Dave Gaubatz is no stranger to controversy.

The former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent maintains he found Saddam's WMD bunkers, but that the U.S. military declined to follow up. His repeated allegations were picked up by a number of media outlets – and attracted the attention of prominent Congressmen, like then-Sen. Rick Santorum, then-Rep. Curt Weldon, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra. There hasn't been any confirmation, however.

Lately, Gaubatz has been pushing another eye-opening assertion. Earlier this month, Gaubatz claimed that the Active Denial System, the military's allegedly-nonlethal "heat ray," is really a killer weapon, after all. It's an allegation that, if true, would mean the entire public face of the program is a cover up of sorts. Gaubatz says he saw first hand the military testing the ray gun on... goats.

DANGER ROOM caught up with Gaubatz recently to quiz him a bit about his claims:

DR: Can you tell me about your involvement in the Active Denial System? Gaubatz: My background in directed energy was from July 2000 till right after the war, September 2003. I was involved with active denial.

I was the point of contact [for security] at [Air Force Research

Laboratory] AFRL at Kirtland where it was tested and evaluated.

Anything they did went through us for security. We had the Chinese,

Russians, and many countries trying to steal this technology. Anything they did, bringing in the animals, or testing, had to go through me. I signed off on it, whether it could move or not move forward on this particular day. DR: What sort of animals would they use? Gaubatz: Goats, primarily. DR: Can you describe what took place with the animals? *Gaubatz: They’d bring the animals in, put them in the pens.

They'd put curtains down, or a wall, to see if [the beam] could go through walls. And it would. You can go to different degrees; you can do nonlethal. But it was not designed as nonlethal. * DR: Would the animals die quickly? Gaubatz: It was quick. DR: I hate to be gruesome, but what did the animals look like after they had been killed? Did they have visible burns. Gaubatz: No, not visibly, I didn’t get right up to the cages....

I’m a big animal lover, it was very hard for me in 2000 to see that. I know it has its purpose, but it’s very difficult for me to see the animals suffer like that. DR: You talk about changing the dial between lethal and nonlethal. As I understand it, the nonlethal version of Active Denial

System operates at 95 Ghz, which heats up the top layer of skins. What frequency then does the lethal version operate in? *Gaubatz: We get into the technical [details], I’m not the one who can give you the technical aspects. All they had to do was change a dial if you wanted a nonlethal form. And then it could be pumped up to whatever range you wanted. *

Okay, the lack of technical details leaves me with some doubts, but I don't doubt his account of using goats. I mean, the military just loves to test things on goats. Poor goats.

These days, Gaubatz is involved with another project sure to stoke controversy (depending on what he finds). The Mapping Sharia project is gathering intelligence on U.S. mosques to determine which ones may pose a threat to U.S. security. How do they do that?

Infiltration.

"People go in under the guise of being long-term Muslims," he says.

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