He is 89 years old, Stanford-trained, and spent decades at the intersection of quantum physics and American intelligence. He led the CIA's remote viewing programme. He advised the Pentagon's most classified aerospace research unit. Recently, while speaking on a major podcast, Dr. Hal Puthoff said something that no one with his credentials has ever said publicly on camera before. He said the United States has recovered the bodies of at least four distinct non-human species. He said it plainly. He did not retract it.
THE MAN WHO SAID IT
Before examining what was said, it is worth establishing precisely who said it — because the weight of this particular statement rests almost entirely on the credentials of the person making it, and those credentials are not ordinary.
Dr. Harold Puthoff is a theoretical physicist trained at Stanford University, where he worked in quantum electronics and laser physics before the intelligence community recruited him for something considerably less orthodox. In the early 1970s, he was brought in to lead the CIA's Stargate programme — the official United States government investigation into remote viewing, the claimed ability of trained individuals to perceive locations and objects at a distance through non-conventional means. The programme ran for over two decades, consumed significant classified funding, and produced results that were, by the CIA's own assessment, sufficiently promising to keep it running far longer than sceptics would have predicted.
Puthoff subsequently became an advisor to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program — AAWSAP — a Pentagon initiative that operated through the Defence Intelligence Agency and that only became publicly known years after its establishment. AAWSAP was the programme that funded investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena at the government level during a period when official policy was to deny any such investigation was occurring. Puthoff was among its most senior scientific advisors.
He is not a YouTube commentator. He is not a conspiracy blogger. He is an 89-year-old physicist whose name appears on classified documents that most people alive will never be permitted to read, who has spent fifty years at the intersection of hard science and American intelligence, and who — on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast — said something that the UAP disclosure community has been waiting for a person of his standing to say for decades.
He said the United States has recovered, from crash retrieval operations, the biological remains of at least four distinct non-human species.
He said it on camera. He said it without apparent hesitation. He did not walk it back.
THE EXACT STATEMENT
Puthoff appeared on the podcast alongside filmmaker Dan Farah, whose documentary Age of Disclosure examines the history of covert UAP programmes. The conversation covered a wide range of territory — the physics of observed UAP capabilities, the history of the Stargate remote viewing programme, the architecture of classified UAP retrieval operations, and the current state of government disclosure efforts.
At a particular point in the conversation, the subject turned to biological recoveries — the question of whether non-human remains had been recovered from downed craft alongside the craft themselves. Puthoff did not deflect the question or offer the carefully hedged non-answer that has characterized most official and semi-official commentary on this subject. He answered it directly.
He said: people who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types.
He acknowledged, in the same breath, that he had not personally examined the evidence. His statement was based on what insiders — people with direct involvement in retrieval operations — had communicated to him. He was not claiming personal witness. He was reporting what people in a position to know had told him, and he was doing so with the specific credibility of someone who has spent fifty years earning access to those conversations.
The significance of that distinction — claiming insider knowledge rather than personal observation — is important to note. Puthoff is not saying he has seen four alien bodies. He is saying that the people who have seen them told him there are four types. That is a different and more limited claim. It is also, given who he is and who his sources are likely to be, a claim that requires serious engagement rather than routine dismissal.
"People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types." — Dr. Hal Puthoff, The Diary of a CEO podcast, May 2026. He has not retracted it.
THE FOUR SPECIES: WHAT THE INSIDERS DESCRIBE
Puthoff did not describe the four species in detail during the podcast. That aspect of the account had already been provided by his longtime colleague and fellow AAWSAP advisor, Dr. Eric Davis, at a 2025 UAP Disclosure Fund conference attended by three sitting members of Congress — Representatives Nancy Mace, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison. Davis named four categories of biological lifeform, each reportedly recovered from downed craft, each possessing a broadly humanoid structure. What follows is the documented description of each type as it has emerged from the combined testimony of Puthoff, Davis, and other insiders who have spoken publicly in recent years.
