Did Kona Blue Really Come to Fruition? Speculation
By Michael and James Hall, authors of the popular "The Sword of Damocles: Our Nuclear Age," now on Audible, Kindle and Amazon books.
In the public-facing history of the Pentagon’s modern UFO investigations, certain chapters are marked strictly as failures. Among them is Kona Blue—a proposal born from the ashes of the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP). According to the official narrative, Kona Blue was a tracking effort proposed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that was ultimately rejected. Modern offices like the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) have written it off as a collection of paranormal theories that never saw the light of day.
But according to the architect who built the program, that official obituary is incorrect.
In a revelatory interview on the Weaponized podcast, Dr. James Lacatski, a former DIA intelligence officer and the original program manager for AAWSAP, broke his silence to reveal a starkly different truth: Kona Blue did not die with a DHS rejection letter. Instead, it survived, mutated, and may remain operational. Furthermore, Lacatski claimed he ran it! This is a monumental revelation that no one is paying attention to!
Much More Than a Proposal
For years, skeptics and government reports have painted Kona Blue as a dead end. The common understanding was that the program sought to create a centralized home for UFO and anomalous phenomenon data but was deemed devoid of value by high-level bureaucrats.
When questioned about why the program is consistently spoken of in the past tense, Lacatski’s demeanor shifted from clinical to deeply deliberate.
"Kona Blue is much more than Kona Blue," Lacatski asserted. "Kona Blue was a compartment, it was also a program."
According to Lacatski, looking solely at the documents released by DHS is a lesson in missing the forest for the trees. While the public focus remained on the rejected proposal, the underlying infrastructure of the research—fueled by the original findings of AAWSAP—was successfully established elsewhere. By shifting the lineage out of the direct line of sight of DHS and standard bureaucratic channels, it evolved into a highly secure, compartmentalized operation. That is our speculation.
The Reality of "Undead" Programs
In the world of deep black budget intelligence, a program's funding line is rarely a straight path. When pressed on how a supposedly defunct UFO study could endure without Congress or the public knowing, Lacatski pulled back the curtain on institutional survival tactics. A program, he explained, doesn't simply vanish when a single agency says no.
"A program continues," Lacatski explained. "It can be unfunded, it can be funded, it can be temporarily funded. Money can go in and out."
Furthermore, he dropped a significant clue regarding the survival of this research lineage, noting that the closing chapters of the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon explicitly suggested the integration of private money from multiple corporate or independent sources to keep the research alive—a concept he states "caught people's eye" at the highest levels of power. A recent interview with Dr. Eric Davis suports this.
The Intelligence Split: Kona Blue vs. AATIP
To understand where Kona Blue fits into the wider puzzle, one must look at how the legacy of AAWSAP fractured after its DIA funding dried up around 2012. The effort essentially split into two distinct, parallel tracks that rarely, if ever, interacted:
The Military Threat Track (AATIP & The Task Force): This line of inquiry was famously led by Jay Stratton, with Luis Elizondo serving as his counterintelligence (general manager) deputy under the unfunded moniker of AATIP (which had previously been the nickname for the former AAWSAP). Stratton and Elizondo likely only managed the loosely organized AATIP alongside their various other intelligence duties within the Pentagon and ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). Stratton later under Naval Intelligence expanded this mission into the official UAP Task Force, focusing strictly on the tactical, military threat. Together, they tracked, documented, and analyzed anomalous craft buzzing Navy carrier strike groups. Operating within the standard Pentagon intelligence infrastructure, they were laser-focused on current operational encounters—yet they remained entirely locked out of historical hardware data. (As they had with AAWSAP, Dr. Hal Puthoff and his long-time associate and employee Dr. Eric Davis served as the consulting scientific advisory team for both AATIP and the later UAP Task Force. Davis noted that during the AATIP years, he and Puthoff primarily reported to Elizondo, whom they viewed as the program's driving force and a sincere patriot.)
The Exotic Research Track (Kona Blue): While Elizondo and Stratton focused on the skies, Kona Blue was the vehicle designed to safeguard AAWSAP's broader, more controversial data—including biological effects, physical materials, and anomalous physics. By mutating into a private or unacknowledged compartment, Kona Blue may have operated entirely parallel to, and hidden from, modern military investigators.
The Shadows of the "Legacy Programs"
This hyper-compartmentalization explains why modern military investigators like Stratton and Elizondo could pull on UFO threads for years without ever finding the center of the sweater. The actual physical hardware—the crash retrievals and recovered materials—belongs to an entirely separate entity that predates them all: what insiders refer to as the "Legacy Programs."
In a comprehensive interview on The Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, physicist Dr. Eric Davis pulled back the curtain on these legacy efforts, describing them not as a single, continuous government agency, but as a decades-long cycle of experimentation, frustration, and extreme secrecy.
