UFO Crash Retrievals

Crash Retrievals and Reverse Engineering Part 1

Aug 25, 2025

The first UFO crash-retrieval story of the 20th century came just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold’s epoch-defining sighting on June 24, 1947. On July 8, the Roswell Daily Record quoted Roswell Army Air Field’s intelligence office as stating that a flying disc had been captured on a ranch in the area. The next day, July 9, the Army recanted and officially debunked the report, stating that the debris was in fact a mundane weather balloon, which effectively buried the story for the next 31 years. It wasn’t until 1978 that former Roswell intelligence officer Jesse Marcel came forward to correct the record and repudiate the official story. This sparked a wave of new research, which eventually elicited the testimony of hundreds of Roswell residents and military participants in the affair. These revelations in turn prompted two additional Air Force debunking efforts in 1994 and 1997 – equally as facile as the original.

Newspapers carried a handful of similar reports in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For example, in December 1949, U.S. naval historian and journalist Fletcher Pratt was quoted as saying that the U.S. was in possession of a flying saucer and the bodies of 3-foot-tall “strange creatures”:

Speaking at a meeting sponsored by a science magazine, Fletcher Pratt said that according to ‘confidential sources’, one of such flying discs together with its occupants – all of them dead – had fallen into the hands of American authorities. These visitors from another world were killed, Pratt said when their flying disc entered the atmosphere of the earth. Atmospheric pressure proved fatal to them and their bodies were now being dissected and studied, he claimed.

Additional reports were quickly and effectively covered up or simply forgotten. Among the latter, in 1955, British journalist Dorothy Kilgallen reported hearing from a Cabinet-level source that British scientists and airmen had examined one flying saucer and that “the saucers are staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall.” Leonard Stringfield quoted a handful of sources who remember either hearing radio broadcasts or reading newspaper articles concerning a UFO crash in the early 1950s. UFO researcher Richard Hall, for example, recalls hearing “a radio news report about a crashed saucer and occupants, one said to be still alive, about 1952.” Robert Oliveri saw a similar report in a New York newspaper that same year, which included a photograph showing a disc-shaped craft partially embedded in a desert floor. Government agents reportedly went door to door confiscating copies of the paper; Oliveri’s father kept his copy hidden under the kitchen linoleum for years following. Researcher George Fawcett recalled seeing a newsreel report on yet another similar incident, circa 1948.

However, the only other retrieval story to make a splash prior to the post-1978 resurgence was the infamous saucer recovery at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. In 1950, journalist Frank Scully published one of the first book-length treatments on the UFO phenomenon: Behind the Flying Saucers. Like Pratt and Kilgallen, he claimed to have informants with knowledge of saucers and their occupants that had been recovered by the U.S. military – in this case, 3 separate craft in 2 southwestern states between 1948 and 1950, including 34 bodies in total, Aztec being the first of these, itself with 16 bodies. It wasn’t until 1952 that his overall claims were effectively debunked. Rival journalist J. P. Cahn published a hit piece exposing Scully’s sources, Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, as “con-men.” As with Roswell, this was enough to taint the case – and crash retrievals in general – for the next several decades. As Stringfield wrote in 1978: “Most [serious researchers] are still soured by it, and as a result, shun or discredit all retrieval stories.”

Scully even quotes the BSRA’s Meade Layne, who wrote in The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution (1950):

In spite of a policy of secrecy and an unofficial censorship, it is widely believed by this time that a number of ether ships of the Disc type have landed in the United States, through accident of some kind. We have no reports that any of the dwarf occupants survived the landing, and we are told that the propulsion and control of these craft is very much of a puzzle to scientists who have inspected them. They are said to be without motors, propellers, or anything recognizable as a drive mechanism. This suggests, of course, some kind of magnetic propulsion.

While some researchers may have privately considered the topic in the following years – or heard the rumors about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – it wasn’t until 1977 that another case would be treated at any length in a major publication. In that year, Stringfield published Situation Red: The UFO Siege, where he shared details about a third case: Kingman, Arizona, 1953. As a result of this book, Stringfield would go on to receive hundreds of reports from readers of his work, detailing dozens of potential crashes, which he wrote up in 7 status reports published before his death in 1994. These included the accounts of 45 firsthand witnesses to retrieved craft and bodies in U.S. custody.

