The bodies
Has any government ever actually had a body?
This is the question underneath all of it. Not lights, not radar returns, not a shape in an infrared frame — a body, on a table, that somebody could walk you in to see. We searched all 5,267 events in this archive and all 2,156 declassified records the Department of War released in 2026, and the answer is short enough to fit in one sentence.
There is no government document in this archive in which a government says it has recovered a non-human body.
That needs stating carefully, because it is not the same as saying the documents are silent. They are not. The declassified files talk about bodies a great deal. The distinction that matters — the one almost every retelling collapses — is between a government making a claim and a government writing down somebody else's.
The single most famous document in this field is the Guy Hottel memo, and it is an FBI agent typing up what an informant told him: three saucers, in New Mexico, each with three occupants three feet tall. The Bureau did nothing with it, because the story had come up through the Aztec hoax circuit and the man at the root of it, Silas Newton, was convicted of fraud in 1953. The memo is authentic. The recovery is not. Those are two different facts and the memo is routinely used to assert the second by producing the first.
Work forward seventy years and the pattern holds. AARO's Historical Record Report describes KONA BLUE — a Homeland Security programme, proposed and never approved, whose purpose would have been to handle recovered biologics. A plan to handle bodies is not a body. AARO's Roswell review, also in this archive, leads with a denial: if the Air Force recovered alien bodies, the reviewing officer was not told about it. And David Grusch told Congress under oath that non-human biologics have been recovered, while stating plainly that he has never handled any and is relaying what other people told him.
In the whole archive, exactly one non-human body was ever physically handed to the authorities. Two men in Mableton, Georgia, in 1953, said they had run something over on the road — pinkish skin, a pointed head, no hair. They brought it in. It was a shaved monkey. That is the complete physical record of extraterrestrial biology in 5,267 cases, and it is worth sitting with, because it is the only entry in the column where something actually got weighed.
None of which means the entity reports are worthless. The archive holds ninety-seven declassified files in which somebody described a figure, and many of those people were plainly terrified and plainly telling the truth as they understood it. The Hopkinsville family shot at something around their farmhouse for four hours and then drove to the police. Lonnie Zamora saw two small figures in white beside an object that left burn marks and landing impressions the Air Force could never explain. Those cases are real and they are open. What they are not is a recovery. Nobody picked anything up.
Recovered and analysed
A laboratory examined the object and reported what it was.
2 cases
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The only case in 5,267 events where a body was actually handed to the authorities. Two men said they had run over a creature with pinkish skin and a pointed head. It was a shaved monkey. This is the entire physical record of non-human biology in this archive.
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AARO's Roswell review. The line the file leads with is a denial: if the Air Force recovered alien bodies, they did not tell the reviewing officer about it. The bodies in the 1947 desert are attributed to anthropomorphic crash-test dummies.
A real file, recording a rumour
The government document is authentic. What it contains is the government writing down a claim it did not make and did not check.
4 cases
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Three saucers, and in each one, three occupants three feet tall. This is an FBI agent recording what an informant said, and the Bureau did nothing with it — because the story came out of the Aztec hoax circuit. It is the single most misrepresented document in the field.
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Eighteen dead three-foot occupants in a disc in the Mojave, as told to an FBI contact by a man who heard it from someone else. Same hoax lineage as the Hottel memo.
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Photographs of a "Martian" in the custody of two Army military policemen, sold by one man to another and forwarded to the Bureau. The photographs were fakes.
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KONA BLUE — the closest the declassified record comes to an official document about recovered biologics, and it is AARO explaining that KONA BLUE was a proposed programme, never approved, premised on a belief that such material existed. A plan to handle bodies is not a body.
Claimed, never produced
Asserted by a witness, a whistleblower, or a document nobody can authenticate.
5 cases
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Non-human biologics have been recovered — said under oath, to Congress, by a man who states plainly that he has never handled any and is relaying what others told him.
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The strongest capture claim on Earth: a live creature, taken by the Brazilian military, witnessed by three young women. It rests entirely on testimony. No Brazilian government document in this archive corroborates any of it, and the Air Force has consistently denied it.
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Four glass jars of preserved bodies in the basement of the Capitol, sourced to one cousin, second-hand, decades later.
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Bodies you can actually go and look at — which is why we know they are assembled from the bones of humans and animals.
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A firefight between US special forces and grey aliens beneath a New Mexico mesa. There is no mesa entrance, no base, and no source but the story itself.
Came down, left a mark, found nothing
A search happened. It recovered nothing. These cases remain genuinely open.
3 cases
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A family shot at small figures around a farmhouse for four hours and then drove to the police, terrified. Police found a house full of bullet holes and no creatures. This is what the honest end of the entity record actually looks like: real fear, real witnesses, nothing to pick up.
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The founding abduction case, and the reason 'occupant' entered the vocabulary. Recovered from it: a torn dress, a bent trunk, and hypnotic testimony that Barney Hill's own psychiatrist did not think was a literal memory.
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Lonnie Zamora saw two small figures in white beside the object before it lifted off. He was the only witness to them, and they left nothing behind — but the object left landing marks, and Blue Book never explained it.
What would change this page
A body, held by an institution that would let an outside laboratory near it, with a chain of custody that starts at the recovery and does not break. Nothing in this archive is close to that, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to arrange the near-misses until they look like one.
Every case above carries its Alien Proof Index score — a deterministic reading of how far the evidence actually goes. The craft are dealt with separately in crash recovery, and the materials in recovered technology. The underlying files are in the disclosure archive, and you should read them rather than take our word for any of this.