Eric Davis is an astrophysicist with high-level national security clearances who has worked as a contractor alongside Harold E. Puthoff on US government-funded research into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), including the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) and its successor, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).1 He holds a very high top-secret compartmentalised security clearance.2 Since December 2019 he has been employed by the federally funded Aerospace Corporation,3 where he works on classified government projects.4 Davis has repeatedly asserted knowledge of an ongoing cover-up inside the US government of recovered alien craft and attempts to reverse-engineer them.5
In 1996, while on secondment from the University of Maryland at a United States Air Force (USAF) fighter wing in South Korea, Davis read an advertisement in a physics magazine seeking research scientists interested in the foundations of spacetime, the universe and the physics of consciousness.6 He began work for Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science in July 1996,7 and within weeks had his first anomalous experience at Skinwalker Ranch.8 Davis saw a craft through the kitchen window there that descended and remained illuminated in front of the background mountain range, some 48 kilometres to the west,9 and watched its amber light descend below tree level, glimpsing it at ground level through the trees, where it stayed visible for half an hour.10 In November 1996, sitting with fellow scientist Colm Kelleher on the ranch-house’s back porch, he saw a similarly lit craft hurtle out from above a nearby bluff and execute a sharp, high-speed 90-degree turn directly above them.11 On another occasion, in the corner of a field, Davis saw a gigantic pair of eyes at the top of a tree, too large and too far apart for a cat and higher than a cat would climb.12 He alerted Kelleher and ranch manager Terry Sherman, and all three then saw a creature the size of a bear or a cow jump down in front of them;13 Sherman fired multiple shots into it at point-blank range, and it did not flinch but walked off into the shrubs and disappeared,14 with no footprints or blood found afterwards.15 Davis said these experiences convinced him the phenomenon was real,16 and that he had concluded the ranch’s activity was the work of a sentient non-human intelligence that consistently avoided detection by the scientists’ cameras.17 He was also at pains to debunk UAP claims when he could,18 and, according to In Plain Sight, National Institute for Discovery Science documents found in the Edgar Mitchell archive show that, while with the institute, he investigated a supposed alien attack and landing in Montana and concluded it was a hoax.19
Former NIDS scientist Davis was brought into Robert Bigelow’s investigation team working on AATIP,20 and was later one of only three contractors - alongside Puthoff and William “Will” Livingston - who remained involved with the programme under Luis Elizondo and Jim Semivan.21 His team was responsible for the covert investigation into the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter.22 In a 2018 interview on Coast to Coast AM with George Knapp, Davis said the “Threat” in AATIP’s name referred to the fact that the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) phenomenon had interfered with operations and had officially been branded a threat requiring study.23 He told Knapp, discussing his work on the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) contract, that there were recovered extra-terrestrial craft whose existence had not yet been revealed publicly,24 and that the recovered material had been analysed but that the available laboratory diagnostic technologies, materials science and understanding of physics were not advanced enough to make sense of it.25 Davis has said his DIA-funded investigation concluded that the 2004 Tic Tac UAP was a legitimate unidentified object under intelligent control, using an advanced technology not made on Earth by humans,26 and suggested the phenomenon remained a mystery to his superiors at the DIA, who needed to act because it was interfering with US military deployments at sea and in the air.27 He also suggested to Knapp’s listeners that the 1947 Roswell crash was a genuine crashed extra-terrestrial spacecraft, saying that “if you’re going to throw your bets on Roswell, your bet is really good”,28 and cited the 5 December 1950 “Del Rio” case, an alleged extra-terrestrial craft crash near Del Rio, Texas, subsequently recovered by the USAF.29
Davis has told journalist Ross Coulthart that the US had so far failed to reverse-engineer the alien craft it had recovered.30 He briefed United States Department of Defense (DoD) agencies and staff members of both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the government’s possession of off-world vehicles,31 and has told the US Congress in private briefings that the technology propelling the Tic Tac, Go-Fast and Gimbal UAP is off-world vehicles not made on Earth.32 Davis discussed the matter with The New York Times in a July 2020 interview, saying the US held recovered physical UAP samples33 and that examination of the material had so far failed to determine its source, leading him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves."34 He told the newspaper he had given a classified briefing to a Defence Department agency in March 2020 about