This is not a lead I want to write, because it’s the sort of half-assed cliché I despise. But I can’t help it. And there’s no other way:

For “X-Files” aficionados, or maybe fans of “JFK,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” or “The Parallax View,” what happened last weekend was like a gift from heaven, the holy grail of a script writer’s wet dream. Because every paranoid fantasy or suspicion one holds of big government, every nagging doubt, every conspiracy theory about shadowy goons operating with absolute power, blank checks, and zero oversight has just expressed itself in an allegedly authentic package of notes dubbed the “Core Secrets” transcripts.

“To doubt it is a failure of more than the imagination. It is a failure to recognize the limits of our own stupidity, the nascency of our science, the rudiment of our tools” — from The X-Files/CREDIT: derekbelt.com

It’s a complicated story, and rather than belabor the finer points with a tedious retelling that might bore your brains out, De Void defers to UFO historian Richard Dolan, who offers a good explainer here. He calls it “The UFO Leak of the Century.”

The drama began percolating Thursday night, when someone – nobody knows who – tweeted out the “Core Secrets” stash that had been languishing, largely unnoticed, since April at the Imgur website. These are 15 pages of notes allegedly compiled by physicist Eric Davis on 10/16/02, immediately following his hour-long interview with one Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, months after Wilson retired as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and J-2, Joint Staff Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

According to “Core Secrets,” Wilson told Davis how, in 1997, as one of the Pentagon elites, he went digging for classified UFO files and was informed, by a private aerospace tech contractor, that he, Wilson, lacked a valid security clearance to be read into the program it was running — with federal money. Wilson told Davis he couldn’t divulge the identity of the company or the name of its project because both were “core secrets.” According to the putative notes, Wilson did say, however, that the project was buried outside the famously opaque special access program structure, and was essentially exempt from Congressional accountability. And that the company alone decided who could and couldn’t have access to the data. And that the corporate suits Wilson met with conceded that it involved the reverse engineering of alien spacecraft. Alien, as in, ET.

“Scully, I’ve been chasing after monsters with a butterfly net …”

But wait, it gets better. Wilson supposedly met with three of the company’s officials – its  security manager, program director, and corporate attorney. When they told Wilson he and his prying eyes could take a hike, Wilson informed them he was going to walk it up the ladder to the Special Access Program Oversight Committee. Created by the Secretary of Defense in 1994, SAPOC instead sided with the corporation and warned Wilson if he kept pressing, he could lose his imminent promotion to DIA director (Wilson was deputy director at the time).

So how d’ya like them apples?

De Void was especially torqued because this isn’t what Wilson told me in 2008. Back then, Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell had been complaining very publicly that not even top  U.S. defense authorities could gain access to UFO projects. Wilson’s name was out there, so I gave him a buzz. Wilson confirmed he had met with Mitchell, and others, and that they had indeed discussed UFOs.

“What is not true,” Wilson added, “is that I was denied access to this material, because I didn’t pursue it. I may have left it open with them, but it was not especially compelling, not compelling enough to waste my staff’s time to go looking into it.”

End of story. Or so I thought. Now this.

Unable to reach Mitchell and Davis, I did manage to catch up with attorney Michael Hall of Edmonds, Wash. He’s been called the “paranormal lawyer” because of his links to the likes of Peter Davenport at the National UFO Reporting Center and Richard Haines, founder of the National Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena.  Hall was so freaked by the “Core Secrets” affair that he felt compelled to announce, online, that he wasn’t the guy who leaked the notes.

The “Core Secrets” thing has been floating out there for quite some time. UFO researcher Steven Greer has been talking and writing about his meeting with Mitchell and Wilson for 20 years. Dolan says he was shown, but not given, the “Core Secrets” notes back 2007. More recently, Canadian researcher Grant Cameron came into physical possession of them. Enter Michael Hall.

For the last six months, Hall and Cameron had been sweating bullets trying to figure out how to handle the material.  Although hardly a classified document, the notes are richly detailed, practically stenographic and, if true, they clearly relate to national security.

“What we’re talking about is a private conversation between two individuals that I am positive was recorded on a device and then transcribed by Eric Davis,” Hall says. “The tipoff for me is one part in the transcript where Admiral Wilson asks Davis ‘What are you gonna do with this?’ What are you gonna do with this? It’s a very specific question that indicates to me he’s got some kind of a device and not just taking notes.”

Hall says he and Cameron spent months vetting “Core Secrets,” and that he’s completely satisfied with the provenance. But the two never actually pulled the trigger on releasing the docs because someone else beat them to the punch. Hall remembers exactly when it hit Twitter – 7:53 p.m. last Thursday.

Trying to navigate infuriating pop-up ads, Hall said he spent hours trying to download the Twitter version to make sure it lined up exactly with Cameron’s version. Even after converting the text to what he thought was a readable format, every page he attempted to post was blurry. “There’s an embedded code in the documents that will not allow them to be transferred like that,” Hall says. Since the Twitter version was an exact match with what he had, Hall published the transcripts in his possession.

“Kennedy’s as dead as that crab meat, the government’s alive and breathing. You gonna line up with a dead man, Jimbo?” — from “JFK”/CREDIT: collider.com

So who dumped the stuff onto the Internet in the first place? Hall says to keep an eye on the larger context.

The To The Stars Academy, which has been instrumental in bringing The Great Taboo into the mainstream with authenticated jet-fighter videos, veteran eyewitness testimony, and its own release of official documents, is now in the middle of its six-part History channel series “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.” Although not a formal member of the TTSA team, Eric Davis has worked extensively on frontier science with Dr. Hal Puthoff, co-founder of TTSA’s Science and Technology Division.

“I’ve heard TTSA is very upset because they weren’t able to leak it,” Hall says. “TTSA has four more episodes to go, and they are now being upstaged by the greatest leaked document of this century.”

TTSA’s Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence,  declined to comment on “Core Secrets.” But he couldn’t resist weighing in on a scenario that a single defense contractor could have blocked Wilson’s access to an SAP.

“When we do ambitious stuff at DoD, there is never, ever only one contractor, a lead contractor, sure, but always a consortium or subs under a lead,” he stated in an email. “Perhaps grounds to doubt the veracity of the document then, eh?”

De Void isn’t smart enough to know one way or another. The whole idea of it seems preposterous, even to Hall: “Can you imagine a J-2 in charge of all the military intelligence programs not being read into the program and being refused by a civilian contractor? My god – that’s nuts!”

You got that right.