I reminded George that he himself had briefly mentioned that fact earlier in the year. Knapp then elaborated, saying that Reid had once told him that revelations contained in the book—regarding UFOs monitoring and even tampering with US nuclear missiles—were one of the reasons the then-powerful Senate Majority Leader had secretly authorized government funding for a covert Pentagon UFO study in 2007. That project ended up being called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), which later morphed into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Although a number of factors led to Reid’s decision to fund the secret program, according to AATIP’s former director, retired US Army counterintelligence special agent Luis Elizondo, I must confess that it is rather gratifying to know that my published research apparently contributed to the creation of one of the US Government’s formal, if classified, investigations of the UFO phenomenon.

Beginning in 1973, I had sought out and interviewed former or retired US Air Force personnel who had either operated or guarded nuclear weapons, regarding their personal UFO encounters at ICBM launch facilities, missile warhead/bomb storage depots, and other nukes-related sites. My interest in the topic resulted from a UFO radar-tracking incident that I had inadvertently witnessed at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, in 1967, involving mysterious aerial objects maneuvering near missile sites outside of the base.

As of 2023, 167 USAF veterans and other military personnel have gone on-the-record for me and UFOs and Nukes is essentially a compilation of some of those individuals’ tape-recorded testimony. Collectively, their revelations about unknown, technologically-advanced observers’ persistent interest in America’s nuclear weapons clearly indicate a potential threat to US national security. Moreover, my investigations unquestionably confirm that the UFO-Nukes Connection is longstanding, widespread and ongoing. Upon reading the book, Senator Reid was understandably concerned by the veterans’ dramatic disclosures and, according to George Knapp, decided that a new, covert investigation of them was warranted.

How the book came to the senator’s attention is rather intriguing. While writing it, in 2005, I had sought the assistance of a physicist when composing a chapter on faster-than-light (FTL) space travel, the assumption being that—should UFOs indeed turn out to be extraterrestrial spacecraft—the entities operating them would likely utilize exotic propulsion modes to travel between their worlds and ours. I emailed several physicists who had written peer-reviewed papers on FTL, to seek their input. The person who ended up working with me was Dr. Harold “Hal” Puthoff. As the public now knows, Puthoff became AATIP’s scientific advisor in 2007.

The first edition of UFOs and Nukes was published in July 2008. At that time, it was only available at my website. In December of that year, Puthoff unexpectedly emailed me and asked that I overnight-ship four copies to him. When I checked into the delivery charge involved, it turned out to be more than a hundred dollars. I quickly wrote back to Puthoff, suggesting that I simply ship the books via US Postal Media Mail, which would take five days, but would be a much cheaper solution. Upon receiving my response, Puthoff immediately called me and said that he had an upcoming meeting with some “movers and shakers in Washington” two days hence, and he wanted to distribute copies of the book to them. At that, I rush-shipped the order.

Years later, when the now-famous bombshell article exposing the existence of AATIP appeared in The New York Times, on December 16, 2017, Hal Puthoff was identified as a member of the secret project. Stunned, I wrote to him shortly thereafter, asking him whether he remembered the overnight-shipping episode in 2008. He confirmed that he did and then told me that AATIP director Lue Elizondo had been one of the recipients of my book.

(In 2021, during a podcast, Elizondo confirmed that AATIP had utilized UFOs and Nukes during its own investigation of nuclear weapons-related UFO activity, and said that I had done “a fantastic job” researching the subject.)

In any case, in 2017, when I asked Puthoff who had received the other three copies of the book during his 2008 meeting with the “movers and shakers”, he declined to answer. Now, given George Knapp’s recent comments to me, I am certain that one of them was US Senator Harry Reid.