In 1979, CIA whistleblower Victor Marchetti said this:

During my years in the CIA, UFOs were not a subject of common discussion. But neither were they treated in a disdainful or derisive manner, especially not by the agency's scientists. Instead, the topic was rarely discussed at internal meetings. It seemed to fall into the category of '“very sensitive activities,” e.g., drug and mindcontrol operations, domestic spying, and other illegal actions. People simply did not talk about the UFO phenomenon.
There were, however, rumors at high levels of the CIA.....rumors of unexplained sightings by qualified observers, of strange signals being received by the National Security Agency (the US Government’s electronic intercept and communications intelligence collector), and even of little gray men whose ships had crashed, or had been shot down, being kept “on ice” by the Air Force at FTD (Foreign Technology Division) at Wright-Patterson AF Base in Dayton, Ohio. […] the little I learned of the [NSA] signals was treated with extreme caution even by SIGINT standards.

Stringfield was one of the first to hear Jesse Marcel’s testimony regarding Roswell, but the initial research into the case was conducted primarily by Stanton Friedman and William Moore in the late 1970s and 1980s, followed by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt. The 1980s also saw the revival of the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, case, investigated by Stan Gordon. William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens revived the Aztec case in 1986 in a hard-to-find self-published book. In the same year, Scott Ramsey (soon followed by his wife Suzanne and colleague Frank Thayer) began his own investigation of Aztec. (Contrary to Cahn’s debunking, Scully had multiple insider sources – a group of 8 or 9 scientists working at places like Wright-Patterson and Los Alamos – feeding him information, not just Newton and GeBauer, the charges of fraud against whom were manufactured by Cahn and the government. According to Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz in UFO Dynamics, Newton eventually saw alien bodies thanks to the intervention of Canadian government scientist Wilbert Smith. Scully also had contacts in the major aerospace corporations of the time, like Lockheed.) And in 1989, Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering a captured disc at the S-4 facility at Groom Lake, Nevada.

While Stringfield had collected leads on possibly dozens of crash retrievals, these (Roswell, Aztec, Kingman, Kecksburg, S-4) were among the most publicized cases by the time the Cassiopaean sessions began in 1994. Each were controversial in their own right, with strong promoters and detractors and no general consensus in the UFO research community. (John Keel, for instance, was famously dismissive of such reports.) In these and the lesser known cases, however, a consistent pattern of elements emerged, going back to the earliest accounts:

The Crash: Civilians observe UFOs appearing to malfunction and crash, sometimes accompanied by loud explosions. The UFOs are sometimes seen in the company of military helicopters, seemingly either accompanying or pursuing them. Military insiders report real-time tracking of UFOs on radar. One source from Army Intelligence told Stringfield that NORAD used “a sophisticated electronic system able to detect a malfunctioning UFO and follow its trajectory flight to the point of crash.” Another source told Long Island investigators that satellites can track their “magnetic signatures.” Scully’s source, “Dr. Gee” (a composite of various scientists, the chief of whom the Ramseys believe was physicist John Torrence Tate), told him:

In the laboratories and also at Alamogordo and Los Alamos and at different parts of the country we have tenescope observers who spend 24 hours a day watching for evidence of objects or ships flying in the sky. Everything that comes within the range of those tenescopes is noted. If it is unfamiliar and lands, the Air Force is aware of it almost immediately, and if it presents scientific problems, we or the other groups are consulted. Two tenescopes caught this unidentified ship [i.e. the Aztec craft] as it came into our atmosphere. [The tenescope was used at White Sands and based on technology developed by Otto Schmitt, another of the scientists the Ramseys believe was incorporated into Dr. Gee.]

The Crash Site: In some cases, no wreckage is found at the presumed location. In others, witnesses report craft of various morphologies (usually disc- or egg-shaped) or unidentifiable debris such as anomalous metals, and sometimes occupants, most often dead but sometimes living. The craft are almost universally described as metallic and seamless, as if cast from a mold, the metal light weight and extremely hard. The bodies will be described further below in the section on biologics.

The Recovery: Civilians report a large military presence, with various branches of the military and civilian agencies represented. Sometimes firsthand participants in the recovery speak out, describing their limited role in the operation, e.g. providing security for the crash site, transferring the wreckage, etc. Some type of special forces are often reported as present (e.g. the “Blue Berets”).

The Storage: Insiders report seeing craft, devices, debris and bodies at various military locations, often in hangars or underground facilities, e.g. at Wright-Patterson, Edwards, Langley, Nellis, Dugway Proving Grounds, Los Alamos.

