Wilson–Davis memo

Wilson–Davis memo
Created	April 10, 2002
Location	Available from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6185702-Eric-Davis-meeting-with-Adm-Wilson/
Author	Eric W. Davis
Media type	Meeting notes (paraphrased)
Subject	Denied access to SAP; UAP reverse engineering

The Wilson–Davis memo is a 15-page document purportedly recording a private meeting on April 9–10, 2002 between Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson — then recently retired as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency — and astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, in which Wilson described his 1997 attempt to gain access to a classified special access program (SAP) connected to crash retrieval of a non-human craft, and the refusal he received from the private contractor running the program. If authentic, it constitutes the most specific first-hand account by a senior U.S. military official of a privately held UAP reverse engineering program operating outside normal congressional oversight.

Background

According to the document, in April 1997, UFO researcher Steven Greer arranged a meeting at the Pentagon with Wilson, then Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell and Navy Commander Willard Miller. At that meeting, Greer briefed Wilson on what he believed were unauthorized black-budget programs handling extraterrestrial technology beyond government oversight. After the formal meeting, Miller stayed behind and spoke privately with Wilson about UFO cover-up operations; Wilson subsequently indicated he would investigate.

Over the following two months Wilson worked through the Pentagon's Special Access Program oversight office (OUSD/SAP), eventually locating a deeply nested program run by a private aerospace contractor, believed by researcher Richard Dolan to be Lockheed Martin. Wilson contacted the program manager, asserting that as Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs he had oversight authority; the program manager agreed to a meeting. At that meeting, Wilson was told the program involved reverse engineering of an alien craft "not made by man, not by human hands, not of this world," with painfully slow progress reported.

Wilson requested access and was refused. The contractors showed him a 'bigot list' of approximately 500 names, almost all from private corporate contractors. Wilson commented that he did not see any members of Congress or even the President on the list. The contractors stated that Wilson had no "need to know" and that his complaint would result in the end of his career advancement; Wilson subsequently backed down, went on to become DIA director, and retired in 2002. Coulthart later confirmed independently that the April 1997 meeting had taken place with five witnesses present, and that Wilson had made admissions there about his inability to access UAP-related information. In a 2006 phone call, when Dolan read him the relevant passage from Greer’s book describing the denied-access episode, Wilson acknowledged “that part is true” before ending the call abruptly. When the document became public in 2019, Wilson publicly denied in a letter to Coulthart that any such meeting with Davis had ever taken place.

Wilson–Davis meeting

In 2002, following Wilson's retirement from the DIA, physicist Eric W. Davis — then affiliated with the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) under Robert Bigelow, and associated with colleagues including Hal Puthoff, Kit Green, and Edgar Mitchell — was sent to interview Wilson. According to Dolan, the meeting took place in a car park at EG&G, a defense contractor facility in Las Vegas. Wilson emphasised more than once that he wanted Davis to keep the information private. He was described as 'furious' that Miller had leaked their previous conversation (resulting in a Boston Globe article and mockery from colleagues) and said that if Davis leaked their conversation he would deny that it ever happened.

Davis typed up 13 pages of paraphrased notes from the conversation and distributed them to NIDS colleagues including Puthoff, Green, and Mitchell (along with a two-page letter he had received from Miller earlier). The document records Wilson's account of his 1997 denied-access experience and includes Davis's technical commentary on what the reverse-engineering program involved, including a non-human intelligence vehicle and biological material. The notes were described by Dolan, who was shown two or three pages of the document by an unnamed NIDS associate in 2006, as matching the later leaked version precisely. In an interview with Stephen Greenstreet for the New York Post's The Basement Office series, Davis made several statements that Coulthart characterized as near-admissions without crossing a legal line; Coulthart argued that his failure to issue a flat denial — despite holding a top-secret SCI clearance requiring protection against false dissemination — was the most conspicuous aspect of the affair. Hal Puthoff and Kit Green, both recipients of the notes, offered what Dolan described as unusually apologetic non-comments when asked about the document.

Public distribution and reaction

Following Mitchell's death in February 2016, his personal papers were preserved by a family member rather than discarded. According to journalist Ross Coulthart, who gained access to Mitchell's private UFO archives through their custodian, the document was faxed by Hal Puthoff to Mitchell and the original remained in Mitchell's estate.

The document was circulated among a small number of researchers beginning in November 2018, when Grant Cameron received it; Australian researcher James Rigby passed it to Cameron and Dolan. Dolan subsequently described it as "the UFO leak of the century."

Coulthart, in his 2021 book In Plain Sight, concluded that the document’s provenance was solid — originating from Mitchell’s estate and authored by Davis — but stopped short of asserting the events it describes are factually accurate, absent on-record confirmation from either principal. If accurate, it would mean that technology “rightfully the possession of the American people, if not the human race” had been privatized into a single aerospace company’s control with minimal government oversight, with the reverse-engineering effort hampered by extreme secrecy preventing scientists from sharing findings. Dolan argued that the combination of Wilson’s partial phone-call admission, the physical provenance from Mitchell’s estate, the non-denials from Davis and Puthoff, and the corroborating testimony of multiple named participants made the document “the UFO leak of the century.”

Davis later worked as a contractor for the Pentagon on UAP-related studies and was reported by The New York Times to have briefed members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on crash-retrieval programs in 2020 — a briefing confirmed by those senators.

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