Charred body in Colorado claim (1978)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 7
| Claimant | An anonymous Air Force technician |
|---|---|
| Reported to | Researcher Randall Clement |
| Claim | Saw a charred alien body at an underground facility in Colorado |
| Published in | Leonard Stringfield, Retrievals of the Third Kind (MUFON Symposium, July 1978), p. 85 per the testimony |
| Facility | Not identified |
| Status | Anonymous hearsay; no records or other witnesses |
| Date | 1978 |
| Topics | Beings & bodies (topic), Bases & Area 51 (topic) |
| People | Leonard Stringfield |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 82 |
| Year | 1978 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1978 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
According to an anonymous Air Force technician who reportedly spoke to the researcher Randall Clement, he saw a charred alien body at an underground facility in Colorado.[1][3] The account appears in Leonard Stringfield's crash-retrieval papers. The testimony this article draws on cites page 85 of Retrievals of the Third Kind, the paper Stringfield presented at the MUFON symposium in July 1978.[1][3] The technician was not named and the facility was not identified. Stringfield published the story as he received it, noting that he could not confirm it, and no records or other witnesses support the claim.[3]
The claim
As summarized in the earlier version of this article, the technician said that he saw a charred alien body in an underground facility in Colorado, and he passed this on to Clement. The account was dated to 1978.[1] The available summaries do not say what the body looked like beyond being charred, how it came to be there, or when exactly the technician saw it. They also do not show whether 1978 is the year of the sighting or only the year the story was published.[1][3] Colorado is home to several secure military sites. The best known is the Cheyenne Mountain Complex near Colorado Springs, a bunker and operations center built into the mountain for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and opened in February 1967.[6] There is no evidence that this or any other Colorado facility was the one the technician meant.[1]
Retrievals of the Third Kind
Stringfield presented "Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody" at the ninth annual MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, on 28 July 1978. It later counted unofficially as the first of his seven "Status Reports".[1][3][5] A three-part version appeared in the British Flying Saucer Review from its July–August 1979 issue.[3] Parts were also printed in the MUFON UFO Journal in 1978, including the first published account by the Roswell officer Jesse Marcel, identified only as "Major J.M.".[2]
Most of the paper consists of numbered "abstracts" summarizing anecdotes from unnamed informants. Many describe military witnesses being blindfolded and driven to crash sites, or seeing alien bodies packed in crates of dry ice.[3] Stringfield acknowledged that cases "without names to back up the informant's testimony can be construed as hearsay". He asked readers to trust his credibility, built over 29 years of UFO research.[3] Some stories were several steps removed. One came "first-hand" from the son of a man who had heard it from his cousin, an Air Force major.[3] Many informants contacted him after reading his 1977 book Situation Red.[3] A composite from "anonymous medical and military sources" described the recovered beings as 3½ to 4½ feet tall, with large heads and grey skin.[3]
Stringfield
Leonard Stringfield (1920–1994) said he first saw UFOs in 1945, when three brilliant lights paced his Air Force transport between Ie Shima and Tokyo.[4] He founded the group CRIFO and its newsletter Orbit in the 1950s and worked with NICAP. He was an "Early Warning Coordinator" for the Condon Committee and later sat on MUFON's board.[1][2] He worked in public relations for DuBois Chemicals in Cincinnati, died of lung cancer in December 1994, and left 60 volumes of papers to MUFON.[1][4]
The writer Charles Lear credits Stringfield's 1978 paper with making crash-retrieval research respectable among ufologists, much as Budd Hopkins's Missing Time did for abduction stories. In Lear's words, the two "were instrumental in raising the tent for the circus that UFOlogy was to become in the 1980s".[3]
Assessment
The technician was not named, the facility was not identified, and the story reached Stringfield through an intermediary.[1][3] Stringfield himself described such unnamed accounts as open to being treated as hearsay. No military records, other witnesses or physical evidence support the claim.[3]
People and topics
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
- NORAD — The U.S.–Canadian air defence command.
- Cheyenne Mountain — The NORAD command complex in Colorado.
- Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
- Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.
On the Timeline
- Project Windfall claim (1978) — John Keel says the CIA ran Project Windfall, an investigation of UAP contactees.
- Ohio crash with survivor claim (1978) (1978) — An Air Force officer reportedly heard of a crash with two dead and one live occupant near Ohio.
See every 1978 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- Leonard H. Stringfield — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Stringfield's 1978 report — Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- Leonard Stringfield's status report at the 1978 MUFON symposium — Podcast UFO · podcastufo.com · archived copy
- Retrobituaries: Leonard Stringfield — Mental Floss · mentalfloss.com · archived copy
- UFO Crash Retrievals: Status Report I — Goodreads · goodreads.com · archived copy
- Cheyenne Mountain Complex · en.wikipedia.org
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Leonard H. Stringfield”, “Cheyenne Mountain Complex”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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