Richard Dolan - Three Strikes, and You're Out!! Strike One - the "UFO Leak of the Century" Collapses

For years now, Richard Dolan has promoted himself as a 'sensible,' or 'thoughtful', or 'conservative' UFO researcher and commentator. How he has gotten away with this branding is puzzling. As I wrote back in 2013 after hearing Dolan speak at the National UFO Congress:

Dolan managed to bring in just about every loopy idea that has come up in recent years: ancient pyramids, crash retrievals, reverse-engineeered alien technology, a "secret space program," alien hybrids, telepathic alien contact, and mind control. Mention this the next time somebody refers to Dolan as a "conservative UFOlogist." The reason for the UFO cover up, he suggested, is because the secret of the UFOs' alien propulsion system threatens petroleum interests, the same claim that Steven Greer makes in the wild conspiracy movie Thrive.

In recent years Dolan has managed to get himself quite tangled up in three major gaffes that completely refute the notion that he is careful or credible in any sense. These are not minor errors or oversights or misquotations, but extended gaffes of colossal magnitude. He has enthusiastically leapt with both feet into making sensational, foolish claims, where wise men fear to tread.

Strike One: Dolan's "UFO Leak of the Century" Collapses

In 2019 Dolan pretty much 'bet the farm' promoting what he called the "UFO Leak of the Century." It's a rather confusing narrative, based on  some leaked notes apparently written by Dr. Eric Davis, after a supposedly clandestine meeting with Admiral Thomas Ray Wilson, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1999 until 2002. Prior to that Wilson served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs from 1997 to 1999.

Dolan writes,

So what are we talking about?

These are notes by Dr. Eric Davis from October 16, 2002. [uploaded anonymously to imageur on April 19, 2019]

Who is Eric Davis? He is a scientist, but surely qualifies as a very interesting scientist. For many years, during the 1990s, he was a member of the National Institute for Discovery Sciences, which of course was owned by billionaire Robert Bigelow. NIDS was a very important organization back then and brought scientific rigor to many interesting areas of research connected to UFOs and beyond. The mystery of the black triangles, for instance. And most famously the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, something Davis was very much involved in studying.

Davis is also a close associate of Dr. Hal Puthoff, who owns the scientific company Earthtech. Dr. Puthoff of course has an extensive career in science and the world of intelligence. Along with Russell Targ he developed the protocols for America’s classified remote viewing program in the 1970s and 80s. He is an expert on Zero Point Energy and what is called spacetime metric engineering. Think about that for a moment. And he has also has worked closely with Bigelow on a number of occasions. Plus of course he is an integral member of To the Stars Academy (TTSA).

These notes "were written by Davis in the aftermath of a meeting he had with Wilson in October 2002. They concern a series of events that took place during the spring of 1997, when Wilson was Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What took place during this meeting was a discussion of very great importance. It concerned nothing less than a confirmation of the existence of deeply classified programs to study alien technology. That is, extraterrestrial aliens. Their craft and technology."

Dr. Eric Davis

Dolan writes that according to the leaked notes,

Wilson confirmed that he was able to confirm in June 1997 that “there is such an organization in existence” in relation to “MJ-12/UFO cabal – crashed UFO.” At that time, this is late June 1997, Wilson phoned [Lt. Commander Willard] Miller and apparently told him that yes, he was right. There is such a group, a cabal, that manages the crashed UFO program...

After reading this Wilson laughed and said that he “didn’t tell Miller EVERYTHING,” whatever that means. Then Wilson said “Miller can make good educated guesses on who (contractors) has alien hardware.” Then, “Miller can give good advice on which defense companies to look at – that’s all he knows.”

Clearly, Wilson knew a lot more.

Wilson was also angry that Miller, a fellow Navy officer, betrayed the trust of their conversation by relaying it to Greer and who knows who else. In reality, it doesn’t seem that Miller told many other people. Davis in his note added that Miller only told Edgar Mitchell, who was the one who told Davis about it in 1999. It’s possible that Miller told something to journalist Leslie Kean. At least this is what Wilson believed in his conversation with Davis in 2002.

Wilson was clearly nervous even in talking with Davis and said he was taking a risk just talking with him. And indeed, two decades later, the entire conversation is now out.

Most significant of all, Admiral Wilson allegedly tracked down the defense contractors who were supposedly working on the 'crashed UFO' program. He was reportedly told that he didn't have the necessary clearances to be told about it, even though Wilson was the Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff!

Edgar Mitchell

It may be of interest that "CE5" Steven Greer and the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell were also involved in this story. Dolan argues, in his own inimitable way, that "It’s will be impossible to debunk this leak as a hoax or fabrication. At most, skeptics might argue that somehow these men were given wrong information. But as you will see, this is also not a credible argument."

But this story/rumor has been kicking around for many years because of Steven Greer and Edgar Mitchell, although the pages uploaded to imageur in 2019 had not been seen before. Nonetheless, there were some obvious "red flags" associated with the story, which should have given pause to anyone who might take it seriously. First, Steven Greer is involved, whose history of promoting UFO absurdities should give pause to any rational person. Second, and more significantly, UFO researcher and blogger Billy Cox interviewed Admiral Wilson back in 2008, and wrote,

A former high-ranking military intelligence official rumored to have been snubbed in his attempts to obtain sheltered UFO data insists he never even bothered to look for it.

