4 Alien Species Recovered From UFO Crashes: 89-Year-Old AAWSAP Veteran Hal Puthoff Confirms It On Camera

Dr. Hal Puthoff — the 89-year-old Stanford-trained quantum physicist who led the CIA’s remote-viewing programs through the 1970s, who advised the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) through the 2010s, and whose name appears on classified UAP-disclosure documents that almost no one in the public has ever been allowed to read — has finally said it on camera. The United States has recovered the bodies and craft of at least four distinct non-human species. The interview aired this week on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast. The clip has been carried by the New York Post, The Hill, IBTimes UK, Unilad, Yahoo News, the Gateway Pundit, and a wave of international outlets within seventy-two hours of release. And for the first time in his sixty-year career inside the most secretive corners of US defence research, Hal Puthoff has put a number on what is allegedly sitting in the storage facilities of the United States military.

The number is four. Four separate non-human species. Four sets of bodies. Four different sets of craft. Four origins.

The Quote That Broke The Story

Puthoff’s central statement during the Diary of a CEO roundtable — recorded with Bartlett and fellow disclosure researcher Dan Farah — was delivered in the matter-of-fact tone of a man who has been holding the statement back for decades:

“People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types.”

Dr. Hal Puthoff, on The Diary of a CEO, May 2026

Puthoff clarified, in the same interview, that he himself had not been the one who personally handled the recovered materials. He has, however, spent his entire post-1970s career in the immediate professional orbit of the people who have. His sources are the recovery teams themselves. And the number he has been given by those sources — repeatedly, across his decades of access — is four.

Who Hal Puthoff Actually Is

Hal Puthoff is not a fringe disclosure commentator. He is, on the most conservative reading of his career, one of the most credentialed parapsychology-and-defence researchers alive.

His CV runs as follows. PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Patents in quantum electronics and laser physics. From 1972 to 1985 he served as the senior scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) running the CIA’s remote-viewing program — a real, declassified US-government parapsychology research effort that operated under various names (Sun Streak, Grill Flame, Center Lane, ultimately Project Stargate) for over two decades. From 1985 onward he ran his own classified-contract research outfit, the EarthTech Institute and Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin.

From the early 2010s, Puthoff was contracted into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) — the classified successor to the CIA-era remote-viewing work, focused specifically on UAP research and on the analysis of recovered exotic materials. AAWSAP is the program Lue Elizondo would later inherit as AATIP. The people Hal Puthoff worked with inside AAWSAP are the same people Lue Elizondo, David Grusch, and Jim Semivan were working with.

When Hal Puthoff says, on camera, that the recovery teams he has been in contact with for forty years have told him there are at least four species, he is not speculating. He is reporting what his colleagues — the actual men and women on the recovery teams — have told him directly.

Which Four Species

Puthoff did not, in the Bartlett interview, publicly name all four species himself. He did not have to. The naming was already in the public record — placed there years earlier by his fellow AAWSAP insider, the physicist Eric Davis.

Davis is the author of the famous “Wilson-Davis memo,” the 2002 document allegedly summarising a meeting between Davis and US Navy Admiral Thomas Wilson about a US crash-retrieval program. Davis has spent the past two decades working in the same defence-research ecosystem as Puthoff and has been remarkably specific in interviews and lectures about the species roster. According to Davis, the four are:

• Grays. The classic post-1947 archetype. Small humanoid, large bulbous head, large black wraparound eyes, slender limbs, grey or pale skin. The body type associated with the Roswell crash, the Hill abduction case, and the long lineage of human-recovery accounts running through the second half of the twentieth century.
• Nordics. Tall, humanlike, fair-skinned, often described as carrying themselves with what witnesses describe as a deliberate calm. The archetype associated with the Scandinavian and pre-disclosure European contactee literature, and with the broader “benevolent visitor” framework that runs in parallel to the Gray-abduction narrative.
• Insectoids (also called Mantids). Tall, segmented, with elongated heads and large multi-faceted eyes that witnesses describe as resembling those of a praying mantis. Almost universally described in contactee accounts as occupying senior or supervisory roles relative to the Grays.
• Reptilians. Reptilian-skinned humanoid forms with scaled features and predatory eyes. The most controversial of the four because the type has been so heavily appropriated by the modern conspiracy ecosystem — but according to Davis, a genuinely documented type in the original recovery files.

All four, according to Davis, share the same basic structural body plan: two arms, two legs, a head, and an erect humanoid posture. The species are distinct, but they are not so foreign as to be unrecognisable. Whatever evolutionary or engineering process produced them appears to have produced them along a recognisably human-adjacent template.

What Puthoff Has Said Before

The Diary of a CEO interview is the most explicit on-camera statement Puthoff has ever made on the species count. It is not, however, the first time he has gestured at the underlying reality.

In 2018, speaking at the SCU Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, Puthoff said publicly that he had been told by his US-government colleagues that “bodies have been recovered.” He declined at that point to specify how many or what type. In 2019, in a long-form interview with Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, he confirmed that he was personally aware of multiple “non-human craft retrievals” on US soil. In 2021, on the Theories of Everything podcast, he confirmed that the recoveries spanned multiple decades and multiple presidential administrations.

The 2026 Diary of a CEO appearance is the moment Puthoff finally gave the number. The number had been sitting on the other side of his answers for almost a decade. He had been waiting for the disclosure climate to catch up to it.

