7 Things To Take Away From The Lockheed UFO Fight

The Pentagon's former top UFO investigator claims he took the Lockheed Martin alien craft story straight to the company's chief technology officer. He claimed they traced it back to people who were trying to make money from ordinary aerospace work. He also alleges that a congressional staffer once called him and told him to send several million dollars to three people to UAP investigations and aerospace startups. These claims land two weeks. after Jay Stratton's memoir put Lockheed Martin at the center of the crash retrieval story. If Sean Kirkpatrick's accounts hold up, money could explain part of the push behind alien technology claims. It could also mean someone in Congress tried to steer that money through the Pentagon. If Stratton's account holds up, a defense contractor has held non-human craft And Congress is still fighting over whether the government can even take them. Hey, you followedgers, I'm Christina Gomez, and this is your UFO News Update. Sean Kirkpatrick gave Paradigm reporter Ben Schreckinger new written comments on how his office handled the Lockheed Martin claims. Stratton's memoir, Out of the Shadows, came out on October 13th and in it describes a 2009 conversation with Jim Ryder, a senior Lockheed research executive. According to Stratton, Ryder told him the company held a dozen alien craft and was working to reverse engineer them. The book also claims that the CIA blocked Ryder from transferring one of those craft to the military. Ryder retired in 2011 and then passed away in 2018. The publicity contact for Stratton's publisher, William Morrow, didn't respond to Paradigm on this. Now, it is worth noting that both Stratton and Kirkpatrick have accused each other of misconduct in the past, so take that how you will. Kirkpatrick told Paradigm that his office looked into the Ryder claims directly, including whether Ryder ever spoke with the CIA. And according to Kirkpatrick, they confirmed he did not. He described the stories from that period as just stories spread by the same people who tried to tie Lockheed Martin to alien aircraft in the first place. He added that this group named other companies too. And in his account, they changed the story every time someone pressed them for evidence. He also took a direct shot at the pattern. Kirkpatrick wrote that these allegations always seem to rely on someone who knew everything and then who just happened to pass away. Kirkpatrick's comments built on the historical report from the Arrow office released in March of 2024. That report found no evidence that the government or private contractors were reverse engineering alien technology. It looked into the claims that the CIA blocked a contractor for handling alien material to the military. It traced much of that story to circular reporting, meaning a smaller group of believers repeated the claim to each other with no evidence behind it. But it is worth addressing that Stratton had pointed the finger at Kirk. stating that he was bought out and being paid by the legacy programs. The report didn't name who Kirkpatrick worked with inside Lockheed, and it didn't offer a motive. But his new comments kind of supply a little bit of both. Kirkpatrick told Paradigm that he investigated the Lockheed allegations together with the company's chief technology officer. According to Kirkpatrick, they found the story connected to people who had misled Lockheed and trying to make money on aerospace technology that had nothing to do with aliens. Now, that is a different evaluation from the one of the most public hearings that we have come across thus far. The usual framing is government secrecy against disclosure, but Kirkpatrick is pointing to commercial interest. In his account, people attached alien stories to real aerospace projects to attract attention and funding. Paradigm then asked him to expand on that profit motive, and his answer went straight to Congress. Kirkpatrick described attempts to get Congress to write earmarks into legislation, and earmarks are funding instructions that direct money to a specific purpose or receipt. According to Kirkpatrick, these earmarks could have ordered his office to pay certain people to investigate UAP. Many described a very interesting phone call. A congressional staffer called him and told him to send several million dollars to three named people. Kirkpatrick wrote all those names down that are tied to the government UAP investigations and to aerospace startups. He gave those three names to Paradigm. But right now, Paradigm is withholding them while it continues its reporting. Kirkpatrick didn't respond to any follow-up questions asking for more detail and he has not named the staffer or the office that the staffer worked for asking about sending millions of dollars over to these three people that Ben Schreckinger knows the names of but none of the rest of us do. So what do you think? If a congressional staffer really tried to direct millions of dollars to specific people through Arrow, should that staffer and the lawmaker they worked for be named publicly? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Here is how Kirkpatrick tells the end of that phone call. He asked the staffer to put the instructions in writing so he could send it to the legal team for review. According to Kirkpatrick, the staffer backed down. A verbal instruction leaves no paper trail, and a written one becomes a record that lawmakers and inspectors can review. Obviously, in Kirkpatrick's account, the request disappeared the moment a record was required. Nothing outside Kirkpatrick's written account confirms the call yet, and Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Goff, who handles Arrow's questions, didn't respond to Paradigm. Kirkpatrick didn't name the chief technology officer, and Paradigm notes that Stephen Walker held that job at Lockheed from 2020 to 2025. Those years cover all of Kirkpatrick's leading time in Arrow before he resigned in December of 2024. Before Lockheed, Walker led the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, and that is the Pentagon's main agency for experimental technology. If Walker was the official involved, the people who helped check the alien craft claim inside Lockheed had also run the Pentagon's own advanced technology agency. Few people would be in a better position to tell real cutting-edge aerospace work Apart from the claims that that are being made about it. Paradigm tried to reach Walker through LinkedIn and through SRI International, a research institute where he sits on the board. But he didn't respond. Lockheed Martin's press office didn't respond either. And that leaves the company at the center of Stratton's claims and the official who most likely helped investigate it, both off the record. Their silence doesn't confirm their account either. Arrow has a second historical report that has been in the works for years and has still not been released, but there's no surprise there. It is expected to cover past military and intelligence UFO investigations, along with military disinformation about aliens. On October 23rd, Congressman Andre Carson of Indiana sent a statement to The Hill accusing the Trump administration of slow-walking UAP transparency. He called for the report to be released right away. And according to Carson, it is expected to show how incidents were investigated, what role classified programs. and whether those activities were properly disclosed to Congress. And that last point goes to the center of this dispute. Stratton claims Congress was kept in the dark. Kirkpatrick claims the stories fall apart once someone asks for evidence. A report on what was actually disclosed to Congress could test both accounts on this. And all of this is unfolding while Congress decides what to do about material that may be in private hands. Since 2023, a group of lawmakers has pushed for eminent domain language, an eminent domain in the government's power to take private property for public use. Here it would cover that the bill. calls technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence held by private companies. The language was stripped from the final defense bill in 2023, and in June, Chuck Schumer of New York and Mike Rounds of South Dakota, both senators, brought it back as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the yearly defense bill. In July, the House passed its own amendment with eminent domain provisions. The two accounts lead to opposite places. If Kirkpatrick is right, there is nothing for the government to take. If Stratton is right, this language could decide who controls recovered craft. The final bill is expected to pass before the end of this year, and it's still unclear whether those provisions would even survive, because they haven't survived since. So there are three questions to watch here. First is who the three people are and what companies they're connected to. The second is who the staffer is working for. And the third is whether Arrow's second historical report comes out before the defense bill is finalized. Any one of those answers would show whether this is a fight over evidence, over money, or over both. Whose account do you find stronger, Stratton's or Kirkpatrick's? And what evidence would it take to change your mind? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I'm Christina Gomez, that is it for today. I will see you again next time for another UFO News update. Be safe and remember, keep your eyes on the skies.