Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).
‘Legacy Program’ Reality Check
This week, I want to walk through a recent chat I had with a former senior national security official on the purported “Legacy Program” to exploit alien technology and the UAP Disclosure Act, which is currently pending in Congress.
The talk did not yield any shocking revelations, but these kinds of temperature-taking conversations with credible, informed insiders are invaluable. They offer reality checks, albeit often indirect ones, that can keep an investigation on course as it winds through murky realms.
Much like the person I interviewed in SOL #07, this former official is someone who was deeply involved in the issue, but is not part of the cast of former officials whose names are publicly associated with it.
I keep bracing for the possibility that one of these people will tell me that they have looked thoroughly into the matter and have concluded that the whole idea of a hidden program working to reverse-engineer alien technology is bunk.
This is essentially the stance taken publicly by Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of AARO, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
But this former official, like others I’ve spoken to, conveyed that claims of a “Legacy Program” are worthy of further investigation.
The first point this person, who worked in Congress, made was that congressional officials are constantly discovering new things that executive branch officials have hidden from them.
“You think you’ve got everything.” they explained, “All of a sudden you get another briefing and you’ll be like, ‘You assholes.’”
The idea that executive branch officials regularly keep secrets from their overseers in the congressional branch is not hard to accept.
The question raised by the UAP Disclosure Act is whether some of those secrets really deal with “technologies of unknown origin” and “biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence.”
Without disclosing the details, the former official affirmed that a high evidentiary bar had to be cleared for those terms to make it into proposed legislation.
And the person said there was sufficient reason for lawmakers to continue using their political capital to try to assert eminent domain over any such technologies or biological evidence three years after the measure was first proposed.
“It’s probably good that they continue to push for it,” the former official said.
As for the watering-down of the original UAP Disclosure Act, which saw the eminent domain provisions stripped alongside language that would have created an independent body to oversee UAP disclosure, the person indicated that more resistance came from the executive branch than from the private sector.
“I don’t put a lot of blame on the contractors,” they said.
I asked whether I was wasting my time chasing after tales of a Legacy Program.
“Either we’re all crazy, or there’s something there, and all we can do is keep picking away at it,” the person said. “I think either conclusion is reasonable to come to.”
I plan to keep picking away at it.
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ICYMI: I went on the “Need to Know” podcast with Bryce Zabel to talk about PARADIGM and takeaways from my first three months of reporting. The conversation went so well that Bryce had me back for another interview to talk through the consequences of the midterm elections for government disclosure.
We plan to get together on “Need to Know” to chat on a roughly monthly basis going forward.
BONUS: Greg Scaduto, an equity analyst at J.P. Morgan and a volunteer at the Disclosure Foundation, interviewed me about my 2021 book “The Bidens” and the launch of PARADIGM over on his Substack, Broken but Readable: Full interview.
OF NOTE
Donald Trump told “60 Minutes” he was not aware of whistleblower claims about the existence of a program, allegedly concealed even from presidents, to study aliens. Trump added, “But if there is, I’m going to find out about it right after this interview.” (“60 Minutes” clip)
Harvard’s Galileo Project unveiled details of its plans for a UAP-sensing observatory in Ithaca, New York, funded by entrepreneur Adam Weitsman. (Avi Loeb on Medium)
Japan’s former defense minister, Yasukazu Hamada, said in an interview that alien intelligence should be considered “one strong hypothesis” for UFO sightings. (American Alchemy)
The Sol Foundation issued a call for submissions of UAP-related technology projects to be presented during its March 2027 symposium in Washington, D.C. (Call for submissions)
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Song of the week
I'm wondering if "Legacy Program" is indeed a real program but it's not about reverse engineering alien technology but instead about obfuscating highly classified programs with paranormal and alien stories.
For example, CIA Dr. Kit Green wrote this report on his analysis of injuries suffered by people at Skinwalker ranch. All of the data points very clearly to human-made EMP effects. Yet in the same report he inserts the conjecture that it's probably "the phenomenon" mimicking humans and human-made tech to hurt people on the ranch. He provides no evidence to this claim but there it is commingled with a credible medical assessment from an expert in directed energy.
Here's the report: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/sept-18/release-06/assets/DOW-UAP-D128_AAWSAP-DIRD-Anomalous-Acute-and-Subacute-Field-Effects-on-Human-Biological-Tissues-March-11-2010.pdf
There is a long history of CIA affiliated figures and "whistleblowers" reframing data and telling paranormal stories (Kit Green, Hal Putoff, Jim Semivan, John Ramirez, John Brennan, etc). So as a journalist how do you pull apart whether they are just reframing what their own program was about?