“Mulder: Right? Who are you to say what’s right?
Cancer Man: Who are you? If people were to know of the things that I know, it would all fall apart.”
– “One Breath,” The X-Files.
“Because a body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
– “The Rights of Man,” Thomas Paine.
“Stand on my soapbox
and speak my own peace.
Whatever you may think,
it’s real.”
– “Silenced,” Mudvayne.
On June 5th, 2023, a bombshell article was published in The Debrief. Written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, it was entitled, “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin.” Shortly thereafter, on NewsNation, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart had an interview with the subject of that article, one David Grusch, where even more was revealed, and then Grusch had another interview with Gaël Lombart in the French newspaper, Le Parisien on June 7th.
Thus far, these are the only three direct public sources for data stemming from Grusch himself.
Major news outlets in the US were slow to pick up on the story, which honestly didn’t surprise me in the least, yet I confess I still felt profoundly disappointed. After all, given the apparent signs of newfound openness and transparency the Navy, at the very least, seems to have developed since the bombshell article in the New York Times on December 16, 2017 – the article entitled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” which was written not only by Helene Cooper, but also Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, the last two mentioned, of course, being the authors of the more recent article in The Debrief – I had hoped, at the very least, prompt coverage of his claims.
No such luck.
So let us start at the top, namely: who the bloody hell is this Grusch, and why is he apparently so important?
1. The Revelations of Grusch.
Back in 1987, in the city of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, the presently 36-year-old David Charles Grusch was born. He explained that given that he both had no money for college and always felt the desire to be part of something greater than himself, he joined the US Air Force. In 2005, he went to college for physics on an Air Force scholarship and in 2009 began his military career, where he was a decorated combat officer for his service in Afghanistan, though he was evidently also stationed in other places too hush-hush for him to mention. He later began his civilian service at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as a GS-15 civilian and took on the role of Senior Intelligence Officer. This was in 2016, the same year he began serving as Senior Intelligence Capabilities Integration Officer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
From 2019 to 2021, he served as the NRO’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) in the role of Senior Technical Advisor for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Analysis/Trans-Medium Issues. Between late 2021 to July 2022, he served as the NGA’s representative to the UAPTF as its co-leadership for UAP analysis. In other words, from 2019 to 2022, his job was investigating the UAP subject, which involved holding extensive, detailed interviews with many high-level senior and former intelligence officials, some of whom he stated he had known for his entire career. By his own admission, he had entered into the subject of UFOs as an ardent skeptic, coming at the issue as “a hard-core physics guy” with “a high bullshit factor,” and so red flags were raised and began waving in what he initially took to be the mighty winds of a lot of hot air when what many of them began to tell him exceeded his boggle threshold.
Initially, he assumed he was likely being fed disinformation for the purposes of covering up some other program, so as he went on, he was very methodical, ensuring he interviewed people who weren’t associated with one another. In the end, however – based on the credentials of the people who confided in him, their verbal testimonies, and the extremely specific details regarding how it all worked, as well as the sensitive documents, photographs, and foreign intelligence they provided him for research and analysis – he ultimately had to accept that what they were collectively telling him was true.
So what did the sources he interviewed tell him that was so damn unbelievable?
Well, they alleged that they had been or were currently directly involved with a broad, decades-old UFO retrieval program that has shielded its efforts within Special Access Programs (SAPs) nested within several different agencies of the US Government. Though his contacts named the overarching program, which he had never heard of before, he simply calls it The Program, and they alleged that it involves the US government (specifically elements of the intelligence community), its allies (other members of the Five Eyes alliance, which is to say Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand), and a handful of defense contractors. The Program deals with the retrieval of landed craft, crashed craft, and fragments of craft that derive from “Non-Human Intelligences” (NHIs) and the subsequent efforts to reverse-engineer and replicate their technology. In conjunction with these retrieval operations, bodies of NHIs have also been recovered, and he suggests that there may even be reason to suspect that meetings and even agreements between members of The Program and NHI have occurred.
The Program continues to this day, Grusch says, and he knows of the particular people involved, both current and former – and presumably this list exceeds those he interviewed. In addition, our geopolitical rivals have also encountered NHI and their technology, have developed similar retrieval programs, and members of The Program have been engaging in a multi-decade cold war with them in efforts to successfully reverse-engineer and replicate the technology. Like the US, he says, they have been secretly exploiting what they’ve learned for military purposes.
Grusch’s contacts went on to express to him their concerns regarding a long list of illicit, unethical, and “un-American” behavior on the part of The Program, with the most immediate and clear crime being that members of The Program were maintaining the secrecy, at least in part, in a deliberate effort to dodge Congressional oversight. In this context of crimes, however, he also specifically mentions “illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations” as well as “the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia” as well as a broad disinformation campaign targeting the public. Other crimes, such as murder, may have been committed in service of maintaining secrecy as well.
2) Getting in the Weeds.
I’d like to pause here in the narrative to detail some of what he’s revealed publicly through The Debrief, NewsNation, and Le Parisien, as I feel they deserve some more elaboration — and, honestly, I feel compelled to provide some commentary as well.
At some point in the NewsNation interview, as I imagine he had to, Coulthart brought up one of the typical go-to arguments Discreditors and Skeptics default to when charges of a conspiracy in this area are made, which is that “the government can’t keep secrets,” and certainly not secrets that had to have been held for what is closely approximating a century. One person I knew, however jokingly, once told me that the government couldn’t successfully organize screwing in a light bulb, much less maintain a cover-up of such magnitude on the order of countless decades. These Skeptics and Discreditors often overlook at least three major factors in my opinion, and this is despite the fact that some of these people have been in the military themselves.
First, we often think of the government as a unified, singular beast, when in fact it is anything but. Different aspects of the government may be far better at keeping secrets than others, and I don’t think it’s a leap to assume that the intelligence community would likely be the unrivaled masters of conspiracies and cover-ups. It’s also a fact that the nature of the secrecy system within the US government undoubtedly plays a role, specifically in the level of classification and the degree of compartmentalization.
