A former US Army serviceman who says he spent years on assignments involving the alleged concealment of extraterrestrial evidence has described a lifelong, telepathic connection with a so-called “mantis alien.”
Clifford Stone maintained that during roughly two decades in the military he assisted with efforts to recover downed craft and information related to multiple purported non-human species. He also said his first unusual experience began much earlier, when he was still a child.
In 2001, he appeared at the Washington National Press Club to speak about what he characterized as a covert Army initiative focused on collecting materials from reported UFO crash locations.
Stone’s most personal claim, however, did not involve a face-to-face encounter. The former Army sergeant and Vietnam veteran said he had been in telepathic communication since childhood with a mantis-like being he called Korona.
Even with Stone’s statements on record, it’s worth emphasizing that there is no reliable evidence confirming alien life. Nor is there a definitive resolution to the Fermi paradox: if advanced civilizations have existed elsewhere in the galaxy over billions of years, why don’t we see clear signs of them?
Still, his account of a mantis-like entity resembles numerous reports over the years describing insectoid, bug-eyed figures—an overlap that is also echoed in claims attributed to a former CIA-linked researcher.
The Daily Mail reports that physicist Dr Hal Puthoff, who worked on government UFO-related research in the 1970s and 1980s, has said the US government categorizes alleged alien “types” into four broad groups.
As described, those groupings include the small, large-eyed Grays; pale “Nordics”; scaly, allegedly shapeshifting Reptilians; and Insectoids—where Stone’s “mantoid” Korona would fit.
Stone, who died in 2021, previously spoke about what those communications were like, claiming Korona perceived more than thoughts alone. He said: “The entity even told me that he could feel the emotions that I felt.
“From that day on, I would have, at his pleasure, interactions with this entity, who would later tell me that his name was Korona.”
He also suggested that supposed encounters may appear random because, in his view, many non-human beings are already present among people, observing behavior to better understand what it is to be human.
Why Stone believed he was selected for these interactions remains unclear. He pointed to the contrast between his official military paperwork—showing mostly clerical and administrative responsibilities—and what he claimed was his true role behind the scenes.
According to Stone, that hidden work involved retrieving alleged non-human vehicles and life forms from crash sites, sometimes involving living occupants. Skeptics, however, often raise an obvious question: how could a species capable of interstellar travel be unable to land safely?
Stone told the Press Club in 2001: “I was involved in situations where we actually did recoveries of crashed saucers. There were bodies that were involved in some of these crashes. Also, some of these were alive.”
No official agency has verified Stone’s allegations. Some argue the absence of public proof is itself suggestive of secrecy, while others see it as reason for doubt. As former President Obama joked, if aliens were being kept at Area 51, someone would ‘have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend.’