“Never,” retired Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson replied Tuesday when asked if he’d ever been barred from retrieving classified material, exotic or otherwise, during his career.

Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 when he agreed to meet at the Pentagon with advocates of UFO declassification. Among them, he confirms, was Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

The driving force behind that meeting was North Carolina UFO researcher and emergency-room doctor Steven Greer. Greer founded The Disclosure Project in an effort to grant amnesty to government whistle-blowers willing to violate their security oaths by sharing insider knowledge about UFOs.

At least seven years ago (http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc788.htm), Greer was telling audiences about extracting a pledge from Wilson during that meeting to investigate special access projects involving UFO technology. But shortly thereafter, Greer claimed Wilson reported that he didn’t have the proper security clearance to inspect those files.

As Greer informed a Portland, Ore., audience in 2001, Wilson said, ” ‘I am horrified that this is true. I have been in plenty of black projects, but when we tried to get into this one,’ he was told, and I quote, ‘Sir, you do not have a need to know.’ The head of intelligence Joint Staffs. You don’t have a need to know. Neither did the CIA director, and neither did the president.”

This story has been circulating on the Internet ever since, and made it into Greer’s book “Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge,” last year. But the thing didn’t sprout legs until Mitchell began discussing the meeting during what turned out to be a media blitz in July.

So, Admiral Wilson acknowledged that he had met with Greer and Mitchell back in 1997, but denied their claim that he had been refused access to classified UFO records. And this was known in back in 2008!

“What is true is that I met with them,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “What is not true is that I was denied access to this material, because I didn’t pursue it. I may have left it open with them, but it was not especially compelling, not compelling enough to waste my staff’s time to go looking for it.”

Remember that this refers only to a 1997 meeting, and has nothing to do with any alleged meeting in 2002, which claim had not yet been made.

But back to Billy Cox: After Dolan's big hoopla about the clandestine meeting supposedly taking place in a car in Las Vegas in 2002 between Admiral Wilson and Eric Davis, Cox contacted Wilson again. On June 15, 2020 Cox (who is certainly no "debunker") wrote,

The admiral at the center of controversial notes describing his inability to access a classified UFO research program says the documents are bogus. Furthermore, he says the alleged author of those notes, physicist Dr. Eric Davis, never interviewed him.

“It’s all fiction,” says former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Thomas Wilson, from his home in Virginia. “I wouldn’t know Eric Davis if he walked in right now”....

In his first public statement on Core Secrets, Wilson rejected the entire premise of the meeting and his role in it. The notes indicate that Wilson and Davis rendezvoused in Las Vegas, inside a car attended by three uniformed military personnel, in the parking lot of the Special Projects Building of defense contractor EG&G.

“I’m not saying that sometime, somewhere, I never met (Davis), but I certainly don’t know him, I don’t remember him, and I definitely did not sit with him in a car for an hour in Las Vegas,” Wilson told De Void.

“You may also see in those notes where I came with two other naval officers, a lieutenant and a lieutenant commander, and a petty officer who was driving the car. I was not even in the Navy then. And the Navy was certainly not ferrying me around in a car at that point.

“Those notes are really detailed – it’s like somebody wrote a fiction piece,” Wilson said.

Cox further notes that Davis "has never affirmed or denied his ostensible authorship of Core Secrets when pressed over the past year. He did, however, tell the New York Post in May that the documents were leaked by the estate of the late astronaut and Apollo 14 moonwalker Dr. Edgar Mitchell."

So what is going on here? Did Davis write up the 15 pages uploaded anonymously to imageur to promote a hoax? Did somebody else write them? That seems unlikely, since Davis was given the opportunity to disavow them, but did not.

Perhaps the most interesting suggestion for the origin of these pages comes from John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault. In a Youtube video, Greenewald notes the similarity of the supposed Davis notes to a film script, pointing out that the enormously successful series The X-Files had ended just a few months earlier. From his experience in the film industry, Greenewald offers "my crazy theory" that the Davis papers were written as a scene for a TV or movie script. (Remember that Wilson himself had suggested "it’s like somebody wrote a fiction piece.")  In this view, Davis had sent Mitchell a copy of his notes for a proposed TV series. After Mitchell's death in 2016, somebody with access to his documents anonymously uploaded the proposed script to imageur, presumably  believing it to be factual. I don't think that's such a "crazy idea" at all.

Veteran UFOlogist Kevin Randle has just published his commentary on the Davis/Wilson matter. He notes how a number of prominenet UFOlogists have been attempting to contact Davis about this, but Davis is refusing to answer any questions. Even from the Executive Director of MUFON, Jan Harzan. Randle notes that since Davis was "a consultant to MUFON, you’d think that a response to the Executive Director would be forthcoming." Nope. This looks very, very bad for the credibility of Eric Davis. And of Richard Dolan.

(I will discuss Strike Two and Strike Three in the Second Part of this posting.)