THE TIDE RUNNING THE OTHER WAY ~ Robert Bigelow on AARO, the Origins of AAWSAP, and Consciousness as the Foundation of Everything

Hybrid Genies | Episode Notes

The Bigelow Podcast with George Knapp, Episode Two

Summarized by Janet Kira Lessin

George Knapp opened by asking why Bigelow started a podcast now, and the answer explains the whole episode. Bigelow advised a president on disclosure and then realized he was rowing upstream against a current already set inside the Pentagon. He believes one office exists as a disguise and as a fraudulent effort to crush the process. He decided the president deserved to know that people behind him were pulling the other direction.

THE PAPER TRAIL HE READ ALOUD

Bigelow walked through the timeline with the books open on the table to get the dates right.

On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena and confirmed that real objects occupy our airspace, which retired eighty years of ridicule in a single document.

Five months later, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks created an office with an unwieldy name. On July 15, 2022, she renamed and expanded it as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Bigelow calls that office the tip of the sword in the government’s pushback against its own admission.

AARO’s January 12, 2023 report struck him as notable for its blandness and thin detail. Then on April 19, 2023, Sean Kirkpatrick testified before Senator Gillibrand’s committee that a small percentage of reports qualify as anomalous and that the office had found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity or off-world technology. Bigelow sets that beside the 2021 assessment and asks listeners to notice the distance traveled in under two years.

He adds a recent example. An intelligence community program asked Bigelow and Jeremy Corbell for help persuading people to come forward, then later announced that the entire body of testimony amounted to grifters and attention seekers. He compares the odor to a cattle mutilation site.

HOW AAWSAP HAPPENED

The origin story runs through a letter.

Jim Lacatski wrote to Bigelow, who authenticated him and then contacted Harry Reid. Reid brought in Ted Stevens, who had experienced his own undeniable sighting and needed little persuasion. The program began in September of 2008, ran 27 months, and died in December of 2010 once word spread and the knives came out.

Lacatski wrote the proposal without the words that would have killed it. No UFOs, no ranch, no alien technology. The contract listed lift, propulsion, and cloaking, and everyone involved understood the purpose. The team held permission to follow anomalous evidence wherever it led.

Bigelow describes the scale: about 50 full-time investigators, a staff of nearly 75, tens of thousands of pages of field notes feeding 7,500 pages of documents delivered to the Defense Intelligence Agency, plus 38 papers his organization retains. He declines to release the bulk without official cover, since the files contain names and medical details of government personnel.

Reid worried on two fronts. He feared exposure would attract enemies at the Department of Defense, and he had picked up indications that Russia and China were investing in the same technology without the constraints a free society imposes. Bigelow references a retrieval in Kazakhstan in 1988 or 1989, where a recovered device became a powerful laser, and he observes that humans weaponize whatever they touch.

He also tells the story of Lacatski’s first visit. Within 45 minutes of arriving, seated in the dining area with three others, Lacatski watched alone as a metallic tubular object floated above the kitchen floor at counter height. He said nothing until the flight home. Bigelow reads the timing as a custom demonstration for the one man who could fund the work.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE FOUNDATION

Then Bigelow opened the box, as Knapp puts it, and this section matters most to our audience.

He states that consciousness is responsible for everything in the universe and that it existed before the universe did. He treats the Big Bang as a theory rather than a fact, points out that string theory required roughly eleven versions and invented constants to close the loop, and asks where the instructions for expansion came from and where the original mass came from. He describes the universe as an open system with no beginning and no end.

He raises entropy as the second problem. Galaxies hold their order for ten to fourteen billion years when material systems should decay. Something maintains that order, and physics attributes 95 to 96 percent of the universe’s energy to dark matter and dark energy while identifying none of it.

His evidence for mind acting on matter comes from Princeton, where Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunne ran hundreds of thousands of trials with a random event generator. Operators shifted the output above or below the baseline through intention. He treats that as elementary proof, with clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing, and mediumship as further expressions of the same faculty. He notes that Stanford Research Institute found most people produce anomalous results using something beyond the five senses.

Then he assembles the pieces. Roughly 100 billion humans have died on this one planet, and each one continues as what he calls a function of thought. Multiply that across an open universe out to a radius of 34 billion light-years, and you arrive at a super collective consciousness, a creator consciousness, which he identifies with dark energy and credits with holding the galaxies together.

He accepts reincarnation and gives the cycle an end point once learning finishes. He defines the soul as a spirit’s character and says death makes nobody an angel, since the personality carries across intact. The research points him toward two things worth gathering: love and knowledge.

THE ESSAY CONTEST

He funded the question rather than arguing it. The 2021 competition asked for proof beyond a reasonable doubt that consciousness survives permanent bodily death, in 25,000 words or less. Entries came from 38 countries, and 1,400 submissions were narrowed to about 205 for seven judges, including Brian Weiss, who read for five months. Bigelow planned three prizes. The judges argued twice for expansion, and the contest closed with 28 winners and roughly $ 1.8 million. Jeffrey Mishlove took first, Pim van Lommel second, Leo Ruickbie third. The essays sit in published volumes and on the institute’s website.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO EXPERIENCERS?

Bigelow spent his own fortune to reach conclusions our community has carried for decades: mind precedes matter, awareness survives the body, and the universe holds order through something conscious. He arrived by funding physicists and essayists. We arrived by living it.

Both roads lead to the same summit, which makes his testimony useful to us regardless of where he goes next with it.

Janet Kira Lessin | Research: Claudia Lenore | © 2026 Aquarian Media

Source: The Bigelow Podcast with George Knapp, Episode Two, 2026Tags: Robert Bigelow, George Knapp, AARO, ODNI, Sean Kirkpatrick, AAWSAP, Jim Lacatski, Harry Reid, Ted Stevens, Skinwalker Ranch, BICS, consciousness, survival of consciousness, dark energy, entropy, PEAR, Jahn and Dunne, reincarnation, Jeffrey Mishlove, Pim van Lommel, disclosure