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Joe Rogan Experience #2065 - David Grusch

David Grusch is a former Air Force intelligence officer, representative of the National Reconnaissance Office to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and co-lead for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena analysis at the National Geo-Spacial Intelligence Agency.

Joe RoganhostDavid Gruschguest
Jun 27, 20242h 41mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:26

    Cold open and why Grusch is speaking now

    1. JR

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

    2. DG

      The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) What's up?

    3. JR

      How are you, man?

    4. DG

      Hey. Good, good.

    5. JR

      Thanks for coming here. Appreciate it.

    6. DG

      Y- yeah. (laughs) Yeah. No, it's, it's a pleasure.

    7. JR

      You've been on a whirlwind sort of tour. Um, I guess we should start from the beginning.

    8. DG

      Yeah.

  2. 0:26 – 3:36

    Grusch’s intel career, clearances, and the moment UFOs hit his radar

    1. JR

      So first of all, uh, lay out to people what your job was with the military and how this all started for you.

    2. DG

      Yeah, yeah. So I was a Intel officer in the Air Force for 14 years, seven active, seven reserve. Uh, then I kind of had, like, a parallel track in the civilian intel world when I became a reservist. Um, (smacks lips) uh, and, uh, ultimately, I got brought back in in civil service in a government way at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency couple years ago, um, at a senior level. Uh, so I was a major in the Air Force and a GS-15 at NGA, which is, like, a full bird colonel equivalent civilian employee. Uh, you know, I'm very humbled that I was able to kind of get that kind of job. But, uh, my career, mostly, I didn't even really think about this topic. UFOs were not on my radar. I wasn't really a believer. I was agnostic about it. Uh, pre- most of my career, I did a lot of, uh, you know, behind the door special access program, uh, technical type activities. I was kind of a space intelligence expert, a cyber intel expert. And, uh, like I said, this was not on my radar at all. You know, like, I would joke with my buddies, 'cause I used to handle, um, the presidential daily brief for the National Reconnaissance Office director in my, my military capacity as a reservist. And I was well cleared to hundreds and hundreds of compartmented programs. And, you know, the joke was like, "When are we gonna get the read on for the crazy shit?" And that never happened. Uh, and, and I do remember the, the day that I really can remember that I was like, "Huh, what's with this UFO stuff?" I was, uh, briefing a senior person, uh, at the CIA into a couple hundred special access programs. Uh, so I was at the headquarters at the agency. And, you know, after the indoctrination I was giving to the senior person, this person, um, who worked with, uh, Lue Elizondo, uh, previously was like, "Yeah, have... Dave, have you ever heard of this guy, Lue Elizondo? He's running some UFO program at the Pentagon. Um, we all think he's crazy." And I'm like, "I, I don't know who this guy Lue Elizondo is, and I don't know of any kind of UFO program. So that sounds nuts to me." But lo and behold, and that was like early 2017, and lo and beholds in December 2017, that New York Times article came out with the, uh, that named the AATIP program and the AAWSAP program, so Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program and Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program being the other acronym. And I was like, "Holy shit. Wait, that's that guy Lue Elizondo that I heard about. Oh, you know what? I think I have heard of AAWSAP." When I was a lieutenant, I used to read these reports from the Defense Intelligence Agency on black holes and stuff, and I was like, "Huh, that's, like, stupid. Why is the DIA, um, looking into black holes, time warps?" It just didn't make any sense to me back in, like, '08, '09 when I was a lieutenant. And all of a sudden, I'm like, "Well, maybe there's something to this UFO thing." I'm not saying

  3. 3:36 – 5:06

    Open-source deep dive to UAP Task Force recruitment

    1. DG

      I was, like, a believer either way on the subject, but this i- this was a topic of concern apparently for the Pentagon. And in 2018, I started doing kind of my, what I call my open source literature review. Like, "Let me spin myself up on this topic," watching Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo, Leslie Kean, all these people talk about the subject and then, you know, just trying to understand, so what is this with UFOs? Has this been going on for a while? The answer is yes, like Foo Fighters, sightings of weird stuff in antiquity, et cetera, which, you know, we can get into later. But, uh, and so early 2019 comes along, and my boss at the National Reconnaissance Office, in kind of my Air Force major capacity, forwarded me an email from the, what became a, uh, stood up in, like, I guess it was 2018, which was the unidentified, well it was aerial, now anonym- anonymous phenomena task force, UAP task force. So the UAP task force director sent my boss an email saying, "Hey, we're looking for a rep to the task force." And as, like any good officer, I was like, "Well, I'll put it on my performance report. Hey, I was on a task force," and, you know, that would look good. And I ha- being well cleared and also, uh, bachelor's degree in physics, uh, master's in intelligence analysis, I'm like, "You know what? I'll figure out what this shit is. It's either gonna be weather shit. Maybe it's an adversarial program. Maybe it's, like, uh, a US program people are misidentifying on rare occasions.

