A former CIA-funded researcher says the US holds four alien species. No evidence backs it.

Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist whose UAP work was once CIA-funded, says insiders told him the government holds remains of four distinct alien species from crashed craft. No document or agency statement supports it.

Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist whose research into UAP was once funded through CIA-linked programs, said in May 2026 that the United States has recovered the biological remains of four separate alien species from crashed craft. The claim moved fast. Fox News, the New York Post, Firstpost, and Sky News Australia all ran it within days.

Puthoff is not a fringe voice, which is the whole reason the story traveled. He helped build the research effort that fed the Pentagon's earlier UAP program, and he has spent decades inside the government-adjacent study of the subject. When he says something about crash retrievals, the people who follow this closely listen.

Here is the problem. Puthoff sources the four-species account to insiders and people he says have direct knowledge. He has not produced a document, a name, a photograph, or anything a third party can check. No agency has confirmed it. No official statement so much as addresses it. The Department of War file releases that ran through the same weeks contain nothing that points to it.

So the claim lands where a lot of disclosure-era claims land. Made by someone with real credentials. Repeated everywhere. Impossible to verify on the evidence in front of us. A credible person saying an extraordinary thing is not the same as the thing being true, and the gap between the two is exactly where this story lives until a record shows up.