IllustrationPhoto: the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, where David Grusch testified in Room 2154 on July 26, 2023. Architect of the Capitol photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Pentagon's UAP office says it found no verifiable evidence that any such program exists. As of October 27, 2026, no public document, photo or physical material has backed up his central claim.
What's documented: What Grusch said under oath, which is in the official hearing transcript. That he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General in May 2022. The Pentagon's written responses, and its own record of trying to interview him.
Status: Unresolved. His evidence, by his account, sits in classified complaints and closed-door testimony that hasn't been made public.
Last checked October 27, 2026, against the sources listed at the end.
Who is David Grusch?
Grusch described his career in his sworn opening statement. He said he was an intelligence officer for 14 years in the Air Force, on active duty and in the Air National Guard and Reserve, reaching the rank of major.
As a reservist with the National Reconnaissance Office, he said, he was a member of the Pentagon's UAP Task Force from 2019 to 2021. He then worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a GS-15 civilian, where he was the agency's "co-lead in unidentified anomalous phenomena and trans medium object analysis." He told the committee he left NGA in April 2023.
None of that background is in dispute. The dispute is over what he says he learned in those jobs.
What did Grusch claim before the hearing?
Grusch went public on June 5, 2023, in an article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal in The Debrief. They're the two journalists who, with Helene Cooper, broke the story of the Pentagon's secret UFO study in The New York Times in 2017.
In it, Grusch said the government, its allies and defense contractors had recovered "intact and partially intact" craft that analysis showed were "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin)." He said that information had been illegally withheld from Congress. The Debrief reported that the Pentagon's prepublication review office had cleared his on-the-record statements for release on April 4 and 6, 2023.
Two other points from that article come up again and again:
- The complaint. His lawyer, Charles McCullough III, the first Intelligence Community Inspector General, filed a complaint of urgent concern and reprisal on Grusch's behalf in May 2022, The Debrief reported.
- "Credible and urgent." The Debrief reported that the Inspector General found the complaint "credible and urgent" in July 2022. That's a legal threshold, not a verdict on whether the claims are true. Under the law at the time, 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5), the Inspector General had 14 days to decide whether a complaint "appears credible" and, if so, pass it to the Director of National Intelligence.
A Pentagon spokesperson, Sue Gough, answered within days. "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," she said, as The Guardian reported.
What did Grusch say under oath on July 26, 2023?
Grusch testified before the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, alongside two former Navy pilots, Ryan Graves and David Fravor. Fravor is the commander from the 2004 Nimitz encounter we cover in our Tic Tac case file.
His central claim was this sentence from his opening statement: "I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it." He added: "I am speaking to the facts as I have been told them."
Under questioning, he went further. All of these quotes come from the official transcript:
- Does the government have UAPs? "Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over 4 years," he told Rep. Robert Garcia. He said he knew "the exact locations" and had given them to the Inspector General and some to the intelligence committees.
- Bodies? Asked by Rep. Nancy Mace about pilots of crashed craft, he said "biologics came with some of these recoveries," and that they were "nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to."
- Funding? Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz how such a program gets paid for, he said "misappropriation of funds and self-fund," and agreed that contractors overcharging the government could feed such programs "through something called IR&D."
- Harm? Asked by Rep. Tim Burchett whether he knew of people harmed to keep this secret, he said "Yes, personally." Asked about murders, he said he had to be careful and had "directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities."
- Retaliation? He said there was "an open whistleblower reprisal investigation on my behalf" and that the tactics used against him were "very brutal."
What did Grusch say he hadn't seen?
This is the part of the testimony that gets lost in most coverage. Rep. Eric Burlison asked him directly.
Asked whether he'd seen the spacecraft, Grusch said: "I have to be careful to describe what I have seen firsthand and not in this environment. But I could answer that question behind closed doors." Asked whether he'd seen any of the bodies, he said: "That is something I have not witnessed myself."
He declined to answer several other questions in open session, including whether the government has had contact with non-human intelligence and where recovered material is kept. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said at the start of the hearing that members had been denied a classified briefing beforehand, in part because of the hoops involved in getting Grusch a temporary clearance.
