Senator Harry Reid of Nevada was the driving force behind both AAWSAP and AATIP, securing $22 million in black budget funding for UFO investigation with bipartisan support from Senators Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. Reid believed private defense contractors, particularly Lockheed Martin, were holding recovered non-human materials. Before his death in 2021, Reid stated: 'I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials.' He pushed for legislation allowing researchers access to classified UFO programs and was instrumental in the Navy changing its UFO reporting procedures. Reid called government UFO secrecy 'one of the good old boys' networks' and said the Pentagon had 'only scratched the surface' of the phenomenon.