Joe Rogan Experience #2560 - David Grusch
THE INTERVIEW
“Joe Rogan Experience #2560 - David Grusch,” published on the PowerfulJRE channel on 30 September 2026, running two hours and thirty minutes. Watch on YouTube
What the interview is
David Grusch is the former intelligence officer whose testimony to a House Oversight subcommittee in July 2023 put the recovered-craft claim on a sworn record. He returns to The Joe Rogan Experience, where he first appeared in November 2023, having, he says, just left the staff of Representative Eric Burlison, and over two and a half hours restates the claim in one breath: “We’ve recovered material, a.k.a. intact, semi-intact craft. We’ve, you know, recovered this anomalous intelligence piloting the craft. And, you know, we are reverse engineering that.”
The new material falls along a line that Grusch draws himself. On one side is something he says he saw: video of bodies at a retrieval site. On the other is a much larger account that he says reached him from colleagues, of beings seen alive, a conflict between non-human groups and a fight in which US personnel died; of that fight he says he hopes the people who were there will be allowed to speak, “so you could just hear it from the horse’s mouth, not through me secondhand.” Around both run two further strands: what he says was done to him, and a set of records he points to, several of which can be read today. Long stretches led by the host, on Egyptian and Peruvian antiquities and on ancient texts, are part of the conversation and are not filed here claim by claim.
This note follows his line. The interview is a long account in his own voice, and it adds to his sworn testimony one element he presents as his own observation; a named participant’s own account is the route the site files as evidence tier 1, and the tier rates the route, not the claims. The sections below sort what he says by where he says it came from, and set each record he cites beside its own words.
Who David Grusch is
Grusch describes himself in the interview as a fifteen-year intelligence officer and Air Force officer, a major in the reserves and a GS-15 civilian, who in early 2019 was brought on “as the NRO rep to the then Navy task force, which became the DOD’s, you know, UAP task force.” His complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, his public statements of June 2023 and his sworn testimony of 26 July 2023 are set out on his dossier on this site, with the Pentagon’s response.
In March 2025 Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri announced Grusch as an adviser on his staff. In the interview Grusch says he stayed “about a year and a half”, has “just finished up” and is now a private citizen. He says: “As far as I can remember, I have no experience with the phenomenon.”
What he says he saw
The part he presents as his own observation arrives about an hour in. He has just said that genomes were compared from bodies, and asked how he knows the bodies exist, he says: “I got to see the audio-visual on that.” Asked whether he saw the bodies physically or on video, he answers “Video”, footage of “dead cadavers in, you know, on the ground because it was a retrieval activity.” He will not date it beyond “It’s contemporary”, saying a date would point to a particular operation “because it narrows it down”. Of how it was shown to him he says only “we’ll just say it was kind of sketchy”, “to keep everybody safe”.
He describes “three or four” bodies, adding “I don’t know what the total was”; “human looking”, “very, very beautiful”, skin “bluish white” and “like a pale sort of albino”, with long hair and “some kind of form-fitting thing, but I didn’t get a good look at it.” He says the footage was not close up: “it was like a pan,” taken while “people had a job to do.” He links their appearance to a remark he attributes to the retired Air Force general Neil McCasland, passed to Tom DeLonge: “think of the Greek gods.” Asked whether this was the most compelling thing he saw, he says yes.
On whether he could have been deceived, he says he “sat on that stuff for like years until I felt comfortable with that not being some sort of limited hangout or deception activity,” and that he “confirmed it through other sources and methods to make sure it wasn’t some sort of hangout from some government element trying to sway me one way or the other.” He does not describe the sources or methods.
The sworn record sits beside this. At the hearing of 26 July 2023 Representative Burlison asked him, “Have you seen any of the bodies?”, and he answered: “That is something I have not witnessed myself.” Asked in the same exchange whether he had seen the spacecraft, he answered: “I have to be careful to describe what I have seen firsthand and not in this environment. But I could answer that question behind closed doors” (transcript, p. 36). The interview does not say when he saw the footage; recalling it, he says “it’s been a while”.
