Dr James T Lacatski, AAWSAP Program Manager's career "ruined"

Who is Dr James Thomas Lacatski?

In a blog post dated 1 May 2018, and titled  "AATIP or AAWSA" I wrote, in part, about those Defense Intelligence Reference Documents" (DIRDs) which had been circulating on the Internet since December 2017. Each of the three available DIRD's made mention of the fact that the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) Program Manager, at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was one James T Lacatski, D. Eng.

Research

I undertook some research into who James T Lacatski was, and wrote up my then findings in the 1 May 2018 blog. Since then I have been able to find out a little more about him. To recap, I found that his full name was James Thomas Lacatski with a date of birth of 9 January 1951.

Between 1984-1986 he was a joint author of a number of technical  papers about plasma engineering studies in Torsatron reactors. In 1986 he was an Engineer Assistant in the Nuclear Design Section of Duke Power Company, responsible for reactor core design, startup and operating predictions and plant support.

I failed to locate any publicly available information on him during the 1987-2003 period. In June 2004 a James Lacatski, Intelligence Officer, Missile Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, attended a UK conference titled "Ballistic Missile Defence." In January 2005, James T Lacatski was promoted to GG-14 within the DIA.

In August 2008, Dr James T Lacatski was designated as the COR and government project leader in the DIA's AAWSAP solicitation number HHM402-08-R-0211.

In April 2009, the DIA's own internal magazine "Communique" showed him as celebrating 10 years Federal service. 

In August 2016 Lacatski attended an energy conference, and listed a DIA email address as his contact details.

I located details showing that his wife Wisal Abouo Lacatski had worked for NASA (at least around 1997.)

That then is a summary of publicly available information about James Thomas Lacatski. Using public data, I spent some time trying to contact Lacatski to ask him a number of questions about his involvement with the AAWSAP/AATIP. I was unsuccessful. Indeed, I know of no one who has successfully located and interviewed Lacatski about his knowledge in this area. He certainly has not publicly surfaced and given a widely reported interview. On a number of occasions, the former (second) AATIP manager, Luis Elizondo has referred to the former (first) manager of the program, without using his name.

A rare 1986 photograph of Lacatski

New information

On 1 November 2018, the To The Stars Academy (TTSA) website blog featured a blog post  by Luis Elizondo, titled "What We Know And What We Believe Are Not Always The Same Thing. How our perception of Fact Influences Our Worldview." Part of this blog post provides some new information about James T Lacatski (although Elizondo, again, does not name him.)

"UAP has even been associated with demons and anti-Judea Christian beliefs.

I experienced this first hand during my time working at the US Government's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), where certain senior government officials thought our collection of facts on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) was dangerous to their philosophical beliefs.

In fact, my AATIP predecessor's career was ruined because of misplaced fear by an elite few. Rather than accept the data as provided by a top-rank rocket scientist, they decided the data was a threat to their belief system and instead, destroyed his career because of it."

This is a very interesting statement by Elizondo, and goes a long way to explaining why Lacatski has not appeared in the public realm discussing his knowledge of the program and topic.

Update:

27 November 2021

A March 1991 Naval Research Laboratory document, titled "Density channel Tracking Study on Pulserad'" shows one James T. Lacatski, System Planning Corporation, Arlington, on the document's distribution list. Thanks to Octavian Marnescu for finding this document.