© NewsNationDavid Grusch
The renewed interest has been prompted in part by the recent release of videos purporting to show encounters between American naval aviators and, what the Pentagon has labeled "unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP)" Congress has convened hearings to determine what these UAP are and what threat, if any, they might pose.
"If UAP do indeed represent a potential threat to our security, then the capabilities, systems, processes and sources we use to observe and study or analyze these phenomena need to be classified at appropriate levels," said Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence.
The Department of Defense has established a special team: the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It's job: to investigate and identify what are now hundreds of reported sightings. So far, they have not confirmed any of them to constitute proof of alien life.
The U.S. government's official stance, however, remains the same: human beings are alone.
But now, for the first time, a former member of AARO is speaking out with a stunning story.
"My name is David Grusch."
"I came from a blue-collar family in Pittsburgh and had the money for college," said Grusch. "I always admired people in uniform and I've always wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself."
About 18 years ago he received an Air Force scholarship in physics. He was originally commissioned on active duty and served 14 years in the Air Force.
He became a career intelligence officer, Grusch spent time on the ground in Afghanistan, and other places he can't mention, before rotating back to Washington, D.C.
"And my last position, which I left in April of 2023, I co-lead the UAP portfolio for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and some of the highest officials within the Department of Defense and intelligence community used to call on me to advise them on some of the hardest target sets that the country had," Grusch said.
He told NewsNation he was entrusted with some of the country's most intimate secrets.
The most earth-shattering of those secrets, he claims, were revealed after 2019, when he was invited to join the UAP task force.
"I have, based on my full security clearance and multiple polygraphs (lie detector tests), had the ability to be read into any program that I needed," he said. "At one point in time, I was extremely highly cleared."
During that time, Grusch claims the UAP Task Force was refused access to a broad crash retrieval program.
"These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it space-craft if you will. Non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed," he said.
Grusch told NewsNation that the U.S. is in possession of "quite a number" of these "non-human" vehicles.
He says he didn't believe it at first.
"I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived. People started to confide in me ... approaching me. I had plenty of senior, former intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program," he said. "They named the program ... I'd never heard of it. They told me, based on their oral testimony, and they provided me documents and other proof, that there was in fact a program that the UAP Task Force was not read into."
Grusch, however, is hesitant to use the term "alien life."
"I couch it as somebody who has studied physics, where you know, maybe they're coming from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics. We know there are extra dimensions due to high-energy particle collisions, etc., and there's a theoretical framework to explain that," he said.
In other words, Grusch believes humans are not alone. He says there is "potentially extra-terrestrial life" out there.
He's never personally seen non-human intelligence but says he's spoken to enough people directly involved in what he calls "the program," that he's convinced it's real.
"I started out as a non-believer. I came to the problem as a hardcore physics guy ... intel officer," he said. So I have, you know, excuse my language high bull — - factor." I was very methodical ... interviewing people who didn't know each other and making sure this wasn't some kind of cover-up of some other program."
Grusch says he pressed to gain direct access to the program, and that's when the trouble started. He claims his investigation was stymied, and his requests for access were rebuffed.
"They shut the door in my face. They denied me access to these programs," he said.
Soon after, he says he endured reprisals and retaliations from above. He reported that information to the intelligence community inspector general and eventually filed a whistleblower complaint.
The experience, he says, is why he has decided to go public in a recent article in "The Debrief" written by Leslie Kean.
Grusch says he is not being paid for any of the testimonials but rather is doing it out of a "sense of service."
"Call me a Boy Scout or whatever. It's just when I saw the kind of wrongdoing I did ... I don't want to be 60 or 70 years old in the future and have that, you know, "could have, should have, would have" kind of feeling where I could have made a difference," he said. "I did not want to live a life of regret."
And his conviction remains the same.
"We're definitely not alone," he said. "The data points quite empirically that we're not alone."
He says the United States has intact spacecraft in its possession.
And possibly bodies.
"Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed ... sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds. It's true," Grusch said.
He told NewsNation that he has seen "some interesting photos," and "read some very interesting reports. However, he says that the specific documents and photos that would prove his claims are still classified and he cannot disclose them here.
