Frank Conahan
Frank C. Conahan served as Director of the National Security and International Affairs Division within the US General Accounting Office (GAO). He is notable in UAP research for his July 24, 1986 Congressional testimony before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, in which he detailed severe document control failures and oversight gaps in Lockheed Martin's (then Lockheed Corporation's) classified special access programs.
1986 GAO Testimony
Testifying at a Congressional subcommittee hearing on July 24, 1986, Conahan presented findings from a GAO audit of Lockheed's Burbank facility, which housed the Skunk Works advanced development programs. Key findings included:
- Lockheed exhibited a "poor document control system" over classified special access documents.
- There was effectively zero oversight from the DOD program office over certain Lockheed special access contracts — carve-out programs operating with minimal government visibility.
- The Defense Investigative Service had been explicitly denied permission to conduct its standard semiannual inspections of the aerospace contracts in question.
- An inventory of 40,000 classified documents revealed 1,460 discrepancies.
- Approximately 46 documents had been destroyed and could not be accounted for.
- 17 documents had been transferred out of the company and were never recovered.
Significance in UAP Research
UAP Gerb connects Conahan's testimony to the account in the Wilson-Davis Memo in which Thomas Wilson is told that the "watch committee" overseeing UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs had to reorganize and improve their SAP security posture after nearly being exposed by an audit. The 1986 GAO audit — occurring just years before the early-1990s reorganization Wilson described — matches the timeline. The destruction and unaccounted transfer of documents from Lockheed's most classified facility is treated as consistent with efforts to conceal the existence of UAP legacy programs housed within Lockheed's Skunk Works structure.