The latest contender in the unending lineage of UFO whistleblowers is Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer David Grusch. His credentials are impressive: 14 years as a US intelligence officer, representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021, and, more recently, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s co-lead for UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) analysis. He resigned from the government last April “to advance government accountability through public awareness.”

The long line of UFO/UAP promoters arguably goes back to private pilot Kenneth Arnold and his report of nine “flying discs” flying past Mount Rainier in June 1947. (The discs morphed into saucers when newspapers picked up the story.) Since then, we’ve been regaled with tale upon tale of alien spacecraft buzzing/crashing on our planet. Roswell…crop circles…the Phoenix lights…New Jersey Turnpike phenomena…USS Nimitz encounter… David Fravor’s 2004 GOFAST video…Bob Lazar. (Remember him? MIT-educated physicist, Navy technician, worked at Area 51, witness to nine recovered flying saucers and alien cadavers. All lies, of course. He didn’t graduate at MIT, wasn’t a Navy tech, isn’t a physicist, had no connection with Area 51.)

Back to David Grusch. In a recent interview with the tech website The Debrief, he claimed that the government has secretly been collecting partial fragments of UFO “through and up to intact vehicles” for decades. Analysis showed the objects to be “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.” In a later interview, he clarified, kinda: “…isotopic ratios…strange, heavy—high up in the atomic table—a very strange mix of elements.” Which sounds like the vague gobbledygook we’ve been hearing from the UFO community for years—just enough to sound like “real science” but not sufficiently specific to actually determine if the objects are truly exotic. 

But wait, there’s more: Aliens! For reasons best known to himself, in the original interview, Grusch kept the Real Story to himself. In a later one, he mentioned, as if in passing, “…when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots…it’s true.” (Why are we analyzing bits of exotic metal when we’ve got bits of actual aliens?)

This would all sound a tad more convincing if Grusch was claiming first-hand knowledge of the aliens and their crash-prone vehicles. But no, his claims are all based on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials.” This is where my spidey-sense gets into high gear. Here’s a guy with top-secret clearance, 14 years in the US intelligence community, years of analyzing reports of unidentified aerial phenomena…who didn’t bother to check for himself!

What’s with that? Fear of flying? (He served in Afghanistan, so unlikely.) Gullible or incurious to the point of idiocy? Afraid he’d discover that the stories he was told were all confabulated, meaning he’d be out of a job? The better to advance a future career on the lecture circuit? Pardon my cynicism, but you’ve got wonder why he didn’t take a day out of his busy DC life to fly to Nevada and see for himself. Aliens were his life, his career, the reason he went into the office every day…and he couldn’t be bothered to see the evidence for himself, instead of relying on hearsay???

Military intelligence: the best example of an oxymoron.