Something happens to a news cycle when a 89-year-old physicist sits down on a podcast and says, in the same unhurried tone you’d use to describe the weather, that the U.S. government has recovered at least four distinct species of non-human life from crashed spacecraft. The room doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The internet doesn’t quite know what to do with it. And if you’ve been paying half-attention to the UFO story over the last few years, you are probably aware that this moment was not exactly a bolt from the blue – but that it still landed differently than expected. That is, more or less, where we are in May 2026.
Stanford-trained quantum physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff, former CIA Stargate program director and Pentagon AAWSAP advisor, confirmed on a May 2026 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast that at least four distinct non-human species have reportedly been recovered from crashed UFOs. He was joined by filmmaker Dan Farrah, whose documentary Age of Disclosure covers claims surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena. Puthoff said his information came from what he described as “high-level sources” involved in secret crash-retrieval efforts. He was careful to add that he had not personally handled recovered materials, but that the people he was describing were not strangers to him – they were colleagues he had worked alongside for decades inside classified U.S. research programs.
The man is not a crank in a tin-foil hat. He spent years running programs the government has since acknowledged were real. And yet there he is, on a podcast with millions of listeners, putting a number on something he had been carefully not-numbering for nearly a decade: four types. Four separate types of biological life, pulled from wreckage. Delivered in the same tone you’d use to tell someone there are four kinds of apples at the grocery store.
What He Said, Exactly
On the podcast, Puthoff made the assertion that the U.S. has recovered at least four distinct alien species from crashed UFOs. He clarified that he himself had not handled any biological material – but his claim was unambiguous: “People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types.”
The four species were named by Puthoff’s longtime AAWSAP colleague Dr. Eric Davis at a 2025 UAP Disclosure Fund conference: Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. Each species supposedly has two arms and two legs in a humanoid arrangement. The Reptilians are described as scaly and lizard-like with long tails, roughly six feet tall and walking upright. The Nordics, despite reportedly originating from another planet, closely resemble people of northern Europe. The Insectoids, for what it’s worth, are described as resembling upright praying mantises, which is either the most terrifying or most whimsical possible thing a species could be, depending on your relationship with insects.
Puthoff’s claims don’t arrive from nowhere. He has spent his adult life at the intersection of physics, intelligence work, and the kind of classified research programs that tend to become declassified about forty years too late to do anyone much good. As far back as 2018, speaking at an aerospace anomalies conference, Puthoff said publicly that he had been told by U.S. government colleagues that “bodies have been recovered.” In 2019, in a long-form interview with Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, he confirmed awareness of multiple “non-human craft retrievals” on U.S. soil. The May 2026 podcast was the moment he attached a number to it. Four. He let it sit.
This Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
The UFO story has been building for years with a momentum that keeps outpacing even the people driving it. At a Congressional hearing on July 26, 2023, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified that he “was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” and that he believed the U.S. government was in possession of UAPs based on interviews with 40 witnesses over four years. He also claimed, in response to direct questions from members of Congress, that “non-human biologics” had been recovered from the craft.
The reaction in the room was visceral. “There was definitely a gasp and everyone was definitely a little bit shocked,” one attendee recalled, “when Grusch was talking about non-human biologics.” Grusch deflected many follow-up questions on the grounds that the details could only be discussed in a SCIF – a sensitive compartmented information facility, the kind of room that doesn’t allow phones, windows, or loose ends. Which is either the most compelling thing a person could say to a congressional panel, or the most convenient.
What made Grusch harder to dismiss than the usual parade of UFO witnesses was his résumé. In 2022, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint that was deemed “credible and urgent,” alleging that elements of the U.S. government had thwarted congressional oversight, withheld information from proper executive branch officials, and illegally concealed programs tied to the recovery and reverse engineering of craft of unknown, non-human origin. A whistleblower complaint deemed “credible and urgent” by the relevant oversight bodies is not nothing. It is, at minimum, a fact that bureaucrats took it seriously enough to put those words on paper.
