Defence Minister Luke Pollard replied on 4 September, reiterating the longstanding MoD position: in more than 50 years, no reported UAP sighting had indicated a military threat to the UK, and as a result the Department stopped routinely investigating UFO reports in 2009. Its historical files were transferred to The National Archives.

However, Pollard also acknowledged that references to UAP could still exist elsewhere, including ships’ logs, air-safety reports and correspondence from members of the public.

This raises a more interesting question than whether Britain still has a “UFO desk”.

If something genuinely anomalous were detected today by military radar, electro-optical or infrared systems, signals intelligence or space-surveillance sensors, where would that information actually go?

Closing the MoD’s public UFO reporting function does not mean the British Government stopped collecting intelligence about unidentified objects. An unknown aircraft, unexplained radar return or unusual technological capability remains potentially important regardless of whether anybody calls it a UFO.

And there is a historical precedent for precisely this distinction.

DI55 and the old intelligence function

Historically, the public-facing Air Staff Secretariat handled UFO reports, while elements of the Defence Intelligence Staff, including DI55, assessed reports to determine whether they had intelligence significance.

The National Archives still places historical UFO material within records associated with the Chief of Defence Intelligence and Defence Intelligence Staff. One UFO policy file even retains its old departmental reference DI/55/40/9/1.

In other words, the office receiving UFO reports and the organisation assessing their potential intelligence value were not necessarily the same thing.

Today, Defence Intelligence has been reorganised within a much broader intelligence structure. Military Intelligence Services integrates intelligence from the Royal Navy, Army, RAF, UK Space Command and Permanent Joint Headquarters.

So if Britain still receives genuinely anomalous information, researchers perhaps shouldn’t be looking for another office labelled “UFO”.

They should be looking at Britain’s wider intelligence architecture.

SIS / MI6

SIS becomes particularly interesting if the question changes from “what are RAF pilots seeing?” to “what have the Americans, Russians or Chinese discovered?”

If another country possessed unusual aerospace technology, recovered materials or intelligence concerning genuinely anomalous objects, obtaining information about it would fall naturally within foreign intelligence.

That makes MI6 particularly relevant when considering Britain’s extremely close intelligence relationship with the United States, regardless of how fractured from temporary administrations they may be.

There is no evidence that I can find that show MI6 operates a UAP programme. But if highly classified American information concerning UAP or advanced aerospace technology had been shared with Britain through intelligence liaison channels, there is no reason it would necessarily appear in MoD UFO files.

It might instead be classified under foreign technology, scientific intelligence, aerospace intelligence or simply intelligence liaison.

GCHQ

GCHQ is another strong candidate for UAP-related technical intelligence outside the traditional MoD reporting system.

Its publicly acknowledged capabilities include the collection and analysis of communications and data with intelligence value. It supports Defence and works extensively with overseas intelligence partners.

Many of the most interesting modern UAP cases involve radar, electronic emissions, communications systems and multiple military sensors.

Once an unidentified object begins generating exploitable electronic information, it is no longer simply a UFO report. It becomes a signals and technical intelligence problem.

And if the United States shared highly classified UAP-related technical intelligence with Britain through Five Eyes channels, GCHQ would be among the British organisations positioned to receive certain categories of it.

National Space Operations Centre

The National Space Operations Centre (NSOC) is perhaps one of the most obvious places to look at modern unidentified-object monitoring.

NSOC tracks satellites, orbital activity, atmospheric re-entries and other objects affecting UK space interests. Its July 2026 report, for example, recorded 62 objects re-entering the atmosphere in a single month.

That does not make NSOC a UFO organisation. It demonstrates something more useful: Britain now possesses sophisticated infrastructure specifically designed to detect and understand objects operating above the country.

An unexplained detection does not need to be classified as a UAP. It can simply become a space-domain-awareness or national-security problem.

Cabinet Office / Joint Intelligence Organisation

The Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) is interesting for a different reason.

Sitting within the Cabinet Office, it produces all-source intelligence assessments for senior government, including the Prime Minister and National Security Council, drawing upon information from across government and international partners.

Imagine an incident involving RAF radar, Royal Navy observations, GCHQ intelligence and information supplied by the United States.

Somewhere, those different streams would potentially need to be brought together.

The JIO and wider Joint Intelligence Committee machinery exist precisely to assess intelligence that crosses departmental boundaries.

There is no evidence of a standing JIO UAP portfolio. But if genuinely anomalous information became strategically important, the Cabinet Office intelligence machinery would be an obvious area for researchers to investigate.

Dstl

Then there is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

Dstl becomes particularly interesting if we move from collection to exploitation.

If Britain ever obtained unusual material, unfamiliar aerospace components, unexplained sensor signatures or technology requiring specialist analysis, it would become a scientific and engineering problem.

Dstl specialises in areas including sensors, ISR, weapons and advanced defence science, working alongside industry, academia and international partners.

There is no public evidence that Dstl possesses recovered anomalous technology.

But if we are asking where Britain could scientifically analyse highly unusual materials or technology on behalf of Defence, Dstl is an obvious candidate.

The private defence industry

Perhaps the least explored area is Britain’s private defence and aerospace industry.

Companies operating from facilities with Facility Security Clearance (FSC) — historically associated with the term List X — can be authorised to hold and work with highly classified government material on their own premises.

Major companies within Britain’s classified defence ecosystem include:

• BAE Systems

• QinetiQ

• Leonardo UK

• Thales UK

• MBDA

• Lockheed Martin UK

• RTX/Raytheon UK

• Ultra

• Babcock International

• Leidos UK

This becomes particularly interesting because highly classified defence programmes do not necessarily exist entirely within government buildings, or within Freedom of Information Act search results...

Specialist scientific, engineering and technical work can be contracted to industry and compartmentalised. Engineers may only have access to the specific information required for their part of a programme without knowing its complete intelligence background.

That is standard practice in sensitive defence work and provides an interesting parallel with allegations made in the United States, where whistleblowers have claimed that some UAP-related material and programmes have been placed within the defence-contractor environment.

This raises a legitimate question: if Britain ever participated in an exceptionally sensitive exploitation programme, would researchers necessarily find it by searching government departments alone?

Not necessarily.

Leidos UK is particularly interesting in this context because of a whistleblower I spoke to told me they had/have a UAP tracking program that he helped create for the FAA. Although this is an American company, their Leidos UK is its UK operation/subsidiary and works extensively with the British Government and defence sector. Watch that interview below.

Perhaps we’re searching for the wrong words

There is another problem facing researchers: terminology.

Searching government records exclusively for UFO or UAP assumes intelligence organisations use the same language we do.

An unidentified object detected approaching Britain might instead be recorded as an airspace incursion. An unusual electronic signature could become signals intelligence. Something arriving from orbital altitude could become space-domain awareness. Recovered material might fall under technical exploitation, materials science or foreign technology.

Information received from the United States might simply be intelligence liaison reporting.

The same underlying event could therefore generate records across several organisations without the words UFO or UAP appearing anywhere.

That makes the statement that Britain “stopped investigating UFOs in 2009” perfectly compatible with Britain continuing to collect and analyse information about unidentified objects. We know they are directing huge resources to UAVs and Drones in our air domain.

What ended was the MoD’s dedicated UFO reporting and investigation function.

That is not necessarily the same thing as Britain’s intelligence services deciding that unidentified objects detected by military sensors should be ignored.

So perhaps researchers need to stop looking for Britain’s modern equivalent of the UFO desk.

The more interesting places are Defence Intelligence, SIS/MI6, GCHQ, UK Space Command and NSOC, the Cabinet Office/JIO, Dstl and Britain’s classified defence-industrial base.

If something genuinely anomalous were detected today and judged to have intelligence, scientific or national-security significance, it would have to go somewhere.

The real question is no longer “does Britain still investigate UFOs?”

It is:

Who investigates the intelligence when nobody calls it a UFO?

This particular trail starts with UFOs, runs through the invention of coherent microwave and laser technology, passes through some extraordinary experiments involving lasers being fired into space, arrives at Skinwalker Ranch and eventually ends with a laser physicist being selected to run the Pentagon’s UFO office.

None of this proves that one caused the other. I’ll be clear on that, but as someone who believes there is a genuine phenomenon behind some UFO reports, and that synchronicities are everywhere in this subject, I think the technological parallels are fascinating.

And it starts in 1952.

1952: UFOs and Coherent Microwave Technology Converge

In early 1952, physicist Charles Townes was working on the concept that would become the MASER — technology capable of producing a highly coherent and tightly controlled beam of microwave electromagnetic radiation. At essentially the same moment, the United States Air Force’s UFO problem was dramatically escalating.

In March 1952, USAF Director of Intelligence Major General Charles Cabell ordered the establishment of Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, formalising a renewed effort to collect and analyse UFO reports amid growing national-security concerns.

Then came the summer of 1952. The United States experienced one of the largest UFO reporting waves on record. Most significantly, during July 1952, unidentified targets were repeatedly reported around Washington, D.C., involving radar detections and visual observations. Whatever your interpretation of those incidents, they were taken seriously enough to generate enormous press attention and concern within the military and intelligence establishment.

So, by the end of 1952, two remarkable developments were occurring simultaneously. In physics, scientists were developing technology capable of generating controlled, coherent microwave electromagnetic radiation. In national security, the USAF and intelligence community were escalating their investigation of unidentified objects apparently operating in US airspace.

The important point is not that the maser caused the 1952 UFO sightings. There is no evidence for that. In fact, the order of events makes that unlikely. What interests me is something different: the US government’s UFO problem escalated immediately before scientists demonstrated, for the first time, a practical means of generating highly coherent microwave radiation.

That makes 1952–53 an unusually interesting junction between the history of UFO investigation and the history of directed electromagnetic technology.

From the MASER to the LASER

The maser was effectively the laser’s older microwave brother. By 1957, Gordon Gould was developing the concept of producing the same fundamental effect using light and coined the term LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). In 1958, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow published their landmark work describing the optical maser. Then, in 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first working laser.

In less than a decade we’d gone from experimental coherent microwave radiation to coherent beams of light. And the military immediately understood the implications.

Over the following decades, laser technology progressed from laboratory experiments into target designation, ranging, tracking, communications, adaptive optics and eventually directed-energy weapons. Which brings us to somewhere particularly interesting: Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico.

Starfire

At Kirtland sits the Starfire Optical Range, eventually operated within the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate. Starfire became involved in extraordinarily sophisticated work involving lasers, atmospheric compensation, adaptive optics, beam control and the acquisition and tracking of objects in space.

In 1992, Starfire participated in a remarkable experiment with NASA/JPL. Scientists fired laser pulses from Kirtland AFB towards NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. Galileo wasn’t orbiting a few hundred kilometres above their heads. Depending upon the stage of the experiment, the spacecraft was roughly 700,000 to 3 million kilometres from Earth.

Lasers were fired from Earth. Galileo detected the pulses.

Think about what that represents technologically. A precisely generated electromagnetic signal originating on Earth could be directed through the atmosphere and detected by an object hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions, of kilometres away.

This isn’t UFO lore, by the way, it’s physics.

And it’s 1992.

Keep that date in the back of your mind, because five years later somebody rather interesting enters our story.

Enter Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick - Who, did I Mention, Is a Laser Physicist?

In 1997, a physicist named Dr Sean Kirkpatrick joined the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

And this is an important detail, so I’m going to mention it now and probably several more times before we’re finished: Sean Kirkpatrick is a laser physicist.

Kirkpatrick didn’t arrive at AFRL by accident. His background was in physics, and at AFRL he established an ultrafast laser physics laboratory for Air Force applications.

Laser physics. For the Air Force.

Keep that filed away, yeah..

His subsequent career would take him through some extraordinary corners of the US national-security establishment, including positions associated with the National Reconnaissance Office, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense. But it’s worth remembering where that journey began: Air Force Research Laboratory, advanced Air Force applications and laser physics.

I promise the laser physicist thing will become relevant again.

Skinwalker Ranch

By the 2010s, something very different was happening at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. For years, researchers associated with the ranch had experimented with different ways of provoking, measuring and documenting the strange phenomena reported there.

That included electronic equipment, radio frequencies, electromagnetic measurements, lasers and other forms of technological stimulus.

The basic experimental question is fascinatingly simple: if there really is an intelligence behind some of these phenomena, can you deliberately interact with it?

Instead of waiting for something strange to happen, can you do something and observe whether the phenomenon responds?

This idea, technological stimulus followed by observation of an apparent response, is particularly interesting when viewed against the history we’ve just gone through. Coherent electromagnetic radiation. Lasers. Beam control. Sending signals towards objects. Detecting responses. Trying to understand what happens when you deliberately introduce energy into an environment.

And then, in 2018, the Skinwalker research reaches Washington.

19 April 2018

On 19 April 2018, Skinwalker Ranch owner Brandon Fugal and members of his team travelled to Washington, D.C. According to Fugal, his team had been invited to provide a confidential briefing to people associated with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Armed Services Committee.

This wasn’t a ten-minute chat over. Fugal says the presentation lasted approximately two and a half hours, consisted of 55 slides plus video, and covered roughly two years of investigation at Skinwalker Ranch.

The subject was the unusual phenomena they had been documenting and investigating.

And sitting in the room was someone we’ve already met.

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick.

Yes. That Sean Kirkpatrick.

The laser physicist.

The former AFRL scientist who had established an ultrafast laser physics laboratory for Air Force applications. The man whose career had subsequently taken him through some of the most sensitive science and intelligence organisations in the US government.

Apparently, when Washington wanted someone in the room listening to a lengthy presentation about strange phenomena at a ranch where researchers had been experimenting with electromagnetic effects, frequencies and lasers, somebody found themselves a laser physicist.

I’m sure you’re beginning to spot the recurring character.

Photographic evidence subsequently released by Fugal shows Kirkpatrick sitting at the table during the briefing. And remember: this was 2018. There was no AARO yet. Kirkpatrick hadn’t become the UFO guy. He was already being exposed to this material years before taking charge of the Pentagon’s eventual UAP investigation office.

And — just in case we’ve forgotten during the previous three paragraphs — he was a laser physicist.

Then Washington gets very interested in UFOs again.

Over the following few years, the UFO issue, now increasingly described using the term UAP, returned to Washington in a way we hadn’t seen for decades. Congressional and Senate interest increased. Legislation followed. The Pentagon’s UAP Task Force appeared. Lawmakers demanded greater reporting and oversight.

Eventually, Congress mandated the creation of a substantially more formal organisation for investigating UAP: AARO (the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office).

Now the US government needed someone to run it.

You can probably see where this is going.

They needed someone from the science and intelligence world. Someone trusted within the national-security establishment. Someone capable of dealing with potentially extremely advanced technology. Someone who understood physics.

And guess who emerged as the intelligence community’s choice?

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick.

The laser physicist.

Kirkpatrick became the first director of AARO, serving during 2022–23.

Of all the scientists and intelligence officials available to the Pentagon, the man eventually placed at the centre of America’s renewed official UFO investigation was someone who had begun his Air Force research career establishing an ultrafast laser physics laboratory, subsequently moved through the intelligence community, and had already sat through a lengthy government briefing concerning Skinwalker Ranch four years before AARO existed.

That doesn’t prove anything nefarious. But as CVs go, it’s certainly an interesting one, right?

