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1 Eric Davis

Last Updated September 15, 2026. v3.

Dr. Eric Davis is an astrophysicist who served as a subcontractor and scientific investigator for the DIA's AAWSAP program and Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). He has held security clearances with both the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, and has publicly stated he briefed congressional staff in classified settings on recovered non-human craft.

1.0.1 AAWSAP - Failure to obtain SAP status

Davis describes how a defense contractor his AAWSAP work depended on had held onto crash-retrieval materials since a 1989 program shutdown, and how Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn rejected Sen. Harry Reid's push to elevate the program to full Special Access Program status because the request bypassed normal security channels.

"But the aerospace defense firm that we were working, we were trying to work with, during the AAWSAP, had direct interaction with him. He was a senior VP, and his executive VP, the corporation had, they had to have a conversation with ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ [Ed: Refer to original source for name]. And he was very antagonistic about that company releasing to us...(Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, and Earth Tech) their collection of crash retrieval materials that they've had since before it got shutdown in '89. So he stepped right in the middle of it. First, he was surprised at that that company still retained materials that when they were supposed to give it up and return it back in '89. And then he said his answer to that whole question about giving permission for them to share it with us under that classified setting, because that was SAP level. We were TS/SCI. We were trying to get SAP and Harry Reid was trying to get Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn to give us an SAP, and William Lynn denied his request.

And the reason why he denied it is because Harry Reid was using political muscle, and you can't do that. It has to go through the security channels and the program management to create a justification and a need to give a program that's already TS/SCI a SAP level, an add-on SAP.

I can understand what William Lynn is looking at. The majority leader of the Senate is telling him, I want you to, you know...I'll write a very nice letter. The letter's been posted on the internet. So a very nice letter saying, well, we have reason that we need to do this, et cetera, et cetera, and Lynn didn't buy it because that wasn't an official channel for how you create a SAP...a program that's already TS/SCI and elevated it up to a SAP. There's a whole process, procedure, bureaucracy and red tape that you have to go through. And Harry was using political muscle to bypass all that.

The executive branch is taught, or trained not to do that. Capital Hill is not their taskmaster. The taskmaster is the president of the United States, the commander in chief, the head of the executive branch. Now, who was the president at that? It was Bush. So George W. Bush, If Harry Reid had written the letter to Bush or actually met him face-to-face, which had been far more effective. I don't know how possible it would have been, but it would have been had a much higher chance that Bush would call down to William Lynn, or he would have maybe his national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, call the Secretary of Defense's office, actually, and maybe the Undersecretary Defense for Intelligence and Security, and say, okay, there's this program. I want it to get a SAP. Sure. And if the president says, I want a SAP, they're going to have to SAP it." (Michels 2024, 18:20)

1.0.2 AAWSAP - Lockheed Martin

Responding to Peter Skafish, Davis says the late Dr. James Ryder's former supervisor at Lockheed Martin, an executive vice president, would also have had knowledge of plans to transfer UAP material to AAWSAP or the related Kona Blue program.

Skafish: "Did any Lockheed Martin executives besides the late Dr. James Ryder have knowledge of plans to transfer UAP material from Lockheed to AAWSAP or Kona Blue?"

"It would be Dr. Ryder's former supervisor, the executive vice president, of Lockheed Martin. So that...she was the other one that that would know." (Sol Foundation Q&A 2025, 23:55)

1.0.3 AAWSAP - Foreign Intelligence

Davis says a source inside a U.S. intelligence agency, separate from Russia's own declassified KGB archives, supplied him with authentic Russian documentation convincing him Russia has had at least one crash-retrieval event of its own, likely dating to the late 1980s.

"But Russia is one that had some crash retrievals. And that's been released when the Soviet Union fell. KGB opened up the files. George Knapp went there. Other people went there, found the thread 3 documents. And I had independent, and I can't get into this because it's still super classified. But through the AAWSAP program, I had a connection in with a three-letter agency that collected not from the KGB open records. They collected it from their own asset. And the asset was filtering out actual legitimate documents, photos, reports, technical, and operational and executive summary type. There's enough evidence that I saw in classified setting that convinced me that they have. At least one, one crash retrieval. I can't say that it would go back to the 40s, 50s, or 60s or 70s. I know I was at the end of the 80s was the one I was exposed to. So they have had something." (Michels 2024, 38:15)

1.0.4 Presidential Emergency Action Documents - PEAD

In conversation with Kirk McConnell and Peter Skafish at the Sol Foundation's 2024 symposium, Davis describes Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) — a classified authority instituted under Eisenhower — as the legal mechanism keeping UAP crash-retrieval special access programs outside congressional oversight and immune to FOIA.

