Tag: Disinformation

Profiling Michael Herrera’s Insider

An investigation with major implications for UAP disclosure.

Introduction

A significant part of the corroboration for Michael Herrera’s alleged UAP encounter has come from a mysterious “Insider” who contacted Herrera after a Steven Greer-hosted press event at which Herrera told his story. Herrera has repeatedly told the story of how it was the Insider who confirmed that what he witnessed was part of a government “black program”, and that the containers he claims to have witnessed contained people abducted by the government as part of “psionic recruitment” to work on UAP reverse-engineered technology. The Insider flew Herrera out to a secret base in August 2023 and showed him some sort of facility which convinced Herrera of his legitimacy. 

The Insider has always been the most intriguing part of the Herrera story to us. Whether or not Herrera himself is telling the truth about his encounter, we have a second party who not only jumped in to verify his story, but added information that became a significant part of Herrera’s tale .  We also know from Joey’s posts and Greer’s website that the Insider claims to be a whistleblower themselves. They have even written a fictional story called Sentinels of Ether which they submitted to DOPSR for review in an attempt to “fish” information from the government.1

While we have no desire to uncover the identities of legitimate whistleblowers who wish to stay anonymous, we are greatly concerned that this Insider is in fact a disinformation agent who is using Herrera as a stooge to influence the UAP community. As a result, we decided to try to uncover the identity of this Insider. 

We approached this by building a profile of the Insider based on (a) his known actions and behavior and (b) the assumption that he is a disinformation agent, and we identified a strong candidate who fits this profile. We have also uncovered links between that candidate and other important figures, narratives, and events in the UAP/disclosure movement, which further reinforces our belief that this Insider is a disinformation agent. 

Notes

  • u/joeyisnotmyname, one of the earliest researchers in the Herrera case, joined our server briefly a few months ago and shared a great deal of his research with us. For those following that case, many of the evidentiary threads against Herrera’s credibility were found as a result of his work, some by him and some by our group (e.g. the camo match). When Joey worked with us, he expressed that he did not want to investigate the Insider, and we respected those wishes until he left the group. 
  • The Zephyr Nexus is a collective of researchers and this analysis does not represent the view of everyone. Some group members have reasonable challenges to the conclusions presented and believe that there are more likely candidates for Herrera’s Insider. Please direct all comments towards the authors of this paper.

Actions and behavior of the Insider

When we summarize the known facts about the Insider, his actions seem suspicious to us because they are not in line with those of a genuine whistleblower, as he claims he is.

  • Was previously known to Greer
  • Attends event on 12 June 2023 where he becomes aware of Herrera’s story 
  • Texts Greer with additional details to add to Herrera’s story
  • Convinces Herrera that the containers pertain to “slavery, kidnapping, organ harvesting”
  • Tells Herrera by phone he is part of the organization conducting the operation he witnessed
  • Arranges for Herrera to be flown to a facility “out west”2 to prove his credentials; this facility is “underground”
  • Asks Herrera to sign an NDA about the facility
  • Claims to have knowledge of multiple SAPs and black programs, including relating to crash retrieval, reversed engineered tech, psionic abduction, etc.3
  • Has written a draft novel called Sentinels of Ether with the help of a ghostwriter, claiming that this is fact disguised as fiction (similar to Tom Delonge’s Sekret Machines series) and an effort to fish information from the government via the DOPSR review process4
  • Made various claims about the black programs, focusing in particular on “psionics” and “psionic recruitment”5

The Insider has changed Herrera’s narrative significantly by adding the people trafficking detail. He claims to have knowledge over a vast number of areas, but doesn’t really give anything verifiable to the public. He claims that he is a whistleblower himself, but is still willing to bring Herrera to black sites – seemingly with the blessing of “the organization” – and still makes Herrera sign an NDA. Also, the whole idea of playing 4D chess with DOPSR seems ridiculous, and his statement on the subject was full of unfalsifiable assertions. These are not the moves of someone with real information to give out, but rather someone who wants you to think they do. 

Profile of the Insider as a disinformation agent 

We decided to draw up a profile for what sort of experience, skills, and traits someone who is acting as a disinformation agent in this way would have. Luckily, we have at least one clear example to work off: Richard Doty, who is self-admitted as having spread disinformation about UAPs. 

Skill set 

We identified the following as key skills/experience a disinformation agent would be required to have: 

  • Undercover work
    • Managing informants and assets
  • Constructing narratives
  • Disseminating information through various channels 
  • Avoiding detection

Career history

Doty’s resume before being recruited into psychological operations was as an investigator. He was a retired Special Agent for AFOSI, the US Air Force Office of Special Investigation6. In other words, his job was to investigate potential crimes committed by members of the Air Force as a sort of military version of a police investigator. As well as criminal investigations, AFOSI  is also engaged in threat detection and information operations. This is the type of career that equips candidates with the skill set required. 

