Skywatcher: The Disclosure Team That Disappeared - I Tracked Their Helicopter

Written by UAP Files - Jimmy

There was a moment in early 2025 when Skywatcher looked as though it might be about to change the UFO conversation completely. The World, actually.

Not another whistleblower interview. Not another grainy debatable light in the sky. Not another retired official telling us that extraordinary things were happening somewhere behind classified doors.

Evidence.

At least, that was the promise.

On 24 January 2025, Jake Barber appeared on Reality Check with Ross Coulthart on NewsNation and made an extraordinary prediction about what his team was going to achieve.

“We have an opportunity to work with the U.S. Government right now. The U.S. Government is aware and knows what we are capable of. They are prepared to allow us to use their facilities. To help them. We provide them a path to redemption.”

Then came the part that really caught my attention:

“I believe the US Government, in the next 12 months, will use me and my team as a peaceful non-judgmental path forward to disclosure. They will help us conduct our operations and gather evidence in order to present this subject matter to the public to answer the questions once and for all.”

Barber went further, suggesting they should be able to answer questions such as what these objects look like, who is operating them and where they come from.

Those are not modest ambitions.

That is essentially the UFO jackpot.

And there was apparently going to be data, scientific analysis and peer-reviewed work at the end of it.

For somebody like me, who believes there is a genuine phenomenon buried somewhere beneath seventy-plus years of mythology, secrecy, misidentification and occasionally industrial quantities of nonsense, this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

But bold claims create equally bold expectations.

And more than eighteen months later, those expectations deserve revisiting.

Jake Barber (Credit: News nation)

There was something else interesting about the timing.

Skywatcher’s YouTube account was created on 18 January 2025, just six days before Barber’s NewsNation appearance.

Then the machine started moving.

The videos were beautifully produced. There were helicopters, sensor systems, large areas of land, people with impressive CVs and the unmistakable appearance of serious financial backing.

Whatever Skywatcher was, this didn’t look like four blokes standing in a field with night-vision goggles and a camping chair.

The organisation today describes itself in decidedly more defence-industry language, saying it combines special operations experience, advanced sensing and “non-traditional air defense techniques” to detect and analyse aircraft, UAVs, unconventional aerospace activity and anomalies.

Alex Klokus (Credit: SkywatcherHQ, YouTube)

Then there was Alex Klokus.

Klokus is a financier, technology entrepreneur and media founder who became closely associated with Skywatcher’s leadership. His involvement interested me because this wasn’t simply another collection of UFO enthusiasts. There appeared to be a business and investment infrastructure developing around the operation. The finance world expected results and appeared to be putting their money behind it - speculate to accumulate…

Alex was so involved in the leadership of the group that he personally registered the skywatcher.ai domain in his name in December 2024. A month before Skywatcher launched their YouTube efforts and Jake appeared on News Nation making the big claims.

Everything suggested momentum.

Skywatcher released two impressive instalments of what appeared to be a continuing series. Its YouTube audience climbed beyond 130,000 subscribers.

And then...

Nothing.

Or at least nothing resembling what many of us thought was coming.

There was no public disclosure of where the objects supposedly originated. No publicly demonstrated recovered craft. No scientific package capable of settling the argument. No Part Three arriving to deliver the answers promised at the beginning.

Instead, Skywatcher largely disappeared from the public UFO conversation.

And that matters to me personally because I supported them.

I made videos about Skywatcher. I wrote about them. When people immediately dismissed the whole project as nonsense, I argued that they deserved the opportunity to produce the evidence before being condemned. Giving them the benefit of the doubt.

That remains my position on almost everything in this subject: claims deserve investigation before either belief or ridicule.

But that principle works both ways.

Eventually, the people making the claims have to produce something.

And Skywatcher ghosted us. Sort of.

So What Happened?

There were hints.

James Fowler, one of the central figures in the organisation, eventually announced that he was leaving Skywatcher to pursue other ventures.

James Fowler on X

Then there were statements from Skywatcher’s official X account suggesting that developments were taking place away from public view.

Skywatcher on X

This is where things become considerably more interesting…but also where we need to be careful.

One theory circulating within the UAP community is that Skywatcher didn’t fail at all.

It succeeded too well.

