Tag: Admiral Thomas Wilson

What was Revealed in Classified UFO Briefings to Congress & Pentagon?

On July 23, the New York Times released an article describing classified UFO briefings delivered to the US Congress and the Pentagon by Dr. Eric Davis, a prominent astrophysicist, researching “out of the box” scientific phenomena since 1996. The authors of the New York Times story, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, provided few details of the briefings other than Davis’ sensational claim that UFOs (aka UAPs) involved “off-world vehicles not made on this earth”.

The New York Times article was quickly picked up by other major media such as the Huffington Post, Popular Mechanics, and popular news sites that included Yahoo News. More recently, Scientific American called for a resumption of scientific studies on UFOs in a very telling sign that mainstream scientists are finally paying attention.

Senator Marco Rubio was informed about the classified briefing given by Dr. Davis to staffers from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which Rubio currently heads. He subsequently arranged for his Committee to give a bipartisan vote of approval (14-1) for the Intelligence Community to write up a comprehensive report on UFOs/UAPs in 180 days after the Bill’s passage into law.

Significantly, the Director of National Intelligence was instructed that the “report shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex”. This means that the report is intended to be released to the general public.

What is missing in the New York Times article and subsequent news stories are the precise details of what Davis briefed members of Congress and Pentagon officials. It can be assumed that the briefings involved information derived from a 15-page leaked transcript/summary of an October 16, 2002 conversation between Dr. Davis and Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, who retired as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, only a few months before the meeting.

I covered the Davis and Wilson leaked document in a three-part series (available here, here and here). Put simply, the document revealed Wilson’s failed efforts in 1997 to gain access to an Unacknowledged Special Access Program, which he had learned involved a corporation studying a retrieved UFO/extraterrestrial craft. Wilson had hoped Davis could shed light on what was happening in the corporate reverse engineering program.

While it is highly likely that parts of the 15-page document were included in Davis’ classified briefings to Congressional staffers and Pentagon officials, we don’t know what conclusions Davis had reached about what Wilson had confidentially shared with him. The leaked document focused on Wilson’s experiences, rather than what Davis knew about the topic.

Consequently, an interview given by Davis on May 10, 2019, five months before his briefing to Congressional staffers, where he gave his evaluation of UFOs and extraterrestrial life becomes highly significant. The interview gives us a very good idea of what Davis told Congress and the Pentagon, which has now been made an issue of national importance due to the New York Times story, and the looming Intelligence Community report destined to emerge in early 2021.

In fact, a strong case can be made that Davis’ briefings will be used as the fulcrum of a UFO/UAP disclosure narrative that will emerge in early 2021 with the release of the unclassified intelligence UAP report to Congress. This is where there is much in what Davis told Congressional staffers and Pentagon officials that raises alarming red flags that a “limited hangout” is being prepared over classified programs involving the retrieval and reverse engineering of crashed UFOs.

While the truth will be told of the non-Earthly origin of some retrieved UFOs, the successful reverse engineering of such craft by major aerospace corporations will be hidden from the public, along with the existence of visiting extraterrestrial life.

What follows is my analysis of Davis’s comments in the interview he conducted with Alejandro Rojas from Open Minds TV, which is available both in audio form on YouTube and as a rough transcript from an automated translation. I have corrected Rojas’ rough transcript using the original interview in my extracts below, which include the YouTube timestamps [YT].

In discussing the origins of the three videos showing UFO craft videotaped by Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015, and officially acknowledged as genuine by the Department of the Navy, Davis declares such advanced technology has not been developed by any government or nation:

[29:28 YT] In a matter of three to five seconds, you’re not basically talking about human technology. There is no Russian or Chinese or North Korean or Iranian or anybody else. No, NATO or any other Alliance, or non-Alliance country, non-Allied countries have any sort of technology that can perform the way these Tic Tacs were found to be performing….

The things we’re seeing are not shaped in the usual typical way that we humans would shape them. So you, you got to come up with another hypothesis and the only hypothesis is something unknown. And then its got a good chance that it’s not human technology….