  4. 5:06 – 11:08

    The ‘triangle over the car’ case and why witnesses stay silent

    1. DG

      So fuck it, I'll, I'll go see where the data takes me." And, you know, early 2019 or so, I joined the UAP task force. Um, and then I started, you know, interviewing pilots, um, uh, flag officers, you know, general officer equivalent type Navy folks. And, you know, they were seeing some really crazy shit. And, uh, like a, you know, event that I talked about previously publicly in a YouTube video on, uh, the, uh, Yes Theory channel, you know, I... There was this one 30-year senior Navy officer that, you know, he was going to work sober, no predisposition for fantasy, all that kind of stuff, 'cause I interviewed the individual for a couple hours, and he saw this, you know, crazy triangle hover over his car going to work at a certain naval facility. And it, like, blew his mind. He was serious. Um, the paint on his car turned milky white after the incident. So that's, to me, that sounds like ionizing radiation. So like ultraviolet, just like how your-... your headlights get all foggy over time if you park your car out in the sun. Same phenomenon just happened, you know, within a 24-hour period. And I'm like, "Whoa. If this is true and the, the, the oral testimony and, you know, crazy radar data that I saw when I was in the taskforce, you know, stuff making turns that didn't make any sense, well, holy shit, what is this stuff then?"

    2. JR

      This, um-

    3. DG

      Yeah.

    4. JR

      ... anomaly with his paint-

    5. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    6. JR

      Wa- is this documented? Is there photographs, or-

    7. DG

      Yes. I saw-

    8. JR

      Yeah?

    9. DG

      ... photographs. It was documented, yeah.

    10. JR

      And, uh, w- what ... Is there a conventional explanation?

    11. DG

      I mean, based on what he described, uh, something to rapidly ionize his paint like that within a, a day? I don't ... I can't think of anything off the top of my head in terms of some conventional aerospace technology. And, and this was a certain facility in the continental US. This was not overseas. So, it's not like our adversary's flying some spooky thing, um, in US airspace.

    12. JR

      So, this thing hovered over his car for how long?

    13. DG

      Couple minutes while he was traveling at about 60 miles an hour or so. It was pacing his vehicle.

    14. JR

      How far away from his vehicle?

    15. DG

      Hmm. (sighs) It's probably a couple hundred feet in altitude. It was less than 1,000 feet-

    16. JR

      Really?

    17. DG

      ... which is also bad because from an airspace perspective, pilots would know this, anything under 1,000 feet, no, unless you get special clearance, and you only do that over controlled airspace, like a military test ranges, right?

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. DG

      Where people fly low and that kind of thing.

    20. JR

      So, is, is he on ... What kind of a highway is he on?

    21. DG

      A conventional civilian highway.

    22. JR

      Civilian high- so anyone could have been on it.

    23. DG

      Yes.

    24. JR

      It just happened to be this guy.

    25. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    26. JR

      Um, did he have any other experiences with this thing?

    27. DG

      No. It was ... This was, like, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Um, he kept it to himself for a couple years, but then he, um, you know, the taskforce came out-

    28. JR

      So, what was his name?

    29. DG

      Uh, I don't ... Well, he's-

    30. JR

      Okay.

  5. 11:08 – 13:48

    First contact with crash-retrieval allegations and the ‘gatekeepers’ problem

    1. JR

      So, when you ... What was ... How did you initially discover this program? And, like, what was your first encounter with the information?

    2. DG

      A very senior individual in the intel community came to me when, uh, I guess I was asking a lot of questions 'cause I'm a very (laughs) inquisitive guy, and it was like, "Hey, we ... I need to introduce you to somebody." Uh, you know, he listed that certain person's academic credentials, which were beyond reproach, you know, PhD level education, clearance. Resume was insane. I'm like, "Well, okay, sure. I'll, I'll talk to this person." And, and I ended up meeting that person in a, you know, uh, uh, top secret facility and, you know, he started to discussing like, "Hey, there's a program. I was on it. And, you know, we were reverse engineering crash material that we've recovered over the decades, you know." And he's like, "I'm not joking," you know. "And, and, uh, we're, we're telling you because you're, you have to ... You guys have to report to the Deputy Secretary of Defense in Congress on this matter," right? "And we were, we were actively briefing, like, uh, Secretary Esper, Deputy Secretary Norquist, you know, um ..."... other cabinet level folks, right? Ands like, there's a, there, you know, there must ... There's an oversight issue because you're the UAP task force, you should be read into this stuff because, like, why spend the taxpayers', you know, dollars looking at stuff that we already have data on?