According to Davis, the story begins around 1960 during the rapid expansion of the modern aerospace industry and the rise of major organizations like TRW and the Aerospace Corporation. At that time, the CIA allegedly awarded highly classified contracts to a small number of elite defense contractors, tasking them with analyzing physical materials recovered from Soviet-era space debris. On occasion, this research reportedly also included UAP crash sites and recovered materials.
For nearly three decades, scientists and engineers attempted to reverse-engineer the UAP
technology but made little meaningful progress; the materials were simply too far beyond contemporary scientific understanding. Compounding the failure was the stifling security. These projects operated as deeply hidden “waived unacknowledged” Special Access Programs (SAPs), where as few as five individuals within a contractor might be cleared to work on the effort at any given time. With no broader scientific collaboration allowed, the CIA ultimately terminated the continuous research contracts in May 1989.
The Semi-Hibernation Cycle and Corporate Defiance
However, the cancellation did not mean the materials were destroyed or handed back to regular military channels. Instead, Davis revealed that the CIA and Air Force retained the program offices and infrastructure, placing the effort into a state of “semi-hibernation.” Rather than maintaining continuous research, they adopted a cyclical strategy: every ten years, the materials would be revisited and temporarily transferred to major defense organizations like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, or Battelle Memorial Institute. The logic was simple: technology and laboratory instruments advance significantly over a decade. Perhaps a new generation of scientists would finally possess the tools necessary to unlock the secrets. If they failed, the materials went back into the vault for another ten years.
When the CIA ended the continuous contracts in 1989, all contractors were ordered to return 100 percent of the recovered material in their possession. However, Davis claimed on The Good Trouble Show that one major California aerospace company complied only partially—allegedly returning about 80 percent of the material while secretly retaining the remaining 20 percent. Company leadership gambled that if their scientists could independently solve the underlying physics outside of government oversight, the resulting proprietary technology would be worth more than the F-35 program.
Years later, during the AAWSAP/AATIP era, Dr. Davis and Dr. Hal Puthoff became aware of this hidden 20 percent cache. Working alongside a sympathetic senior executive at the aerospace company, they attempted to establish a pipeline to fund research through unclassified corporate channels. Their objective was to bypass the government's suffocating classification system entirely, analyze the samples in open laboratories, and publish the peer-reviewed findings in mainstream scientific journals.
The effort was entirely crushed before it could begin. Glenn Gaffney, a senior CIA portfolio manager, discovered that the aerospace firm had withheld materials from the 1989 order. Gaffney intervened, permanently froze the initiative, and locked the materials away.
A War of Counterintelligence
The friction between these factions highlights a crucial distinction that Davis emphasizes: the difference between the Legacy Programs (the private aerospace and defense contractors who physically hold and study the hardware) and the Government Gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are permanent civilian administrators and counterintelligence personnel—particularly within organizations like the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)—responsible for controlling access and protecting the secret, regardless of whether active research contracts are running.
This reality brings the timeline back to Dr. James Lacatski’s warnings on Weaponized. The divergence between testimonies from insiders like Lacatski and Davis versus official AARO reports highlights a sophisticated, multi-front war of counterintelligence.
During his interview, Lacatski took direct aim at modern official reviews, dryly mocking a quote from a former deputy director of AARO who dismissed Kona Blue as a repository for "paranormal UFO crap."
"Now, isn't that great?" Lacatski remarked. "What did you expect to come out in their review? Any reasonable person... would say, 'I'm being had. The wool is being pulled over my eyes.'"
He warned that the public—and even Congress—is currently trapped in the middle of a "major and repetitive counterintelligence operation" executed by unknown operators. The goal of this campaign is simple: steer the conversation away from core physical realities and bog the public down in internet chatter, false documentation, and manufactured ridicule.
The Enduring Mystery
By his own admission, Lacatski continues to play a high-stakes game of "controlled disclosure," releasing only what has been meticulously cleared by the Department of Defense's security review process. Yet, by confirming that the Kona Blue lineage lived on as both a compartment and an active framework, he has rewritten history.
When you piece the entire picture together, the institutional map becomes clear. Modern military investigators like Elizondo and Stratton were tracking real-world threats in our skies, but they were entirely siloed from the decades-old, corporate-held Legacy Programs described by Davis. Meanwhile, architects like Lacatski attempted to bridge the gap and keep the data alive via Kona Blue, only to watch the project slip further into the unacknowledged, and perhaps privately funded shadows.
If the Kona Blue lineage is still quietly breathing, shielded by private capital and corporate vaults, it suggests that the Pentagon's quest to understand anomalous technology never truly stopped. It merely retreated deeper into the darkness, leaving the public to debate the ghost of a program that the government claims never existed. Or, maybe DHS finally did host Kona Blue or at least consulted with it.
We may know the full story soon.