According to this interpretation, the team’s capabilities attracted the attention of the U.S. Government and its work was subsequently pulled behind the classified curtain, potentially through government contracting, national-security agreements or even some form of Special Access Program (SAP).

It’s a fantastic story.

Unfortunately, fantastic stories are something the UFO world has never been short of.

The question is whether there is evidence for it.

One of the most controversial elements of Skywatcher’s operation was its use of people who could somehow attract or “summon” UAP through consciousness or so-called psionic techniques.

So is the Skywatcher leadership aren't giving us straight answers, what about the psionic they worked with?

Rather than argue about it endlessly online, I spoke to somebody who was actually there.

I interviewed John, who worked with Skywatcher and participated in these summoning operations.

John explained to me that, although he only worked with them for a few days as part of the psionic’s team, he believed the psionic had gone their separate ways, moved in to their own endeavours and that potentially the Skywatcher team had disbanded.

Though John did caveat that with the understanding that he wasn’t any longer an insider. Part of that interview with John is in the YouTube video at the end of this article.

I also had the opportunity to put the subject directly to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO — who has publicly discussed meeting members of the Skywatcher organisation.

Kirkpatrick told me:

“I met with them. They didn’t have anything. They didn’t have videos, photos or any data. I didn’t find them particularly credible.”

Now, whatever you make of Sean Kirkpatrick — and personally I take everything said by current or former government officials on this subject with a healthy pinch of salt, Kirkpatrick especially — his comments are important.

Not because Kirkpatrick automatically settles the argument, but because he occupied one of the most senior official positions investigating UAP inside the Pentagon.

His assessment therefore belongs in the evidence pile whether we agree with it or not.

That is how investigation is supposed to work.

I also decided to go directly to the people involved.

I contacted Alex Klokus seeking clarification about what happened to Skywatcher and where the project currently stands.

I separately contacted Susan Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson through whom many UAP-related media enquiries have historically been routed.

At the time of writing, I have received no response from Klokus.

Gough didn’t have anything for me at the time of writing this.

Gough may still respond. If either does, I’ll publish the response on my Instagram account, which has essentially become UAP Files HQ.

But the absence of a response leaves us with the same fundamental question.

What happened?

And that brings us to perhaps the strangest part of this story.

The Government SAP Theory

Congressman Eric Burlison has spoken publicly about an event involving a group conducting an operation intended to attract, down, document or interact with UAP.

The descriptions have naturally led people within the community to speculate that the group being discussed was in fact Skywatcher.

That identification needs to remain labelled as speculation unless Burlison or somebody directly involved confirms it.

But the wider suggestion is fascinating: an operation was apparently sufficiently successful to alter the way some people around government viewed the subject.

Then another location began appearing in conversations around these activities.

West Texas.

More specifically, the region around El Paso, Van Horn and southern New Mexico.

And that’s where something I noticed more than a year ago suddenly became rather interesting.

Jake Barber’s Helicopter

On 6 April 2025, Jake Barber posted an image of himself standing in front of a helicopter.

Most people presumably looked at Jake.

I looked at the helicopter.

More specifically, I noticed that its registration — the tail number — was visible.

Aircraft registrations are useful because aviation tracking services can sometimes allow you to reconstruct where an aircraft has been operating.

So I screenshotted it and checked.

The tracking data I found at the time placed the helicopter around Van Horn, Texas.

I didn’t know what to make of it then.

Van Horn is a small West Texas town surrounded by enormous stretches of desert. El Paso lies roughly 100 miles to the northwest, while the wider region contains Fort Bliss and, across the state line in New Mexico, White Sands Missile Range.

It is, in other words, quite an interesting neighbourhood if your business involves unusual things flying around in the sky.

The flight data I captured appeared to show the helicopter operating in the region across multiple days. Six days at the time I'd noticed. Full screenshots and location details in the YouTube video below.

At the time, I filed it away.

Then came February 2026.

The El Paso Shutdown

On 10 February 2026, the FAA abruptly shut the airspace around El Paso International Airport, initially announcing restrictions that were expected to remain in place for ten days.

They lasted only hours.

The original notice cited “special security reasons”, and the episode caused considerable confusion among local authorities, airlines and aviation officials.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy subsequently said:

“The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.”

He added that:

“The threat has been neutralized.”

That was the official public explanation.