The Cover-up: Witnesses and low-level participants are told that they have seen a top-secret Air Force vehicle and must stay silent for reasons of national security. Civilians are threatened with death and harm to their families should they speak publicly. Military men are bound by non-disclosure agreements, secrecy oaths, as well as threats. Potential security threats are reportedly killed.

December 10, 1994

A: They [Area 51/S-4] have recovered craft of Grays, but human and alien personnel are not working together there.
Q: (T) Are the craft actually captured?
A: Recovered from crash.

January 21, 1995

Q: (L) How many alien craft – actual alien craft – are in the hands of the government or this consortium?
A: 36.

In 1979, Leonard Stringfield estimated that perhaps 12 of his then 49 separate reports might represent actual incidents. In 2023, U.S. intelligence whistleblower David Grusch told Ross Coulthart that the number of craft possessed by the U.S. was in the “double digits” (i.e. a precise number between 10 and 99, known to Grusch).

Ryan Wood’s book, MAJIC Eyes Only, collects 104 possible crashes of varying quality (Michael Schratt estimates there are at least 200 such reports), 23 of which Wood gives a medium-high to high rating of authenticity (i.e. characterized by extensive investigation of multiple witnesses, physical evidence and/or documentation). Many of the cases included are incomplete, often relying on a single source. Some only provide hints of a crash, but no evidence of a recovery, or an attempted recovery that comes up empty-handed. Others may represent crashes of top-secret aerospace projects, hoaxes or counter-intelligence disinformation.

There is also the question of what counts as a craft. Some crashed UFOs appear to have been extensively or completely damaged upon impact. If the U.S. has 36 intact craft in their possession, they may have debris collected from any number of additional crashes. Also uncertain is whether or not unmanned UFO “drones” (e.g. egg-shaped and “tic-tacs”) count. The rate of collection may also have increased since 1995, especially if the testimony of crash-retrieval specialist Jake Barber is considered. He alleges that 1 to 2 craft are recovered each year using electromechanical signaling, neuromeditative interaction and microwave weaponry, techniques perhaps only put into operation in the last 2 or 3 decades.

Q: (L) And were these captured craft? Or gifted?
A: And recovered.
Q: (T) OK, they were all three. Were any of them purchased?
A: Not correct concept, Grays are not financial.
Q: (T) I didn’t mean by money, I meant purchased as in some kind of a trade. A gift is something that is given without anything in return. (J) We give them something in return. (T) Were the gift ones not what we would really consider gifts, but they were given to us in return for something else, some other kind of payment? Barter?
A: No. Because all sought return favors were already achieved. [The implications of this will be covered in a future series.]
Q: (L) So it was all just a farce. (T) So they were payment as opposed to gifts.
A: Not correct concept.
Q: (L) How about this: They weren’t payment, they weren’t gifts, they were distractions?
A: Closer.
Q: (T) OK, we’ve got captured ships, recovered ships, something called gifted ships that were not really gifted ships, and the concept that some of them were purchased, but they were not purchased in a sense that we would normally purchase things, bartered for something, and that the ships that were gifted were given to the government in order to keep them distracted from other things that the beings were doing. Is this something close along the lines of what we’re talking about?
A: Close
Q: (T) OK, so there’s a lot of different categories of how these ships got into the hands of the federal government?
A: Yes. Multidimensional.

Stringfield cites a number of means by which alien craft become available for recovery. Many appear to crash due to some kind of interference or malfunction (more on which in the section on Roswell). Ryan Wood lists a handful of theories proposed over the years, from intense lightning strikes to the influence of high-powered radar. Others are reported to have been shot down using either conventional or unconventional weapons. Stringfield quotes two military sources (E.L. and R.K.) who reported UFOs shot down with missiles off the coast of Hawaii in 1944 and 1973. Another reports a UFO taken down by fighter jets over Germany in 1966 or 1967. Wilbert Smith was reportedly gifted a fragment shot off one of the craft involved in the July 1952 D.C. flyovers. When researching the alleged South African crash of 1989, Henry Azadehdel was told it was brought down by “an experimental NDEW” (nuclear directed energy weapon). The Long Island source mentioned above (“Dr. Nick”) even claimed that a “Doppler Radar System” was used to take one down.

Another source (R.M.) ascribed a 1969 crash in Indiana to “an electrical disturbance,” with no elaboration. Researcher Chuck Oldham’s source for a pre-1950 crash in Farmington, New Mexico (probably a reference to Aztec, which is nearby), a former military officer, did elaborate:

There was mention of a magnetic fault, or opening, or something like that, located in the area where the craft came down. There were three of these faults or openings located in North America: one was located in the Southwest, around the Texas/New Mexico area, one was somewhere in the Carolinas, and one was somewhere in the Northeast sector […] From the report, I learned that these areas occur naturally and could possibly interfere with the navigation of these craft.