Put the Chronology Together

1952: Massive UFO wave; Project Blue Book established; Townes developing MASER technology.

1953: First working MASER; CIA Robertson Panel examines the UFO problem.

1957–60: LASER concept developed; first working laser demonstrated.

Following decades: Military laser technology develops rapidly into targeting, tracking, beam control, adaptive optics and directed-energy research.

1992: Starfire/Kirtland fires laser pulses towards Galileo; Galileo detects them hundreds of thousands to millions of kilometres from Earth.

1997: Sean Kirkpatrick joins AFRL and establishes an ultrafast laser physics laboratory for Air Force applications. Yes, we’re officially in the laser physicist part of the story.

2010s: Skinwalker Ranch researchers experiment with electronic equipment, frequencies, lasers and other technological methods while investigating anomalous phenomena.

19 April 2018: Brandon Fugal’s Skinwalker team gives a 2.5-hour Washington briefing, involving 55 slides plus video, to an audience associated with Senate intelligence and armed-services interests. Sean Kirkpatrick attends. The laser physicist.

2020–22: Congressional pressure drives increasingly formal government investigation of UAP.

2022: The Pentagon needs somebody to lead AARO.

And the man selected is…

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick.

Physicist. Former AFRL scientist. Intelligence official. Skinwalker briefing attendee.

And, in case I haven’t mentioned it:

laser physicist.

So what am I actually suggesting?

I’m not suggesting that Charles Townes invented the maser because UFOs appeared over Washington. I’m certainly not suggesting Theodore Maiman built the laser so somebody could summon a flying saucer. And I’m not suggesting that firing a laser at Galileo is the same thing as communicating with an Orb.

But I am suggesting there’s an extraordinarily interesting technological chronology sitting alongside the history of the UFO subject. Again and again we find electromagnetic radiation, signalling, detection, tracking and interaction appearing somewhere in the story.

In 1952, the US government was confronting one of the most extraordinary UFO waves in history just as physicists were developing the technology necessary to generate coherent microwave radiation. Within eight years, we had the laser. Within a few decades, the military was developing incredibly sophisticated systems capable of directing those signals through the atmosphere and towards objects in space.

By 1992, Starfire could fire laser pulses from New Mexico that were detected by a spacecraft millions of kilometres away. Five years later, Sean Kirkpatrick - laser physicist, for anyone arriving late - joined AFRL and established a laboratory dedicated to ultrafast laser physics for Air Force applications.

Then, two decades later, the same Kirkpatrick found himself sitting across the table from Brandon Fugal while the Skinwalker Ranch team briefed Washington about its investigation of anomalous phenomena - an investigation that itself involved experiments with electromagnetic frequencies, electronic equipment and lasers.

Four years after that, the US government needed someone to run its new UFO office.

And somehow, after seventy years of UFO investigations, intelligence agencies, electromagnetic research, lasers, radar, signalling and increasingly sophisticated attempts to understand anomalous objects…

the bloke they chose was the laser physicist.

Coincidence?

Possibly.

But it’s one hell of a chronology.

Skywatcher

Skywatcher then appeared publicly in January 2025, combining Jake Barber’s claims with an even stranger proposition: UAP could apparently be “called” through both human psionic/telepathic abilities and technology. James Fowler, co-founder, described a proprietary electromechanical signalling system, nicknamed the “dog whistle”, developed over roughly five years and allegedly capable of attracting particular classes of UAP. Importantly, Skywatcher never publicly established that this was specifically sound frequency; Fowler generally described it in terms of electronic signals or signatures rather than lasers. Yet they were remarkably open about the concept, promoting it through highly produced YouTube films, mainstream news and UAP conferences.

And that openness made me wonder whether we were being shown exactly what somebody wanted us to see.

If America were investigating something entirely different, lasers, coherent light or another directed-energy technology, publicly pointing everyone towards a mysterious electronic “dog whistle” would make quite the red herring for anyone watching in Russia or China.

Counter-intelligence? Misdirection? I genuinely don’t know.

But Skywatcher then largely disappeared from public view after its initial burst of publicity, with Fowler returning to government-contracting work and later reporting suggesting elements of the project had effectively “gone government.” None of that proves the dog whistle was a cover story, but given how loudly Skywatcher arrived and how quietly it disappeared, it’s an intriguing possibility. I covered the wider Skywatcher story in a recent video here:

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Not another whistleblower interview. Not another grainy debatable light in the sky. Not another retired official telling us that extraordinary things were happening somewhere behind classified doors.

Evidence.

At least, that was the promise.

On 24 January 2025, Jake Barber appeared on Reality Check with Ross Coulthart on NewsNation and made an extraordinary prediction about what his team was going to achieve.

“We have an opportunity to work with the U.S. Government right now. The U.S. Government is aware and knows what we are capable of. They are prepared to allow us to use their facilities. To help them. We provide them a path to redemption.”

Then came the part that really caught my attention:

“I believe the US Government, in the next 12 months, will use me and my team as a peaceful non-judgmental path forward to disclosure. They will help us conduct our operations and gather evidence in order to present this subject matter to the public to answer the questions once and for all.”

Barber went further, suggesting they should be able to answer questions such as what these objects look like, who is operating them and where they come from.

Those are not modest ambitions.

That is essentially the UFO jackpot.

And there was apparently going to be data, scientific analysis and peer-reviewed work at the end of it.

For somebody like me, who believes there is a genuine phenomenon buried somewhere beneath seventy-plus years of mythology, secrecy, misidentification and occasionally industrial quantities of nonsense, this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

But bold claims create equally bold expectations.

And more than eighteen months later, those expectations deserve revisiting.

There was something else interesting about the timing.

Skywatcher’s YouTube account was created on 18 January 2025, just six days before Barber’s NewsNation appearance.

Then the machine started moving.

The videos were beautifully produced. There were helicopters, sensor systems, large areas of land, people with impressive CVs and the unmistakable appearance of serious financial backing.

Whatever Skywatcher was, this didn’t look like four blokes standing in a field with night-vision goggles and a camping chair.

The organisation today describes itself in decidedly more defence-industry language, saying it combines special operations experience, advanced sensing and “non-traditional air defense techniques” to detect and analyse aircraft, UAVs, unconventional aerospace activity and anomalies.

Then there was Alex Klokus.

Klokus is a financier, technology entrepreneur and media founder who became closely associated with Skywatcher’s leadership. His involvement interested me because this wasn’t simply another collection of UFO enthusiasts. There appeared to be a business and investment infrastructure developing around the operation. The finance world expected results and appeared to be putting their money behind it - speculate to accumulate…

Alex was so involved in the leadership of the group that he personally registered the skywatcher.ai domain in his name in December 2024. A month before Skywatcher launched their YouTube efforts and Jake appeared on News Nation making the big claims.

Everything suggested momentum.

Skywatcher released two impressive instalments of what appeared to be a continuing series. Its YouTube audience climbed beyond 130,000 subscribers.

And then...

Nothing.

Or at least nothing resembling what many of us thought was coming.

There was no public disclosure of where the objects supposedly originated. No publicly demonstrated recovered craft. No scientific package capable of settling the argument. No Part Three arriving to deliver the answers promised at the beginning.

Instead, Skywatcher largely disappeared from the public UFO conversation.

And that matters to me personally because I supported them.

I made videos about Skywatcher. I wrote about them. When people immediately dismissed the whole project as nonsense, I argued that they deserved the opportunity to produce the evidence before being condemned. Giving them the benefit of the doubt.

That remains my position on almost everything in this subject: claims deserve investigation before either belief or ridicule.

But that principle works both ways.

Eventually, the people making the claims have to produce something.

And Skywatcher ghosted us. Sort of.

So What Happened?

There were hints.

James Fowler, one of the central figures in the organisation, eventually announced that he was leaving Skywatcher to pursue other ventures.

Then there were statements from Skywatcher’s official X account suggesting that developments were taking place away from public view.

This is where things become considerably more interesting…but also where we need to be careful.

One theory circulating within the UAP community is that Skywatcher didn’t fail at all.

It succeeded too well.

According to this interpretation, the team’s capabilities attracted the attention of the U.S. Government and its work was subsequently pulled behind the classified curtain, potentially through government contracting, national-security agreements or even some form of Special Access Program (SAP).

It’s a fantastic story.

Unfortunately, fantastic stories are something the UFO world has never been short of.

The question is whether there is evidence for it.

One of the most controversial elements of Skywatcher’s operation was its use of people who could somehow attract or “summon” UAP through consciousness or so-called psionic techniques.

So is the Skywatcher leadership aren't giving us straight answers, what about the psionic they worked with?

Rather than argue about it endlessly online, I spoke to somebody who was actually there.

I interviewed John, who worked with Skywatcher and participated in these summoning operations.

John explained to me that, although he only worked with them for a few days as part of the psionic’s team, he believed the psionic had gone their separate ways, moved in to their own endeavours and that potentially the Skywatcher team had disbanded.

Though John did caveat that with the understanding that he wasn’t any longer an insider. Part of that interview with John is in the YouTube video at the end of this article.

I also had the opportunity to put the subject directly to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO — who has publicly discussed meeting members of the Skywatcher organisation.

Kirkpatrick told me:

Now, whatever you make of Sean Kirkpatrick — and personally I take everything said by current or former government officials on this subject with a healthy pinch of salt, Kirkpatrick especially — his comments are important.

Not because Kirkpatrick automatically settles the argument, but because he occupied one of the most senior official positions investigating UAP inside the Pentagon.

His assessment therefore belongs in the evidence pile whether we agree with it or not.

That is how investigation is supposed to work.

I also decided to go directly to the people involved.

I contacted Alex Klokus seeking clarification about what happened to Skywatcher and where the project currently stands.

I separately contacted Susan Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson through whom many UAP-related media enquiries have historically been routed.

At the time of writing, I have received no response from Klokus.

Gough didn’t have anything for me at the time of writing this.

Gough may still respond. If either does, I’ll publish the response on my Instagram account, which has essentially become UAP Files HQ.

But the absence of a response leaves us with the same fundamental question.

What happened?

And that brings us to perhaps the strangest part of this story.

The Government SAP Theory

Congressman Eric Burlison has spoken publicly about an event involving a group conducting an operation intended to attract, down, document or interact with UAP.

The descriptions have naturally led people within the community to speculate that the group being discussed was in fact Skywatcher.

That identification needs to remain labelled as speculation unless Burlison or somebody directly involved confirms it.

But the wider suggestion is fascinating: an operation was apparently sufficiently successful to alter the way some people around government viewed the subject.

Then another location began appearing in conversations around these activities.

West Texas.

More specifically, the region around El Paso, Van Horn and southern New Mexico.

And that’s where something I noticed more than a year ago suddenly became rather interesting.

Jake Barber’s Helicopter

On 6 April 2025, Jake Barber posted an image of himself standing in front of a helicopter.

Most people presumably looked at Jake.

I looked at the helicopter.

More specifically, I noticed that its registration — the tail number — was visible.

Aircraft registrations are useful because aviation tracking services can sometimes allow you to reconstruct where an aircraft has been operating.

So I screenshotted it and checked.

The tracking data I found at the time placed the helicopter around Van Horn, Texas.

I didn’t know what to make of it then.

Van Horn is a small West Texas town surrounded by enormous stretches of desert. El Paso lies roughly 100 miles to the northwest, while the wider region contains Fort Bliss and, across the state line in New Mexico, White Sands Missile Range.

It is, in other words, quite an interesting neighbourhood if your business involves unusual things flying around in the sky.

The flight data I captured appeared to show the helicopter operating in the region across multiple days. Six days at the time I'd noticed. Full screenshots and location details in the YouTube video below.

At the time, I filed it away.

Then came February 2026.

The El Paso Shutdown

On 10 February 2026, the FAA abruptly shut the airspace around El Paso International Airport, initially announcing restrictions that were expected to remain in place for ten days.

They lasted only hours.

The original notice cited “special security reasons”, and the episode caused considerable confusion among local authorities, airlines and aviation officials.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy subsequently said:

“The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.”

He added that:

“The threat has been neutralized.”

That was the official public explanation.

But reporting that followed made the situation considerably messier.

NPR reported that the Pentagon had authorised the use of a high-energy counter-drone laser against what officials believed was a cartel-operated drone. Other reporting described disagreements or coordination problems between military activity and the FAA over the safety implications of the counter-drone technology.

The Texas Tribune reported conflicting explanations from government and industry sources, including claims involving military drone activity and the White House’s account of Mexican cartel drones breaching U.S. airspace.

So there is no need to invent mystery here.

The documented story is already strange enough.

A major American airport was effectively told its surrounding airspace could be restricted for ten days for special security reasons, only for that decision to be reversed within hours amid conflicting explanations involving cartel drones, military activity and experimental counter-drone technology.

None of that proves a UAP was involved. It is important to say that clearly. But it certainly makes the region interesting. And shows a connection to Skywatcher.

This is where my old screenshots came back out.

People including Pavel from Psicoactivo Podcast have been examining activity around El Paso and White Sands, while Ross Coulthart has more recently discussed the wider story on Reality Check.

That prompted me to go back through my phone.

There they were.

The screenshots I’d taken in April 2025 showing the aircraft associated with Barber operating around Van Horn.

A helicopter journey between the Van Horn area and El Paso would be perfectly practical — roughly the sort of trip that could be made in under an hour depending on the aircraft, routing and conditions.

And the geography deserves attention. A helicopter being in West Texas in 2025 does not prove that Skywatcher was connected to an extraordinary airspace closure around El Paso ten months later. It doesn’t prove Skywatcher was operating at White Sands.

But it does prove they were operating in the area.

An aircraft associated with Jake Barber was operating in this broader region during the period in which Skywatcher was publicly claiming to conduct UAP-related operations.

Then, less than a year later, an extremely unusual “counter-drone” incident occurred around El Paso.

My Three Possibilities

So where does that leave Skywatcher?

As far as I can see, there are three broad explanations.

The first is the most tantalising.

Skywatcher genuinely demonstrated something valuable enough that the U.S. Government became interested. Contracts were offered, classified relationships developed, NDAs appeared and some or all of the operation disappeared behind national-security restrictions.

Perhaps the public campaign was even part of the leverage: demonstrate enough capability publicly that government couldn’t simply ignore them, then negotiate access, funding or cooperation. I.e if you don’t buy us out, we’ll give disclosure to the world. That’s one hell of a hand to play.

Skywatcher’s current website is intriguing in that context. The language is no longer simply about UFO disclosure. It describes advanced air-domain awareness, air defence, UAVs, unconventional aerospace activity and sensor networks.

That sounds rather more like a company positioning itself for defence and government work than a group preparing Part Three of a UFO YouTube series.

But again, intriguing is not the same thing as proof.

The second possibility is more straightforward.

Skywatcher hasn’t disappeared at all.

The team may simply have realised that conducting complicated scientific work while simultaneously feeding the UFO internet’s insatiable appetite for updates is almost impossible. Perhaps they stepped away from publicity, concentrated on collecting better data and will eventually return with the evidence Barber originally promised.

If Part Three suddenly drops with multisensor data, independent analysis and something genuinely extraordinary, I will happily get the popcorn.

Then there is option three.

They never obtained the extraordinary evidence they expected.

