For decades now, UFO stories have mostly involved blurry lights in the sky, shaky footage shot on potato phones and men called Del insisting they’d seen something strange from their truck on the drive back from a night spent at their local dive bar.
Slowly but surely, however, the idea of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth has started to become a tad more serious.
Now a former CIA scientist has claimed that the US government secretly knows about at least four different types of alien life linked to crashed UFOs.
Dr. Hal Puthoff, who worked on intelligence projects involving UFO research and psychic spying during the 1970s and 1980s, made the claims recently during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.
Ex-Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program advisor Puthoff said: ‘There are at least four types. Four separate types. Now, I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people I talked to. Four different types of life, at least.’
The four species he referred to have also been discussed by the physicist Dr. Eric Davis, another figure who’s been linked to plenty of top secret Pentagon projects and UFO investigations down the years.
Last year, Davis told members of Congress that witnesses had described ‘Grays, Nordics, Insectoids and Reptilians’ as the possible operators of mysterious craft recovered by the US.
The Grays are, of course, the classic alien look. Small. Grey. Giant black eyes. Massive heads. The sort of thing that’s been appearing in low-budget documentaries on rubbish TV channels for decades. X Files stuff.
Their popularity exploded after the famous Betty and Barney Hill case in the 1960s. The American couple claimed they’d been abducted by strange humanoids with smooth grey skin and oversized almond-shaped eyes.
Then there are the Nordics, who – apparently – look like extremely tall Scandinavian humans with blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin.
Stories about them have floated around UFO culture since the 1950s, with some believers linking them to the Pleiades star cluster, around 440 light years from Earth. They’re said to be highly evolved and benevolent in nature.
The Insectoids are quite a bit less appealing, we’re afraid.
People who claim to have encountered this type of alien describe giant mantis-like creatures with antennae, mandibles, exoskeletons and multiple limbs. Some stories even claim they communicate telepathically, which sounds stressful enough before you factor in their giant bug faces.
Insect-like alien beings have been turning up in science fiction and UFO mythology for well over a century, including in Georges Méliès’ early cinematic classic A Trip to the Moon from 1902.
Then there are the Reptilians. These alleged alien beings are described as humanoid creatures with reptile-like features and became deeply tied to conspiracy theories thanks to claims that shape-shifting lizard people secretly control human society.
That theory was pushed heavily by David Icke in the late 20th century and has never fully disappeared from the popular consciousness. Icke’s theory is that these cold-blooded ETs have assumed human visages and infiltrated monarchies and the upper echelons of world governments.
Puthoff appeared on the podcast alongside filmmaker Dan Farah, director of The Age of Disclosure, which claims the US government has secretly recovered non-human craft since the 1940s.
Farah said: ‘The people I’ve talked to, through the process of making the documentary, both on camera and off the record sources, 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 that either crashed organically or caused a crash and then recovered.’
To this day, the US government continues to insist that there’s ‘no verifiable evidence’ that extra-terrestrials or alien technology have ever been recovered. More UFO files are expected to be released later this month though, with Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett teasing what he called a potential ‘holy c***’ moment for disclosure.
Some politicians have argued these unusual tourists might not even be aliens. Vice President JD Vance is among figures who have reportedly discussed the possibility that they could instead be ‘interdimensional beings’ documented by humans since biblical times.
Which is probably not a sentence anyone expected to hear from American politics a few years ago. Nowadays, though? It seems like anything goes when it comes to disclosure and discourse around the subject.
Aliens – we look forward to meeting you all. Even you, insectoids. See you soon.