And here, I feel, I should add some context.
To the best of my understanding, government secrecy is organized by means of both classification and compartmentalization – two forms of secrecy that, though interwoven, should be distinguished. Visually, I’ve always imagined this secrecy as a whole as constituting a sort of grid, with the horizontal lines representing classification and the vertical ones representing compartmentalization.
A system of classification limits the dissemination of information to categories of individuals who have achieved a certain level of clearance. Since the end of WWII, for instance, the classification system in the US government is said to have three levels: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.
A system of compartmentalization, on the other hand – also known as ”codeword-classified information” – further limits the dissemination of information to specific individuals on a need-to-know basis. This means that while all compartmentalized information is classified, very little classified information is compartmentalized and that people with the lowest classification may operate in a compartment to which someone with the highest security clearance doesn’t have access. On the surface, this may seem stupid, but the point of such compartmentalization is pretty straightforward: if people only know as much classified information that is required for them to execute the specific task or mission to which they’ve been assigned — if such data is only disseminated on a “need-to-know” basis, in other words — the likelihood that information vital to national security will leak and fall into the hands of any adversaries is reduced considerably.
Compartmentalized information, as implied by its aforementioned alternative title, is designated not only a classification but a codeword – for instance, “Top Secret: Ultra.” Such compartmentalized programs are often referred to as the aforementioned SAPs and the information involved as Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (SCI). There may be additional details involved here, and for all I know I have gotten particular details wrong, but this is as far as my feeble mind has brought me thus far.
In any case, the ways in which compartmentalization functions was, in my opinion, best expressed by Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN 2nd District) in the midst of being interviewed by sci-fi writer and podcaster John Michael Goldier on the July 2nd episode of his podcast, Event Horizon – the details of which I will cover later. As for now, I’d like to reference an anecdote he offered during their conversation.
Burchett explained that when he ran for office, he largely did so by going from door to door. As he was doing this in West Knoxville, he came upon a house that sported an American flag, which in his experience strongly suggested that the resident was a veteran. So when an elderly gentleman answered the door, he asked, and with some subtle signs of shame, the old man confessed that he hadn’t served, but that he had worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, which Burchett was well aware had helped construct the atomic bomb that had led the US to win the Second World War. Burchett told him that his father was in Okinawa when they dropped the bomb and that if he was alive today, he’d hug him, as given his participation, his father didn’t need to help invade Japan.
He then asked the guy what he did at Oak Ridge, and this was where the story got interesting – and relevant to the current subject. During the war, both the old man and his wife – likely just his girlfriend at the time – worked at Oak Ridge, right down the hall from one another, but neither knew what they were working on or why. It was only far later that they realized that while he was working on the switch, she was busy working on the fuse, though both had been unknowingly working on the epic bomb, and that their shared ignorance was due to the strict compartmentalization imposed by the Manhattan Project.
The reason Burchett offered this anecdote was that he thinks this may be the case with the reverse-engineering aspect of the UFO retrieval program: people may be subjecting certain parts of crashed craft to analysis without having the faintest clue as to what the entirety of The Project entails. Going even further, he suggests that some people may be working on staged projects because The Powers That Be know they’re liable to leak the information – in reality, disinformation – which will either throw UFO researchers off the track or ultimately be revealed to be erroneous, thereby discrediting not only that individual, but the subject as a whole in the eyes of many.
The second thing Skeptics and Discreditors often overlook is, assuming some aspects of our government are indeed good at keeping secrets, you naturally wouldn’t know about them — you would only know of those secrets which were ultimately declassified or exposed by whistleblowers and then confirmed. When confronted by Coulthart with the allegation that “the government can’t keep secrets,” after all, Grusch, who has been an intelligence agent for fourteen years, didn’t hesitate shooting that notion down.
“Well, I’ve certainly been the recipient of a lot of US government secrets and I can tell you they’ve never seen the light of day,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
Third, to say that certain aspects of our government are good at keeping secrets doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t leaks, just that such leaks are not or cannot be proven to have real substance. For instance, my typical response to the allegation that “the government can’t keep secrets” is that despite the fact that I’ve only worked in shit jobs in my life, mostly in food service – supermarkets, grocery stores, but by and large, fast food – I have nonetheless witnessed more than one conspiracy, and if it can happen in the context of a fast food franchise and be successful, it’s not a leap to assume it happens at higher levels of society. One might reasonably counter that conspiracies at my level have not been successful given I know about them, and on the surface that seems like a legitimate argument, but the success of a conspiracy isn’t so much whether or not people outside the conspiracy know about it, but whether they can successfully – or for that matter, even have the guts to try – and prove the legitimacy of the conspiracy in question, to take any real action and bring the perpetrators to justice. In the aforementioned fast food conspiracies, those who knew judged such efforts to be far more trouble than they were worth, and that’s the point. I never blew the whistle, nor did those who confided in me, but they did occasionally gossip about the details in whispers.
This relates to the UFO conspiracy intimately. After all, there have been leaks of such a conspiracy for decades, but many would just dismiss them as rumors.
This brings us to the fourth fact so often overlooked, and that is that people who are good at keeping secrets realize with utmost clarity that leaks are going to occur and that they cannot prevent them entirely. Given their awareness of this fact, what can they do, if they can’t plug the leaks? For one thing, they can bribe, intimidate, or eliminate the disseminators of such leaks, and tales in UFO circles have espoused this for decades. People have retracted their allegations, at times later confessing that they had been intimidated with reprisals, even threatened with their lives or, worse, the lives of those that they love. There are suggestions that many have been bribed, and others have died in, shall we say, mysterious circumstances.
