KONA BLUE was a proposed DHS successor to AAWSAP/AATIP after its 2012 termination, described by AARO as a 'Prospective Special Access Program' that was never approved

Per AARO's 2024 historical-record report, after the AAWSAP contract's 2012 termination, its supporters "unsuccessfully attempted to convince DHS to support a new version of this effort dubbed KONA BLUE." AARO records that the proposal "gained some initial traction at DHS to the point where a Prospective Special Access Program (PSAP) was officially requested to stand up this program, but it was eventually rejected by DHS leadership for lacking merit," and that "[t]he SAP was never approved or stood up, and no data or material was transferred to DHS" (pp. 34–35).

This is a distinct, previously uncaptured programmatic thread in the vault's AATIP/AAWSAP research: not a rename or continuation of the original DIA program, but a specific, named, unsuccessful attempt to re-establish it under a different sponsoring agency (the Department of Homeland Security rather than DIA) and a different institutional mechanism (Special Access Program status, rather than the original contract vehicle). It sits alongside — and is distinct from — the informal, unofficial "AATIP" activity documented in claim-aatip-name-persisted-post-2012-as-unofficial-activity, which also arose after 2012 but had no DHS sponsorship, no proposed SAP status, and no formal proposal at all. KONA BLUE's failure to gain DHS approval means the AAWSAP/AATIP research thread's one formally-proposed institutional successor was rejected; per the primary record, no successor was ever approved.