Davis goes on to assert that the UFOs are operating on a new physics and humanity currently doesn’t have the means to replicate this:

[37:44 YT] In other words, they don’t, the objects don’t follow the aerodynamic rules of engineering. Okay, they just don’t. Okay, and that’s driven by physics. And they are not saying that they’re breaking the laws of physics. So don’t quote me on anything having to do with why they’re operating on a new physics, we have an event, or no, they’re breaking the laws of physics, it is possible to operating on the physics we haven’t invented or haven’t discovered yet. That’s possible, we don’t know. So anyway, the point is, is that these things are operating there you go way outside the envelope of our engineering and physics technologies. And, and I can guarantee you that no laws of physics are broken whatsoever.

Davis declares that the UFOs and their advanced flight capacities are not something that can be manufactured given the present level of technological development on Earth:

[38:58 YT] And these things don’t look like anything that we can manufacture on Earth. So we don’t have the manufacturing or industrial technology for it. We don’t have engineering for it. In other words, the blueprints and designs to get something … shaped like air fighter-sized piece of candy mouth mint and get that to fly through the air stably. And do the wonderful things that they do in the years reported by the F-18 pilots associated with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group.

Davis is then asked about the truth of reports of UFO crashes and whether the craft have been retrieved for classified studies. He answers:

[1:14:32 YT] Yeah, there have been crashes. The super powers on the Earth have had their share of crashes. And they have recovered the vehicles from their crashes.

Davis goes on to explain how the truth about classified studies of recovered alien spacecraft is kept from most public officials:

[1:15:30 YT] So yeah, they have that technology. We do too. And it’s a very super sensitive topic. Because it’s something that your listeners, you’re probably going to be shocked at… probably a minute fraction, it’s like less than 1/1000th or 1/100,000th of the people with the “need to know” access, “need to know” authorization, and security clearances to be involved with that type of work, are the only ones that know. The vast majority of the rest of the government really doesn’t know. And that’s why one hand, like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing…

Davis was likely referring to the process whereby even senior military officials like Admiral Wilson, with high level security clearances and “need to know” authorization, was still denied access to classified studies of retrieved non-Earthly spacecraft.

Davis elaborates on the complexity of the security clearances system in finding the truth about what’s happening in unacknowledged special access programs:

[1:16:16 YT] Because of the stovepipe thing that goes on in compartmentalized programs … you just can’t knock on doors and say, Hey, here’s who I am … I got clearances, but not the right ones. I don’t have a need to know. But I want to know, so can you tell me…. You’re going to be lied to, because that’s, that’s the rule. You don’t want to tell the enemy anything, when this guy is knocking on your door asking you about UFO crashes, could be an asset for the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, or the Chinese PLA, or the nincompoops over in Iran and North Korea and so forth.

So, you know, even if it’s an American, you still don’t want to answer that question because you don’t know who they are. And you’re not supposed to be revealing that information. So it takes a lot of hard tracking and digging after working. And it can take years and years and years. And then you develop the security clearances and the authorization for you to know that appropriately … allow you access to that information, then you find out hey, yeah, it’s there, it’s true.

On the other hand, sometimes the information does come out on its own. But it doesn’t come out in the way that UFOlogy likes to fantasize about it. It comes out only to specific people, who have specific talents or skills, who have security clearances, they may not have the need to know. But they could have the need to know if they were presented with that requirement.

At this stage in his interview, Davis comments on the Disclosure Project witnesses that Dr Steven Greer arranged to come forward in 2001 in a ground-breaking Press Conference. According to Davis, most of Greer’s witnesses were crackpots and just “noise” when it came to identifying the genuine signal in the available public information on retrieved UFOs:

[1:21:05 YT] A good majority of them were crackpots, they were phonies. But there was a small number of them that were the real deal. And so he successfully picked up a very small number of them, and got some information. And now, as to the veracity and quality of that information. That’s another story.

But he did get some interesting information.… the information was not … verifiable. In other words, once people looked into it, they said, yeah, this is realistic. Whereas a good chunk, a good chunk of his disclosure witnesses. You know, they had middle of the road guys, they had some information, but it was too purple. It was just anecdotal.