This is merely the reactive means by which the keepers of secrets seek to plug or neutralize the predictable leaks, however, and there is a more proactive way of dealing with them. This brings us to the deliberate dissemination of disinformation, of muddying those leaks with utter bullshit or even revealing bullshit within which reside a few golden peanuts of truth — which I personally feel has been one of their most successful techniques with respect to maintaining secrecy. Grusch spoke on this point to NewsNation as well.
“I guess ostensibly this has leaked like a sieve for decades,” he said, “but it was a very sophisticated disinformation campaign where they have allowed some of the truth to come out through some of their trade crafts. But they’ve disenfranchised people, they’ve stigmatized it, they’ve made it this totally wacky thing to talk about so anybody who may come forward with that kind of information is looked like a total tinfoil hat guy because it’s a perfect amalgamation of disinformation to just make it look crazy.”
Summarizing it elsewhere, he says that “there’s a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the US populace which is extremely unethical and immoral.”
This disinformation may come in another form, at a deeper level, however, which brings us to the recommendations of the Robertson Panel. After the Washington flap of 1952, in which UFOs flew over the capital on two successive weekends in July and inspired a strong public reaction, the CIA commissioned a panel headed by HP Robertson, which took place between the 14th and 18th of January, 1953. The ultimately declassified version of their report, known in UFO circles as the Durant Report, concluded that while UFOs themselves weren’t a direct threat to national security, UFO reports could overwhelm military channels and pose a threat in that sense. They then recommended a public “training and educational program” aimed at the subject of UFOs to discredit it and reduce public interest and concern and consequently minimize UFO Reports. From a portion of the report:
“The Panel’s concept of a broad educational program integrating efforts of all concerned agencies was that it should have two major aims: training and “debunking.” The training aim would result in proper recognition of unusually illuminated objects (e.g., balloons, aircraft reflections) as well as natural phenomena (meteors, fireballs, mirages, noctilucent clouds). … The “debunking” aim would result in reduction in public interest in “flying saucers” which today evokes a strong psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles. Basis of such education would be actual case histories which had been puzzling at first but later explained. As in the case of conjuring tricks, there is much less stimulation if the “secret” is known. Such a program should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”
Though these suggestions were never officially executed, there is nonetheless a strong suggestion they were, and that the true “clever hostile propaganda” was, in fact, this “training and educational” program itself, which succeeded in making the subject seem utterly ridiculous in the eyes of the public and inspired ridicule towards and silence of any potential UFO witnesses, abductees, or insiders inspired to blow the whistle. And it still has an effect – many whistleblowers remain anonymous, and the legitimacy of many of the leaked documents provided are still contested – but its effect does seem to be lessening.
So again, allegations of a UFO conspiracy have been made for decades, but even with respect to Those in the Know who want this to come out, how do you get others to take it seriously, and even then, how do you prove it?
For decades the efforts of many to bring a collective sense and official declaration of legitimacy to even the surface aspect of the UFO phenomenon seemed a Herculean feat. Then came that initial New York Times article that ultimately led to the establishment of UAPTF – which Grusch worked for, and where he gained his dire revelations – and which has since reincarnated into the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
I must confess, I was pleasantly surprised by this sudden turn of events, though I knew well enough not to get my hopes up, striving to sustain a cautious and critical kind of optimism. Grusch clearly shares my skepticism in this regard, for however much hope some of us may have naively felt when the Navy confessed the leaked videos of their encounters with UAP were true unknowns, he assures us that this admission – and the subsequent establishment of the UAPTF and then the AARO – is not the new age of government transparency regarding the subject that we might believe it to be. The UAP videos that have been released, he insists, are just the tip of the iceberg (which I believe Elizondo has also said), and many videos in their possession could be declassified and released. And he finds it disturbing from a transparency perspective that they have not been. There are more concerning videos, he said, that left him with a lot of questions.
Most concerning of all, however, had to have been the briefings he was given regarding a decades-old UFO retrieval program.
The moment I learned of this, I was of course curious as to which specific UFO crash-retrievals Grusch would be willing or legally able to stand behind, as many such cases have been floating around in the UFO community for decades. I have a short list of those I find most credible – Roswell, New Mexico, in July of 1947; Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, on December 9, 1965; Virginha, Brazil, in January of 1996 – and I was eager to see if he mentioned any of them. The only recovery Grusch specifically detailed, however – to both NewsNation and the French paper – was the oldest case he had been briefed on, and evidently, the only one he was cleared to talk about. It dealt with the recovery of a crashed and damaged bell-shaped craft, roughly ten meters in size, in Magenta, Italy, in 1933. The Italian military, under the rule of World War II Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, retrieved it and moved it to a secure air base in the country. Pope Pius XII ultimately gave a tip to the US government and it was subsequently recovered by agents of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944.
Two or three years later, of course, after the end of the Second World War, there was the now-infamous Roswell Incident, where a crashed craft and debris were allegedly collected in the area around Roswell, New Mexico, in early July of 1947. While Grusch spoke of Roswell, he didn’t technically confirm it, save through implication. More specifically, he critiqued the most recent government explanations for the incident in Roswell, New Mexico.
“That analysis they did was a total hack job,” he said. “Anybody with analytical skills, if you read it, you can deduce that they’re conflating multiple situations with crash test dummies and Mogul balloons and they’re just saying that the townsfolk who personally witnessed it were totally imagining things. They concocted that whole report just to disinform.”
While retrievals of UFO crashes are certainly interesting, this turns out to be the least interesting aspect of what Grusch said regarding these retrieval operations, as he specifically explained that the UFO retrieval program dealt with recovering not just fragments of craft and crashed craft, but also in-tact, landed craft – ones that had presumably been abandoned.
