Selected by Extraterrestrials

About the Author

William Mills Tompkins was born in May 1923 and died in San Diego, California, on 21 August 2017, aged 94. His obituary in the San Diego Union-Tribune describes him plainly as an engineer who worked in aerospace for forty-five years. That is the uncontroversial outline, and it matters, because the parts of his account that can be checked are the parts that make the rest of it interesting to anyone.

The documented history runs like this. As a teenager Tompkins built exceptionally detailed scale models of U.S. Navy warships, accurate enough that a public display of them drew official attention on security grounds — a story that has the ring of the period, when the Navy was genuinely anxious about how much of a ship's silhouette and armament a hobbyist could work out from newspaper photographs. He was recruited into Naval Intelligence in 1942 and served until roughly 1946 in a role whose title he gives as “Disseminator of Aircraft Research and Information”: a draftsman and courier moving debriefing material between contractors including Douglas Aircraft, Northrop, Lockheed and North American Aviation.

After the war he worked at Douglas Aircraft, including on internal advanced-design study groups of the sort every large aerospace firm ran in the 1950s and 1960s. Later employment took him through the wider Southern California aerospace industry. None of this is exotic. It is a recognisable mid-century engineering life in an industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people on exactly this kind of work.

What separates Tompkins from every other retired Douglas draftsman is that in December 2015, at 92, he published a memoir saying that the debriefing packets he had carried during the war originated with 29 Navy operatives embedded in Nazi-occupied Europe, reporting on German antigravity flying-disc programmes; and that from about 1950 he worked alongside human-looking extraterrestrials of a type the literature calls “Nordics,” several of them employed as secretaries in his own office.

The book's editor is Dr. Robert M. Wood, and his involvement is the single strongest thing the project has going for it. Wood is a genuine aerospace physicist with a real career at McDonnell Douglas, and he overlapped with Tompkins at the same company. He has said that he was able to confirm parts of Tompkins' corporate history — the names of managers, the existence of particular programmes — which is precisely the sort of verification an outside reader cannot do. It is also, importantly, verification of the mundane half.

Tompkins himself made no secret of when he started talking. He was not a whistleblower who came forward and was suppressed; he was a very old man who decided, six decades on, to publish. Whatever one concludes, the timing is a fact about the source that a reader has to hold in view.

Historical Context & Origins

The Secret Space Program idea did not begin with this book, but this book is where it acquired a name, a face and a claimed documentary pedigree.

Its raw materials had been circulating for years. The notion that Nazi Germany had developed disc-shaped aircraft is old, contested and mostly traceable to post-war pulp and to a handful of unreliable memoirists; this site examines the technical version of the claim in Man-Made UFOs and its industrial context in The Hunt for Zero Point. The idea that a compartmented American programme had continued that work in secret is the subject of this site's Breakaway Civilization file.

What changed between 2014 and 2016 was the arrival of a cluster of first-person claimants. In 2014 a man using the pseudonym “Captain Kaye” — later identified as Randy Cramer — described service in a covert Mars unit. From 2014 onward Corey Goode described recruitment into a childhood military-abduction programme and a “20 and back” off-world tour. Neither man had a public professional record that anyone could examine.

Tompkins was different in exactly one respect, and it is the respect that made the whole field pay attention: he had a checkable career. A real wartime Navy assignment, a real name on a real payroll at Douglas, a real editor with a real doctorate. That combination gave the Secret Space Program narrative something it had never had before — a claimant whose ordinary biography survived scrutiny.

The distribution channel arrived at the same moment. Cosmic Disclosure, an interview series co-hosted by Goode and David Wilcock on the subscription streaming platform Gaia, ran from 2015 to 2018 and featured Tompkins alongside the other claimants. A memoir that would otherwise have sold a few hundred copies became the reference text for a continuously produced television narrative, and its specific vocabulary — Nordics, the Navy programme, the Douglas think tank — propagated outward from there.

It is worth setting this against the real history it borrows from. Operation Paperclip was genuine, extensively documented, and brought German aerospace personnel into the American programme; the Battle of Los Angeles of February 1942 was a genuine, still-unresolved anti-aircraft barrage over Los Angeles; and mid-century aerospace firms genuinely did run classified advanced-design groups. Every load-bearing element of Tompkins' setting is real. The extraterrestrials are the addition.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The wartime courier role was real and unusual. Tompkins' account of being recruited into Naval Intelligence in 1942 on the strength of his ship models, and of spending the war carrying research packets between contractors, is the book's most checkable claim and the one Robert M. Wood's involvement most directly supports.

The packets contained German antigravity intelligence. This is the first real leap. Tompkins says the material he moved originated with 29 Navy operatives inside Nazi Germany and described flying-disc and field-propulsion programmes. He is the sole source for the contents of documents he says he was not cleared to read closely and did not retain.

The U.S. Navy responded by starting a covert space programme. The book's structural claim: that the wartime intelligence prompted an American effort to design deep-space vessels, running in parallel with and hidden from the public space programme.

Tompkins designed kilometre-scale spacecraft at Douglas. He describes producing conceptual designs for enormous crewed vessels while working in a Douglas advanced-design group in the 1950s and 1960s. Large speculative design studies were a normal industry activity; the claim that these particular ones were built is not.

Nordic extraterrestrials were embedded in the workplace. The claim the title is built on, and the one that admits of no test whatever: that human-appearing extraterrestrials worked in his office, several as secretaries, and guided the design work.

Two extraterrestrial factions were competing over Earth. The wider frame — benign Nordics against a hostile reptilian group — which links the book to the pre-existing contactee literature far more closely than to anything in aerospace history.