Perhaps they recorded genuinely unusual objects but couldn’t demonstrate that those objects were non-human, exotic or even particularly exotic aircraft.

Perhaps the imagery will remain what so much UFO imagery becomes: interesting enough for believers and sceptics to argue over until the cows come home, but never quite good enough to settle anything.

And perhaps the narrative that Skywatcher became so successful that the government absorbed it provides a convenient explanation for why the promised evidence never arrived.

That possibility has to remain on the table, too.

I don’t write any of this because I want Skywatcher to fail. Quite the opposite.

I want Jake Barber’s original prediction to come true.

I want somebody to put calibrated sensors in the field, attract whatever this phenomenon is, record it from multiple independent systems, publish the raw data and let scientists tear it apart. If consciousness is involved, test it. If there are structured craft, photograph them properly.

If extraordinary objects can be summoned on demand, repeat the experiment under controlled conditions. That would be disclosure. That is what I want.

The ball is in your court, Skywatcher.

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That’s exactly why I wanted him in the UAP Files Podcast studio.

I’ve known Partick “Patch” for years, he’s a local around my area, we’ve worked together and been friends for a long time and one thing that has always stood out is his honesty. He’s not trying to convince anyone of anything. He isn’t selling a book - although he does have a book, though doesn’t mention it in our conversation - he isn’t pushing a theory or claiming insider knowledge. If anything, he spends more time questioning his own experience than trying to persuade other people to believe it.

His story begins on a cold October night in 1990.

Driving home along a familiar rural road, Patch noticed an unusual light in a field. Curious, he pulled his Mini Metro into a lay-by to get a better look. What he saw wasn’t the stereotypical flying saucer that popular culture has taught us to expect. Instead, he describes a dark, angular craft hovering only a few metres above the ground. The lights outlining its shape revealed something far stranger than a classic disc. Then, without warning, it slowly rose before accelerating away at incredible speed.

What stayed with him wasn’t simply the object itself.

It was the feeling.

During our conversation, Patch repeatedly returns to one moment above all others. He describes an overwhelming adrenaline surge—a genuine feeling of fear that he says has remained vivid for more than three decades. While memories can fade, distort and evolve over time, he believes that emotional response has never changed. Even today he openly admits that he questions parts of what he remembers, but not how it made him feel. It’s an unusually grounded perspective in a subject where certainty is often claimed far too easily.

Interestingly, when trying to compare the object to something people might recognise, Patch doesn’t point towards the familiar saucer-shaped craft often depicted in films. Instead, he says it reminded him far more of the object associated with the famous Rendlesham Forest incident than anything resembling an Adamski-style flying saucer or the modern “Tic Tac” reports.

That encounter eventually became the starting point for a much wider discussion.

One of the most fascinating parts of Patch’s life has nothing directly to do with UFOs at all.

His father served as a Royal Navy nuclear submariner on HMS Resolution, Britain’s first Polaris ballistic missile submarine. Growing up, Patch never fully appreciated the significance of his father’s career because, to him, he was simply Dad. Only later did he realise just how much responsibility came with serving aboard one of Britain’s nuclear deterrent submarines during the Cold War.

Naturally, I had to ask whether his father had ever experienced anything unusual beneath the ocean, or if Patch shared his experience with his dad.

The answer was yes to both.

Patch recalls asking him directly about unidentified objects underwater after reading about reports of USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects). His father dismissed the idea that he’d encountered anything extraordinary during his service. Yet he also represented something increasingly rare in today’s world: someone who genuinely understood the importance of keeping official secrets. Even decades after retirement, there were aspects of his service that he simply would not discuss.

Many years ago, post-retirement, Patch’s father worked in computer programming and software development. During that time, an American visitor came to stay with the family while learning programming techniques from him. Curious, Patch asked where he worked.

The answer caught him completely off guard…Lockheed Martin.

More specifically, the man told him he had previously worked at the legendary Skunk Works division.

According to Patch, the visitor explained that the technology he’d worked with was decades ahead of what existed in the commercial world, and that he needed to learn, or re-learn mainstream programming languages before moving into civilian industry. Unsurprisingly, Patch admits he tried to get him talking over a beer, but the conversation never ventured into UFOs or classified aerospace projects. Even so, it’s one of those remarkable stories that stays with you and reminds you how small this world is and the synchronicities.

From there, our discussion broadened into many of the biggest questions facing modern ufology.

We explored whether disclosure is really happening or whether we’re still witnessing one of the largest counterintelligence operations in history. We talked about Roswell, recovered technology, the role of defence contractors, the gradual release of official information, and whether governments are trying to prepare the public without exposing decades of secrecy. Rather than presenting these ideas as established fact, both of us approached them as questions worth examining, weighing competing claims and acknowledging where evidence remains incomplete.

We also found ourselves wandering into some of the stranger corners of the phenomenon. Simulation theory. Interdimensional hypotheses. Time travel and “plasmoid” intelligence.

Neither of us pretended to have definitive answers. In fact, Patch repeatedly argued that perhaps we should understand the simplest possibilities first before trying to explain the most exotic ones. If there really is another intelligence visiting Earth in physical craft, he suggests, perhaps that alone is extraordinary enough before we begin trying to explain every mystery through increasingly complex ideas. It’s a refreshingly measured position that reflects the tone of the entire conversation.

That’s probably what I enjoyed most about sitting down with Patch. He isn’t interested in winning arguments. He isn’t interested in becoming another self-proclaimed insider.

He’s simply someone who experienced something he still can’t explain, has spent decades thinking about it, and remains willing to question even his own conclusions.

He’s also just a really great guy and someone I'm lucky to call a friend.

If you’d like to hear the full story—from his extraordinary 1990 encounter to our conversation about Rendlesham Forest, Lockheed Martin, Cold War secrecy, disclosure, counterintelligence and where the UFO subject might be heading next—you can watch the complete interview now on the UAP Files Podcast.

Watch the full podcast here:

Yet Canada may have been quietly doing a better job of documenting the phenomenon all along.

That was one of the most interesting points to emerge from my recent conversation with Canadian UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski. Chris has investigated reports since the 1970s and helped compile the Canadian UFO Survey, which now contains around 26,000 to 27,000 individual cases.

Most have ordinary explanations. Aircraft, satellites, stars and atmospheric effects account for a large proportion of what people report. However, Chris estimates that around three per cent remain genuinely puzzling after investigation. Anomalous, some might say.

That may not sound like much until you consider the size of the database. Three per cent of tens of thousands of reports still leaves hundreds of cases that cannot be dismissed with a quick glance at a flight tracker.

Chris’s approach is refreshingly grounded. He checks aircraft records, astronomical charts, satellite information and witness testimony. He is not claiming every unexplained light is an alien spacecraft. He is simply saying that some cases survive the usual explanations and deserve to be taken seriously. He’s not a debunker. He wants to assess which cases warrant further investigation.

Canada was releasing government UFO documents long before the recent wave of American “disclosure”.

According to Chris, Canadian records include military, aviation and civilian reports stretching from 1947 to the present day. These include sightings reported by pilots, police officers, astronomers, air traffic controllers and military personnel.

Between roughly 2000 and the late 2010s, hundreds of reports came from pilots alone.

Chris contrasted this with the United States, where official UFO investigations appeared to vanish after Project Blue Book closed in 1969, only for the public to discover decades later that secretive programmes had continued behind the scenes.

Canada’s record is not perfectly open, and some information is understandably withheld for operational or national-security reasons. However, it has often released considerably more detail.

The Falcon Lake Incident

Of all the cases Chris has studied, Falcon Lake remains one of the strongest.

On 20 May 1967, amateur prospector Stefan Michalak was searching for mineral deposits in a remote area near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, when he reported seeing two unusual objects.

One moved away. The other landed on a rocky outcrop nearby.

Michalak described something resembling the classic metallic flying saucer. Rather than watching from a safe distance, he approached it and spent several minutes observing the object.

He claimed that a blast of extremely hot gas suddenly emerged from a grid-like opening, setting fire to his clothing, burning his chest and igniting vegetation around him.

He was later treated in hospital.

This is where Falcon Lake separates itself from the endless collection of distant lights and blurry photographs.

Medical records documented Michalak’s injuries. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigated. The Royal Canadian Air Force investigated. Material was recovered from the area, and radioactive contamination was reportedly detected at the site.

There are hundreds of pages of records covering interviews with Michalak, members of his family and people connected to the investigation.

Neither the RCMP nor the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a satisfactory explanation.

As Chris put it during our conversation, Falcon Lake gives us injury to a witness, medical documentation, physical traces, radiation, government records and a detailed investigation.

What more could we reasonably ask from a historical UFO case?

It does not prove that Michalak encountered extraterrestrial visitors. Even Chris, who has spent decades studying these reports, remains cautious about crash-retrieval stories and unsupported claims of alien bodies hidden in bunker.

But Falcon Lake is not merely an anecdote. Something happened to Michalak, and the official investigation failed to explain it.

The modern UAP debate has given us numerous military videos, but often without the information required to investigate them properly.

We are shown a blob moving across a screen without the precise location, complete sensor data, flight conditions or full chain of custody. We are then expected to choose between “alien spacecraft” and “nothing to see here”.

Falcon Lake is different. The documentation exists. The witness was examined. Officials visited the location. Physical material was tested. The case was not solved.

Believing that some UFO reports represent something genuinely anomalous does not require accepting every extraordinary claim. It requires recognising when a case has earned the right to remain open.

Falcon Lake has earned that right.

Chris Rutkowski explores the case, along with many others, in his latest book, Canada’s UFO Secrets. His work is based on decades of collecting reports, studying official records and separating cases with genuine substance from the inevitable noise surrounding the subject.

I spoke with Chris about Falcon Lake, the Shag Harbour incident, Canada’s government files, pilot reports, UFO statistics and why Canada may have been ahead of America on transparency for decades.

Watch the full interview with Chris Rutkowski now on the UAP Files Podcast. Link below.

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Then, almost unbelievably, one of the most recognisable scientists on the planet does exactly that... and large parts of the same community immediately turn on him.

It really is one of the strangest contradictions in modern ufology.

Professor Avi Loeb isn’t some YouTuber chasing clicks or a self-proclaimed whistleblower with a story that can’t yet be verified. He’s a Harvard astrophysicist, the former Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy and the founder of the Galileo Project. Now he’s also been asked to lead the newly established UAP Science Advisory Council, advising organisations including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, AARO, the FBI, the White House and the wider intelligence community.

When I sat down with Avi this week, it wasn’t another discussion about obscure videos or anonymous sources. Instead, we spoke about what this council actually is, why the government approached him in the first place, and perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.

One thing became clear almost immediately. Avi isn’t claiming to know the answers. If anything, he’s saying precisely the opposite.

During our conversation he explained that representatives from ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) came to him to ask whether he would establish and lead the council. That detail alone caught my attention. Governments don’t generally knock on scientists’ doors because they’re completely confident they’ve already solved a mystery. As Avi put it, if officials already knew they were simply dealing with Chinese drones or conventional technology, the conversation would have been very different. The fact they’ve asked scientists to become involved suggests there are at least some cases they genuinely can’t explain with confidence.

That isn’t disclosure. It isn’t proof of ET or inter-dimensional beings. But it is damn interesting.

What also impressed me was how grounded Avi remains despite the headlines that inevitably follow him around. He repeatedly stressed that much of what has been released publicly can probably be explained by mundane causes. Some cases may be sensor artefacts. Others may be satellites, balloons, atmospheric effects or human technology. The aim isn’t to prove aliens. The aim is to separate the wheat from the chaff and collect data that’s actually worth analysing.

Oddly enough, that’s exactly what good science is supposed to look like.

I’ve interviewed Avi a number of times now, including during the media frenzy surrounding 3I/ATLAS, and that period taught me something about both journalism (I’m not a journalist btw, just a researcher) and the UFO community.

Before speaking to him back then, I read every article Avi himself had published about the object in preparation for that particular interview with him. What struck me was that almost every piece began with essentially the same disclaimer: “this is most likely a comet, but…”.

Only after establishing that did he begin discussing the object’s unusual characteristics and why they deserved scientific attention. And a bit of speculating on possibilities. Yes ET is a possibility.

That nuance somehow evaporated the moment it reached social media.

Headlines declared that Harvard’s top astronomer thought an alien spacecraft had entered the Solar System and was going to land. Critics then spent weeks attacking him for a claim he hadn’t actually made, while many believers simultaneously became frustrated because he wasn’t declaring it to be alien technology with enough confidence, or because they felt he was sensationalising the subject with wild conclusions.

Both sides, bizarrely, ended up arguing against positions he hadn’t taken.

Ironically, Avi himself raised exactly this frustration during our interview this week. He told me that much of the criticism directed towards him stems from headlines and second-hand interpretations rather than what he actually writes. I have to admit, having read the source material myself, I think he has a point.

Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that we’ve spent decades demanding mainstream scientists engage with this subject, only to instinctively distrust them the moment they do.

We say we want Harvard involved. Then Harvard gets involved. We say we want respected academics to speculate responsibly.

Then we accuse them of being government assets because they don’t immediately confirm our preferred conclusion.

It’s almost impossible to win.

Which brings me neatly onto another accusation that follows Avi around online with remarkable persistence: that he’s somehow working for Mossad, the CIA or whichever intelligence agency happens to be fashionable on social media that week.

Now, could intelligence agencies attempt to influence public conversations? Of course they could. History tells us governments are perfectly capable of doing all sorts of things.

But where’s the evidence in Avi’s case? I’ve looked. Genuinely.

As someone who’s perfectly happy to entertain unusual possibilities if there’s data to support them, I’ve searched for something even slightly concrete. I haven’t found it.

The overwhelming “evidence” seems to boil down to the fact that Avi was born in Israel before becoming an American citizen.

That’s... not evidence.

If someone has something more substantial than rumours based off country of birth, I’d genuinely like to see it. Seriously, leave it in the comments if you have.

If we’re going to ask scientists, whistleblowers or government officials to produce evidence, perhaps we should hold ourselves to exactly the same standard.

One of the more controversial appointments to the new advisory council was Michael Shermer, probably the best-known sceptic in the UFO debate. Some would go further and describe him as a professional debunker. So I asked Avi directly why he’d invited someone with such a reputation.

His answer, I thought, was quite sensible.

He wants someone in the room who doesn’t already agree.

If compelling evidence eventually lands on the table and Shermer is forced to accept it, then that evidence has probably reached the highest standard imaginable. As Avi put it, if someone who has spent years questioning “extraordinary claims” is convinced beyond reasonable doubt, then the rest of us can have far greater confidence that bias hasn’t crept into the process.

Frankly, that’s exactly how science should work.

You don’t build a serious investigation by surrounding yourself with people who already agree with you. You actively invite people who’ll challenge your conclusions.

The interview wasn’t without controversy, however. Discussing former AARO Director Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, Avi didn’t hold back.

“I’m wondering if he’s getting paid by someone...”

He continued:

“It’s either some psychological issue that he has... or he’s being paid to be negative about the disclosure... and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case.”

Whether you agree with those comments or not, they’re among the strongest public criticisms Avi has made and will no doubt generate plenty of discussion.

Walking away from the interview, though, that wasn’t my biggest takeaway.