    3. JR

      Right.

    4. DG

      So that's... And that spooked me and that was like fall of 2019. And, you know, I don't take a guy's word for it. I'm like, "You know what?" Myself and my trusted colleagues that had a lot of, a lot of special accesses like me, you know, we cultivated our network and we ultimately interviewed about 40 people or so, all the way up to multi-star generals, directors of agencies, mid-level guys that literally touched it, worked inside of it, all the, the stuff. They brought intel reports for me to look at, you know, documents and, and a lot of that I could cross ve- verify with other oral sources that my high-level colleagues or I talked to. And, um, you know, it, it checked out. Especially when I had enough information on e- and, and I know wh- who specifically to ask, like, "Hey, well, I want read into this." Like, "I'm on the UAP task force," and we went to those, I'll call 'em gatekeepers for the lack of a better term, and they basically said fuck you to me and my colleagues.

  6. 13:48 – 16:35

    Inspector General complaint, Congress briefings, and what ‘credible & urgent’ meant

    1. JR

      Hmm. So why were these other people willing to discuss this with you?

    2. DG

      Well, they determined I didn't need to know. I was already cleared at such a high level, handling presidential material and everything, it's like, "Dave needs to know," and they felt that coming to us, it was a form of a protected disclosure. They felt that they weren't really violating anything because, you know, we were the, I'll call it the investigatory body, uh, for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community and, and Con- Congress at the time. And they ... You know, you are allowed to, you know, disclose to a government official in an official capacity and I, you know, did that. And, you know, of course I protected those people and, and do know I took those people, a lot of them and I, and I brought them to the Intelligence Community Inspector General when I filed my complaint 'cause I don't want people to, you know, hear it from a secondhand source. You know, people call it hearsay, whatever, though I have some firsthand knowledge I eventually talk about someday, I'm trying to get it cleared, but through s- through security processes. Um, uh, so they could hear it and hear the details like, you know, who, what, when, where, why, where the shit is, who's in control of it, what are the cover programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, and that's what deemed my, my complaint credible and urgent in July 2022, uh, which is a s- ... So the ... My complaint, yes, was about reprisal too. I filed that separately eventually to the, the Department of Defense Inspector General, and that's an ongoing investigation, but my ... It was my congressional oversight, uh, UAP crash retrieval allegations that was deemed, uh, credible and urgent. It was sent to the Director of National Intelligence and then it was sent to the Congressional Intelligence Committees around that time, July of 2022. And I eventually went to Congress in December of 2022. And it's a crazy story why it took so long. It's fucking nuts. Um, but I provided total about 11 and a half to 12 hours of, uh, you know, classified testimony to the congressional staffers and their lawyers for both the House and the Senate. And I, I went, you know, full open kimono. I mean, I told them as much as I could within my time slot, if you will, so.

    3. JR

      So this is obviously very compartmentalized where-

    4. DG

      Yes.

    5. JR

      ... there's only a few people that know about this information and they're not allowed to discuss it with other people.

    6. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    7. JR

      When did this all start? I mean, is this-

    8. DG

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      ... out of Roswell? Is it predate that? Like, when, when did they first realize that there are things that cannot be explained or can't be explained through conventional means?

  7. 16:35 – 22:06

    How far back it goes: the 1933 Italy (Magenta) retrieval and Vatican/OSS backchannel

    1. DG

      Yeah, I mean, the program goes back a ways. The precise, mm, beginning of it I can't talk about, but I did ... Because of security stuff. But I did talk about, uh, publicly the 1933 retrieval and I did that, uh, tactically and I ran that through the Security Approval Office because I wanted it to show that this is much older and it's international. It's not like a US thing. I mean, th- this stuff is landing or crashing around the world and unexpected countries have had this happen, and that's why I picked that 'cause I thought that was a interesting case. And then of course the, you know, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican were involved back channeling it through the OSS, which became the CIA later, to FDR and that's how the US knew something weird happened in Italy during ... Well, right before World War II, but yeah.

    2. JR

      So this is '33-

    3. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    4. JR

      ... was the first, like, documented?

    5. DG

      Uh, (laughs) I can't ... That is the earliest one I can talk about. Yeah. There's a-

    6. JR

      Something that predates that?

    7. DG

      My ... You could infer that.

    8. JR

      You could infer that?

    9. DG

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      So this '33 one you said was in Italy?

    11. DG

      Yeah, Magenta. So it's, uh ... I'm bad at geography. I think that's like Lombardy region. It's like northern, northwest Italy.