Though I’ve speculated and written about it for years, I believe it was in my blog post regarding the relatively recent shoot-downs of “balloons” that I first mentioned online my working hypothesis that most if not all of these UFO crashes were, in fact, staged by the intelligence behind the phenomenon – by the NHI, to use Grusch’s handy, neutral acronym – for the purposes of inspiring divisions amongst the human populace. Global powers would struggle for decades to replicate them, engaging in a secret cold war, all the while keeping their respective populations in the dark. It’s the old, Machevellian, divide-and-conquer technique, I hypothesized: break the power of an adversary, or potential adversary, into smaller pieces and get them working against one another so that they’re far less likely to band together into a unified force against you, their common enemy. It also diverts their attention from your activities behind the scenes.
That the retrieval program would have also acquired landed and perfectly functional craft only reinforces my suspicions, though this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of such allegations. In the periods in which I’ve found myself believing in Bob Lazar’s claims, for instance, I remember him describing that lone occasion in which he saw all nine of the craft being studied at S-4, where he allegedly worked for a short time in the late 1980s, and he described seeing one that looked as if a projectile had blasted through it. While the nature of that particular craft certainly provoked questions in my mind – questions that arose again recently when Grusch referenced “certain techniques” that may have even been used to bring down such craft deliberately – far more intriguing were the eight other crafts that were, so far as his description of that moment implies, entirely undamaged. Whether or not one trusts Lazar’s claims, to hear of similar details from Grusch, who we know is who he claims to be, should give one pause, and make one consider the potential motivations of the NHI.
When it comes to the subject of the non-human origin of the craft, however, Coulthart asked Grusch how his contacts can be so sure. In response, Grusch references “vehicle morphologies” and the “unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures” of the materials he was briefed on. The craft and the materials out of which they were constructed were engineered in a sophisticated manner, he says, and “certainly not by humans.”
While the nature of the crafts itself certainly indicated the crafts were of unearthly origin, the dead bodies of NHIs he later mentioned were sometimes found in conjunction with the crashed craft, I must imagine, undoubtedly also played a role in that determination. He has seen photos and has read some intriguing reports regarding the entities, he says, and prefers to refer to them as NHIs due to the fact that they don’t have sufficient data (or, at the very least, he wasn’t briefed on such data) to confidently nail down their origin. Turning to his physics background, he speculates that they could derive from higher spatial dimensions, a parallel universe essentially superimposed over our own. While he doesn’t state it specifically, the language he uses indicates he was subtly referencing the additional possibility that they could be time travelers. He emphasizes this is only speculation, however, and ends by stating that at the very least we are dealing with an intelligent, non-human intelligence that is “potentially extraterrestrial.”
Unlike Stephen Greer, who speaks as if all NHIs are benevolent space brothers and sisters, Grusch also makes it clear that not all of them are benevolent from the human perspective. He explains how it’s a logical fallacy to assume that simply because they represent an advanced, non-human intelligence they would be kind – a perspective I’ve cradled myself for some time and doesn’t seem to be embraced by enough people in the UFO field, in my opinion. Sociopaths, psychopaths, and serial killers are often highly intelligent, after all, providing sufficient evidence that even within our own species higher intelligence doesn’t necessarily suggest a greater degree of empathy and compassion.
This isn’t merely speculation on his part, either, at least according to him, as he references having been provided evidence of what he at one point calls “malevolent activity,” though says he can’t “get into the specifics, because that would reveal certain US classified operations,” which I must say, is ominous as fuck. While there he makes absolutely no references to the phenomenon of alien abduction, this immediately makes me think of it, and most specifically some cases in David Paulides’s book series, Missing 411, that may suggest some abductees are returned dead or never returned at all. Animal mutilations also come to mind.
The malevolence doesn’t stop with NHIs, however, but extends to those involved in the recovery and reverse-engineering program itself. “At the very least, I saw substantive evidence of white collar crime was committed,” he says, and among the members of the program that he’s talked to, there was grave suspicion and concerns that people had been murdered over the years in the service of the program and the secrecy surrounding it. “Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve heard some very un-American things that I don’t want to repeat right now,” he says at one point.
Speaking of what patriots such as himself would undoubtedly regard as “un-American things,” this seems like a good point to mention his unnerving statement regarding the “agreements” he referenced in an internal document he wrote regarding the discoveries he made – “agreements,” he wrote, “that risk putting our future in jeopardy.” In the NewsNation interview, when Coulthart pushed him on the question as to whether or not there had been agreements made between our human leaders (specifically the US government) and the NHI, he only offered cautiously constructed, incredibly ominous responses. It was clear that this was not a particular avenue of the subject that he was eager to get into.
“That’s the kind of information that I hope national leadership will get to the bottom of,” he said at one point, and then, later: “I think that’s a question that I would like to know of all the details of as well.”
I explored this notion of “agreements” between NHIs and aspects of the US government in my blog post Gray Aliens: Origins and Objectives. However passionate I was about exploring the subject matter I provided in the post (and however weird my seemingly paranormal experience one evening while taking notes on the subject), it rather embarrassed me as I put it together, as I considered the level of conspiracy here to be nearly the darkest of the dark, and yet the general notion struck me as entirely probable given everything else I’d considered quite likely to be true. I was almost happy to find discrepancies in the associated accounts of such meetings and agreements, as it meant I had to throw this in my “gray basket” between truth and bullshit, though I knew if such a meeting and agreement did take place the Powers That Be would undoubtedly muddy the leaks referencing it with disinformation to throw anyone off the trail, as explained earlier.
3. Grusch’s War for Disclosure.
After these revelations, as was his duty as a member of the UAPTF — and acceptable, given his broad clearance — Grusch ultimately pressed to gain direct access to The Program.
He was denied.
He subsequently filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), Thomas A. Monheim, in June of 2021, that elements of the intelligence community were hiding UFO data for the explicit purpose of avoiding Congressional oversight. The following month, he confidentially provided the Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General (IG), one Sean O’Donnell, with the aforementioned UFO-related classified material he had amassed.
Shortly thereafter, Grusch’s problems began.