When asked about his credibility, and why his claims should be taken seriously, Grusch pointed to his credentials.
"Well, we provided the proof internally to the inspector general and went into all the details," he said. "I mean, I have the credentials. I was an intelligence officer on the UAP Task Force."
Allegations of aliens and their spacecraft are hard to accept, even coming from a respected insider; the notion comes with obvious questions.
How could such nonhuman aircraft travel to Earth in the first place, and go undetected by the general public?
Grusch says the craft may not be traveling through space as we understand it.
"It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions," he said.
"And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I'm not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it's actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here."Grusch says he's certain that the materials the crafts are made out of are not of our planet.
"Based on the very specific properties that I was briefed on ... isotopic ratios that have to be engineered for it to be at those levels. But also just extremely strange, heavy atomic metal, high up in the Periodic Table. Arrangements that we don't understand. You know what the emergent properties are, but there's just a very strange mix of elements," he said.
And while Grusch says the U.S. has gleaned some insight from these materials for military use, much more could be done if academia and the private sector had access.
"It's totally nuts that humanity as a whole especially, U.S. citizenry as a whole, they're not even benefiting from broad research on this to solve propulsion, energy issues, novel material science that could improve people's quality of life," he said. "It's just totally nuts how it's been protected and inhibits progress."
Grusch believes there is a "sophisticated disinformation campaign" in the United States with regard to nonhuman life and aircraft.
He also made stunning claims that go back to the famous Roswell incident. At the time, there were multiple witnesses who said there were bodies recovered from the alleged Roswell aircraft.
"You might want to trust some of these witnesses," Grusch said.
In 1947, an object crashed in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell. The U.S. Air Force recovered material that was described as metallic and rubbery, though the government changed its story as to what it was, calling it a "flying disc" at first, then a weather or spy balloon.
But he says reports like Roswell date even further back.
"It's long been known that the regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini documented numerous UAP. An internal memo from the Italian Secret Services includes crude drawings of the UAPs.
"In 1933 was the first recovery in Europe and in Magenta, Italy," said Grusch. "They recovered a partially intact vehicle."
Most believe that the Roswell incident has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, the Air Force published a report in 1994 to put the issue to rest once and for all.
Grusch has read it.
"That analysis they did was a total hack job," he said. "I mean, even anybody with analytical skills ... if you read it, you can deduce that they're completing multiple situations crash test dummies and movable dunes. They (the Air Force) is just saying that the townsfolk who personally witnessed it were totally imagining things. They concocted that whole report just to disinform."
As to why Grusch believes the Air Force and the U.S. government maintain such a degree of secrecy, he believes it is, in his words, "Feudalistic dominance," and "fuel in the war machine."
He claims that through the 50s and 60s, encounters with nonhuman aircraft continued, as did the alleged cover-up. One incident in 1967, about which multiple Air Force veterans have gone public, involved UAPs tampering with the nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Base in Montana.
Officials observed a craft that appeared to be intelligently controlled hovered over the nuclear weapons. The silo and 10 nuclear ICBM missiles were shut down.
"It certainly looks like they (nonhuman organisms) want to understand how far we've advanced in our nuclear fissile kind of technologies at the very least," Grusch hypothesized.
Meanwhile, he claims the crash retrieval program continued, and while he won't reveal where the downed craft are stored, he does say that the people working with the technology have been putting themselves at risk.
"A lot of them were injured looking at some of this stuff," he said. "You can imagine the nuclear, radiological and biological risks to looking at an unknown. And a lot of them have literally suffered physically because of their service."
Are attitudes in Washington changing?
Footage captured by naval aviators' military-grade cameras in 2015 may be changing the minds of some lawmakers in Washington.
The videos were leaked in 2017, then officially released by the Pentagon in 2020. At the time, it seemed the Pentagon may have finally abandoned secrecy and decided to do what some countries have been doing for decades: establish a properly-funded, publicly accountable team to investigate reports of UAP.
David Grusch was part of that team.
He says, however, that the promised new age of government transparency is a fallacy. For starters, he says the videos that have been released are just the tip of the iceberg.
