Call your first witness

Admiral Wilson still waiting for his followup interview

See No Evil and Hear No Evil plead ignorance at a UFO hearing on Capitol Hill in 2022: Will the Pentagon ever take a formal position on the Wilson Memo?

In May 2022, during the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than half a century, Rep. Mike Gallagher entered the so-called Wilson Memo into the Congressional Record, primarily for the benefit of a two-man audience. Charged with getting the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence up to snuff on the UFO/UAP mystery, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray instead sat granite-faced while claiming they knew nothing about the firestorm of controversy raging on the Internet since it popped up in 2019.

Also known as Core Secrets and the Smoking Gun for their exquisitely detailed inclusion of names, dates and places, the Wilson Memo is a 15-page set of notes and correspondence concerning clandestine and possibly unlawful government programs involving the attempted exploitation of UFO technology.

Those transcripts describe an alleged meeting between physicist Eric Davis and Thomas Wilson, the vice admiral who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency until retiring three months before the two crossed paths in Las Vegas in 2002. During their conversation, the admiral vents his outrage with Davis over being personally rebuffed by the defense contractor in charge of a reverse-engineering program when he tried to learn more about the classified project. Even worse, Wilson’s Pentagon colleagues sustained the unnamed corporation’s objections.

The notes, purportedly written by Davis either during or immediately after the meeting, also indicate that, if word of their encounter ever leaked, Davis would clam up and Wilson would deny it ever happened. Davis has declined to comment since the documents dropped online four years ago, and Wilson has repeatedly denied knowing Eric Davis.

Waiting in plain sight

Last month, 36-year-old former National Geospatial-intelligence Agency analyst David Grusch revived the Wilson Memo scenario when, behind the shield of recently enacted whistleblower immunity, he told the media about having discovered back-engineering projects involving UFO tech and private corporations. As with the Wilson Memo, reprisals were threated if he continued to press for answers. Grusch, however, kept asking questions, claimed to have suffered retaliation, and filed a formal complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General last year. Alarmed by the IG’s representation of Grusch’s allegations as “credible and urgent,” lawmakers are planning to follow the money. Late Thursday, the NY Times awoke from its coma to announce Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s campaign to declassify UFO material.

But just how far is Congress willing to go when the rubber hits the road?

That’s what Wilson wants to know.

“The only thing I wonder about is why, as all this moves along, why Congress hasn’t said, ‘We’d like to hear from Admiral Wilson, because he’s supposed to be the Wilson Memo guy,’ right?”

Still recovering from emergency back surgery, the former director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Directorate for Intelligence admits Grusch’s allegations haven’t commanded his full attention; in fact, when asked about them in a brief phoner this week, Wilson said he wasn’t even certain he knew the latest whistleblower’s name. But he repeated his own assertions that, if invited to testify, “I can tell you this – I don’t need any nondisclosure oath protection.”

While conceding that he’d entertained an appeal in 1997 from Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell to search for classified UFO programs, Wilson has long denied that he ever conducted such an investigation, stating he was too busy with earthly threats to chase the white rabbit of high strangeness. But Grusch’s closed-door delivery of secret-program evidence to Congress raises at least one question: Did Wilson wish he had been more inquisitive 26 years ago and not blown it off?

Please hold for crickets . . .

“Look, I had a job to do – it was a big one and it was overwhelming,” said Wilson, who claims the UFO controversy never once crossed his desk. “And I did that job.” But when asked if a top insider for the JCS is required to get a need-to-know clearance in order to assess the status of outsourced R&D on recovered non-human vehicles, Wilson appeared to hedge:

“Well, the things I needed to know were related to national security, military operations, intelligence, all that kinda stuff. And I’m not sure anybody felt like I . . . I . . . well, I don’t even know that there are such programs, these dark programs. Nobody ever, y’know, suggested I get signed in and talk to them.”

Has Congress been suckered into a snipe hunt?

“I don’t know if they’re on a fool’s errand or not because I don’t know the information that they have,” Wilson replied. “It is a little bit surprising, if you consider all the things that have happened in the past, that they haven’t delivered much evidence for what was being claimed.”

Wilson says he’s still waiting for a callback from Capitol Hill. Maybe it was last year, or maybe 2021, but he was contacted by a legislative staffer whose affiliation he can’t remember. Maybe it was the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe they didn’t like what he had to say.

“I just know there are – I’m pretty sure there are – zealots on this one side, and sometimes I wonder if you speak the truth and the truth doesn’t agree with what they believe, they don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

Wilson remains puzzled by the crickets that have greeted his consent to speak under oath. “If anybody ever particularly invited me to testify or meet with them about the Wilson Memo and things like that, I would’ve been more than willing to do so,” he says. “But nobody ever did.”

This Wilson Memo business is either a diversionary fraud or the contextual framework for Grusch’s complaint. It needs to be dispensed with ASAP or employed as evidence. And at 77, the admiral is getting no younger. Is anyone in Congress paying attention, or have they forgotten already?