"There's the onus of the presidential emergency action documents that are called P-E-A-D-S, Presidential Emergency Action Documents that President Eisenhower instituted during his administration in the 1950s. This is what keeps the waived unacknowledged Special Access Programs (SAP), the UAP crash retrieval programs, outside of congressional oversight. The classified PEADS are designed to implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations, such that they are not even subjected to congressional oversight. And there is no requirement to disclose the PEADS to the Congress. And they've never been disclosed to Congress. And there are no PEADS that have ever been leaked as well. They've never been briefed outside of the executive branch. And the gang of eight, or at least one or two members of the gang of eight from both houses of Congress, have been briefed on UAPs, but only on the parameters of the phenomenon. Not the specific details. And the PEADS are not subjected to the modern FOIA law at all. In addition, the legacy UAP waived and unacknowledged Special Access Programs are tied up in contractual relationships with select members of the defense intelligence industry. And they have these relationships with the cognizant U.S. government agencies. And the industry firms that run these would not be allowed to reveal any of this information under any circumstances, neither with the defense intelligence agencies, because they're in the executive branch. Such contracts are almost assuredly sole source contracts. They can't be publicly, competitively bid through requests for proposals or broad area announcements, because to do so would jeopardize their security. So they're done very much under the table. And there would be no open request for proposals through that mechanism. So that's why you don't hear about it. The Congress could exert its power of the purse by choosing to defund these programs. But the question is, is how do you know which programs to defund because they don't know what they are or who has them." (Sol Foundation Symposium 2025, 34:00)

During a separate Q&A:

Skafish: "We've had a number of people with intelligence community backgrounds who have argued or suggested that there are there are a number of these (Presidential) Emergency Action Directives that have that have been written then kept in secret that concern you UAP and that have actually created something like a legal administrative framework for classified programs."

"There's no source for this information. I have security clearances with the intelligence community in the Department of Defense. So I see these Presidential Emergency Action Directives within that community in a classified basis. So I already know their history. The Brennan Center has a web page that that mentions the P.E.A.D. So this isn't this isn't source information. It's not a rumor. It's not a myth. It's factual classified information. Although the P.E.A.D. itself is not classified by name or its existence because the Brennan Center has already written something up about it on its web site. How confident is am I that the P.E.A.D exists? Well it's 100 percent because Jim Semivann who retired from the CIA back in 2015,2016 or thereabouts. He knows all about the P.E.A.D.S. And he has encountered those during the 30 plus year career that he had at the Central Intelligence Agency. And so the P.E.A.D.S. are well known. If you're in the intelligence community for a long time and you work up at high level you'll see you'll see the P.E.A.D.S. come up in some sort of briefing environment." (Sol Foundation Q&A 2025, 19:49)

TIME Magazine article on PEADS: https://time.com/7086057/donald-trump-second-term-emergency-aides/

Speaking at the UAP Disclosure Fund's "Understanding UAP: Science, National Security, and Innovation" panel, 2025, moderated by Lue Elizondo:

"So we're working in a combination of industry and classified programs that we were contracted to do on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the Pentagon agencies that Lou worked at and the UAP Task Force that James Stratton led at the Office of Naval Intelligence. And so a long story short is that I came into contact with industry leaders, technical scientists, both active duty and later retired, as well as intelligence officers, generals, admirals, colonels, people who directed intelligence or human intelligence collection and analysis, directorates at the DIA and the Central Intelligence Agency, who reached out to me to have me do some foreign UAP intelligence analysis and assessment.