"There are many videos that are totally fair to release through a declassification process," he said. "I find it very concerning from a transparency perspective that all that the department has declassified were those three famous videos. There are more concerning videos that left me with a lot of questions."
He says there are credible witnesses who could testify before Congress about spacecraft — big spacecraft.
"A lot of them were very large, very large, like a football field kind of size," Grusch said.
Grush says the aircraft retrieval team includes at least one private aerospace company that is storing alien craft.
High-level officials in the U.S. government, and even presidents, have categorically denied that the aircraft retrieval unit exists.
Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Shawn Kirkpactrick, the head of the Pentagon's UAP investigation program told Congress that his team has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity or objects that defy the known laws of physics.
"While a large number of cases in our holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases," Kirkpatrick told lawmakers.
Grush said he expressed "some concerns" with Kirkpatrick about a year ago.
"I told him what I was starting to uncover and he didn't follow up with me. He has my phone number, he could've called me," said Grush. "I hope he ultimately does the right thing. He should be able to make the same investigative discoveries I did."
In movies, the aliens are sometimes portrayed as peaceful, even cuddly. Grush doesn't think they're that friendly.
"I think the logical fallacy there is because they're advanced, they're kind. We'll never really understand their full intent and that's because we're not them. But I think what appears to be malevolent activity has happened. That's based on nuclear site probing activities and witness testimony.
When asked if human beings have been injured or killed by nonhuman intelligence, Grush avoided getting into details.
"While I can't get into the specifics because that would reveal certain US classified operations, I was briefed by a few individuals on the program that there were malevolent events like that," he said.
But if this non-human intelligence is so advanced, and at least some of them are malevolent, why haven't they destroyed us already?
Grusch has written an internal document about his discoveries that refers to "agreements that risk putting our future in jeopardy."
"That's the kind of information I really hope national leadership is able to get to the bottom of," Grusch said.
We do know of at least one agreement among humans that's worth noting. A 1971 agreement between the U.S. and the USSR on measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Whether or not you believe David Grusch, the document proves the two superpowers were aware that UAP existed, whatever they were.
Grusch believes the U.S. government will do anything to keep these secrets safe.
"At the very least, I saw substantiative evidence that white-collar crime was committed," he said.
When asked if people have been killed to protect the alleged secret, Grusch again gave few details.
"Yeah, unfortunately. I've heard some really un-American things I don't want to repeat right now."
Grusch's credibility
Here's what he doesn't have.
He doesn't have smoking gun documents or photos; he doesn't have official confirmation of his claims.
NewsNation has confirmed through multiple sources that he is who he says he is: an Air Force veteran from Pittsburgh who worked in military intelligence and was part of the UAP task force.
Grusch said he does not suffer from any mental illness.
"I'm not a disgruntled employee," he said. "I resigned on my own accord because I thought, altruistically, it's more appropriate to show leadership on the outside."
Here's the proof Grusch said he does have, in his own words.
"Based on the credentialled people that came to me. Some of the subjects provided me with sensitive foreign intelligence to read ... program documents and photographs to evaluate. And then describe in very specific detail how all this worked. And they were telling me that the exact extremely specific details that it all checked out."
Perhaps the best reason to believe Grusch may be the whistleblower complaint he filed. It appears to not have fallen on deaf ears.
"They (the inspector general) found after interviewing myself, the subjects and other subjects that I'm not even cognizant of who they were, they found my complaint, urgent and credible for the intelligence committees," he said.
Grusch has since left the government and he was not part of AARO during the most recent congressional hearings when more UAPs were revealed, including one captured by a drone in the Middle East in 2022.
His whistleblower case will take months to conclude. In the meantime, he says he's starting a scientific foundation, and he's willing to speak to anyone in Washington who has the clearance, and the desire, to hear the classified information he could not share with NewsNation.
"I'm happy to further brief elected officials on the specific ecosystem, the secrecy ... down to fine details," he said.
Watch the full interview here.
Comment: Evidence suggests UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar was telling the truth all along - world owes him an apology
On the other hand: Wait...are they REALLY going to do a UFO psy-op?