DIA's AAWSAP program makes Skinwalker Ranch a government-funded field site

In August 2008 the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a solicitation for a program to study advanced aerospace weapon system applications — breakthrough propulsion, lift, signature reduction, and related technologies. The sole bidder was Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), a unit of Robert Bigelow's aerospace company, which received the contract in September 2008. The program, championed by Senators Harry Reid, Daniel Inouye, and Ted Stevens, was funded at approximately $22 million across fiscal years 2008–2010.

BAASS hired roughly fifty investigators, analysts, and scientists. Alongside its paper studies — 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on subjects from warp drive to metallic glasses, a list the DIA confirmed in a January 2019 Freedom of Information Act release — the program ran field investigations, and its principal field site was Skinwalker Ranch, which Bigelow already owned through NIDS-era arrangements. Program managers Douglas Kurth, Colm Kelleher, and DIA scientist James Lacatski later described the ranch as the program's 'living laboratory' in their 2021 book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.

AAWSAP's funding lapsed in 2010. A successor effort under the name AATIP — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — continued inside the Pentagon under Luis Elizondo until 2017, and the December 2017 New York Times story that revealed AATIP's existence is what first put the AAWSAP-Bigelow-ranch chain on the public record. The full documentation trail, including the DIA's released product list, is archived publicly at The Black Vault.