Fw: The old insights were sexier
Terry W. Colvin
carried out at Project Blue Book.Terry W. Colvin...
-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Billy Cox from Life in Jonestown <reply+2yr6lf&3xwgbc&&4dd78632dea1cef9cac4224bf94fc1ae...@mg1.substack.com>
Sent: Nov 21, 2025 11:03 AM
To: <fort...@mindspring.com>
Subject: The old insights were sexier
Hey gang — free jumboburgers for anyone who can prove they read a book this year! Confession: Decades ago, when I was a sports writer and working nights, I got hooked on a daytime soap called “Guiding Light.” I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was the grinding melodrama that contrasted so sharply with a merciful lack thereof in my own life. Fortunately, the affair didn’t last long, two years maybe, max. The final straw involved a violent tussle between a ne’er-do-well named Roger and his cuckolded nemesis, Ed. The slugfest began on a Monday, and a real-life brawl at a real-time pace should’ve lasted no more than a minute or two. But, thanks to maddening edits, multiple rotating storylines and Snuggles commercials, Roger and the cuck kept duking it out on Tuesday. Wednesday came along, and they were still throwing furniture at each other. The grunting and straining tumbled on into Thursday. As I recall, Roger’s estranged wife barged in on Friday and shot Roger three times, but it didn’t matter. By Friday, I just didn’t give a shit anymore. Having to wait a whole week for the resolution of a staged fistfight is like going to see King Kong v. Godzilla and getting jerked around by extraneous romantic subplots. If I want verbal foreplay, I’ll go see something with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston. In other words, please: Don’t try to disguise slack in the material with padding and distractions. It only amplifies what’s not there. I got to thinking about “Guiding Light” because I just tried to read the new book by former Defense Intelligence Agency UFO analyst James Lacatski. And I don’t know what to say. Except, I’m ready for Roger’s estranged wife to barge in and shoot Roger three times. One helluva storyLacatski’s decision to go (somewhat) public four years ago was a true milestone in advancing the UFO debate. This guy had been the director of the Pentagon’s first publicly acknowledged UFO investigation since Project Blue Book folded under Nixon. Though it would take several years for an accurate picture of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program to emerge, news of its existence would trigger a desultory but unprecedented chain of events. Congress did the unthinkable and attempted to legislate transparency into state-held UFO/UAP secrets; in response, the Pentagon erected a damage-control firewall called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Lawmakers convened a handful of sobering UFO hearings on Capitol Hill, but their efforts to establish an independent review panel collapsed without anyone taking credit for killing the bill. Lacatski’s contribution nevertheless can’t be underestimated. With an assist from co-authors Colm Kelleher and George Knapp in 2021, the buttoned-down Defense Department physicist and intelligence officer confessed to conceptualizing and running the AAWSAP program during its abbreviated run in 2008-10. The book, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program, was a fairly audacious piece of work. Although word had spread four years earlier about former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s earmarking $22 million in federal dollars for UFO research, Lacatski’s team cast a much wider net. Conducting field research from a high strangeness magnet called Skinwalker Ranch in rural Utah, AAWSAP’s range of suspects read like a Chris Carter storyboard. The project’s guiding light was the idea that rigorous inquiry required broadening the scope. Any analysis of UFO/UAP data that excluded the associated elements of consciousness and metaphysics – no matter how bizarre or preposterous – was like running with one foot nailed to the ground. And it’s still too early to evaluate that strategy because we haven’t seen AAWSAP’s data. Houston, we have contactWhen Skinwalkers broke, it wasn’t the orbs or UFOs tracked by numerous sensors installed across the Ranch that got the most traction. That space was reserved for tales of “werewolves,” “shadow people,” “dogmen,” poltergeists and other spectral “hitchhhikers” that reportedly followed some researchers home as part of an emerging “social contagion.” Lost in all that were Lacatski’s assertions that the project had compiled and categorized lists of more than 200,000 UAP reports, domestic and abroad, many predating living memory, in pursuit of everything from breakthrough technologies to malign health effects. Considering