What he says he was told
Most of the interview’s new claims, on his own account, reached him from other people. He says he knows “people that are good friends of mine that were on retrievals and saw them as well in person,” and that “some of my colleagues saw them alive as well.” He says he is “relying on the personal experience of others, you know, audio-visual stuff,” and, more than once, that he never had the whole picture: “I’m not omnipotent, I didn’t have full access, and I only know what I know.” His “biggest regret”, he says, was not getting access to “the biological assessment reports”. He grades what he relays as he goes, from “pretty good sourcing on that” to “my own hypothesis”, “water cooler talk” and “at the limit of my personal knowledge”.
What he relays:
Kinds of beings. Greys, taller and smaller, which he links to the 1994 sighting at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe; human-looking beings, whose craft he gives as “boomerang, crescent moon, usually”; and reptilian beings, “seven foot tall plus, sort of gorilla looking”, whose craft is “tic-tac looking”. Of the reptilians he says: “Now, I’ve never seen them personally.” Of an insectoid type he has heard only what he calls “water cooler talk”.
A conflict. He says conflict between non-human groups has been documented “in collection”, that a crashed reptilian craft was found with dead greys, and that “adversarial conflict crashes” number “at least a dozen or two. I don’t know.”
Deaths. Asked what happened to the living reptilians from that crash, he says they were killed: “it just posed a threat and, you know, U.S. personnel started, you know, getting hurt and dying.” He gives no number, place or date, and says: “I’m sure the people who were in some of those events will probably speak publicly at some point.”
A feeling. He says sober, senior colleagues on retrievals describe a feeling of comfort coming over them, and offers his “own hypothesis” that it may work as a countermeasure.
The ocean. He says there is “some sort of base of operations in certain locations” under the sea: “It’s large. Don’t know when it got there.”
Origins. He says he never had access to where the beings come from, and asks whether they are extraterrestrial, bioengineered or “a break from our tree”: “I don’t know the answer.”
Photographs. About ten years into his career, he says, imagery analysts told him: “they told us to airbrush some stuff out of photos and stuff and it was round.”
The policy history. He says he knew participants in a 2004 exercise on the effects of disclosure, whose main concern, “if I remember correctly, was the federal contracts fraud”: legal challenges from contractors shut out of decades of sole-source work, after which, he says, “the government would be liable” for billions; “we’re kind of culpable”. He says he knows of an assessment done for President Nixon, and that government think tanks wrote assessments for earlier presidents on how a disclosure might be paced.
He sums up the layer himself: “it is wild, but it’s true,” and, later, “I know who I talked to. I know what I saw.”
What he says happened to him
The interview opens on a strand that is not about craft. Grusch starts from the case of David Rush, a CIA officer arrested in May 2026 and charged with theft of public money, which he places in the same “ecosystem” he says he ran into, though not, he says, in UAP: “Not that I’m aware of.” He says that while “following the money” he came on “a criminal enterprise run out of a particular agency,” raising money through “the most unspeakable type of criminal endeavors under the cover of certain national security programs.” Asked by the host whether that meant child trafficking, he answers: “Officers of the government. That’s true.” For the enterprise itself he names no agency, person or case. He says he briefed members of Congress on it in a classified setting, worked with the Department of Justice, and has to be careful because it is “an ongoing thing with DOJ”.
He then gives the sequence he says pushed him into his complaint: being “administratively nuked” in October 2020 along with people around him; three agencies investigating him in 2021, while people helping him reported symptoms of the anomalous health incidents known as Havana syndrome; a message in early 2022, received the same day by others, “that they can touch me and my wife”; and, weeks later, an “off books” meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staff in a secure room, where, he says, named individuals were described as having wanted to kill him. He says this was considered and stopped (“there was a kibosh to that”). He says he still does not know which line he crossed, and suspects it was what he had found: “what turns out they were monitoring my classified computer at work”, with his encrypted investigation notes on it. He says a Department of Justice investigation is under way. The interview documents none of these events, and he says he is holding back detail to protect people and the investigation.
