UFO crash retrievals are the claimed recoveries of non-human craft, debris and bodies by the United States military, a category first catalogued under that name by Cincinnati researcher Leonard Stringfield. In this episode of the 4biddenknowledge Podcast, Billy Carson hosts military aerospace historian Michael Schratt, who walks through a dozen of Stringfield's anonymous military witness accounts from 1942 to 1953, shows the drawings he has commissioned from them, and argues that the witnesses, taken together, outweigh the Air Force's denial. Carson's position is that the circumstantial evidence is enough to make a case; the mainstream reading is that anonymous testimony, however voluminous, has never produced a verifiable artifact.
The topic matters because crash-retrieval claims sit at the centre of the disclosure debate: the recent congressional hearings, David Grusch's testimony and the Pentagon's historical review all turned on the question Stringfield asked in 1978, whether the government holds recovered craft.
What the video covers
Who Michael Schratt is (from about 3:50)
Schratt is a private pilot and military aerospace historian who researches classified black-budget aircraft built at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. His interest began at age five among derelict warbirds at the Victory Air Museum outside Chicago and continued through 27 years at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, where he spoke in 2006 and 2007. He interviews pilots and engineers, commissions line drawings from their descriptions, then colour renderings. Asked by Carson whether contractors are reverse-engineering UFO technology, Schratt says the answer lies in what the witnesses, as a body, are saying.
The premise (from about 6:40)
The lecture, "Retrievals of the Third Kind: Cosmic Crashes, Corpses and Cover-ups", is a tribute to Stringfield's 1978 paper. Schratt calls crash retrievals the holy grail of the subject because they bundle bodies, debris and craft into one category, and says 2024 is "the final curtain call on UFO crash retrievals" because the legacy witnesses, including the last of the 509th Bomb Group from Roswell, have died. He sets them against the Air Force's July 1980 statement that there have never been extraterrestrial visitors or equipment at Wright-Patterson.
Leonard Stringfield (from about 10:30)
Stringfield (1920–1994) ran the civilian group CRIFO in the mid-1950s and wrote "Inside Saucer Post 3-0 Blue" (1957) and "Situation Red: The UFO Siege" (1977). His 1978 MUFON symposium paper in Dayton presented twelve first-hand military witnesses under a promise of anonymity, which drew both an international reaction and immediate pushback: nothing could be checked. Schratt says the witnesses ranged from Air Force generals to pathologists and Wright-Patterson engineers, and that 22 bank boxes of drawings and testimony once existed, "the Rosetta Stone of ufology". It began, he says, with Stringfield's own August 1945 foo-fighter sighting from a C-47 between Okinawa and Iwo Jima (from about 13:35).
The source book and the roulette analogy (from about 15:25)
Everything that follows comes from "UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Complete Investigation, Status Reports I–VII", a dense text with no illustrations that Schratt has spent four years turning into drawings, with page numbers so viewers can check. He pairs it with Ryan Wood's "Majic Eyes Only" (104 cases) and argues from numbers: a roulette wheel with 120 spaces and 119 bets, where only one case needs to be authentic for the denial to fail. He credits his sketch artist Rudy and volunteer illustrators.
The cases, 1942 to 1947 (from about 18:00)
The first case (page 319) is a 1942 crash into a building at an unnamed army base in north Georgia: a 15-foot, three-level craft, four live crew about five feet tall with large black eyes, and hieroglyphic-style writing around the rim. At Wright Field, Dayton, in 1946 (pages 242–243), six-year-old Tex Martin, visiting his avionics-mechanic father, saw through a hangar doorway an 18-foot disc with two rings and three small bodies on stretchers. A 1947 Wright Field case from a memoir by Clark McClelland describes a polished 15-foot disc shipped from Arkansas by rail, with no welds, seams or screws, which technicians failed to open with diamond-tipped drill bits, a detail that recurs in two other cases.