While he made no accusations that the IG’s office made improper disclosures, what followed did lead him to the strong suspicion that individuals or entities within the DOD and intelligence community learned of his identity and testimony, as he subsequently experienced what he described as “reprisals,” which involved denial, delay, cancellation, and obstruction of his compartmentalized accesses to other elements in the intelligence community, allegations of misconduct, and apparently threats on his life, as well as other forms of threat and retaliation that he would not detail publically at this time, citing an ongoing investigation, though he did tell the French newspaper he may be able to within a few months.
In light of this, if I understand all this correctly and I have the timeline right, what he did next was a very intelligent move.
Throughout his time in the government, Grusch apparently helped prepare countless briefs for Congress regarding the UAP subject, but perhaps none of them were as important as his assistance in early 2022 with respect to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 (FY2023 NDAA). It required the military to review UFO sightings dating back to 1945 and provided detailed procedures regarding how UFO sightings and encounters should be reported, and – perhaps not coincidentally – provided whistleblower protections, stating that any individual with relevant data regarding UFOs, regardless of any former NDAs, has the right to inform Congress on the matter, and without retaliation.
Then, in February of 2022, Grusch got a lawyer – namely one Charles McCullough III, who was not only the senior partner of the Compass Rose Legal Group in Washington but had also been the first ever Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (IGIC). In May, McCullough filed a “Disclosure of Urgent Concern(s); Complaint of Reprisal” on Grusch’s behalf with Thomas Monheim, the current IGIC, regarding his accusation that classified data had been concealed from ARRO and Congress by elements of the intelligence community for the explicit purpose of avoiding Congressional oversight. And this was provided by Grusch, it should be emphasized, under oath. Though I’m skipping ahead a bit, it’s important to mention here that a little over a year later, in June of 2023, after the firm had “successfully concluded its representation” of Grusch and after Grusch had brought his specific claims public, the law firm clarified that Grusch did not offer details regarding the classified data. In their words:
“The whistleblower disclosure did not speak to the specifics of the alleged classified information that Mr. Grusch has now publicly characterized, and the substance of that information has always been outside of the scope of Compass Rose’s representation. Compass Rose took no position and takes no position on the contents of the withheld information. The ICIG found Mr. Grusch’s assertion that information was inappropriately concealed from Congress to be urgent and credible in response to the filed disclosure. Compass Rose brought this matter to the ICIG’s attention through lawful channels and successfully defended Mr. Grusch against retaliation.”
In other words, Grusch did everything above board, and legally, much unlike any former “whistleblower” I’m aware of, and I’m currently of the opinion that he did it in this way because (much unlike myself at this point in my life) he still believes in the system, and he feels that if he’s going after The Program principally because they’re committing criminal acts, he has no desire to become a criminal himself in his efforts to disclose their crimes. It’s also likely that he doesn’t want distractions from the central issue he’s fighting for, as was the case with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who provided classified data on an insidious program to the media illegally – and where the government and media spotlight was more focused on whether he constituted a traitor or a hero than any of the disturbing revelations he provided.
I should mention here that I’m not condemning Snowden. I’m one who truly believes he’s a hero, and that he made a sacrifice in providing this information to the public, but while I don’t share the apparent patriotic and legal convictions Grusch clearly seems to have, I have both an admiration for his apparent strategy and how he’s followed through with it up to this point.
Anyway, a month following his whistleblower disclosure, in July 2022, as suggested in the previously provided quotation from Compass Rose, the current ICIG – after having interviewed not only Grusch himself (during which he presumably provided details not provided to the firm), and not only the subjects he was speaking on behalf of, but other subjects he doesn’t even know of – found his complaint “credible and urgent.”
Why is this important? As I’ve heard it explained, the ICIG is essentially in the role of serving as an “internal cop” whose duty it is to ensure that the entire intelligence community – and apparently there are 18 separate intelligence agencies – are all operating legally. And the ICIG, after hearing Grusch’s testimony as well as others, who actually have first-hand knowledge of this illegal program, found his complaint, again, “credible and urgent.”
As a consequence of the ICIG’s determination, a whistleblower reprisal investigation began. A summary was then swiftly provided to the Director of National Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. According to The Debrief, this was also when Grusch began talking in closed-door sessions to the staff of Congressional intelligence committees. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reveal all he knew to them, he claimed, as they didn’t have the “required clearances,” which to me seems odd, given their job is to provide oversight for such things.
Then, on December 23, 2022, Biden signed the aforementioned FY2023 NDAA into law.
In April of 2023, in preparation for his public interviews, Grusch maintained his habit of adhering to the law by providing the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense (DOPSR) with all data he intended to disclose. As should be suggested by its title, the purpose of this office is to review material that Those in the Know wish to express – be the medium in question a book, an article, or shit they desire to discuss publicly, as in the context of an interview – and assess whether or not any elements of that material should be withheld for reasons of national security. Well, they looked over the material he provided and (presumably) marked some aspects of it as classified – which is to say, shit he couldn’t say legally, as expressed in certain points in his NewsNation interview – and other aspects of that data they gave the official thumbs-up and stamp of approval. And so everything in the article, ultimately published in The Debrief for reasons formerly explained – and, presumably, the NewsNation interview – was “cleared for publication” on the 4th and 6th of April.
“I’m still bound by my confidentiality agreement with the US government, and I cannot discuss still-classified information,” he told the French newspaper. “So I can speak publicly, in a general sense, but the details about material recoveries are very limited until they are declassified.”
Many have dismissed all that he’s said on account of the fact that he got “permission” before coming forward publicly with all that he has said. Honest Skeptics as well as the usual line of impassioned Discreditors have been quick to assume that because he got the thumbs-up this means all that he has revealed to the public thus far isn’t considered “protected information,” and that if that’s the case it clearly means that everything he said is bullshit, as obviously the things he spoke about would be considered “protected information” if they were indeed true.
Not necessarily.