What stayed with me was something much simpler. Avi Loeb isn’t asking people to believe. He’s asking them to measure. To collect better data. To test every hypothesis, even the uncomfortable ones.

That really shouldn’t be controversial.

In fact, it’s exactly what many of us have spent years asking mainstream science to do.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped eating our own every time someone with genuine academic credibility decides to take the subject seriously.

If we keep doing that, we may eventually get exactly what we wished for.

A scientific community that decides UFOs simply aren’t worth the grief.

If you want to watch the full interview, click the link below.

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That isn’t speculation. It is well documented that DeLonge communicated extensively with John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff and counsellor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The Man who (apparently) wanted to disclose the reality of UFOs via Hillary Clinton, had she won the Presidency.

Those conversations became public following the release of the Podesta emails by WikiLeaks, revealing that DeLonge wasn’t merely discussing UFOs with enthusiasts on internet forums, or bis buddies on celebrity podcasts, but was engaging directly with senior political and national security figures.

Which is kinda weird, right?

He was emailing back and forth with Podesta about disclosure, his growing network of contacts inside government, and the team he was assembling to help bring the subject into the public domain.

That team would eventually become To The Stars Academy, whose founding members included former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Luis Elizondo, former CIA operations officer Jim Semivan, and several respected scientists and engineers. Regardless of what anyone thinks of the organisation, the calibre of people willing to publicly associate themselves with DeLonge was unlike anything the UFO community had seen before. Way before they all hit the Congressional hearings, or featured in The Age of Disclosure.

The emails also revealed repeated references to the now missing Major General William Neil McCasland, formerly commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory. McCasland oversaw the organisation responsible for advanced Air Force science and technology programmes, making him one of the most senior research officials in the United States Air Force. Within UFO circles, he has long been rumoured to have been connected to, or at the very least knowledgeable about, the alleged reverse-engineering effort surrounding recovered unidentified craft. If such a programme existed, many researchers have argued that someone in McCasland’s position would almost certainly have been aware of it.

One email is particularly interesting because it records DeLonge telling Podesta that McCasland had helped assemble his advisory team and was “very, very aware” of what DeLonge was attempting to achieve. DeLonge also made the much more extraordinary claim that McCasland had previously overseen the laboratory where material recovered from the Roswell incident had supposedly been taken after the 1947 crash. That allegation has never been substantiated with independent evidence, but it is significant because it demonstrates the level of trust DeLonge believed existed between himself and senior defence figures, and the level of access he believed he had been granted.

Whether DeLonge’s understanding of McCasland’s knowledge was accurate remains open to debate. Nevertheless, what cannot be disputed is that he was communicating with individuals at the highest levels of the defence and intelligence establishment, including people who had held positions with access to some of the United States’ most sensitive aerospace programmes. He wasn’t simply talking to retired officials looking for publicity. His network included people who had served at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the intelligence community and advanced defence research. That context is important because it means his public endorsement of an obscure UFO video carried considerably more weight than if it had come from an ordinary social media account.

Does that make the footage genuine? Well, no. An endorsement is not evidence. By itself it proves absolutely nothing. But it does make the question worth asking: what did Tom DeLonge believe he was looking at when he decided to show this footage to millions of people?

It’s also worth noting that DeLonge didn’t make a habit of publicly endorsing random UFO videos very often or encouraging people to pay attention to specific details within them. When he shared this footage, he specifically drew attention to the unusual swirling sound captured during the encounter and stated that he believed the video was genuine. That makes this case stand out from the thousands of clips that circulate online every year.

Someone convinced him this footage was real and deserved attention.

Whether that person was a witness, a researcher, or someone from within the circles DeLonge had spent years cultivating remains unknown. We simply don’t know. But given the people he was communicating with at the time—including former and serving defence and intelligence officials—it is difficult to dismiss his endorsement as being based on something trivial.

That, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes this case worth revisiting today.

The original video didn’t come from a well-known UFO researcher, filmmaker or media outlet. It appeared on an obscure YouTube channel called ResearchForTruth12, belonging to someone identifying themselves only as “Bob.” The account uploaded just two videos, both showing unusual aerial objects, before disappearing completely. No further uploads. No interviews. No social media presence. No attempts to build a community. More than a decade later, the channel remains exactly as it was left.

Then something remarkable happened.

Years after the upload, Tom DeLonge shared the footage with his audience of well over a million followers, instantly exposing Bob’s forgotten video to one of the largest UFO audiences on the internet. For most YouTube creators, that kind of endorsement would be life-changing. It could have launched an entire channel, generated thousands of pounds in advertising revenue and opened the door to interviews, documentaries and media attention.

But none of that happened.

The channel was not monetised. Bob never returned to acknowledge the sudden interest. He never answered questions, never uploaded another video and never appeared to capitalise on the attention in any way. The account simply fell silent, leaving behind two intriguing videos and a great many unanswered questions.

That behaviour is difficult to ignore because it runs completely against the way viral internet hoaxes normally unfold. People seeking fame usually continue posting. People seeking money monetise. People seeking attention tend to embrace the spotlight. Bob did none of those things. Instead, he walked away from what could have become one of the most talked-about UFO channels on YouTube almost overnight.

There is another strange coincidence. Long-time UFO researchers will immediately recognise the name Bob from the infamous Skinny Bob footage, another anonymous upload that appeared online before its creator vanished without explanation. The similarities almost certainly end there, but it’s an interesting parallel nonetheless. Once again, an anonymous uploader, a couple of mysterious videos, and then complete silence.

ResearchForTruth12 remains one of the more unusual YouTube channels in UFO history.

Watch the full episode, case analysis and footage enhancement below.

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After hundreds of interviews with military witnesses, intelligence officials, pilots, scientists and whistleblowers over the past few years, I’ve reached the point where I no longer find the existence of genuinely anomalous objects particularly controversial. The evidence, taken as a whole, is simply too substantial for me to dismiss.

What I am deeply sceptical of, however, are individual videos.

Especially anonymous ones.

The internet is overflowing with spectacular footage that arrives without provenance, without metadata, without witnesses willing to identify themselves and, crucially, without any meaningful chain of custody. As soon as those elements are missing, every conclusion has to become provisional.

That’s exactly where this latest Brazilian video sits.

On paper, it’s everything I usually distrust. An anonymous YouTube account appears out of nowhere. No identifiable researchers. No witness interview. No original file. Comments disabled. Grand claims about a private archive that has supposedly been sitting on remarkable footage for over fifteen years before suddenly deciding now is the right moment to release it.

Ordinarily, I’d probably dismiss it in under thirty seconds.

Except...

There’s something about this footage that keeps pulling me back.

Not because I think it proves anything extraordinary, but because several aspects of it don’t behave quite the way I’d expect if someone had simply manufactured it for clicks with AI. There are little details, individually insignificant perhaps, but collectively interesting enough that I found myself opening DaVinci Resolve instead of putting my feet up for the evening.

One thing I’ve learnt after analysing UFO footage for years is that authenticity rarely comes from the object itself.

Almost every hoax focuses obsessively on the UFO.

Very few spend equal time recreating all the mundane imperfections that surround genuine recordings.

It’s often those imperfections that interest me most. The autofocus hunting. The slight hesitation in the zoom motor. The lens struggling to lock focus. The tiny exposure changes as magnification increases. The operator overshooting slightly before correcting the framing.

None of those things prove the object is anomalous.

What they do suggest is that we’re looking at footage that behaves exactly as I’d expect a consumer camcorder from that era to behave.

Current AI video generation is getting frighteningly good, but reproducing that messy combination of optical behaviour, autofocus breathing, digital zoom artefacts and compression characteristics consistently is still surprisingly difficult.

The lack of provenance remains a serious problem.

If nobody is prepared to put their name behind the footage, if the original witness remains anonymous, if the original recording hasn’t been released and if there is no verifiable chain of custody, then this case can never be treated as first-tier evidence. Those aren’t minor issues, they’re fundamental limitations. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense these days claiming you’re too scared. Even if you were the original person that filmed the footage. The YouTuber who claims they collect footage like this and received it from the original camera person…they don’t really have an excuse.

But equally, I don’t think it’s intellectually honest to dismiss footage simply because it arrives anonymously. Some of the U.S. Navy videos arrived online anonymously first.

History is full of genuinely important material that initially surfaced through obscure routes before eventually being substantiated. Anonymous evidence shouldn’t automatically be believed, but neither should it automatically be discarded.

So where does that leave this case? Somewhere in the middle. I find the provenance weak. I find the supporting story impossible to verify. I find the camera discrepancy genuinely puzzling. But I also find the footage itself unusually really bloody compelling.

There’s something about the way the optics behave, the focus breathes, the zoom tracks, and the object maintains its apparent structure that strikes me as more consistent with a real object being recorded through a consumer camcorder than something artificially generated or hastily fabricated.

That doesn’t necessarily make it anomalous. It simply makes it interesting.

And after spending years looking at thousands of videos, many of which I lose interest in quite quickly, that alone is enough for me to keep this one on my radar.

One aspect of this footage that immediately caught my attention was the apparent geometry of the object. Although it’s tempting to describe it as triangular, I’m not convinced that’s quite right. To my eye, it appears closer to a diamond shape, almost as though we’re viewing a triangular platform from an oblique angle rather than directly beneath it. If—and it’s a very big if—this were a genuinely structured craft, it raises an interesting possibility. Could some of the classic “black triangle” reports actually appear diamond-shaped when viewed from the side or at a shallow angle? Perspective alone can dramatically alter the perceived geometry of an object, particularly at distance and under high magnification.

It’s impossible to draw any firm conclusions from a single piece of footage, and there are plenty of optical effects that could create the same impression. Nevertheless, it immediately reminded me of conversations I’ve had with witnesses over the years. During my interviews with Space Force technician Kyle Knopp and Hollywood stunt performer Chris Romrell, both described large triangular objects, albeit with slightly different lighting configurations. Kyle recalled dim lights towards the corners, while Chris described an enormous black triangle without a central light. By contrast, many reports from the Belgian UFO wave describe three corner lights accompanied by a fourth nearer the centre. If this Brazilian footage is authentic, perhaps we’re simply seeing a similar class of object from a very different viewing angle, or perhaps we’re seeing nothing more than the quirks of optics and digital zoom. At this stage, both possibilities remain firmly on the table.

To watch the full footage, analyse and enhancement work in a tidy eight minute package, check the link below.

Ryan isn’t a household name within the UFO community. He isn’t a regular on the podcast circuit, nor has he spent years building a profile as a researcher or commentator. In fact, this conversation was his first interview ever, and that’s partly what appealed to me. Sometimes the most interesting conversations aren’t with the people you’ve heard from a dozen times already, but with someone quietly working away in the background whose story hasn’t yet been widely heard.

Ryan’s background is also rather different from many guests I’ve had on the podcast. Rather than coming from an aviation or military career, he worked as a geospatial software developer, employed by Leidos while contracted to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His speciality was building GIS applications, mapping systems and data visualisation tools, all while holding a Secret security clearance.

Ryan’s prior work was for NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and United States Census Bureau as part of his GIS and geospatial career before his role with Leidos supporting the FAA.

I recently interviewed Ryan on the UAP Files Podcast. As the conversation unfolded, it quickly became apparent that Ryan doesn’t approach the UAP subject from the perspective of someone looking to prove extraterrestrial life exists. Quite the opposite. His interest has always been in whether unexplained sightings can be explained using data. That immediately resonated with me because, regardless of where you sit on the UAP debate, that’s exactly where any proper investigation ought to begin.

According to Ryan, that philosophy led to one of the most fascinating projects of his career.

In 2022, he says he was tasked with developing a prototype capable of analysing FAA reports of unidentified aerial phenomena by comparing them against satellite orbital data. The idea sounds straightforward. If a pilot reports an unexplained light moving across the sky, can modern orbital mechanics determine whether it was actually a satellite reflecting sunlight?

Using Python and the orbital mechanics library Skyfield, Ryan built software capable of reconstructing satellite positions with remarkable precision. His primary focus became SpaceX’s rapidly expanding Starlink constellation, which has become well known for producing spectacular “glints” and reflections under certain lighting conditions.

As Ryan explained during our conversation, many reports appeared to have perfectly ordinary explanations once the satellite data was overlaid onto the witness accounts.

Others, however, didn’t fit so neatly.

That point is worth emphasising.

Ryan wasn’t claiming his software proved the existence of non-human intelligence. In fact, quite the opposite. The purpose of the tool was to eliminate conventional explanations wherever possible. If the geometry worked, then great…case closed. If it didn’t, then all the software could honestly conclude was that it couldn’t explain what had been reported. Pretty simple, though I imagine creating such a tool wasn't very simple in practice.

One of the more surprising aspects of Ryan’s account came when he described where he believes the project ultimately ended up. According to him, the work was shared beyond the FAA and eventually reached the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Whether or not that proves significant is impossible for me to determine, but it certainly wasn’t something Ryan says he expected. Who decided which cases he should analyse? That’s a question he didn’t really know the answer to past his leadership at Leidos. As far as he was concerned, he was simply a software developer solving a technical problem.

It’s what Ryan says happened afterwards that turns an interesting engineering story into something altogether more controversial.

During our interview, Ryan alleges that he was instructed to begin working under a false identity before becoming caught up in what he believes was a campaign of retaliation following the filing of federal complaints. He describes being hospitalised, losing access to work accounts, seeing projects disappear and spending years attempting to navigate complaints through various federal channels.

These are serious allegations, and it’s important to state clearly that they remain Ryan’s account of events. They have not been independently verified by me, nor should this article be interpreted as confirmation that every conclusion Ryan reaches is necessarily correct.

What intrigued me most wasn’t actually the more sensational elements of his story. It was his willingness to openly discuss the limits of his own work. Throughout the interview he repeatedly returned to the same point: most things probably do have conventional explanations. His software was designed to find those explanations wherever possible. It simply wasn’t capable of explaining everything.

He said there were some very interesting objects that he simply couldn’t explain and couldn’t assign to any particular satellite.

I’ve often said that the UAP debate suffers from two extremes. On one side are those prepared to conclude every light in the sky is an alien spacecraft, or a plasma sentient orb. On the other are those who insist every report can be dismissed before the evidence has even been examined. Neither position does much to advance our understanding.

Good investigation sits somewhere in the middle.

It asks awkward questions. It follows the evidence. It accepts ordinary explanations where they exist and remains open-minded where they don’t.

Whether Ryan’s broader allegations eventually stand up to scrutiny, or the federal complaints produce any results remains to be seen.

As always, I would encourage you not to take my word for it—or Ryan’s. Watch the conversation yourself, listen carefully to the questions and the answers, and the receipts he presents and decide where you think the evidence leads.

You can watch my full interview with Ryan Lingo below.

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Maybe it was all three.

John W. Warner IV is not the sort of guest who fits neatly into a five-minute “UFO witness tells all” format. He comes from a family tied deeply into American political, military and intelligence history. His father, John Warner, served as Secretary of the Navy and later as a United States Senator. His maternal grandfather was Paul Mellon, connected to the Mellon banking dynasty and, according to John, wartime intelligence circles.

So when John talks about UFOs, he does not approach the subject like somebody who stumbled across it late in life through a few glossy AI generated YouTube videos.

