David Grusch's UFO claims: what he said and what has been confirmed

What David Grusch claimed in 2023

Grusch went public in June 2023. On 5 June, The Debrief published an article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal reporting that he had briefed Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General, in classified form, on secret programmes that in his account held recovered vehicles of non-human origin, some whole and some in pieces. It described him as a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office who had represented the NRO on the government's UAP task force from 2019 to 2021, then co-led the NGA's UAP analysis until July 2022. He left government on 7 April 2023. According to the article, the inspector general had found his complaint about information being withheld from Congress "credible and urgent" in July 2022, and Pentagon reviewers had cleared his statements for publication. The Debrief also reported that Congress had not been given any physical material.

Six days later NewsNation aired an interview with him by Ross Coulthart. There he said the US holds a substantial number of non-human vehicles, that recoveries have sometimes included dead pilots, and that the first recovery in Europe was in Magenta, Italy, in 1933. He also said he had never personally seen non-human intelligence, and that the photos and reports he had seen remain classified.

David Grusch's testimony to Congress

On 26 July 2023 Grusch testified under oath before the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, alongside the former Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor. In his prepared opening statement he said his official work had brought him word of a UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering effort running for decades, and that he had been refused access to it. He said his account came from current and former officials he regarded as credible, several of whom had shown him photographs and official records or given him classified verbal accounts, and that under oath he was "speaking to the facts as I have been told them". He also said he had suffered retaliation for reporting it.

Under questioning, as ABC News reported, he said he had met people with direct knowledge of non-human craft, but would not name them in public, saying the names had gone to the intelligence committees and the inspector general. He said he could not say publicly when the programme began or who authorised it, and offered lawmakers a list of officials they should call.

The official explanation

The Pentagon rejected the claims from the start. In June 2023 it said it had not found "any verifiable information to substantiate" them. In March 2024 its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, released the first volume of a historical review covering 1945 to October 2023 and drawing on interviews with about 30 people. Its acting director, Tim Phillips, said the office had found no verifiable sign that either the government or private companies had ever obtained extraterrestrial technology, and nothing to show that Congress had been illegally or improperly kept in the dark. In AARO's assessment, the secret programmes people described were either nonexistent or genuine national security projects mistaken for something else, and the stories had mostly circulated within a small group passing on second-hand accounts over several decades. Phillips added that most people repeating them did so without malice.

Grusch did not meet AARO. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, reported by NewsNation in May 2024, show AARO repeatedly tried to meet him; one meeting was scheduled and he did not attend. Grusch responded that AARO first contacted him officially in November 2023, that his security questions had gone unanswered, and that AARO does not have access to the information he gave the inspector general and the congressional intelligence committees.

What has happened since, as of October 2026

Grusch has continued to work with members of Congress. In March 2025 NewsNation reported that Rep. Eric Burlison had hired him as a senior adviser on UAP issues, initially for four months, after the Oversight Committee declined to take him on as committee staff. On 9 June 2026 he joined Burlison, Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett and Jared Moskowitz at the Capitol to demand more records. There, NewsNation reported, he said the government knows of several kinds of extraterrestrial life, and he accused political appointees of failing to follow the law on disclosure.

One of his specific claims has been checked since. NewsNation reported on 15 June 2026 that a Vatican source's search of the Vatican Apostolic Archive found no listed reference to the alleged 1933 Magenta crash; NewsNation added that this does not conclusively disprove it. On the government side, DefenseScoop reported in February 2026, shortly after President Trump said he would order files on extraterrestrial life released, that the second AARO volume promised for 2024 had still not appeared. Since 8 May 2026 the Pentagon has posted declassified UAP records in batches on its PURSUE website, the sixth on 18 September 2026. It presents them as unresolved cases on which it cannot reach a determination, and Interesting Engineering reported that, according to the Pentagon, the second batch confirmed neither an extraterrestrial origin nor non-human technology. AARO's own list of reports, checked for this file in October 2026, still shows only the first volume, and its website answers the question of whether the department has found evidence of extraterrestrial technology with one word: "No."

Where scientists stand

Writing after the hearing, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute argued that a claim this large needs public physical evidence, that no one has produced convincing images of alien hardware, and that a scientific discovery cannot be held back by classification: "The cure for cancer cannot be classified." He added that interstellar travel would not break physics, but that aliens being able to come here is not the same as their being here. The same gap runs through the David Grusch examples above: by his own description the account is secondhand, and the proof is said to be classified.

Verdict

David Grusch explained in one line: a real former intelligence officer has repeated, under oath, what others told him about crash-retrieval programmes, and the government office charged with checking says it found nothing to support them. As of October 2026, no craft, material, body, document or photograph backing the David Grusch claims has been made public, and the evidence he says exists sits with the inspector general and congressional committees, none of which has publicly confirmed it in any source we found. Real or Legend files the claims as disputed.