I’m no lawyer, obviously, but I think people operating under this assumption should take some time to reflect on his central accusation here, namely that elements in the intelligence community have intentionally and illegally concealed information regarding a long-standing and far-reaching program dealing with the retrieval of NHI craft and bodies for the explicit purpose of avoiding Congressional oversight.
Given that The Program, as Grusch has evidently called it, is illegal, even the most extreme aspects of the data he provided would not technically or necessarily be recognized as classified or compartmentalized within the legal context, and so, as a consequence, he would be free to talk about it. Despite this, as revealed by the article and interview, he was clearly tight-lipped in many respects. Even Colhart referenced this in the interview. Much of this may be a consequence of the results of the DOPSR, yes – perhaps some aspects of what he could say were legal and classified or would be classified if they were later deemed to be legal, and in any case would threaten our national security – but it may also be the result of his own discretion as an impassioned patriot. After all, as he said in the NewsNation interview, he believes the subject should be handled much as the subject of atomic weapons and nuclear physics are handled, which is to say: the government acknowledges the program, and we’re all well aware that nuclear weapons exist, and nuclear physics is unclassified. At the same time, you don’t get to know the designs for nuclear weapons.
That’s his approach to the subject – and to bring up Stanton Friedman again, this seems to approximate his approach to the subject as well: the humans of planet Earth deserve to know that NHIs exist, what their biology is, and they deserve to know we have their bodies and advanced craft. And, yes, to step out of the analogy for a moment, they deserve to know what egregious crimes have been committed in the efforts to conceal this secret and glean further information. Nonetheless, some things should still be kept under wraps. And I think, given the context, that this sufficiently explains what he revealed and didn’t reveal in the article and interview: what he thinks, given sufficient Congressional oversight, we have a right to know, and what he thinks, for reasons of national security, we ought not to. It’s certainly consistent with his character as it has been displayed in both the article and interview.
In any case, on April 7th, the day after DOPSR cleared what he intended to say for publication, Grusch resigned from the NGA, as he expressed it, for the purpose of going public on this issue in efforts to push not only for increased collective awareness but for greater government accountability.
“I have more information that I will publish later,” he told the French newspaper. “I want to be an opinion leader on this subject. This year, I will launch a non-profit foundation to help the scientific community initiate protocols on this subject, from undergraduate students to graduates. It would be helpful because there are no secrets in the academic system. It would allow us to finally look at these things scientifically.”
He was then interviewed by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal for their article, which The New York Times refused to publish, but which both Politico and The Washington Post had an interest in, though they wanted more time to gather more facts and add more context. On May 26, 2023, attorney Daniel Sheehan leaked Grusch’s name, however, which sent them into a state of hyperdrive. Kean and Blumenthal felt it was important to get this out before they lost control of the story. Ultimately, this is what prompted them to publish their article in The Debrief on June 5. On NewsNation, they initially provided but a small portion of the interview award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart had with Grusch, which I believe aired on the same day, with the entire interview – or a longer version of it, at the very least – airing on June 7th, which revealed a wealth of additional information.
In response to Grusch’s testimony, DOD spokesperson Sue Gough said, on June 5th, said that: “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
This, of course, fits very well given Grusch’s claims that the UAPTF, the former incarnation of ARRO, was denied access to these programs. The circumstances surrounding ARRO and its inability to “discover any verifiable claims” regarding what Grusch revealed was more fully detailed two days later by journalist Micheal Shellenberger, who on June 7th published his article, “US Has 12 or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors” on substack. This article was subsequently covered on Breaking Points as well as Rising, where they actually had an interview with Shellenberger, and where he provided additional details fed to him by his own sources.
As Shellenberger’s sources point out, ARRO operates under Title 10 authority, whereas the intelligence community operates under Title 50, so ARRO doesn’t even have the authority to access such programs – so of course they can’t verify it, and it doesn’t help matters that they don’t seem to want to verify it, either. Kirkpatrick hasn’t provided the evidence these sources shared with Congress and seems to have publicly downplayed how operating under Title 10 authority obstructs his ability to verify the information, which seems to suggest he doesn’t desire to investigate and verify the data and so effectively execute the job he was tasked with. In his interview with Coulthart, Grusch also mentioned how he has known Sean Kirkpatrick for roughly 8 years, and he expressed some concerns to him about a year ago regarding what he was amassing from his interviews, and the guy has thus far failed to follow up with him. He has his phone number, he said. He should be able to make the same investigative discoveries he did, he says. And though he falls short of saying Kirkpatrick is lying or deceiving Congress and the American public, he looks sincerely disappointed, almost hurt when he says this.
4. The Revelations of Shellenberger.
Between his article and subsequent interviews with him on the topic, Shellenberger revealed that during his time reporting on nuclear energy, he came across a lot of eyewitness testimony suggesting the reality of UFOs, and over the last few years he’s been interviewing multiple people, the testimonies of which confirm much of what Grusch has said. Shellengerger says that “multiple sources” – and the article implies there were three sources, but this was never stated outright – who were
“… close to the matter have come forward to tell Public [referring to the free and public aspect of substack, I believe] that Grusch’s core claims are accurate. The individuals are all either high-ranking intelligence officials, former intelligence officials, or individuals who we could verify were involved in U.S. government UAP efforts for three or more decades each. Two of them have testified, including as recently as last year, to both AARO and Congress. The individuals said they had seen or been presented with “credible” and “verifiable” evidence that the U.S. government, and U.S. military contractors, possess at least 12 or more alien space crafts…”
These sources, he said, wanted to speak out now to provide support and validation for Grush’s testimony, which they felt was a major step in bringing the truth to light, but due to their NDAs and/or security clearances, they wanted to remain anonymous. And two of the three sources, he added, refused to answer particular questions, on or off the record, for fear of reprisals. Despite their collective facelessness and selective censorship, however, much of what they had to say I have found quite illuminating, and it provides elaboration on Grusch’s public testimony.
