Main Article / Jul 25, 2026

Davis, Bush, and the April 1964 Holloman landing: what is claimed, what was promised, what remains unverified

By Jan for UAP Logbook / Published

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Astrophysicist Eric Davis says former President George H.W. Bush privately confirmed a 1964 UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base and was told he lacked the clearance to see the film. A 1974 TV documentary had already used the same story as a hypothetical.

Color photograph of George H.W. Bush at his desk at CIA headquarters, with the agency seal visible behind him, taken during his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence from January 1976 to January 1977.
George H.W. Bush during his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence, 1976–1977. The period matters: Davis's account places Bush's knowledge of the alleged Holloman film inside this 12-month window. Public domain, U.S. government source.

Astrophysicist Eric Davis says former President George H.W. Bush privately confirmed a 1964 UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base, and was told, by his own Pentagon liaison officer, that he lacked the clearance to see the film. A nearly identical story had already circulated on American television fifty years earlier — as a hypothetical, never delivered on.

In April 1964, according to the story Davis now tells, a helicopter crew got rerouted from White Sands with a camera loaded and rolling. Three Air Force general officers were already standing on the tarmac, in position rather than scrambling. Something non-human reportedly walked toward them. Decades later, a former president of the United States asked to see the footage and was turned down flat.

That is the most detailed public version yet of a story that has drifted through UFO literature for half a century. The 1964 date, the diverted helicopter, the "no need to know" — each of those specifics has either surfaced or sharpened in the past twelve months, layered onto a promise Hollywood was made in 1973 and never kept.

What Davis said on Disclosure Drop

Davis sat down with host Josh this year for a long-form interview whose transcript has circulated widely; the Holloman section runs from roughly minute seven to minute nine. He opens with a correction: the landing happened in 1964, he insists, not 1970 as some tellings have it.

From there, his account builds in sequence. Bush — Bush Senior, not his son — allegedly confirmed the landing to Davis directly, in private conversation. Bush told Davis he had first learned of the incident when he was read in as CIA director under President Ford, a post Bush held from January 30, 1976 to January 20, 1977. Three craft approached the base, two broke off, and the third touched down on the runway. The generals on the tarmac, in Davis's telling, had been expecting it.

A helicopter crew diverted from White Sands allegedly caught it all on 16mm film after the control tower told them to "film whatever comes in." Bush asked to see the footage. A Pentagon liaison officer said he didn't have the need to know. Bush pushed for written reports and documentation instead and got the same answer. His reaction, as Davis relays it, was to call the material "so spectacular... like an ontological shock."

Davis frames his source chain carefully: these were conversations brokered, he says, through the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Elsewhere in the same interview he deflects other stories with a flat "can't get into that" — but on Holloman he walks through the operational detail without hesitation.

In the same interview, on the four-species question, Davis clarifies the labels he has been quoted on elsewhere. "Insectoid" and "reptilian," he says, are morphological descriptions, not literal taxonomy. A species may look insect-like without being an insect, the way a praying mantis is not what an "insectoid" NHI actually is. The clarification matters because the public chain has tended to read those labels as biology, when Davis is talking about shape.

Davis is not a stranger to the story. He has told versions of it on Jesse Michels' podcast in 2024, in the 2025 Amazon documentary The Age of Disclosure directed by Dan Farah, and on Disclosure Drop in 2025. The tone shifts each time; the chronology doesn't.

The context in which he is now making the claim is significant. The Age of Disclosure centers on what the film calls the "Legacy Program" — an alleged eighty-year, multi-agency effort, run by elements of the CIA, the Air Force, the Department of Energy, and unnamed private contractors, that the documentary says has retrieved crashed craft and non-human bodies, and has concealed them even from sitting presidents. Davis sits inside that frame throughout the film. In one of its more specific claims, he asserts that non-human bodies were recovered in Russia in 1988 from the wreckage of a large, tic-tac-shaped UAP. The Holloman account is part of the same narrative architecture. None of the film's central claims is supported by named documentation; the filmmakers have explicitly said the most sensitive material remains classified.