how all that work was eventually transferred into a DIA “data warehouse,” where it remain sequestered today, Skinwalkers aimed to give taxpayers a sense of the mission scope. But a single book wouldn’t cut it. Two years later, Lacatski and his fellow co-authors wrote a sequel, Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations. And this one came with a newsflash that set impossibly high expectations for everything that followed. Referring to himself in the third person, Lacatski recalled a 2011 meeting on Capitol Hill where he told an unnamed senator and an “agency Under Secretary” — in censor-approved language — that “the United States was in possession of a craft of unknown origin and had successfully gained access to its interior. The craft had a streamlined configuration suitable for aerodynamic flight but no intakes, engine, fuel tanks or fuel.” Return of The RiddlerSay it again. The man with security clearances out the wazoo admitted the United States is studying technology that makes a shambles of everything we know about physics. Then he dropped the news like a hot skillet and never got back to it. The book’s discussions of other UFO encounters – again, thoroughly sanitized by DoD editors – were inconsequential by comparison. No less perplexing was Lacatski’s subsequent 2023 interview with Knapp and Jeremy Corbell on their “Weaponized” podcast. Spewing contradictions, non sequiturs and opaque rhetoric, Lacatski was slippery as a greased squid and refused to vouch for anything. He couldn’t even say whether it was him or someone else who had actually entered the “craft.” Making matters worse, Lacatski insisted that disinformation documents were being circulated to create more fog around AAWSAP’s work. But he wouldn’t cite examples or name the trolls. He asked “Weaponized” listeners to ask themselves a question that almost had a Zen allure to it: Why was AAWSAP created in the first place? “The bottom line may not be what you anticipate,” Latski began. But all he had in his pocket was a bumper sticker: “There may be no bottom line. There may be multiple bottom lines.” Fascinating. Thanks for the insight. He diverted the conversation to something he hadn’t even been asked about – phony Men In Black encounters versus “legitimate” Men In Black encounters. After refusing to elaborate on either, Lacatski then shifted the burden onto his listeners: “(Do the MIB stories) draw attention away from the UFO phenomenon? Or using reverse psychology to draw attention to it?” Sweet weeping Jesus, I’d get straighter answers from a Magic 8 Ball: “It is decidedly so.” “Outlook not so good.” “As I see it, yes.” “You may rely on it.” “My sources say no.” Even “Reply hazy, try again” wouldn’t put me on the edge of a cliff like this guy. Assembled, not writtenWell, Lacatski’s got another book out now, and he’s written it all by himself this time. It’s called Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: New Insights, and he’s downright stoked about it. “Welcome! Congratulations! and Thank You!” he writes in the opening sentence of his introduction. “A sincere thank you,” he adds a bit farther down, “for purchasing these books.” Well, who doesn’t want to feel acknowledged. And, to his credit, Lacatski gives fair notice — there’s more to come. He warns us that New Insights is just the third leg of a four-part retrospective on his tenure as AAWSAP director. Don’t worry, book four comes out soon. “It should be evident by now,” he writes in New Insights’ third paragraph, before anything at all is evident, “that these books are not written in the traditional sense but assembled.” Only a few pages later did that much sound accurate. Spoiler alert: Lacatski doesn’t bring up the ET craft again. He makes jumbled and repetitive references to the aspects of the UFO puzzle AAWSAP considered – propulsion, lift, power source, platform design, etc. – but he shares no conclusions. He lobbies hard for standardization, the only way to mine meaningful data from the voluminous case files. “A valuable approach to improving this situation,” Lacatski goes on, “would be to obtain samples of materials from classified storage and reevaluate them based on current knowledge about the incidents where they were found, as well as the use of the latest forensic techniques.” Great idea, Sherlock — somebody should do that! Name that tuneBut primarily, he writes, “New Insights describes AAWSAP activity from June 2009 to January 2010” at Skinwalker Ranch. Except that when you get to page 196 and the day-by-day summaries logged by “almost twenty security officers” during the onsite investigation, it covers a period from August 2009 through December 2010. A pedantic quibble, to be sure, but I won’t ruin it for you. You’ll just have to buy the book yourself to find