THE GRAYS are the most widely recognized extraterrestrial archetype in popular culture — small, pale grey or whitish beings with oversized craniums, large black eyes that wrap around the sides of the head, vestigial nasal and oral features, and slender limbs. Reported heights range between four and five feet. Their ubiquity in popular culture — from the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind to decades of alien abduction testimony — makes them the baseline against which all other described non-human beings are measured. According to those who have spoken from inside the classified programmes, the Grays correspond closely to the beings most consistently described by individuals reporting close encounter experiences across multiple decades and multiple countries.
THE NORDICSrepresent the most unsettling category precisely because of their proximity to ordinary human appearance. Described as tall — between six and seven and a half feet — with fair skin, light hair, and facial features that could, at a sufficient distance, pass for northern European human, the Nordics have been reported by witnesses who initially believed they were looking at a very tall person before close observation revealed physical anomalies that made that identification untenable. Their resemblance to humans raises questions — some researchers argue deliberately uncomfortable ones — about the relationship between human biology and whatever produced them.
THE REPTILIANS stand at the furthest remove from human biology while remaining bipedal and broadly humanoid in their physical organisation. Described as six to eight feet in height, covered in scaled skin, with reptilian facial features, long tails, and clawed hands and feet, the Reptilians appear in indigenous traditions, ancient mythology, and modern encounter accounts across cultures that have no documented connection to each other. In the context of the crash retrieval programme, Davis and others describe them as both physically powerful and cognitively sophisticated — a combination that places them in a different category from simple animal life.
THE MANTIDS— sometimes called Insectoids — are described as the most physiologically alien of the four types: six to seven feet tall, with the compound eyes, elongated limbs, and exoskeletal structure of a large insect rendered at human scale. Witnesses who have described encounters with Mantid beings consistently note their quality of absolute stillness and the specific quality of presence they project — an attention that witnesses describe as penetrating and evaluative in a way that differs qualitatively from the way any familiar animal regards a human being.
THE DISCLOSURE TIMELINE THAT SURROUNDS THIS STATEMENT
Puthoff's statement does not exist in isolation. It arrives at the end of a sequence of public disclosures that have accelerated markedly since 2023 and that form a coherent pattern only when viewed as a whole.
In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath before the United States Congress that the US government possessed recovered non-human craft and non-human biological remains. Grusch declined, under oath, to give a species count. He said he had not personally seen the materials but had spoken with people who had. The testimony triggered formal congressional investigation.
In November 2024, independent journalist Michael Shellenberger published a detailed report on the alleged Immaculate Constellation programme — a Pentagon archive of UAP materials whose architecture and operational structure was described in detail, though its species-related contents were not.
In January 2025, helicopter pilot Jake Barber gave a detailed account to NewsNation of his role in physical retrieval missions involving downed non-human craft. Barber declined to characterise the biological materials recovered during those missions.
In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to begin declassifying UAP evidence. A first tranche of declassified material was released days before the Puthoff podcast, the most widely discussed item being a 1972 Apollo programme photograph showing a triangular craft above the lunar surface.
In April 2025, former CIA officer Jim Semivan, a co-founder of the To the Stars Academy with Tom DeLonge, spoke publicly about his own work with recovered exotic materials and about what he described as the non-human intelligence programmes he had been involved in during his government career.
Against this backdrop, Puthoff's statement on The Diary of a CEO is less a bombshell dropped from a clear sky and more the latest and most explicit data point in a pattern of controlled, sequential disclosure by credentialed insiders — people with government careers, security clearances, and professional reputations to protect — who are choosing, one by one, to say publicly what they have spent careers unable to say.
This is not a single isolated claim by an eccentric. It is the latest and most explicit statement in a sequence of public disclosures by credentialed insiders — military officers, intelligence professionals, physicists — that has been building since 2023 and shows no sign of stopping.
WHAT THE SCEPTICAL POSITION REQUIRES
The Strange Archives does not advocate for a conclusion on this subject. The editorial commitment of this publication is to the evidence as documented and to the honesty about what it does and does not establish. The sceptical position deserves to be stated clearly and taken seriously.
