UPDATED 12/6/2023
The news broke yesterday on The Debrief by journalists Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, authors of the December 2017 New York Times article that revealed the existence of a UFO / UAP office within the Pentagon (AATIP).
According to David Charles Grusch, former representative of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to the UAP Task Force - which followed after AATIP -, objects "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin)" have been recovered for several decades - by the US government and subcontractors and by their allies for military purposes.
Speaking on camera with award winning journalist Ross Coulthart, in an interview recorded last month, the army veteran explains :
The UAP Task Force was refused access to a broad crash retrieval program. (...) Non human, exotic vehicles that either landed or crashed. (...) Quite a number. I have plenty of current and former Intelligence officers that came to me, (...) they were a part of a program (...) they provided me documents.
While the origin of these objects remains unknown, journalist Max Moszkowicz puts forward a hypothesis in an article for Revu magazine, published just a few hours ago. According to the Dutch journalist's sources, the device was retrieved by the US after their invasion of Italy in 1943.
Franc Milburn, a British military analyst for the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University, already talked about the United States developing UAP based weapons in his 2021 study entitled "The American Development of UAP Technology: A fait accompli?"
A Congress kept in the dark
According to whistleblower Grusch, these programs are being carried out without the knowledge of Congress, without any political oversight - he also claims to have suffered reprisals for having informed representatives of the people.
Grusch does not appear to be making these startling statements lightly. According to The Debrief, he's referred the matter to the Inspector General of Intelligence, a body responsible for ensuring the proper management of the relevant services. The whistleblower is being represented by non other than... the former Inspector General of Intelligence.
Grusch's decision doesn't seem to have come out of the blue, as Congress itself had included provisions within the 2023 Defense Funding Act, encouraging any whistleblower to come forward and testify about "any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a department or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including with respect to material retrieval, material analysis [and] reverse engineering."
The law, signed by Joe Biden in December 2022, also requires the establishment of provisions protecting members of the military and intelligence community who wish to report possible wrongdoings - a move that may have decided Grusch to dare to speak out.
The current climate seems conducive to such revelations, since less than a week ago NASA held a public working meeting on the investigation currently being carried out by the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team (UAPIST); both houses of Congress have held public meetings on the subject of UAP in 2022 and 2023; Tennessee representative Tim Burchett has been all over the news these last few months, asserting the existence of programmes linked to hidden UAP within the government, and announcing the forthcoming holding of new public hearings.
A few weeks ago, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, co-author of UAP provisions, declared that she was available to any whistleblowers wishing to testify without fear of being denounced. The Senator's remark, along with the launch of the investigation by the Inspector General, seem to give credence to the concern that witnesses wishing to speak out may be subject to pressure.
This is not the first investigation of this kind to be launched by the Inspector General (IG). Just a few years back, former AATIP director Lue Elizondo went to the IG, accusing his superiors of seeking to discredit him after he resigned from the Department of Defence in 2017 - a decision taken in protest at the inaction of his superiors on the subject of UAPs. He also went to the Inspector General.
Secret UAP programs: sounds familiar
As striking as Grusch's accusation is, the whistleblower is not the first to mention the existence of secret programs studying devices of non-human origin. In 2018, physicist Eric W. Davis, a Pentagon subcontractor, told the New York Times that he had informed congressional staff of the recovery of unexplained objects as early as 2019, and that he had even briefed a Department of Defense agency on "off-world vehicles not made on this earth" in 2020. Stanford University and renowned immunologist Garry Nolan revealed, during last month's Salt conference, that he was in contact with people "who frankly have worked or are working on the reverse-engineering program (...) of downed craft".
The Debrief points out that Grusch's statements have been backed up by Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer with Top Secret clearance, currently based at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). He too asserts that spacecraft recoveries are not limited to the United States, and goes so far as to describe them as a global phenomenon. But Grusch goes further, claiming that this is a veritable arms race, derived from recovered - sometimes intact - devices, "over the past eighty years". And it's not just about devices, as he said to Ross Coulthart during his interview.
"When you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots. (...) As fantastical as that sounds... It's true."
Grusch adds, in the Debrief article, that the secrecy surrounding this subject "prevents the global population from preparing" for a potentially destabilising prospect: a possible "contact with a non-human intelligence".
