ANALYSIS: Vatican Official Denies Whistleblower’s Mussolini-Era UAP Cover-Up Claim

ANALYSIS: Vatican Official Denies Whistleblower’s Mussolini-Era UAP Cover-Up Claim
Maj. Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles north west of Roswell, N.M., in June 1947. The debris has been identified as that of a radar target. The Air Force released a report on June 24 debunking reports of a UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947. UNITED STATES AIR FORCE/AFP/Getty Images
Matt McGregor
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News Analysis 

A Vatican official has denied a recent whistleblower’s claim that it was involved in a cover-up of extraterrestrial craft.

David Grusch, a decorated Air Force veteran and former senior intelligence officer, reported to media outlets The Debrief and NewsNation that classified information about the government’s possession of craft of nonhuman origin has been illegally withheld from Congress.

Grusch told interviewers he handed classified information on the craft to Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General and filed a complaint that he’s suffered from retaliation since becoming a whistleblower.

The publication of his statements on June 5 was followed up by a publication of more segments from the interview on June 11 in which he claimed that Pope Pius XII backchannelled a partially intact UAP Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime discovered in 1933.

Historically, it’s been reported that Mussolini documented UAPs, as demonstrated by the Italian Secret Services’ internal memo showing drawings of craft, according to NewsNation.

It was the first documented retrieval before the next one in Roswell, New Mexico, Grusch said.

“The Italian government moved it to a secure air base in Italy for the rest of the fascist regime until 1944-1945,” Grusch said.

It was then when Pope Pias XII informed the Americans of the craft, Grusch said.

“We ended up scooping it,” Grusch said.

Ross Coulthart, the investigative reporter who was interviewing Grusch for NewsNation, said, “Let me be very clear about this: you’re saying that the Catholic Church—the Vatican—they know about the existence of nonhuman intelligence on this planet,” to which Grusch responded, “Certainly.”

The Epoch Times contacted the Vatican for comment.

In response, Marco Grilli, the secretary of the prefecture for the Vatican Apostolic Archives, told The Epoch Times that the Monsignor Prefect “directed me to inform you that no mention of that topic of your interest is contained in the archival fonds of this Vatican Apostolic Archives.”

RADAR detecting UFOs swarming US Navy ship (Screenshot/Mystery Wire)
RADAR detecting UFOs swarming US Navy ship Screenshot/Mystery Wire

‘As Fantastical as That Sounds, It’s True’

Grush, a former intelligence officer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), 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 (AARO) to include investigating underwater phenomena.

Grusch told Coulthart that the UAP Task Forces was refused access to a “broad crash retrieval program” and that the government had a “sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. population, which is extremely unethical and immoral.”

Grusch also said that the government was in possession of extraterrestrial bodies.

“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.”

When asked about details about the Roswell crash, Grusch said he wasn’t approved to speak about the 1947 incident.

According to The Debrief report, Grusch had to clear his statements before the Department of Defense’s Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review, which was later “cleared for publication.”

The UAP that crashed 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.

“Why are these things crashing?” Coulthart asked.

To which Grusch responded, “Some are landed, some are crashed, and I think that’s an interesting discussion that’s come up. As advanced as we are as humans—planes crash, cars crash—just because you’re some advanced sentience that has advanced technology doesn’t mean some small percentage of your—I’ll use the Air Force term—sorites meet an unfortunate operational conclusion.”

Couthart asked about Dr. Shawn Kirkpactick’s recent testimony to Congress.

Kirkpatrick, director of AARO, told Congress that he had seen no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

“While a large number of cases in our holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases,” Kirkpatrick said.

Grusch, a former member of AARO, said he expressed concerns with Kirkpatrick.

“I told him what I was starting to uncover, and he didn’t follow up with me,” Grusch said. “He has my phone number; he could’ve called me. I hope he ultimately does the right thing. He should be able to make the same investigative discoveries I did.”

A UFO was captured over Victoria, Australia, on Google Earth, according to bloggers. (Google Street View)
A UFO was captured over Victoria, Australia, on Google Earth, according to bloggers. Google Street View

‘Feudalistic Dominance’

Grusch said the reason for the secrecy around UAPs was “feudalistic dominance” to “feed the war machine.”

Grusch pointed to an incident in 1967 in which ten nuclear missiles were shut down after several officials said they witnessed UAPs hovering over nuclear weapons launch facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Cascade County, Montana.

“It certainly looks like they want to understand how we’ve advanced in our nuclear fizzle kind of technology, at the very least,” he said. “I mean, it looks like preparatory probing activity. It might be an innocent kind of scientific gathering. It could be ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] probing.”

Though he wouldn’t disclose where the craft is being stored, he said those who have worked with them have contracted health problems.

“A lot of them were injured looking at some of this stuff,” he said. “You can imagine the nuclear, radiological biological risk to looking at an unknown unknown, and a lot of them have literally suffered physically because of their service.”

Though one would assume because an advanced species that has achieved space travel would be benevolent, Grusch said, in truth, there have been reports of the opposite.

“Have human beings been hurt or killed by nonhuman intelligence?” Coutlhart asked, to which Grusch responded, “While I can’t get into the specifics because that would reveal certain U.S. classified operations, I was briefed by a few individuals on the program that there were malevolent events like that.”

Other countries, such as Russia and China, have crash retrieval programs as well, Grusch said, and are engaged in a geopolitical competition to comprehend the technology.

“It’s a multi-decade Cold War that’s been under our nose for so long,” Grusch said. “There’s no good way to level the playing field and hold other nation states accountable if they’re doing [an] unethical or illicit activity as it relates to this subject, and I think the obtuse secrecy is actually putting us in a very dangerous position where a country might make a breakthrough that’s an adversary of ours and it is so destabilizing.”

Without answering directly, Grusch implied that he was aware that there are treaties between world governments and nonhuman intelligence.

Grusch provided an example of how these governments are aware of UAPs by highlighting Article 3 of a 1971 treaty between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Article 3 states, “The Parties undertake to notify each other immediately in the event of detection by missile warning systems of unidentified objects, or in the event of signs of interference with these systems or with related communications facilities if such occurrences could create a risk of outbreak of nuclear war between the two countries.”

A screenshot of ABC News shots photo of the UFO in Santee. Calif.
A screenshot of ABC News shots photo of the UFO in Santee. Calif.

‘A Moment of Pause’

Grusch said that among the reasons he came forward is he believes it’s unethical that the technology is being kept from the public, whom he said could benefit from what improvements it could make to civilization.

“It’s totally nuts that humanity as a whole—especially the U.S. citizenry as a whole—they’re not even benefitting from broad research on this to solve propulsion, energy issues, novel material science that could improve people’s quality of life,” he said. “It’s just totally nuts how it’s been protected and inhibits progress.”

Overall, Grusch said he hopes the information could bring people together in contemplation over their place in the universe.

“I don’t have this utopian ideology that this is going to solve world problems, stop war entirely,” Grusch said. “But all I want is a moment of pause and to see if this subject unites us as we’ve obviously become more divided over the last couple of decades.”

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