The Files That Just Dropped
All of this is happening against the backdrop of something genuinely new: the government is actually releasing documents now. In May 2026, the Pentagon released more than 160 records, citing President Trump’s call for unprecedented transparency in giving the public access to federal and military records related to unexplained encounters with strange phenomena. The records are posted to a specialized web portal, war.gov/UFO, housing additional files to be released on a rolling basis. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement: “These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves.”
The Pentagon released what it described as “never-before-seen files” on UFOs after President Trump directed the agency to do so. The batch of files outlines various investigations of reported sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena spanning decades. Among the files in the newly unsealed trove are incidents from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 17 moon missions. In a 1969 debriefing after the Apollo 11 flight, astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported seeing “flashes of light inside the cabin” while trying to fall asleep, and a bright light the crew tentatively described as a possible laser.
The documents don’t suggest any wide-ranging government cover-up of extraterrestrial encounters. The files show no indication that the U.S. government has had any interaction with beings from other planets or that it has any reason to believe such beings have visited Earth. So: a tranche of files lands on the government’s new UFO website, and what greeted most visitors was grainy infrared footage, documents from the 1950s, and Buzz Aldrin’s notes about flashing lights. Transparency is a process, apparently, and the process currently involves a lot of redacted PDFs.
What the Government Actually Says
Formally, the U.S. government has a consistent position, and it has not wavered. Between May 2023 and June 2024 alone, 757 new reports of UAPs were received and investigated by the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. As of October 2024, the AARO had received a total of 1,652 UAP reports. Of the cases examined, many resolve into balloons, satellites, birds, and the kinds of objects that pilots, under stress and low-light conditions, can genuinely misidentify. That is not a cynical observation. It is a boring one, which in this context might be a point in its favor.
The Pentagon’s formal review, delivered to Congress in 2024 and described as its most comprehensive report on the topic to date, was stark in its conclusion. Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder stated: “To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.” The report assessed that all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse-engineering programs provided by interviewees “either do not exist; are misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to an unwarranted and disestablished program.”
The Gap Nobody Is Closing
In 2026, the gap between “credentialed insiders are saying remarkable things” and “here is one piece of verifiable physical evidence” has not closed. None of the vivid descriptions being circulated can be independently checked. Neither Puthoff nor Davis has released photographs, laboratory reports, biological samples, or any other hard evidence that would allow outside scientists to test the claims. Puthoff’s own contribution in the podcast was explicitly second-hand: a relaying of what others allegedly told him, not a first-hand account of classified material he had handled.
On one side are figures like Puthoff and Davis, who insist they have spoken with insiders and, in Davis’s case, examined what he has described as “off-world” wreckage and biological material from craft “we couldn’t make ourselves.” On the other are scientists and skeptics who regard such stories as, at best, unproven and, at worst, folklore dressed in military jargon.
Read More: Have You Ever Noticed This One Strange Detail in Pictures of Princess Diana and King Charles?
The Part That Actually Stays With You
The thing that doesn’t let this story go is not the Reptilians or the Insectoids, vivid as those descriptions are. It’s the specific quality of Puthoff’s delivery. He is 89 years old. He has been living with whatever he knows, or believes he knows, for decades. He ran programs the U.S. government classified for a reason. He has, by any measure, earned the right to say less than he does. And instead, on a podcast with Steven Bartlett in May 2026, he chose this moment to put the number on it. Four. At least four.
You don’t have to believe him to find that observation genuinely difficult to set aside. The government is releasing documents now, in rolling tranches, on a website anyone can visit. The disclosures are less dramatic than the headlines suggest and more substantial than the Pentagon’s formal denials imply. Somewhere in that gap – between the grainy infrared footage and the congressional testimony, between the formal “no evidence” and the 1,652 UAP reports that landed in the government’s inbox – something is happening. What exactly it is remains, for now, exactly as unresolved as it was before Dr. Puthoff said his four words.
The universe is enormous. The information is incomplete. And the 89-year-old physicist who ran the CIA’s remote-viewing program wants you to know the number is at least four.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.