These sources, he says, have seen or have been presented with credible and verifiable evidence that the US government and military contractors were involved in a UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering program. Like Grusch, many of his sources echo the claim that we didn’t only retrieve these craft through crash recoveries, but by deliberately bringing them down as well as through cases where the aliens abandoned the craft and left them unoccupied. One of his contacts, a contractor who also shared this data with Congress and ARRO, alleged that we were in possession of 12 to 15 craft, either from a crash, a landing, or “that we catch,” and that we tend to acquire another one or two of them every half a decade.
In his interview on Rising, apparently speaking on behalf of all of his contacts, Shellenberger says the retrieval program involves cases of craft having crashed, craft having been abandoned, and crafts making it into military hands in “other ways,” which makes me think of an exchange program, those ominous “agreements” Grusch alluded to – but he doesn’t go into detail and, to my unbridled frustration, this line isn’t followed up on. He also mentions he’s not the lone confessional, that others are interviewing these people, among them Christopher Mellon, who published an article in Politico referencing at least four witnesses who, for all he knows, may be some of the very same people he spoke to, as they don’t share information with each other.
Yet another contractor claimed there were at least four distinct morphologies of these crafts, and of the retrieved ones he was aware of, six were damaged and six others were in good shape. Another source described having personally seen three different kinds of craft, with one of them being the triangular or delta-shaped craft described by so many UFO witnesses, but another with a morphology I’ve never heard of and find difficult to properly visualize. According to Shellenberger, the guy described it as looking akin to “a chopped up helicopter, with the front bubble of a Huey helicopter, with the plastic windows, or more like a deep sea submarine, with a thick piece of glass bubble shaped, and where the tail rudder should have been, it was a black, egg-shaped pancake, and instead of landing gear it had upside-down rams horns that went from the top to the bottom and rested on the ends of the horns.”
I really wish even a rough sketch would have accompanied the article.
All sources apparently claimed that the Pentagon and the military contractors move the craft around between contractor facilities and military bases – including the infamous Area 51 – in their continued efforts to research the technology, though it seems there were conflicting allegations regarding whether or not the US had been able to successfully reverse-engineer and replicate the technology or, for that matter, even operate the NHI craft already in their possession.
According to one of his sources, between the government and their contractors, there were only between 100-700 individuals who knew about the UFO retrieval program; according to another, far fewer knew about the reverse-engineering and replication aspect. Regardless of how far they alleged we had gotten in understanding or operating the technology, all sources apparently agreed that the suffocating secrecy surrounding the program, which strictly forbids the kind of sharing of data and brainstorming between scientists and engineers that is so vital to scientific progress, was a major impediment.
Shellenberger also describes one military contractor that claimed there was an effort by a major aerospace corporation some thirteen years ago, in December of 2010, to circumvent this obstacle. What they had proposed, according to Shellenberger, was to create “a buffer organization to prevent [civilian] scientists and engineers who lacked top-secret clearance from learning where the tech they worked on came from” but would create an environment where they could share information and so be more likely to produce the kind of results that were desired from the higher-ups. When the vice president of the aerospace corporation took it back to an unnamed government agency, however, this proposal was swiftly and rather aggressively shut down by the military – to such an extent that the vice president was evidently “pretty stressed out about the whole thing.”
With respect to the bodies of dead aliens, he did confess to having confirmation of that from one of his sources, though he kept it out of the article, wishing to lesson “ontological shock,” a term he references Grusch having used, but again, I don’t recall that and to keep the focus on the retrieval program.
As to Grusch’s claims that there has been a secret cold war with respect to UFO reverse-engineering with our adversaries – and he mentions in particular that it’s between the US, China, and Russia, which to my knowledge Grusch himself did not specify – it was evidently something he wasn’t able to disconfirm or confirm, as his contacts simply didn’t know. What he does insist is that the data given to him by his contacts was data they also shared with AARO, which they have in turn evidently refused to provide to Congress.
Shellenberger added that he only felt comfortable writing his article now. In April of 2023, the ARRO director said there was no “credible” evidence of ETI, but after Grusch’s courageous act of stepping forward and the ICIG’s July 2022 determination that the information provided by Grusch and others constituted “credible and urgent” information, this statement was now changed. Now, the ARRO claims, through the DOD spokesperson, that there’s no “verifiable” evidence.
Shellenberger says this evidence is indeed verifiable. While there may certainly be resistance, we have civilian control over our military: you have to go into these facilities and look for these craft. Congress has to make it clear that this is not up to the military to withhold, it’s the right of the people to know what our tax dollars are being invested in.
5. The US Congress Responds.
The responses from members of Congress to Grusch’s allegations, while it has certainly not been unanimous, have been surprisingly open-minded, even all-in, and sober concern has been revealed.
On or around June 22, at least to NewsNation, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) gave his opinion on the Grusch revelations. While he can’t verify whether The Program exists, some of the claims Grusch made evidently track with what he’s heard in briefings after the US shot down those three UFOs this past winter.
“I’m not surprised, necessarily, by these latest allegations,” he said, “because it sounds pretty close to what they kind of begrudgingly admitted to us in the briefing. It’s not good. None of it’s good. I think we want to get to the bottom of this. I think it’s disturbing.”
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who led the Senate’s UAP hearing last April, assured us that: “I’m willing to do the work and analyze it and figure it out. We need to just look into whether there are rogue SAP programs that no one is providing oversight for. The goal for me will be to have a hearing on that at some point so that we can assess if these SAP’s actually exist. So if there are SAPs out there that are somehow outside of the normal chain of command and outside the normal appropriations process, they have to divulge that to Congress.”
The most explosive commentaries by members of Congress in this context, at least in my opinion, came when Joe Khaleel from NewsNation interviewed Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), vice chairman on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on June 27th, and when John Michael Goldier interviewed Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN 2nd District) on his podcast, Event Horizon, on July 2nd.
