If in fact the Vice Directorate for Intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (VJ-2) was foiled in his bid to learn more about a classified UFO program 22 years ago, a man in a position to substantiate that claim has no recollection of such an effort.

“I don’t recall specifically anything about that in 1997,” says retired USAF Gen. Joseph Ralston, former Vice Chair of the JCS and erstwhile member of the Pentagon’s Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC). “It could’ve happened, I just don’t know.”

However, upon being reached for comment in Alaska, Ralston stated he worked closely with Vice Admiral Tom Wilson, who is alleged to have complained about lack of access to information on a classified UFO project during the Clinton administration. Wilson went on to become director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“In any of the official positions that I had, whether it was commander of Air Combat Command, whether it was Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs, whether it was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, I never received a report of any kind about UFO activity” — Gen. Joseph Ralston/CREDIT: wikipedia

“I met with Tom Wilson every day. When I was (JCS) Vice Chairman, the Vice J-2 would come in every morning and give me a briefing,” says Ralston. “I know Tom very well and we worked very closely together and I have great respect for Tom. But never, ever, in my time with Tom do I recall discussing UFOs with Tom Wilson.”

The controversy flared last month when 15 pages of notes allegedly written by physicist Eric Davis surfaced on the Internet. Davis, who has declined to comment on the authenticity of those notes, reportedly created them in 2002 either during or directly after a conversation with Wilson, who had just retired from the Pentagon.

Wilson, according to the notes, was still “livid” after having been denied an SAP briefing from an unnamed aerospace contractor five years earlier. The notes suggest the company was working on reverse engineering of “technological hardware” that “was not of this Earth.” They also indicate the contractor’s objection to reading him in was sustained by either SAPOC — of which Ralston was a member — or its supporting Senior Review Group.

The notes also state that Wilson shared his concerns privately in 1997 with late astronaut Ed Mitchell and UFO activist Steven Greer. In 2008, Wilson confirmed to De Void that the meeting with Mitchell occurred, and that UFOs were indeed on the agenda. But he denied he had ever gone looking for UFO material, classified or otherwise.

Ralston, who directed Air Combat Command and served as Allied Supreme Commander of NATO from 2000-03, said he had not read the purported Davis notes – De Void forwarded him a link – but added it was “not unusual at all for very senior people to be denied access to special access programs.” He emphasized that proper security clearances aren’t synonymous with need-to-know guarantees.

“For example, I worked on the F-117 program in the very early days when we started the program,” he says. “We didn’t have anybody at all in the intelligence world briefed on it, because it wasn’t an intelligence platform. And it had nothing to do with anything they would come across in their intelligence world. So no one in the DIA was briefed, no one in the J-2 was briefed, no one in Air Force intelligence was briefed because there wasn’t a need for it.

“Very few people in the Department of Defense knew there was an F-117. There were only eight members of Congress who knew, but a true special access program doesn’t show up in Congressional appropriations. One of the reasons you can keep it a secret for a long time is, you don’t have a whole bunch of people cleared into it, unless someone is going to add value to that program.”

A combat veteran who logged 147 missions over Vietnam and Laos, Ralston was ambivalent at best over recent UFO-encounter testimony coming from Navy pilots. He was also underwhelmed by the Pentagon’s release of three UFO videos recorded by carrier pilots in 2004 and 2014-15.

“It just means they’re unidentified – we don’t know what they are. Sometimes they’re natural phenomena of a nature where you’ve got gases somehow reflected by light and so on. I’ll just tell you up front,” Ralston says, “of all the things that I worry about, that’s not one of them. I’ve never seen anything credible in terms of UFO sightings.” Not once during his career in any command position, Ralston insists, was he ever briefed on or given a report on UFOs.

Ralston’s lack of exposure to UFOs mirrors that of fellow USAF veteran and ex-SecDef/CIA boss Robert Gates. At a speaking engagement in Sarasota in 2013, Gates told De Void, “I first joined the government 46 years ago and I have never seen one shred of evidence or one report of any kind of UFO or remains or cadavers or anything.”

Gates’ recollections, however, contrast sharply with those of one of his CIA successors, John Brennan. Prior to a 2018 lecture in Sarasota, Brennan said he had been “aware” of UFO “endeavors” (plural) underway while serving in both the White House and in the CIA. Brennan said investigating the phenomena makes perfect sense.

“We know that a number of our adversaries continue to try to look for gaps and vulnerabilities in our national defense,” Brennan said, “so anything that might take place in the air, in the atmosphere, is something that I think is rightly an area for pursuit on the part of our intelligence community and Defense Department.”

For Ralston, however, military UFO reports likely have prosaic explanations: “We have had radar blips show up forever, and usually it’s some internal malfunctions in a radar site, in airplanes, for example. I’ve flown fighters my whole career and radar anomalies happen all the time. You see a blip and it goes away very fast across the radar scope or something, that’s some stray electron in there that did it. And it’s hard to say that any of this didn’t happen. But you’re gonna have to have more proof than what’s come forward.”

Ralston, who was also affiliated with Lockheed Martin for 16 years, describes the current interest in UFOs as part of a “cyclical” pattern. He tempers much of the discussion, including reports of UFOs tampering with America’s nuclear missile facilities in the 1960s, with the context of faulty technology.

“Strange things would happen with electronics when I flew F-105s in Vietnam,” Ralston says. “Things would fail, radars would fail, go offline. The F-4 was certainly that way and I flew the F-4 up until 1980. When the F-16 came in, it was light years ahead of anything we had before in terms of reliability of the electronics. So the fact that a 1960s Minuteman would go offline would not be surprising to me.”

De Void has reached out to other SAPOC and SRG members listed in the Davis notes. No other replies so far.