Eric Davis asks George H.W. Bush about Corso

Eric Davis asks George H. W. Bush about Corso

Who	Eric W. Davis, physicist; George H. W. Bush, former president and former Director of Central Intelligence
Recorded in	Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science 5: Pacific Heights (journals 2000–2009, published 2023), entry dated 26 March 2004
Subject	Philip J. Corso's 1997 book The Day After Roswell, and whether Corso might have mistaken Soviet technology for alien technology
Bush's answer	None of substance recorded
Later account	The Age of Disclosure (Amazon Prime, November 2025): Davis says Bush told him in 2003 of a 1964 landing at Holloman AFB
Evidence	Davis's word only; Bush died in 2018
Date	26 March 2004
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Eric W. Davis, Philip J. Corso, Jacques Vallée, Harold Puthoff
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 155
Year	2004 in UFO history
Timeline	2004 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	12

According to Jacques Vallée's published journals, the physicist Eric Davis said in 2004 that he had asked former President George H. W. Bush about the claims in Philip Corso's The Day After Roswell. Among his questions was whether Corso might have mistaken Soviet technology for alien technology.^[1][2] More than two decades later, Davis gave a fuller account of a conversation with Bush in the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure. There he said Bush had told him about a 1964 alien landing at Holloman Air Force Base.^[3][4] Both accounts rest on Davis's word alone.^[1][3]

The book

The Day After Roswell was published by Pocket Books in 1997, in time for the 50th anniversary of Roswell. It was credited to the retired Army officer Philip J. Corso and ghostwritten by William J. Birnes.^[2][11][12] Its claims:^[2][10][11]

• The recovery. The government had recovered an alien spacecraft near Roswell in 1947.
• The files. As a Pentagon officer in the early 1960s, Corso inherited a filing cabinet of Roswell debris and helped pass the pieces to defense contractors.
• The spin-offs. The reverse engineering that followed contributed to integrated circuits, lasers, fiber optics, particle-beam devices and Kevlar.
• The body. Corso had seen an alien body in a shipping crate at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1947.
• The group. A covert group led by the first Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, controlled the secret.

Publishers Weekly's anonymous reviewer found Corso "calm, sober and rational" but his claims "so outlandish" that readers might struggle to tell whether it was a hoax.^[11] The book spent three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, peaking at number 12.^[2] In 2001 The Guardian listed it among the top ten literary hoaxes.^[2][7]

Corso's record and the critics

Corso served in the Army from February 1942 to March 1963 and retired as a lieutenant colonel. His Officer Qualification Record, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows the following:^[10]

• The Foreign Technology Division. He joined it as a staff officer on 20 June 1961. He was its chief only from 18 April to 18 July 1962, and was absent for 15 of those days.
• Fort Riley. He was posted there from April 1947 to May 1950.

The researcher Jan Aldrich concluded that Corso had headed the division for 90 days, not two years. Birnes disputed the point.^[10] Critics documented further errors:^[2][7][8]

• Philip Klass. He noted that Corso had no science or engineering degree, and that the book placed the 8th Air Force headquarters at Fort Bliss instead of Fort Worth. It also called the radar-guided Hawk missile "heat-seeking".
• Kevin Randle. Citing an Eisenhower Library archivist, he found no record that Corso served on the National Security Council staff.
• Karl Pflock. The first CORONA satellite launch came two years before Corso's Pentagon posting. Pflock had met Corso in 1993 and dismissed him as a "blowhard loony tune".
• Brad Sparks. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1998, he called the errors "impossibilities". Corso described confronting the CIA covert-operations chief Frank Wisner at Langley in 1961. But Wisner had been replaced in 1958 and was then posted in London, and Langley received its first CIA staff only in September 1961. Corso also said Wisner hanged himself in a London hotel in 1961; Wisner died in Maryland in 1965. And Corso claimed to have inspired President Kennedy's Apollo decision at a 1962 meeting, a year after Kennedy announced it.

Senator Strom Thurmond, for whom Corso had worked in 1963–64 and 1973–74, had written the book's foreword believing it a memoir. Once he learned its subject he said, "I know of no such 'cover-up,' and do not believe one existed." The foreword was withdrawn.^[8][11] A 1997 British government memo, declassified by the UK National Archives in 2011, dismissed the book, citing Corso's "previous track record of unreliable testimony".^[2] The UFO researcher Stanton Friedman also reviewed the book. That review is hosted on Medium, which refuses automated access, and could not be read.^[9]

The 2004 account

Vallée, a computer scientist and longtime UFO researcher, has published his private journals in a series called Forbidden Science.^[5][6] The fifth volume, Pacific Heights, covers 2000 to 2009 and was published in January 2023.^[1] The account comes from that volume:^[1]

• The entry. It is dated 26 March 2004 and records what Davis told Vallée.
• The question. Davis said he had asked Bush about Corso's claims, including whether Corso could have mistaken Soviet technology for alien technology.
• The answer. The entry records no substantive reply from Bush.

Bush, a former Navy aviator, had headed the CIA, which made him a natural person to ask.^[3] He never commented publicly on Corso.^[1] The text of the entry is not available online, and its details cannot be checked against the book's listings.^[1][6]

The 2025 claim

Davis gave a different and fuller account in Dan Farah's documentary The Age of Disclosure, released on Amazon Prime in November 2025.^[3][4] Davis had been a scientific adviser to the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The film said Bush had told him privately in 2003 that:^[3]

• three unidentified craft approached Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in 1964
• one landed on the tarmac, and a "non-human entity" came out and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel
• when Bush asked for more details, he was told he did not have a "need-to-know"

Reports noted that no physical evidence was offered.^[3] The film also included Hal Puthoff, who claimed that several kinds of non-human beings had been recovered. It included Garry Nolan, who described personnel reporting injuries after contact with UAP.^[3] Farah said he hoped the film would set "the table" for a president to announce that humanity is not alone.^[3] The story was widely covered, mostly by outlets the aggregator Ground News rates as right-leaning.^[4]

The 2025 account dates the conversation to 2003, a year before the journal entry. Neither source says whether the two accounts describe the same conversation. Nor do they explain why the Corso question in the journal appears nowhere in the later Holloman story.^[1][3]

Assessment

Both accounts come only from Davis. Bush, who died in 2018, never spoke publicly about either conversation.^[1][3] The book Davis asked about is widely regarded as unreliable, and Corso's own service record contradicts parts of it.^[2][8][10]

People and topics

• Eric W. Davis — Physicist who worked on AAWSAP and has said the U.S. holds recovered craft.
• Philip J. Corso — Army officer who claimed in The Day After Roswell that he seeded alien technology into industry.
• Jacques Vallée — Computer scientist and astronomer, author of the Forbidden Science journals and a central figure in UFO research.
• The Day After Roswell — The Day After Roswell
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Harold Puthoff — Physicist who co-founded the SRI remote-viewing research and later worked on AAWSAP and To The Stars Academy.

On the Timeline

• Four "iron post" sources (6 March 2004) — A consultant tells Vallée that four trusted insider sources back Puthoff and Davis.
• DIA source notes on fake MJ-12 papers (2004) (26 March 2004) — Davis receives notes from a DIA source about fake MJ-12 papers and a secret project.

See every 2004 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “The Day After Roswell”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.