And so I have been exposed to so much in the classified realm that I can tell you definitively that there is a there and there. The human race, basically the world's biggest governments, like the United States, our adversary, China, and Russia at least as far as I know, have had the occasion to recover craft that have either landed or crashed or both in their territory or even outside of their territories. And have taken those back to the most sensitive of their programs that they've ever had. These programs are even more sensitive and one well hidden than the Manhattan Project was, or the minor nuclear weapons industry and the US military and the Department of Energy programs to maintain and upgrade and modernize our nuclear weapons arsenal. And so this is one of the most well-hidden programs that was hidden from congressional oversight and always has been. And it was hidden by the action of the President Eisenhower who instituted Presidential Emergency Action Directives during his administration. These directives are not shared with congress. They were classified. And when the Freedom of Information Act was instituted in the '70s, those are not subjected to the Freedom of Information Act request. These directives provide cover for actions that are associated with the retrieval of these vehicles and the scientific engineering study of them." (UAP Disclosure Fund 2025, 58:00)

1.0.5 UAP Reverse Engineering Funding...

Davis describes how Pentagon and CIA offices route sole-source contracts through shell companies to defense firms, which then use that money as internal research and development (IRAD) funding to conduct reverse-engineering work off the books, bypassing both congressional oversight and the Gang of Eight.

"And that takes place within the industry. What happens is the Department of Defense offices, CIA offices, they create shell companies, they give a sole source contract to the shell company who passes the money to a selected group of defense industry firms. And those firms will take that contract money and turn it around and use that as internal things, called internal research and development funds (IRAD), which they give to their own people, it's like they're becoming their own employees to do the reverse engineering analysis and study of these recovered vehicles. And so this avoids all congressional oversight. It avoids the game of eight. And it's one of the most clever techniques used to hide it." (UAP Disclosure Fund 2025, 1:00:00)

1.0.6 Generals and Admirals...

Davis says only two senior officers, a four-star general and a three-star admiral, ever managed to locate the relevant programs, with the general's superior rank giving him the standing to gain full access despite hostile pushback.

"And as far as I know, only one four-star general and one in three-star admiral were able to locate these programs. And that's about as much as I can say they located the programs and they uncovered them. One got a lot of resistance and hostile reception and was told that he found who he was looking for, they were who they were suspected to be, yes they were, a UFO, UAP, class crash, approval, and reverse engineering program. The other one had a lot more political power than I did because of his stature as a four-star general. And he was able to get into the program and use his authority and his access, I think they call that a super user, a super user and access to all, with those special access programs. So he had his capability to get into that whole thing." (UAP Disclosure Fund 2025, 1:01:07)

The admiral referred to is likely Admiral Wilson, from the infamous, alleged memo. See: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114761/documents/HHRG-117-IG05-20220517-SD001.pdf

From an interview with the Jesse Michels channel:

Question: "Do you feel any better than do you feel like it's safer now than it was when Dave came out?"

"Possibly. I think so. I just have to have a lawyer tell me, look at the situation, look at the circumstances under which Admiral Wilson gave me information and then find out if that's something I should do at the level of congressional hearings." (Michels 2024, 07:51)

1.0.7 On talking with President H.W. Bush...

Davis recounts a 2003 conversation in which George H.W. Bush told him he was briefed on a major UAP event only while serving as CIA director, not later as President, after a Pentagon liaison officer mistakenly assumed Bush already knew and described the incident to him.

"I had conversations with him back in 2003 and what he learned, he was not briefed as a President on this subject. He was briefed as an incoming CIA director. And that's all he had on it. When he became President, he didn't hear about it anymore. When he was the CIA director, he was given some pretty spectacular information and he insisted that he wanted to see that. This is DOD information. What's funny is that his agency was the portfolio owner for UAPs. So even he wasn't told who in the CIA was running it for him to get briefed by, for him to call on his phone and say, "I need you to brief me." He wasn't told. Instead, it was the Pentagon liaison officer who had no intention on briefing him about UFOs or UAPs. And instead, he assumed that Bush had already been briefed by his CIA personnel or his leadership who oversee that portfolio. And he accidentally assumed that. He started rattling off about a major UAP events that took place in the early '60s. And Bush's eyes lit up and this is what he's told me. He said, "What are you talking about?" So the Pentagon liaison officer told him all about it. He said, "Are you kidding me? There's a there, there? And he said, "Absolutely." And he said, "Well, I want to see the evidence." And the evidence was in the form of a film and some documentation, reports or something, but the film was the primary thing and he was declined. The liaison officer said, "No, you don't have any to know because this is DOD intelligence and we're not going to give it to you." Only if there's an event that happens that requires you to take that information up to the President, actually go to the National Security Advisor, he's the clearinghouse for all things UAP. So you go to the presidents National Security Advisor and you say, my agency just had a major event that we collected intelligence on and it's going to require a presidential decision and the National Security Advisor is going to have to say, okay, here's a number in your agency who you're going to call to get a full briefing on the whole UFO thing. And meanwhile, I will schedule a meeting in the Oval Office with the President, please. That's how that works." (Michels 2024, 22:16)

1.0.8 On David Grusch...

Davis says he personally briefed David Grusch and Grusch's superior for two and a half days shortly before COVID-19 struck, at Luis Elizondo's request, sharing classified and proprietary findings from his own investigations at NIDS, AFRL, and under Hal Puthoff at EarthTech — material Davis says fed directly into Grusch's later whistleblower complaint.

