Ben Schreckinger is an American political journalist and author who spent most of his career at Politico before turning in 2026 to independent reporting on UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena. He grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts, and studied classics at Brown University, graduating in 2012. As editor-in-chief of The Brown Daily Herald he won the 2011 Robert Novak Collegiate Journalism Award for a story on the university's handling of rape cases.

Politico was his first full-time job after college. As a campaign reporter he covered Donald Trump's rise in 2016, a year in which the Trump campaign twice kept him out of or removed him from its events. He also worked as GQ's Washington correspondent and as a staff writer for Politico Magazine, and most recently served as Politico's national political correspondent, reporting on the Biden family's business dealings and helping launch the Digital Future Daily tech-policy newsletter. He was among the first reporters at an established outlet to confirm some of the emails in the Hunter Biden laptop cache, and his 2021 book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power, was called "scrupulously reported" by the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. He won a 2021 National Headliner Award for best magazine column.

After leaving Politico, Schreckinger launched Paradigm, a Substack newsletter subtitled "Dispatches from the frontiers of reality," whose stated mission is to investigate the UFO mystery and other anomalous phenomena. A beginner's guide to UFOs and disclosure in August 2026 was followed in September by a weekly briefing called Signs of Life. Its first issue identified the man known in UFO circles as "Whistling Mike" as the Wichita-area businessman Michael Spicer and reported, citing three people familiar with the matter, that the Senate Intelligence Committee had kept a rock Spicer supplied in a safe. The same issue reported that Andrew Bates, a former White House deputy press secretary and Biden campaign spokesman, was quietly giving the Sol Foundation pro bono public-relations advice after an introduction from John Podesta.

Much of his later reporting sought on-record answers from people named in disclosure claims. In September he asked researchers who study the Hessdalen lights in Norway about two luminous-orb cases from the War Department's UFO releases; seven responded, and several said the U.S. cases could involve a similar phenomenon, proposing mechanisms involving plasma and geology. On October 1, John Podesta told Paradigm by email that he had joined a call with Tom DeLonge and others about declassifying Defense Department files and reducing stigma, while disputing David Grusch's description of those contacts as an effort to acclimate the public. Two weeks later Sean Kirkpatrick, the founding director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, called Jay Stratton's account of a secret "Legacy Program" in his book Out of the Shadows absurd and accused Stratton and his associates of violating national security law. Stratton's publisher did not respond to Paradigm's request for comment.

Schreckinger is one of the few national political reporters to make UFOs a full-time beat. Within its first three months, Paradigm drew on-record responses from Podesta and Kirkpatrick, two figures central to the modern disclosure debate, and put a name to the source behind one of the year's most discussed physical-evidence claims.