He comes at it through history, war, intelligence, secrecy, elite power, black projects, occult traditions, and the uncomfortable possibility that the UFO subject is not really a separate issue at all.

In his view, it is woven into almost everything.

That does not mean every claim should be accepted at face value. Some of what John says is extraordinary. Some of it is difficult to verify. Some of it will make sceptics roll their eyes and some even hardened “believers” roll their eyes equally.

But that is also why I wanted to speak to him.

This subject has so many unknowns. So much secrecy, classification of data, misinformation and counter intelligence operations running alongside pockets of truth. It’s really, really complicated and confusing and who you can trust becomes increasingly complex.

Whether you agree with him or not, John represents a particular strand of the UFO conversation that is worth understanding. It is the strand that says disclosure is not just about lights in the sky, or pilots seeing strange objects, or whether a three letter agency has a recovered craft.

It is about power. And it is about history.

And it is about who gets to know what reality actually is. John also doesn’t really care if you agree with him or not. I find that incredibly refreshing and authentic.

John traces his interest in the subject back to childhood. He was born and grew up during the space race, surrounded by programmes like Star Trek, Lost in Space and The Outer Limits. Like many people of that generation, the idea of space, aliens and the unknown was embedded early.

But in John’s case, that childhood curiosity sat alongside something else: proximity to real political and military power. That’s quite rare.

He told me that as a child he would look through his father’s desk and saw references to UFOs and USOs — Unidentified Submerged Objects. He also said that by the age of fourteen he had got his father to acknowledge the existence of secret bases beneath the ice in Antarctica, connected, he said, to “space operations.”

Now, obviously, that is an enormous claim.

But what interested me was not simply the claim itself. It was the way John framed it. For him, UFOs were never just a pop culture curiosity. They were tied to military history, hidden infrastructure, classified technology and a world behind the world.

That theme ran through the entire conversation.

John spoke at length about his grandfather, Paul Mellon, and his involvement in wartime intelligence through the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA. He also talked about Alan Dulles, David K.E. Bruce, General Patton, occult libraries, secret societies, Nazi mysticism, the Thule Society, the Nazi Bell, and the idea that hidden knowledge has always sat in the background of military power.

This is where the conversation moved into territory that many people will find uncomfortable.

John argues that advanced technology, occult traditions and military secrecy are not separate historical lanes. In his view, they overlap. He believes that during and after the Second World War, the race for advanced technology was not simply about rockets, jet engines and atomic weapons. It was also about deeper principles: energy, gravity, consciousness, frequency, and technologies that the public still does not properly understand.

Again, that is not something I can verify. But isn’t virtually everything in the UFO/UAP and paranormal space hard to verify? It is a worldview that appears again and again in this subject.

The idea that the public version of history is incomplete. That recovered technology was hidden. That scientific progress has been managed. That the gap between what we are told exists and what actually exists is not thirty years, but hundreds.

John’s position is blunt: he believes we have had reverse-engineered UFO technology for decades.

He talked about anti-gravity, free energy, quantum computing, black triangles, exotic weapons, and craft capable of travelling extraordinary distances. He suggested that technologies now entering public life may have been used in classified programmes long before we ever saw them.

That is a familiar claim in UFO circles, but John presents it through the lens of geopolitics.

For him, the question is not simply, “Do aliens exist?”

The question is: what happens if multiple nations and private contractors have spent eighty years developing technology that is far beyond anything the public understands?

That is where the conversation became darker.

John believes we are in an arms race. Not just a conventional one involving ships, missiles, aircraft and drones, but an exotic technological arms race involving weapons and capabilities that most people would consider science fiction. He talked about China, Russia, the United States, the Five Eyes nations, and a hidden layer of military competition happening beyond public view.

He also warned that disclosure itself could become entangled with conflict.

That struck me because we often talk about disclosure as though it would automatically be a good thing. As though one grand revelation would unite humanity, dissolve borders, end war, and make everyone suddenly realise we are one species on one planet.

I would love that to be true. Honestly I would and a part of me still feels ultimately it’s the only thing that can really bring us together in this super fractured world right now.

Plus, I really, really want an anti-gravity flying DeLorean.

But what if disclosure does not arrive as a clean, inspiring, Steven Spielberg moment?

What if it arrives mixed with panic, power struggles, technological shock, financial disruption, military escalation and competing narratives?

John’s view is that governments have delayed the truth for so long that controlled disclosure may no longer be possible. He compared it to a steam boiler. The system is overheating, pressure is building, and officials are letting out little controlled bursts of steam to stop the whole thing exploding.

The problem, in his view, is that the boiler is still getting hotter.

That felt like one of the more useful images from the entire interview.

Because whatever you think about John’s more extreme claims, it is hard to deny that something has changed since 2017. The New York Times article, the Navy videos, congressional hearings, whistleblowers, AARO, NASA, legislation, pilots, intelligence officials, scientists and journalists have all dragged the subject back into public life.

But the process still feels strangely unsatisfying.

We get hearings. We get careful language. We get more acronyms. We get promises of better data.

We get officials saying there is no evidence of extraterrestrial technology, while others claim there are recovered craft hidden inside deeply buried programmes and talk of interdimensional beings. Some, with positions of power and authority tell us it’s real and it’s spiritual. Religious, even.

And the public is left in the middle, being told to take the subject seriously, but not too seriously.

That is the bit I keep coming back to.

If there is nothing there, why all the theatre?

And if there is something there, why are we still being treated like children?

John is highly critical of what he sees as managed disclosure. He believes the current process is too conservative, too controlled, and too connected to the very institutions that helped bury the subject in the first place. He mentioned Chris Mellon (his cousin from his mothers side), Luis Elizondo, Avi Loeb, Gary Nolan and others, and while he gave credit for helping bring the topic back to life, he clearly believes the public is still not being told the real story.

That is one of the tensions in this whole subject.

On the one hand, people inside the system may be the only ones able to move the conversation forward.

On the other hand, if the system hid the truth for decades, how much trust should we place in a disclosure process managed by that same system?

That is not an easy question.

John’s answer seems to be: very little.

Towards the end of the conversation, I asked him whether there was anything ordinary people could actually do. Citizen journalists, researchers, podcasters, people trying to make sense of all this from the outside.

His answer was more hopeful than I expected.

He pointed to the internet, the growth of independent media, podcasts, documentaries, public discussion and the fact that this subject can no longer be contained in the way it once was. Thirty-five years ago, the UFO conversation was much easier to marginalise. Today, it is everywhere.

Of course, that creates another problem.

More information does not always mean more clarity.

Sometimes it just means more mud in the river.

That phrase stuck with me too. Mud in the river. Because that is exactly what the UFO subject feels like at times. There may be something real moving beneath the surface, but the water is so polluted with hoaxes, disinformation, ego, grifters, government language, anonymous sources and online tribalism that it becomes almost impossible to see clearly.

And yet we keep looking.

Because somewhere beneath all of it, there is a question that refuses to go away.

Are we alone?

And perhaps more importantly: who already knows the answer?

John’s worldview is not a comfortable one. He does not offer the soft version of disclosure. He does not present extraterrestrial or NHI contact as a gentle spiritual awakening where everyone raises their vibration, buys a crystal, and suddenly the world heals itself with big hugs over a shared dinner table at Maccy’s.

He talks about war, secrecy, technology, corruption, elite power, hidden history, and the darker side of human nature.

At one point, he made the argument that too much of the disclosure movement focuses only on positivity. Love and light. Consciousness. Spiritual growth. Contact festivals. Higher beings. Ascension.

He is not dismissing all of that. In fact, he accepts that positivity and spiritual development matter.

But his point is that the universe requires balance. Light and dark. Hope and realism. The yin and yang. If we only focus on the comforting parts, we ignore the shadow. And if we ignore the shadow, we never really understand what we are dealing with.

That is probably the best way to understand this episode.

It is not a comfortable conversation. It is not neat. It is not something I would present as proven fact. But it is a conversation that forces you to think about the UFO subject in a much wider frame.

Not just as a mystery in the sky, but as a possible organising principle behind secrecy, technology, history, war, economics and power.

Maybe John is wrong about some of it.

Maybe he is wrong about a lot of it. I just don’t know. I hope he is wrong about much of it.

But maybe the deeper point still stands: if the UFO subject is real in the way many whistleblowers, witnesses and insiders suggest, then it was never going to remain confined to grainy videos and strange lights.

It was always going to lead somewhere much bigger. And maybe much more uncomfortable.

You can watch the full conversation with John W. Warner IV on the UAP Files Podcast below:

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I do not buy that for a second.

If anything, I suspect the UK’s under-representation has less to do with a lack of sightings and far more to do with a familiar British cocktail of stigma, institutional caution, and a long-standing reluctance among serious professionals to stick their head above the parapet. Pilots, perhaps more than most, have had every reason to keep unusual experiences to themselves. You do not spend decades building a career in aviation only to risk becoming a running joke in the crew room because you admitted that something impossible-looking shot past your wingtip at altitude.

That is one of the reasons I wanted to speak to retired pilot Chris Crowther on the UAP Files Podcast.

Chris is not a man who wandered into this subject after watching a few late night documentaries and deciding he fancied a go at amateur ufology. He spent 42 years flying, logged around 22,000 hours, flew both aeroplanes and helicopters and ultimately became chief pilot of a helicopter operation in West Africa. He is exactly the sort of witness people say they want in this subject: experienced, measured, technically literate, and not remotely given to melodrama. He also has a story that, in my view, deserves far more attention than it has received.

The sighting: 12 black spheres over the Wash

Chris’s most significant encounter took place on 8 February 1978. At the time he was co-pilot on a corporate aircraft returning from Linton-on-Ouse to Norwich, crossing the Wash at 7,500 feet. He and the captain were under the watch of Eastern Radar, a joint military-civilian air traffic facility responsible for guiding them until they descended for their approach into Norwich.

Then came the call.

Eastern Radar told them they had unidentified traffic ahead, coming in the opposite direction, moving fast, and with unknown height. It had a radar track…Chris and the captain looked up and almost immediately something tore past the aircraft’s starboard wingtip at extraordinary speed. The whole thing was over in a second, but what Chris saw has stayed with him for nearly half a century: around a dozen black spherical objects, tightly grouped, flashing past at the same altitude and in the opposite direction.

That detail is important. Aircraft travelling opposite ways are not meant to be at exactly the same level. Chris explained that under standard separation rules, two aircraft heading directly towards one another should not be sharing the same altitude in the first place. Yet whatever this was appeared to do precisely that — right in controlled airspace, at speed, and close enough to leave a lasting impression on two professional seasoned pilots.

The sighting was not just visually unusual; it was operationally troubling. Chris was clear on that point in our conversation. This was not some distant light on the horizon that could be shrugged off as Venus. It was a near-airspace intrusion of something that was not where it should have been, moving in a way that made no obvious sense. Radar had it. The crew saw it. And then, just as quickly, it was gone.

When Chris and the crew queried it, Eastern Radar reportedly told them they had no idea what it was and that it had moved off radar so quickly they could no longer track it.

That, for me, is where the case becomes especially interesting. UFO discussions often get bogged down in the false binary between “little green men” and “obvious nonsense,” as though those are the only two options available. But there is a third category that matters enormously, particularly in aviation: something genuinely unidentified that may pose a risk to flight safety regardless of what it ultimately turns out to be.

Chris understands that distinction instinctively. He is not presenting himself as a prophet of disclosure, nor is he trying to turn one sighting into a grand theory of the cosmos. His point is simpler, and in many ways more compelling: if an object or objects can appear in controlled airspace, at the same altitude as an aircraft, moving rapidly and contrary to normal traffic rules, then that is a problem whether you call it a UFO, a UAP, a radar anomaly, or something else entirely.

There is a habit in this subject — not always a healthy one — of discussing witness credibility as though it can settle a case on its own. It cannot. A credible person can still be mistaken. A trained observer can misjudge distance, speed, or scale. That is true. But it is also true that not all testimony is created equal, and the testimony of a pilot with tens of thousands of flying hours is not something to be waved away by a keyboard debunker from their bedroom.

Chris’s credibility comes from several things at once.

First, there is the obvious matter of experience. Forty-two years in aviation is not a weekend hobby. Nor is 22,000 hours in the air. He flew in different environments, on different platforms, and in operational settings where situational awareness was not optional. He loved helicopters, particularly the Bell 206, and spent years flying in Africa under demanding conditions. This is someone who knows what normal looks like in the sky. On top of this there was a radar track and a corroborating pilot sat next to him. That’s not nothing.

Second, there is his manner of telling it. Chris does not sound like a man trying to impress you. He sounds like a pilot recounting something that happened, with the same blend of precision and restraint that pilots tend to apply to everything from fuel planning to discussing the weather. He is careful where certainty is not possible. He does not claim to know what the spheres were. He does not insist they were extraterrestrial. He simply refuses to pretend they were ordinary when, by his own professional judgement, they were anything but.

Third, there is the consistency of the detail. Chris has never forgotten the sighting and still describes it vividly. He told me that when the BBC asked him to sketch what he saw, the computer-generated reconstruction they created was, in his words, “absolutely spot on.” He also made an interesting comparison to a more recent case involving a sphere filmed from an Airbus A320 over Medellín, Colombia, a very famous case online, saying the object depicted there looked almost identical to the spheres he remembered — with the key difference being that the Medellín object appeared relatively stationary, whereas his own sighting involved rapid movement.

When the Ministry of Defence or other officials wave the matter away by saying there is “no threat to British defence,” they may think they are sounding reassuring. In practice, it can feel like a bureaucratic dodge, or an attempt to hide their real interest from the public. Even if one accepted that there is no direct national security threat, it still would not address the central question Chris raised. What about the risk to aircraft? What about the possibility of objects, drones, unknown technology, or genuinely unidentified aerial phenomena moving through controlled airspace in ways that put crews and passengers in danger?

You do not need to believe in aliens to think that deserves more attention than a weary shrug from Whitehall.

Britain’s problem is not sightings. It is silence.

A recurring theme in my conversation with Chris was the odd imbalance between the amount of UAP discussion in the United States and the relative quiet in Britain. That does not mean the UK lacks cases. Far from it. It means we seem to lack the same appetite for taking them seriously in public.

Chris himself finds it baffling. So do I.

Here in the UK we have Rendlesham Forest, arguably one of the most significant military UFO cases anywhere in the world, involving multiple witnesses, a US airbase, and testimony that has endured for decades. We have Lakenheath, Bentwaters, Woodbridge, Warminster, and a long tail of aviation and military encounters that rarely receive the sort of sustained mainstream attention you’d expect. And yet the treatment is often faintly tongue-in-cheek, as though the only acceptable way to mention the subject is with a little bit of Twilight Zone humming for comic relief (literally what the news presenter who interviewed Chris on the BBC did...

Chris made a point that I think is worth sitting with: if the UK authorities are not interested in the defence side of the matter, they should at least be interested in the keeping-the-airways-safe side of it.

That may be changing, slowly, in part because the Americans have forced the issue back into public view. Congressional hearings, whistleblower testimony, military footage, and official Pentagon processes have made it harder for legacy media to treat the entire subject as an after-dinner joke. But Chris’s case is a reminder that we should not need Washington to tell us that British aviation witnesses are worth hearing.

