dating back to at least Roswell (1947) if not earlier. Simply put, UFOs crash, are shot down or even "gifted" and the US government, possibly others, now have these UFOs either in their possession or have lent them out to contractors like Lockheed.
The evidence for these programs is vague at best, but the recurring theme of high ranking officials in government, particularly the military, revealing their existence is common. As is the often anonymous and layered nature of such claims.
As noted here and in other threads, many books and records are full of anecdotes and retelling of various crash retrieval programs, often via NIDS and AAWSAP/BAASS alums Puthoff and Davis. Here is author Nick Cook relaying Putoff's thoughts on black programs related to zero point energy:
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I probed further, but gently. Were there already forms of aerospасe
travel out there-in the black world, maybe-whose principles contra-
vened, if not the laws of physics, then at least our understanding of
aerodynamics?
He (Puthoff) sucked the top of his pen, giving the question a lot of thought
before responding. "I've certainly talked to people who claim that
something is going on," he said, pausing to add: "I would say the
evidence is pretty solid."
I felt myself rock back on my chair.
I eased back on to the more comfortable subject of the NASA BPР
study. "Which of the five methods outlined in Breakthrough Propulsion
Physics would you say is the one most likely to have a payoff?" I asked him.
Because of Puthoff's promotion of ZPE, I thought it inevitable that
this explanation would have figured in his answer. But it didn't. Without
even thinking about it, he said his money was on the third experiment-
the one about perturbing space-time; antigravity from time travel.
Given Puthoff's strong connections to the military-intelligence
community, it was tempting to dismiss all such talk as a deliberate blind,
something to lead me away from a more probable area of breakthrough.
The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity pg: 114
https://archive.org/details/huntforzeropoint0000cook/page/115/mode/1up
Note that the above idea occurs again when Puthoff told Vallee he was working on FTL type stuff at TTSA.
Vallee's multi-volume memoirs,
Forbidding Science has multiple sections with Puthoff and Davis, along with Vallee, Kit Green and others making claims about secret crash retrieval programs. And we know how influential in the various Bigelow programs they were.
In addition to these guys, others were making similar claims, and specifically from supposedly high ranking sources back into the '70s, '80s and '90s. A prominent source for these claims was Leonard "Leon" Stringfield.
Many in the UFO world consider Stringfield to be the originator of the whole "crash retrieval program" paradigm. From a 2013 MUFON report that reexamined Stringfield's collection of notes :
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His ground breaking lecture titled "Retrievals of the Third Kind" at the 1978 International MUFON Symposium held in Dayton, Ohio caused a sensation and introduced the general public to the possibility that UFOs may have crashed on Earth, and that their occupants might have been recovered by elements of the United States government. He ultimately coined the term "UFO Crash/Retrieval." Between 1978 and 1994, Leonard published seven "status reports" which kept readers informed regarding his on-going research.
Obviously, even the primary sources from Roswell (1947) record that some military personal went out to the Brazel ranch and "retrieved" debris from a crashed Mogal balloon, but it's really Stringfield that collects and codifies the claims of an organized government run program to collect, store and study crashed UFOs and their occupants. Despite the many claims and the supposed status of the claimants, there as little that could be confirmed due to the anonymous nature of Stringfield's sources:
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Leonard's sources for the information contained in this book include the following: 3-star USAF Generals, USAF fighter pilots, astronauts, commercial pilots, air traffic controllers, neurosurgeons, pathologists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians, U.S. Army officers, U.S. Navy officers, military police, high level Pentagon officials, top military brass, and scientists/engineers who worked at Wright Patterson AFB.
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Michael%20Schratt%20-%20Retrievals%20of%20the%20Third%20Kind%20(version%205,%20Dec%202013).pdf
Despite there being 65 of these binders filled with Stringfield's notes held by MUFON, there are few if any actual names linked to direct claims, and if there were, Stringfield maintained that they remain secret:
Stringfield was well connected in the UFO world and wrote a series of documents he referred to as "Status Reports". Despite the somewhat official sounding name, these Status Reports were really just collections of stuff he had heard about or was shared with him and recorded in his notebooks. They're largely somewhere between 2nd and 4th hand accounts.
For example here is a claim from Status Report 6. It's a bit hard to trace exactly what is going on, because Stringfield uses 1st person when referring to himself, but he also shares things from other people that are also using 1st person when retelling what their sources told them, and so on. In this case, it seems Stringfield is retelling what someone told him about a claim told to them, so 3rd hand at best. Note Stringfield claims his source, an intermediary, is a high ranking officer, while the primary source seems like a contractor:
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Now, we (Stringfield and the reader) take another step into the "breached" Inner Sanctum's wall. For this report, we recapture the experience of one person with the right access clearance to a "Blue Room". Its location is secret. The room was a verilable museum holding the artifacts of crashed saucers and the retrieved cadavers from Roswell. My cooperative, but cautious, intermediary is a retired army officer of high rank who got the information, firsthand, from an equally cautious source. I have edited the following report, as requested, to conceal the identification of both my friend and his source.
I (Army officer) will describe this to you as it was told to me, My source sometime ago related an incident to me that leads me to question the "official" government position on their research into UFO/IAC activity.
