Six whistleblowers spill UFO secrets to congress

Senior members of Congress have spoken to as many as six whistleblowers who claim they worked on Roswell-style UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs, according to a top attorney, a leading Stanford scientist, and ex-UFO program officials.

For decades it has been the subject of spooky TV shows and sci-fi novels: the theory that the government has alien spacecraft in a bunker somewhere, and has been trying to disassemble and understand their technology.

But things got a lot more real after Congress passed a law last year creating whistleblower protections for anyone who has worked in such mind-boggling secret programs – suggesting they may be more than just fiction.

The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden in December, included an amendment requiring the Pentagon to give high-ranking Senators classified reports on any previously undisclosed programs ‘relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including with respect to material retrieval, material analysis, reverse engineering’.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Daniel Sheehan said he is in contact with at least six former government officials or military contractors who say they worked on just such a program.

Sheehan represents Lue Elizondo, who ran a previous incarnation of the UFO office called AATIP until 2017. The attorney is also launching a watchdog charity pushing for greater government transparency on UFOs.

Sheehan said that some of these half-dozen whistleblowers briefed the staff of Senate committees dealing with military intelligence even before the NDAA passed, and may have even been the inspiration for Senators to include the ‘reverse engineering’ language.

‘There are half a dozen of them that have already gone and talked to them,’ he said. ‘The Senate staff people were reaching out to some others.’

Sheehan says witnesses who allegedly know about Roswell-style programs, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency director, have been referred for interviews with the Pentagon’s UFO office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

A top Stanford scientist says he is also in touch with whistleblowers.

Immunologist and Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Garry Nolan was commissioned by the CIA to investigate cases of the mysterious Havana Syndrome inflicting embassy officials worldwide, and has conducted experiments analyzing material allegedly jettisoned in UFO flyovers.

He claims to be in contact with several former staffers of extraordinary UFO ‘reverse engineering’ programs.

‘I have good reason to trust a number of individuals who were actually part of the reverse engineering, or very close to the reverse engineering programs, or who have testified to the fact, recently,’ he said in a podcast interview earlier this year. 

‘When you testify, you’re under oath. So these people are putting their careers at risk for breaking one oath [of secrecy] and taking another.’

AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick may have hinted that his office has indeed interviewed whistleblowers, in testimony to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday. 

‘Congress has mandated that your office establish a discoverable and accessible electronic method for potential witnesses of UAP incidents and potential participants in government UAP-related activities to contact your office to tell their stories,’ Gillibrand said to Kirkpatrick.

‘Congress also set up a process whereby people who are subject to non-disclosure agreements, preventing them from disclosing what they may have witnessed or participated in, could tell you what they know without risk of retribution from the violation of their NDAs.

‘When do you expect that you will establish a public facing discoverable access portal for people to use to contact your office as the law requires?’

‘Thank you all very much for referring the witnesses that you have thus far to us. I appreciate that,’ Kirkpatrick replied. ‘We’ve brought in nearly two dozen so far.’

He added that an online portal for witnesses had been ‘submitted for approval’.

Kirkpatrick, a veteran intelligence officer and physicist, told senators his office ‘will follow scientific evidence wherever it leads’, but said that ‘AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.’

Another Nobel Prize nominee and CIA scientist Dr. Hal Puthoff, who worked in the government’s 2008-2012 UFO program called AAWSAP, told DailyMail.com that he had briefed congress on classified information about reverse engineering programs, and knew of whistleblowers who had worked in the alleged programs.

‘I don’t consider myself secretly coming out of the shadows the way whistleblowers may,’ he said. ‘I can just speak to what I learned in congressional-supported programs that they paid for.

‘We were specifically tasked with collecting whatever evidence we could collect from military individuals and contractors, as to the reality of what evidence there is.’

Puthoff said he knew ‘some’ military contractors or officials who worked on reverse engineering programs, who are now coming forward to AARO after the new whistleblower protection was added to the NDAA.

‘The ones I know of felt it was their responsibility to tell what they knew, and they were not reticent,’ he said. ‘Certain people in that category would fall into the whistleblower regime.

‘I can’t comment in detail,’ the former CIA laser scientist added.

A Defense Department spokeswoman told DailyMail.com that they have not yet found any UFO programs that were improperly kept from Congress – but that they haven’t finished their search.

‘In addition to AARO’s principal mission to address current operations regarding UAP, AARO is also conducting a historical review of the U.S. government’s identification and resolution of UAP activities, including speaking to witnesses for authorized disclosures as prescribed by law,’ DoD spokeswoman Sue Gough said.

‘While there have been nearly two dozen people that AARO has interviewed, confidentially and securely, AARO has not finished its data collection nor its analysis. We will not comment on our findings prior to reporting them to Congress.

‘As prescribed by law, AARO has 72 hours to report to Congress any program discovered that has not been properly reported to Congress for appropriate oversight. None have been found so far.’

