Reviving the W-D Memo

Elizondo, Wilson at odds over reverse engineering notes

Thanks to the media blitz attending Luis Elizondo’s bestselling Imminent: Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, there’s a new buzz reinvigorating those unremitting allegations of UFO crash-retrieval/reverse-engineering operations. Wonder how Congress, the Defense Department, and the new director of its UFO PR wing — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — will weasel out of this one.

Just last March, AARO assured us in writing that the subterranean alien-tech lab storyline was all bullshit. It tried squelching the debate in its “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”:

“AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” it wrote. “AARO determined, based on all information provided to date, that claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology, are inaccurate.” Furthermore, said inaccuracies are “the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals . . . who have been involved in various UAP-related endeavors since at least 2009.”

Without citing a single person, known location, technological test or document or specific lead of any kind, the DoD nevertheless hoped this splash of paint might be enough to make suspicious lawmakers buzz off. After all, things got a little tight for dark-world program managers in 2022 when, during the first UFO/UAP hearing on Capitol Hill in more than half a century, Rep. Mike Gallagher submitted the so-called Wilson-Davis Memo into the Congressional Record.

Surfacing publicly in 2019, the controversial entry was the alleged transcript of a 2002 in-person conversation between just-retired Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and physicist Eric Davis, the presumptive author of the notes. According to the Memo, while sitting in the back seat of a car outside an EG&G office in Las Vegas, Wilson spilled his guts.

Tell it to the hand

Following a meeting in 1997 at the Pentagon with Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell and researcher Steven Greer, Wilson said he went looking for evidence of a UFO coverup his guests insisted had been underway for decades. The infuriated admiral told Davis he actually found it, a private corporation in possession of a recovered craft, and attempting to create its own version. Not only did Wilson say he was denied access to the site because he didn’t have a “need to know,” he said he was threatened with career repercussions if he kept pressing. Wilson was, at the time, next in line for the DIA directorship.

According to the notes, if word of their meeting ever leaked out, both agreed to deny it.

Elizondo revives the controversy in Imminent and calls Davis “one of the greatest living researchers and one of the most honest men I have ever known.” In supporting the credibility of the Memo, he calls its implications an assault on democracy:

“These companies truly have more power than the government officials who are supposed to be overseeing them. In reality, these officials get no oversight or awareness at all. Defense contractors’ iron lock on UAP materials supersedes any kind of normal or routine security protocol in the government.”

Ever since the allegations of his meeting with Mitchell surfaced on “Larry King Live” on CNN in 2008, Wilson has conceded he met with and listened to the astronaut’s charges, but denied he ever went digging for hidden UFO programs. When the Memo broke online in 2019, he denied knowing Davis and dismissed the notes as fiction.

Davis never publicly addressed his role in the documents until a Facebook post this week, when he admitted to being the author. But just how accurate is the intricately detailed Memo?

‘I don’t recall . . . I just don’t know’

I tried reaching out to as many named sources as possible five years ago. One of them, Navy veteran and former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Oke Shannon, was credited for having introduced Davis to Wilson. Wilson said he didn’t know Davis or Shannon. Shannon begged to differ: “Let’s just leave it at the fact that I do know both of these gentlemen. Tom Wilson is an honorable man. And if this has embarrassed Tom Wilson, I am really sorry.”

According to the Memo, Wilson turned to the DoD’s Special Access Program Oversight Committee in hopes that SAPOC would override the unnamed corporation’s refusal to read Wilson in on the program. Retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chair Joseph Ralson said he didn’t remember ever discussing UFOs with Wilson. “I don’t recall specifically anything about that in 1997,” Ralston said. “It could’ve happened, I just don’t know.”

The Memo states that, in 1997, Wilson got then-Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology Paul Kaminsky to verify the name of the reverse-engineering company that locked him out. Twenty-two years later, Kaminsky wasn’t so sure. “I don’t think I knew Admiral Wilson. I don’t recall him,” Kaminsky said. Then again, the former director of Low Observables Technology for the USAF offered up a little fudge: “I wasn’t aware of all programs. So it’s certainly possible there was something that was special access and there wasn’t a need to know.”

I followed another lead to Kaminsky’s successor, Noel Longuemare. The blogosphere was popping over Wilson’s alleged assertion about what happened after he complained about SAPOC’s decision to sustain the corporation’s smackdown. According to the Memo, the Senior Review Group chairman threatened to sabotage Wilson’s impending promotion and strip him of a star or two if he kept it up. Who was the SRG chair? The trolls winnowed it down to Longuemare, who did in fact slide into the DepSecDef’s job in 1997 when Kaminsky retired.

