#Sludge Report #8: Eric Davis's fantasies, John Mack the fellow traveler, and speculative tidbits about the Hopeless Diamond
In an interview for NewsNation posted on August 19, 2026 ( https://youtu.be/nkVKbHsknZc?t=1099), Eric Davis highlighted his request for Presidential immunity for what he supposedly saw regarding NHI and recovered bodies over the years ("photographs, reports and so forth") so that he can reveal it to the American people without fear of retaliation. He also cited the need to waive his signed Standard Form 312 intelligence NDA and claimed that the files he formerly accessed are not subject to FOIA and are sealed for up to 75 years. He noted that he is "not that satisfied" with the Trump administration's UAP releases thus far and that he is not currently working for the DoW, AARO or PURSUE. He mentioned that the releases are being conducted at a pace commensurate with analyzing items to ensure they won't harm national security, but he evidently feels he could speed up the process by spilling the beans himself if he receives the reassurances he seeks. He reiterated his claim that "recoveries" have been made, including of "deceased NHI bodies. While acknowledging the need to protect national security if he revealed his knowledge, he alluded to his desire to release only "top level information" verifying such recoveries. However, it seems incongruent to suppose that the Pentagon possesses this information (and needs Davis to help them find the good stuff, apparently) and that Trump is sincere about releasing it (as per Davis's groveling appeals to Trump), especially since, by Davis's own admission, he no longer works in the classified realm. Wouldn't Pentagon insiders be much better placed to find and relay these sorts of details, given Trump has already issued a waiver for serving and former military and IC personnel of exactly the type that Davis seeks for himself? Davis listed the "minimum of four" alien species that we "know" about: the greys, Nordics, insectoids, and reptilians, sprinkling in a mention of the by now obligatory "ontological shock." Asked where the alien bodies reside, he said that he had tried to find an answer to that question when he worked for AAWSAP but had been unsuccessful in that pursuit. However, his colleagues had a "hint" and surmised that a "classified" military medical institute was holding the cadavers. He claims this institute dates back to the Civil War and that it "got split up into two or three components and relocated into different military medical institutes by the Obama administration. That seems awfully specific for something he "can't reveal" by name, as it gives plenty of clues for eager investigators to narrow down the institute. It would be akin to discussing the CIA without naming it, alluding instead to its 1947 formation and its numerous controversies. Lo and behold, a quick Google AI search with the query "What American institute, if any, fits this description: a "classified" military medical institute dating back to the Civil War and that got split up into two or three components and relocated into different military medical institutes by the Obama administration?" returns the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), complete with sources and references and a brief historical rundown of the institute's history since 1862, when it was the Army Medical Museum. The AFIP was eventually disbanded in late 2011 and its components were absorbed by the Joint Pathology Center (JPC), the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM), and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (AFMES). AASAWP ran from 2008 and definitively closed in 2012. Following Davis's timeline, if we assume he received the information about the likely cadaver custodians by the time of the medical institute's dissolution, AFIP would have still been intact and would have been the caretaker. If the information arrived with Davis after Obama's edict, any one of the three other institutes would be the custodians, complicating any follow up by investigators but still narrowing it down greatly compared to a mere mention of a "classified military medical institute." Thanks for the secret/not so secret extra hints, Dr. Davis!
When asked about the creatures' biology and physiology, Davis categorically answered that he didn't know, stating he had "never been able to access that type of information" (admittedly, as a physicist and engineer rather than a biologist, this gap in his knowledge might be excused as an example of compartmentalized classification).
Incidentally, Davis described AATIP's duration as being from 2008 to 2012 in this interview, though elsewhere he has mentioned the program as having a start date of 2007 and his own role in it ending in 2013. Whether the latter timeline refers to the gathering of people and resources rather than the proper start per se, and 2013 being a follow-on/mop-up of informal duties, is still unclear.
(*For anyone interested, the Google AI summary for the medical institute is provided at the end of this article.)
I happened to come across an interesting tidbit about the late John Mack, of Ariel school and alien/esoteric fame, while reading Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Western intellectuals in Seach of the Good Society (1998, page xi):
I don't know if Mack ever traveled to the socialist states in his lifetime (apart from Zimbabwe), but the above apologia for Soviet cynicism would be a pretty vile example of the whitewashing that many Western political pilgrims and fellow travelers did on behalf of Marxist-Leninist states.
While some commentators have attached high hopes to Trump's supposed push for more "disclosure" and transparency around the UAP issue, others have seen through the octogenarian psychopath's predilection for corruption and self-aggrandizement, such as commentator and pro-UAP advocate Billy Cox, who sees little prospect of anything truly valuable coming out of the White House's UAP Advisory Council. (https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/quarantine-this-insanity) Cox also points out that disclosurists, such as Garry Nolan, have had to issue humiliating "suck up" messages appealing to Trump's ego and hatred of the "Deep State" in order to get this ball rolling. It is highly doubtful that Nolan, an esteemed Stanford scientist, found this anything other than a bitter pill to swallow, given Trump's evisceration of federal funding for science and research. Michael Shermer has also taken a similar suck-up approach (not that he's particularly alarmed by Trump's attacks on science and education, despite being a "skeptic"), as has Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb.