The Insider would likely need to have high-level clearances to view Special Access Program and Unacknowledged Special Access Program (SAP and USAP) material. 

Traits

We are looking for someone who is:

  • Willing and able to lie convincingly 
  • Persuasive
  • Able to develop and maintain relationships 
  • Able to establish credibility 
  • Loyal to the program / government 

Goals

We can assume that any disinformation agent working in this space has the goal of influencing or discrediting the UAP disclosure movement in some way. That might involve: 

  • Planting false narratives 
  • Obscuring or modifying true narratives
  • Establishing their own credibility/that of their assets
  • Damaging the credibility of those who are a threat
  • Influencing important people and institutions

Suspect pool: Greer witness list

We did not have much success finding candidates for the Insider based on the initial evidence. However, a new researcher who joined the team, Radiation King, pointed out that the Insider is likely to be on Greer’s witness list, since it is known they were also a whistleblower and attended Greer’s event.

We looked through this list, published on his website dpiarchive.com, to see if there were any candidates for good matches. The Witness List can be found on DPI archive as document 115482 (you need to sign up for a free account to look at documents)7.

Many of the names of witnesses are redacted and instead are given an identifying number. Despite this attempt to preserve anonymity, Greer has practiced shockingly poor operational security (OPSEC). Even in the document itself, many names are retained in the explanatory notes. Others are easily identifiable through simple Google searches. 

Witness #10142: Thomas P. Barnes

We identified witness #10142 from the list as the best match candidate to be Herrera’s Insider. The description for this witness from Greer states:

Was in the US Army for 28 years. Was a Special Agent Army Criminal Investigation Division Command (Army CID). Has detailed knowledge of SAP’s ( acknowledged and unacknowledged). Knows about the underground basement at the Pentagon which is a SCIF and known as the Technology Management Office (TMO). Involved in the investigation of General John Riggs who showed his un-cleared girlfriend a USAP near Fort Seal Oklahoma. At this location, they had a cloaking device that they reversed engineered from an ET craft. Also has knowledge of a radar system that can disable aircraft, causing them to crash. Was cleared baseline clearance Space TS-S CIA. Has knowledge 18 USAPS. Also knows about the underground facility in Irvine California were ET bodies are stored. Knows about the large ET craft (from the 1970’s) which is stored in a mountain near Seoul South Korea.8

If you search on DPI archive for #10142, you will see a selection of documents relating to this witness. There is more than enough detail to find the identity of this person. For example, one of the documents (122803) is a report about them being awarded the Soldier’s Medal in 1989. The notes from Greer’s meeting with them (document 122809) even has a last name that is unredacted in the document – Barnes. 

Through this it was fairly trivial to find the identity of witness #10142: Sergeant Thomas P. Barnes.9 

As an aside, we would not have published this report if we had found out some information that was hidden from the public. Greer is playing it incredibly fast and loose with the identity of his witnesses, as all of the personally identifying information used was available on publicly-accessible websites. 

Barnes did not respond to a request for comment before publication. 

Career history

Barnes was a Special Agent with the Army CID10, which is essentially a police force investigating crimes committed by people in the army. He is allegedly retired from that role, and has been extremely well decorated and awarded for his service. 

This is extremely similar to Doty’s background, and it makes sense that disinformation agents would be recruited from similar pools of talent. 

We can actually find out a lot about Barnes’ career, because he wrote a “true crime” book which details many of the cases that he worked on called Sisu: Tales from the Zombie Squads. You can find the book on Amazon here. Incidentally, the “customers also bought” section is illuminating, given there is no mention of UAP in Sisu… 

The book details many of the cases he worked on, including the investigation into a “Senior General Officer”, which we know based on Greer’s notes is John Riggs. 

The book also refers to the fact that Barnes was read on to multiple SAPs and USAPs (USAPs are unacknowledged SAPs):

Mr. Barnes possessed a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information security clearance and was involved in the investigations of numerous DOD Special Access Programs (acknowledged and unacknowledged).

 Additionally, he mentions a highly classified case that he was hand-picked to work on between 2002-2005. 

Skill set

From Sisu, we learn that Barnes: 

  • Worked undercover on many cases, including ones where he adopted fake roles to gain the trust of suspects
  • Has experience setting up elaborate ruses to entrap suspects into admitting their guilt – on one occasion he created a whole fake production company to establish credibility
  • Managed confidential informants and other assets

Again, this exactly matches the profile of what we would expect from someone hired to do a psychological operation in this area.