And then you had the guys that were real liars. He’s got a chunk of liars out there … I don’t know how much effort he spent on vetting any of those people. And I’m not going to name names of who they are. It’s not important, because … the fact that they have no real information means it’s noise. We’re dealing with signal, we’re interested in signal and science folks, not the noise. Check the noise.

Next, Davis went on to elaborate on Greer’s witnesses who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of crash retrieval operations:

[1:22:25 YT] So, he did have a small signal of people that had verifiable information…. They came forward, they gave him information that was freely given to him. But it was after the fact, it was never expected that it could be acted upon. The people that gave him information … weren’t directly involved with the crash retrieval at all. They actually were either peripheral, or they heard it from somebody reliable. So the vertical information was high quality, but they were not first-hand people.

Davis is here suggesting, for example, that Clifford Stone, a 22 year US Army veteran, who was interviewed by Greer and claimed to have had first-hand knowledge of multiple crashed UFOs retrieved by the US military, was a crackpot and liar. There are many reasons to dispute Davis’ information when it comes to Stone’s testimony who has been successfully interviewed many times over several decades, and has maintained the same story with consistency and sincerity.

Davis provides no evidence that Stone or other Disclosure Projects witnesses are lying or crackpots, consequently his assertions need to be considered as unverified or misinformed. This is a major red flag that Davis testimony may be part of a “limited hangout” that is being unveiled to the American and World publics through the New York Times, arguably the most important media organ of the CIA and the Deep State.

The most significant aspect of Davis’s interview is his assertion that UFO crash retrievals were part of a small unsuccessful program that was terminated in 1989, around the time the famed whistleblower, Bob Lazar, emerged with his experiences claiming something very similar had occurred during his time at the S-4 facility at Area 51.

To be continued in Part 2

© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice

[Note: an Audio version of this article is available here]

Further Reading

Navy Admiral Describes Reverse Engineering Program Involving Extraterrestrial Spacecraft

[Cont. from Part 1] In the transcript/summary of a 2002 conversation between Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson and Dr. Eric Davis it was revealed that a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle was being reverse engineered by a major aerospace company. Wilson first learned about the classified UFO program through a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) document shared with him at a confidential April 10, 1997 meeting with Dr. Steven Greer, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, and Navy Commander Willard Miller.

The recently released transcript describes what Admiral Wilson [TW] told Dr. Davis [EWD] about Wilson’s efforts up to June 1997 to learn the truth about the classified UFO program, and the associated reverse engineering effort revealed to him in the April meeting.

EWD: Okay then, what happened in April-June ’97?

TW: After parting with Miller (week later, he thinks) – I made calls, knocked on a few doors, talked to people – went on for 45 days (thereabouts) on and off

      • Suggestion came from Ward (Gen. M. Ward) to go through the records groups files (like an index system) in OUSDAT (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology)
      • Ran into Bill Perry in May ’97 – talked about this quietly – he suggested the same thing
      • They told me of a special projects record group not belonging to usual SAP – a special subset of the unacknowledged/carve-outs/waived programs – not belonging to usual SAP divisions as organized in ’94 by Perry himself – set apart from rest but buried/covered by conventional SAPs. (Transcript/Summary, pp. 6-7)

Wilson was here referring to different categories of Special Access Programs (SAPs), where the most important – unacknowledged/carve-outs/waived – were hidden behind conventional SAPs.

The method of hiding the most highly classified programs behind less classified ones was verified in one of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden called Sentry Eagle. It graphically depicted how Exceptionally Compartmented Information (ECI – an Intelligence Community classification similar to an Unacknowledged SAP used by the Pentagon) would be hidden behind a Non-ECI Program (similar classification status to a conventional SAP)

NSA leaked slide showing SENTRY EAGLE program where different DHS, DOD, and NSA clasified programs are hidden within less classified national programs. (NSA)

Wilson went on to describe the aerospace company that ran the classified reverse engineering effort, without naming it:

EWD: Who was the project contractor or USG agency that runs the program?

