US once considered a program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals

The Pentagon has disclosed that the government once considered a program to recover and reverse-engineer any captured alien spacecraft, an effort that never came to fruition but fueled conspiracy theories about a cover-up.

The Defense Department on Friday released a public version of a congressionally ordered comprehensive review of classified U.S. government programs since 1945 that debunked decades of speculation about UFOs, saying it found no evidence of extraterrestrial activity or efforts to withhold information from Congress.

However, DOD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office did discover a program that was proposed to the Department of Homeland Security in the 2010s, code-named “Kona Blue,” to reverse-engineer any recovered extraterrestrial craft. The effort was eventually rejected by DHS leaders “for lacking merit,” and never actually recovered any other-worldly craft, according to the report.

“It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected—this material was only assumed to exist by KONA BLUE advocates and its anticipated contract Performers,” according to the report.

Kona Blue was not reported to Congress at the time because it was never established as a highly classified “special access program.” It was declassified for the AARO review released Friday, Tim Phillips, AARO’s acting director, told reporters. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks notified Congress of the program when it was identified “in the spirit of transparency,” the report states.

But that effort fueled a wave of reports of a longstanding U.S. government cover-up stemming from people with various connections to the program, Phillips said.

“That was reported as, ‘that's where they hide bodies.’ That wasn't true,” he said, stressing that “the prospective program was never formally approved by leadership and never possessed any material or information.”

Still, the revelation of the Kona Blue proposal will likely add to a recent explosion in speculation about extraterrestrials visiting Earth. During a hearing last year before a House Oversight subcommittee, retired Maj. David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence official, alleged that the government was covering up the existence of just such an effort to recover and reverse-engineer extraterrestrial craft.

At the time, Pentagon officials, including then-AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick, said such claims were categorically false.

Phillips, in a briefing with reporters ahead of the report’s release, also revealed that AARO is working on a new capability to better detect UFOs. DOD is partnering with the Department of Energy and Georgia Tech to develop a deployable, configurable sensor suite called “Gremlin” designed to conduct “hyperspectral surveillance” to better capture the events, he said.

AARO is testing the system at a large range in Texas, he said. “We're really starting to understand what's in orbit around our planet and how we can eliminate those as anomalous objects,” Phillips said.

Overall, the historical report on government involvement in UFOs, which Congress mandated last year, attempted to pour cold water on speculation about aliens and government cover-ups. Phillips pointed to depictions of aliens in popular culture as fueling a spate of mistaken UFO sightings and allegations of secret government efforts to study the phenomenon over many decades, noting that the claims turned out to be honest misinterpretations of classified national security programs.

“These are rational people making observations and just relating to what they know,” Phillips said. “We were able to go back to the program owners in that range and ask, ‘by the way, what were we flying during this week?’ My God, I would have thought it would have been a UAP myself when I actually saw the picture of it.”

UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government acronym for UFOs.

AARO assessed that “the majority” of historical UFO sightings resulted from the misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomenon, while some were likely the misidentification of new or experimental technologies, for example, the invention of stealth aircraft such as the F-117, Phillips said.

The report is based on what Phillips said was an unprecedented investigation into U.S. government efforts involving UFOs going back to 1945. The office’s research revealed the existence of approximately two dozen separate investigatory efforts with names such as “Project Saucer” and “Project Twinkle,” but none found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

AARO investigators discovered the existence of Kona Blue after interviewees claimed it was a DHS program to cover up “the retrieval and exploitation of ‘non-human biologics,’” according to the report.

It arose out of an effort by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to establish a Defense Intelligence Agency program to investigate foreign advanced aerospace threats, the report states. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application program, which was established in 2009, was funded through a special appropriation and executed by an unnamed “private sector organization,” the report states.

The report did not name the organization, but DIA documents show it was space technology company Bigelow Aerospace, the company founded by aerospace titan and hotel chain founder Bob Bigelow, a friend of Reid.

The official purpose of the aerospace weapons program was to research 12 areas of cutting-edge science, such as advanced lift and signature reduction. But the team also investigated “an alleged hot spot of UAP and paranormal activity at a property in Utah,” which at the time was owned by the head of the mysterious private sector organization, according to the report. The research included examining reports of “shadow figures” and “creatures,” as well as plans to hire psychics to study “inter-dimensional phenomena” believed to appear at the site.

DIA terminated the aerospace weapons program in 2012 “due to lack of merit and the utility of the deliverables,” the report states.

But after its cancellation, supporters of the program proposed that DHS create and fund a new version. The proposed effort, Kona Blue, “would restart UAP investigations, paranormal research (including alleged “human consciousness anomalies”) and reverse-engineer any recovered off-world spacecraft that they hoped to acquire,” according to the report.

The idea gained some initial traction at DHS, to the point where a “prospective special access program” was officially requested in order to stand up the program, the report states. Reid and then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman asked that the program be established and promised additional funding.

“KONA BLUE’s advocates were convinced that the [U.S. government] was hiding UAP technologies,” according to the report. “The program would provide a security and governing structure where it could be monitored properly by congressional oversight committees.”

However, the attempts to establish Kona Blue were ultimately unsuccessful.

Based on research and numerous interviews, AARO concluded that recent allegations that the U.S. is covering up such a program come from a group of individuals who have ties to the canceled DIA program and the unnamed private sector organization’s paranormal research efforts.

Broadly, the review found no evidence that the U.S. and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology. All of the allegations of such programs either do not exist, were misidentified as classified national security programs, or trace back to “an unwarranted and disestablished program,” according to the report.

“We assess that claims [of] such programs are largely the result of circular reporting in which a small group of individuals have repeated inaccurate claims they have heard from others over a period of several decades,” Phillips said.

He emphasized that most of the individuals were not acting with malice, rather they “sincerely misinterpreted real events, or mistaken sensitive U.S. programs for which they were not cleared.”

He stressed that AARO had “unprecedented access” to classified government programs, noting that no one tried to block the office’s investigation.

AARO is also investigating more recent claims of UFO sightings. More than 1,200 cases have been reported to the office, primarily from DOD employees, Phillips said. The office typically gets roughly 100 new reports a month, primarily from the military, he noted.

Volume I of the historical review contains AARO’s findings from 1945 to Oct. 31, 2023, based on the congressional requirements. AARO is working on a second volume, which will focus on findings from Nov. 1, 2023, to April 15, 2024.