The record survives in documents. Tompkins reproduces drawings, notes and company-era papers. The drawings are his own. The company-era material, where it is genuine, documents ordinary aerospace work; nothing in it mentions extraterrestrials.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The 1942 Battle of Los Angeles. The anti-aircraft barrage over Los Angeles on the night of 24–25 February 1942 is the anchor event for the whole Secret Space Program chronology, treated by Tompkins and by Michael Salla after him as the trigger for the Navy's covert effort. This site's own case file examines what the barrage actually establishes, which is considerably less.

German wartime disc programmes. The claimed subject of the intelligence Tompkins says he carried. The documentary record for German disc aircraft is thin and contested; see Man-Made UFOs.

Douglas Aircraft's advanced design groups. Real internal study organisations at a real company. Their existence is not in dispute; what was studied inside them is where the account leaves the record.

The “Nordic” typology. Tall, fair, human-passing extraterrestrials are a fixture of contactee literature going back to the 1950s — see Flying Saucers Have Landed and Aboard a Flying Saucer. Tompkins' Nordics arrive in a corporate office rather than a desert, but they are recognisably the same characters.

The “20 and back” framework. The claim that covert personnel serve a fixed off-world tour and are then age-regressed to their point of departure. It predates all of the current claimants and does most of the work of explaining why none of them has a missing-time gap in a checkable life.

Antarctica. Later volumes and Salla's companion books extend the narrative to a German presence in Antarctica. This site's Deception Island file covers what the real Antarctic UFO record contains.

The Grusch testimony. Proponents routinely cite David Grusch's 2023 congressional testimony as corroboration. Grusch described second-hand accounts of craft-recovery programmes; he made no claim resembling anything in this book.

Critical Reception & Controversies

There is no review of this book in any aerospace, historical or scientific venue, and there was never going to be. It was self-published, it is a memoir, and its central claims are of a kind that no journal reviews. Its reception has been entirely inside the UFO field, where it split the audience about as sharply as anything in the last decade.

The supportive case rests almost entirely on the man rather than the material: Tompkins had a real career, he was very old, he had nothing obvious to gain, and a credentialed physicist who worked at the same firm vouched for parts of his corporate history. That is a real argument and it deserves to be stated at its strongest.

The objections are structural, and they are not answered anywhere in the book. The first is the sixty-year silence. Tompkins published in 2015 about 1942–1963. There is no contemporaneous note, no letter, no confided account to a colleague from the intervening decades that anyone has produced. A recollection first recorded at 92 is not a weaker version of a contemporaneous document; it is a different kind of object entirely.

The second is that the corroboration runs only where it is least needed. Wood could confirm that certain managers existed and certain programmes ran, because those things are ordinary and findable. Nobody can confirm the contents of a briefing packet that no longer exists, and no former Douglas employee has come forward to say that there were extraterrestrials in the secretarial pool.

The third is the sourcing structure. The American writer and skeptic Jason Colavito, who has followed the Secret Space Program claims closely, has summarised the problem as follows: everything Tompkins alleges was either told to him by people he does not name or is his own inference, and the supporting “documents” reproduce material already circulating in UFO lore. That is a fair description of the book's architecture, and a reader can verify it simply by asking, at each claim, who else could know this.

The fourth is the Nordic secretaries themselves. Set aside plausibility and consider testability: there is no observation, document or physical trace that could distinguish a world in which they existed from one in which they did not. A claim built that way cannot be investigated, only believed or declined.

The fifth is contamination. Tompkins gave his account into an environment that already contained Corey Goode's and Randy Cramer's, and appeared alongside them on the same programme. The shared vocabulary that proponents read as mutual corroboration is at least as easily read as the ordinary convergence of accounts told in the same room.

One further point of fairness. Tompkins was never accused of the kind of documented fabrication that has attached to some claimants in this field, and his professional record was, so far as anyone has shown, exactly what he said it was. The problem with this book is not that its author was caught lying. It is that the extraordinary half of it was constructed to be unfalsifiable, and no amount of goodwill toward the ordinary half changes that.

Influence & Legacy

This book is the origin point of the modern Secret Space Program literature as a claimed historical narrative rather than a rumour. Before it, the idea existed as a diffuse suspicion about black budgets and reverse-engineering. After it, there was a chronology, a named originating agency, a founding event and a witness with a resume.

Its most direct descendant is Michael Salla's The US Navy's Secret Space Program and Nordic Extraterrestrial Alliance (2017), which takes Tompkins' testimony as its evidentiary base and builds an institutional history on top of it. Salla's later Antarctica volumes extend the same line.

Through Cosmic Disclosure the material reached an audience orders of magnitude larger than the book's own readership, and it is now embedded in the general vocabulary of online UFO discussion — the Navy programme, the Nordics, the 20-and-back tour — largely detached from any memory of where the specifics came from.

The legacy question worth putting to a reader is narrower and more useful than whether the claims are true. It is this: what did the field actually gain by treating a documented ordinary career as evidence for an undocumented extraordinary one? The pattern recurs across this literature. A verifiable biography is offered, verified, and then the verification is quietly transferred to claims it never touched.

This site's Secret Space Program Hypothesis file takes the alternative approach: measuring the claim of a covert crewed presence beyond Earth orbit against what a real, large-scale human spaceflight programme demonstrably required in people, money, tracking infrastructure and hardware — a test that does not depend on any single claimant's credibility, and one this book was never designed to survive.

The Book

As an Amazon Associate, OverClassified may earn from qualifying purchases made through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Related Cases & Theories