Harry Reid was an American politician who represented Nevada in the United States Congress, serving in the US House of Representatives from 19831 and the United States Senate from 1987 to 2017,2 rising to Senate Majority Leader over his three decades there.3 Born the son of a rock miner in Searchlight, Nevada,4 he worked as a United States Capitol Police officer while putting himself through law school.5 The first person George Knapp told about accounts of a crashed saucer outside his newsroom was Reid, then in his first Senate term, in 1989.6 Knapp said Reid told him he wanted to hear more, beginning a private conversation between the two that continued for the next three decades.7 Knapp kept Reid informed of UFO developments he was pursuing as a journalist, and Reid helped him obtain information otherwise inaccessible.8 After the National Institute for Discovery Science began its own investigations, Knapp told Reid about the organisation and arranged an introduction.9 Knapp said Reid attended one of its first board meetings and was impressed by the professionalism of its Science Advisory Board.10 Topics of interest to Reid, Robert Bigelow, and the Institute included Russia’s ongoing interest in UFOs;11 Knapp said this information made a lasting impression on Reid and became a key factor in a secretive programme launched a few years later.12 Reid said his interest in UFOs came from Bigelow.13
Around 2008, Reid received a letter from a senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) scientist - according to the book In Plain Sight, likely the physicist James Lacatski, though he was never publicly named - whose world view had reportedly been transformed by events he witnessed at Skinwalker Ranch.14 Bigelow sent Reid the letter.15 Reid did not name the scientist but said he had visited Bigelow’s Skinwalker Ranch, presumably around 2007-2008, and that what the scientist saw there convinced him it was a real phenomenon needing investigation.16 Reid said the scientist was clearly rattled by the experience and told him it was time such phenomena be properly investigated,17 and Reid has said the account prompted him to seek Congressional funding for a study into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).18 Journalist Ross Coulthart has said he suspects Reid already knew far more from the classified intelligence world than the single scientist’s letter suggested.19
Reid recalled that he had spoken with John Glenn, the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, some years earlier, who he said had told him the federal government should be looking seriously into UFOs.20 Glenn had also told him, Reid said, that the military should be talking to pilots who had reported aircraft they could not identify.21 Reid approached Senators Daniel K. Inouye and Ted Stevens to secure funding for a study into the UAP mystery.22 Reid said he summoned the two men to a secure room in the Capitol,23 where Stevens recounted that he had seen a UAP during a wartime flight and said they needed to look into it.24 None of the three wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding.25 Reid, Stevens and Inouye together controlled congressional spending for black-budget Pentagon programmes,26 and Reid recalled: “This was so-called black money. Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it."27 Reid was for years a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight”, entitled to briefings on highly classified intelligence matters including Waived Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (WUSAPs).28 At Reid’s direction, then Senate Majority Leader, the Defense Appropriations Acts of Fiscal Years 2008 and 2010 appropriated 22 million US dollars for the DIA to assess long-term and over-the-horizon foreign advanced aerospace threats.29 The Bigelow team’s UAP investigations had begun before that funding arrived in July 2008, when Reid guaranteed black-budget funding for the programme that became the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).30 Stevens died in a plane crash two years after backing the funding.31
Inside AAWSAP, Luis Elizondo went on to lead the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the secretive Pentagon unit set up at Reid’s urging to study UAP.32 Congressional funding for AAWSAP ran out in 2012.33 By 2009 Reid had concluded that the programme’s work had produced findings extraordinary enough to warrant heightened security,34 and, according to a subsequent US government historical-record report, on 2009-06-24 he sent a letter to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III requesting that AAWSAP/AATIP be made a United States Department of Defense (DoD) Special Access Program.35 According to The Black Vault, the resulting memo outlined Reid’s request and reasoning for SAP designation.36 Reid wrote that substantial progress had been made identifying several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings, and requested a restricted special access programme limited to a few listed officials;37 the request was denied.38 The Department of Defense received Reid’s memo and responded to him, spokesperson Susan Gough later said,39 though her office told The Black Vault it could not provide a full copy of that response, since the Department’s Public Affairs office does not release Congressional correspondence.40
As the senator representing Nevada, home to Area 51,41 Reid visited the base during his Senate term.42 He provided the so-called Unofficial Official Report on the Nimitz Tic Tac incident to Knapp, making it public;43 Knapp knew the identities of those involved because he had obtained the report from Reid.44 In a May 2021 interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus of The New Yorker, Reid said he had been told for decades that Lockheed held retrieved materials from recovered craft.45 Reid said he tried to obtain classified approval from the Pentagon to view the alleged materials, but the Pentagon would not approve it,46 giving him no explanation for the refusal;47 he confirmed that this refusal was what had prompted his 2009 request for SAP status for AATIP.48 Reid said he had concluded that there were reports the government and private sector had actual physical materials in their possession,49 and he said he considered it extremely important that information about the discovery of such materials come out.50
After AATIP became public, Reid publicly corroborated his and his colleagues’ role in funding the original programme and Elizondo’s leadership of it.51 Elizondo later said Reid remained his ally and champion, defending him in the months after his resignation when the Department of Defense was disputing his role;52 Reid wrote a letter that countered the Department’s later claim that Elizondo had had no part in AATIP.53 Elizondo also described Reid as a longtime benefactor of his and Christopher K. Mellon’s UAP advocacy.54 Reid retired from Congress in 2017,55 and said he was proud of AATIP, considering it one of the good things he had done in his congressional service.56 In his final months, while in the last stages of a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer, Reid continued to support the UAP legislative effort then before Congress;57 Elizondo said Reid told him he would keep fighting his cancer until President Joe Biden signed the UAP legislation into law.58 Reid died peacefully in his sleep the day after Biden signed that legislation, in December 2021.59