A CIA Physicist Says America Has Recovered Four Species of Aliens. He Named Them. Here Is Who He Is and What He Said.

On May 14, 2026, Dr. Hal Puthoff — a Stanford-trained quantum physicist, electrical engineer, and former research scientist in the CIA’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program — appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steve Bartlett and stated on the record that the United States government has recovered at least four distinct species of extraterrestrial biological entities from crashed UAP craft. Puthoff is 89 years old. He acknowledged he has not personally seen or handled the recovered biological material. He said he knows because the people who have been involved in the recoveries told him. His colleague Dr. Eric Davis — also a physicist with deep ties to classified US aerospace programs, who has testified before Congress — has previously named those four species: Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. The claims are extraordinary. The credentials of the people making them are not easily dismissed. And as of May 20, 2026, not a single piece of physical evidence for any of these claims has been produced in public.

To understand why this story is more than a standard “UFO guy says wild things” account, it helps to understand who Hal Puthoff actually is.

Puthoff received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and worked for many years on quantum vacuum energy and advanced propulsion concepts that eventually became mainstream physics research. In the 1970s, he ran the US intelligence community’s Stargate Program — the now-declassified government effort to study and weaponize psychic abilities including remote viewing — at the Stanford Research Institute. After Stargate was publicly declassified in 1995, Puthoff moved into the advanced aerospace research world and became an advisor to AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, which was a secret Defense Intelligence Agency program that ran from 2007 to 2012 and investigated UAP alongside a range of anomalous phenomena including cattle mutilations, hauntings at Skinwalker Ranch, and apparent biological effects of UAP encounters on witnesses.

He is a person who has, in documented government service, worked on the most fringe-adjacent classified programs the US has ever officially acknowledged.

What He Said and What His Colleague Has Added

“People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types,” Puthoff said in the Diary of a CEO interview. He declined to describe the beings physically himself, attributing his knowledge entirely to second-hand accounts from people he believes had direct access to the recovered material.

His longtime collaborator Dr. Eric Davis, a physicist who has served as an adviser to the Pentagon and who testified in a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee in December 2020, has been more specific in other forums. In a presentation at the 2025 UAP Disclosure Fund conference, Davis reportedly described four categories: Grays, the grey-skinned large-eyed beings that dominate popular culture alien imagery since the 1960s; Nordics, humanoid beings described as physically human-like with distinctly fair features; Insectoids, beings described as resembling a humanoid version of insect anatomy; and Reptilians, beings described as resembling a humanoid version of reptile anatomy.

Davis has noted that describing beings as “reptilian” or “insectoid” does not necessarily mean they are biologically related to Earth’s reptiles or insects — it means human percipients encountering them reached for those categories as the closest available analogy.

Also present during the Diary of a CEO interview was Dan Farah, a filmmaker who recently released a documentary called The Age of Disclosure, which interviewed numerous high-ranking US government officials and military veterans about what they claimed to know about UAP recovery programs. Farah stated in the interview: “The people I’ve talked to, through the process of making the documentary, both on camera and off the record, and the people Hal’s talked to over the decades have said that there have been dozens of recoveries of crashed craft in the US alone. Dozens of craft of non-human origin.”

What Makes This Different From Standard UFO Claims

The disclosure community has been producing extraordinary claims for decades. What makes the current cluster unusual is the accumulation of credentialed witnesses making similar claims across multiple official venues simultaneously.

David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who served as the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the UAP Task Force, testified before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023 under oath and with congressional immunity that the US government possesses non-human craft and non-human biological material from crash sites, and that access to this material is controlled by a covert legacy program operating outside normal congressional oversight.

Puthoff’s podcast statement is not testimony and carries no legal weight. What it does is add another name — one with documented decades of classified-program access — to a list of credentialed individuals making versions of the same claim in different forums across the past several years.

What Critics Say

The central problem with all of these claims remains unchanged: no physical evidence has been produced. No photograph of a recovered biological entity. No tissue sample subjected to independent scientific analysis. No document produced publicly saying “we have alien bodies and here is where they are.” Critics note that the witnesses are uniformly working from secondhand accounts — they were told by people who were told by people — and that the consistency across those secondhand accounts could reflect a shared cultural narrative rather than a shared physical reality.

The Liberty Line, covering the story this week, put it bluntly: “Either show us the aliens or stop telling us they exist. The middle ground of dramatic claims and zero evidence is getting old.” It is a reasonable position. The claims are real. The evidence, publicly, is not.

Sources: The News Pakistan — Four Alien Species Recovered from Crashed UFOs, Ex-CIA Researcher Claims (May 16, 2026) — IBTimes UK — US Recovered 4 Alien Species From Crashed UFOs: An 89-Year-Old Former CIA-Funded Government Researcher Claims (May 16, 2026) — MSN / Daily Mail — Four Species of Aliens Recovered From UFOs According to CIA Scientist — Here’s What They Look Like (May 19, 2026) — Internewscast — Former CIA Scientist Claims Discovery of Four Alien Species from UFO Recoveries (May 2026) — The Liberty Line — Government Says They Recovered Four Alien Species from Crashed UFOs (May 19, 2026) — Unexplained Mysteries forum — Four Species of Aliens Recovered from UFOs According to CIA Scientist (May 20, 2026)