“I will say there are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years,” Rubio confessed on camera. “I would imagine some of them are potentially some of the same people that perhaps [Grusch is] referring to. I want to be very protective of these people. A lot of these people came to us even before these protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward.”
And these people have considerable access and status. “Most of these people at some point or maybe even currently have held very high clearances in high positions within our government,” he continued, “so you do ask yourself, like, what incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification — these are serious people — have to come forward and make something up?”
They remain anonymous for entirely understandable reasons, too. “A lot of them are very fearful,” he says “Fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career, and some frankly are fearful of harm coming to them. People we entrusted to do some very important things for our country are saying some pretty incredible things that I think we have an obligation to take seriously and listen to.”
He emphasizes that he doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, and refuses to claim that he believes them or not, but there is more than sufficient evidence that he and his colleagues on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are taking their allegations very fucking seriously.
Then there was the commentary of Representative Tim Burchett. While I didn’t watch the podcast myself, he was quoted as saying on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “I think it’s a little bit of madness and a whole lot of reality. I do believe we’ve recovered a craft at some point.”
He also was interviewed on Event Horizon, the podcast of sci-fi author John Michael Goldier, however, where I took extensive notes, and what he had to say certainly fleshed out that quotation above.
When asked if he believes Grusch, he was quick to assert that he not only did but he was briefed by countless people In The Know who seemed to corroborate what he said before Grusch even came on the scene. He’s seen compelling evidence of non-human presence that isn’t in the mainstream media that he can’t talk about. And he knows things are being hidden from Congress as well. He specifically mentioned an occasion when Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL 1st District), Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL 13th District), and himself were briefed in Florida and were informed that they “were going to get to see some things.” He warned Matt Gates they were going to pull back, and indeed they did – the three of them saw none of it. They were told it was because they didn’t have the proper clearance, which was curious, as they had the highest levels of clearance as Congressmen. Gaetz even served on the Military Funding Committee.
He also explained a very sneaky technique, one he described as a sort of trap, that they’ll use when they don’t want Congress to speak about something. They’ll put it in a classified briefing and you have to read it in a skiff. He explained how you have to turn your cell phones, fit bits and other electronic devices off and put them in a secure vault before going in. When they brief you, however, it’ll often turn out to be information that was already out there, though unconfirmed, and which you could have easily spoken about before, but now that they’ve briefed you on it, you can’t speak about it legally. Though he says he doesn’t do this with respect to the UFO subject, he often won’t go to these meetings because he knows they’re just going to tell him something he already knows and he wants to freely speak about the subject with the press.
He also says they plan on holding House hearings with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and that he is determined to keep this matter bipartisan. When asked if there was any way that Those in the Know could lay the UFO situation out for him in such a way that he might agree the public should be kept in the dark, he offered a hard no, asserting that they could have destroyed humanity already if they wanted to and there would be no way we could defend ourselves, so he reasons they wouldn’t be a threat to us. While I personally find his assumption here to be naive, I do hope his confidence holds strong throughout this.
Twice Goldier asked him a question I have been wondering myself. If indeed it’s proven that The Program exists – that there are SAPs that have no proper Congressional oversight – what can be done about it? He mentions the Defense Authorization Act, by which I believe he means that if these programs exist, Congress has the power to gut their funding, and by this, he seems to mean the Pentagon in general. He wants to bring in those running The Program before the committee, swear them under oath, and release the unredacted truth to the American people, who can decide where to go with it themselves.
He does seem skeptical that we’ll ever know the entirety of the truth, however, citing how it’s been over half a century since Kennedy was assassinated and they still refuse to release the files. He also claims there are certainly people in Congress who are compromised – that those truly in power have put them in situations where they now can blackmail them if necessary, so they’re essentially owned by them. He does assert, however, that we’ll at the very least get closer to the truth.
In any case, there is certainly evidence that Congress is taking assertions such as those Grusch made with considerable seriousness.
As reported on June 22, in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, in Section 1104, funding will not be authorized for any UFO-related activities (and they specifically mention analysis and reverse-engineering of craft) that have not been provided Congressional oversight. Furthermore: “Any person currently or formerly under contract with the Federal Government that has in their possession material or information provided by or derived from the Federal Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena that formerly or currently is protected by any form of special access or restricted access shall” notify the director of AARO within 60 days of the bill’s enactment and provide within 180 days provide for ARRO, “for assessment, analysis, and inspection” not only “all such material and information” but “a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic unidentified anomalous phenomena material.” ARRO must then provide this to Congress.
Honestly, this blows my mind.
I’ll be painfully honest here and confess that this is the last thing I ever expected. At least over the last two decades, I developed the pessimistic, cynical opinion that even if saucers stationed themselves over every major city on earth that nothing even vaguely approximating disclosure would occur. On the absolute contrary, I felt confident that our government and the career skeptics would keep up their game.
“UFOs? What UFOs? What you clearly uneducated, inbred idiots are seeing the light from Venus reflecting off a weather balloon, viewed through swamp gas.”
Yet here an intelligent, strategic, patriotic whistleblower provided legal, public testimony that paved the way for his sources and others In the Know that he didn’t even know about to utter what they knew of The Horrible Truth and the illegal and unethical activities that a rogue minority in our crooked government have engaged in for what disturbingly approximates a century, and even Congress has sided with them and felt fit to draw a fucking line.
I remain cynical, yet at the same time – and perhaps paradoxically – cautiously optimistic, and for holy fuck sure intensely curious as to where all this may lead. If nothing else, I hope to hell it brings all of us, as a species, a little closer to awareness of the greater, cosmic context of which we’ve always been a part, and have unethically been kept ignorant, and that in the end, we don’t find that we’ve been played, in the process, by truly super-intelligent, alien hands.
Transmissions to Earth 