Silas Newton had proposed such a theory. As Scully wrote:

Around certain areas of this earth are places known to have magnetic fault zones. Here blow-outs occur, similar to the perpetual eddying of the waters around Cape Hatteras. […] If the saucers fly on these magnetic waves and have an intelligence operating them (like ours or even superior to ours) it follows that they would show a curiosity about areas that were troublesome. Also atomic explosions might disturb magnetic lines of force and certainly be not unkown to their instruments. This would explain their frequent appearances over areas like the White Sands Proving Ground.

Coincidentally, Drs. Tate and Schmitt (mentioned above) helped develop the MADD (magnetic anomaly detector) for anti-submarine warfare during WWII.

Still others appear to have landed or been abandoned. Dr. Gee knew of 4 intact landings, 3 of which were recovered (including Aztec). Stringfield also discusses alleged landings, e.g. at Ft. Riley (Kansas) in 1964, Nellis (Nevada) and Big Springs (Texas) in 1968, Edwards (California) in the early 1970s, and Ft. Dix/McGuire (New Jersey) in 1978. A former lieutenant colonel told Richard Hall about an alleged crash at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1953: “Air Force personnel immediately rushed to the area and found the saucer, unharmed and unoccupied, with doors open. Upon searching the surrounding area they came upon the bodies of the saucer’s four occupants, all dead.”

As a source (“Barnabas”) told Stringfield: “Flying disks were landing on military bases in California and New Mexico and they were not ours.” Another (“Dr. Epigoni”) said that by 1971 or 1972, “in that area, New Mexico to California, we had about 40 or 50 landings.”

For this and other reasons that will become clear in the section on reverse engineering, Dr. Garry Nolan (as “James” in D.W. Pasulka’s book American Cosmic [2019]) once referred to such craft as gifts or “donations” – mysteries given to humanity (or a small subset of humanity) for us to ponder or figure out. When Pasulka asked Nolan whether or not a particular “donation” (a possible piece of UFO material they uncovered at an alleged New Mexico crash site) was for their benefit or not, Nolan paused to consider the question before replying, “It’s too early to tell.”

One of Nick Redfern’s sources, “Will,” told him “that the intelligence that created these ‘deliberately crash-landed’ objects had a goal to ‘poison the human race’ via large-scale exposure to an alien virus.” There are several anecdotes of first responders becoming sick and dying after exposure to crashed UFOs and their occupants, seemingly from some kind of infection (e.g. Varginha 1996, Coyame 1974, Roswell 1947).

Q: (T) The government, our government, the U.S. government, is holding 36 craft of one kind or another that they gotten in one way or another. How many other governments have craft?
A: All is one.
Q: (L) We already have a one-world government is what they’re saying. […]
A: Has been so for long time, as you measure time. [While this may have been true at the time, later sessions indicate it may not be so monolithic at present.]

In 1982, Stringfield wrote:

Allegedly, UFO affairs involving the United States and many world governments are of the highest degree of secrecy. If my “insiders”, both here and abroad are correct, there is a high level international exchange of UFO data and a cooperative contingency plan for alien craft retrieval. I have been told on good authority that countries in NATO have close Intelligence ties as does the U.S. with Australia and New Zealand, and some countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Some insiders even believe that Russia, and more recently, the Peoples Republic of China, share a close detente on UFO matters.

A CIA source intimated to Stringfield “that the U.S., through NASA, had cooperated with Russia on the evaluation of a movie film showing UFOs in flight near their Salyut 6 space station.” Seven years later, Bob Lazar would report that Americans and Russians had been collaborating in S-4 at some point before his employment there.

Despite the possibility of past (and present) cooperation to some degree, each superpower no doubt attempts to keep its own secrets and privately worries that rival powers have made breakthroughs that they haven’t. According to Grusch, the U.S. has been engaged in a “multi-decade” reverse-engineering cold war with Russia and China.

The U.S. military and intelligence communities also feel justified in violating the sovereignty of foreign nations in their pursuit of such technology and limiting the circle of those “in the know.” Before his first lecture on the topic in 1978, Stringfield was “informed circuitously by the CIA several days in advance that it would be inadvisable to reveal information about UFO crashes in Mexico and West Germany.” Stringfield suspected this was because of alleged “illegal entries” into those countries to retrieve crashed craft (e.g. the Coyame crash of 1974). In 2023, journalists Josh Boswell, Chris Sharp and Matt Ford reported that the CIA’s secretive Office of Global Access (OGA) had conducted at least 9 such operations since 2003.