    12. JR

      And what's the story behind it?

    13. DG

      So, um, basically it, it, it looked like it crashed, right? I- Uh, the original shape most likely was like a lenticular disc-like craft, you know, with like, uh, two dinner plates-

    14. JR

      What does lenticular mean?

    15. DG

      So like two dinner plates, you know, smooshed together, right?

    16. JR

      Okay.

    17. DG

      A hump. And there's like a, you know, like a bubble on top of it.

    18. JR

      The classic flying saucer.

    19. DG

      Classic like, yeah.

    20. JR

      Flying saucer.

    21. DG

      Like that. (laughs)

    22. JR

      Like that. Okay.

    23. DG

      But it looks like when it hits, the edges broke off, so it became this like bell or acorn shaped thing.... um, and there was nothing in it. It was, like, just an artifact. You know, there was no biological remnants, if you will. Um, so it's so funny because the Italians were so confused, they actually called up the Germans and they were like, "Is this one of your Wunderwaffe? Like, what the hell just crashed in northern Italy?" Mussolini, um, and this is all publicly available information, 'cause some Italian researchers, um, found all these original documents that some people were sitting on for years in Italy. Uh, you know, they put a gag, a gag order on the press, et cetera. And, and yeah, Mussolini asked the Germans to come down. Of course, the Germans came down and they were like, "Uh, that is not ours, but let's look at it together." So, that's kind of, uh, perhaps a tertiary reason the, kinda, axis powers got together. I'm not saying that's, like, the reason. But I think the Italians and the Germans were so intrigued with what they found from, like, an artifact perspective, there was at least some scientific and military, uh, collaboration during the war. The details of which, uh, I'm not, I'm not sure of. But I know people that know that specific event that are currently still intel officers within this program, uh, in detail. But, you know, yeah.

    24. JR

      So was there witnesses to the crash or some sort of an understanding that something had crash landed and then they discovered it?

    25. DG

      Yeah. I, I forget the precise discovery, uh, I don't know if it was, like, local police officers or local farmers found it in the field, something like that. I, I don't wanna misspeak. Um, I assume some of the Italian researchers might have some fact witnesses that could orally say, "Oh, yeah. My great, my great-grandfather found it," or something like that. But I don't remember off the top of my head.

    26. JR

      What was the scale of this vehicle?

    27. DG

      Uh, it was probably like, like t- 20 feet by 10 feet. Something like that. Not super huge, but kinda big.

    28. JR

      Do they think that this was a drone? Do they think that this was occupied?

    29. DG

      There was nothing in it, so if it wa- if it was, uh, piloted, if you will, by some sentience, I mean, your, your guess is as good as mine, so...

    30. JR

      Hmm. So, what happened to that vehicle?

  8. 22:06 – 26:30

    Reverse engineering, extreme compartmentalization, and national-security limits on details

    1. JR

      ... United States. And, uh, was the attempt to try to back engineer this thing? Was the attempt-

    2. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    3. JR

      ... to try to understand what it was?

    4. DG

      Yeah. I mean, first of it, obviously, it's understanding the situation, right? What do we have our hands on? And, and like I've said in some other videos and stuff, you know, they took the Manhattan Project secrecy and overlaid it on this issue because that secrecy worked well for atomic bomb developments and whatnot. And, and certainly this whole program in a nutshell, if I were to summarize the 90 plus years of history, it is a reverse engineering program to garner some kind of insight. Uh, and of course not a lot of the things that we've learned from it are, like, directly, you know, ripped off the technology we found, but it has inspired other innovations that made its way into other US classified programs over the year for national defense reasons. You know, and it's a myriad of different things, so...

    5. JR

      I- the UFO folklore is that this is where fiber optics were discovered first.

    6. DG

      Yeah. I'm not gonna break the seal on anything we've discovered or anything like that. And (laughs) yeah, it's-

    7. JR

      How-

    8. DG

      ... place I can't go to, yeah.

    9. JR

      How limited are you-

    10. DG

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      ... in what you can discuss and what you can't discuss, and why?

    12. DG

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      Why do they let you discuss any of this?