But reporting that followed made the situation considerably messier.

NPR reported that the Pentagon had authorised the use of a high-energy counter-drone laser against what officials believed was a cartel-operated drone. Other reporting described disagreements or coordination problems between military activity and the FAA over the safety implications of the counter-drone technology.

The Texas Tribune reported conflicting explanations from government and industry sources, including claims involving military drone activity and the White House’s account of Mexican cartel drones breaching U.S. airspace.

So there is no need to invent mystery here.

The documented story is already strange enough.

A major American airport was effectively told its surrounding airspace could be restricted for ten days for special security reasons, only for that decision to be reversed within hours amid conflicting explanations involving cartel drones, military activity and experimental counter-drone technology.

None of that proves a UAP was involved. It is important to say that clearly. But it certainly makes the region interesting. And shows a connection to Skywatcher.

This is where my old screenshots came back out.

People including Pavel from Psicoactivo Podcast have been examining activity around El Paso and White Sands, while Ross Coulthart has more recently discussed the wider story on Reality Check.

That prompted me to go back through my phone.

There they were.

The screenshots I’d taken in April 2025 showing the aircraft associated with Barber operating around Van Horn.

A helicopter journey between the Van Horn area and El Paso would be perfectly practical — roughly the sort of trip that could be made in under an hour depending on the aircraft, routing and conditions.

And the geography deserves attention. A helicopter being in West Texas in 2025 does not prove that Skywatcher was connected to an extraordinary airspace closure around El Paso ten months later. It doesn’t prove Skywatcher was operating at White Sands.

But it does prove they were operating in the area.

An aircraft associated with Jake Barber was operating in this broader region during the period in which Skywatcher was publicly claiming to conduct UAP-related operations.

Then, less than a year later, an extremely unusual “counter-drone” incident occurred around El Paso.

My Three Possibilities

So where does that leave Skywatcher?

As far as I can see, there are three broad explanations.

The first is the most tantalising.

Skywatcher genuinely demonstrated something valuable enough that the U.S. Government became interested. Contracts were offered, classified relationships developed, NDAs appeared and some or all of the operation disappeared behind national-security restrictions.

Perhaps the public campaign was even part of the leverage: demonstrate enough capability publicly that government couldn’t simply ignore them, then negotiate access, funding or cooperation. I.e if you don’t buy us out, we’ll give disclosure to the world. That’s one hell of a hand to play.

Skywatcher’s current website is intriguing in that context. The language is no longer simply about UFO disclosure. It describes advanced air-domain awareness, air defence, UAVs, unconventional aerospace activity and sensor networks.

That sounds rather more like a company positioning itself for defence and government work than a group preparing Part Three of a UFO YouTube series.

But again, intriguing is not the same thing as proof.

The second possibility is more straightforward.

Skywatcher hasn’t disappeared at all.

The team may simply have realised that conducting complicated scientific work while simultaneously feeding the UFO internet’s insatiable appetite for updates is almost impossible. Perhaps they stepped away from publicity, concentrated on collecting better data and will eventually return with the evidence Barber originally promised.

If Part Three suddenly drops with multisensor data, independent analysis and something genuinely extraordinary, I will happily get the popcorn.

Then there is option three.

They never obtained the extraordinary evidence they expected.

Perhaps they recorded genuinely unusual objects but couldn’t demonstrate that those objects were non-human, exotic or even particularly exotic aircraft.

Perhaps the imagery will remain what so much UFO imagery becomes: interesting enough for believers and sceptics to argue over until the cows come home, but never quite good enough to settle anything.

And perhaps the narrative that Skywatcher became so successful that the government absorbed it provides a convenient explanation for why the promised evidence never arrived.

That possibility has to remain on the table, too.

I don’t write any of this because I want Skywatcher to fail. Quite the opposite.

I want Jake Barber’s original prediction to come true.

I want somebody to put calibrated sensors in the field, attract whatever this phenomenon is, record it from multiple independent systems, publish the raw data and let scientists tear it apart. If consciousness is involved, test it. If there are structured craft, photograph them properly.

If extraordinary objects can be summoned on demand, repeat the experiment under controlled conditions. That would be disclosure. That is what I want.

The ball is in your court, Skywatcher.

Watch the full episode this article references here: