Robert Bigelow

American real-estate entrepreneur who founded Bigelow Aerospace, a private spaceflight company that has flown two inflatable space-station modules in orbit, and who separately funded and helped originate the Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP research effort that became AATIP.

Matters to this vault as the actual, named channel through which Hal Puthoff was recruited into DIA's UAP/antigravity work in 2010 — not, per Puthoff's own 2026 account, any continuation of his 1972 Stargate-era CIA relationship. Bigelow employed Puthoff as chief science advisor at Bigelow Aerospace; it was in that capacity that DIA approached him.

References

• claim-puthoff-2026-account-names-bigelow-aerospace-as-the-aatip-recruitment-channel
• claim-no-primary-us-government-document-names-jay-stratton-in-aawsap-aatip-uaptf

Updates

• 2026-10-27: AARO's own 2024 primary historical-record report confirms AAWSAP's DIA contract "was awarded to a private sector organization" — consistent with, though the primary itself does not name, Bigelow's described role as the program's recruitment channel. The same report anonymizes the organization entirely, so this is corroboration of the contract's existence, not an independent naming of Bigelow. (claim-no-primary-us-government-document-names-jay-stratton-in-aawsap-aatip-uaptf)