Schratt then reads from General Nathan Twining's memo of 23 September 1947, which calls the phenomenon "something real and not visionary or fictitious" (from about 26:40). A January 1947 case west of Globe, Arizona (page 93) has two servicemen stopped by armed military police near a 30-foot tilted disc; a source in Stringfield's notes adds that the Foote Brothers Gear and Machine Company of Chicago analysed pieces from an Arizona crash.
White Sands on 4 July 1947 (page 196) is a night recovery of a 150-foot disc under floodlights with cameras rolling; Schratt argues cleared legislators should obtain that film (from about 30:40). A Berkeley warehouse case (page 197) has a metallurgical engineer watching a 30-foot cracked-egg-shaped craft arrive by truck, and a field south of Salinas, California, has two farm workers finding a nine-foot disc; one kicked it, and a military convoy arrived within minutes.
Danny Sheehan and the microfilm photographs (from about 36:15)
The longest segment concerns Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-trained lawyer, who has said that in January 1977, working through the Congressional Research Service, he was admitted to a basement room of the James Madison Memorial Building to review classified Project Blue Book microfilm. He says he found three photographs of a winter recovery: a 30-foot disc tipped at about 30 degrees, a mound of earth where it stopped, hieroglyph-like markings around a low dome, and four men in fur-trimmed parkas with still and movie cameras. Schratt and his artist sat with Sheehan to reconstruct the image, rotating the scene and lowering the tilt until Sheehan accepted it as the closest they would get without the photograph. From the camera type, Schratt dates the scene to between 1948 and 1961.
Storage sites and the later cases (from about 48:35)
One Stringfield witness said the files are held at Wright-Patterson, CIA headquarters and NSA headquarters, and named MacDill and Seymour Johnson Air Force Bases among the craft storage sites; Schratt's reading is that early recoveries went to Wright Field's Foreign Technology Division and were later dispersed.
A highway engineer described a nine-foot craft loaded into a C-119 Flying Boxcar in Mexico around 1948 (page 32), with three badly burned small bodies. A radar operator at Naval Air Station Sunnyvale in 1950 (page 57) saw a 100-foot domed disc inside Hangar One. Schratt then turns to the Farmington, New Mexico, mass sighting of 1950 and the July 1952 headlines ordering jet pilots to shoot down saucers (from about 54:10). He says F-94 Starfires flew the intercepts with gun cameras running, that the order was rescinded after aircraft and pilots were lost, and cites Frank Feschino's "Shoot Them Down!". A 1979 letter to Stringfield relays a former gunner's story of filming shells bursting against a UFO and being interrogated over 17 seconds of film.
Three more follow (from about 58:55): a classified materials library at an unnamed base (pages 212–213) with a report that an entry hatch opened as though the metal "liquefied and solidified again"; a 1952 Pentagon office worker (page 152) who found a preserved being in a glass jar in a basement room; and Cecil Tenney's 1953 sighting near Dutton, Montana, of a 120-foot cigar-shaped object trailing smoke and flame, followed by questioning at Great Falls Air Force Base, later Malmstrom, which Schratt links to the 1967 Malmstrom missile shutdown. The last case is Fort Polk, Louisiana, summer 1953 (page 80), where a private described medics helping four-foot beings in green flight suits who staggered because they had no knee joints (from about 65:30).
Key takeaways
Schratt's lecture rests entirely on Leonard Stringfield's "Status Reports", anonymous first-hand military accounts gathered between 1978 and 1994.
His argument is statistical rather than forensic: with 119 cases, only one needs to be genuine for the official denial to collapse.
The Twining memo of September 1947 is authentic and calls the phenomenon real, but it is not a crash-retrieval document.
Daniel Sheehan's 1977 microfilm account is the one case tied to a named, living witness, and it remains uncorroborated by any released photograph.
Carson's conclusion is that enough circumstantial evidence has been assembled to convict in a courtroom, which is a legal standard rather than a scientific one.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson lets Schratt carry the lecture and sums up: in America "you can actually be convicted of a crime" on enough circumstantial evidence, and he believes Schratt has compiled enough to make a case that retrieved vehicles and bodies exist. That fits his position that disclosure is being managed in stages and that the real programmes sit inside special access programmes beyond congressional oversight, a view laid out in the secret space program explained. For Carson, the Stringfield witnesses, the Grusch testimony and the modern UAP hearings are one continuous story, and the repeated details across decades of accounts are the signature of a real programme rather than folklore. Carson also goes further than Schratt, treating recovered craft as part of a longer history of contact he reads back into ancient texts, the argument of ancient astronaut theory.
