At 10:06 on the morning of 26 July 2023, in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, a former intelligence officer raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth. His name was David Charles Grusch, a retired major in the United States Air Force, a combat veteran of Afghanistan, who had served as the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021. And what he told the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, under oath, was this: that he had been informed, in the course of his official duties, of a multi-decade programme to recover crashed craft of non-human origin and reverse-engineer them — and of what he called “non-human biologics” recovered from them.
It was, by any measure, the most extraordinary claim ever made under oath about unidentified flying objects. It was also, from the first, a claim with a peculiar shape: sweeping in its scope, precise in its language, and almost entirely unsupported by public evidence. Grusch named no programmes. He named no officials. He produced no photographs, no documents, no pieces of material. He said, repeatedly, that the specifics were classified, and that he had provided them in classified form to the Intelligence Community Inspector General and to the congressional committees. Everything that mattered, in other words, was behind a closed door. Everything in the open was a man, under oath, saying that he had been told something extraordinary by people he trusted.
Who David Grusch is
Grusch’s background is not in dispute, and it is the reason his claims were taken seriously. He is a former Air Force officer who served in Afghanistan and then moved into intelligence work, serving with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and as the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the UAP Task Force. He held Top Secret clearances with access to sensitive compartmented information. He also helped draft the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023, which included provisions for reporting unidentified phenomena, including whistleblower protections and exemptions from non-disclosure orders.
In May 2022 — on 24 May, by his own account — Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Thomas A. Monheim, under Presidential Policy Directive 19, the rule that protects intelligence community whistleblowers. The complaint alleged a multi-decade crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme, and retaliation for trying to expose it. The Inspector General’s office found the complaint “urgent and credible” — a formal determination that it was serious enough to be forwarded to the Director of National Intelligence and to Congress. That determination is a matter of record. It is also a determination about the complaint, not about the truth of what the complaint alleged.
Grusch first detailed his claims publicly in June 2023, in an interview published by the specialist outlet The Debrief, written by the journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. A month later, he was sitting before the subcommittee, alongside two other witnesses: the retired Navy commander David Fravor, who had encountered the “Tic Tac” object off the California coast in 2004, and the former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who had reported repeated encounters off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015. Fravor and Graves testified to things they had seen themselves. Grusch testified to things he had been told.
What he claimed
Under oath, Grusch made three specific public claims. First, that the United States operates a programme to recover and reverse-engineer craft of non-human origin, running across multiple decades, and that he had been informed of it in the course of his official duties — a programme, he said, to which he had been denied access when he requested it. Second, that “non-human biologics” had been recovered from some of these craft. Third, that materials related to the programme had been transferred to private aerospace contractors in ways structured to remove them from congressional oversight.
When pressed, he was careful about the limits of his own knowledge. Asked whether he had seen the spacecraft himself, he said he had to be careful to describe what he had seen firsthand and not in that environment, and that he could answer behind closed doors. Asked about bodies, he said plainly: “That is something I have not witnessed myself.” His knowledge, he said, rested on interviews with more than forty witnesses over four years — people, he said, with “a long-standing track record of legitimacy and service to this country”, whom he had personally interviewed. When Representative Robert Garcia asked whether the government possesses UAP, Grusch answered: “Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over 4 years”, adding that the locations of the material “were provided to the Inspector General and some of which to the intelligence committees”.
He also made a stranger claim, one that has received less attention. Grusch said he had viewed documents reporting that a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini’s government in 1933, and procured by the United States in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Like his other claims, it was presented without evidence in public, and it has not been corroborated by any document that has surfaced since.
The official answer
The response from the United States government was swift and unambiguous. NASA and the Department of Defense both denied Grusch’s claims, stating that there are no such programmes and that extraterrestrial life has not been discovered. At the hearing itself, Representative Virginia Foxx placed on the record the contrary testimony of Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, then the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO — the office created to investigate UAP reports — that there was “no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity” or of “off-world technology brought to the attention of the office”.
AARO’s own investigation reached the same conclusion in writing. In March 2024, the office published Volume 1 of its Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, examining crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering claims back to 1945. It concluded that “none of these programs have been involved with capturing, recovering, or reverse-engineering off-world technology or material”, and found “no empirical evidence” for the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology by the United States government or by private companies. One sample alleged to have come from a recovered craft, the report noted, was identified on analysis as a manufactured terrestrial alloy of magnesium, zinc and bismuth. Subsequent AARO reports, including the Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report, likewise reported no verifiable evidence of recovered UAP-derived material.
That is the state of the public record: a sworn witness who says he was told, by people he trusted, that the government holds non-human craft; and a government office, after a formal historical review, that says it found no evidence that any such programme exists. Both statements are documented. Neither, on its own, settles the question — but only one of them is backed by evidence that anyone outside a classified briefing has been able to examine.
What happened next
Grusch did not disappear after the hearing. In March 2025 he was announced as a Special Advisor to the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, a congressional effort to push for the release of classified material, including on UAP. In June 2026, at a press conference, he gave further details on the supposed alien life-forms he said the government knew about — again without producing evidence in public.
A separate strand of the story concerns his treatment as a whistleblower. Grusch has said he suffered retaliation for his decision to come forward, and that he lost his security clearance. In January 2026, a Department of Defense Inspector General report on UAP whistleblower reprisal, released under the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that the protected disclosures at issue “were not a contributing factor” in the clearance action. The report did not name the complainant. Its finding does not address the truth of Grusch’s claims about crash retrieval; it addresses only whether his disclosures caused the action taken against him.
The Grusch case is best understood as a dispute about evidence — about what counts as proof, and who gets to see it. His supporters point to his clearances, his record and the Inspector General’s “urgent and credible” finding, and argue that a man with his background would not risk his career on a fantasy. His critics point to the claims themselves: secondhand in every particular, unaccompanied by a single piece of public evidence, and contradicted by the government’s own historical review. The disagreement is about what the facts mean.
What is certain is that no evidence supporting Grusch’s claims has been presented in public, and that multiple independent experts have dismissed them. What is also certain is that the claims have not been disproved in public either — because the evidence that would settle them, if it exists, is classified, and a negative finding by AARO is a finding about the evidence AARO could examine, not proof that nothing exists anywhere. That is, for the moment, where it rests.
What is documented, and what is not
Documented facts: David Charles Grusch is a former United States Air Force major and intelligence official who served as the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021, and with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. On 24 May 2022 he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General under Presidential Policy Directive 19; the Inspector General found the complaint “urgent and credible”. On 26 July 2023 he testified under oath before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, alongside David Fravor and Ryan Graves, stating that he had been informed of a multi-decade UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme, that “non-human biologics” had been recovered, and that his knowledge came from interviews with more than forty witnesses over four years. He also stated that he had not personally witnessed the craft or the biologics. NASA and the Department of Defense have denied the claims. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, in its March 2024 Historical Record report, found no empirical evidence that the United States government or private companies recovered or reverse-engineered non-human craft or biologics. In March 2025 Grusch was announced as a Special Advisor to the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. In January 2026 a Department of Defense Inspector General report concluded that the protected disclosures at issue were not a contributing factor in the clearance action.
Unverified or unproven claims: That the United States operates a multi-decade programme to recover and reverse-engineer non-human craft; that “non-human biologics” have been recovered; that materials were transferred to private contractors to evade congressional oversight; and that a craft was recovered by Mussolini’s government in 1933 and procured by the United States in 1944 or 1945 with the help of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance. All of these are claims made by Grusch on the basis of secondhand accounts. No evidence supporting them has been presented in public, and they have been dismissed by multiple independent experts and contradicted by AARO’s historical review.