The UFO control panel in Lyn Buchanan's story

The hangar

Lyn Buchanan's American Alchemy interview covers remote viewing, Mars, alien bases, Rendlesham, a future through 2050, and Chernobyl. The line that travels is shorter than all of that. It is one sentence, spoken in a hangar.

Buchanan says he was inside a hangar where aircraft wreckage was being examined after mid-air collisions. A friend was showing him around. Piles of debris sat across the floor.

In one pile, 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.

The hangar is not named. The collision is not named. The unit and date are not named. No image and no second witness appear in the episode. The story is Buchanan's.

The STARGATE record

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.

The interview runs next to a real intelligence program.

CIA's 2021 account says it began its research into psychic phenomena in 1972, moved the effort to the Defense Intelligence Agency after 1977, and later took the program back for review before the records became public. The program became publicly known as STARGATE.

The same CIA article says the mid-1990s review found 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 as an official program is the documented part. The hangar panel, the Mars walks, the alien bases, the prophecy, and the 2050 collapse are not.

What Buchanan says

Asked 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 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 turns the episode: "That's out of a UFO."

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

The panel

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 makes the claim stronger as a scene and weaker as evidence: it sounds concrete, but the episode gives the viewer no way to check the concrete parts.

Around the hangar

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.

An in-person claim

Buchanan's 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 account. The public material is a real program on one side and a sentence spoken in a hangar on the other.

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.