David Grusch

David Grusch is a former United States Air Force intelligence officer and arguably the most prominent UAP whistleblower of the modern era. In 2023 he claimed publicly that the U.S. government has operated a decades-long program to recover and reverse engineer crashed craft of non-human origin. He made the claims under oath before Congress. The Department of Defense says it has found no verifiable evidence to support them.

Grusch served in the Air Force and later worked as a civilian intelligence officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He is a decorated Afghanistan combat veteran. From 2019 to 2021 he was the NRO's representative to the government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. He later served as a co-lead for UAP analysis at NGA. He left government service in 2023.

Grusch went public on June 5, 2023, in an article by investigative journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published in The Debrief, followed by a television interview with Ross Coulthart on NewsNation. On July 26, 2023, he testified before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee alongside pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves. The hearing drew global coverage.

In 2025 he was hired as a special advisor to Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, working on UAP transparency legislation from inside Congress.

Grusch claims the government has recovered "non-human origin technical vehicles," some with deceased "non-human biologics" aboard. He claims a multi-decade retrieval and reverse engineering program has been hidden from Congress, and that funds were misused to conceal it. He says he interviewed more than 40 witnesses over four years as part of his official duties. He says he faced retaliation for reporting his findings.

He filed a complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which reportedly deemed his allegations of retaliation credible and urgent. He has stated that his claims about craft come from witness interviews, not from personally seeing evidence.

The Department of Defense has stated it has no verifiable information to substantiate claims of any recovered extraterrestrial materials, and AARO's Historical Record Report, published in March 2024, said it found no evidence of such a program. Grusch has said classification limits what he can say publicly, and that he provided specific names and locations to Congress and the Inspector General in closed settings.

As of 2026, Grusch serves as a special advisor to Rep. Burlison and remains a central figure in the congressional push for UAP records disclosure.