If you want the full conversation with Chris, click the link below.

It gets thrown around with such confidence that you’d think the matter had already been settled, stamped, laminated and filed away in a government drawer marked “nothing to see here.” But the problem is that many people using that phrase are not really talking about evidence at all. They are talking about proof.

And those are not the same thing.

Evidence is data. It can be a witness statement, a radar return, a photograph, a video, a pilot report, a police report, a government document, a consistent pattern across multiple cases, or several people describing the same strange event from different viewpoints.

Proof is what you do with that evidence.

That distinction matters enormously, because the UFO/UAP subject is drowning in evidence. What it does not yet have, at least publicly, is a universally accepted standard of proof that forces everyone in the room to say, “Right, fair enough, that’s it then.”

I recently interviewed Professor Michael Bohlander on the UAP Files Podcast. He is not some bloke on Facebook who once saw a suspicious cloud over Asda, or an armchair analyst using ChatGPT. He is a former (and technically still current) Judge, an expert in international criminal law, and now holds the wonderfully unusual title of Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham University. Professor Bohlander speaks to me in a purely personal capacity and his views represent him and him alone…

In other words, his professional life has involved looking at evidence and deciding what can reasonably be proven from it. He has done it in courtrooms, he has taught it academically, and he now teaches others how to think about these questions properly.

During our conversation, he made the point very clearly: evidence and proof are different concepts. Evidence is the data. Proof is the conclusion you reach after assessing that data against a standard. In criminal law, that might be “beyond reasonable doubt.” In civil cases, it might be “the balance of probabilities.” Different standards, different outcomes, but the evidence itself does not vanish just because it has not yet satisfied every possible threshold of proof.

This is where the UFO debate becomes a bit of a mess.

Professor Bohlander used a useful hypothetical example: imagine a ten-year-old Amish girl, with no television, no exposure to modern alien imagery, and no obvious reason to lie, running back to her parents and describing three small grey beings with large black eyes who entered a silver sphere and vanished. On its own, that is evidence. You then ask questions about credibility and reliability. Is she believable? Could she have known about this imagery? Is there any motive to lie? Did other children see the same thing? Were their accounts taken separately? Did they draw similar pictures?

That hypothetical tracks, in broad shape, with real cases people often discuss: Ariel School, Broad Haven, Westall. Multiple children. Similar descriptions. Drawings. Witnesses speaking independently. Adults often downplaying it at the time, then later admitting something strange happened.

Does that prove aliens? No.

Is it evidence? Absolutely.

And not all evidence is equal. A blurry dot on TikTok with dramatic music and a caption saying “THEY’RE HERE” is not the same as multiple trained observers, radar data, official reports, and consistent witness testimony. Evidence has weight. Some of it is weak. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is strong enough that any serious person should at least pause before dismissing it with a smug little wave of the hand.

The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” also came up in the interview. Professor Bohlander’s view was that it can be a red herring. What counts as “extraordinary” is often about our perception. A fact is a fact. The question is not whether it makes us uncomfortable, or whether it ruins someone’s neat little worldview. The question is what the evidence shows, how reliable it is, and what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from it.

That is the bit we keep skipping.

The UFO subject does not need blind belief. It does not need people accepting every orb, every story, every shaky video, every anonymous source, every “trust me bro” claim. But it also does not need people pretending there is no evidence simply because they do not think the case has yet been proven.

Those are different arguments.

There is evidence. Mountains of it. Witness evidence, historical evidence, military evidence, sensor evidence, government evidence, and patterns of human experience that deserve to be studied rather than sneered at.

The real question is what standard of proof we are applying, who gets to apply it, and whether the public is being allowed to see enough of the underlying data to make a fair judgement.

That is why I wanted to speak to Professor Bohlander. Because this subject does not just need believers and debunkers shouting at each other across the internet like two drunk uncles at a wedding. It needs people who understand how evidence works.

And when a former international Judge tells you there is evidence, and that evidence needs to be assessed properly, it is probably worth listening.

You can watch the full interview here:

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Maybe it’s all three.

Lately, I’ve started to feel the early signs of something I’ve never really thought much about before: UFO fatigue.

There comes a point in life where human beings need some form of resolution. We need results, progress, and the feeling that we’re moving towards an answer.

If we don’t get that answer, eventually our brains start looking for the exit.

You see it in jobs. People stay in careers they dislike for years, convincing themselves things will improve, until one day they wake up and realise they simply can’t do it anymore. They update the CV and start looking elsewhere.

You see it in relationships. If two people spend years trying to fix something that never seems to get fixed, eventually one or both decide it’s time to move on.

The same thing happens with mysteries.

Human beings are problem-solving creatures. We can tolerate uncertainty for a surprisingly long time, but not forever. At some point we either solve the puzzle or we stop trying.

And that’s where I think a lot of people in the UFO community are beginning to find themselves.

Recently I interviewed former AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. Depending on who you ask, Kirkpatrick is either a truth-teller attempting to inject reality into the conversation or a gatekeeper protecting highly classified programmes. Personally, I suspect reality probably sits somewhere in between, though if I had to choose I’d lean towards the latter.

During a recent presentation to a sceptical audience, Kirkpatrick suggested that some of the objects reported by military aviators — including incidents associated with fighter pilot Ryan Graves and others — may have been calibration spheres. Others have suggested radar reflectors suspended beneath surveillance balloons.

After hearing that, I did what most people would do and searched for them online.

I Googled it.

The calibration sphere explanation didn’t immediately resonate with me, but the radar reflector argument was more interesting. Some can be carried to extraordinary altitudes beneath balloons, some can appear unusual on sensors, and some could, at least on paper, explain certain observations.

And I found myself thinking, “Maybe.”

I wasn’t convinced, and I certainly wasn’t ready to draw a conclusion, but I could see how the explanation might fit.

That single word is powerful.

Because once you resolve one thing as a mistake, a misidentification, or a misunderstanding, it starts to chip away at the certainty you’ve built elsewhere.

You begin questioning things you were previously comfortable with.

If trained military aviators can misidentify one thing, what else might they misidentify?

Then almost immediately the counterargument appears.

These aren’t random members of the public staring at the sky for the first time. These are people whose jobs involve identifying objects in the air. They spend thousands of hours doing exactly that. They know what balloons look like, what conventional aircraft look like, and what radar clutter looks like.

And suddenly you’re back where you started.

This is the cycle.

The sceptic only has to present something that vaguely resembles the reported object. It doesn’t have to be the object itself; it simply has to look enough like it that doubt begins to grow.

We see this all the time online.

It’s much like a criminal law defence team. Present something else, insert just an element of doubt and you win - beyond all reasonable doubt: "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit”

People confidently declare that an object was Venus, Starlink, the ISS, a weather balloon, a Chinese lantern, or a drone.

Sometimes they’re right.

Sometimes they’re laughably wrong.

But if they sound confident enough, they plant a seed.

Years ago that seed was often enough. Most people lacked the tools or knowledge to challenge it. Somebody would confidently declare an explanation and the discussion would end.

Today we’re entering a different phase.

We can now test many of these claims ourselves. We can check satellite databases, flight paths, astronomical positions, trajectories, and compare witness testimony against sensor data.

The problem is that uncertainty still remains.

One side says, “It was definitely a balloon.”

The other says, “It definitely wasn’t.”

Neither position is particularly scientific.

And that’s where fatigue starts creeping in.

UFO Sightings are quite different from human experiences of beings and crafts landing. Government knowledge and recovery of craft…I’m not really talking about that, this is more the data that’s in public domain.

After years of looking at lights in the sky from fifty thousand feet away and debating whether they’re non-human intelligence, a Chinese lantern, or one of Elon Musk’s satellites, I keep finding myself returning to the same question.

Why are we still arguing about distant lights?

If the allegations are true, multiple governments have recovered physical craft.

We’re not talking about lights, blurry videos, or witness testimony. We’re talking about solid objects that can supposedly be touched, photographed, measured, and analysed.

If that’s true, why are we still arguing over decades-old astronaut stories and grainy infrared footage?

Why aren’t we looking at the hardware?

This is one area where I surprisingly find myself agreeing with some sceptics.

Even people like Neil deGrasse Tyson have repeatedly asked a version of the same question.

Show us the craft. Show us the evidence. Show us whatever it is that’s been recovered.

That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request anymore.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable after decades of rumours, countless whistleblowers, congressional hearings, and repeated claims of crash retrieval programmes.

Now, to be fair, the most credible information we’ve received appears to come from people who would genuinely be in a position to know. Whether they’re right or wrong is a separate question.

Many of these individuals occupied positions requiring extraordinary clearances. They worked close to the alleged programmes, close to the rumours, and close to the stories that have circulated for decades.

It’s as if everyone agrees there’s a bunker.

The debate is whether there’s actually anything inside it.

And we keep hearing from people who worked in or near that bunker saying there is.

At some point, though, testimony alone stops being enough.

That isn’t necessarily because people stop believing. It’s because people get tired.

That’s human nature.

We invest our energy into things we believe can be solved.

If progress feels impossible, we eventually redirect that energy elsewhere.

Some people walk away entirely.

Others drift back towards conventional explanations because they seem more achievable.

All it takes is one former official stepping onto a stage and saying, “Those were probably calibration spheres.”

You search for calibration spheres, look at the photographs, and think to yourself, “That actually looks quite reasonable.”

A seed gets planted.

Maybe that’s legitimate scepticism.

Maybe it’s misinformation.

Maybe it’s counterintelligence.

The uncomfortable truth is that, from the outside, those things can look remarkably similar.

And that’s what makes this subject so frustrating.

The UFO conversation isn’t taking place in a vacuum. If crash retrieval programmes exist, counterintelligence would naturally exist around them as well. Confusion, misdirection, and competing narratives would also exist.

That possibility doesn’t prove the claims.

It simply makes the landscape harder to navigate.

Which brings me back to fatigue.

I think a lot of us are reaching a point where we need something more substantial.

We don’t need another rumour, another blurry video, or another hearing where everyone hints at extraordinary secrets.

We need something tangible.

If official disclosure is ever going to happen, I increasingly suspect it will come through nuts-and-bolts evidence rather than stories.

Photographs, materials, recovered technology, and physical artefacts would all carry far more weight than endless testimony.

The existence of a craft would also be far easier for the public to process than discussions about biologics, consciousness, interdimensional entities, or any of the other concepts that tend to accompany this subject.

Maybe that’s the lesson here. Or maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe this is simply me recognising that after a few years of following this topic, every time I think I’ve moved a little closer to an answer, somebody appears with a new explanation that throws a spanner in the works. Or I get sent in a totally different direction which requires re-assessing past information I thought I’d had pinned down.

That’s how genuine investigation works.

It’s also how misinformation works.

And sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to tell the difference.

All I know is that for the first time in a long time, I can feel the early stages of UFO fatigue setting in.

That isn’t because I’ve stopped caring. It’s because, like everyone else, I’m still waiting for something that finally moves us from endless debate to an actual answer.

I really hope we’re close. Or the buggers show themselves to me…

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Yet there’s one area of the UFO subject I’ve largely avoided.

Not because I thought the people involved were lying. Not because I thought they were crazy. And certainly not because I thought the topic wasn’t important.

The truth is, I never quite knew how to approach it.

The experiencer phenomenon — what many people still call alien abductions — has always felt like the deepest end of the pool. It’s the part of the subject that can make even people who are comfortable discussing UFOs suddenly feel awkward. It’s intensely personal, often traumatic, and if we’re honest, it’s dark. Really dark.

When I first started UAP Files and the associated UAP Files Podcast, I made a conscious decision to focus on areas that I felt could bring people into the conversation. Military encounters. Government investigations. Sensor data. Pilot testimony. The sort of material that allows someone who has never thought seriously about UFOs to engage without feeling they’ve wandered into the deep end before they’ve learned to swim. Those kinds of interviews that de-stigmatise because these people are serious credible folks, often in a position to know the things they claim and a ton to lose for making it all up.

But over time I’ve found myself asking a question that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

If we accept that there are credible military witnesses seeing extraordinary craft...

If we are willing to entertain claims of reverse-engineering programmes...

If we are seriously discussing consciousness, telepathy, non-local awareness, remote viewing and CE5...

Then why aren’t we talking to the people who claim to have met the occupants?

Why are we endlessly discussing the vehicles while ignoring the pilots?

Whether you believe every experiencer account or none of them is almost beside the point. The question isn’t whether every story is true. The question is whether this group of people deserves to be heard.

That’s partly why I was keen to sit down once again with award-winning filmmaker Dean Alioto.

This was our third conversation together. Previously we discussed The Alien Perspective and The Alien Perspective 2, two films that stood out because Dean approached the UFO subject differently from most filmmakers. Rather than recycling familiar talking points or simply presenting a parade of talking heads, he seemed more interested in exploring the human side of the mystery. And rather uniquely, the perspective of the Non-Human Intelligence (NHI).

His latest film, The Experiencers: Full Disclosure, takes that idea even further.

Over the course of several years, 67 interviews and multiple countries, Dean immersed himself in the experiencer community. The result isn’t a sensationalist documentary designed to shock people. Quite the opposite. It’s an attempt to understand what happens when ordinary people report extraordinary encounters and then spend years trying to make sense of them.

What struck me during our conversation wasn’t that Dean was asking viewers to believe every account.

It was that he was asking us to listen. Interestingly, that’s the same message Steven Spielberg left us with in his latest film Disclosure Day.

One point Dean made stayed with me long after the cameras stopped rolling.

For years, public hearings, documentaries and news reports have focused on the craft. We analyse flight characteristics. We debate propulsion systems. We discuss materials science. We speculate about where these things come from.

Meanwhile, there are people claiming direct interaction with whatever is behind the phenomenon, the pilots, and they are often dismissed before they’ve even spoken.

As Dean put it, perhaps we’ve been studying the elephant’s tail while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Now, I’m not suggesting we abandon critical thinking. Quite the opposite. Skepticism remains important. Evidence remains important.

But I’ve also reached the point where I think completely ignoring experiencers is no longer a serious position.

At the very least, these are people reporting life-changing events. Many describe genuine trauma. Many have struggled to tell friends, family members or even therapists what happened to them. Others say the experience ultimately became positive, transformative even, despite initially being terrifying.

Whatever the explanation turns out to be, there is clearly something worth examining.

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing more conversations about this subject now than ever before. Maybe that’s why filmmakers like Dean Alioto are dedicating years of their lives to it. Maybe that’s why even people who once kept their distance from this aspect of the phenomenon are beginning to look a little closer.

Including me.

You don’t have to agree with everything discussed in this interview. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone did.

But if we’re genuinely interested in understanding the UFO mystery in its entirety, then perhaps it’s time we stopped treating experiencers as an awkward footnote and started listening to what they have to say.

The Experiencers: Full Disclosure is available now on Amazon and Apple.

Watch my full conversation with Dean Alioto and watch the trailer below:

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What interests me is something much bigger than that.

And strangely, I think it has massive implications for the UFO/UAP subject.

Now, before everyone rolls their eyes and says, “Jimmy’s gone off on another tangent,” hear me out.

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve had since starting UAP Files is that the UFO subject isn’t actually short of information. If anything, it’s drowning in it.

