Imagine being one of the most senior intelligence officers in the United States, with the authority to audit some of the Pentagon’s most closely guarded spending, and being told that one programme is off limits to you. Not because of a clearance technicality, but because the people running it had arranged things so that even you couldn’t look.
That is, in essence, the story told by a set of notes known as the Wilson-Davis memo. It claims to record a 2002 conversation between a physicist, Dr. Eric Davis, and Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, a recently retired director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The notes say Wilson revealed that a private defence contractor was holding recovered non-human craft and had walled the programme off from oversight. Wilson says none of it happened. Davis has declined to confirm the notes. And yet the document ended up in the Congressional Record.
This article walks through what the memo says, how it reached the public, what the people named in it have said, and how a careful reader should weigh a document that is simultaneously famous and unverified.
What the Wilson-Davis Memo Is
The Wilson-Davis memo, also called the “Core Secrets” document or, by its fans, the “Smoking Gun” memo, is a set of notes, usually described as around 15 pages. They are presented as a record by Eric Davis of a meeting with Admiral Wilson in Las Vegas in 2002. Davis is an astrophysicist who has worked with a number of private research efforts into anomalous phenomena, including Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science, the physicist Hal Puthoff’s EarthTech, and later projects tied to the Pentagon’s advanced aerospace research.
Wilson was no minor figure. According to descriptions on The Black Vault’s analysis page, he was the former Director of the DIA, and the meeting took place shortly after he left that post. In the late 1990s, he had been a senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That timing is the heart of the story.
The notes are not an official government memo, despite the name that has stuck. They’re a private account, supposedly written by Davis either during or just after the conversation. That distinction matters enormously, and we’ll come back to it.
What the Notes Claim
According to summaries published by several researchers, the notes describe this sequence:
- In 1997, while serving in a senior intelligence role, Wilson became curious about a rumoured programme involving recovered craft of non-human origin.
- He looked into Pentagon special access programmes (SAPs), the highly compartmented projects whose existence is restricted even within government.
- He allegedly found records of a reverse-engineering effort that was protected by an arrangement between an oversight body for special access programmes and a large defence contractor.
- Wilson says that, despite his rank, he was refused access to the programme. The notes also describe a senior defence official telling him to drop the matter and suggest that there were warnings about what would happen if he kept pushing.
- The notes state that the contractor, not the government, was effectively in control of the material.
The notes also reportedly include a supposed agreement between the two men: if word of their meeting ever got out, Davis would stay silent and Wilson would deny it took place. You can read the document yourself in the Congressional Record version on DocumentCloud or in the earlier circulated copy.
That last point creates a structural problem for anyone evaluating the story, which we’ll look at below. If a denial is part of the plan, then a denial can’t be treated as evidence.
How It Reached the Public
The notes surfaced online around 2019, at a time when public interest in unidentified aerial phenomena was rising. They spread quickly in UFO research circles. The historian and author Richard Dolan called them the “UFO leak of the century” in an interview carried by Las Vegas station KLAS, saying he believed the notes were genuine. Other researchers were more cautious.
The broader story isn’t quite as new as the leak suggests. The Black Vault’s analysis points out that rumours about Admiral Wilson and a hidden UFO programme date back to at least 2001. In 2008, the journalist Billy Cox contacted Wilson about them, and Wilson denied many aspects of the claim. So the 2019 leak gave an old rumour a detailed paper trail, rather than starting from nothing.
The document later received an unusual boost. In 2023, the notes were entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Mike Gallagher, during a period of intense attention to claims that the U.S. government had hidden programmes involving crash retrievals. That inclusion made headlines, but it needs context: placing a document in the Record is not the same as an official finding that it is authentic. Members of Congress can and do insert all kinds of material.
What the Two Men Have Said
The positions of the two central figures are the most important facts we have, so it’s worth being precise.
Admiral Wilson has consistently rejected the notes. As reported in the sources collected by The Black Vault and in interviews quoted by independent journalists, he has called the documents bogus and has said he doesn’t know Eric Davis and never had the conversation described. When asked about it more recently, he reportedly said that the document’s presence in the Congressional Record doesn’t make it true. He has also said that if Congress asked him to testify, he would appear.
Dr. Davis has been quieter. According to The Black Vault’s compilation, he has said he has no comment on the authenticity of the document. He has not publicly confirmed that he wrote the notes, and he has not disowned them either.
So here’s the situation: the alleged author won’t confirm or deny, and the alleged source flatly denies. There’s no named, on-record witness who says the conversation happened as described.
The Case That the Notes Are Authentic
Supporters make several arguments, and they deserve a fair hearing.
First, they point to the level of detail. The notes include names, dates, places and procedural terms that would take real knowledge to invent, and some of that detail is consistent with how special access programmes work in practice.
Second, they argue that Wilson’s denial is exactly what you’d expect if the notes were true. Because he was apparently briefed into, or threatened about, classified matters, he may have been legally obliged to deny discussing them. The journalist Leslie Kean’s discussion of the document, in a podcast episode summarised by the show’s hosts, makes this point directly: the admiral may have been required to call it fiction if the programme was or is real.
