Will Miller on senior officials kept in the dark

Will Miller on senior officials kept in the dark

Date	2000
Topics	Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Will Miller, Peter Gersten, Leslie Kean, Luis Elizondo, David Grusch
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 142
Year	2000 in UFO history
Timeline	2000 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

Will Miller on senior officials kept in the dark refers to a claim by Will Miller, a retired U.S. Navy commander and former Defense Department intelligence officer, that senior officials were deliberately shut out of knowledge about UFOs. According to Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee, Miller told the lawyer Peter Gersten in 2000 that officials such as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), "whom I recently met on this subject", were isolated from UFO knowledge. In his view the "keepers of the secrets" were in Defense Department middle management, and at civilian contractors such as BDM, SAIC, Boeing and Lockheed, along with the comptrollers who monitored money flowing to certain classified and special access programs.^[4] Miller made a similar point to the journalist Leslie Kean in 2009: "Neither Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence nor the director of the DIA himself could get ANY information on the subject; this is a fact."^[1]

Will Miller

The Australian researcher Keith Basterfield summarised Miller's background from Kean's 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record.^[1]

• Career. After the Navy, Miller became "a senior Department of Defense command center operations action officer, a senior intelligence analyst, and a program manager" for future operations programs, including World War III planning, non-lethal weapons and future space systems. He advised U.S. Space Command and U.S. Southern Command on international counter-drug operations, and held a Top Secret clearance with Sensitive Compartmented Information access.
• His own sighting. Kean wrote that Miller "had his own sighting from a Naval vessel while serving near Vietnam".
• A quiet interest. Through the 1980s, Miller said, "I was simply a concerned officer who studied the subject... People with personal knowledge would seek me out because they knew I had an interest."

The briefings

According to Kean, after retiring from the Navy in 1994 Miller arranged a series of information briefings.^[1]

• Wilson. In 1997 he met Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, vice director for intelligence on the Joint Staff.
• Hughes. In 1998 he met Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, director of the DIA.
• His concerns. At the briefings he raised two national security concerns: the risk of uninformed human aggression toward UFOs leading to disaster, and the government's disregard for public concern and refusal to give honest answers.
• A hidden program. Over the years, Kean wrote, he became "more and more concerned of the existence of a well-concealed, 'need-to-know' UFO program", based on statements by people at his Pentagon briefings and others.

The claim

• To Gersten, 2000. Shellenberger's timeline quotes Miller telling Gersten that senior officials such as the DIA director were isolated from UFO knowledge. The "keepers of the secrets", he said, resided in Defense Department middle management and civilian contractors such as BDM, SAIC, Boeing and Lockheed, and among "the comptrollers who monitor the flow of money to certain classified and Special Access Programs".^[4] The timeline cites a passage in a book on Google Books, which could not be read for this article.^[3][4]
• To Kean, 2009. In a 2009 email to Kean, Miller wrote that the "control group" could not allow any information on its UFO research to reach anyone outside those cleared for the Unacknowledged Special Access Program. "Neither Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence nor the director of the DIA himself could get ANY information on the subject; this is a fact."^[1]

Later statements

• Offer to Davis and Puthoff, 2002. According to Shellenberger's timeline, on 25 April 2002 Miller wrote to Eric Davis and Hal Puthoff offering his services to research UFO crash retrievals and those "involved in that business". He said he could do so without touching classified information. He claimed to know of a special team whose secondary mission included recovering crashed craft, including the F-117, as well as its successor, its parent entity and two key officers. He also said he knew the name and last location of a senior officer with first-hand knowledge of "alien reproduction vehicles" at Area 51.^[5] (See Will Miller's offer to Davis and Puthoff.)
• Multiple control groups, 2020. On 25 June 2020, according to the timeline, Miller said he believed "we" have our own faster-than-light ("transluminal velocity") craft. He also said there are probably several "control groups", each covering part of the UFO issue: one for crash retrievals, another for collecting reports, another for oversight. Only a limited number of contractors, he said, could do this.^[6] (See Will Miller's secret groups claim (2020).)

Peter Gersten

According to the Wikipedia account, Peter Gersten (born 1942) is an attorney known as "the UFO lawyer". He represented UFO claimants including Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum, and the astronomer J. Allen Hynek.^[2] In 1977 he represented Ground Saucer Watch in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA. The CIA released nearly 900 pages of UFO files, and Gersten sued successfully over about 50 withheld pages.^[2] He later worked in the Navajo County public defender's office in Arizona, and retired to Sedona.^[2]

Context

Miller's view, that UFO knowledge is so tightly compartmented that even senior officials are excluded, recurs throughout claims of a hidden program. Basterfield, quoting it, remained sceptical. He wrote that "insiders" abound, and that although their stories may first sound credible, "deeper checks almost inevitably reveal problems".^[1] Miller's specific claims about the DIA director are not independently documented in the sources read here.

Notes on the earlier version

• Kean and the Boston Globe. The earlier version said Miller spoke to Kean, "who wrote about UFO secrecy in The Boston Globe in 2000". The sources read here place Miller's statements to Kean in her 2010 book and a 2009 email. Her 2000 newspaper work is not covered in the sources read here.^[1]
• Later whistleblowers. The earlier version linked Miller's view to the 2020s claims of Luis Elizondo and David Grusch that programs were hidden from Congress and senior leaders. That comparison is not covered in the sources read here.

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Will Miller — Retired Navy commander who discussed UFO secrecy with researchers.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Peter Gersten — Lawyer who directed Citizens Against UFO Secrecy and sued federal agencies for UFO records.
• Defense Intelligence Agency — The Pentagon's military intelligence agency, which ran AAWSAP.
• Leslie Kean — Journalist who co-wrote the 2017 New York Times story on AATIP.
• Luis Elizondo — Former Army counterintelligence officer who says he ran AATIP.
• David Grusch — Former intelligence officer who testified in 2023 that the U.S. has recovered non-human craft.

On the Timeline

• Puthoff–Green emails on a pseudonymous article (31 July 1999) — Puthoff emails Kit Green about a UFO magazine story.
• Proposal for a new Project Blue Book (2000) (24 January 2000) — Bigelow tells Vallée of an idea to push Congress for a new Project Blue Book.

See every 2000 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Peter Gersten”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.