Sumar Shapiro
Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro was a senior US Navy intelligence officer who served as Director of Naval Intelligence before retiring to join BDM International, a defense contractor that hosted classified Advanced Theoretical Physics working groups and was eventually absorbed into Northrop Grumman through TRW Inc. He is significant in UAP research for a 1989 disclosure to NASA mission specialist Bob Echler in which Shapiro stated that the United States possessed extraterrestrial vehicles he had personally studied at close quarters, and described in detail the operational procedures by which those craft were handled.
| Role | Rear Admiral, US Navy; Former Director of Naval Intelligence; BDM International executive |
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1989 Disclosure to Bob Echler
In 1989, Bob Echler was introduced to Shapiro by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had served as Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of the NSA, Deputy Director of the CIA, and Director of the classified National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO). Inman directed Echler to Shapiro under the pretense that Echler was interested in working with the group that managed UFO information; Shapiro was at the time retired from his DNI role and serving as an executive with BDM International.
Shapiro told Echler that factions within the US government and military possessed extraterrestrial vehicles and that he had personally studied one at close quarters. He described the operational handling of recovered craft in concrete terms:
- Teams would disassemble the craft
- The disassembled components would be packed up and shipped across the country to different laboratories for study
- The craft featured unique interlocking components that had to be disassembled in an exact sequence to be put back together
- Shapiro was deliberately careful about what information he divulged, declining to specify where vehicles and technology were taken in order to protect classified information
Second Meeting (1990)
A second meeting was held at Shapiro's home in Virginia in 1990. The meeting ended abruptly when Echler displayed a small hologram of an alien head in an attempt to draw a link between the technology and its non-human source. Shapiro became visibly upset, paced about his living room, expressed concern that he had been unable to reach Inman to confirm the purpose of the meeting, and decided to terminate the visit, suspecting that Echler was there under false pretenses. According to Echler, as relayed by author Timothy Good, Shapiro also wondered aloud why Inman had not directed him to the current Director of Naval Intelligence rather than to Shapiro himself.
Significance
Shapiro's Naval intelligence seniority and BDM board membership positioned him within two overlapping institutional networks independently implicated in UAP legacy programs — military intelligence and the defense contractor world. His introduction through Inman connects three figures each associated with alleged UAP program awareness: Inman (NURO director, SAIC board); Shapiro (Director of Naval Intelligence, BDM); and Echler (NASA mission specialist). The specific operational detail about sequential disassembly of recovered craft is consistent with other witness descriptions of non-human vehicle construction. BDM International, where Shapiro served as an executive, hosted a series of Advanced Theoretical Physics working group meetings in the 1980s that Eric A. Walker and other senior figures allegedly participated in, discussing UFO propulsion physics.