So the sworn record is this: Grusch said he was told about the program by people he considers credible, and he said they showed him and his colleagues photos, documents and classified testimony. He didn't show any of it in public, and he said he hadn't personally seen the remains.
How did the Pentagon respond?
The fullest answer came on March 8, 2024, when the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released Volume I of its historical record report, covering 1945 through October 2023.
"AARO has found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology," acting director Tim Phillips told reporters. "AARO has found no indications that any information was illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress."
Phillips said the office assessed that alleged hidden programs "either do not exist or were misidentified, authentic national security programs." He blamed "circular reporting in which a small group of individuals have repeated inaccurate claims they have heard from others over a period of several decades." The report drew on interviews with about 30 people, DoD News reported. He also said most people repeating such claims did so "without malice."
Two months earlier, AARO's former director, Sean Kirkpatrick, had gone further in an essay for Scientific American. He wrote that as of his departure, "none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded 'whistleblowers' in the public eye had elected to come to AARO" despite "numerous invitations." He didn't name Grusch.
Critics of AARO, including several members of Congress, haven't accepted those findings. And AARO's report was written without an interview with Grusch, for the reasons in the next section.
Did Grusch ever talk to AARO?
No, according to AARO's own records. A January 8, 2024, AARO memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, lists attempts to interview him from June 2023 through January 2024. They went through his associates, Senate staff and direct emails.
The memo says Grusch agreed on November 10, 2023, to be interviewed in Arlington, Virginia, on November 14, then didn't show up. AARO says he told them he wasn't convinced the office was authorized to receive the information. "It became evident that Mr. Grusch had no intention of providing AARO with information regarding his claims," the memo concludes.
Grusch's side is in the same file, in his own emails. He wrote that the law "may grant your office need-to-know, but does not establish policies and procedures with various data owners." He said that talking about UAP-related work would also expose unrelated classified programs that share the same security rules, and asked for written answers before he'd meet.
On January 8, 2024, AARO sent him a memo from the intelligence community's controlled-access programs office and told him the invitation still stood. His reply, in the same file, asked AARO to address the specific concerns he'd emailed on November 19, 2023. No public record shows an interview since.
What has happened since 2023?
Plenty of activity. No new public evidence for the core claim.
- December 2023: a records law, minus the review board. The 2024 defense bill created a "UAP Records Collection" at the National Archives, DefenseScoop reported. But an independent review board proposed by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds was dropped in negotiations with the House, which Schumer called "an outrage" on the Senate floor.
- November 13, 2024: a second House hearing. Grusch wasn't a witness. The panel heard from retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo, Michael Shellenberger and Michael Gold, NPR reported.
- September 9, 2025: a third. At a House task force hearing on UAP whistleblowers, witness George Knapp noted Grusch was in the room. Rep. Eric Burlison thanked him by name, and witness Dylan Borland said he went to the Inspector General in August 2023 after Grusch testified. Rep. Nancy Mace said Grusch's "private medical information" had been leaked, and Rep. Eli Crane entered a letter about his reprisal case into the record.
- March 2025: a job on Capitol Hill. Rep. Eric Burlison announced on March 27, 2025, that he'd hired Grusch as a special advisor on UAP transparency. NewsNation reported the post was for four months at first and that he'd advise Burlison only, not the Oversight Committee.
- March 2, 2026: a records lawsuit. Grusch sued the Defense Department in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, under the Freedom of Information Act (Grusch v. U.S. Department of Defense, No. 1:26-cv-00607). It's about records of an unauthorized-disclosure complaint involving him, not about whether his UAP claims are true. According to the government's filings, as reported by USA Herald, the Pentagon's searches turned up about 6,632 pages of possibly relevant records, and it released 40 pages in May 2026. Grusch isn't challenging the redactions, only whether the search was thorough enough. Both sides have asked for summary judgment. The docket shows the Pentagon's next brief due October 30 and a hearing set for November 20, 2026.
