C. Richard D'Amato's warning to Vallée (1991)

C. Richard D'Amato's warning to Vallée (1991)

Key date	24 May 1991
Speaker	C. Richard "Dick" D'Amato, counsel for international and national security, Senate Appropriations Committee
Listener	Jacques Vallée
Claim	A secret UFO group spreading false information was committing "a felony"
Record	Vallée, Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles (journals 1990–1999)
Public position	Inquiry found nothing meriting further Senate investigation
Date	1991
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	C. Richard D'Amato, Jacques Vallée, Robert Byrd
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 108
Year	1991 in UFO history
Timeline	1991 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

C. Richard D'Amato, counsel for international and national security on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, told the researcher Jacques Vallée in 1990 and 1991 that the intelligence community was hiding UFO data from Congress, and that a secret project spreading false information was acting illegally. The account comes from Vallée's published journals.^[1][4] On 24 May 1991, Vallée wrote, D'Amato called the group's activities "a felony".^[1] D'Amato's later public statement was far more cautious. He said that an inquiry he made for a senior senator into alleged 1940s crashes in New Mexico found nothing that merited further Senate investigation.^[2]

Background

In the 1980s and 1990s D'Amato served on the staff of the Senate Democratic leader, Robert Byrd. He helped manage the budgets of the Department of Defense and the National Foreign Intelligence Program, and oversaw special access programs.^[2] According to the journalist George Knapp, Byrd, who chaired the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Harry Reid tasked D'Amato with looking into the subject in the early 1990s.^[2] By 1990 he had been on the Senate staff for 16 years.^[1]

Vallée, a French-born astrophysicist, computer scientist and venture capitalist, and a former associate of the Project Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek, has published his private journals in six volumes as Forbidden Science.^[3][4][5] The meetings with D'Amato appear in the fourth, The Spring Hill Chronicles, covering 1990 to 1999. Its publisher describes it as taking readers to "meetings with congressmen and intelligence officials".^[3][4] The researcher Keith Basterfield summarized the D'Amato entries in 2019, adding his own comments.^[1] The journals have been praised for their intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of ufology.^[6]

The first meeting

On 18 June 1990 the writer Whitley Strieber phoned Vallée and suggested he meet D'Amato. Strieber said D'Amato was convinced there was illegal intelligence activity involving UFOs, but warned that "the spooks will circle the wagons" under outside pressure. D'Amato would speak only in secrecy and wanted nothing to do with ufologists.^[1]

They met on 21 June 1990. Vallée described D'Amato as a solid man in his early forties, who had read Vallée's book Confrontations.^[1] D'Amato said the intelligence agencies had been hiding UFO data from the legislative branch for years and behaved "as if they ran the country". He said they came before Congress only to get money for secret projects such as "their latest discoid platforms". They were not authorized, he said, to fool the public or to stage hoaxes and "UFO simulations" with taxpayers' money.^[1] Asked about congressional hearings, he said that in Washington "you must find out the truth first, and THEN you hold the Hearings".^[1]

"A felony"

On 24 May 1991 Vallée flew back from a three-hour meeting with D'Amato at the Appropriations Committee.^[1] In the meantime D'Amato had met the writer Timothy Good, Knapp and Bob Lazar. He also mentioned a former CIA officer named Heineman as someone who might have access to UFO data. He agreed that he, Vallée and Kit Green should meet before he did anything about "Doty".^[1] Basterfield asks whether this meant the Air Force agent Richard Doty, and notes that several of the people D'Amato met were the very ufologists Strieber had said he wanted to avoid.^[1]

According to Vallée, D'Amato made these points:^[1]

• "What that stealthy group is doing is a felony."
• A government employee who knowingly spread false information to the public should go to jail.
• Spending appropriated money on projects Congress did not know about was an offense, and spending private money that way was worse.
• If senators could not find out about a project, the country was "no longer in a democracy". He asked whether "a Batelle or a Lockheed" was deciding the nation's fate.
• The project must be controlled by "an incredible level of fear" because nobody dared talk: "I find no leaks anywhere."

With Kit Green

On 11 June 1991 Vallée introduced D'Amato to Kit Green, the former CIA physician, over four hours of conversation at the Madison.^[1] Green recognized D'Amato from a review of the SRI psychic research. D'Amato said he was now funding that work and had written it into legislation.^[1] Green described his own experiences:

• He had visited former CIA directors John McCone and William Colby, and Professor Eric Walker.
• Colby had advised him to drop the matter if the people who sent him would not confide in him.
• Green described a "Brotherhood" of men in their seventies, a small project made to look large and "hidden in a contractor's basement somewhere, not in the government".
• He said its members were initiated by seeing their first UFO in the desert near Sandia, New Mexico.

Vallée summed up the meeting: the secret project was illegal and outside any government agency. It was small, and it generated high-level "leaks" designed to infect researchers with false data.^[1] Afterwards Green told Vallée that D'Amato had a good reputation at the agency but was "typical of all those senate staffers, who think they know everything".^[1]

Later contacts

Later journal entries record further meetings:^[1]

• 22 May 1992. D'Amato said Senator Pell remained fascinated by UFOs. He was convinced the Belgian-type flying triangles were human-made and the project behind them illegal, because "no money was ever appropriated for it". He added that groups such as the Air Force Office of Special Investigations continued to "cover, distort, destroy data".
• June and July 1992. Vallée sent him a classified copy of the 1952 Battelle "Pentacle" memorandum, which D'Amato acknowledged and placed in Senate storage. D'Amato also said that Donald Atwood, the deputy secretary of defense, had professed ignorance of anyone building flying triangles.
• November 1992. D'Amato returned from Belgium, where he had met Colonel De Brouwer, still convinced the triangles were "very plain human craft".
• 1994–1996. D'Amato cut the budget of Ed May's remote-viewing research from $2 million to $500,000 a year, and told Vallée that 26 boxes of remote-viewing data had never been opened by the analysts.

Basterfield noted that Vallée's journals do not show what evidence D'Amato's statements rested on, or why he concluded the triangles were American.^[1]

The official version

According to Knapp, D'Amato visited Area 51 and could not verify the crashed-saucer claims. But he thought it "entirely feasible" that a cover-up existed inside a private company such as Lockheed Martin, EG&G or Northrop Grumman.^[2] Knapp says he arranged a meeting between D'Amato and Alfred O'Donnell, a senior manager at EG&G, which ran Area 51, but O'Donnell would not tell D'Amato anything.^[2]

D'Amato's public statement says a senior Senate committee chairman asked him to make a preliminary inquiry into allegations of "unidentified aerial crashes in the 1940s in New Mexico". He met several people who had spoken publicly on the matter and reported to the senator that the allegations "did not appear to merit any further Senate investigation". He says he has no personal opinion and considers the inquiry closed.^[2] The private views recorded by Vallée have not been confirmed by D'Amato himself.^[1][2]

People and topics

• C. Richard D'Amato — Senate Appropriations Committee counsel who looked into black budgets for Sen. Robert Byrd.
• Jacques Vallée — Computer scientist and astronomer, author of the Forbidden Science journals and a central figure in UFO research.
• Robert Byrd — Senate leader for whom C. Richard D'Amato and Christopher Mellon investigated black programs.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.

On the Timeline

• Aviation Week secret aircraft report (1990) (1 October 1990) — Aviation Week reports 45 sightings of craft in the Southwest that hover, then go supersonic.
• Radio caller's underground base claim (1991) (1991) — A radio caller claims he wired a deep underground site holding military personnel and creatures.

See every 1991 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References