We’ve got decades of sightings. Military encounters. Pilot testimony. Radar tracks. Intelligence documents. Government reports. FOIA releases. Whistleblower claims. Counter-claims. Skeptics. Debunkers. Believers. Experiencers. Contactees. People claiming they’ve recovered alien spacecraft, or at least figured out how to down one. And people claiming the whole thing is a giant counterintelligence operation.

At a certain point you almost don’t need more information. I’m not making that argument, I’m just sayin’.

You need a better way of making sense of the information you’ve already got.

That’s why I keep coming back to AI.

Because when I listen to people like Dario Amodei from Anthropic, Sam Altman from OpenAI, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and others working at the absolute cutting edge of this technology, I get the feeling they’re talking about something very different from what most of the public think AI is.

Most people still think AI is basically a clever chatbot. A better Google. Something that can help you write emails.

But the people building these systems increasingly seem to be talking about AI as a tool that could dramatically increase humanity’s ability to understand complex problems.

And if that’s true, then surely one of the most interesting problems on Earth is the UFO/UAP subject.

Think about it for a second.

If there really is something unusual going on, which I firmly believe there is, whether that’s ET, time travellers, non-human intelligence, advanced aerospace technology, some weird natural sentient phenomenon we don’t understand, a mixture of all three, or something else entirely, then we’ve spent decades creating the perfect environment for confusion.

We’ve mixed genuine sightings, data and experiences with obvious nonsense.

We’ve mixed classified military programmes with genuine mysteries.

We’ve mixed intelligence agencies, secrecy, national security concerns, conspiracy theories, grifters, hoaxes, social media influencers and genuine researchers all into one giant mess.

Then we’ve spent the last seventy years arguing about it.

And that’s before you even get into the possibility that some of the confusion might be intentional.

Because here’s something I’ve wondered for years.

If you wanted to hide a genuinely important secret, would you classify it?

Or would you bury it underneath so much noise that nobody could ever work out what was true and what wasn’t?

That’s a very different question.

And this is where AI starts becoming really interesting.

Not because it’s going to magically announce that aliens are real next Tuesday afternoon.

But because it may eventually become capable of analysing vast amounts of information in ways human beings simply can’t.

Patterns across decades. Connections between cases. Similarities between witness reports. Correlations between locations. Relationships between intelligence operations, media narratives and public perception.

The sort of things that no individual researcher, journalist, scientist or intelligence analyst could realistically hold in their head all at once.

When people ask me why I find AI so fascinating, that’s the reason. Not because I think it has all the answers. But because for the first time in history we may be building tools capable of helping us navigate a subject that has become almost impossible for any one person to fully understand.

And if there is a genuine mystery sitting somewhere in the middle of the UFO/UAP story, hidden beneath decades of noise, secrecy, misinformation and human error, AI might eventually become one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had for finding it.

I’ve written before about what I called “soft disclosure” and how it seemed to arrive at almost exactly the same time that modern AI really burst onto the scene. Here and Here. Back when GPT started making headlines, and people began to realise this wasn’t just another clever bit of software, we also started seeing an increasing number of government officials, intelligence officers, military personnel and insiders saying something that, for decades, would have been career-ending:

“Yeah, there might actually be something to this UFO thing.”

I’ve never been fully convinced that’s a coincidence.

Maybe it is. Maybe the timing is completely unrelated. But it strikes me as odd that the most significant technological leap of our lifetime appears to have arrived at precisely the same moment that the UAP conversation started moving out of the shadows and into the mainstream. UAPDA, Whistleblowers, Congressional hearings, Declassification of files…

Why now? Why not ten years ago? Why not twenty?

Why are former intelligence officials, military officers, senior politicians and government insiders suddenly willing to talk about this subject in a way that would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago?

I keep coming back to the same possibility.

Perhaps they’re aware of something that most people haven’t fully grasped yet.

For most of modern history, information has been power because information was difficult to access, difficult to analyse and even more difficult to verify.

If somebody buried a document in an archive, hid a programme behind layers of classification, mixed truth with misinformation or flooded a subject with nonsense, the average person had very little chance of untangling it all. You needed teams of researchers. Teams of analysts. Departments of scientists. Huge budgets. Years of work.

Today? Not so much.

For twenty quid a month, anyone can sit in their spare room and access tools that would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago.

And we’re still right at the beginning.

Soon we’ll have AI agents working while we sleep. You’ll be able to point them at thousands of pages of declassified documents, witness testimony, scientific papers, radar reports, patents, intelligence assessments and media coverage, then wake up the next morning to find a structured intelligence-style briefing waiting for you.

Not a Google search. Not Guerrilla Skeptic-corrupted Wikipedia page. An actual briefing. Cross-referenced. Sourced. Analysed. With contradictions highlighted.

Think about what that means for a subject like UFOs.

Suddenly everyone has the ability to become a researcher on a level that previously required an institution behind them.

Imagine combining the historical knowledge of Richard Dolan, the theoretical physics of Jack Sarfatti, the engineering mindset of Salvatore Pais, the scientific curiosity of Eric Davis and Hal Puthoff, whilst simultaneously understanding how intelligence agencies operate, how special access programmes have historically been hidden, how counterintelligence works and how information warfare shapes public perception.

That sounds ridiculous today. But does it really? Because we’re already starting to see the first signs of it.

Take VectorPoint, for example.

We’re just a couple of blokes building an app.

That’s it.

No government funding. No giant corporation. No army of researchers. No shady investors.

Yet we’re already building something that, a decade ago, would have required a serious organisation. We are already the largest ingested UFO/UAP sightings database with 1.4 million sightings logged.

The goal isn’t to create another UFO website.

The goal is to create a data ecosystem.

A place where scientific papers, declassified documents, historical sighting reports, military encounters, government records and real-world observational data can live together in the same environment.

Not edited Wikipedia articles. Not somebody’s opinion. The actual source material.

Then you layer AI on top of that data. You allow it to search connections. Spot patterns. Identify anomalies. Cross-reference cases. Correlate sightings.

And perhaps most importantly, separate signal from noise.

One feature I’m particularly excited about is the ability to plot sightings not just on a flat map but in the sky itself. Think of something closer to Street View for the heavens. A way of visualising where objects were reported, how they moved and whether recurring patterns emerge over time.

Again, we’re just scratching the surface.

But if a couple of ordinary people can begin building tools like this from their living rooms, imagine what happens when millions of people start doing the same thing.

Imagine what happens when scientists, engineers, pilots, intelligence analysts, software developers and ordinary curious people all have access to these capabilities.

Imagine what happens when humanity effectively gains a research team in its back pocket — or they simply download VectorPoint…

That’s why I keep wondering whether some people inside government can see what’s coming.

Because there may come a point, and I don’t think it’s that far away, where maintaining decades-old ambiguity becomes increasingly difficult.

Not because somebody leaks a document and because a whistleblower appears, but because the tools available to ordinary people become so powerful that the underlying patterns start revealing themselves anyway.

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing movement and maybe that’s why we’re hearing more admissions.

Maybe that’s why former officials seem increasingly comfortable saying, “Yes, there are things we can’t explain.”

Because perhaps they know that within the next decade millions of people will have the ability to analyse information in ways that were once reserved for governments, intelligence agencies and major universities.

And if that happens, there may eventually come a moment where somebody has to stand up and say:

“Well... we did sort of tell you this stuff was real.”

The question is whether we’ll get there first.

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Not because I expected him to reveal where the crashed saucers are hidden. Not because I thought he was going to accidentally confirm David Grusch’s claims. And certainly not because I thought he’d suddenly become a believer and advocate.

I wanted to interview him because Sean sits at the centre of one of the most fascinating puzzles in modern UFO history.

For those unfamiliar, Sean isn’t just another government spokesperson. He’s a laser and materials physicist, career intelligence officer, former Director of AARO, and has spent decades inside some of the most secretive organisations in the United States government. His career includes senior roles within the CIA, NRO, DIA, National Security Council, US Strategic Command and US Space Command. He has served as Chief Technology Officer at the DIA, Deputy Director of Intelligence for STRATCOM, Deputy Director of Intelligence for Space Command, and ultimately became the public face of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation effort.

In short, if there were a CV designed in a laboratory to investigate UFOs, it would probably look something like Sean Kirkpatrick’s.

Which is exactly why he’s so controversial.

This is a man who has publicly argued that intelligence work sometimes requires deception. A man who has spent his entire adult life operating inside systems built around secrecy, compartmentalisation and strategic information control. Yet he simultaneously asks the public to trust his scientific assessment that AARO found no evidence of ET and non-human intelligence.

That tension alone makes him one of the most interesting people in the entire UFO debate.

And perhaps most surprisingly, despite years of interviews, hearings and public appearances, Sean has never really sat down with a UFO podcaster from the “believer” side of the fence before. Most of his conversations have been with journalists, sceptics, academics, or interviewers broadly sympathetic to the official position. None have really pushed back.

So I wanted to do something different.

Not a shouting match.

Not a gotcha interview.

Not another three hours of people talking past one another.

I wanted to understand how Sean thinks.

Because if you’re trying to solve this puzzle, understanding the people involved is every bit as important as understanding the technology.

And this week, I got that interview.

The Question That Stuck With Me

There was one moment in the interview that genuinely surprised me.

When we got onto the subject of CE5, consciousness, contact modalities and some of the “stranger” aspects of the phenomenon, Sean explained that AARO followed an evidence-based approach. If there was no measurable data, there was nothing to investigate.

On the surface, that sounds entirely reasonable.

The problem is this:

How can you confidently dismiss an avenue of investigation that you’ve never actually attempted?

Sean openly acknowledged that he never attempted any form of contact protocol himself. No CE5. No consciousness experiments. No attempts at summoning. Nothing. When I pushed him on it, his answer was essentially that there was no data to justify doing so.

And that’s where my mind started spinning.

Because if we’re genuinely investigating the possibility of non-human intelligence, consciousness-based phenomena, or what some would call psi effects, isn’t the first step to at least test the claim?

You don’t have to believe Dr. Greer, or the man who really popularised all this years earlier than Greer, Sixto Paz Wells.

You don’t have to believe experiencers.

You don’t even have to believe CE5 works.

But if millions of people are discussing it, books have been written about it, documentaries made about it, apps exist that guide people through the process, and reports of contact attempts go back centuries in one form or another, surely the scientific response isn’t to simply ignore it.

Surely the scientific response is to test it.

Even if only to rule it out.

Corroborating human evidence is….evidence. It is data.

When it comes to the UFO/UAP subject, my interest tends to gravitate towards two areas above all others: consciousness and engineering. On the consciousness side, I’m fascinated by the psychology of the people involved, the secret keepers, gatekeepers, believers, experiencers, debunkers, and hardened sceptics.

What drives individuals to dedicate years, sometimes decades, to proving or disproving the phenomenon? How do belief systems, cognitive biases, personal experiences, and institutional cultures shape the narratives we hear? Added to that are the more controversial aspects of the subject, including telepathy, psionic claims, and the broader question of how consciousness itself might interact with reality.

The second area is the engineering: the design of these craft, their propulsion systems, materials, and the technological principles that might underpin them. While I’m endlessly curious about both, Sean’s perspective sits much more within the consciousness and human-behaviour side of the discussion, offering insights into the people, motivations, and mindsets that surround the phenomenon rather than the mechanics of the craft themselves.

The Microscope Problem

The first compound microscope, built around the late 1500’s, early 1600’s by Zacharias Janssen, used two lenses to magnify tiny objects. It paved the way for later improvements by scientists such as Galileo Galilei and Robert Hooke, eventually leading to the discovery of cells and microorganisms.

This is where I think Sean’s greatest strength may also be his greatest limitation.

He is a physicist.

He wants measurable data.

He wants sensor returns.

He wants signatures.

He wants evidence that fits within a framework that can be quantified and analysed.

And normally that’s exactly what you want.

But history is full of examples where reality existed long before we had instruments capable of detecting it.

For most of human history nobody knew germs existed.

Nobody knew there were microscopic organisms living everywhere around us.

Nobody knew mites lived on our skin.

Nobody knew entire ecosystems existed in a drop of pond water.

Those things weren’t discovered because someone demanded better evidence.

They were discovered because somebody invented a new way of looking.

The microscope came first.

The evidence followed.

If you lived in 1600 and someone suggested tiny invisible creatures lived all over your body, demanding sensor data would have sounded perfectly rational.

The problem was that the sensor didn’t exist yet.

And, unlike UFOs and UAPs, there weren’t millions of people saying they’d seen, experienced, recorded, corroborated descriptions of micro life.

So when Sean talks about requiring data before exploring certain hypotheses, I find myself wondering whether that’s backwards.

What if the reason we don’t have data is because we’re using the wrong tools?

What if consciousness itself is part of the sensor?

What if we’re still trying to understand a microscope problem using a magnifying glass?

The other thing that struck me throughout our conversation was how much of Sean’s worldview appears shaped by national security.

And that makes perfect sense.

If you’ve spent thirty years worrying about foreign adversaries, espionage, classified technology, strategic deception and military advantage, then naturally you’re going to view anomalies through that lens.

Throughout the interview he repeatedly returns to adversary technology, sensor errors, bureaucratic failures and human misperception.

But what if some of the misdirection isn’t about aliens or NHI at all?

What if parts of this story really are about advanced aerospace projects?

What if some sightings are secret programs?

What if some are deliberate counterintelligence operations?

What if some are genuine unknowns?

And what if all of those things are happening simultaneously?

The closer I get to this subject, the less I think there’s a single answer.

The more I suspect there are multiple overlapping stories, each creating noise for the others.

Which is why conversations like this are so important.

Not because Sean provides all the answers.

But because understanding how someone like Sean thinks helps us understand the system itself.

And sometimes that’s just as valuable.

What We Covered

We also discuss AATIP, AAWSAP, Skinwalker Ranch, government secrecy, classification for embarrassment, pilot testimony, Jake Barber, Skywatch, the Nimitz “Tic Tac” case, sensor limitations, consciousness, interdimensional theories, and why Sean remains unconvinced that any evidence points to non-human intelligence. Dr. Jon Kosloski’s comments contradicting Sean’s, Susan Gough, personal sacrifices and life in the spotlight, Jesse Michels’ offer of $100k for an interview, FOIA withholding documents, John Greenwood and Black Vault and much much more.

Whether you agree with him or not, I think you’ll find this conversation compelling. As you watch, it’s worth keeping in mind that our interpretations are often shaped by our professional backgrounds and priorities. In this case, the discussion comes from someone whose focus has been national security and threat assessment, rather than the open-ended exploration of unexplained phenomena. A healthy dose of scepticism—and an awareness of that perspective—will help you draw your own conclusions.

Watch the full interview below and let me know where you think Sean gets it right — and where you think he’s missing something.

UAP Files / UAP Files Podcast is an independent, self-funded channel produced entirely by one person. If you enjoy the content and would like to help support future research, interviews, and productions, please consider buying me a coffee, here.

You can go back to the Belgian sightings in the late 80s and early 90s, where you had loads of people, including police, all reporting the same shape, the same movement, the same silence. Then you’ve got the Phoenix Lights in 1997, thousands of witnesses all seeing something massive moving overhead, blocking out stars, not behaving like any aircraft people were familiar with. OK that was more of a boomerang, but pretty triangular in my opinion. That level of consistency doesn’t just happen because people are bored or imagining things, especially when it’s spread across different countries and decades.

