George Knapp

In early-1990s Russia, USSR/Russian defense officials described the objects studied under their program as real, able to fly in formation, evasive, and outperforming any aircraft known to exist, including the Soviets' own.

These things are real. They're not fictitious. They can fly in formation. They're evasive and they outperform any aircraft known to exist, including ours.

The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), initiated by DIA scientist Dr. James Lacatski, is the largest acknowledged UFO program ever funded by the US government, and the DIA has still not released roughly 95% of what the program produced.

the largest acknowledged UFO program ever funded by the US government... the DIA still hasn't released 95% of what was prepared by that program

Robert Bigelow, through his company BAASS and a colleague from AAWSAP, negotiated with senior Lockheed Martin executives and reached a deal to receive a quantity of unusual material that had been stored in secret at a California facility.

I have confirmed on the record that Robert Bigelow and a trusted colleague from AAWSAP met with and negotiated with senior executives at Lockheed Martin.

The USSR ran what is likely the largest UFO investigation program in the world, ordering every military unit to collect evidence and testimony on sightings; the collection effort fed a KGB-routed analysis program called Thread 3, aimed at reverse-engineering superior technology.

the USSR launched what is almost certainly the largest UFO/UAP investigation in the world... Thread 3 was an analysis program.

In October 1982 at a Soviet ICBM base, UFOs performed maneuvers (splitting apart and re-fusing) over a four-hour period, and near the end of the incident the missile launch-control codes activated on their own, arming the missiles, which officers could not shut down until the UFOs departed.

the launch control codes for the ICBMs lit up. Something entered the correct codes. The missiles were fired up and ready to launch and they could not shut it down.

Knapp smuggled classified Russian Thread 3 documents out of the USSR by removing the classification-stamped top pages and carrying them on his person and in a suitcase, using tins of caviar as a distraction.

I took the top pages off that were stamped with a security signature and I carried them out on my person... threw some caviar in there as a distraction.

Dr. James Lacatski told Knapp and a co-author that the US government has recovered at least one non-human craft with no wings, rotor, tail, or fuel tanks, whose flight mechanism was not understood by those who examined it, and it took 14 months to get authorization for Lacatski to release even two sentences about it.

This craft we had managed to get inside of it. It had no wings, no rotor, no tail. It had no fuel, no fuel tanks. They didn't know how it flew or how it was operated.

Bob Jacobs, a lieutenant attached to Vandenberg AFB in 1964, recorded a UFO firing a laser-like beam at and disabling a nuclear dummy warhead during a missile test; his film was confiscated the same day, and when Jacobs later reported this to AARO, AARO falsely claimed to have located the original footage and found nothing anomalous in it.

They made up a story that they had tracked down the original footage and there was nothing like that in it. Well, there was no original footage.

Bob Salis, who worked at a nuclear ICBM base, reported seeing UFOs flying over missile silos that were subsequently taken offline; AARO 'completely disregarded' his account when he came forward.

People like Bob Salis who had worked at a nuclear ICBM base who saw UFOs flying over the base and these missile silos were taken down. He went to AARO too and was completely disregarded.

'Dr. James Ryder' at Lockheed Martin and CIA officer 'Glenn Gaffney' are named as specific individuals/gatekeepers connected to keeping UAP-related material secret.

Well, one of them was named Dr. James Ryder at Lockheed... Glenn Gaffney, CIA.

Of the Russian crash-retrieval-related documents Knapp submitted to Congress, only about 1% was already public; the rest is new.

So the rest of it should be predominantly new information... maybe 1%.

During the Cold War, the US and USSR/Russia reached an informal or documented understanding to report sightings of unidentified objects near sensitive nuclear sites to each other, to reduce the risk of a UAP being mistaken for an incoming missile; Reagan and Gorbachev are described as having exchanged public remarks about cooperating if threatened 'from outside.'

We did reach an agreement to try to lessen the possibility that us detecting a UFO or group of UFOs would not be mistaken for a bunch of Russian missiles.

A 1947 memo by General Nathan Twining, written after the country was overflown by dozens to hundreds of UFOs, stated the objects were 'not visionary or fictitious,' were real craft, 'not ours,' and 'outperform anything we've got.'

Look, this is not visionary or fictitious. It's real. These things are craft. They're not ours. They outperform anything we've got.

Our check Partly right, partly a well-known misquote. The real September 23, 1947 Twining memo ('AMC Opinion Concerning Flying Discs,' reproduced in the Condon Report Appendix R) does say the phenomenon 'is something real and not visionary or fictitious' -- that phrase is verbatim. But the memo does NOT say 'not ours' or that the objects 'outperform anything we've got.' It explicitly lists domestic US origin as one of three live possibilities ('the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this Command'), alongside unproven and foreign-nuclear-propulsion possibilities, and states the US could build a similar craft 'within present U.S. knowledge... provided extensive detailed development is undertaken.' The 'not ours / outperform' framing is a popular paraphrase repeated by many UFO researchers (including, apparently, Knapp here) that is not supported by the primary text.

Sources files.ncas.org, skepticalinquirer.org

Colonel Boris Sokolov's Soviet program recorded about 40 incidents in which Russian warplanes were ordered to intercept and, in some cases, fire on UFOs; three pilots fired, their planes stalled and crashed, two pilots died, after which Russia changed its standing order to leave the objects alone.

There are 40 incidents where Russian warplanes were sent to intercept UFOs and they were ordered to fire on them... Two of those pilots died and after that the Russians changed the standing order.