Editorial timeline of the Holloman Air Force Base UFO landing claim from 1964 to 2025, with nine labelled events on a horizontal axis.
Editorial timeline of the Holloman claim chain, 1964–2025. Each entry marks a public appearance of the same story. The locations and the institutional behavior (promise, withdrawal, denial) are recognizably the same. The dates are not. Editorial infographic by UAP Logbook; not source imagery or evidence.

Where the 1964 date comes from

Davis's date isn't new. It is a variation on a story that has circulated since 1974, just with the year changed.

That year, NBC aired UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, narrated by Rod Serling and based on producer Robert Emenegger's book of the same name. The show included a dramatized Holloman landing, presented as a hypothetical. The backstory: in 1973, Emenegger and his partner Allan Sandler had been invited to Norton Air Force Base, California, to discuss a television project with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. There, AFOSI's audio-visual director Paul Shartle and an unnamed officer described a film of an alleged landing — placed not in 1964, but in 1971.

Emenegger and Sandler were told they would get somewhere between 600 and 3,200 feet of 16mm film, provided the documentary stuck strictly to official Defense Department and NASA material. The footage never arrived. It was pulled "at the last minute," and researchers have blamed everything from the Watergate political climate to internal AFOSI disputes to a deliberate setup. The finished documentary shipped without it and reduced the landing to illustrations of a hypothetical event.

A persistent rumor held that eight seconds of genuine landing footage had made it into the broadcast anyway. That has been debunked: frame-by-frame analysis shows the sequence is an F-4 Phantom takeoff, played in reverse, with the canopy and wings visible as a negative image.

Davis's version and Emenegger's therefore do not quite line up. Emenegger was promised 1971 footage that never came. Davis says Bush described a 1964 landing that was filmed but never released to him either. Different years, same base, and the same institutional rhythm: promise, then withdrawal, then denial.

The Vallesé diary and the Bush–Ford pair

A third version of the story predates Davis's recent media rounds by two decades.

In Forbidden Science 5, the fifth journal of Jacques Vallesé's diaries, Vallesé records that researcher Grant Cameron separately contacted both Bush and Gerald Ford. Both men reportedly told Cameron they had seen the Holloman landing film during official UFO briefings — Bush while heading the CIA, Ford during his presidential briefings. When Cameron pressed both men about the cover stories attached to the case (an A-12 test flight, a psychological training film), Bush denied those explanations outright but stopped short of calling the footage an authentic landing record.

Cameron's account is itself second-hand: he says he got the details from Davis, who at the time sat on the board of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers alongside both former presidents. Vallesé logged the exchange around 2004, which makes it the earliest point in the current public record where Bush gets tied to specific knowledge of the film.

A March 2026 segment on Jesse Michels' YouTube channel added a small but distinctive detail. According to a recap of that segment, Vallesé and J. Allen Hynek were at one point invited to view the Holloman footage, but were not permitted to do so — someone, in the language of the source, persuaded the film unit's decision-makers to withhold the screening before the two researchers arrived. If that account holds, it is a second instance of the same institutional pattern Emenegger described: the promise of access, then its withdrawal.

The counter-intelligence reading

There is a less dramatic way to read all of this, and it does not depend on whether Davis is sincere.

Researchers Jerome Clark, Greg Bishop, and Mark Pilkington have long argued that the entire Holloman saga fits a single pattern. Emenegger's unfulfilled 1973 promise, and AFOSI agent Richard Doty's 1983 attempt to dangle a "1964 Holloman landing" film plus a fabricated set of extraterrestrial-biology documents in front of journalist Linda Moulton Howe during the Paul Bennewitz affair, are part of the same playbook: a non-existent or theatrical film offered to sincere outside researchers and journalists, then pulled back just before it can go public. The promise, on this reading, was the point. The signature of bait is the offer, not the disclosure.