TW: An aerospace technology contractor – one of the top ones in US

EWD: Who?

TW: Core secret – can’t tell

EWD: Defense contractor?

TW: Yes, the best one of them.

The reference to the “best one of them” firmly points to Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks division which has a long track record of successfully working on cutting edge aerospace programs. For example, Skunkworks former Director, Ben Rich, was fond of ending lectures by declaring: “We now have the technology to take ET home”.

Slide Ben Rich used to end lectures with comment about taking ET home

Wilson then explained what happened when he discovered which company was running the classified UFO program and contacted it to gain access:

EWD: What happened with you found contractor?

TW: I made several calls (end of May ’97), first to Paul, Mike & Perry to confirm I had right contractor and program manager to talk to.

EWD: They confirm?

TW: Yes.

EWD: Then?

TW: (End of May ’97) Made three calls to the program manager – one of them conference call with security director and corporate attorney.

Confusion on their part at to why I was looking for them and what I wanted from them or wanted to know about.

Very testy tone from all of them. [Transcript/Summary, pp. 8-9]

Wilson next explains how he was denied access to the classified UFO program by the three corporate officials (program manager, security director, and attorney):

TW: I told threesome I wanted formal briefing, tour, etc. – was exploiting my regulatory authority as Deputy Director DIA/Assistant Joint Chief of Staff J-2 – Told them my not being briefed was oversight they needed to correct – I demanded!

TW: They needed to discuss this (his demand) so hung up. Got called 2 days later and they said they don’t want to talk on phone and arranged for face-to-face meeting at their facility.

EWD: Did you go?

TW: Yes, ten days later (mid-June or so). Flew out there

      • Met in their conference room in their secure vault
      • Three of them show up

EWD: 3 guys with whom you had telecon?

TW: Yes, same 3

      • Security director (NSA-retired, a CI expert)
      • Program director
      • Corporate attorney
      • Called themselves “the watch committee” or gate keepers [Transcript/Summary, p. 10]

Wilson describes how the “watch committee” told him about a prior incident years ago where the present security system was set up after an agreement was reached with the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs Oversight Committee (SAPOC), which was overhauled in 1994, very likely due to the incident Wilson was told about. The agreement gave the corporate contractor running certain categories of SAPs the authority to restrict access to UFO related programs from Pentagon officials regardless of their rank and position:

– [TW] Said after that episode a formal agreement was struck with Pentagon people (SAPOC) to prevent this in future – didn’t want a repeat

–      Special criteria were established in agreement

      • A special circumstance that must meet rigorous access criteria set by contractor committee
      • No USG personnel are to gain access unless they met the criteria – to be administered by contractor committee (program director, attorney, security director) irregardless of the tickets and position USG personnel possess
      • Literally their way or the highway. [Transcript/Summary p. 11]

The “watch committee” told Admiral Wilson that despite him being Deputy Director of the DIA and Vice Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he was not on the “bigot list” – those with a “need to know” access – who could be briefed about the UFO program:

TW: They said my tickets were all confirmed and valid, but I was not on the bigot list

      • My tickets alone were not enough
      • I didn’t meet the special criteria so need to know authorization was not being granted….

TW: Argued more – they wouldn’t accept my arguments that they fell under my statutory oversight and regulatory authority as Deputy Director DIA – under purview for my right to have need to know (oversight, audit, justification issues, etc., etc.)

      • Regulatory and statutory authority as Deputy Director DIA not relevant or pertinent to nature of their program!
      • Then they pulled out their bigot list to convince me otherwise – several pages long – dated 1990, updated 1993. [Transcript/Summary, pp. 11-12]

The transcription goes on to cover Wilson and Davis’ conversation about names on the bigot list, and who in the Pentagon and White House was allowed access:

EWD: Who was on it? Recognize names?

TW: That is core secret.

Willing to say that most were program employees – names and titles (job titles) – civilians – didn’t recognize any military personnel – could be there.

EWD: Any politicians?

TW: No

      • No White House names, no President!
      • No Congressional people
      • No Congressional staffers

EDW: Any in Clinton or Bush Sr. Administrations?