So again, Stringfield's source is an anonymous high rank Army officer retelling what a supposed contractor told him. The wild story goes on to include a secret flight, threats of violence and hooding the contractor until he arrives at a facility full of crashed UFO parts, aliens along with many usual commonplace technologies that were inferred to be reverse engineered. And in invitation to return when ever he wanted to:
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When they (the contractor telling the story to the Army officer) removed their hoods they were inside a converted aircraft hangar, floor and walls entirely painted blue. Around the room were tables, shelves, and fixtures holding thousands of artifacts, none of which were immediately recognizable. They were told that they were to study each object and determine its purpose, operating parameters, and whether or not it could be duplicated. Looking back, he now recognizes many things such as lasers, integrated circuits, printed circuit boards of now commonplace design (including microprocessors and surfacemount components, etc.).
They were on site for approximately four days, took their meals and sleep there. They were allowed to ask any questions necessary to complete their task, and the "curator" (as he described himself) was pleased when one of them finally asked where the artifacts came from. They were led to a small locked room that they had heretofore not seen, and shown four large aquariums filled with a pink solution, each containing a small body of gray skin, oversized cranium, huge eyes, no hair, In the back of this room were pieces of metal, ranging from slivers to very large twisted chunks.
The curator then related the story of the Roswell crash. When they had been debriefed days later they were told that they could return anytime and discuss the objects with anyone as long as it was done in a hypothetical sense and no identifying data were disseminated. A year or so ago he contacted this group and asked if the offer was still good. He was told that indeed it was and that the collection had grown tremendously. The philosophy was that no one would believe the story unless supporting evidence was included and that would result in dire consequences.
https://archive.org/details/stringf...Retrievals_Report_6_inner_sanctum_LQ/mode/2up
It's unclear when this story was shared with Stringfield, but Status Report 6 was published in 1991, so a full 10+ years since the Roswell story had it's rebirth with the addition of alien bodies in
The Roswell Incident (1980) by Moore and Berlitz.
Stringfield notably made a presentation at the 1978 MUFON conference where again, he passed on claims that involved high ranking military officials talking about crashed UFO, aliens and recovery efforts. From some of his written summaries of his presentation we get things like this:
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The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens. The job assigned the Provost Marshall, now a retired colonel, was to cordon off the crash site. The retired colonel, now living in Florida, was tracked down by Zechel. Among other facts revealed by the colonel was that found aboard the craft was one dead alien described as about 4 feet, 6 inches tall, completely hairless, with hands that had no thumbs.
And this one, that supposedly is about the thoroughly debunked Aztec NM UFO crash of 1948, made famous by
Variety gossip columnist Frank Scully:
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Continuing his investigation, Zechel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 crash event. In his statement, Zechel relates the following: "I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias Air Force base in Texas, and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hour.
"It made a_90-degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.
"The craft was covered with a canopy, and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event."
https://archive.org/details/stringfield_Retrievals_Report_6_inner_sanctum_LQ/Stringfield_Retrievals_Report_1_of_third_kind_LQ/page/10/mode/2up
Again, we have a rather fanciful claim involving crashed and retrieved UFOs from an anonymous Air Force colonel supposedly told to a researcher, then passed to Stringfield who uses it as evidence for crash retrieval programs at his MUFON presentation.
For a little synchronicity, here is Stringfield rationalizing how a 3rd-4th hand account is "unquestionable":
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Additional testimony in support of a crashed UFO incident in 1952 comes from an unquestionable source: John Schuessler, Deputy Director of MUFON, and engineer for McDonnell Douglas at NASA; his data comes from his father and stepmother, who, equally unquestionable, secured their data in 1968 from an unquestionable first-hand source, who was their neighbour in a small town in Pennsylvania.
John Schuessler said he tried to follow up to get more information by arranging a meeting with the former guard through the influence of his parents. But, his efforts were futile. Said John: "'He refused to talk about it, even to me.
Going back to the OP, we find that Schuessler was instrumental in BAASS getting access to, and tuning up MUFON's database of UFO sightings, for which MUFON received $350K of the AAWSAP $22M via BAASS. In addition, one notes that the file dump that included the 36 DIRD papers that were secured by Puthoff's EarthTech under contract to BAASS for AAWSAP, also included a '90s era report by Schuessler. A report that chronicled UFO sightings and possible health side effects. Whether Schuessler was paid for this old report is unclear.
These claims and their supposed military sources are nothing new, in fact they are part of the zeitgeist that led up to NIDS and eventually AAWSAP. They are still part of the zeitgeist now, even though Stringfield was making the claims back in the '70s based on similar claims made before him.
Post AAWSAP we find the claims continuing with the attempted KONA BLUE and the private TTSA. Right up to the present, we find these claims being repeated, rehashed, riffed on and reused.
In the 2023 congressional UAP hearings, journalist Michael Shellenburger provided at least some congress-people what he termed a "UFO Timeline". Shellenburger has been coy about exactly where this document came from, hinting that it was prepared by an ex-intel person. Regardless, this supposedly important document designed to inform congress-people about UFOs included Stringfield's unsubstantiated claims from 1978:
Round in circles we go, with the same stories and claims bouncing around for decades and never any concrete evidence for any of it.