That interpretation is older than Davis. What has changed by 2025 is who is now repeating the same story: a physicist tied to AATIP, and a documentary produced with figures connected to the Senate-Reid-era Pentagon UAP push, retelling it on camera without Emenegger's-era qualifications. Whether or not the original claim holds, it has clearly outgrown the narrow audience it was reportedly built for. A January 2026 appearance on the Vetted podcast with Patrick Scott Armstrong, picked up in German- and Spanish-language UFO media, is a small marker of how far that spread has gone.

There is also a sharper in-community skeptical reading. A persistent line of criticism, common on UFO forums and reflected in the March 2026 Michels-clips Reddit thread, holds that figures like Davis, Hal Puthoff, and Vallesé mix genuine insider detail with invented or secondhand material in ways that are hard to separate from the outside. A user in that thread puts the credibility point bluntly: the program allegedly involved, sometimes called WUSAP, is described as a Special Access Program, and Davis, the user notes, holds only a TS/SCI clearance — "which isn't particularly elevated" by the standards of compartmentalized SAPs. The observation doesn't impeach Davis's specific account, but it is the kind of caveat that mainstream coverage of the Age of Disclosure tends to skip.

What the government's own record says

The U.S. government's current position has not moved since AARO's 2024 findings. That report concluded there is no verifiable evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic study, or official review panel has confirmed a UAP sighting as extraterrestrial, and no evidence the government or private industry has ever had access to alien technology.

AARO's report does not mention Holloman specifically. It is a general finding, and it neither validates nor dismisses the Emenegger story, the Davis account, the Vallesé–Cameron version, or the counter-intelligence theory. AARO exists to adjudicate what the government is willing to disclose about its own files — not to investigate a 1964 event that, if real, likely never fell under a program AARO has authority over.

What is still missing

Three things would turn Davis's account from a compelling second-hand story into something verifiable:

  • The 16mm film itself, or a documented chain of custody showing where it went after it was shot.
  • A Pentagon-era record of the incident — a report, a teletype, a contact log, a radar tape, a base security blotter entry. Holloman's own historical office should still hold whatever was filed at the time, if anything was.
  • A second, identifiable witness — someone from the tarmac, the helicopter, or the control tower, with a name, rank, and verifiable 1964 assignment record.

A fourth caveat, less often voiced in the public discussion: Davis's TS/SCI clearance is not the same as the access allegedly required to know whether a special-access recovery program like the one the documentary describes actually exists. He has been explicit, including in a 2025 exchange with Tectonic Defense, that he would tell all he knows if a president issued an executive order waiving his NDAs. No such waiver has been issued. The clearance he holds is consistent with someone briefed on a program by people who had read-ins he does not. It is not consistent with someone who personally walked into a vault.

None of that has surfaced. The story is unusually specific about the parts that do not require proof — the date, the runway, the diverted helicopter, the liaison officer's exact refusal — and silent on the parts that would.

The shape of the claim

In 1964, the Air Force was running serious flight testing across southern New Mexico — the X-15 program at nearby Edwards, the YF-12 at Area 51, and the A-12 OXCART under deep cover. Holloman's rocket-sled track and high-speed flight test program were public knowledge. A small research community in Albuquerque was already monitoring unusual sightings around the Tularosa Basin. AFOSI was running cover programs on UFO matters in the same decade. The A-12, in particular, has long been floated as a plausible cover story for a classified event at Holloman, since it was a real, deep-cover program flying through the same region in the same years. A story that names a 1964 Holloman air base does not have to invent its context; the context was already there.

Every link in the chain is independently checkable. Bush's CIA tenure is public record. AFIO has a public membership roster. Vallesé's diary is published. Emenegger's documentary is on YouTube. The 1973 Norton meeting is documented. What cannot be checked is the event itself — and that is exactly where the story, for now, has to be taken on faith.

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