EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—A year ago, former U.S. Navy airman Jake Barber appeared on NewsNation and claimed he’d helped recover a white, egg-shaped craft of nonhuman origin from a classified site, even sharing helicopter footage as proof. He promised that his organization, Skywatcher, could do it again—and this time, show the world.

“I believe the United States government in the next 12 months is going to use me and my team as a peaceful, non-judgmental path forward to disclosure,” said Barber, near the end of a nearly three-hour interview with journalist Ross Coulthart.

Barber insisted that the biggest mysteries—what these craft look like, how they work, who pilots them, and where they’re from—could be “answered once and for all.”

“We should be able to answer those questions probably entirely in the next 12 months.”

But a year on, no craft landed, no irrefutable data appeared, and no formal findings were published.

It was a year that began with sky-high anticipation, only to sputter out gradually as it wore on.

A Daring Proposition

After Barber’s January 18 whistleblower special on NewsNation, Skywatcher released its first documentary episode, “The Journey Begins,” on January 28. The pitch was audacious: use electromechanical signaling and consciousness-based techniques to summon UAP on demand, capture everything with multi-sensor arrays, and ultimately coax a craft to land. The company, incorporated in late 2024 with Silicon Valley backing, claimed it had the means and expertise to prove the unknown.

Just two days after the documentary’s release, Barber appeared on Jesse Michels’ American Alchemy podcast for another three-hour interview. He said his team was conducting demonstrations for AARO’s new director, and that the Pentagon’s UAP office had seen their videos, data, and reports. The Pentagon confirmed it was investigating Barber’s claims, and AARO representatives reportedly visited Skywatcher’s field site.

When Hope Took Flight

On April 7, Skywatcher released its second documentary episode, “Mapping the Unknown,” featuring field operations blending sensor tech with what the team called “psionic calling.” The episode’s centerpiece was a nine-class UAP taxonomy—Tetra, Tic Tac, Blob, Orb, Manta Ray, Bright Star, Jellyfish, Hornet, and Egg—each presented with illustrative graphics and accompanied by sensor footage that the team said corresponded to distinct morphologies observed across multiple field operations. That same day, Coulthart reported on NewsNation that Skywatcher claimed a 100 percent success rate with its signaling device—which he compared to an electromechanical “dog whistle”—and that the team had captured video of nine distinct UAP shapes. That footage was supposedly imminent. It never arrived.

The group also teased a third installment of the documentary series, this time centered on psionics—the controversial idea of telepathically contacting these crafts, which Barber had discussed in earlier interviews. Yet, as promised, Part III never materialized.

Earlier, on February 11, Skywatcher member James Hodgkins gave his first interview as the group’s lead “psionic” operator on the Post Disclosure World podcast. He described a protocol for summoning UAP through focused intention—a consciousness-based approach at the heart of the psionics claim. This aspect, which suggested that trained individuals could use meditation and mental focus to telepathically attract UAP into sensor range, and that the U.S. military had quietly relied on such operators for decades, remained the most radical and potentially testable of Skywatcher’s propositions. It was also the one most in need of transparent documentation, but that clarity never arrived.

Turbulence Ahead

Then, in mid-2025, Skywatcher publicly received a seemingly devastating structural blow. Co-founder and lead technologist James Fowler—the person who built Skywatcher’s sensor platform, led all field operations, and appeared prominently in the documentary series—announced he was stepping away to pursue government contracting work related to the technology. Skywatcher’s official account posted a congratulatory farewell, thanking Fowler for playing “a key role in all of our field operations and in the data we have collected to date.” Fowler confirmed on LinkedIn that his tenure ran from August 2024 to July 2025—less than a year.

The departure landed hard. Community commentator The Paranormal Chris reported that sources had told him for months about a major shift at Skywatcher, including a change in ownership and turmoil within the organization over its direction. Some forum users questioned where the money had gone, with one noting that Skywatcher’s private funding reportedly exceeded $5 million. Others worried that perhaps Fowler’s technology was being bought up by the government, and the public would never be allowed to see how, or even if, it works.

Barber posted a statement on X on August 31 after the public rupture, saying that Skywatcher had completed its first round of field operations, collected nearly 10 terabytes of data, and had “successes with both Psionics and the Dog Whistle.” But no data accompanied the update, and no timeline was offered, and he acknowledged that Skywatcher was not a full-time job for anyone on the team—they all had other professional commitments that paid the bills. The community, which had been promised world-changing evidence, was not reassured.

Silence in the Skies

With the organization quiet, one of Skywatcher’s self-described psionic assets went public on their own.

On September 18, former Green Beret Mike Battista appeared on NewsNation, and claimed Skywatcher had successfully landed a craft. No corroborating data from the organization accompanied the claim. He did, however, present night-vision footage he said showed UAP and entities he had summoned to his backyard. The reception was lukewarm at best: analysts on Metabunk dismissed the clips as indecipherable blurs likely explained by pareidolia, and even sympathetic commentators acknowledged the footage looked like “blurry blobs” that did little to advance Skywatcher’s credibility.

At the SOL Symposium in Italy in November, Barber framed the project as having entered a “data analysis” phase and hinted at results by year’s end. Skywatcher’s official accounts posted a December holiday message urging “patience.” Then they went quiet again.