The source said the CIA has a ‘system in place that can discern UFOs while they’re still cloaked,’ and that if the ‘non-human’ craft land, crash or are brought down to earth, special military units are sent to try to salvage the wreckage.
Another source with knowledge of the OGA’s role said that they specialize in allowing the US military to secretly access areas around the world where they would usually be ‘denied’ – for example behind enemy lines.
‘They are basically a facilitator for people to get in and out of countries,’ the source said. ‘They are very clever at being able to get anywhere in the world they want to.’
Multiple sources briefed on the OGA’s activities told DailyMail.com that most of its operations involve more conventional retrieval missions, such as stray nuclear weapons, downed satellites or adversaries’ technology.
But they claimed some missions coordinated by the OGA have involved retrieval of UFOs.
‘The task at hand is simply to get it into custody and protect the secrecy of it,’ one source said. ‘The actual physical retrieval is by the military. But it’s not kept under military control, because they have to keep too many records. So they start moving it out fairly quickly into private hands.’

In 1991, Stringfield speculated on the existence of just such a group, writing: “it is my suspicion that U.S. special retrieval teams have been, and still are, prepared to ‘go into action’ into any crash location within its sphere of military or economic influence such as was exercised with NATO in the ‘artifact’ retrievals in England and West Germany.”

Stringfield also suspected that the helicopters reported in the vicinity of UFO crashes suggested the existence of a rapid response team “1) to maintain military readiness for alien UFO incursive activity and/or crashes, 2) to maintain security escort for secret saucer-like craft developed by the U.S., [and/or] 3) to maintain clandestine contact with alien fores established by agreement of by coercion.” He later quoted researcher Tommy Blann’s “Lt. Col. X,” who “stated that underground installations, as well as isolated areas of military reservations have squadrons of unmarked helicopters, which have sophisticated instrumentation on board, that are dispatched to areas of UFO activity to monitor these craft or airlift them out of the area if one as malfunctioned.” Jake Barber claims to have performed this role.