Now for a wild speculation and stab in the dark, but I'll go for it anyway. In the 1988 TV special "UFO Cover Up? Live!", Richard Doty (under the pseudonym of "Falcon") talks about a book written by an alien and a crystal that “displays pictures...of Earth many thousands of years ago”. (https://youtu.be/5CzZyrGolAg?t=4246) Bob Lazar, whose own story broke the following year, would go on to claim that he read in “briefing documents” that aliens had altered our DNA many thousands of years ago. In the 1970s, Lockheed's Skunk Works developed a software program called ECHO 1 that could predict the strength of radar returns from flat, angled surfaces. It would lead to the "Hopeless Diamond", (so named because some engineers felt at the time that such a configuration couldn't possible fly) which would itself be the basis for the Have Blue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Have_Blue) and the F117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft. A diamond is a crystal lattice of carbon atoms. Lazar, at the time he came out with his story in 1989, had a friend named Jim Tagliani, who was an electronic warfare technician or engineer working at the Tonopah Test Range, where much of the F117's development took place. (Also of interest in that story is that the maintenance crews who looked after the radar absorbent skin of the aircraft were nicknamed "Martians", for "MARS": Materials Application Repair Section, and these crews initially had to use the Identimat hand scanners that Lazar described much later on) I raise all this because of James Carrion's compelling Human Deception Hypothesis for the Roswell saga, (https://www.keepandshare.com/doc13/21520/the-roswell-deception-by-james-carrion-pdf-7-8-meg?nav=4) in which he describes the events therein in the context of Soviet fears of America's nuclear monopoly, American fears of sneak Soviet attacks over the Arctic, code breaking, network analysis, and other items of statecraft and geopolitics. Just as the 509th Bombardment Group played a pivotal role in those events, (the 509th was the only operational nuclear capable strike force in the world at the time) so the Groom Lake facility popularly known as Area 51 may have played a role in the Lazar story. In the scenario I'm suggesting, this was unbeknownst to Lazar but possibly used John Lear as a conduit. Lear, who became a close associate of Lazar's, had worked at the Nevada Test Site in the early 1980s doing air collection missions for the Department of Energy and would have known some logistical details about the complex that could have been furnished to Lazar (such as the Janet flights from Las Vegas). Using Carrion's model, the idea goes something like this: Have Blue/the F117 was a highly classified program, and the Soviets would have been extremely keen to know about this portfolio. Reports in the popular aviation press by writers such as Bill Sweetman were already speculating about the nature of stealth technology. The Hopeless Diamond may have leaked at some point, but the USAF, wanting to get ahead of the leak and exploit it, coupled it with a story about an alien crystal. This would have allowed US counterintelligence agents to do some network analysis by listening to chatter on the Soviet end, in order to catch the people who were doing the leaking. Two variations on a similar theme: a mysterious diamond and an extraterrestrial crystal containing esoteric knowledge. Or it could have been to obfuscate and discredit the former by virtue of proximity with the latter, to make it seem like a ridiculous idea that was being thrown around by alien obsessed folks within the military establishment. Released into the yonder for the Soviets (or UFO curious insiders) to grab hold of, and then to see how those stories traveled. Yankee Blue, which was revealed in 2025 in a Wall Street Journal article, was a reputed Air Force disinformation campaign to trick cadres into thinking that they were getting involved in a flying saucer reverse engineering program. If Doty, or at least some element of the IC, was involved, it could conceivably have including references to crystals as well.
The timing, however, doesn't quite work, or is at least strained. The faceted shape of the F117 was already in the public domain by 1986 when Bill Sweetman deduced it in his Stealth Aircraft: Secrets of Future Airpower. The aircraft itself was officially acknowledged two years later. In 1989, it was used in Operational Just Cause in Panama, so plugging up the Hopeless Diamond with an alien story seems like an anachronism, unless the US Government wanted the developmental history of the F117 to be concealed from the Soviets. Still, the Soviets already had digital flight control systems of their own by this time and already had experience with using them in their own aerodynamically unstable airframes It would likely not have been a huge leap for them to figure out what the F117 was all about.
I'm afraid that's all of I've got. This isn't just a stretch; it's wafer thin, and the motif of a crystal was already doing the rounds in ufology well before Lazar ever came out with his tale in 1989 anyway (such as this Navy man yapping, in a 1978 UFO documentary, about a crystal rock with an elemental composition unlike anything on Earth, itself highly reminiscent of Lazar's story about element 115 and easily a candidate for its inspiration: https://youtu.be/QxKpYgG-GSk?t=3819) There were also sci fi/fantasy movies with the name "crystal" in the title, such as The Dark Crystal (about alien creatures on a fictional planet) from 1982. 1978's Superman (about an extraterrestrial man, no less) also featured crystals. My speculation will likely crash and burn and be denounced as "retarded", but it's worth a shot, and if it does turn out to be on the right track, then you heard it here first.
*The institute that fits your description is the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP).
Civil War Roots: It was originally founded in 1862 during the American Civil War as the Army Medical Museum, tasked with collecting and studying specimens of battlefield trauma.
The Split and Relocation: Following recommendations from the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission, the institute was officially disestablished on September 15, 2011, under the Obama administration.
The Main Components: Its core responsibilities and massive biorepositories were split and absorbed primarily by three distinct components distributed across different military and federal entities:
The Joint Pathology Center (JPC) – Absorbed the AFIP's world-renowned tissue repository and diagnostic consulting services, operating under the Defense Health Agency.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) – Maintained the historical and public anatomical collections, eventually relocated to the US Army Garrison Forest Glen in Silver Spring, Maryland .
The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (AFMES) – Formally took full responsibility for federal forensic pathology and medicolegal death investigations, relocating to Dover Air Force Base. [3, 4, 6, 7, 8]
While AFIP was highly visible for its public medical research, it frequently handled "classified" and highly sensitive operations. This included identifying human remains from secret missions, spacecraft disasters (like the Space Shuttle Challenger), and conducting forensic investigations for high-profile government figures and combat operations. [7, 9]
AI responses may include mistakes.
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