Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).
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CAPITOL HILL GETS A NEW GRUSCH
UFO whistleblower Jake Barber has joined the staff of Rep. Eric Burlison to assist on UAP work, Burlison spokesman Nate Lucas confirmed to PARADIGM.
Barber replaces UFO whistleblower David Grusch, who left Burlison’s staff around Labor Day. Grusch disclosed his departure shortly after PARADIGM revealed he was an executive at an advanced materials startup stacked with UFO world figures, a position that created potential ethical conflicts with his congressional work.
Barber, an Air Force veteran, came forward publicly in early 2025 to claim that he had participated in retrievals of alien craft while working as a helicopter pilot for a private contractor.
Before going public, Barber privately briefed Senate staffers about his claims, according to a person familiar with the episode as well as reporting from NewsNation.
Unlike Grusch, Barber has never publicly testified under oath about his claims.
After going public, Barber helped to launch SkyWatcher, an initiative that purported to use an “electromechanical dog whistle” and psychic powers to summon UAP. The project, which was active last year, has gone silent without publicly disclosing any independently verified evidence of success.
Barber’s hiring was first reported by Pavel Ibarra Meda, host of Psicoactivo.
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THE CASE FOR THE ‘LEGACY PROGRAM’
Nick Cook is a veteran aerospace journalist.
So I was surprised when he recently told me that in the past year or two he’s concluded that a “legacy program” to reverse-engineer alien technology really does exist. And I was glad that he agreed to explain his thinking.
For decades, the idea that the government and private contractors possess alien technology and have been trying to replicate it was the province of fringe conspiracy theorists. But since 2023, it’s been the premise of a legislative push backed by Chuck Schumer, Mike Rounds and other lawmakers who want to assert eminent domain over any technology “of unknown origin” or alien biological material held in private hands.
Of course there is no consensus that the Legacy Program — which these legislators define as any preexisting government or private effort to study or exploit alien technology and bodies — is anything more than a myth.
When it comes to figuring out whether American lawmakers are simply chasing figments of the collective imagination, I find Nick’s perspective uniquely valuable.
He covered the aerospace industry for Jane’s Defence Weekly for decades. He wrote The Hunt for Zero Point, a fascinating 2002 book that explored the possibility that the U.S. government has mastered gravity manipulation technology, and that secret, superadvanced aircraft were the cause of some UFO sightings.
Later, Nick engaged deeply with America’s largest military contractors from another angle, working with them to try to apply their technologies to pro-social applications.
Recently, he’s returned to covering secret technology, this time with a heavy emphasis on anomalous phenomena, with his publication Rogue Icons.
It helps that Nick is a Brit, allowing him to look at the UFO fracas playing out inside the American system from the privileged perch of an informed outsider.
When Nick and I initially corresponded about his belief in the reality of the Legacy Program, Nick pointed to two recent sources.
One is the new memoir from former military intelligence official Jay Stratton, in which Stratton claims that the Lockheed Martin executive Jim Ryder confided in him about “the Program” in early 2009 and said that Lockheed possesses a dozen intact craft. The other is a September interview in which physicist Eric Davis, who has worked as a consultant on Pentagon UFO inquiries, made similar allegations about “the Program.”
Nick wrote that “Both sets of testimony line up with things I’ve heard from other sources.”
Nick agreed to get on a video call to elaborate on his conclusions. Nick explained that one sourcing pool he has drawn on has included people publicly associated with claims about UFOs, such as Hal Puthoff and others associated with the UFO-obsessed aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow (Nick also served a roughly year-long stint as a research director at Bigelow’s Institute for Consciousness Studies starting in 2022).
Then he revealed why he has a particular reason to treat their claims seriously: his longstanding source relationships inside the advanced concept projects at America’s largest defense contractors:
“I had developed a whole range of other contacts which were very plugged in, and they had hinted quite strongly about the existence of a legacy program. Pre-2017, as I said, I just wasn’t interested because UFOs just weren’t really on my radar screen at all. Post-2017, I paid them some more attention.And they were in some of those advanced concepts offices that we know and read about. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works is the best example, but there are others. Every major U.S. prime contractor has its own Skunk Works, so Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and Boeing too.”
Nick acknowledged that his industry sources never mentioned aliens. But he also expressed skepticism that the claims UFO whistleblowers are making about aliens stem from disinformation used to cloak advanced human technology. The deception, he argued, would have to be too elaborate.
“It wasn’t ever said quite so explicitly that this did not come from human beings,” Nick said. “But it was certainly said in very suggestive ways that, hey Nick, whatever you are writing about in terms of stealth or hypersonics or whatever breakthrough area it is, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, matey. You could look a whole lot deeper than that and you’d be astounded.”
I’ll publish a full video of our conversation next week. Subscribe below to get it in your inbox.
OF NOTE
Sean Kirkpatrick, former director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said that some UFO cases disclosed this year by the War Department had already been resolved by his office, but that the Department had removed AARO’s conclusions. A Pentagon spokesperson said the department was not releasing its conclusions about specific cases so that people can “make up their own minds.” (Fox News)
The head of the German military’s space command said he is “absolutely certain” that “other life forms exist out there.” (German-language article in Welt)
The National UFO Reporting Center released details of an August incident over Ohio in which flight crew reported seeing, and photographing, a 10- to 20-foot-long, metallic-silver, cigar-shaped object at a distance of five nautical miles. (NUFORC report)
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How does it serve the American people to setup an office to identify anomalous objects in the sky and then strip out their analysis when it's released to the public so we can "Make up their own minds"? Is the DOD running fun treasure hunts now?
How is this a good use of tax dollars, helping our national defense, or benefiting the greater good? It's the Department of Defense's job to share their expert opinion for what is flying over our air space--not mine.
So Nick's sources are 1. the same circular reporting of Robert Bigelow associates/AAWSAP employees (Jay Stratton, Hal Putoff, Eric Davis) that spent millions looking for aliens at Skinwalker Ranch and have lots of stories and no evidence and 2. anonymous aerospace company employees that say they are working on advanced tech. He's then taking this "Legacy Program" euphemism pushed by the Bigelow crowd and attaching it broadly to advanced aerospace programs with no evidence of aliens. If this was misinformation how would it look different?