Robert Bigelow

Robert Bigelow is a Las Vegas real-estate and aerospace entrepreneur who founded Bigelow Aerospace, which flew inflatable modules on the International Space Station, and earlier the National Institute for Discovery Science, which from 1996 to 2016 owned and studied Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. His company Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies held the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP contract from 2008 to 2010, worth about 22 million dollars. He has said on 60 Minutes that he is convinced extraterrestrials are present on Earth.

The contracts and the ranch ownership are documented; what the studies found is not. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, written with the programme's DIA manager, describes phenomena the authors say they could not capture on instruments. Bigelow has also funded research into survival of consciousness after death. Critics say the AAWSAP money produced speculative physics papers and no verifiable result; defenders say the effort was cut short.

The corpus discusses Bigelow in many episodes, chiefly through Skinwalker Ranch, AATIP and the people he employed, including Eric Davis, Hal Puthoff and Colm Kelleher, but does not interview him. The knowledge base records his programmes as documented and the phenomena they reported as contested.