Traits

At the start of this investigation we assumed we wouldn’t know much about Barnes’ personality or traits. From his career profile, he gave 28 years of loyal service to the military, and was trusted as one of very few people read into these SAPs. We do not think someone with that history would easily turn whistleblower. 

According to Greer’s meeting notes, Barnes’ motivation for doing so was he was incensed by the lack of legal oversight of USAPs, something he experienced as part of the investigation into General John Riggs. By his telling, Riggs was investigated for misuse of private contractors, having an affair with said contractor, and showing her a USAP facility. Barnes says that the investigation into Riggs was not able to be prosecuted properly because the Attorney General wasn’t allowed to see key evidence from within the USAP. 

We find this motive somewhat suspect. It is entirely plausible that he would want to correct this miscarriage of justice. However, why does that mean he is approaching UAP figures like Greer and Coulthart? There are many mainstream channels and defense industry media outlets which would be interested in accountability/oversight of USAPs. More importantly, if he is motivated by the lack of punishment for someone in a position of authority showing USAP facilities to an outsider, why is he now at the very least leaking classified information to Greer, and possibly (if he is Herrera’s Insider) doing the exact same thing as Riggs by bringing Herrera to an underground base? Also, if he is officially retired, why is he still telling Herrera he is “working for the organization” and able to fly him out to these black sites?

Since beginning this investigation, we have become aware of UAP Gerb’s work on the Greer witnesses.11 He refers to Barnes in his videos, though by initial only. Interestingly, through this interaction, we can learn a lot more about Barnes. According to Gerb’s account, Barnes:

  • Denied ever contacting Greer
  • Denied he had knowledge of SAPs
  • Claimed he was being treated for unspecified “memory problems” 
  • Was gracious and charming 

It’s worth examining these points in detail. 

  • Denied contacting Greer – this is contradicted by the files on DPI Archive showing emails from Barnes to Greer, and the letter Greer showed during a presentation that is from Barnes. There would be a slim possibility that perhaps someone pretending to be Barnes was the one who contacted Greer, if not for the following point –
  • Denied he had knowledge of SAPs. We know for certain that Barnes was read into SAPs and USAPs. He claims this multiple times in his book, which has nothing to do with UAPs and is written for a general audience. This is a clear and provable lie.
  • “Memory problems”, as well as being a classic of the accountability avoidance genre, does not ring true to us. This is someone who published an in-depth memoir featuring a myriad of stories, names, locations, and other details just two years ago. His first contact with Greer was made in 2018, well before publication of the book. 
  • Gracious and charming – exactly how we would expect someone who is trying to make friends and influence people to act. 

Direct links between Barnes and the Insider

We have established that Barnes is a very strong candidate to be considered as Herrera’s Insider based purely on his profile, career history, and provable facts.

To add to this general profile, there are also several compelling links between the Insider and Barnes. 

Technology mentioned in Sentinels of Ether

The Insider’s manuscript specifically mentions two pieces of advanced tech. To save you reading it, the story relates to an incident which is set in the Chihuahua desert in Mexico, in which a US Army team escorting refugees is executed by some black ops guys, who abduct the refugees in helicopters. Fighter jets are sent after the helicopters, but are disabled by an EMP-style weapon that kills the electronics on board. Then the helicopters escape by flying into a secret base which is hidden by some kind of projection of a mountain. 

There are two pieces of advanced tech described in the book:

  1. A secret base cloaked/hidden and disguised as a mountain 
  2. An weapon that disables fighter jets and causes them to crash

In Greer’s witness list notes, Barnes is recorded as having knowledge of two specific pieces of tech:

At this location, they had a cloaking device that they reversed engineered from an ET craft. Also has knowledge of a radar system that can disable aircraft, causing them to crash.

This is a perfect match for the tech mentioned in the Insider’s book. 

We also note that Barnes is someone who would be familiar with the DOPSR review process, having gone through it with Sisu, and is therefore in a position to make claims about how DOPSR operates/how he would fish information from them.

There are also a couple of more circumstantial links:

  • In Sisu, Barnes acknowledges the help of a female editor (name withheld for privacy purposes) with “preparing the manuscript”. I found this person’s LinkedIn and she is offering research/editing/translation services. Sisu doesn’t credit her as a ghostwriter, but it shows Barnes has previously gotten help with writing a book about his experiences from a female editor. The Insider’s book has a female ghostwriter’s name attached. 
  • Sisu is essentially a greatest-hits memoir of his best cases that he is able to talk about openly. In the book he regrets that he can’t share some of the details of classified cases. It makes sense that he would try to write about these under the cover of a fictional account. 