July 8, 1995

Q: (L) OK, here’s what we know [reading from an unknown article]: “The case in question involves the alleged crash of the so-called ‘Kecksburg UFO’ recently featured in magazines and even re-enacted on television. The ‘acorn’ shaped object supposedly fell to the ground in Western Pennsylvania on December 9, 1965. As the story goes, Air Force search teams cordoned off the wooded area and hauled a large object away. It was later reportedly seen at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio […]
“One suggested identity for the mysterious intruder was the Soviet Cosmos 96 satellite, which actually did fall back into the atmosphere that day. But, according to Air Force spokesmen, that craft had plummeted 12 hours earlier over another part of the planet. It was a shame, of course, because Cosmos 96 would have been a wonderful UFO.
“In May of 1991 the Pittsburgh Press decided to verify the Air Force claims on its own. Toward that end, reporters obtained official space tracking data from the archives of NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain. The decades-old data finally arrived in the form of 8 snapshots of the satellite’s orbital position. The last snapshot, when projected forward into space and time by a leading satellite watcher who does not want his name revealed, seemed to confirm the official Air Force account. But, going on a hunch and tapping my own expertise in space operation and satellite sleuthing, I decided to check the data myself. The released tracking data could not be positively identified with pieces of the failed probe. Why in the world would our government lie?
“In the 1960’s U.S. military intelligence agencies, interested in enemy technology, were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris that they could find. International law required that the debris be returned to the country of origin. The hardware of Cosmos 96 was its special missile warning shielding; too valuable to give back. Hardline skeptics still doubt that anything at all landed in Pennsylvania. Robert Young, an investigator from Harrisburg, keeps finding new ‘holes’ in the claims of witnesses. ‘I am now more convinced than ever that nothing came down in Kecksburg,’ he says. And, arch-skeptic, Phillip Klass […] attributes the NORAD data to foul-ups, not cover-up.
“But those of us who study the relationship between U.S. military intelligence and the former Soviet Union, still wonder, after all, what better camouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a Soviet probe, but, rather, a flying saucer. The Russians would never suspect; the Air Force laboratories could examine the specimen at leisure and, if suspicion lingered, UFO buffs could be counted on to maintain the phony cover story protecting the real truth.”
And that is all we know about the purported Kecksburg landing. (T) Why would anyone fly in a small, acorn-shaped capsule? (L) […] Remember, it can appear very small on the outside but be huge on the inside. (T) And, they hauled something away […] My folks saw it when it passed over the Great Lakes! I missed it. I was over at a friend’s house. We walked out of the house ten minutes after it happened and everybody was saying: “Did you see that! Did you see that!” […] Could this have been a human experiment using technology from WWII, from the Einstein work, the Philadelphia Experiment work? Could they have been messing with something and it came down where it wasn’t supposed to? […] It was described as a small acorn-shaped capsule, a lot like what we were shooting up at that time on rockets. […] (L) Is Terry on to something here?
A: Maybe…
Q: […] (L) OK, on December 9, 1965, there was a reported UFO crash at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. This was purported […] to be a crash of a Soviet spy satellite. […] Was the event that occurred on December 9, 1965, in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a crash of a UFO [i.e. an “alien space craft”]? […]
A: Close.
Q: (L) It was not a Soviet spy satellite?
A: No.
Q: (L) Now, you say “close.” What, specifically, was it?
A: […] Density 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, now, how does the concept of “craft” apply here?
Q: (L) Was it a projection? A transdimensional, atomically remolecularized object?
A: Closer. [See the series on UFOs.]
Q: (L) Piloted by, I would assume, the Grays? (T) Not necessarily.
A: ! If you prefer.
Q: (T) Well, if it was a craft as they have been telling us, brought in from 4th density, it would be the Lizards or someone else of the other side, the [Orion] Union.
A: The point is the mode of transfer.
Q: (L) OK, so it may be that it didn’t crash there […] Did something happen, and something came through the dimensional curtain? Is that it? (T) Well, it didn’t crash, it landed! Or materialized, or became solid. (L) I think NORAD tracked it. (J) It was seen as a fireball.
A: Colder.
Q: (T) OK, this is just a theory, a thought, just something I am throwing out here, nothing positive. The military was “Johnny on the spot.” They made a big production of hauling it out of there and threatening everyone. What if it was put there, or sent here for them? Not that it crashed, but it was something being sent from there to there and then Uncle [Sam?] came and picked it up?
A: No.
Q: (L) The point is the “mode of transfer.” (T) The point is that it was “cross density.” (J) Well, we know that they all are “cross density.” […] (L) What are they trying to say? (T) It was materialized here from 4th density. It didn’t fly here. (L) OK, it was not a UFO, because it never “flew.” (T) The trail that was seen coming in was it materializing into the atmosphere. (L) Actually, it was materializing in the same spot, the atmosphere moved. (T) There was a visible path left. (J) I think we should stop using the term “UFO.”
A: Isn’t this fun?! […] The point is why look for “nuts and bolts.” Do you want to join Gene and his cronies? [Gene was MUFON member with a strictly materialist view of UFOs: they all come from other planets, period. According to David Paulides, the region in question is host to a lot of high strangeness, suggesting it may be a window area.]
Q: (L) So, in other words, are you saying that something happened and the military went in and didn’t get anything?
A: No.
Q: […] (L) Was this something that the military knew was going to happen at that place and that time?
A: Maybe, but still not issue behind this query.
Q: (L) Well, what is the issue? I just wanted to know if the blasted thing was a UFO or a spy satellite? Was it not a crash? (T) It was reported as a crash, but we don’t know if it crashed or landed. (J) We don’t know what really happened. (L) Was it a crash of a craft?
A: What defines “crash?”
Q: (L) Did it do something it didn’t want to do? (Laughter) A crash is when you go bongo-zongo without intending to.
A: Do thought-forms crash?

The answers below from August 12 and those on Roswell, further below, suggest that they can malfunction and experience catastrophic failure. However, in the case of Kecksburg, there are hints that the craft did not crash per se. Stringfield first heard about Kecksburg in 1979 from former NICAP director Clark McClelland, who reported:

A loud aerial explosion occurred causing several shock waves that were experienced by private and commercial aircraft pilots flying over Michigan and Lake St. Clair, east of Detroit. During the explosion, pilots and people on the ground observed something detach from the glowing form and fall to earth […]

The object was calculated to have been travelling at around 1,000 mph (meteors usually travel at least 25,000 mph). According to Stan Gordon:

Several witnesses, who saw the object making a slow descent towards the Kecksburg area, independently describe the object hovering for a period of time, before slowly descending towards the wooded area. These reports seem to indicate that the object, whatever it was, had some control, and did not crash as the term might indicate. There apparently was little structur[al] damage to the object, and no fire or major damage at the site. Even though some area residents heard a loud explosive sound about the time of the occurrence, a number of people who actually saw the object fall into the woods, then blue smoke rise (then quickly dissipate), said that there was no sound at the moment of impact.