out what happens next. Lacatski promoted New Insights with a no less mystifying but perhaps equally revealing two-part interview on “Weaponized” earlier this month. First came the Captain Obvious patter. “You all are in the middle of a major and repetitive counterintelligence operation by unknown multiple operators or organizations, and for unknown reasons,” he told his hosts and listeners. “In my opinion, we’re all being played like a fiddle.” Stop the presses, we need a new lead. Being played by who or what, Lacatski didn’t say. But he did want to clarify something about Kona Blue, a proposed UFO program that allegedly never made it off the drawing board. Kona Blue was suggested as a followup to AAWSAP’s research after the latter was defunded by the DIA more than a decade ago. Maybe, Kona Blue’s advocates had argued, the Department of Homeland Security could pick it up as a Special Access Program. DHS’s Kona Blue webpage says that idea was formally rejected on February 10, 2012, in part because of staggering security costs. But Lacatski says no. Kona Blue “was not killed,” he told George and Jeremy. “You can’t kill Kona Blue.” Then he dropped the zombie thing and went on to praise the DHS accounting as “a very good writeup.” But oops, wait, one final thought – go back, he said, and re-read what DHS actually wrote about Kona Blue. “There’s a key sentence in there,” Lacatski insisted. “Let people find it.” Find what? He offered zero context for the key sentence. Socks on the ceilingSo I went scrolling for the key sentence amid all 56 pages of the DHS report, and I couldn’t find it. Now I feel like an idiot. But Lacatski’s word salad kept tossing and tossing. “Now,” he said, “am I agreeing with what has been said in DHS’s and what has been said by AARO about Kona Blue? All I can say is, hmmm.” I had to climb a ladder to pluck my socks off the blades of a ceiling fan after that. But wait – Lacatski wasn’t done. He had a bone to pick with the press. In 2021, Skinwalkers set the record straight about how AAWSAP – not the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, as reported in 2017 by the New York Times – was initially running the Defense Department’s secret UFO arm. In a story as elusive, convoluted and radioactive as The Great Taboo, it’s not surprising that errors were made on the front end, journalism being the first draft of history etc. But Lacatski decided to flog that horse – he calls the Times reporting “totally inaccurate” – yet again. “Contrary to what some people claim,” he added, “the (NYT) authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the Washington Post, Politico, contacted me within hours after the articles were published, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Now why didn’t they contact me?” Who’s “they”? The NYT reporters or the WaPo/Politico reporters who solicited his opinion? Times article co-author Leslie Kean declined to comment. Unless he was cited anonymously, neither Politico nor the Washington Post quoted Lacatski during their AATIP coverage in 2017. Naturally, the DoD didn’t want to touch it, either. “The Pentagon has never asked me about anything,” he said. “They circumvented me and went to my colleagues, but not me.” Shhh! Don’t spill the beans!Capitol Hill apparently kept its distance as well. “I’ve never been asked to testify” before Congress, Lacatski said (as if he would ever be authorized to tell lowly lawmakers anything about poking around inside an ET time machine or whatever). “The senators and congressmen can have their staffs read the books and summarize it in bullet points,” Lacatski suggested. “I can do no more than what is in the books. Believe me, it is the absolute truth, what is in the books.” He also declined, perhaps judiciously, AARO’s invitation to sit for an interview. The agency has yet to recover from the PR disaster wrought by previous management, and it continues to stovepipe data on its case studies. That said, Lacatski chose to stay squishy on AARO’s lack of transparency: “I wouldn’t say they’re lying. I would say they’re doing their job. And that’s their job. Counterintelligence is a job. It is a position.” Corbell: So you’re saying AARO is a counterintelligence operation? “Well, I don’t wanna say that either. But you know something? Something important that I really can’t go into any further than saying this.” Oh no — the ol’ switcheroo again. “I wouldn’t be overly concerned. Whatever the answer is, I wouldn’t be overly concerned.” OK, I’m not overly concerned anymore. I’m changing the channel. Life in Jonestown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You're currently a free subscriber to Life in Jonestown. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2025 Billy Cox
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