David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims
Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini's government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have both denied Grusch's claims, stating there are no such programs and that extraterrestrial life has yet to be discovered.
[7] Congressional interest in UFO sightings immediately prior to Grusch's public claims surrounded questions about the four objects that the Air Force shot down in February 2023.
[8] On June 5, 2023, independent journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal provided a story detailing Grusch's claims of a UFO coverup by the government to The Debrief, a website that describes itself as "self-funded" and specializing in "frontier science".
[12][13] Grusch claims that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and possesses multiple spacecraft of what he calls "non-human" origin as well as corpses of deceased pilots.
[19] When Representative Tim Burchett asked him if he had "personal knowledge of people who've been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal" the government's possession of "extraterrestrial technology", Grusch said yes, but that he was not able to provide details except within a SCIF.
Claims that the government is covering up extraterrestrial visitation to Earth are broadly considered untrue by the majority of the scientific community because they oppose the best currently available expert information.
[30] Eghigian said that "a new kind of sobriety needs to be interjected here" and that the Grusch story "ups the ante" but is "very hard to take seriously unless we start getting some real evidence that's of a forensic nature to prove these things".
Neither Grusch nor anyone else claiming to have knowledge of secret government UAP programs has ever been able to publicly produce convincing photos showing alien hardware splayed across the landscape.
[33] Laurie Leshin, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director for NASA, when asked by reporter in August 2023 if she had "seen spacecraft made from outside of this world", replied "Absolutely not.
"[10][37] General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave an interview to The Washington Times on August 6, 2023, in which he stated that he had never encountered evidence that would verify the claims made by Grusch regarding "quote-unquote 'aliens' or that there's some sort of cover-up program".
"[40] In response to Grusch's claims, Representative Mike Turner, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said, "every decade there's been individuals who've said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space" and that "there's no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level".
[45][46][47] The enrolled bill directs the National Archives to collect government documents about "unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence".
[48] On January 13, 2024, members of the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee received a classified briefing from the Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG) Thomas A. Monheim regarding UAP reporting transparency.
[49][50] On behalf of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and in response to Grusch's claims, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett organized a hearing on July 26, 2023.
[59][60] In 2024, after retiring from AARO, Kirkpatrick wrote an opinion piece for Scientific American in which he said that the US Government UFO coverup allegations "derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology.
Describing it as “a small group of interconnected believers and others with possibly less than honest intentions,” who promote a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings".
"[62]: 33:28 Keith Kloor writing for the Scientific American on August 25, 2023, draws a line from "these outlandish assertions" by Grusch "to the vast repository of so-called studies" funded over past years by Robert Bigelow.
[66] Marina Koren wrote in The Atlantic that the case fits a long pattern of previous unprovable claims and that, "so far, the best evidence [Grusch has] come up with, besides his own word, is the government's denial".
[9] Matt Laslo, writing for Wired, described the sympathetic hearing of Grusch's claims by some members of Congress as an indication that in "our strange new political universe of alternative facts turned dystopian reality, once-fringe notions have built-in fan bases in today's Capitol".
[69] Andrew Prokop, a political news correspondent for Vox, wrote on June 10 that, "skeptics question whether Grusch is just repeating tall tales that have long circulated through the UFO-believing community, suggesting he may be just a gullible sap (if not an outright fabulist)."
Prokop went on to state that, "mainstream media sources have so far remained wary of Grusch – The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico were all offered his story but none thought it was publishable.
"[70] Sean Thomas expressed confusion in his opinion piece for The Spectator that, preceding Grusch, there have been others trying to convince officials and the public that UFOs are worthy of serious considerations including some who themselves were high-ranking U.S.
[11] Steven Greenstreet, a documentary filmmaker and an investigative journalist, criticized Grusch in a video with the New York Post for previously attending UFO conventions and associating with the Skinwalker Ranch ufologists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, whom he met at a Star Trek Convention and both of whom sat behind Grusch at the July 26 Hearing and whom Representative Tim Burchett recognized from the dais and read their statements into the record.
[73][74][75] Outside the United States, the story received attention from multiple foreign mainstream news outlets, in such countries as Denmark,[76][77][78][79] Germany,[80][81] Austria,[82] France,[83][84] the Netherlands,[85] Sweden,[86][87] Norway,[88][89] Croatia,[90][91] and Turkey.
