A former US Army sergeant claimed he spent most of his life in telepathic contact with an alien companion before his death in 2021.

Clifford Stone rose to prominence in UFO circles after testifying at the National Press Club in Washington in 2001, where he alleged he had participated in a secret Army program tasked with recovering crashed UFO materials.

Stone claimed the mysterious being he called ‘Korona’ first appeared to him when he was seven years old and continued communicating with him telepathically throughout his life.

The Army veteran described the entity as a mantis-like creature and said it was one of several unexplained encounters he experienced over the decades, though no evidence supporting the claims was ever presented publicly.

While the US government has never confirmed such creatures as Stone described, a former CIA scientist recently stated that there are different types of aliens.

Dr Hal Puthoff, a physicist and electrical engineer who worked on the intelligence community's psychic spy and UFO research programs in the 1970s and 1980s, said last week that people who have recovered crashed UFOs encountered 'at least four separate types' of life.

Those allegedly include Grays, Nordics, Reptilians and Insectoids, which Stone's mantis alien would fall under.

Stone made statements that when he met Korona during childhood, telepathic messages flooded his head, saying: '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 added.

The Army veteran also claimed he believed many aliens walk among humans in an effort to observe and better understand the human race.

During his bombshell testimony at the National Press Club, he alleged that he had personally catalogued 57 different species of extraterrestrial life forms while working in secret military programs.

Born in Portsmouth, Ohio, on January 2, 1949, he joined the Army in 1969 and served for more than 20 years, including during the Vietnam War, where he worked as an administrative and legal specialist.

His official military records list his primary role as an administrative and legal specialist, a position he held while serving for more than two decades.

Over time, however, Stone asserted that his duties extended far beyond clerical work.

He claimed he was quietly reassigned to classified recovery operations involving unidentified craft and, in some cases, non-human biological entities - these assertions have never been independently verified.

'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,' Stone said, according to a 2001 report from the BBC. 

The Department of Defense has never confirmed Stone's involvement in any program related to extraterrestrial recovery or communication, and no declassified documents substantiate his account.

Critics have long pointed out this absence of evidence, noting that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.

Although the US government has maintained that there has never been physical proof of UFOs or alien life existing, President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to release all information regarding extraterrestrial encounters.

Until his death, Stone consistently maintained that his claims were rooted in firsthand encounters rather than speculation, describing them as experiences that had permanently changed his understanding of religion, mortality, and humanity's place in the universe. 

Stone claimed that Korona's civilization had reached what it considered a scientific conclusion about the existence of a creator, not as a matter of belief, but as an empirically established reality. 

Scholars of religion and philosophy have long debated whether scientific inquiry can ever address metaphysical questions such as the existence of God.

Stone claimed that belief in a singular creator is 'no longer a faith-based ideal,' and argued that science from advanced intelligence now supports the existence of what many people call God.

He further alleged that this same intelligence possessed technology capable of facilitating communication between the living and the dead, though he stressed that such interactions were tightly constrained.

'They even have the means to communicate with their loved ones. It's not some parlour trick,' he claimed. 'They really have the means to do it. But there are forbidden questions that you can't ask about what happens after death.'

That restriction, Stone claimed, was not presented as a technical limitation but as an enforced boundary, one that prevented deeper inquiry into the nature of death itself.

He suggested that certain knowledge may either be dangerous, destabilizing or simply inaccessible to human understanding at this stage of development.