- 2026: the Pentagon releases files. After President Trump's February 19 post, the Pentagon began publishing UAP records through a program called PURSUE. Seven releases have come out through October 23, 478 records in all, according to file-list trackers. They're mostly sensor video, witness accounts, astronaut records and old Air Force paperwork. None of it confirms anything extraterrestrial, and the Pentagon doesn't claim it does. We track them in the Pentagon UFO files.
- June 9, 2026: a Capitol press conference. Grusch joined Reps. Luna, Burchett, Burlison and Moskowitz to call for declassification. "This press conference is about moving from testimony to action," he said beforehand, according to Los Angeles magazine.
- September 30, 2026: Joe Rogan. On episode #2560 of The Joe Rogan Experience, Grusch described a crash involving dead "grays" and living "reptilian" beings that U.S. personnel shot, Cybernews reported. He said the account was secondhand. He also spoke of a large underwater "base of operations," the Daily Mail reported, without saying where it is or how it was found.
The pattern hasn't changed since 2023. The claims have grown more detailed, while the evidence he says exists stays classified or unpublished.
Grusch's claims vs. what's been checked
| Claim | Where it comes from | What's been checked |
|---|---|---|
| A multi-decade crash retrieval and reverse engineering program | Grusch, under oath, July 26, 2023 | Based on what he was told; AARO says it found no verifiable evidence |
| "Nonhuman" biologics recovered | Grusch, citing people on the program | He said he hadn't seen them himself; nothing public |
| Exact locations given to investigators | Grusch, under oath | The Inspector General and intelligence committees haven't released anything |
| ICIG found his complaint "credible and urgent" | The Debrief, June 2023 | A legal screening threshold; the complaint itself isn't public |
| Information illegally withheld from Congress | Grusch | AARO found "no indications" of it, March 2024 |
| AARO isn't set up to receive his information safely | Grusch, in emails to AARO, Nov. 2023 | AARO and the Pentagon say the law lets it receive UAP information at any classification; its records show repeated invitations and a missed Nov. 14, 2023, meeting |
| Reptilian beings shot at a crash site | Grusch on Joe Rogan, Sept. 30, 2026 | Secondhand by his own account; no record |
What would settle it?
The fastest route runs through records that already exist. Grusch says he gave the Inspector General and the congressional intelligence committees locations, program details and witnesses. An unclassified summary of what those investigators found, even a short one, would tell the public whether any of it checked out.
Physical evidence would settle it outright: material from an alleged recovery, examined by independent labs and published where other scientists could check it. A closed-door session in which members of Congress see that evidence, followed by a public account from them, would be the next best thing.
The other open thread is AARO's second historical volume, which was meant to cover interviews from November 2023 to April 2024. As of October 27, 2026, it hasn't been published.
Until then, the honest summary is narrow. A credentialed intelligence officer made sworn claims based on what others told him. The Pentagon says it can't verify them, and he hasn't brought them to the Pentagon office that investigates them. For how that office's work fits into the government's wider UFO budget, see what the U.S. government spends on UFOs.
The crash-retrieval story itself is much older than Grusch. It goes back to Roswell in 1947, and in 1989 Bob Lazar claimed he'd worked on recovered craft near Area 51, a claim we've checked against the records. And the 2008-2012 Pentagon contract that also paid for paranormal research at a Utah ranch is covered in our Skinwalker Ranch briefing. If you're wondering why officials now say "UAP" instead of "UFO," we explain it in why UFO became UAP.