What mainstream scholarship says
Historians of the subject, including sceptical ones, accept that Stringfield was sincere. The difficulty is that every account was anonymous, most were decades old when told, and none produced a document, photograph or material that could be examined. Sociologists note that crash-retrieval stories became common only after Roswell was revived in the late 1970s, when Stringfield began collecting them, and that details such as small grey beings and seamless hulls recur between cases in a way consistent with cultural transmission.
On specifics, the Twining memo is authentic, but it also notes "the lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash-recovered exhibits", which cuts against the idea that Wright Field held wreckage in 1947. The Air Force's 1994 and 1995 Roswell reports attributed the debris to Project Mogul balloon trains. Project Blue Book closed in 1969 having found no evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles, and Sheehan's microfilm account has never been matched by a released image. The 1952 interception orders were real, but there is no documented loss of a pilot in combat with a UFO. The Air Force attributed the 1967 Malmstrom shutdown to an electronic noise pulse. Most directly, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) reported in 2024 that it found no verifiable evidence of any programme to retrieve or reverse-engineer non-human craft, the conclusion reached earlier about the Majestic 12 documents. Carson and Schratt answer that AARO lacked access to the compartments that matter; critics answer that this is unfalsifiable.
Watch, read and go deeper
The companion reading is the secret space program explained, which separates real classified aviation projects from the reverse-engineering claims. For the one named modern witness who says he worked on a recovered craft, see Bob Lazar and Area 51 explained. The official-files side, from Sign to the Condon Report, is in the Project Blue Book article above. On 4BK TV, Richard Dolan's UFO Chronicles covers the same early Cold War period from a historian's angle.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Leonard Stringfield?
Leonard H. Stringfield (1920–1994) was a Cincinnati UFO researcher who, from his 1978 paper "Retrievals of the Third Kind", collected anonymous military accounts of recovered craft and bodies, published in seven "Status Reports" between 1978 and 1994. He is credited with coining the term "crash retrieval".
What did the Twining memo actually say?
On 23 September 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining of Air Materiel Command wrote to Brigadier General George Schulgen that the reported flying discs were "something real and not visionary or fictitious" and recommended a formal study, which became Project Sign. The memo also noted the lack of crash-recovered physical evidence.
Has any UFO crash retrieval been verified?
No. The 2024 AARO historical report, the Air Force's Roswell reports and the Blue Book closure all concluded that no recovered non-human craft or bodies appear in government records. Proponents argue the records sit in compartments those reviews could not reach; critics note that no witness has produced a verifiable artifact.
Who is Michael Schratt?
Michael Schratt is a private pilot and military aerospace historian who researches classified aircraft programmes and has spoken at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh. He commissions drawings and renderings from witness descriptions; his current project illustrates Stringfield's cases.
Sources mentioned
Leonard H. Stringfield, "UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Complete Investigation, Status Reports I–VII", his 1978 MUFON paper "Retrievals of the Third Kind", and his books "Inside Saucer Post 3-0 Blue" (1957) and "Situation Red: The UFO Siege" (1977). Ryan S. Wood, "Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology". Frank Feschino Jr., "Shoot Them Down! The Flying Saucer Air Wars of 1952". A memoir by Clark McClelland for the 1947 Wright Field case. The Twining memorandum of 23 September 1947. Daniel Sheehan's account of the 1977 Library of Congress microfilm review. Newspaper clippings from the Albuquerque Journal, Cincinnati Enquirer, Chicago Tribune and Great Falls Tribune. For the mainstream side: the Air Force's "The Roswell Report" (1995) and "Case Closed" (1997); the Condon Report (1969); and the AARO historical record report, Volume I (2024).