Documentarian James Fox told The Amazing People Podcast on April 4, 2023 that he had just interviewed at least four whistleblowers who had testified to Kirkpatrick with evidence of UFO crash retrieval programs.

‘There are elected officials that are right now coming to the realization that these programs exist, that we probably do have recovered debris,’ Fox said.

‘They’re hearing testimony from this whistleblower protection that’s recently been signed into law.

‘I met with intelligence folks that had just met with Kirkpatrick and met with Senate Intel. They couldn’t share every single detail [with me] because it was classified, but they did with them.

‘Some of them were retired, a lot of them were still employed.

‘What they’re basically saying is, these reverse engineering programs exist,’ he added.

‘I have this on camera: ‘Don’t take it from me, don’t take my testimony, but I’m here to tell you this is the name of the program, this is the location of the program, these are the names of the people involved in the program, and if you give me the security clearance, I’ll walk you into the labs.’

‘That’s happening right now in Washington DC. I’ve seen the photographs of these guys’ credentials. More than three. And they’re telling me about their friends who are also testifying.

‘The question is, Kirkpatrick, who’s he going to share it with?’

Fox told DailyMail.com that his sources did not give him classified information – as even with the new whistleblower protections, they can only disclose restricted information to AARO, not go public.

Amid the claims of Roswell-style crash retrieval programs, on Friday US intelligence leaders held an ‘unprecedented’ briefing at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio – a site with deep historic and rumored links to UFOs.

Reports after the notorious alleged 1947 flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, claimed that the supposed wreckage was taken to Wright Patterson, leading UFO researchers to dub the base ‘the real Area 51’.

Wright Patterson, which now houses the National Space Intelligence Center (NSIC) and National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), was also the headquarters of two previous government UFO programs in the 1940s through 1970s: Project Sign and Project Blue Book.

Last week CIA director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, National Security Agency director Gen. Paul Nakasone, and several members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence flew to the secretive base for a meeting on topics reportedly including Chinese spy balloons, the war in Ukraine, and recent leaks of classified documents by National Guard Airman Jack Teixeira.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes said Thursday the event is ‘historic’ and unlike any previous briefing he and his colleagues have attended.

‘I don’t recall the committee ever doing anything like this,’ he told the Dayton Daily News.

One congressman publicly put the Pentagon on notice that he was aware of claims of UFO-tinkering programs evading proper oversight by lawmakers during the first public hearing on unidentified objects in over 50 years last May.

At the historic hearing, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher entered into the Congressional record an explosive document dubbed the ‘Wilson-Davis Notes’.

Physicist and intelligence official Dr. Eric Davis allegedly met with then-deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, in Las Vegas in October 2002, and wrote notes of what Wilson told him.

According to the notes, the Vice Admiral told Davis that in the early 2000s he uncovered – but was denied access to – a secret program run by a defense contractor that retrieved and attempted to reverse engineer UFOs.

The bombshell, controversial documents claim Wilson found discrepancies in budgets that led him to the program run by ‘an aerospace technology contractor – one of the top ones in [the] US’.

Wilson allegedly met with three officials from the program who called themselves ‘the watch committee’, who told him ‘they were a reverse engineering program’ with ‘something recovered years ago… an intact craft they believed could fly.’

‘Program manager said they didn’t know where it was from,’ Wilson told Davis, according to the notes. ‘It was technology that was not of this Earth – not made by man – not by human hands.’

Despite his rank, the DIA deputy was denied access, and his bosses said his career would suffer if he pursued it, the notes claimed.

Speaking at a Los Angeles conference in February, Sheehan said AARO was planning to take testimony from both Davis and Wilson.

‘This is of course one of the primary pieces of information, documents, that needs to be evaluated,’ the lawyer said.

‘Eric has been apparently contacted by Sean Kirkpatrick from the new office that’s been set up. They’re going to interview Eric. They’re going to try to interview Admiral Wilson. We’re going to try to figure out what happens in those interviews.’

Sheehan told DailyMail.com this week: ‘as far as I understand it, they have both been asked to testify.’

Davis has remained tight-lipped about the alleged meeting in his public statements.

He told New York Post journalist Steven Greenstreet in November 2019 that the notes ‘were leaked out of [astronaut] Ed Mitchell’s estate and there’s nothing I can say about it’.

Davis described them as ‘purportedly classified information’, adding: ‘I’m not at liberty to confirm or verify any aspect of those notes and when you have security clearances that’s something you don’t want to violate.’

The bombshell document leaked online in 2019 after an Australian researcher James Rigney found it among late astronaut and sixth man on the moon Edgar Mitchell’s archive of files.

Mitchell had been sent it by his colleague and Davis’ boss, Dr. Hal Puthoff, another Nobel Prize nominee and CIA scientist, who worked in the government’s 2008-2012 UFO program called AAWSAP.

