AARO's 2024 report cites the FY2008 and FY2010 Defense Appropriations Acts, directed by Senator Harry Reid, as the primary source of AAWSAP/AATIP's $22 million funding

AARO's "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I" (February 2024) states that "the Defense Appropriations Acts of Fiscal Years 2008 and 2010 appropriated $22 million for the DIA to assess long-term and over-the-horizon foreign advanced aerospace threats," at the direction of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

This is the vault's first primary, Tier 1 corroboration of the "$22 million" figure that has circulated in AATIP coverage since The New York Times' 16 December 2017 investigation. claim-aatip-22m-budget-figure-traces-solely-to-2017-nyt-report documents that, as of 2026-07-25, an exhaustive search found no public DIA/DoD budget line item, GAO report, or congressional record naming $22 million — only journalists' descriptions of contracts they said they had but did not publish. AARO's report closes that gap: a DoD primary source now names the appropriations acts that funded the amount, rather than unpublished contracts a newspaper says it saw. Two caveats keep this from being a full resolution: AARO's figure is attributed to appropriations covering FY2008 and FY2010 specifically, which is a narrower and differently-shaped claim than "$22 million over 2008–2012" as most secondary coverage frames it; and AARO's stated purpose for the funding — to "assess long-term and over-the-horizon foreign advanced aerospace threats" — is the program's general threat-assessment mission, not a specific accounting of how much of the $22 million went to the antigravity/warp-drive theoretical-physics report series documented in claim-aatip-dia-funded-22m-antigravity-warp-drive-reports-2008-2012.