Thomas R. Wilson is a retired United States Navy admiral whose intelligence career included service as Vice Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff,1 Director of Intelligence for the United States Atlantic Command,2 and Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support at the Central Intelligence Agency.3 He went on to become the 13th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).4 In 1997, Wilson was Deputy Director of the DIA and Assistant Joint Chief of Staff for Intelligence (J-2), reporting to DIA Director Patrick Hughes.5 As a Vice Admiral that year, he was responsible for briefing the generals who advised the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.6
In April 1997, Edgar Mitchell’s renown as an astronaut opened the way for a briefing with Wilson, then Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.7 Ahead of the visit, Steven Greer sent Wilson’s staff a leaked US National Reconnaissance Office document listing codenames for Special Access Programs (SAPs).8 Greer, Willard Miller and Edgar Mitchell then gave the briefing in a Pentagon conference room, with Admiral Mike Crawford and General Hughes also present.9 Wilson met with the UAP researchers at the Pentagon that year.10 Greer, Miller and Mitchell were convinced they had presented Wilson with strong witness evidence supporting their belief that the US government was covering up alien visitations, recovered spacecraft and bodies, and technological breakthroughs derived from those discoveries.11 Mitchell later confirmed to friends that the meeting had happened as Greer described it.12 In 1998, Greer and Miller were invited back to the DIA to brief Hughes, by then Director and Wilson’s immediate superior, on UFOs.13
A document that later circulated online, referred to as The Admiral Wilson Memo or “EWD Notes”, purports to detail what Wilson admitted to Eric Davis during a private conversation in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2002.14 According to the document, Davis met the recently retired DIA Director in a car parked in the car park of a corporate office building in Las Vegas on 2002-10-16, in what is termed the 2002 Eric Davis-Tom Wilson Las Vegas meeting.15 Davis’s notes record Wilson arriving ten minutes late to the meeting at the EG&G building, accompanied by two uniformed Navy officers, while he himself wore civilian clothing.16 The document has Wilson saying he was taking a risk in talking to Davis, trusting the word of Oke Shannon,17 and that Rich and Doug had vouched for Davis through a shared Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) connection.18 It also has Wilson recalling that the subject discussed between Shannon and Miller had included a Boston Globe story on UFOs, crashed and retrieved craft and bodies, and an alleged Majestic 12 (MJ-12)-like organisation.19
According to the document, Wilson had been told in 1994 of a special projects record group, a subset of unacknowledged, carve-out and waived programmes organised outside the usual SAP structure by William Perry.20 General M. Ward suggested he search the records of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OUSDAT),21 and Wilson said Perry gave him the same advice when he raised the matter in May 1997.22 He talked to both Paul Kaminski, then Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics,23 and Michael Kostelnik, director of special programmes within OUSDAT as reorganised by Perry in 1994.24 At the end of May 1997, Wilson called Kaminski, Kostelnik and Perry to confirm he had identified the right contractor and programme manager.25 In mid-June 1997, during his investigation, he flew to meet three people in a secure vault conference room at the contractor’s facility.26 The three - a security director who was a retired NSA counterintelligence expert, a programme director, and a corporate attorney - called themselves the watch committee, or gatekeepers.27 The document has the Watch Committee producing a Contractor bigot list (dated 1990, updated 1993), several pages long, to argue that Wilson’s DIA authority was not relevant to their programme.28 Wilson described the contractor as an aerospace technology firm, one of the top such firms in the United States,29 and said he was told the reverse-engineering programme was built around technological hardware recovered years earlier.30 The document also has Jacques Gansler, then Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, telling Wilson that UFOs are real but that alleged alien abductions are not.31
The document states that on his return to Washington, Wilson complained to Senior Review Group members overseeing the programme inside the Pentagon.32 It states that members of the group told him they would sustain the contractor’s denial of his access to the programme.33 It quotes him confirming he came close to being disciplined over the affair34 and describes him becoming very angry and yelling during the meeting.35 He is quoted saying he was warned that pressing the matter would cost him promotion to Director of the DIA36 and could mean losing one or two stars in rank.37
For more than a year after the EWD Notes document was first published online, Wilson made no public comment on it.38 Asked about it at an Arlington Institute address in February 2020, Harold E. Puthoff said Wilson was one of the joint chiefs of staff interviewed by his colleague Davis, but declined to comment further.39 As rumours of an imminent New York Times story mounted in June 2020, Wilson issued a strong denial that any such meeting with Davis had ever happened,40 stating in his denial letter that the entire memo, including its characterisation of his attitude, emotions and sentiments toward other people, was pure fiction.41 He denied ever visiting Las Vegas in 2002 or meeting Davis,42 saying the only time he had been in Las Vegas was for a Carrier Air Wing Three deployment to Nellis Air Force Base in 1979 or 1980.43 Journalist Ross Coulthart found no one able to confirm the document’s authenticity on the record,44 and concluded that, absent a senior Department of Defense official, Davis, Wilson or Puthoff going on record to affirm it, its claims should be treated with extreme scepticism and as a hoax document until proved otherwise.45 Wilson has categorically denied that the meeting described in the memo ever took place.46