Puthoff's statement is based on what others told him, not on personal observation. The people who told him — insiders in classified programmes — cannot be identified, cannot be questioned, and cannot have their accounts independently verified. The physical evidence they reportedly describe has never been presented in any public forum. The Pentagon, in response to the 2023 congressional hearing and to subsequent inquiries, has consistently stated that its investigations have not produced verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial craft or biological remains.
The sceptical framework would note that the entire structure of the disclosure movement rests on an unfalsifiable architecture: the evidence exists, it is classified, it cannot be shown, and the people who have seen it are prevented by law from confirming what they saw. This architecture makes the claims immune to the standard evidential tests that science requires for extraordinary propositions, which is precisely what makes them impossible to confirm and impossible to refute.
That is a genuine epistemological problem. It should be acknowledged rather than papered over.
What the sceptical position struggles to account for is the specific quality of the people making the claims. David Grusch testified under oath before Congress, subject to perjury laws, and did not retract his testimony. Jake Barber described physical operations with the specificity of someone describing a real job. Eric Davis presented his account to sitting members of Congress at a formal conference. Hal Puthoff made his statement on camera, on one of the most widely distributed podcasts in the English-speaking world, with full understanding of what he was saying and to whom he was saying it.
These are not people who have nothing to lose. These are people who have already lost, or risked, significant professional standing by speaking publicly. The sceptical position requires a theory of motivation for all of them that has not been persuasively articulated.
THE QUESTION THIS MOMENT ASKS
If Hal Puthoff is telling the truth — if the people who told him about four distinct non-human species are telling the truth — then the implications are not primarily scientific. Science can, in principle, accommodate the existence of other intelligent species in the universe. The universe is very large and very old. The prior probability of other life is not negligible.
The implications are primarily historical and political. If the United States government has been in possession of recovered non-human biological remains since 1947 — and the emerging testimony consistently points to the Roswell period as the beginning of the retrieval programme — then the entire postwar history of American science, defence, and public policy was conducted in the shadow of a secret so large that its disclosure rewrites the context of everything that followed.
Every arms race. Every space programme. Every public debate about extraterrestrial life. Every statement by every official that there was no credible evidence of non-human intelligence. All of it would need to be re-examined in the light of what was apparently known at the highest levels and kept from everyone else.
The four species described by Davis and referenced by Puthoff are not, in this reading, a fringe curiosity. They are the central fact of the postwar era that was deliberately withheld from the people it most affected — the entirety of the human population that was never told it was not alone.
Whether that disclosure comes — whether the second tranche of declassified files promised under the Trump executive order contains what the insiders say it contains, whether the sitting president makes the announcement that filmmaker Dan Farah predicted on the same podcast — is a question this article cannot answer. The timeline, if the pattern of the last two years continues, suggests it will not be long before the question resolves itself one way or the other.
What this article can say is this: a physicist of Hal Puthoff's standing, with his access and his credentials and his professional history, said on camera this week that there are at least four of them.
He said four separate types.
He did not retract it.
The Archive is watching what comes next.
- Sources & Further Reading: Dr. Hal Puthoff's statement was made on The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett, released May 2026, alongside filmmaker Dan Farah. The statement is reported by IBTimes UK, AOL News, USA Herald, and multiple other outlets. Dr. Eric Davis's species descriptions were delivered at a 2025 UAP Disclosure Fund conference attended by Representatives Nancy Mace, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison, and are documented in reporting by multiple news organisations. David Grusch's July 2023 congressional testimony is preserved in the official congressional record. The Pentagon's denials of verified extraterrestrial evidence are documented in official DoD press releases and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office public statements. The February 2025 Trump executive order on UAP declassification is a matter of public record. Michael Shellenberger's reporting on the Immaculate Constellation programme is published at Public.substack.com. The Strange Archives presents this account based entirely on documented public testimony and verified reporting. All claims attributed to named individuals reflect what those individuals have stated publicly. No editorial conclusion is offered as to the factual accuracy of the underlying claims.