How This Fits The 2026 Disclosure Moment

Puthoff’s statement does not exist in isolation. It is arriving at the precise moment that the US disclosure apparatus is shifting from denial to controlled release:

• July 2023 — David Grusch testifies before Congress that the United States possesses recovered non-human craft and non-human biological remains. Grusch declined, under oath, to give a species count.
• November 2024 — Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger publishes the first report on the alleged Immaculate Constellation Pentagon UAP-archive program. The architecture is described, the structure is described, the species count is not.
• January 2025 — Helicopter pilot Jake Barber goes on NewsNation describing his role in physical retrieval missions of downed non-human craft. Barber declines to characterise the bodies retrieved.
• April 2025 — Former CIA officer Jim Semivan describes his own work with recovered exotic materials. Semivan also declines to specify species.
• May 2026 — The US Department of War launches the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), the largest UAP declassification effort in American history.
• Mid-May 2026 — Hal Puthoff, on camera, with two interviewers and an audience of millions, finally puts a number on the recovery program: four species.

The sequence is not coincidental. Each disclosure has been calibrated. Each whistleblower has revealed slightly more than the previous one. The institutional movement, watched from the outside, looks less like a leaky cover-up and more like a deliberate, paced rollout — and Puthoff’s quiet confirmation of the species count is the highest-credibility data point yet released.

Why This Number — And Why Now

The cynical reading of Puthoff’s timing is that the disclosure cycle has reached the point where the establishment now needs the public to be ready for a controlled species reveal — and the four-species number is being prepared as the official baseline.

The disclosure-community reading is that Hal Puthoff has spent forty years being told the same thing by multiple recovery-team members across multiple administrations, and at age 89, with the protective benefit of decades of credentials behind him, he has decided that the public deserves to know what the people running the program have been telling him in private.

Either reading converges on the same conclusion. The number is four. The species, according to Davis, are Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. The recovery operations span multiple decades and multiple presidential administrations. And the most credentialed living human voice on the subject has now said all of this, on camera, to a global audience.

How The 4-Species Number Fits The Eshed, Lazar, And Burlison Claims

Puthoff’s number does not exist in isolation in the broader contactee-and-whistleblower literature. Multiple parallel sources have converged on similar — though not identical — species counts:

• Bob Lazar, the alleged former scientist at the S4 facility adjacent to Area 51, claimed in 1989 that the United States possessed at least nine recovered craft. He did not specify a species count but described non-human bodies consistent with the Gray archetype.
• Brigadier General Haim Eshed, the founder of the Israeli space program, has publicly stated that an agreement exists between the US government and a “Galactic Federation” — a multi-species framework that implicitly requires more than one non-human civilisation.
• US Congressman Eric Burlison has, in interviews following the 2023 UAP hearings, suggested that the entities recovered may have an extradimensional or theological dimension, fitting a multi-species framework rather than a single-civilisation framework.
• The Suit Study 48 material — the alleged recovered alien garment described by the whistleblower “John” — is consistent with the Gray archetype but the broader study allegedly included other material from multiple species.

The convergence is not random. Multiple, mutually-independent sources are arriving at the same picture: a recovery program spanning decades, involving multiple non-human species, kept under the deepest classification the United States is capable of producing. Hal Puthoff’s contribution is the on-camera confirmation, from inside the actual program, that the number is at least four.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Hal Puthoff actually say about alien species?

On a May 2026 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett, Puthoff stated: “People who have been involved in recoveries have said there are at least four types. Four separate types.” He clarified that he had not personally handled the recovered materials himself, but that his sources are the recovery-team members he has worked alongside for decades inside US classified UAP research programs.

Who is Hal Puthoff?

Dr. Hal Puthoff, 89, is a Stanford-trained quantum physicist who led the CIA’s remote-viewing program at the Stanford Research Institute from 1972 to 1985 — the program that would later be publicly known as Project Stargate. He was subsequently contracted into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), the classified UAP-research effort that ran from 2007 to 2012 under the Defense Intelligence Agency and that became the foundation for the AATIP program later led by Lue Elizondo. Puthoff is one of the most credentialed living voices inside the US UAP-research establishment.

What are the four alien species?

According to Eric Davis — Puthoff’s fellow AAWSAP veteran and the author of the famous Wilson-Davis memo — the four species are Grays (small humanoid, large black eyes), Nordics (tall, fair, humanlike), Insectoids / Mantids (tall, segmented, with mantis-like elongated heads), and Reptilians (scaled humanoid forms). All four share a basic two-arm, two-leg, erect humanoid body plan.

How does this compare with David Grusch’s testimony?

David Grusch, in his July 2023 Congressional testimony, confirmed under oath that the United States possesses recovered non-human craft and non-human biological remains. Grusch did not — and was not asked to — specify a species count. Hal Puthoff’s May 2026 statement is the first time a credentialed insider has publicly put a number on the program. Puthoff’s “at least four types” answers the question Grusch declined to answer.

Has the Pentagon responded?

The Pentagon has not directly addressed Puthoff’s species-count statement. The Department of Defense’s standard public position remains that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has found no evidence of recovered non-human craft or biological material — a position widely contested by the credentialed whistleblowers, including Grusch, Lue Elizondo, Jim Semivan, Jake Barber, and now Puthoff, who have been making increasingly explicit public statements to the contrary.

Why is Puthoff’s statement considered significant?

Because Puthoff is one of the most credentialed and longest-tenured insiders of the US classified UAP-research establishment alive. He led the CIA’s remote-viewing program for thirteen years. He has spent the past four decades inside the immediate professional orbit of the recovery-team personnel. He is not speculating about what the program contains. He is reporting what the people running the program have told him personally over the course of forty years.

Where can I watch the Diary of a CEO interview?

The full UFO Roundtable featuring Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dan Farah is available on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO YouTube channel and on all major podcast platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts) under the title “UFO Roundtable w/ Dr. Hal Puthoff & Dan Farah.” A full transcript of the conversation has been independently published by The Singju Post.