Puthoff, 86, was asked about the memo’s authenticity at a talk at the Arlington Institute on February 8 2020, and conspicuously failed to deny it. 

‘That is a question about the Wilson documents,’ he said. ‘They probably got leaked on the internet. Wilson was one of the joint chiefs of staff interviewed by my senior scientist colleague Eric Davis. Since it discusses potentially ongoing programs, I have no comment.’

In an interview this week, he told DailyMail.com he couldn’t confirm or deny its authenticity.

‘We’re still not verifying its authenticity, just because it addresses highly classified stuff,’ Puthoff said.

But Christopher Mellon, a former senior defense intelligence official who has been involved in the UFO topic for decades, wrote that Davis was the author, in a December 2022 blog post.

‘Even before this ‘whistleblower’ legislation was signed into law, credible individuals were providing congress information alleging that the US government has recovered extraterrestrial technology,’ Mellon wrote in the eyebrow-raising article.

‘This process began in 2019 when I brought astrophysicist Dr. Eric Davis to Capitol Hill to meet with staff from the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees.

‘Dr. Davis, author of the famous Wilson-Davis memo, provided specific information lending credence to sensational reports that an official US government program is actively seeking to exploit recovered technology that was fashioned by some other species or perhaps advanced AI machines.’

Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and Bush administrations, described in his essay the NDAA amendment as ‘far-reaching legislation that could soon confirm the existence of an alien presence on earth.’

Nolan, a friend of Davis, said he was aware of the notes before they were published, and believes they are authentic.

‘Before this came to light I already knew of the document, because Eric was part of a group I was associated with,’ he said in an Australia 7 News interview last year. ‘I know Eric Davis. Eric is of a kind of character that it’s just impossible for him to lie.’ 

But Wilson was strident and categorical in his denial to Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, published in his 2021 book In Plain Sight, calling the document ‘pure fiction’.

‘The Dr. Eric Davis memo contains somewhat detailed accounts of alleged efforts by me to get access to Special Access Programs… and of meetings I supposedly had with various contractors or Special Access Program managers/overseers,’ Wilson told Coulthart.

‘I participated in no such meetings on these subjects. I never formally or informally requested any such access, was never denied such access and was never threatened to have my career ‘derailed’ if I persisted.’

Wilson said he was in an isolated camp in Maine during October 2002, and had only been to Las Vegas once: a deployment to Nellis Air Force base in 1979 or 1980.

Coulthart noted in his book that if the memo were real, its contents could be so highly classified that Wilson would be obliged to deny it publicly.

Another alleged witness of alleged downed UFOs squirreled away in a government bunker is General John ‘Jack’ Sheehan – revealed in January this year in a memoir by Jacques Vallée, a scientist close to top intelligence officials who has worked in past iterations of the government’s UFO-monitoring office.

According to the memoir, Sheehan, a retired four-star NATO general, allegedly told Puthoff at a 1996 meeting a story of ‘his boss instructing him to take a flight to a certain facility (presumably a Lockheed site) where he saw and touched a ‘craft.’

Vallée’s memoir said Gen. Sheehan ‘also said he would honor his secrecy oath and not reveal more, but he did acknowledge he found a $9 billion discrepancy in some budgets which led him to uncover the project.’

Sheehan, 82, later went on to become Senior Vice President at Bechtel Corporation in Virginia.

A source briefed on the work of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence told DailyMail.com that Gen. Sheehan has been asked to testify to AARO.

Puthoff said he did not know if Gen. Sheehan had testified.

In a phone interview from his Virginia home, the retired General told DailyMail.com the story was not true, and he was never shown a UFO or uncovered a secret program.

He added that a researcher called him last year about the topic, but he could not recall whether they were a government official or not.

Another key alleged witness has recently died.

Charles Bowsher was US Comptroller General from 1981 to 1996, presiding over wide ranging audits and scrutinizing government department finances.

Vallée wrote that Bowsher ‘found a crashed UFO program during a massive audit of classified projects’ around 1984.

‘In the period 1984-85, Bowsher uncovered a bizarre special access program coverup which surely violated every classification, executive order, regulation, and Congressional rule,’ Vallée wrote in the 24 September 2004 entry in his diary.

‘They contemplated turning it over to Justice for prosecution, but ‘a powerful person in DoD quenched it.’ The program, according to the reviewers, had to do with an exotic, non-Earthly vehicle.’

The Wilson-Davis memo references a similar-sounding incident, though it does not name Bowsher.

According to the notes, Wilson told Davis that a high-ranking government auditor discovered the program, ‘was officially briefed, given tour, shown their program… Said after that episode, a formal agreement was struck with Pentagon people (SAPOC) to prevent this in future – didn’t want a repeat. Special criteria were established in agreement.’

Bowsher died on September 30 last year.