First, while perhaps a minor quibble, I don't think it makes sense to call something a "false flag" operation when it's merely the result of poor decision makin

First, while perhaps a minor quibble, I don't think it makes sense to call something a "false flag" operation when it's merely the result of poor decision making. Otherwise we'd have to call every contracting boondoggle the DoD has been involved in a "false flag," and the term loses all meaning. The distinction is important, because I find it very unlikely that the DoD's involvement in Bigelow's research was at all intentional. We can point to two things to support this idea: first, that the DoD shut down AATIP apparently just about as soon as the broader executive branch became aware of it. Second, the fairly clear evidence that AATIP was only ever funded because of Sen. Reid's dogged support---in other words, it never really was a DoD initiative, it was Sen. Reid's project (and Sen. Reid's friend) and the DoD was merely the channel for that funding. After the abrupt and awkward end of AATIP, having produced almost no useful results at all, the DoD replaced it with their own in-house program which has since operated in a far more normal way... without any field trips to Skinwalker Ranch. Many people, almost everyone I think, radically overestimate the significance of AATIP because they are not familiar with the general world of DoD contracting. AATIP was a tiny project in a massive budget, and one apparently included at the behest of a powerful senator, which is an extremely common way that all sorts of misventures get added to the DoD. There's little evidence that AATIP ever had serious support from any high level of military intelligence, and some evidence that military intelligence mostly ignored it. This kind of thing happens all the time, a simple result of the DoD's secondary function as one of the primary pork barrels for the US Senate. In short, calling AATIP a "false flag" attributes a lot more executive function to the DoD than appears to have happened here, and indeed than happens in the vast majority of small, eccentric DoD projects. AATIP would have come and gone almost completely unnoticed were it not for the massive press round it received, years later, as a self-serving promotional stunt for the private, for-profit TTSA. TTSA aggressively tried to link itself to AATIP for cachet, but even those links are questionable when inspected closely. That too passed without much impact on anything, but not before other events like the Chinese balloon program thrust UAPs solidly into the media spotlight. This creates an endlessly frustrating situation in which the media, the public, and even apparently some of congress are inclined to interpret current UAP events in the context of the AATIP, even though there is almost no connection between the two. AATIP is a result of an eccentric millionaire leveraging a very powerful senate connection to capture a bit of flab on the DoD budget for his own self-interest. This kind of thing happens over and over again, it just usually doesn't have the sex appeal of UFOs.