David Grusch Under Oath and the Pentagon's Historical Record

On 26 July 2023, in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, a former intelligence officer named David Grusch was sworn in before a subcommittee of the United States Congress.

Then he told it that the government was holding craft that were not made by human beings.

Not rumours. Craft.

He said he had passed what he learned to the Inspector General, and he said it in public, in words the Pentagon's prepublication review office had cleared for security.

He sat at the witness table with two former Navy aviators. Nine members of the House who did not sit on the subcommittee were present as well. The transcript records the moment in three words, in brackets: "Witnesses are sworn."

What Grusch said that morning is a record. It is printed by the Government Publishing Office, in the official transcript of the hearing, and it was given under oath.

So is the answer.

The officer and the complaint

David Grusch, in his own written statement to the subcommittee, described fourteen years as an intelligence officer: a major in the US Air Force, and from 2021 to 2023 a civilian at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at the GS-15 level, "the military equivalent of a full-bird Colonel." From 2019 to 2021, as a reservist with the National Reconnaissance Office, he served on the government's UAP Task Force, the unit set up to study what the military now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena. He was his agency's co-lead on the subject.

In that work, he wrote, he was told something. "I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access."

He took it to the inspector general. In May 2022, as Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal reported in The Debrief in June 2023, his lawyer Charles McCullough, himself a former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, filed a complaint of urgent concern and reprisal on his behalf, and in July 2022 the office found the complaint "credible and urgent." The Pentagon's prepublication review office cleared his public statements in April 2023. In June the story broke. In July he was in the witness chair.

His statement was careful about what it rested on. "My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country," he said, "many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony." And: "as I stand here under oath now, I am speaking to the facts as I have been told them."

What he said under oath

Then the questions came, and the record of his answers is the core of the case.

Asked by Representative Robert Garcia whether the government possessed UAPs, Grusch answered: "Absolutely, based on interviewing over 40 witnesses over 4 years." Asked where, he said he knew the exact locations, and had given them to the Inspector General.

Asked by Representative Nancy Mace whether there were bodies, he said: "biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yes." Human or non-human? "Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program."

Asked by Representative Tim Burchett when the government had become aware of non-human intelligence, he said he preferred the word non-human because it does not presume an origin, and added: "previously 1930's."

Asked whether he knew of anyone working on reverse engineering of non-terrestrial craft: "Personally, yes."

The two men beside him spoke from their own experience. Ryan Graves, a former Navy F-18 pilot, said he had "experienced advanced UAP firsthand" and spoke for more than 30 aircrew and veterans who had confided similar encounters. Commander David Fravor, who commanded a fighter squadron aboard the USS Nimitz in 2004, told the subcommittee about the encounter his squadron had off California that year.

Grusch's closing statement named what he hoped the hearing would start: investigations of "the Non-Human Reverse Engineering Programs I have reported," which he said would act as "an ontological (earth-shattering) shock."

Members of Congress took it seriously. Representative Burchett told the hearing: "we were denied access to the SCIF." Within months, a law signed in December 2023 ordered the National Archives to build a collection of government records on UAP.

If he was right

Set aside for a moment whether it is true. Ask the better question. What would it mean if it was?

It would mean the most important discovery in the history of our species has already been made, and filed. Somewhere, in a hangar or a vault, there would be objects that prove humanity is not the only maker of machines, and a small number of people would have known it for decades.

It would mean the question of whether we are alone was answered in the 1930s, on Grusch's dating, before the first electronic computer, before the first rocket reached space. Every telescope since, every signal search from the Wow! signal of 1977 on, every argument about the odds of life elsewhere, every measurement of a visitor like Oumuamua, would have been carried on in public while the answer sat in private.

It would mean a government can keep a secret of that size across generations. That alone would change what citizens think a democracy can hide from itself, and from the Congress that is meant to watch it. Which means the hearing of 26 July 2023 would not be the beginning of the story. It would be the first time the story was told under oath in public, near its end.

And it would leave the largest question in front of us. If the craft are real and the beings who built them are real, they are out there now. What do they know about us that we do not yet know about them?

The report from the anomaly office

The Pentagon's answer is a document too. On 8 March 2024 the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, released Volume I of its Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, required by Congress, covering 1945 to 31 October 2023.

AARO says it reviewed every official US investigation since 1945, searched classified and unclassified archives and conducted about 30 interviews. Its findings are flat. "AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology." And: "AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology."

It names where it thinks the story comes from: "circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case," connected to a cancelled Defense Intelligence Agency study program. It traces one claim, a program called KONA BLUE said to have hidden "non-human biologics," to a proposal that was never approved: "no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected." It says that a real intelligence program was "unnecessarily expanded in 2021" to include a reverse-engineering mission and "never recovered or reverse-engineered any technology." And it notes that "none of the interviewees had firsthand knowledge of these programs."

Grusch's own words agree with that last point on one matter. Asked whether he had seen the bodies, he said: "That is something I have not witnessed myself."