Knowledge of underground base in Irvine, CA

We know from Herrera’s various YouTube appearances that he was flown to a facility “out west”. In one video Joey lets slip that the facility is “underground”12. Herrera also makes mention of arriving at some hour “their time”, suggesting he changed time zones when he flew there. Herrera lives in Colorado. We can therefore surmise that the facility he was taken to was somewhere in CA or NV. 

We know from Greer’s witness list that Barnes “knows about the underground facility in Irvine California”. We found through OSINT that Barnes has previous addresses in Irvine, CA associated with him, which corroborates his assertion of knowledge of an underground facility there.

This makes it highly plausible that Barnes, who had lived in Irvine, worked at the facility and was therefore able to make arrangements to show Herrera some sort of underground base. 

How the Insider/Barnes has influenced UAP/disclosure narratives

Let’s look now at whether Barnes or the Insider’s behavior shows that he has been trying to achieve the goals we would expect a disinformation agent to achieve – namely, establishing credibility, constructing and modifying important narratives, and influencing key figures and institutions. 

Once we started diving into it, we realized that Barnes/the Insider has been the driving force behind multiple narratives of recent times and managed to influence a disconcertingly high number of important figures in the UAP world. 

Direct links between Barnes/the Insider and important figures in UAP

Steven Greer

The first contact Barnes had with the UAP space was through Steven Greer. Based on the documents we believe he first made contact in 2018. Although Greer is largely seen as discredited nowadays, he was an extremely influential figure in the past thanks to his efforts with Project Disclosure. Using Greer as a way ‘in’ to the space also makes sense as Greer is known to be overly credulous and opportunistic. 

Through the communications with Greer we can see that Barnes is keen to establish his credentials, sending him details of the awards he won and a chapter from his book showing he was involved in the Riggs investigation. And he was successful – he was able to get Greer to publicly present documents relating to his claims. 

Ross Coulthart

One line that stood out to us from Greer’s description of Barnes in the Witness List was this claim:

 Knows about the large ET craft (from the 1970’s) which is stored in a mountain near Seoul South Korea.

As most of you will remember, there was a big flap last year when Ross Coulthart stated that there was a craft “so big they couldn’t move it and had to build a building over it”13. He confirmed that it was not in the USA, that “good men and women serve there” and that it had been built for a “laudatory purpose.” There were many posts on r/ufos that drew the connection to Greer’s witness, whom he discussed on this video (at 07:57 onwards).

Barnes definitely served part of his duties in South Korea, as per his book. Most people in the UAP community dismiss Greer as a grifter and distrust his statements. If it had just been Greer saying this, no one would have cared. But the fact that Coulthart raised it independently is extremely interesting.

Coulthart is one of the most trusted figures in this community, and appears here to be repeating a claim that comes from Barnes. We don’t know if Coulthart got the story from Greer or from Barnes himself. As a potential whistleblower (or disinformation agent), it would make sense for Barnes to contact Coulthart with his stories as well as Greer. And as an investigative journalist who is known for being thorough and careful, it seems unlikely that Coulthart is merely repeating second-hand claims from the discredited Greer. We think it’s highly likely Coulthart is at least in contact with Barnes directly.

Incidentally, Barnes uses the word “laudatory”, a fairly uncommon bit of vocabulary, in Sisu. This word has been used by Coulthart when describing the location of the supposed large, unmovable UAP. Normally not the sort of correlation anyone would bat an eye at, but potentially meaningful if we keep in mind that journalist Coulthart might take care to use the exact term his source used if he was uncertain about whether he might misrepresent them by using some other term.

Another potential link between the Insider/Barnes and Coulthart is that earlier this year, when Coulthart was asked what the most important thing to investigate at this time is, he responded with the word “psionics”. To quote from the statement given by the Insider through joeyisnotmyname:

The Psionic’s relationship with ET could be our saving grave, because the ET are more powerful than our black programs. And the ET seem to be good-natured. And with the Psionics on our side, we should have ET on our side. Maybe they will intervene at some point.14

If Barnes is a disinformation agent, and if he has been feeding information to Coulthart, then that is – to put it lightly – a pretty big problem for the disclosure movement. 

Coulthart did not respond to a request for comment before publication. 

