Jake Barber: UFO Retrieval Whistleblower

Last Saturday night, (January 18) NewsNation aired a segment that featured Jake Barber who claimed that he had seen a “nonhuman” egg-shaped aircraft and had been recruited for a top-secret government UFO crash/retrieval program. Unlike David Grusch who talked of hearing of such things from credible but unnamed sources, Barber said that he had participated in retrievals.

I probably should point out here that neither of these “whistleblowers” was the first to make claims of an involvement in some sort of government UFO crash retrieval program. Among the first was Clifford Stone, a mid-level Army NCO, who claimed to have been involved in several such operations and had even seen the “alien autopsy file,” not long after he had joined the Army. I mention this because Stones’ revelations were little more than invention that was not backed up by any sort of independent evidence.

The late Cliff Stone, who claimed to be on the inside
of a secret program involved with crash retrievals.

According to NewsNation, which had checked Barber’s records, he was a talented airplane mechanic who was deployed on several presidential support missions. He had been recruited into the Air Force’s Elite Combat Control unit suggesting he was a helicopter pilot (though it is unclear if he had been a military pilot), freefall parachutist, expert marksman and the recipient of a NATO top-secret security clearance, known as Cosmic Top Secret and service in Bosnia, for which he earned an unidentified valor award. They don’t reveal what award that might be. Stones’ records provided no corroboration for his tales.

To indicate the off-world nature of the retrievals, Barber said, “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous. It was not human.” The craft was metallic, pearly white, and about the size of an SUV.

Normally, I am skeptical of these sorts of claims and I believe we all should be as well. However, my own experiences in both Air Force and Army intelligence suggests there might be some truth to it.

Because of my status in the military, that is as an intelligence officer, and because some knew of my interest in UFOs, I occasionally received nuggets of information about UFO cases that haven’t been reported or that have had little military interest. Bob Cornett and I might have been among the first to gain access to the Project Blue Book records while they were still housed as Maxwell Air Force Base and had not been redacted, taking out the names of the witnesses.

Bob Cornett reviewing UFO records while on assignment from
a magazine in the 1970s.

One of the first cases we wanted to see was from November 1953 that involved the disappearance of an Air Force fighter. The Blue Book file was just two pages and it was noted that it was an aircraft accident rather than a UFO report. According to an Air Force colonel who was stationed at Kinross Air Force Base said that in November 1953, a jet fighter was scrambled to intercept an unknown target, meaning a UFO, over the Soo Locks on Lake Superior. The intercept was watched on radar, the two blips, that is the UFO and the jet, merged but never separated. That single blip flew off the scope and disappeared in the distance. From the point of the merge, there had been no further communication with the fighter. The jet was never found. The colonel told me that there had been two schools of thought. One was that the UFO abducted the jet and the second was that it had crashed into the lake.

That is the sort of thing that I believe David Grusch heard when he talked about UFO crashes. People who were at the right place at the right time to know something more than the public provided that information. The colonel believed that the jet had been abducted, or in his words, the UFO took it. I wasn’t there, but the source had been. I knew him and he was credible but then where do you go with such a tale. If it is highly classified, how do I, as a civilian now, break through that barrier. Besides, attempts to learn more about it, other than the mundane and unclassified, have failed. I’m pointed back to the information and documentation that I already had.

In a somewhat similar vein, Don Schmitt and I interviewed a general at the Pentagon. Well, interviewed might be an over statement. He agreed to meet us in a snack bar on one of the lowest levels. The tables were about waist high or higher, so that people had a place to set a plate, but there were no stools. It was a get in, get your food, eat it and get out place.

We wanted to talk about the Roswell case. Don had apparently chatted with him at some point, explaining what we were after which is information about Roswell. By this time, we had talked to many witnesses to the crash and knew more about it. We had rejected the balloon answer and had even interviewed three of those who had been in General Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947.

We were inside the Pentagon for about fifteen or twenty minutes. The general didn’t look nervous. He just told us that there was an area in the Pentagon to which he had no access. He said that our Roswell information was there. He didn’t elaborate. Just hinted that highly classified information about Roswell was in that area, and those entering had to have a specific request and their time in that area was limited. I would later talk to another man who had said he had seen the classified version Project Blue Book and described for me. He said he saw some of the pictures of crashed UFOs and the recovery operations that had been conducted. I don’t know if these classified Blue Book files were part of that section of the Pentagon to which the general had referred.

I have also talked with another general who said he knew the photographer who photographed Roswell bodies, but didn’t provide very much information about that. I need to point out that by the time the information got to me, it was third-hand. The general hadn’t seen the pictures, he had just talked to one of those men who took them.

I suppose I should mention the retired MSGT who said that he’d provided the rawin target for the Roswell explanation. What he had said to Cornett and me, was that he had taken a balloon into an area to show the witnesses what they had seen. This was before I had talked with Irving Newton, the weather officer who identified the wreckage in Fort Worth. He said they didn’t have rawin targets on the FWAAF, but did know where to get one if it was needed.

The MSGT was careful about what he told us, but the implication was that he had taken the balloon around the Roswell area. I have assumed that it was part it was part of the 1947 cover up, but when Bob and I talked to him, neither of us knew much about the Roswell case. I had read Frank Edward’s laughable description of the Roswell case in his Flying Saucers – Serious Business, but that didn’t contain much information other than it happened near Roswell and the Air Force had explained it, in Edward’s words, as a pie tin hooked to a kite.

All these are incidents, in which I was involved to some extent. Like those being talked about today, they suggest that these retrievals do happen. Sometimes the information is limited and we must deduce where it is going. Sometimes it is more explicit. What it does confirm is there was a cover up then and it remains in place now.