Q: (J) OK! It was a thought-form; it came through the density and yet they hauled something away on a truck. […] Did they haul away something?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) What did they haul away? […]
A: Sorry! 64,000-dollar question!
Q: […] (T) The only thing known is that on December 9, the residents of Kecksburg, PA, saw something come down, or thought they saw something come down […] (T) They saw the military come in. […] And they saw the military take something away. (J) So, what does that tell you? (T) There are residents who said they saw a large, metallic object in the woods, and we only know what they said they saw. Most of the town and the police department and the fire department did see the military come in because they commandeered the fire department.

Stringfield includes several updates on Stan Gordon’s Kecksburg research in his status reports. NASA currently maintains the object was likely a meteor fireball. However, the object’s observed flight path did not match a fireball or space debris. Randy Overly, for example, described it as “slow-moving” and Bill Bulebush said it appeared to slow down and change direction. The object itself was described by locals who found it as bell- or acorn-shaped, dull copper or bronze in color, seemingly cast in a mold, and ringed with strange hieroglyphic writing (definitely not Russian, according to Jim Romansky, who could read Cyrillic). The markings were described as consisting of “broken and straight lines, dots, rectangles and circles.”

The military admitted to sending just a three-person team from Project Blue Book to investigate, but witnesses reported a much larger military presence – documented contemporaneously in local media. At one point, NASA claimed it had analyzed debris from the site, but later claimed the records were either missing or destroyed.

Gordon interviewed a former air force officer “who was stationed at Lockbourne AFB,” where he guarded the object during a stopover before it made its way to Wright-Patterson. Two or three days after the recovery operation, Myron, who drove a truck for his cousin J.S.’s shale and tile/brick business, received an order from the Navy for a special type of glazed brick to be delivered to Wright-Patterson for the construction of “a double-thick, lead-lined structure” within an already existing brick warehouse. While making the second delivery of bricks, he observed a military flatbed truck carrying a bronze, bell-shaped object matching the description of the Kecksburg craft, with a tarp draped “over its mid-section.” The next day, he saw the same object within the building, surrounded by scaffolding. Myron asked one of the military workmen about the object and was told that “he was still trying to get inside.” All prior attempts, including diamond head drills and acids, had failed. “I was surprised when he told me that if there were bodies inside, they might be too hot for the morticiain to handle.” J.S. independently confirmed Myron’s story, saying that he (J.S.) had seen the object the day before, when he had brought a first load of bricks to the base.

Gordon comments: “This case, regardless of the nature of the object involved, is important because it shows that our military already had in place, a procedure to quickly respond to crashes of aerial objects of undetermined origin.” Dr. Eric Walker, whom Dr. Robert Sarbacher had recommended to researchers as someone who had attended meetings at Wright-Patterson on UFO matters, told Henry Azadehel that he had personally participated in the Kecksburg recovery, but would not comment further. While Gordon remained agnostic as to the object’s origin, he had two former military sources who independently told him they had read the same report (at different bases) which concluded that “the object was extraterrestrial.”

As to the possibility of bodies, Ryan Wood quotes a few potential sources. Years after his initial testimony, and in poor health, Myon told Gordon and a film crew that “he also saw a body lying on a workbench in that same room.” He described the body as approximately 4 to 5 feet tall, perhaps 80 pounds. He could only see a hand sticking out from its white covering: “He indicated that he could only see three fingers, and the skin looked ‘lizard like.’” Another witness, “Joel,” describes how he observed a hatch open while the object was still in the woods of Kecksburg. “When it opened there was an odd whirling-hissing sound, and Joel said he saw what looked like ‘two fingers and an unusually long arm’ extend out of the hatch,” which then closed.