Senator Rubio/Senate Committee 

By his own admission (via email to Greer, preserved in the Greer document archive), Barnes was subpoenaed to Senator Rubio’s Senate Committee on UAP [find proper name] Of course, we do not know what happened during these proceedings, but what’s noteworthy is that Barnes has put himself in a position to be able to influence its findings. 

AARO (via Herrera)

To the extent that we have successfully made the case that Barnes is the “insider” helping Michael Herrera, the government’s own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has also become involved in the story. In their now-infamous “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume 1,” AARO clearly references Herrera’s tale in a list of stories provided to them by persons who had testified to AARO by the cutoff date of September 17th, 2023:

An interviewee who is a former U.S. service member said that in 2009, while participating in a humanitarian and security mission in a foreign country, he encountered “U.S. Special Forces” loading containers onto a large extraterrestrial spacecraft.15

Michael Herrera himself has corroborated that he did indeed testify to AARO about his story.

It might turn out to be important that although clearly AARO had the ability to look up military operation records such as flight logs stored at the National Archives or make other similar attempts to vet the Herrera story, they did not. In fact, Herrera was the only witness in the document that did not receive any attempt at an explanation at all. If the Insider is Barnes, and Barnes is an active disinformation agent, did he enlist the help of AARO in further obfuscating the truth regarding his asset Michael Herrera? At this point it is only clear that AARO is now also involved to some extent in the same story that Herrera and his insider are – the insider whose profile Barnes matches so well.

YouTube content creators/community at large

Barnes/the Insider has also managed to influence independent researchers such as u/joeyisnotmyname and UAPGerb. 

From the beginning, Joey was able to determine that the Insider “was who he said he was” (though without disclosing his method of doing so). We are unable to verify this but we believe that Joey is sincere on this matter. When he was in our group, he expressed multiple times that he did not wish to look into the Insider. Without speculating on the reasons, we can see that on the face of it, the Insider has been able to influence the direction of Joey’s research16. 

UAPGerb covered Barnes on his channel, referring to him by initial only. As discussed above, Barnes lied to Gerb. We believe his denials are a poor attempt at covering his tracks after finding out that Greer has essentially outed his identity via poor OPSEC. They makes far more sense if he is a disinfo agent who does not wish to be scrutinized – if he is truly a whistleblower who is working with Greer, then there is no reason to deny that to another well-regarded UAP researcher who is likely to be sympathetic to his cause, such as UAP Gerb. 

While we’re here, we do note that Gerb has indicated he is aware of the identity of the Insider and that the Insider is not someone he has covered on his channel before. If that’s true, then it decreases the likelihood of the Insider being Barnes. However, since neither Joey nor Gerb has released the identity of the Insider, our position remains that Barnes is the best match candidate for the profile we are looking for.

Many thanks to @kip, Radiation King, u/joeyisnotmyname, @bananapancake, and The Zephyr Nexus community for their contributions to this investigation. 

Conclusions

We are fairly sure that Barnes is Herrera’s Insider, and that he fed information to Coulthart about the large craft with a building over it. We are extremely concerned that this individual has not only exerted influence over so many emerging narratives and figures in the UAP community, but also fits the exact profile of a disinformation agent. 

We would like to see responses from Coulthart, Greer, Herrera, Senator Rubio, and Joey/UAP Gerb regarding their involvement with Barnes, how much they have relied on his information, and why they consider him trustworthy on the UFO topic.

  1. Comparison of Various Versions of Sentinels of Ether and the DOPSR response to the version submitted to them ↩︎
  2. Cosmic Disclosure Jan 15, 2024 Part 1 ↩︎
  3. Reddit post: Leaks Provided to Michael Herrera by Black Project Insider ↩︎
  4. Reddit post: Sample Manuscript Release from “Black Program” Insider ↩︎
  5. Reddit post: A message from a likely Black Project Insider ↩︎
  6. Ex-Air Force Law Enforcement Agent Says He Hoaxed Major UFO Mythologies, Huffington Post ↩︎
  7. The Greer Witness List (downloadable version uploaded to OneDrive here) ↩︎
  8. ibid. ↩︎
  9. Thomas P. Barnes, recipient of Soldier’s Medal ↩︎
  10. Warrant Officer Prerequisites and Duty Description 311A – CID Special Agent ↩︎
  11. UFO Witnesses [Redacted List], UAP Gerb ↩︎
  12. Michael Herrera – Insights into UAP Encounter and Black Program Insiders, UAP Gerb ↩︎
  13. Ross Coulthart Drops UFO BOMBSHELL, Project Unity
    ↩︎
  14. Reddit post: A message from a likely Black Project Insider ↩︎
  15. Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume 1 ↩︎
  16. cf notes 3 – 6. ↩︎