Catherine Austin Fitts
Catherine Austin Fitts is an American investment banker and former US government official who served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the George H.W. Bush administration. She is the founder of Solari Inc. and is widely cited in UAP research circles for her analysis of unauthorized government spending and the mechanisms by which trillions of dollars in black budget funds may be directed toward clandestine programs, including those potentially related to non-human technology.
| Role | Former US Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; financial analyst and black budget researcher |
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Black Budget Research
Fitts's most cited contribution to UAP research is her analysis of what she characterizes as unauthorized or "missing" government spending. Her research found that as much as $21 trillion in unauthorized spending occurred within the Department of Defense and Department of Housing and Urban Development between 1998 and 2015. This figure is based on official government records and accounting discrepancies rather than speculation.
UAP Gerb cites Fitts's findings as providing a plausible financial basis for sustained, multi-decade UAP legacy programs — arguing that the scale of unauthorized DOD spending is more than sufficient to fund classified underground construction, retrieval operations, reverse engineering programs, and associated infrastructure without Congress or the public being aware of the expenditures.
2004 "Black Budget of the United States" Paper
In 2004, while at the HUD Department, Fitts wrote a paper titled "The Black Budget of the United States" documenting that large portions of the nation's wealth had been illegally diverted into secret, unaccountable channels supporting clandestine military research and development — some portion of which was suggested to be UAP-related. Fitts found that accounting systems of several high-profile defense contractors were responsible for scrubbing and obfuscating the direction of these diverted funds.
This paper, along with her earlier university paper detailing $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the DOD and HUD from 1998 to 2015, is cited as potentially precipitating the first comprehensive Pentagon audit launched in December 2017. The Pentagon has not passed an audit since.
Connection to the Wilson-Davis Memo
In the Wilson-Davis Memo, Admiral Thomas Wilson relayed that the "watch committee" — the gatekeepers of the UAP legacy program portfolio — told him their programs were reorganized following an audit in the 1990s that nearly exposed them. Fitts's research documents the same period of irregular defense contractor accounting, providing a financial mechanism by which UAP program funding could have appeared to auditors as routine contract overcharging — as happened in the TRW Inc lawsuit settled in 2003 by Northrop Grumman.