retrievals from off-world vehicles not made on this earth.35 According to Jonathan Caplan, Davis has described a conversation with George Herbert Walker Bush in which Bush said that on becoming director of the CIA he was briefed about a landing at Holloman Air Force Base.36 Caplan’s account has the briefing involving a number of uniformed and CIA officers, at which a non-human individual of Nordic appearance emerged from a craft and met with them.37 Elizondo has said Davis has an eidetic memory, remembering details beyond normal human capabilities,38 and that Davis has long consulted for aerospace and defense contractors including EarthTech, the company Puthoff founded.39 Elizondo also recalled that Davis was known to wear Hawaiian shirts in settings where others wore suits,40 and that he and Puthoff built a gravity device sensitive enough to detect the gravity field of a car parked in an adjacent lot.41
Davis had already met and spoken with Thomas Wilson, then Director of Intelligence (J2) for the Joint Staff, in the late 1990s, according to Elizondo,42 who has said Wilson confided details of an earlier encounter with an aerospace contractor to Davis and never spoke of it again, even after the two men’s memo later leaked.43 The formal meeting took place on 2002-10-16: Rich directed Davis to the EG&G Special Projects building at Grier and Paradise in Nevada Las Vegas for a 10:00 meeting,44 where Wilson arrived ten minutes late, accompanied by two Navy officers in uniform, while wearing civilian clothes himself.45 The two men then sat and talked in Wilson’s car until 11:20, while others attended a meeting inside the building.46 Wilson’s visit to Las Vegas had been arranged by the National Nuclear Security Administration and organised by Rich and Doug, both Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) members whom Wilson said Davis knew;47 Rich and Doug had earlier sent Wilson copies of Davis’s NASA papers and material on wormholes,48 along with his PACAF orders, US identification and Lockheed slides.49 Davis had also shown Wilson a letter from Willard Miller dated 2002-04-25, for his evaluation.50 Wilson nonetheless had his own office run a background check on Davis, which came back clear of derogatory items, noting a good record from his service in South Korea and the trust of the Air Force,51 and the AFIO’s Washington, D.C. membership, some by then in Las Vegas, vouched for him.52 Wilson recalled a 1999 phone call from Oke Shannon in which Shannon had supported Davis.53 The notes of the meeting record Wilson warning Davis that if he violated Wilson’s trust, Wilson would deny meeting him and deny everything said, and would not meet with any more uncleared people about the subject, calling it more tightly held than anything he had encountered in the black programmes community.54 Davis said he intended to keep the information for private research, to track the UFO story and gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in media and government reporting.55
The document that resulted, now commonly known as The Admiral Wilson Memo, carries the real title “EWD Notes” - Davis’s own initials.56 Puthoff was Davis’s employer at the time of the meeting.57 Wilson has since categorically denied that the meeting, part of the 2002 Eric Davis-Tom Wilson Las Vegas meeting, ever took place.58 As rumours of an imminent New York Times story mounted in June 2020, he issued a strong denial,59 and in a formal 2020-06 Tom Wilson denial letter that month he called the entire memo, including its characterisation of his attitudes and sentiments about other people, “pure fiction”,60 stating that he had never formally or informally requested access to the Special Access Programs the notes describe and had participated in no such meetings,61 and separately denying that he had visited Las Vegas in 2002 or ever met Davis.62 He acknowledged occasionally meeting some of the people named in the memo, but not on anything related to its content.63 Puthoff, asked about the memo at an Arlington Institute address in February 2020, said it had been leaked on the internet and that Wilson was one of the joint chiefs of staff interviewed by Davis, declining to comment further because it discussed potentially ongoing programmes;64 he later told Keith Basterfield that he had not meant to confirm that the interview and notes were authentic.65 Oke Shannon, said to have facilitated contact between the two men, told journalist Billy Cox that he did not know the document’s provenance or whether it was genuine, but that he knew both Wilson and Davis and considered Wilson an honourable man;66 Shannon did not deny to Cox that he had facilitated a meeting between them or that it had happened.67 Davis has himself declined to authenticate the notes: he told New York Post journalist Steven Greenstreet that they “were leaked out of Ed Mitchell’s estate and there’s nothing I can say about it”,68 describing them as “purportedly classified information” he was “not at liberty to confirm or verify any aspect of” because of his security clearances,69 and said he had said all he wanted to say publicly about his claims of recovered extra-terrestrial debris.70 Journalist Ross Coulthart has written that no one who should know about the purported meeting was prepared to confirm the memo’s authenticity on the record,71 and that, absent such confirmation, its claims must be treated with extreme scepticism as a hoax document until proved otherwise.72