TESTIMONIAL
May 9, 2001: National Press Club, Washington,
D.C.
My name is Daniel Sheehan. I am an
attorney serving as general counsel to the Disclosure Project. I am
a 1967 graduate of Harvard College in American Government Studies
and Constitutional Law. I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I
served as general counsel, and one of the cocounsels for the
New York Times in the
Pentagon Papers case and was involved in briefing and arguing the
case in front of the United States Supreme Court, giving permission
to the New York Times to
publish the classified documents, the forty-seven volumes of the
Pentagon Papers.
Subsequent to that time, I served as
special counsel to the office of F. Lee Bailey as one of the
trial counsels when we represented James McCord in the Watergate
burglary, and got Mr. McCord to write the letter to Judge Sirica to
reveal the Watergate burglars’ relationship to the plumbers unit in
the White House at that time. Subsequent to my service in that
case, I went back to Harvard to the divinity school to study
Judeo-Christian social ethics in public policy. I did my master’s
and PhD work there and became general counsel for the United States
Jesuit Headquarters in Washington, D.C., assigned to the National
Social Ministries Office and their Public Policy
Office.
It was there in 1977 that I was
contacted by Miss Marsha Smith, who was the director of the Science
and Technology Division of the Congressional Research Service. She
[ … ] informed me that President Carter, upon taking office in
January 1977, held a meeting with then director of Central
Intelligence, George Bush, Sr., and demanded that the director of
Central Intelligence turn over to the president the classified
information about unidentified flying objects and the information
that was in the possession of the United States’ intelligence
community concerning the existence of extraterrestrial
intelligence.
This information was refused to the
president of the United States by the director of Central
Intelligence, George Bush, Sr. The director insisted that the
president, in order to have access to this information, needed to
have clearance to contact the Congressional Research Service, to
contact the United States House of Representatives’ Science and
Technology Division, to have them undertake a process to declassify
this information.
Because the DCI suspected that the
president was preparing to reveal this information to the American
public, the Congressional Research Service’s Science and Technology
Division, under the directorship of Marsha Smith, was contacted by
the House Science and Technology Committee and instructed to
undertake a major investigation of the existence of
extraterrestrial intelligence and the relationship of the UFO
phenomenon to this.
I was contacted by Miss Smith, and
asked, in my capacity as general counsel to the United States
Jesuit Headquarters, National Social Ministry Office, to see if we
could obtain access to the Vatican Library to obtain the
information that the Vatican had with regard to extraterrestrial
intelligence and the phenomenon of UFOs. I pursued that with the
permission of Father William J. Davis, the director of the National
Office, and we were refused access as the United States Jesuit
Order, to the information in the possession of the Vatican
Library.
When I reported this to Miss Smith,
she then later subsequently asked me to participate [ … ] as a
special consultant to the United States Library of Congress
Congressional Research Service, to the classified portions of the
“Blue Book Project” of the Air Force [ … ].
In May of 1977, I went to the Madison
Building of the United States Library of Congress [ … ] and was
directed to a basement office, where there were two guards at the
door, and a third, sitting at the table, who took my
identification, verified that I had been designated as a special
consultant to the Congressional Research Service of the United
States Library of Congress, and was admitted to the room. I
thereupon found some dozen photographs of what is unquestionably an
unidentified flying object on the ground that had crashed and
plowed a furrow in a field of snow, and was embedded in an
embankment. There were United States Air Force personnel
surrounding this craft, taking photographs of the
craft.
On one of the photographs I could see
that there were some symbols on the side of the craft [ … ]. I had
been instructed that I was to take no notes and had to leave my
briefcase and all my identification outside of this room. But I had
brought with me a yellow pad. And [ … ] so I opened up the yellow
pad and refocused the overhead projector to the same size of the
cardboard backing of the yellow pad. And I physically traced the
copies of the symbols on the side of this craft, closed the yellow
pad back, put the microfiche back into the canister, reclosed the
box that I had, and I said, “It is time for me to leave.” And I
took this and proceeded to leave the office. At which point the
security guards stopped me and one of them said, “What is that you
have there, Mr. Sheehan?” At which point I handed the yellow pad to
him and he flipped through all the yellow pages and never found the
copy that I had.
And so I took that with me and brought
it to the United States Jesuit Headquarters, had a meeting with the
staff and Father William J. Davis, reported this to them, was
authorized at that time, by the United States Jesuit Headquarters,
to make a report to the National Council of Churches, and to
request that the entire fifty-four major religious denominations of
our country undertake a major study of extraterrestrial
intelligence—which they declined to do. I was subsequently asked to
deliver a three-hour, closed-door seminar to the top fifty
scientists of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of SETI—the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence—which I did do in 1977. I am more
than happy to testify under oath to these details to the United
States Congress, and would be happy to meet with any members of the
press [ … ].
—Daniel
Sheehan,
attorney and
Disclosure Project counsel
Used by permission of the Disclosure
Project