Third, they note that the story of Wilson’s frustration over access had circulated years before the leak, so it wasn’t concocted overnight.
Fourth, the notes fit within a wider pattern of claims by other people about hidden programmes. Since 2023, several former officials, most notably the former intelligence officer David Grusch, have told Congress they were informed of crash-retrieval efforts. Supporters see the Wilson-Davis notes as part of that picture.
The Case That the Notes Are Unreliable
Sceptics have an equally serious list of concerns.
The notes are secondhand. Even if Davis wrote them exactly as described, they record what one person says another person told him. They are not documents from inside a programme. At best, they’re evidence that a conversation was reported. They can’t verify whether a hidden programme exists.
There’s no corroboration. No independent witness, official record, audit report, email or meeting log has emerged confirming the meeting took place, or what was said. A senior intelligence official’s schedule and travel would usually leave some record.
The denial problem cuts both ways. If Wilson’s denial can be dismissed as expected, then no evidence could ever count against the story. A claim that cannot be disproven is also one that can’t be tested. Good evaluation requires some outcome that would count against the claim, and the “he must deny it” argument removes that.
The authorship is unconfirmed. The notes circulated online without a verified chain of custody. Davis hasn’t authenticated them. Until someone with first-hand knowledge does, the provenance is a question mark. As one researcher put it, it’s unclear who held the notes before they leaked, and why.
Fabrications are common in this field. The UFO subject has a long record of forged and planted documents. The Majestic 12 papers, for example, were declared bogus by the FBI. That history doesn’t prove the Wilson-Davis notes are fake, but it justifies extra caution.
The Congressional Record isn’t a stamp of approval. As Wilson himself reportedly noted, plenty of material in the Record is unverified. Its presence tells us a member of Congress thought it was worth entering, not that investigators confirmed it.
Official Reviews: What the Government Has Said
It’s also worth knowing what the government’s own investigations have concluded. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), set up to look into unidentified anomalous phenomena, has published a historical review of claims about secret programmes. At the time of its report, it said it had found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry had recovered extraterrestrial technology. You can find AARO’s public materials at aaro.mil. Critics reply that a review from inside the system might not reach the most compartmented programmes, and that’s exactly the claim the Wilson-Davis notes describe. Neither side has produced documents that settle the matter.
That is the uncomfortable position the memo sits in. It describes a programme that, by design, would be invisible to official reviews. So either it describes something real that is hidden, or it describes something that doesn’t exist, and from the outside the two look alike.
How to Read a Document Like This
The Wilson-Davis notes are a useful case study in evaluating contested leaks. A few principles help:
- Separate the claim from the document. The question “are these notes authentic?” is different from “are the claims in them true?” Even authentic notes can contain errors or exaggeration.
- Look for independent corroboration. The most persuasive evidence comes from sources the claimant doesn’t control: audits, contracts, meeting logs, named on-record witnesses.
- Beware of unfalsifiable framing. If every denial counts as confirmation, the argument cannot lose, which is a sign it isn’t being tested.
- Check the chain of custody. Who had the notes, when, and how did they get out?
- Weigh the source’s track record. Documents with similar origins have sometimes turned out to be fake or planted.
- Read primary versions yourself. Don’t rely on summaries, including this one. The notes are public and can be read in full.
So, Where Does This Leave Us?
Here is the straightforward assessment. The Wilson-Davis memo is a real document in the sense that it exists, circulates and has been placed in the Congressional Record. Whether it is a genuine contemporaneous record of a 2002 conversation is unverified. The man it names as the source rejects it, the man it names as the author declines to confirm it, and no independent evidence has surfaced that the described meeting took place.
Even in the most favourable case, where Davis wrote exactly what he heard, the notes would show only that a retired admiral said he was blocked from a programme. They would not show that recovered craft exist. That would require evidence beyond one person’s account of another person’s account.
That doesn’t make the topic uninteresting. It makes it a reminder of how difficult it is to assess secrecy from the outside, and of why the most important thing a reader can do is hold a firm line between what is documented and what is claimed. If the programmes described in the notes exist, only oversight with real access, such as formal inquiries, sworn testimony and verified documents, could demonstrate it. Until then, the Wilson-Davis memo remains an intriguing, unproven story.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Wilson-Davis memo? A set of notes, allegedly written by physicist Eric Davis, describing a 2002 conversation with retired Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson about a hidden programme involving recovered craft of non-human origin.
Is the Wilson-Davis memo authentic? It hasn’t been verified. Wilson denies the meeting happened, and Davis has said he has no comment on the document’s authenticity.
Was it entered into the Congressional Record? Yes. A member of Congress placed it in the Record in 2023, but that does not mean it was confirmed as genuine.
Does the memo prove that the U.S. has recovered non-human craft? No. Even if authentic, it is an account of a conversation, not direct evidence of a programme or of any recovered craft.
What has the Pentagon said about crash-retrieval claims? The Pentagon’s AARO has said it found no verifiable evidence that the government or private industry has recovered extraterrestrial technology, though critics argue that review could not reach every compartmented programme.
Editorial note: This article summarises publicly available information about a disputed document. The claims described are unverified allegations, and readers are encouraged to consult the primary and secondary sources below.