Two cases of real people come up. He describes the disappearance of Neil McCasland, the retired major general and former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, “who disappeared within a week of Trump giving the declassification order on UAP in February 2026”, and says “nobody knows” what happened. McCasland was last seen at his home in Albuquerque on the morning of 27 February 2026. Of the wider list of missing or dead scientists that has circulated since, Grusch says: “To be fair, it was a little overblown and I don’t think there was a ton of correlation.” He also names Matthew Sullivan, an Air Force friend he says was one of his sources, and calls his death “an open investigation”: “it’s binary. It’s either a very tragic thing, either self-harm or otherwise, or it was something else.” Sullivan died at his home in Falls Church, Virginia, on 12 May 2024. In April 2026 Representative Burlison, then Grusch’s employer, wrote to the FBI asking it to investigate; the New York Post reported that month that he died of an accidental drug overdose, citing the Northern District Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the cause.
The record he points to
Each record below is set out with his description of it.
The 1971 agreement. He cites the US-Soviet “Accident Measures Agreement of 1971”, saying its Article 3 “talks about UAP”. The Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War, signed in Washington on 30 September 1971, binds the parties “to notify each other immediately in the event of detection by missile warning systems of unidentified objects, or in the event of signs of interference with these systems or with related communications facilities, if such occurrences could create a risk of outbreak of nuclear war between the two countries.” He says a classified annex was declassified in 2013. The National Security Archive at George Washington University posts a September 1976 protocol that updated the agreement, marked Secret, which set out message formats for six “NUCFLASH” situations, one of them “detection by missile warning systems of unidentified objects”; the Archive says the protocol was secret at the time and may not have been officially declassified until 2013, when the Carter Library released it.
The 2004 exercise. He says the first volume of the historical report by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) accepts that the exercise took place, “but it was just a hypothetical scenario at a federally funded research and development center in northern Virginia”; asked the year, he says “November of 2004”, and he says “the story is” that it was sponsored from the White House, adding that the official he names denies it. The report, published in March 2024, summarises interviewees’ claims “that between 2004 and 2007 the White House requested a research institute in Virginia study the theoretical societal impacts of disclosing that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin”, and finds: “AARO confirmed the study was conducted, but it was not requested by the White House.” The interviewees, it records, described a one-day study by “approximately 12 participants who evaluated 64 different aspects of society”. The report does not name the institute and gives no conclusion for the study.
The 1952 recording. He says Burlison obtained the declassification of a 1952 recording from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, released in the latest tranche, in which Edward Ruppelt tells Lincoln Laboratory’s Beacon Hill study group that “the Air Force has ruled out mass hysteria,” that near White Sands and Holloman “we caught multiple objects traveling an estimated 3,500 miles an hour. We can’t rule out maybe some sort of meteor shower,” and that foreign programmes were ruled out. PURSUE Release 06, published on 18 September 2026, carries an audio record of a March 1952 presentation by Ruppelt (DOW-UAP-PR160), whose DVIDS page gives its location as “BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, US”, and a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by him (DOW-UAP-D154), briefed together on this site as Release 06 Briefing 5. In May 2026 Burlison’s office referred to his earlier letter to MIT Lincoln Laboratory “concerning historical UAP-related records associated with the Beacon Hill Study and the reel-to-reel recording identified as ‘AF-ATIC-FILM, 03/52.’” The transcript names no place or audience. Of the 1949 conclusions it says “We’ve been able to drop out all except the misinterpretation of conventional objects” (p. 2); of a Soviet origin, “We’ve had quite a bit of discussion as to whether or not these objects could possibly be some highly developed aircraft type that the Soviets have. We’ve almost been able to throw that out” (p. 4); of the Holloman track, “about 3,500 miles an hour, but again, they won’t back that up because they aren’t, they aren’t sure of the conditions that these readings were made under” (p. 9); and “Up till the present time, we’ve got no real proof that anything even exists,” adding that the office cannot “say that we know that they’re from Venus or that we know they’re from Russia or that we even know they exist” (p. 12).
