George Knapp is an investigative journalist for KLAS-TV in Nevada Las Vegas, where he has worked for 40 years, breaking numerous Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) stories.1 His interest in Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) secrecy began in 1987,2 and he has since written hundreds of UFO-related news stories and series.3
Knapp says that in 1989 he began hearing accounts of crashed saucers, strange materials and reverse-engineering programmes said to be carried out secretly in the Nevada desert by intelligence operatives and defence contractors.4 That year he interviewed Bob Lazar on KLAS-TV in what became known as the 1989 Bob Lazar KLAS interview, in which Lazar asserted - anonymously at first - that he had worked on a recovered extra-terrestrial flying saucer at the purported Site 4 (S-4) facility.5 Knapp later rebutted official denials that Lazar had ever worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, citing an old news story placing him there and the fact that Lazar had sneaked Knapp into the secure facility and was familiar with its workers.6 That same year, Knapp became the first person outside his newsroom to tell Harry Reid, then in his first term as United States Senator, about these accounts.7 Knapp says Reid responded that he wanted to hear more, opening a private conversation between them that continued for the next three decades.8 Knapp kept Reid informed about UFO developments he was pursuing as a journalist, and Reid helped him obtain information otherwise inaccessible.9 Also in 1989, Knapp met billionaire businessman Robert Bigelow.10 Bigelow went on to spend more of his own money on UFO investigations - tens of millions of dollars - than any person in the history of the world.11
In 1996, Bigelow founded his own research organisation, the National Institute for Discovery Science.12 Its science advisory board included PhD-level academics, two former astronauts who had walked on the Moon, and several scientists who had worked for or consulted with the US military and intelligence agencies.13 After the institute began its own investigations, Knapp informed Reid about it and arranged an introduction.14 One of the subjects of interest to Reid, Bigelow and the institute was Russia’s ongoing interest in UFOs.15 In 1993, during the Glasnost-era window when Western journalists and researchers could investigate previously off-limits subjects in the former USSR,16 Knapp - with the assistance of former US Congressman Jim Bilbray - met Russian physicist and national security adviser Nikolai Kapranov,17 asking him to identify high-ranking figures in the former USSR who might discuss secret Russian UFO programmes.18 In the spring of 1993, in what is now referred to as the 1993 George Knapp Moscow investigation trip, Knapp travelled to Moscow with two colleagues and interviewed more than a dozen military officials, intelligence operatives and scientists with knowledge of UFO incidents from the Cold War era.19 Knapp has said the Russian military’s UFO investigation was directed by Colonel Boris Sokolov,20 who told him of 45 incidents in which Russian warplanes engaged with UFOs.21
Knapp has said his information from Russia made a lasting impression on Reid and became a key factor in a secretive programme launched a few years later.22 The 22 million US dollars Reid subsequently secured did not fund the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) itself, but instead went to a separate effort managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency.23 That effort was dubbed the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program.24 AATIP itself was launched from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and managed by career counterintelligence officer Luis Elizondo.25 Reporting on AATIP in the New York Times was largely responsible for the creation, by the United States Congress, of the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Task Force, which later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.26 The first case investigated under the Bigelow-run programme was the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac UAP incident,27 and the programme lasted 27 months before it was ended, rather than the five-year term originally planned by the Defense Intelligence Agency.28
By mid-2019, Knapp had for two years been a vocal defender of Elizondo and Tom DeLonge, pushing back on critics of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA).29 He also purchased TTSA stock, something he did not always disclose to readers and viewers in his reporting.30 Knapp later acknowledged, in an email to The Intercept, buying 400 shares of TTSA stock in 2018, saying it was intended as support for the company rather than as an investment.31 He has said he placed the shares in a trust to be donated to charity and believes he now owns none of the company’s stock.32 In a 2018 interview with Knapp on the radio programme Coast to Coast AM, Eric Davis said the word “Threat” in AATIP’s name referred to the fact that the UFO phenomenon had interfered with operations and had officially been branded a threat requiring study.33 In the same interview, Davis cited the case now known as the 1950 Del Rio, Texas alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) crash retrieval, of 5 December 1950, an alleged crashed extra-terrestrial craft near Del Rio, Texas said to have been recovered by the US Air Force.34 Davis, discussing his work on the LLC Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Knapp that recovered extra-terrestrial craft did exist, though the information about them had not yet been revealed or published.35 Knapp has also interviewed DeLonge at length. In a March 2016 interview, DeLonge told Knapp he had learned from government insiders that the United States had made a secret technological breakthrough in anti-gravity propulsion.36 DeLonge added that the United States was building machinery with anti-gravity capability.37 DeLonge has also described to Knapp his first meeting with a figure he called “The General”, who he said made extraordinary and terrifying claims about a recovered alien lifeform.38 DeLonge was at pains in that interview to characterise The General as a well-intentioned person.39 When Knapp asked DeLonge why officials would confide secret information in a rock musician, suggesting it might give them plausible deniability if things went wrong,40 DeLonge replied that officials could deny or discredit anybody, even presidents, and that people were talking about levels of power civilians could not comprehend.41
In late 2018, Knapp told viewers that one sample from Art’s Parts (alleged Roswell metal samples) was engineered in layers thinner than microns, through a process he said was unknown on Earth.42 After Lazar came forward publicly, Knapp called him and arranged to meet at the Union Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas,43 a meeting that came relatively soon afterwards, not months later.44 Lazar has said that, before a later interview, he had never mentioned the name of Chuck Payne to anyone, including Knapp.45 According to Jason Samosa, Knapp is among those within the UFO field - alongside researcher Jacques Vallee - who have long used the term Collins Elite, often to refer to several different things.46 In more recent years, Knapp and Jeremy Corbell received a series of leaked UAP videos and went to considerable effort to provide them to Congress.47 Journalist Ross Coulthart has said Corbell and Knapp were careful to vet their sources and ensured the videos were not released without proper redactions or without checking whether secrets would be compromised.48 Coulthart has also said around 46 of the videos were provided to Congress, many of them first brought to the attention of the Congressional Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Caucus as a result of Corbell and Knapp’s work.49