The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 30: Special Access
(Cover illustration © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 30: Special Access
Nobody was talking much about Skinwalker Ranch the first time I met Eric Davis - at a space-science conference near Washington D.C. in May 2003. Not that I knew it back then, but Eric had already had his encounter with the ‘dark mass’ that he later described to me over dinner with Hal Puthoff as ‘blacker than a black hole is black’ - and the metallic voice in his head, seemingly emanating from it, that told him ‘in the most threatening tone imaginable’ that they – whoever or whatever they were - were watching him and his NIDS colleagues, with the implicit instruction they should get out.
It was, however, another encounter for which he would become sensationally synonymous with UFOs that interested me at this moment – an encounter, not that I knew it back in 2003 either, that had occurred eight months before that conference.
On 16th October 2002, according to a document now lodged in the US Congressional record, Eric met in Las Vegas with a retired US Navy vice admiral, Thomas Wilson, in a car parked in a lot belonging to EG&G – a firm bound to this story already not just via its role as a key subcontractor in the development of US nuclear weapons, but because of its supposed ties to Bob Lazar. Before gaining ‘employment’ at his S4 secret saucer site on the edge of Area 51, legend had it that Lazar had been interviewed for the job at EG&G. At the time the meeting took place, Admiral Wilson had held various positions in intelligence – positions that culminated in a stint as head of the DIA, from which he’d retired a few months beforehand.
Five years prior to his meeting with Eric, Wilson had had another fateful encounter – this time at a hotel in Washington DC. This meeting, in 1997, had involved several people, including somebody else intimately connected to this story, Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell, during which the subject of ‘crash-retrievals’ came up.
In the wake of this meeting, Wilson developed a strange and abiding fixation. If UFOs had crashed to earth and been recovered by the military, as Mitchell and others claimed, he wanted to know why he’d not been briefed on the subject – as a senior and highly cleared intel official, as he saw it, this was his God-given right.
He started to make some phone calls to people he thought would be ‘in the know’ and after a lot of initial pushback, managed to gain access to a DoD indexing system for special access programmes. In it, he found a programme that matched the account that had been described to him by Mitchell and others in Washington.
The project was in the hands of a large and well-known defence contractor.
His blood now up, Wilson banged on the doors of some very senior Pentagon officials – including that of the recently retired SecDef, William Perry – who told him it was all real. They also confirmed the name of the contractor listed in the index.
We don’t know this contractor’s name, but – from various leaks, snippets of data, whispers, and rumours - it is strongly conjectured to be Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed or not, Wilson made three calls to ‘the company’ – one to the programme manager listed in the index, one to its security director and the third to its corporate attorney, all of whom were surprised and agitated, so the story goes, he’d found his way to them.
Wilson demanded he be given a briefing on the project and ten days later flew to the company (if this was Lockheed, the meeting would most probably have taken place either at its Missiles and Space HQ in Sunnyvale, near San Francisco, or at the Skunk Works in Palmdale, near LA) for a face-to-face meeting.
In the conference room of the firm’s ‘vault’, the three gatekeepers told him that the project’s cover had almost been blown several years earlier during a Pentagon audit of black programmes, after which they’d been ordered not to let its existence slip to anybody who wasn’t on the ‘bigot list’ – the list of individuals cleared to work on it.
The project was what is known as a ‘waived unacknowledged SAP’ – a special access programme so secret its existence was denied to all but a few. No US government personnel were to gain access unless they met the criteria, no matter their level of clearance – and Wilson, the gatekeepers told him, didn’t have clearance, nor would he ever be given it. This was the purpose of the meeting, they said, to inform him of this.
But still, Wilson wouldn’t let it go; as the DIA’s Deputy Director, he insisted he had the right to know, a claim they rejected comprehensively. To reinforce their decision, the gatekeepers showed him the bigot list. The 600 names on it – mostly civilians employed by the company, plus a handful of Pentagon types, were the only people who were – or ever would be – cleared to work on the project, they said.
But then, out of sheer exasperation, it seems, they admitted what the programme entailed: reverse engineering a technology – and this quote comes from the memo - ‘not of this Earth, not made by human hands.’
Wilson now took his request angrily to SAPOC, the DoD’s Special Access Program Oversight Committee, a group that decides who gets cleared into black projects. Its head told him his denial of access had been upheld and if he didn’t drop the matter he’d be stripped of at least two stars and pushed into early retirement.
This, finally, signalled the end of his quest – but not the end of the story.