In a diner, according to the story, three tall blond strangers sat down across from a former U.S. Army psychic spy and told him they were extraterrestrials.
They were Nordics, they said — beings from another world, living quietly in small mountain towns in Colorado, passing as Scandinavian. They were fleeing a tyrannical home government, building a half-human family tree on American soil, and they needed help evading the CIA. The spy they approached was Lyn Buchanan, who claims to have worked in the CIA's remote viewing program. What Buchanan allegedly did with that encounter — and what he allegedly learned from it — has now become one of the stranger claims circulating in UAP disclosure circles: that the Central Intelligence Agency engineered a covert backdoor into 23andMe and Ancestry.com, specifically to identify and flag users carrying extraterrestrial DNA.
The story deserves scrutiny not because it is obviously true, but because of how it traveled, who is telling it, and what gets added each time it moves.
The claim and its single point of origin
The primary published account comes from a Vice article by Ashley Fike, dated May 28, 2026. The source is Jason Reza Jorjani, a philosopher and novelist with a PhD, who says Buchanan told him the story. Jorjani relayed it on the podcast American Alchemy. A NewsNation report by Rob Taub, published two days earlier, on May 26, covered the same claim.
Neither Buchanan nor Jorjani is cited providing a contemporaneous document, a named corroborating witness, or a verifiable date for the alleged diner encounter. The entire architecture of the CIA-23andMe allegation rests on a single chain: Buchanan told Jorjani, Jorjani told a podcast audience, journalists reported what Jorjani said. That is three links, and the first is unverifiable.
The specific mechanism alleged is that former CIA analyst Christopher "Kit" Green, who was involved in the agency's remote viewing program in the 1970s, allegedly engineered a backdoor into 23andMe to screen users for a genetic variance linked to nonhuman beings. Green left the CIA well before either consumer DNA company existed. No document, legal filing, FOIA release, or named intelligence official has confirmed any aspect of this claim. The CIA has not publicly responded to it.
Buchanan's own reported behavior is worth noting. According to the Vice account, he has said he would never submit his own DNA to 23andMe — a posture consistent with believing the claim, but not evidence that the claim is true. He also pointed to the category sometimes labeled "other" or "unknown unidentifiable" on consumer ethnicity breakdowns, saying that government people are reportedly looking into that wedge. That is attributed to Buchanan in Vice. It is a claim, not a finding.
"unknown unidentifiable"
The story then acquired a second layer. Geneticist Dr. Max Rempel is cited in the Vice piece as having published a study asserting that alien DNA may have already been inserted into the human genome, potentially affecting millions of people. According to Vice, Rempel added that we need to consider how much alien hybridization is healthy for the planet. No journal, institution, peer review record, or methodology is named for this study in the available reporting. The claim that alien DNA potentially affects millions of people is listed in the underlying reporting as contradicted — the assertion conflicts with itself in its own framing, oscillating between Rempel's specific study claim and the broader population-level assertion without resolving how either was measured or what genetic marker would constitute alien origin.
What the pattern of amplification looks like
What is traceable here is less a conspiracy and more a recognizable amplification loop — one that the UAP beat has seen before.
A claim is introduced on a podcast by a secondary source relaying what a primary source told him. Journalists report the secondary account. Bloggers and aggregators pick up the journalistic reports. Each iteration tends to flatten the attribution chain. By the time the claim reaches a tier-4 aggregator, it often reads as established fact rather than as a philosopher repeating what a former psychic spy allegedly said over what amounts to hearsay about a diner conversation with extraterrestrials.
The Nordics story is particularly worth slowing down on. The claim that tall, blond, blue-eyed beings from another world approached a retired Army intelligence officer in a restaurant, disclosed their extraterrestrial origin, and asked for help evading a U.S. intelligence agency is — to state the obvious — extraordinary. The Vice piece handles it with appropriate dry skepticism while still reporting it. But the downstream coverage has not always maintained that register.
None of the open questions this claim raises have been answered in the public record. Who are the three individuals? Where and when did the encounter occur? Has Buchanan ever provided a sworn statement, a contemporaneous written account, or a date? These are the basic evidentiary gates that would need to exist before a claim of this magnitude could be treated as anything more than attributed testimony.
Meanwhile, the CIA's alleged interest in consumer genetics databases does not lack for real-world context — just not the kind being invoked here. The U.S. intelligence community's relationship with commercial data, including genetic data, is a documented and ongoing policy debate. But that documented reality is categorically different from the claim that the CIA is specifically hunting extraterrestrial DNA markers in 23andMe's customer base. Conflating the two — gesturing at real surveillance concerns to lend weight to an unverified supernatural one — is a rhetorical move that deserves to be named.
What the official record does and doesn't say
The one primary document in the vicinity of this story is a FOIA release from AARO — Case Number 330UAP000032, reviewed by the Chief of Staff of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and released in part on March 27, 2025, then cleared for open publication by the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review on June 13, 2025. It is a memorandum for record, dated January 8, 2024, documenting AARO's multiple attempts to interview David Grusch, the intelligence official who testified before Congress about alleged U.S. government possession of non-human materials and reverse-engineering programs. The document records that between June 2023 and November 2023, AARO made repeated attempts — through intermediaries, Senate staff members, and Grusch's known associates — to secure an interview. Grusch rebuffed multiple overtures. On November 10, 2023, according to the document, Grusch contacted AARO at the urging of Congressional staff members and agreed to proceed.
This document is real, sourced, and significant. It tells us that AARO was actively trying to get Grusch on record and that he repeatedly declined — a dynamic that matters for evaluating both what the office knew and what Grusch was willing to put into an official government record. But it says nothing about 23andMe, alien DNA, or Kit Green. It is cited here because it is the only primary government document in this cluster of claims — and its presence makes the contrast with the DNA story sharper, not weaker.
The broader disclosure environment this spring and summer has included genuine official activity: the Department of War published a fourth release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files on WAR.GOV/UFO in July 2026, confirmed by a U.S. Department of War press release and covered by CBS News, among others. Lawmakers have hosted whistleblowers and UFO investigators, as the Washington Times reported in late May. NewsNation's Alicia Sitz reported that aerospace policy analyst Michael Gold argued publicly that UAP whistleblowers need legal protections from threats and retribution — a position that reflects genuine congressional concern about the treatment of sources, whatever one thinks of the underlying claims.
This is the environment in which the 23andMe story is circulating. Some of the surrounding activity is documented and verifiable. The DNA claim is not. That distinction matters, and the current media environment — in which podcast testimony, advocacy blogs, and tier-one news aggregators sit in the same feed — makes it harder to maintain.
The specific gap that would change this picture is straightforward: a named, on-record statement from Lyn Buchanan, with a date and location for the alleged diner encounter, or any documentary evidence that Christopher Green accessed 23andMe's database in any capacity. Without one of those, this story remains what it currently is — an attributed claim, one source deep, traveling much farther than its evidence warrants.