August 12, 1995 (direct channeling)

Q: (L) So, there are actual, material, alien craft that have been captured or retrieved by the government and studied?
A: Do you have any doubt of this?
Q: (L) Well, sometimes I wonder if the whole thing is cooked up by the government just to make us all crazy!
A: […] We can assure you, that that is not, in any way, correct.
Q: (L) Well, if these craft emerge into our reality from 4th density, as I assume some of them do, how do they stay here? Do they become absolutely physically material and do they remain here?
A: If they malfunction in 3rd density, they then become frozen in 3rd density. Very simple. [This excerpt was previously discussed in the series on UFOs.]
Q: (L) And, does the same hold true for the beings?
A: Precisely. […]
Q: (L) So we have some real things happening, and a possibility that a film was taken of this interaction with these malfunctioning 4th-density beings and craft. And, supposedly, this film is going to be shown on television. Is this film of this autopsy, and examination of craft remains, a true filming of same, or is it a fake, or fraud?
A: Well, one would suggest that for the maximum amount of learning, that the film be witnessed by those seeking the truth, in order to determine for themselves whether or not it is factual, as such will be possible upon viewing. [Discussed further below in the section on biologics.]

“Dr. Epigoni,” describing the cadavers associated with a UFO which had landed at Edwards AFB sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, told the following to researcher Ron Madelay, an associate of Stringfield:

They [the scientific team] came to the conclusion that since there was no deterioration [of the bodies], to leave them alone, because another craft may come in the area and rejuvenate or reactivate them. […] every one of them told me the same thing: those were not dead. […] They are either alive and in a state of suspended animation or they’re activated by another craft of by someone in that craft.

December 2, 1995

Q: (L) Did the Germans capture […] or retrieve a crashed UFO during the war?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Who was flying that craft – excuse me – operating that craft?
A: Grays.

There are reports of both the U.S. and UK recovering UFOs during World War II. One MJ-12 document (to be discussed in a later series) refers to a naval salvage operation that recovered an “unidentified airplane [with] no bearing on conventional explanation” after the so-called Battle of Los Angeles in 1942. Stringfield heard a report that England’s 8th Air Force retrieved a foo fighter. However, the fullest account from this time period is that of the Magenta, Italy, retrieval in 1933.

The craft, described as bell-shaped (perhaps because its surrounding saucer had been destroyed), was discovered on April 11, 1933, and subsequently studied by a team named RS/33, headed by electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi (in collaboration with Nazi scientists) and authorized by Benito Mussolini. (Journalist Christopher Sharp states that he heard from a source that two Nordic-type beings were found in this crash.) Initially researched by Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti, the first apparent allusion to the crash was a casual remark during a 1995 lecture by Phil Schneider. According to David Grusch, the Italians held onto the craft until the end of the war, at which point the Americans took it into their possession.

January 13, 2024

Q: (Keit) Is Russia in the possession of alien vehicles, tech and bodies as claimed?
A: Yes.

In 1978, Stringfield reported that one of his informants, Robert Barry, had learned from “a reliable Intelligence source that Red China has two ‘downed’ UFOs, one of which landed in water without occupants; and that there were two, possibly three crashes and retrievals in Russia.” He also reported on alleged crash retrievals in East Germany (1981) and Dalnegorsk (1986). Russian test pilot and air force colonel Dr. Marina Popovich wrote: “The Soviet Air Force and the KGB have fragments of five crashed UFOs in its possession,” claiming the sites included Tunguska, Novosibirsk, Tallinn (Estonia), Vladikavkaz (Caucasus) and Dalnegorsk. Wood also includes the Skrunda, Latvia, case from 1968, which reportedly involved a large disc shot down by a Russian S-200A air defense system and resulted in 3 dead occupants and 1 survivor.

Over the past several years, crash retrievals entered the mainstream. During the writing of his 2021 book In Plain Sight, journalist Ross Coulthart befriended Nat Kobitz, the former Director of Advanced Technology Development and Assessment and Director of Research and Development for the U.S. Navy, who implied to Coulthart that he had knowledge that Roswell, Aztec and Kingman “were all real incidents.” In his 2023 interview with Coulthart, David Grusch asserted the reality of the Magenta case and strongly implied that of Roswell. In early 2024, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon shared messages he exchanged in 2020 with a high-ranking government official who claimed to have discovered the program dealing with the craft recovered at Kingman. And in June 2025, Coulthart interviewed Jake Barber, who claimed to have performed crash retrievals as a helicopter pilot for two major aerospace companies (probably Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin).

In 2024, the Infographics Show produced a short video on the claims of an anonymous firsthand retrieval witness. The alleged witness claimed that the most frequently recovered craft are egg- and bell-shaped, which are likely unmanned drones (in line with what the C’s state in the series on UAP). “UAP Gerb,” who produced the documentaries featured in this article, is the best crash-retrieval investigator active today.