Somewhere along the line, the name TR-3B starts doing the rounds, supposedly a classified triangular craft, tactical reconnaissance, advanced propulsion, all that sort of thing, but the name almost becomes irrelevant after a while because what people are actually talking about feels bigger than just a single secret project. It becomes a way of describing something we don’t properly understand, something that sits awkwardly between known technology and something else entirely. It almost doesn’t fit in to the classic UFO category.

The idea that comes up again and again is that this isn’t purely human. The phrase people use is “alien reproduction vehicle”, which basically means we’ve come across something not originally ours and we’ve tried to copy it. Not perfectly, not completely, but enough to get something working. That would explain why some of these sightings look structured, almost engineered, like they’ve been built, but then behave in ways that don’t match anything we publicly know how to do.

That’s where my conversation with Kyle Knopp comes in, because this isn’t someone guessing from the outside. Kyle’s employed right now for Space Force, his background is Air Force, aircraft mechanic, communications and navigation specialist, so we’re talking about someone who understands radar systems, antennas, how aircraft are put together, what should be there and what shouldn’t. He spent years on base and then worked for Lockheed Martin at the same place, so when he says something didn’t look right, it carries a bit more weight.

He told me about this night where everything already felt a bit off, one of those dark, quiet ones where there’s no sound and no movement, and he’s driving onto base, slightly late, clock says 12:01. He notices what he thinks is a burnt-out streetlight at first, just a dim glow, then he realises there are three of them, evenly spaced, moving together. As his eyes adjust, he sees the centre isn’t just dark, it’s darker than the sky itself, like something solid is there but not reflecting any light.

The way he described the movement stuck with me, because it wasn’t flying in the normal sense, it was more like floating, like something had reduced the effect of gravity on it. He compared it to an air hockey puck when the air turns on underneath it, just gliding without resistance. No sound either, and that’s what really made him question it, because he knows what aircraft sound like. He even put his window down to check, and all he could hear was his tyres on the road, nothing else.

This thing was low, around treetop height, not massive like some of the reports you hear, but definitely there, definitely structured, with those three lights glowing in a sort of purplish-orange way. He said it looked like it might be rotating slightly, almost scanning the area, and then in a moment that comes up a lot in these cases, he looks away briefly, looks back, and it’s gone. Not flying off, not disappearing gradually, just gone.

What makes it more convincing, at least for me, is how he handled it afterwards. He didn’t go shouting about it, didn’t tell everyone straight away, didn’t try to turn it into something dramatic. He kept it to himself, partly because he thought no one would believe him and partly because he was working in an environment where talking about that sort of thing could cause problems - he’s got Secret Security clearances. That reaction is pretty typical of people who’ve had these experiences, especially ones with professional backgrounds. Incidentally, stunt man Christopher Romrell ( Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt’s stunt double) told me an almost identical story when we spoke on the UAP Files Podcast a couple of years back.

Eventually Kyle did report it, spoke to officials, even had contact with people connected to investigations into these phenomena (Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution office, AARO), but the impression you get is that he wasn’t dismissed outright, just not really engaged with in a meaningful way either. That kind of half-listening response seems to come up a lot, where people acknowledge something happened but don’t go any further with it. Almost like they know, so what you’re telling them is a waste of their time.

On the technical side, he started looking into how something like that might actually work, digging into patents, theories, feeding information into AI systems, trying to piece together what could explain the behaviour he saw. The same themes keep coming up: field propulsion, plasma effects, manipulation of inertia or gravity, things that sound like science fiction but are at least being explored in theoretical and patent form. See patients by Dr Salvatore Pais who we interviewed on the podcast - very interesting indeed!

Then there’s the part people struggle with, which is the idea of consciousness being involved in control systems. It sounds ridiculous at first, but you hear it mentioned often enough in different contexts that it starts to feel like something people at least take seriously behind closed doors. If you’ve got a craft operating in ways that don’t rely on conventional aerodynamics, it’s not impossible that the control systems would be just as unconventional.

So where does that leave the TR-3B? The honest answer is that it’s probably not a single, neat answer. Some of these sightings could be advanced human technology, some might be misidentified, but some of them, especially the ones described in detail by trained observers in controlled environments, don’t fit easily into either category. That’s where the idea of something hybrid starts to make more sense, not fully understood, not fully controlled, but functional enough to operate.

At the end of the day, the triangle itself is the constant. The same shape, the same behaviour, the same silence, reported over and over again by different people in different places. You don’t have to jump straight to aliens to recognise that something unusual is going on, but it’s getting harder to argue that it’s all easily explained away as well.

Sitting there talking to Kyle, listening to him go through it step by step, it didn’t feel like a story being told for effect. It felt like someone trying to make sense of something they didn’t expect to see and still can’t fully explain. And that’s the bit that sticks with you, that quiet sense that whatever these things are, we’re not getting the full picture yet, and maybe we haven’t been for a long time.

Watch the full interview below.

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I’m Jimmy from UAP Files and UAP Files Podcast, and this is exactly the kind of case I cover on the podcast: raw, emerging sightings that haven’t yet been filtered, “debunked”, or buried under layers of narrative control. Sometimes that means we’re looking at something genuinely unexplained, potentially otherworldly. Other times, it means we’re watching a very convincing fabrication. Either way, the process is important and this case is a perfect example of why.

The video, originally posted on X by UAPWixy, shows a luminous object hovering in the night sky. It’s not your typical “dot in the distance.” There’s structure, light distribution, and—most interestingly—behaviour. As the camera zooms in and out, the object seems to retain coherence in a way that’s surprisingly difficult to fake convincingly. The attempts for the camera sensor to focus on zooms is something AI finds it difficult to do convincingly.

My first impression? It immediately triggered a memory from S4: The Bob Lazar Story. In that film, renders of the nine alleged craft Lazar described include one that resembles a “hat on its side.” This object isn’t identical, but the silhouette feels quite familiar - sort of top heavy. That alone doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it places the shape within a broader historical context of reported craft designs, especially from New Mexico 1960s.

Looking back through older sightings from the 1940s through the 1960s, there are vague parallels—nothing definitive, but enough to say this isn’t a completely unprecedented form. Still, it’s not a common one either. I’ve seen one or two found in the pages of the National Archive. Often photo’s marked “fake” and assumed to be things dangling from fishing wire for a cheeky 5 mins of fame.

Community Notes & Claims

Before you even get to analyse the footage properly, you run into something else: the narrative layer.

In this case, a Community Note was attached claiming the footage is actually 13 years old, originally filmed in North Carolina and later reposted as something new. Sounds decisive, right?

Except when you follow the link provided in that very note, it leads to a video uploaded… this month. It may well be 13 years old, I haven’t seen evidence of that yet, but that’s not the point. The point is many will see Community Notes and assume it’s nonsense without checking. I clicked on the link and the link confirmed the footage was uploaded in April 2026, this year and month.

That’s not a minor discrepancy, that’s a complete contradiction.

This is where things get tricky. Community Notes are often treated as a final word, but they’re only as reliable as the people contributing to them. And if you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember similar issues with platforms like Wikipedia, where organised groups, sometimes referred to as “gorilla skeptics”, have historically shaped narratives through selective sourcing and editorial control. Entire teams of editors.

The lesson here isn’t to ignore Community Notes—it’s to verify them independently.

Analysing The Footage

So, I ran the footage through Google Lens and reverse image search tools, focusing specifically on time filtering.

The result? Everything traces back only a couple of weeks. No older matches. No archived versions. No evidence of this clip existing years ago.

That doesn’t prove it’s new, it isn’t an exact science and i’ve known it to miss things before, but it strongly suggests it hasn’t been circulating publicly for long.

Next step: AI detection.

I used ImgDetect and cross-referenced it with SightEngine, which scans for signatures of major generative models—DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, Firefly, GPT-based systems, and others. It also checks for manipulation artifacts like face morphing or synthetic layering.

The result came back at 41% confidence AI-generated.

Now, that’s important. Not because it proves anything—but because it doesn’t. A 41% score is essentially saying: “We’re not sure.” That’s nowhere near the level you’d expect for clearly synthetic footage.

And here’s where things get interesting.

When you examine the video closely, especially during zoom transitions, you see camera-like imperfections—focus hunting, exposure shifts, slight blur recovery. These are the kinds of micro-artifacts that AI still struggles to replicate convincingly, especially in dynamic sequences.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be AI. But if it is, it’s extremely well done. And if we find out it is AI, then we need to be aware that AI has very quickly levelled up and be aware of that in the future analysis.

I also ran the footage through some basic enhancement—adjusting contrast, isolating light sources, trying to cut through what appears to be a strange colour filter.

One thing stood out: a kind of purple haze overlay that isn’t typical of standard night shooting, whether on mobile or mirrorless cameras. It could be:

A deliberate filter to obscure details and make it harder for AI detection tools.

A byproduct of digital processing.

Or something introduced during compression or reposting.

Again, nothing definitive. But it adds another layer of complexity.

What is clear is that once you strip back some of that noise, the object maintains a consistent structure. It doesn’t break apart or behave like a simple light artifact.

The Bigger Problem: No Provenance

And this is where the case hits its biggest wall.

We don’t have an original uploader, a named witness, metadata, any official confirmation from Nellis or military sources.

That lack of provenance is frustrating—and it’s often the deciding factor in cases like this.

Because without it, you’re left balancing probabilities that it’s too detailed to dismiss outright, but too unverified to confirm. And when you’re operating in this space, nailing your colours to the mast without solid data is dangerous. the internet never forgets, “remember when you thought X/Y/Z was real?”

Right now, this sits in a very uncomfortable but familiar category:

High-quality, low-verification footage

It could be one of the clearest UAP recordings we’ve seen in years.
Or it could be one of the most convincing AI-generated clips to date.

Both possibilities are on the table.

And that’s exactly why cases like this are really important and why it is essential, when investigating and researching UFOs and UAPs, that the source, context and data are captured. The only way to shift this issue in to “science” and away from fringe, is to apply some kind of universally trusted verification process.

And that is where we come in.

UAPFilesLive.com and the soon-to-be released accompanying app VectorPoint will offer users the ability to capture UFO footage straight from the app, capturing a data package and plotting the footage on a map (an interactive map) with everything from real-time aircraft, satellites, ships, balloons, rocket launches and a whole host of other map overlays.

It will enable the user to go in to a 3D map, plot the object exactly where they saw it - adding that human data point that others disregard (often intentionally so they can resolve a case as prosaic). Once in that 3D map you can pinch the screen and look up to the sky and touch where the object was seen. The overlays will help the user understand what was in the sky at the time, but won’t demand that this is what you saw. A few degrees off, a different trajectory and it’s a totally different object.

More data is good.

And as time goes on, with these features and the ability to verify the footage as authentic, the landscape will change and it really needs to with the speed with which AI generated imagery is progressing.

At UAP Files, this is what we do—real-time investigation, open analysis, and challenging both hoaxers trying to muddy the water and skepticism when the evidence demands it.

This case isn’t closed. Not even close.

If you’ve seen this footage elsewhere, if you can trace it back further, or if you’ve got tools or insights I haven’t used here—drop them in the comments. This kind of investigation works best when it’s collaborative.

Watch the Full Analysis

I break all of this down in detail—including the footage, enhancement tests, and live analysis—in the full video.

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“The sky burst … and a huge flame-like body fell between them… its shape like a wine jar… in colour like molten silver.”

Thousands witnessed it. And then, just as suddenly, the moment passed — not with victory or defeat, but with both armies choosing not to fight at all.

Two questions have followed humanity for as long as we’ve been looking up: are we alone, and has anything ever visited us? In recent years those questions have moved out of the margins and into official spaces. Pentagon briefings, pilot testimony, even congressional hearings. What was once dismissed outright is now discussed openly, cautiously perhaps, but increasingly.

But this isn’t a modern mystery. It never was.

Long before radar, before flight, even before electricity, people were already seeing things. They wrote about them, painted them, tried (in the language available to them) to make sense of something unfamiliar. The account from ancient Phrygia is just one example. Across centuries, similar descriptions appear again and again: objects in the sky, structured, moving with intent, often witnessed by many at once.

Roman historians like Livy wrote of “phantom ships” seen in the sky, while Pliny the Elder described a “spark falling from a star… growing as it descended.” At the time these were taken as omens, messages from the gods. But if you remove the interpretation and focus only on what was described, what remains feels strikingly physical - something observed, not imagined. Something tangible.

That same tension appears in Renaissance art. Painters of the period were deliberate; details were rarely accidental. And yet in works like The Madonna with Saint Giovannino, a figure points toward a disc-shaped object in the sky while a dog reacts below, as if aware of something unusual. The artist wants you to find it, wants you to wonder what the dog is barking at. In The Annunciation, a beam of light descends from a circular opening with a precision that feels engineered. In The Baptism of Christ, a glowing disc emits light downward in a way that looks less like symbolism and more like structure. Officially, these are divine representations. But visually, they are difficult to separate from modern descriptions of aerial craft.

Then there are events that read less like symbolism and more like eyewitness reports. In 1561, over Nuremberg, Germany, a broadsheet described the sky filled with objects - spheres, crosses, cylinders - moving and colliding for over an hour before some fell to Earth trailing smoke.

At the time it was framed as a warning from God. Today, it reads more like an aerial event involving multiple objects in controlled motion. Something that feels surprisingly contemporary. An altercation in the sky…A dogfight!

By the late 1800s, before the Wright brothers first flight, people across the United States were reporting “airships.” These weren’t vague lights; they were described as structured craft with illumination, sometimes even beams directed toward the ground. One witness admitted, “I wondered if my senses had abandoned me.” But he wasn’t alone, and that’s the recurring detail that runs through all of this - these sightings are often shared, not solitary.

In 1954, during a football match in Florence, thousands of spectators looked up as objects hovered above the stadium. A strange fibrous substance - later nicknamed “angel hair” - drifted down and dissolved upon contact. The event was reported widely at the time, yet never fully explained. Once again, a large group of people witnessed something unusual in the sky, together. And where have we heard “angle hair” before?

Today, the technology has changed, but the core mystery hasn’t. Military pilots - trained observers - describe craft that outpace known capabilities, move without visible propulsion, and perform manoeuvres that challenge current understanding, current physics. The Pentagon now openly acknowledges that some objects remain unidentified, while figures like Col. David Grusch tell us that more is known behind closed doors. Whether those claims are accurate or not, the broader point remains: something is being observed, and it always has been.

What changes over time isn’t the phenomenon - it’s the language we use to describe it. Omens become angels, angels become airships, airships become UFOs, and now UFOs are rebranded as UAP. The terminology evolves with culture and technology, but the underlying reports remain oddly consistent.

And that consistency is the most difficult part to ignore. Not because it proves anything definitively, but because it suggests continuity. A thread running through history that we’ve repeatedly noticed, recorded, and then reinterpreted to fit the understanding of the time.

If you want to see these cases laid out properly, with visuals and a deeper breakdown of the connections between them, I’ve put together a full video exploring it chronologically. It’s much easier to see the pattern when everything is placed side by side.

So the question remains — not just for us, but for every generation before us:

What… exactly… is out there?