The Turner paper. He cites a 1971 paper by the Australian intelligence scientist Harry Turner as recording that Project Blue Book was “a facade” and that a plan of ridicule followed the Robertson Panel of 1953. The paper is in the National Archives of Australia (A13693, 3092/2/000): a Department of Defence minute paper, “Scientific and Intelligence Aspects of the UFO Problem”, signed O. H. Turner, Head of Nuclear Branch, dated 27 May 1971, forwarding a report on “U.S. Official Attitude to U.F.O’s” that it says was “compiled from official reports and statements made by the CIA, US Air Force, Congressional Hearings and Project Blue Book records.” Its summary says that the Office of Scientific Intelligence, which it identifies as the CIA’s, “acting through the Robertson-panel meeting of mid-January 1953, persuaded the USAF to use Project BLUE BOOK as a means of publicly ‘debunking’ UFO’s” (summary), and that “By erecting a facade of ridicule, the U.S. hoped to allay public alarm” (summary); the report itself says Blue Book “served mainly as a means of supplying unclassified summaries of UFO identifications to the public, and did not form a vital link in collection or serious analysis” (p. 3). The same paper appears in PURSUE Release 03, and this site briefs it as Release 03 Briefing 11.
The MITRE interrogatories. He says Burlison’s office sent legal questions requiring sworn answers to the MITRE Corporation. On 26 May 2026 Burlison announced that he had “transmitted legislative interrogatories and production requests to The MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research and development Center (FFRDC).” Grusch says the company’s counsel is working on a response.
Where the interview’s own evidence sits
Sorted by how far each layer can be checked from outside:
The records, the strongest layer and the narrowest. Each can be read, and most of what he says of them holds at the source. Where they part from him the section above sets the words side by side: AARO says the 2004 study was not requested by the White House; it is less specific than he is on the study’s date and venue; and the 1952 transcript speaks both ways on a Soviet origin. The records concern how governments handled the subject; none of them describes a recovered craft or body.
His career and the public cases. The 2023 hearing, the start of his time on Burlison’s staff and McCasland’s disappearance are on the public record, and so is Sullivan’s cause of death, as the New York Post reports it from the medical examiner’s office. The events he says led to his complaint, the October 2020 actions, the 2022 message and the Senate meeting, are his account, which he says is partly under investigation.
The footage. His own observation, described in detail, not dated, not shown, with a verification he says he made and does not describe. Asked whether the video will be part of disclosure, he says a government video alone would be dismissed while trust in government is so low, and “you’re going to have to wheel out the physical evidence, too.”
The relayed layer. The beings, the conflict, the deaths, the ocean site and the historical assessments reach the interview through him from people he does not name, and he says so. One structural caution belongs to any account of a compartmented programme, this one included: where the absence of a document is itself explained by the compartment, the claim becomes hard to test from the outside, and matching accounts add weight only to the degree that they are independent, which a reader outside the compartment cannot measure.
What the interview says
It records that the officer whose sworn testimony in 2023 relayed other people’s accounts of recovered craft and non-human biologics now says, on the record, that he has watched video of bodies at a retrieval, and describes them. It records a detailed secondhand account, from colleagues he does not name, of several kinds of beings, a conflict between them and US deaths; his account of threats against him and of criminal activity he says he reported; and citations to records that exist and can be read.
What it does not show
The footage. It is described, not shown; its date, its origin and the verification he says he made are not given.
That the beings, the conflict, the deaths or the ocean site exist. They are relayed from people the interview does not name; of the reptilians he says he has never seen them himself, and beyond the footage of bodies he describes no observation of his own.
The criminal activity, the threats and the killing he says was considered. No agency, person, document or case is named for them; he says the matter is with the Department of Justice.
That the documents he cites say everything he summarises. AARO’s report says the 2004 study was not requested by the White House, and the 1952 transcript does not rule out a Soviet origin outright, as set out above.
A connection between the McCasland and Sullivan cases and the subject. He raises both; the public record holds a missing-person case and a reported medical examiner’s finding.
