Michael Spicer is a Wichita-area businessman who was known in UFO circles by the pseudonym "Whistling Mike" until the journalist Ben Schreckinger identified him in September 2026 in his newsletter Paradigm. Spicer says that in the early 2000s he encountered a quiet, dark, roughly triangular craft about the size of a fighter jet hovering low over public land in Kansas, retrieved material connected to it and has since spent years reverse-engineering its technology and building a system to detect it. Paradigm has said it has not verified those claims.

His public record predates the pseudonym. In January 2020, amid nighttime drone reports over northeast Colorado, Spicer told the Journal-Advocate of Sterling, Colorado, that a Wichita group called ArchAngelRECON had been flying formations of six to 12 drones in grid patterns while trying to track what he believed was a "TicTac"-type aircraft like the one described by Navy pilots in 2004. He said the Federal Aviation Administration had interviewed him and that the group's drones never flew near any airport.

According to Paradigm, Spicer presented a raw material to members and staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a 2023 briefing, describing it as a manufacturing input for the craft. Three anonymous sources told the outlet the committee kept a "dark, dense, porous rock" in a safe for months. After Spicer asked for it back in early 2025, former Senate aide Jon Estridge retrieved it and returned it through Dillon Guthrie, a co-founder of the Disclosure Foundation; Estridge confirmed the basic chain of custody but declined to comment on the craft claims. In a later Paradigm interview he named tellurium as a key ingredient in the craft's exterior, which he says also drives its power and steering; Paradigm noted that the element is mostly a by-product of copper refining.

Official pushback has come from Tim Phillips, a former acting director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. On the Total Disclosure podcast, without naming Spicer, Phillips said a committee chairman had referred the man to the office, that he doubted the claims and referred them to the FBI, and that an image given to Congress could have been taken from an aircraft maker's promotional video. Spicer rejects that account and says he has cooperated with the FBI. AARO did not answer Paradigm's questions, and the FBI declined to comment.

Spicer says the craft is American-made and uses a propulsion method "roughly analogous to magnetism," and he cites his failure to win a government contract among his reasons for going public. After a long interview with VETTED in September 2026, he announced an October 10 presentation in Brush, Colorado, billed with his claim that Senate staff had assured him of whistleblower protections that were later reversed. With security consultant Gene Sticco, he is pitching his detection system to operators of critical infrastructure. The case rests on a physical sample that a Senate committee reportedly held and on Spicer's own account of the craft, which a former acting AARO director has publicly doubted.