David Charles Grusch's assertion that the United States' allies have also recovered such devices is another particularly shocking one. Indeed, the Australian Air Force, which is very close to its American cousin, was still declaring in 2021 that it wasn't looking into UAP. As for France, although it has been funding its own UAP Study Group (GEIPAN) since the 1970s, it has never reported recovering any "exotic" devices.
That said, these revelations by the former US intelligence officer could encourage potential whistleblowers in Australia, France or elsewhere to speak out, if such programs do indeed exist in these countries.
Unveiling the Shadows (June 12th update)
On June 11th, a one-hour version of the ground-breaking interview featuring David Grusch aired on NewsNation, after last week's excerpts.
Speaking of the anomalous objects he claims were retrieved, Grusch insists on not calling them specifically "extraterrestrial", but rather of non-human intelligence (NHI, he says) not to exclude any hypothesis.
"I don’t think we have all the data to say, 'oh, they’re coming from a certain location.' (...) Maybe they’re coming from a different physical dimension, as described in quantum mechanics. (...) This is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and [may actually be] coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co located. You know, right here."
Later on, when asked why the population should trust him, he admits never to have seen any of those craft with his own eyes, but mentions seeing "some interesting photos" and some "very interesting reports". He also says he provided the proof to the Inspector General, reminding us he "had the credentials", being on the UAP task force (2019-2021). He goes on addressing the possibility he's been fed lies, citing the "credentialed people" who came to him with "sensitive program documents":
"I took about four years being very methodical before I filed my whistleblower complaint, to be absolutely certain of these basic facts."
"Why should we trust you?"
He then explains that while the public can't access the information he had, due to its classified nature, all of it has been transmtitted to the Inspector General of The Intelligence Community, who ultimately found his complaint "credible" and "urgent". Later in the interview, he adds that many good-quality videos could be released by going through the declassification systems already in place.
He also says more about his motivation to come forward:
"I’m not a disgruntled employee, I resigned on my own accord. (...) It’s totally nuts that humanity as a whole [is] not even benefiting from broad research on this to solve, you know, propulsion, energy issues, novel material science that can improve people’s quality of life. (...) All I want is a moment of pause and then to see if the subject unites us as we’ve obviously become more divided over the last couple of decades."
Regarding crash retrieval operations, He confirms the partial recovery of a UFO in 1933 by Fascist Italy, and its subsequent transfer to the USA with the Vatican's help. He continues, explaining that such crafts and technologies were entrusted for expertise to certain private contractors, which gives them an unfair advantage compared to their rivals.
He then explains that the secrecy existed specifically to keep reverse engineering a secret and gain a major technological advantage. In his opinion, it is likely that witnesses have been silenced to protect the secrecy and confirms there indeed has been a "sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the american populace".
The civilian population isn't the only one subjected to disinformation. Even the own Department of Defense's AARO had its access to information restricted to slow down the UAP research. His predecessor, the UAPTF, was denied access to a large program regarding the recovery of physical devices which have been recovered either following a crash or found intact on the ground, according to Grusch.
Regarding the recent military footage that has been leaked in recent years, the Air Force veteran says that while Gimbal is not a jet, it could be a weather Phenomenon. As for the famous "Tic Tac" UAP...
"Truly anomalous. Technical vehicle, physical, and that’s absolutely something that we didn’t make."
Same goes with the sphere, captured in infrared while descending into the water from the Omaha navy ship during the 2019 California swarms : another "truly anomalous" craft.
The interview ends in dark tones. Grusch explains that there is ongoing competition between different nations to develop technologies, adding that the U.S. have attempted and developed techniques to shoot down UAPs.
In a chilling sequence, and after confirming UAP seem to have deactivated nuclear missiles at the Malmstrom AF base in 1967, Grusch acknowledges that NHI "seems" to have "at some point", murdered human beings (Ross Coulthart's choice of words).
When asked about alleged contacts between governments and NHI, he replies, quite enigmatically, obviously choosing his words:
"I think... That's a question I'd like to know all the details of."
What about Roswell?
"Those details were not approved for me to talk about right now. "
He does note that the final 1994 report compiled by the Air Force shows obvious signs of misinformation, stating that "additional elements over time" were added to "explain some of the events".
Main picture : Photo by SpaceX
