The UFO control panel in Lyn Buchanan's story

The hangar

In the middle of Jesse Michels's new American Alchemy interview, Lyn Buchanan reaches a scene that is not remote viewing.

He says he was inside a hangar where aircraft wreckage was being examined after mid-air collisions. A friend was showing him around. There were piles of debris.

In one of those piles, he says, he saw a metal panel with a hand-shaped impression and holes where fingers would go. He says he recognized it from an earlier abduction memory.

Then, he says, he said it out loud: "That's out of a UFO."

According to Buchanan, the remark carried through the building, a colonel came out, and he was removed from the hangar.

That is the piece to follow: one physical scene, one unnamed hangar, and a story that either has more behind it or does not.

Why that line lands

Buchanan's new American Alchemy interview does not begin with a random witness. It begins near the U.S. government's remote-viewing program.

The CIA says its own research into remote viewing began in 1972, moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency after 1977, and later returned for review before the program became public.

That gives the interview a real floor before it moves into much stranger territory.

The STARGATE context

The CIA's version is much narrower than the interview.

In an official 2021 CIA article, the agency says it began its own research into psychic phenomena in 1972. The question was whether some people could describe distant places, objects, or events without being physically present. That ability was called remote viewing.

The CIA says it ended its own research in 1977 and handed the effort to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The program later became known publicly as STARGATE. In the mid-1990s, DIA handed the program back to CIA, and CIA agreed to review it only if an independent group evaluated the results.

That review did not give believers the clean win they might want. CIA's summary says there were enough accurate remote-viewing results to defy chance, but the effect was too unreliable, inconsistent, and sporadic for intelligence use. The program was not restored.

Remote viewing was an official intelligence program. That part is not folklore. The hangar panel, alien bases, Mars walks, and prophecy sit somewhere else.

Where Buchanan enters

Buchanan is presented in the episode as a former Army sergeant and remote viewer connected to the military remote-viewing world. His own training company describes him as a former remote viewer and trainer in the U.S. military's remote-viewing unit for eight and a half years before retiring from active duty in 1992.

That background puts him near a real program. It also changes what the UFO part of the interview needs. A recovered-craft story needs something other than a remote-viewing résumé.

The interview moves through alien bases on Earth and the Moon, Project 8200, Mount Hayes, Mount Zeil in Australia, Mars, Rendlesham, a future through 2050, and Chernobyl.

The cleanest part to isolate is smaller than all of that. It is a hangar.

The hangar scene

When Jesse Michels asks whether there is a connection between remote viewing and UFO crash retrievals, Buchanan says he does not think the remote-viewing unit was tied to crash retrieval. He says he heard of only one official UFO target, and that other UFO-related work came as practice sessions or informal requests from senior officers.

Then the story turns.

Buchanan says he once saw a control panel in a hangar and identified it as coming from a UFO. When Michels asks whether he had ever seen a UFO in U.S. military possession, Buchanan says the object he saw was not a complete craft, but debris in a hangar dealing with mid-air collisions.

He says he was there in person, not in a remote-viewing session. He describes walking through a building with piles of aircraft wreckage, then seeing a control panel in one debris pile. The short line he says he spoke in the hangar is the episode's hinge: "That's out of a UFO."

According to Buchanan, the remark echoed, a colonel came out, and he was removed from the place.

The location is not named. The aircraft collision is not named. The unit is not named. The date is not pinned down. No image or second witness appears in the episode.

So the story stays where Buchanan leaves it: specific, memorable, and unproven.

The panel itself

The object gets more specific later in the interview.

Buchanan describes a metal panel with the impression of a hand and holes associated with finger placement. In his telling, stopping or covering those holes controlled the ship. He connects the recognition of the panel to an earlier abduction memory, saying he had operated something like it before.

At that point the story leaves remote-viewing territory.

A control panel is not a vague light in the sky. Buchanan is describing an object, indoors, inside a military setting, seen at close range. That is why the claim is stronger as a scene and weaker as evidence: it sounds concrete, but the episode gives the viewer no way to check the concrete parts.

Rendlesham, Mars, and the pile-on

The episode does not stay with the panel.

Buchanan discusses the Rendlesham Forest incident, says UFO-related tasking sometimes happened outside formal channels, describes remote viewing Mars, and talks about alien bases on Earth and the Moon. He also says he viewed the future through 2050 and saw severe population loss, decentralization, and an agrarian turn after disasters and war.

That mix is what makes the interview worth handling carefully: one part official intelligence history, one part UFO and psi lore that still has to stand on Buchanan's account.

The hangar story is the cleanest piece because it is not cosmic. It is local. A room, a pile of wreckage, a panel, a colonel.

Why this one sticks

The interview has more than a wild clip title.

Buchanan's lane runs next to a real government program, and his biggest UFO story is not framed as a psychic session. It is framed as something he says happened in person.

That does not make it proven. It does make it harder to shrug off as just another remote-viewing claim. If the hangar scene happened as told, it had a place, a day, other people, and an object sitting in a pile of wreckage.

For now, the panel remains Buchanan's story. But it is a story with edges.

Sources

• Jesse Michels / American Alchemy: "I Operated a UFO... It's Not What You Think" - Army Sergeant Lyn Buchanan, published May 28, 2026. Local transcript saved from YouTube auto-captions.
• CIA: Ask Molly, Did CIA Really Study Psychic Powers?, October 27, 2021.
• CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: STARGATE collection.
• CIA Reading Room: STAR GATE operational tasking and evaluation.
• Lyn Buchanan's Controlled Remote Viewing Training: About Us.