Jason Sands

Jason Sands is a retired United States Air Force intelligence specialist and special access program (SAP) veteran who came forward publicly in 2023 as a UAP whistleblower claiming direct knowledge of classified crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs involving non-human intelligence (NHI), and reporting a personal close encounter with a non-human being on the Nellis Test Range in 1994.

Background

Sands was born in Harrogate, England to a British mother and a U.S. Army Green Beret sergeant father; he became a U.S. citizen by birth under legislation signed by President John F. Kennedy shortly before his assassination. He grew up on U.S. military installations across Japan, Massachusetts, California, and Germany.

Sands enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1987, trained in electronic warfare, and served at multiple postings before assignment to a telecommunications monitoring unit at the Nellis Test Range in 1993. He retired as a master sergeant after 21 years of service.

Service at Nellis Test Range

At Nellis, Sands served on a telecommunications monitoring team at Quartz Mountain — intercepting, logging, and classifying communications associated with classified programs operating on the range. Through this work he gained incidental knowledge of crash retrieval and reverse engineering operations — competitive, messy, and often violent — with competing private groups racing to secure hardware and biological materials, death threats between factions, and a mercenary culture among retrieval teams.

1994 Nellis encounter

Main article:

Jason Sands Desert encounter (1994)

In October 1994, Sands reported a close encounter on a Nellis Test Range dirt road near Quartz Mountain with a non-human being — later identified via recovered star-map memory as originating from the Regulus system — who communicated via telepathy and requested materials for a damaged craft resting nearby. The encounter took place one week after the Nellis Test Range UFO sighting (1994) at the same location. The being expressed hostility toward personnel at Groom Lake, and most members of Sands' convoy appeared to be in a trance state and had no memory of the stop afterward.

RAF Mildenhall encounter (1999)

A second anomalous experience occurred in approximately February 1999 during a pre-dawn drive to work at RAF Mildenhall in Cambridgeshire, England. The evening before, Sands had stood at his upstairs French doors looking at the night sky and mentally projected a question: "If you guys are out there, are you guys just an extension of the family?" The following morning, while driving through a farming valley flanked by fields and tree lines, the entire area illuminated as bright as daylight from a source to his left — a perfectly spherical, glowing object approximately 30–40 feet in diameter, hovering 50–70 feet above the tree line on a farmer's field, bright enough to illuminate the cloud layer overhead. Sands' next memory was of driving in full daylight, receiving a telepathic message — "we're done talking now, go to work" — with a tear on his left cheek, indicating he had been crying during a period of missing time. The sphere paralleled his car for approximately a quarter mile before he lost sight of it; other motorists on the road were looking up at the object. Sands described this as a first-person account never related publicly before this 2025 interview.

Terminal team missions

During active service, covert "terminal team" missions were conducted under partial or full missing time — approximately four-person operations involuntarily assigned following a disciplinary incident. Consciousness returned only at a cave or entry point, receiving telepathic tactical instructions, using an anomalously lightweight long-barrel weapon with no recoil, and having no memory of mission conclusions — waking with physical marks including scratches and chest soreness lasting weeks. He was assigned these missions as an alternative to execution after a serious disciplinary incident.

Firsthand organization

Following his own experiences with retaliation — including having his 30-year security clearance revoked and break-ins to his vehicle — Sands established an organization called Firsthand to assist other whistleblowers navigating the congressional testimony process.

Views and public advocacy

• Views the existence of NHI as never formally classified — classification covered specific technologies and weapon systems, not the basic fact of non-human contact, entitling whistleblowers to speak about NHI without violating NDAs.
• Views NHI as members of civilizations with their own governments, legal systems, internal conflicts, and range of moral behavior — not uniformly benevolent or malevolent. Does not refer to the being he encountered as an "ET" but as a "person."
• Helped Jake Barber navigate the congressional whistleblower process; describes Barber's public testimony as independently corroborating his own accounts of messy crash retrieval operations.

Legal representation declined by NPI

Attorney Daniel Sheehan, founder of the New Paradigm Institute, disclosed that Sands had reached out to the Institute for legal representation but was declined. Sheehan stated that "there's been a good deal of confusion apparently on his part about what he knows and what he doesn't know and what he's heard from 2nd and 3rd and 4th hand people" and that Sands was "not taking any advice from anybody apparently on what he's, what he should be doing and how he should be acting."

Doty dispute

Richard Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) counterintelligence agent, has publicly disputed Sands' account, citing former AFOSI agents stationed at the range during 1993–1994 who stated no such incident occurred — while confirming that telecommunications monitoring teams of the type Sands belonged to did operate at Quartz Mountain.

See also

• Regulus being
• Nellis Test Range UFO video
• The Program (documentary)

References