Jason Reza Jorjani, a philosopher and novelist, appeared on a podcast called American Alchemy and described a conversation he says he had with Lyn Buchanan, an Army veteran who claims he served as a psychic spy in the CIA's remote viewing program. Buchanan, according to Jorjani, told him that a former CIA analyst named Christopher "Kit" Green had allegedly engineered a backdoor into 23andMe and Ancestry.com — specifically to screen users for a genetic variance linked to nonhuman beings.

That is the chain. A philosopher, relaying what a former psychic spy told him, about what a retired CIA analyst allegedly did. No document. No named agency source. No on-record statement from Green, from Buchanan, or from anyone inside 23andMe or the CIA.

Vice reported the story on May 28, 2026, under the byline of Ashley Fike. NewsNation followed two days later, with Rob Taub's piece headlined "CIA explored 23andMe, Ancestry for alien DNA links: Whistleblower." Both pieces attributed the claim accurately — to Jorjani, relaying Buchanan — but the headline compression that happens on social media stripped that attribution fast. Within days, the story was circulating as established fact: the CIA is hunting alien DNA in consumer genetics databases.

"CIA explored 23andMe, Ancestry for alien DNA links: Whistleblower."

It is worth pausing on what is actually confirmed here before tracing how the story grew.

What's real, what's claimed, and where they diverge

The CIA did run a remote viewing program. That is documented. The program, which investigated whether people could use extrasensory perception to gather intelligence on distant targets, is part of the public record and has been the subject of congressional inquiries and declassified reports. Buchanan's claim to have participated in it is unverified by the available sourcing, but the program itself is not in dispute.

Christopher "Kit" Green is also a real person — a former CIA analyst who, according to the Vice report, was involved in the remote viewing program in the 1970s. Green left the agency well before either 23andMe or Ancestry.com existed. That timeline gap is not a minor detail. It means any backdoor Green allegedly engineered would have required him to return to active intelligence work, establish access to private commercial genomics platforms, and do so without any documented trace — all after departing the CIA. None of that is addressed in the available sourcing, because the claim originates entirely with Jorjani's account of what Buchanan told him.

Buchanan himself has since said publicly that he would never submit his own DNA to 23andMe. He has also pointed to the "other" or "unknown unidentifiable" category that sometimes appears in commercial ethnicity breakdowns. "From what I found out, there are government people who are looking into that wedge," he said, according to the Vice report. That is a claim, not a finding. It does not identify who those government people are, under what authority they operate, or what looking into that wedge actually means in practice.

The backstory Jorjani attached to all of this is where the sourcing fully leaves the ground. Buchanan, according to Jorjani, was approached at a diner by three individuals who identified themselves as Nordics — tall, blond, blue-eyed beings from another world who are supposedly living among us in small mountain towns in Colorado, passing as Scandinavian. They had been running what Jorjani described as "an intergalactic underground railroad of sorts," fleeing a tyrannical home government and secretly building a half-human family tree on American soil. They asked Buchanan for help avoiding CIA detection. "They said, 'Look, our children, especially our grandchildren, have no idea where they're from,'" Jorjani said. "We just want them to have lives of peace and liberty here in America."

This is reported claim, not established fact. It is Jorjani's account of what Buchanan told him. Whether Buchanan said it, whether he believed it, and whether anything resembling it occurred are all unanswered questions.

Into this already-strained chain of transmission, add one more link. A geneticist named Dr. Max Rempel published a study — the Vice report says "last fall" — asserting that alien DNA may have already been inserted into the human genome, potentially affecting millions of people. Rempel was quoted saying "we need to consider how much alien hybridization is healthy for the planet." No journal, no institutional affiliation, and no peer review process was cited in the available coverage. That study has not been independently verified, and the claim sits in direct tension with itself: if alien DNA affects millions of people, the question of whether the CIA is looking for it in 23andMe becomes simultaneously more alarming and less coherent — because the variance, if real and that widespread, would not be a meaningful signal in a consumer database.

That contradiction has not been resolved, because no one with relevant expertise or authority has been asked to resolve it on the record.

The network around a single claim

What makes this story worth examining beyond its surface absurdity is the broader network it sits inside.

The claim about CIA genetic surveillance arrived in the same news cycle as genuine, documented activity: the Trump administration directing the Pentagon and other agencies to gather and release UFO and UAP files, with the Department of War publishing its fourth release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files on WAR.GOV/UFO as recently as July 10, 2026. CBS News covered that release. The Economic Times covered it. LAmag covered it. Real documents, real release events — even if what those documents contain remains contested.

Also circulating simultaneously: an AARO memorandum, Case Number 330UAP000032, released in part on March 27, 2025, and cleared for open publication by the Department of Defense on June 13, 2025. That document, reviewed by the Chief of Staff of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office under the authority of the FY24 NDAA, now codified at 44 U.S.C. 2107, describes AARO's repeated and unsuccessful attempts to interview David Grusch — the intelligence official turned whistleblower whose congressional testimony in 2023 accelerated the current disclosure moment. The memo is specific and dated: between June and November 2023, AARO made at least eight documented attempts to reach Grusch through direct contact, Senate staff intermediaries, and close associates. On November 10, 2023, Grusch contacted AARO at the urging of congressional staff members and agreed to an interview. Whether that interview actually occurred is not addressed in the portion of the document available.

That paper trail — a classified-then-declassified government memorandum, authenticated, stamped, and traceable — is a different category of evidence from a podcast appearance. Both are circulating in the same information environment, often treated as equivalent.

NewsNation's Alicia Sitz reported on June 29, 2026, that a UAP expert named Michael Gold argued whistleblowers need legal protections from threats and retribution — and that "the only reason the issue has progressed this far is because people have openly discussed what they know." Gold is right that whistleblower disclosure has driven the UAP story forward. But the Jorjani-Buchanan claim is not whistleblowing in any verifiable sense. It is a secondhand account of an alleged diner meeting with extraterrestrials, attached to an allegation about a named former government employee who has not responded publicly to the specific accusation.

The pattern here is one that anyone who covers this beat long enough learns to recognize. A real program — remote viewing — lends credibility to an adjacent, unverifiable claim. A real person — Green — is named in a role he cannot easily disprove without confirming he's paying attention to the allegation. A real commercial vulnerability — consumer DNA databases and their privacy limitations — provides a plausible mechanism. And a real disclosure moment — genuine government document releases, actual congressional activity — creates an atmosphere in which the implausible feels adjacent to the confirmed.

None of that makes the CIA alien DNA claim true. It makes it resilient.

What would actually move this story is straightforward and has not happened: a response from Christopher Green, on the record, about whether he had any post-CIA involvement with 23andMe or Ancestry; a statement from either company about whether they have received or complied with any intelligence community requests related to genetic markers of the kind described; or a primary document — FOIA release, court filing, congressional subpoena — establishing that such a program exists or existed. Buchanan speaking directly and on record, rather than through Jorjani's account, would also change the evidentiary picture considerably.

Until one of those surfaces, the story is a claim about a claim about a diner meeting. It deserves coverage. It does not deserve the headline it's getting.