Sources
- U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs: "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," hearing transcript, July 26, 2023 (Serial No. 118-53)
- Congress.gov: hearing record, July 26, 2023, 2154 Rayburn House Office Building
- The Debrief: Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, "Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin," June 5, 2023
- 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5): Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, urgent concern complaints (Cornell LII)
- The Guardian: "A whistleblower claims the US has alien vehicles. But where's the proof?," June 9, 2023 (Pentagon statement by Sue Gough)
- DoD News: C. Todd Lopez, "DOD Report Discounts Sightings of Extraterrestrial Technology," March 8, 2024
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I," 2024
- Scientific American: Sean Kirkpatrick, "Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter," Jan. 19, 2024
- AARO FOIA release 24-F-0266: memorandum for record, "AARO Invitations to Interview Mr. David Grusch," Jan. 8, 2024, with email exchanges (cleared for open publication June 13, 2025)
- DefenseScoop: Jon Harper, "Government UAP records repository on the verge of becoming law, opened to public viewing," Dec. 7, 2023
- Senate Democrats: Schumer and Rounds floor colloquy on UAP provisions in the NDAA, Dec. 13, 2023
- NPR: "UFOs and UAPs should be studied by the U.S., experts tell congressional hearing," Nov. 13, 2024
- U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets: "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," hearing transcript, Sept. 9, 2025 (Serial No. 119-44)
- Los Angeles magazine: Lauren Conlin, "UFO Whistleblower David Grusch Returns to Capitol Hill Tuesday," June 9, 2026
- C-SPAN: "Rep. Burlison and Others on UAP Declassification," June 9, 2026
- Cybernews: Marcus Walsh, "UFO whistleblower David Grusch claims US troops shot reptilians in 'Ghostbusters moment,'" Oct. 1, 2026
- Office of Rep. Eric Burlison: "Rep. Burlison Welcomes Former U.S. Air Force Officer David Grusch as Special Advisor," March 27, 2025 (via LegiStorm)
- NewsNation: "UFO whistleblower David Grusch hired to advise Rep. Burlison," March 2025
- U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia: Grusch v. United States Department of Defense, No. 1:26-cv-00607, docket (via PACERMonitor), checked Oct. 27, 2026
- USA Herald: Samuel Lopez, "David Grusch Takes Pentagon FOIA Fight to Critical Stage After 6,632 Pages Yield Just 40," Oct. 13, 2026
- U.S. Department of War: "Department of War Publishes Seventh Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files," Oct. 23, 2026
- WARUFO: archive of PURSUE Releases 01 to 07 (478 documents)
- Daily Mail: Chris Melore, Grusch's underwater-base claim on The Joe Rogan Experience, Oct. 1, 2026
- Wikimedia Commons: "Flickr - USCapitol - Rayburn House Office Building.jpg," Architect of the Capitol, public domain
Questions people ask
Who is David Grusch?
David Grusch is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who served on the Pentagon's UAP Task Force from 2019 to 2021 as a National Reconnaissance Office reservist, then worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency until April 2023. He became known in June 2023 for claiming the U.S. government has a secret program that recovers and reverse-engineers non-human craft.
When did David Grusch testify?
Grusch testified under oath on July 26, 2023, before the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, the border and foreign affairs, alongside former Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor. He wasn't a witness at the later UAP hearings on November 13, 2024, or September 9, 2025.
Did Grusch see the alien bodies or craft himself?
He told Congress he had not seen the bodies. Asked whether he'd seen any, he said, "That is something I have not witnessed myself." Asked about the craft, he said he couldn't describe what he'd seen firsthand in an open hearing. His claims are based, he said, on interviewing more than 40 witnesses over four years.
Did the Pentagon confirm Grusch's claims?
No. In June 2023 a Pentagon spokesperson said AARO had found no verifiable information to back claims of programs possessing or reverse-engineering extraterrestrial material. AARO's March 2024 historical report said it found no verifiable evidence the government or private industry ever had extraterrestrial technology, and no sign information was illegally withheld from Congress.
Did David Grusch talk to AARO?
Not according to AARO's records. A January 2024 AARO memo released under FOIA lists invitations from June 2023 on, and says Grusch agreed to an interview on November 14, 2023, then didn't attend. In emails in the same file, Grusch said he wanted written answers on how classified programs unrelated to UAP would be protected before he'd meet.
What does David Grusch do now?
He's continued to push for disclosure. Rep. Eric Burlison hired him as a special advisor on UAP in March 2025. In March 2026 he sued the Defense Department under the Freedom of Information Act over records about him; a hearing is set for November 20, 2026. He joined a Capitol press conference on June 9, 2026, and on September 30, 2026, he described secondhand accounts of a crash involving non-human beings on The Joe Rogan Experience. None of those accounts has been backed by public evidence.
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