From the record
“I got to see the audio-visual on that.”
David Grusch, asked how he knows of bodies from a retrieval
“I think three or four is what I saw. I don’t know what the total was.”
On the bodies in the footage
“I’m relying on the personal experience of others, you know, audio-visual stuff.”
On what his account rests on
“So you could just hear it from the horse’s mouth, not through me secondhand, you know.”
On the US personnel he says were hurt and killed
“I’m not omnipotent, I didn’t have full access, and I only know what I know.”
On the limits of what he can say
“Don’t take my word for it.”
On the material he describes, asking that the President release it
Where the case connects
The David Grusch dossier on this site carries his 2023 testimony and the Pentagon’s answer to it, and now records what he said in this interview beside what he said under oath. The same AARO report he cites for the 2004 study states the Pentagon’s position on his central claim: “AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology”; the office that wrote it is a party to the dispute it reports on. Two other accounts of the programme he describes are filed here: Luis Elizondo’s memoir, set out in the Imminent source note, and Dan Farah’s interview, in the note on Farah’s claims.
The Files brief the Turner paper as Release 03 Briefing 11 and the Ruppelt recording as Release 06 Briefing 5. The wiki carries the 1971 agreement and the AARO historical report.
The site’s instruments touch his ground at several points. The Nuclear Lure prices the pattern of sightings near nuclear sites that the Ruppelt transcript’s preface also records. The Bigot List Leak Bench runs a published model of how long a secret held by hundreds of people lasts. The Corso Ledger dates the older claim that recovered technology seeded modern inventions; Grusch describes what was derived as “garnered via inspiration, not one-to-one.”
The interview leaves its own threads. He says “the people who were in some of those events will probably speak publicly at some point”; he says what he calls “the threshold disclosure, you know, call it we’re not alone, we have stuff” has to happen “before Trump leaves”; and he says the MITRE answers are being prepared. Any of these that reaches the record lands here when it does.
Watch the interview. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
- David Grusch
- Legacy Program
- Crash Retrieval Program
- 1971 US-Soviet Accidents Agreement
- AARO Historical Record Report 2024
- Harry Turner
- Edward J. Ruppelt
- Ariel School 1994
- Tom DeLonge
- Luis Elizondo
References and further reading
- “Joe Rogan Experience #2560 - David Grusch,” PowerfulJRE, YouTube, 30 September 2026. youtube.com/watch?v=dYPXINFcvmI
- House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency, hearing of 26 July 2023, Serial No. 118-53, transcript p. 36. congress.gov
- Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Washington, 30 September 1971. Avalon Project, Yale Law School
- Secretary of Defense to the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, “Communications Between the US and USSR In Time of Crisis,” with the 30 September 1976 protocol on immediate notifications, National Security Archive. nsarchive.gwu.edu
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I, February 2024, released March 2024. media.defense.gov
- DOW-UAP-D154, “Transcript of a Presentation by Captain Edward J Ruppelt 1952,” and DOW-UAP-PR160, “Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952,” PURSUE Release 06, U.S. Department of War, 18 September 2026. dvidshub.net
- National Archives of Australia, A13693, 3092/2/000: O. H. Turner, “Scientific and Intelligence Aspects of the UFO Problem,” minute paper, 27 May 1971, with the report “U.S. Official Attitude to U.F.O’s” (CIA-UAP-019 in PURSUE Release 03)
- Office of Representative Eric Burlison, “Burlison Presses MITRE for Answers on UAP Records, FFRDC Accountability, and Compliance with Federal Declassification Mandates,” 26 May 2026. burlison.house.gov
- “Retired Air Force major general still missing 2 weeks after vanishing in New Mexico,” CBS News, March 2026. cbsnews.com
- “Would-be UFO whistleblower died of accidental drug overdose after agreeing to testify to Congress,” New York Post, 25 April 2026. nypost.com
- “CIA officer arrested with gold bars accused of making up top secret program, sources say,” NBC News, 8 June 2026. nbcnews.com