What the report does not reach

The report never names David Grusch, and he never sat for it.

AARO's own records, released under the Freedom of Information Act and published by John Greenewald of The Black Vault, show it tried to interview him through 2023. He agreed to an interview on 14 November 2023 and did not attend, citing doubts about the office's authority to receive what he knew; he declined again on 19 November. AARO's own memo on the episode, dated January 2024, concluded that "Mr. Grusch had no intention of providing AARO with information." So the report rests on interviews with about 30 people; whether any of them were Grusch's sources, it does not say. It does not address the classified material Grusch says he gave the Inspector General and offered to Congress in a secure room.

Much of what Grusch said, he said he could say only there. Asked for documentation: "The specific documentation I would have to talk to you in a SCIF about." Asked whether he had seen a craft: "I could answer that question behind closed doors." Nothing from those closed sessions is public.

Volume I said its second volume would cover interviews from November 2023 to April 2024. As of February 2026, DefenseScoop reported, it had not been published, and neither had AARO's 2025 annual report.

The reporting has not stopped. AARO's annual report of November 2024 counted 757 reports received over thirteen months to June 2024, 272 of them about older incidents, 1,652 in total, and 21 cases that merit further analysis; by February 2026 its caseload was over 2,000. In May 2026 the Pentagon began releasing previously classified files and videos; ABC News reported that AARO found no evidence that any of the incidents were extraterrestrial and that officials acknowledged many incidents remain unresolved.

They did not find a craft. The record does not show the room where Grusch says one is.

Where it stands

The two records stand side by side. One is sworn testimony from a former intelligence officer, given in public, resting by his own account on what others told him and on evidence he says he can show only in secret. The other is a report from the office Congress set up to investigate, which says it searched the archives from 1945 on and found no craft, no bodies and no reverse-engineering of off-world technology; it found one intelligence program expanded in 2021 that recovered nothing. AARO also wrote that the claims it examined about "specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents" were inaccurate.

Both rest partly on material the public cannot see: Grusch's on what he gave the Inspector General and offered in a secure room, AARO's on numbered interviewees and classified archives. But the report prints its findings, describes the programs it traced and reports testing a metal sample it found to be an ordinary terrestrial alloy. On what is public, the weight lies with the report.

What is still open is precise. What Grusch gave the Inspector General. What members of Congress were told in secure rooms, if they were told anything. What Volume II says, if it is published. And what the 21 cases and the unresolved videos turn out to be.

The people still on it are on both sides. Members of a House task force held another hearing in September 2025. AARO keeps taking reports, and says it has more than 2,000. The records law sends agency files to the National Archives. Each of those is a channel through which the classified half of this record could, one day, become public.

Grusch said he knew the exact locations, and that he gave them to the Inspector General.

Those locations are not on the public record. Until they are, this record has two halves, and only one of them is open.

Questions This Leaves You With

Is there anything a person actually does with this?

Not in your daily life. Nothing in either document asks anything of you, and anyone selling a date for disclosure is selling something. What you can do is read the two records yourself: the hearing transcript is on the Government Publishing Office site, and the AARO report is public. Reading what was actually said, rather than what was reported about it, is the single most useful thing a person can do with a story like this. You may find the testimony more careful than its headlines, and the report more specific than its summaries.

Does this sit against a religious account of the world?

It has been argued both ways. Serious people have argued that other intelligent beings would fit inside a larger creation, and others that humanity's place would be challenged. Grusch himself chose the word non-human because, he said, it does not presume an origin. This site will not tell you which way it falls for you, and neither document tries to.

Does this change what a human life is?

Put your own life beside the claim. If Grusch is right, you have lived your whole life in a world where the largest question was already answered and kept from you. If the report is right, you live in a world where that question is still open, and every telescope is still looking. One version makes a life feel smaller and managed. The other makes it part of the generation still searching. Notice which one you reached for first. Neither answer is forced on you by the record as it stands; both documents leave room for the reader to decide what a secret of that size would mean, and what it would mean if there were no secret at all.

What would change your mind, in either direction?

Name it now, before you are committed. It helps to know how such a claim would be checked. Congress can hold a closed hearing, but it can also subpoena records and require agencies to identify programs by name, and the records law of 2023 began to require agencies to identify their UAP records. Toward Grusch: a member of Congress who has seen the classified material saying in public that it supports him; a named program, a contract, a budget line. Toward the report: Volume II published, addressing his claims, and the people he named on record denying them. Decide now which of these you would accept.

What did the Inspector General receive?

That is the empty space at the centre of this record. Grusch's complaint was filed in 2022 and, as reported, found credible and urgent: a finding about the complaint, with no public ruling on its claims since. The material he gave, the locations he named and the witnesses he pointed to have never been published, and AARO's report does not say it saw them. Somewhere inside the government is a file that would move this question further than any hearing. It has not been released.