Former Intelligence Official Says Congress Being Kept in the Dark About ‘Nonhuman’ Aircraft

A still from GO FAST, an official U.S. government video of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), taken in 2015. U.S. Navy

An Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer has come forward alleging that classified information about the government’s possession of nonhuman craft is being illegally withheld from Congress.

David Grusch, 36, was a decorated combat officer in Afghanistan and is a former intelligence officer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Grusch first told his story to investigative journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, who published the story in the science and technology outlet The Debrief on June 5. NewsNation aired an interview with Grusch later that evening.

Grusch, who has handed over classified information on the craft to Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), said he’s filed a complaint alleging that he’s suffered from retaliation since becoming a whistleblower.

Kean and Blumenthal, who have both researched and conducted numerous interviews on the topic, said what Grusch reported corroborates the testimonies of other intelligence officials they’ve interviewed.

According to Kean and Blumenthal, Grusch served as the NRO’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021, and from 2021 to 2022, he was a co-lead for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) analysis for the NGA and its representative to the task force.

The task force—which fell under the Department of the Navy’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security—has been restructured and renamed the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigating underwater phenomena.

‘Broad Crash Retrieval Program’

Grusch told investigative journalist Ross Coulthart on NewsNation that the UAP Task Force was refused access to a “broad crash retrieval program.”

“These are retrieving nonhuman origin technical vehicles—call it spacecraft if you will—nonhuman, exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” he said.

In response to Coulthart’s question asking if the government had spacecraft from another species and how many, Grusch said, “We do. Quite a number.”

“I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” he said.

Grusch said he was approached by former senior intelligence officers who confided to him that they were part of a program that had been kept from the task force.

For decades, the program has been recovering nonhuman craft, Grusch alleged.

“If you’re right, if you’re telling us the truth, everyone, the entire American public, has been lied to for decades,” Coulthart said, to which Grusch responded by saying there’s been a “sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. populous which is extremely unethical and immoral.”

In response to Coulthart’s question as to whether the government is in possession of extraterrestrial bodies, Grusch said, “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.”

According to Kean and Blumenthal, in filing his complaint Grusch is being represented by Charles McCullough with the Washington-based Compass Rose Legal Group.

McCullough served as the first Inspector General of the Intelligence Community after the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act established ICIG within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Currently, Thomas Monheim serves as the ICIG.

Kean and Blumenthal said Grusch had presented the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review with the statement he intended to give the journalists, which was then “cleared for publication” in April 2023.

Reverse Engineering for Defense Technology

In his statement, Kean and Blumenthal said, Grusch reported programs dating back to the Cold War that have been involved in retrieving and reverse engineering extraterrestrial craft to “garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”

“Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia,” he said.

Grusch left the government in April 2023, according to Kean and Blumenthal, to “advance government accountability through public awareness.”

Others on the UAP Task Force vouched for Grusch’s credibility to Kean and Blumenthal, they said.

“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” retired Army Colonel Karl Nell told Kean and Blumenthal.

According to Grusch, the ICIG found Grusch’s complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022 before it was submitted to Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

This led to the launching of a whistleblower reprisal investigation.

Much of what Grusch found in his investigation, however, couldn’t be brought before Congress because they don’t have the appropriate security clearance, Kean and Blumenthal stated.

“When you have multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional [Special Access/Controlled Access Programs], both as recipients of exploitation-related insights and for operational reasons, without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities, you have a problem,” Grusch said.

‘Materials That Are Not of This World’

In January, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told NewsNation that the government persists in hiding information on UAPs.

“We’ve been covering this thing up since the ‘40s—since Roswell or before then,” Burchett said. “I don’t trust government. There’s an arrogance about it, and I think the American public can handle it, and they need to release everything, and that includes if they in fact do have a craft, which I believe at some point, we have obtained some materials that are not of this world that are being studied by different members of industry, I’ve been told.”

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in a report (pdf) published on Jan. 12, there has been an increase in sightings.

The U.S. government collected a total of 510 UAP reports as of Aug. 30, 2022, an increase of 366 reports in the 17 months since DNI’s preliminary assessment when, in June 2021, it reported 144 UAP sightings between 2004 and 2021.

The DNI said there have been “247 new reports and another 119 that were either since discovered or reported after the preliminary assessment’s time period.”

According to Burchett, when it comes to topics addressing classified material, there are two reports: the one made public and the one that is classified.

“If a congressperson is briefed on the classified briefing, then basically, they’re not allowed by law to even talk on the issue of what’s in that, even if it’s something they already know,” Burchett said.

Roswell, New Mexico

Burchett mentioned the Roswell, New Mexico, incident, where, in 1947, there was an unidentified aircraft crash that was initially reported as a recovered flying saucer by the U.S. Army Air Forces before it was quickly retracted and reported as a fallen weather balloon.

In 1997, the late Col. Philip Corso alleged in his memoir “The Day After Roswell” that when he was a member of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Security Council and head of the foreign technological desk at the U.S. Army’s Research and Development Department, he headed the Army’s reverse-engineering project that took recovered technology from the 1947 Roswell crash and seeded the information out to major corporate firms.

Using the provided information, these firms were able to manufacture “integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, laser technology, and super-tenacity fibers.”

Burchett said he’s talked with Navy pilots who admitted the UAPs are neither of terrestrial origin nor under any government control.

“So, there’s a lot of things going on within this,” he said. “There’s a lot, I think, that has transpired since the ‘40s.”

The Epoch Times contacted Grusch’s attorney, Charles McCullough, for comment.