But Philip Klass was great!

Longuemare responded to my query with a brief and squirrely email. He knew nothing about the Wilson controversy, and steered me in another direction. “There was,” he wrote, “a high level Senior Review Group (not 100 percent on the title) chaired by the DepSecDef that had higher level Executive Oversight of a selected number of key DoD activities.” So yeah, maybe somebody else made the call — but not him. Longuemare then lost me altogether when he heaped unsolicited praise on the late propagandist/debunker Philip Klass for conducting “very credible work” on UFOs.

The source I really wanted to reach was USAF Maj. Gen. Mike Kostelnik, described in the Memo as the SAPOC director during the Wilson kerfuffle. The one publicly listed number I found for him was disconnected after the Memo story broke. Last I heard, Mike, you were still living near Eglin AFB. Call me!

But if Wilson’s colleagues in the Pentagon were merely being evasive, what about the Memo characters known only as “Doug & Rich”? Davis’ notes credited them for actually setting up the meeting in Las Vegas with Wilson. They turned out to be Richard Cohn and Doug Nousen. Both were living in Vegas in 2002. Members of the local chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, they had worked together at the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

According to the Memo, both had urged Wilson to meet with the AFIO’s newest member, Eric Davis, to discuss job prospects. “Rich/Doug talked about you,” Wilson allegedly told Davis, “phoned from DC – sent me copies of your NASA papers and other related – wormholes your thing.”

When I contacted Cohn and Nousen two years ago, both flat-out declared they didn’t know Admiral Wilson, barely knew Davis, and certainly wouldn’t have facilitated a meeting between those two. Added Cohn, “It’s doubtful that I would be in a position to vouch for him because, when it comes to attesting whether or not someone is trustworthy enough to be in a position of trust to the government, I did not know him that well.”

‘The memo is legit’ — Elizondo

Anyhow, over the Labor Day weekend, Wilson reiterated his longstanding contention that the only accurate fact in the Wilson-Davis Memo was the bit about him meeting Edgar Mitchell. Everything else was fake and he wouldn’t know what Eric Davis even looks like. He hadn’t read Imminent, but what got his attention were the nine world-class defense contractors – Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc. – that Elizondo rattled off as chief suspects in the UFO “Legacy Program.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that, no,” Wilson said. “It would surprise me if there were that many companies involved in that kind of research and there weren’t dozens and dozens of people there who were leaking information or talking about it. Major defense contractors certainly have clout. But I think keeping something secret like this buried in this day and age is almost impossible.

“There may be UFOs or there may have been some sort of crash – I mean, I have no idea. I just don’t know what the motivation is to keep this story alive. I just don’t believe it.”

Elizondo, however, reiterates what Wilson’s critics have said for years.

“The memo is legit. Confirmed to me by someone who was there,” Elizondo wrote in an email before Davis ‘fessed up. “With that said, I am completely sympathetic to Wilson’s concerns and fear. If he admits the memo is real, a Counterintelligence investigation would be opened on him and others for having a classified discussion outside of a SCIF (in this case the back seat of a car).  I get it….”

In its “Report for the Historical Record,” AARO claimed it “conducted approximately 30 interviews,” but without revealing any names. Wilson, however, said he was one of them. He was interviewed on an open phone line last year by two AARO reps, a civilian and a lieutenant colonel. “And I told them the same thing I’ve been telling you and everybody else over the years,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll find any deviation.”

He says AARO sent transcripts of his statements for him to sign for accuracy. Wilson says he told them the same thing he shared with an inquiring Senate staffer before AARO caught up with him — but he never received an invitation to meet with anyone on the Hill. He then reaffirmed his willingness in 2022 to testify under oath, without a promise of immunity.

“I think (the Senate) called me about (the Memo) because somebody still has the mistaken impression that what I have said about it is only because I’m trying to not violate a secrecy agreement that I have,” Wilson said two years ago. “I told them that wasn’t the case. You know, there’s a lot of state secrets I could talk about, but not on this issue.”

Which begs another question – did AARO reach out to Eric Davis as well before concluding the reverse-engineering narrative was bunk? Davis didn’t respond to a query for comment.

Well, AARO’s got a new guy now, former National Security Agency Research Directorate official Jon Kosloski. Fortunately, coming on the heels of obstructionist Sean Kirkpatrick, he doesn’t have a tough act to follow. But if Kosloski decides to take the Wilson-Davis Memo seriously enough to conduct a transparent investigation, I’ll eat my hat.