"I was fortunate to meet Dave Grusch, at the behest of Jay Stratton. Dave was an NRO liaison officer to the UAP task force. And Dave was working for his boss at the NRO, which was situated in the second floor SCIFs of the Aerospace Corporation, Colorado Springs. And I was assigned to work at the Aerospace Corporation facility in Huntsville, Alabama, because I was supported now since basically through propulsion program office. So Dave and Dave's boss and I together, and I briefed them for 2 and 1/2 days just the week before COVID struck. And Dave took all of my classified and proprietary information of all the investigations I did at NIDS, AFRL, and working for Hal Putoff at EarthTech. And he took that data around with it. And what you now know, the aftermath of that was his classified whistleblower complaint to the IG of the IC. And so there is a there there. We have had this program going on in various guys' various code names. Code names change roughly every three years. They often shipped around due to major office and program added new organizations for presidential administration, presidential administration, maybe every five to 10 years at some cases." (UAP Disclosure Fund 2025, 1:02:00)

"The breadcrumbs I gave him (David Grusch) are proprietary to NIDS and Bass (Bigelow Advanced Space Studies), and classified to the DIA and another three-letter agency. Maybe two. I need to wait for a couple of people at the corporate level to die of old age. And when they do that, I won't have trouble with lawyers. And then I'll come out with the book. Now, the classified stuff in that, I don't know what I'm going to do with that. That's classified for life." (Michels 2024, 39:37)

1.0.9 Response to the WSJ article...

Responding to a Wall Street Journal report, Davis says he never told reporter Joel Schectman that the so-called "Art's parts" material was connected either to his 2020 New York Times remarks or to his October 2019 SCIF briefings with Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, and that he explicitly flagged "Art's parts" as lacking credible provenance.

"In my conversations with Wall Street Journal reporter Joel Schectman, I clearly explained that my statements in the 2020 New York Times article did not include any mention of "Art's parts." furthermore, I did not confirm or imply during our discussions that "art's parts" were part of my interactions with Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. Kean and Blumenthal can independently verify that our conversations were specifically about classified SCIF briefings conducted in October 2019, relating exclusively to recovered non-human, off-world craft, both damaged and intact, retrieved by the U.S. Government since the mid-1940s and subsequently analyzed by select aerospace-defense companies. My only mention of "Art's parts" to Joel pertained strictly to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) materials analysis report, sponsored by AARO under the Army crada with to the stars. During my pentagon visit last august with Hal Puthoff and Joe Cannon (army), we reviewed and discussed these ORNL findings directly with ORNL and AARO representatives. I explicitly did not associate this information with the 2020 New York times article in my dialogue with Joel additionally, I explicitly informed Joel that "Art's parts" lack credible provenance, being anonymously mailed to Art bell along with an unverified account involving a grandfather allegedly discovering them in the New Mexico desert around the mid-1940s. I clearly expressed my professional skepticism regarding such anecdotal narratives. Joel's misunderstanding or misrepresentation of these points in our interviews has significantly affected the accuracy of his reporting." (Good Trouble Show 2025, 1:16:32)

1.1 References

Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford. (22 June 2025.) Retired US Navy Rear Admiral: Why We Need UFO Legislation. YouTube. https://youtu.be/OLzMTSBTRRg

Michels, Jesse. (Dec 13 2024.) Eric Davis Interview. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnAiNChnuEQ

Sol Foundation Q&A. (2025.) LIVE Q&A: With Dr. Eric Davis & Sol’s Jonathan Berte moderated by Dr. Peter Skafish. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9RlDhJbStk

Sol Foundation Symposium. (2025.) Eric Davis, Kirk McConnell, and Peter Skafish, ‘The Politics of Executive Branch UAP Secrecy.’ YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5f9bd2ps-c

UAP Disclosure Fund. (2025.) Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation (House Oversight and Government Reform). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVdux73iJEk