TW: No! But handful of names were Pentagon individuals I recognized – few from OUSDAT, one from another department, another at the NSC who is Pentagon SES employee. [Transcript/Summary, p. 12]

Stunningly, Wilson learned that no members of the Legislative (Congress) or Executive (White House) branches of government were briefed about the corporate UFO program. Only a few Pentagon officials were given access. This corroborates what Greer and others have been claiming for decades over the unconstitutional nature of the secrecy system developed for the UFO issue.

Next, the transcript elaborates on how Wilson tried to gain access by identifying the type of program that was underway attempting to link it to his official field of responsibility as Deputy Director DIA:

– [TW] Program Manager said they were

      • Not any weapons program
      • Not any intelligence program
      • Not any special ops or logistics program
      • Doesn’t fit these categories [Transcript/Summary, p. 12]

Finally, Wilson was told that the UFO program was a reverse engineering program of a recovered extraterrestrial vehicle, exactly what Greer, Mitchell, and Miller, had told him at the April 10, 1997 meeting. Importantly, Wilson expressed his surprise thinking that the UFO term was merely a cover for acquired foreign aerospace technology built by the USSR or China:

      • I asked what they were then
      • Loud groan from Program Manager
      • Security Director and attorney say it’s okay to say it.

EWD: Say what?

TW: There were a reverse engineering program –

      • Something recovered years ago in the past
      • Technological hardware was recovered
      • So I thought they meant recovered Soviet/Chinese, etc. hardware and reverse engineer it – like a missile or intel platform or aircraft – actually came to meeting expecting to find a sensitive foreign collection and reverse engineering operation – thought “UFOs” used as a cover for that –
      • So I said that and they said they weren’t that either
      • They had (program manager talking) a craft – an intact craft they believed could fly …
      • Program manager said they didn’t know where it was from [they had some ideas on this] – it was technology that was not of this Earth – not made by man – not by human hands [Transcript/Summary, pp. 12-13]

Wilson next described that he was told the corporation had encountered great difficulty in its reverse engineering efforts:

      • [TW] Said they were trying to understand and exploit technology: their program was going on for years and years with very slow progress
      • Agonizingly slow with little or no success – painful lack of collaboration to get help from outside community of experts and facilities to assist effort – must remain isolated and use own facilities and cleared personnel – tough environment to work – about 400-800 (bigot list count) workers varying in number funding or personnel changes. [Transcript/Summary, pp. 12-13]

When Wilson threatened to go to the Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC) he was told to go ahead by the corporate “watch committee” and was eventually denied access by the Senior Review Group running SAPOC Pentagon committee set up to oversee Special Access Programs:

TW: Before last week of June (’97)

      • They told me (TW) that they were sustaining the contractor, that I was to immediately drop the matter and let it go – forget about it as I did not have purview over their project, it didn’t fall within my oversight, etc.
      • I became very angry – started yelling when should have kept my mouth shut…
      • … Senior Review Group chairman said if I didn’t follower their suggestion that I would not see Director DIA promotion, get early retirement, lose 1 or 2 stars along the way
      • Really incredibly angry – upset over this – livid!!!
      • Why such a big deal over this considering the position of trust I have in the Pentagon – I do have relevant regulatory/statutory authority over their program – that’s my position!!! [Transcript/Summary, p. 14]

The refusal to grant access was the critical moment that Wilson realized that the corporation was being supported by a powerful group linked to the Pentagon to hide the corporation’s reverse engineering of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, as an Unacknowledged/waived SAP, hidden within the labyrinth of conventional SAPs conducted by the Pentagon and its corporate contractors.

The refusal was ultimately why Wilson believed that a UFO cabal/ MJ-12 was in charge of UFO related projects, and even senior officials at the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were out of the loop. This is what he told Commander Miller back in June 1997, who in turn relayed Wilson’s conclusions to Steven Greer and Edgar Mitchell who respectively revealed more details over the next two decades.

[To be continued in Part 3. Click here for Part 1]

© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice

[Note: The 15 page leaked Document is available here]

Further Reading

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