    14. DG

      Yeah. So, anything sensitive that I wanna say as it relates to, like, US government activity, whether it be intelligence stuff, military stuff, et cetera, I have to submit it through what they call DOPSR, DOD Office of Pre-publication and Security Review. That is something anybody who's been an intel officer, anybody with, like, a clearance has to submit that kind of stuff. Now, obviously if you're writing a book about gardening you don't have to. But if you're gonna talk about anything military and intelligence related you have to submit. So, it's kind of a Catch-22 for this office, right? They're only looking at it from a security perspective. They're not vouching for it or anything like that. And that's like any author, right? They could write a, a book about Navy SEALs and they're not vouching for the story. They're vouching that you didn't say any nasty code words, you didn't burn a specific ongoing classified program. And for them, I mean, I'm not in their OODA loop, but certainly it's a Catch-22 for them where if they want to redact and they propose a redaction, they're like, "Hey Dave, you can't say these sentences. You can rewrite it and resubmit." You know, "We can't necessarily tell you what agency said to redact it, but you're not allowed to say this."... uh, they would be basically self-certifying there's a there there. So, in my opinion, probably the policy is like if it has to deal with the subject, we're not saying anything, we're not proposing any redactions. As, as long as he's not burning a conventional program, uh, we kinda have to allow him to exercise his First Amendment rights. And I, so I think it's like a Catch-22 for that office, is kind of the long or the short of the long answer, so.

    15. JR

      So, this is essentially one of the very early ones, 1933.

    16. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    17. JR

      How many crash retrieval incidents have there been?

    18. DG

      It is double-digit, uh, the s- specific numbers I do know. However, I can't discuss that. And I know it sounds like, oh, I'm being coy or whatever, but, you know, this show, any other interviews I do, right, you know, foreign intelligence services are watching. And it's like, I'm not here to help Russia and China calibrate their intelligence collection, like, "Oh, Dave said it's this number. We missed a couple. Shit."

    19. JR

      Right.

    20. DG

      "Let's put it out for the KGB, SVR, and GRU are now gonna hit the streets to try to figure out which ones they missed."

    21. JR

      Right.

    22. DG

      So I'm, I'm here to protect national security, and I'm just trying to put all the general topics out there for public conversation to hold our government accountable, really.

    23. JR

      Hm.

    24. DG

      So... 'Cause I'm, I'm here as a fact witness 'cause we have a, you know, a constitutional oversight issue because this program has not been, you know, reported to Congress in the appropriate way, you know? And I can get into a senator I talked to that has died recently, so I can, you know, explain to ya why I'm so sure, besides what I read, which we can get into the what intel port- reports

  9. 26:30 – 40:59

    Harry Reid, AAWSAP’s ‘real purpose,’ and the Lockheed/CIA bureaucracy clash

    1. DG

      I read. I did get some stuff cleared. Um, so during my investigation, I'm like, "You know what? I need to talk to somebody at the highest levels," right? So, and this'll give you an idea of the kind of people we talked to, and this is the only one I'm gonna talk about using their name because they died two years ago, so... In spring 2021, I actually flew with a couple colleagues of mine to Las Vegas, and I met with Senator Harry Reid about nine months before he died. And of course, he's a private citizen now, and I wanted to brief him on the topic, and I wanted to get his kind of thought leadership on it 'cause, you know, he was a Gang of Eight member, right, you know, which is the top most cleared senators and congressmen. He was the majority leader, for God's sake, so the Senate. And I knew, you know, he helped sponsor the AAOSAP program that I mentioned and, you know, where they looked at Skinwalker Ranch and some other things. And I wanted to understand, like, what does Harry Reid actually know? Like, why did he, you know, give $21 million to DIA and Bigelow Aerospace for this? So I'm sitting there in Harry Reid's living room, you know, right next to him with some other witnesses that were there with me, and he straight up says, he's like, "Yeah, I knew we had UFO material. I was denied access for decades. I tried to get access," and then he explained some of his efforts during AAOSAP, uh, and I was like, "Holy shit, did the m- did the former majority leader just say, did he just confirm this to me as well?" You know, I was already talking to these amazing high-level people, but I have Harry Reid literally saying, "Yes, we have material," and, you know, he knew it was non-human.

    2. JR

      Did Harry Reid have personal experience with this?

    3. DG

      I don't know if he's had any personal stuff in his personal life.

    4. JR

      I mean, did he see it? Did he- did he witness?

    5. DG

      He said in terms of seeing the material himself, he said he was denied access for years, uh, decades was his term, and he actually told me on behalf of me, he was going... So he had like a weekly call with President Joe Biden at the time, and he straight up said to me he was gonna talk to President Biden about this issue, literally. And then, uh, what he was telling me about AAOSAP, um, I was like, "Holy shit, I have like 20 other people that told me this dude." So, the real history what fucking AAOSAP was 'cause I think there's a lot of people out there that think well, they were looking at ghosts, Skinwalker Ranch. Yes, they went to the ranch as a secondary and tertiary objective, but the real, uh, reason... So like there's a document that came out a couple years ago through FOIA from the Defense Intelligence Agency. There was this special access program request that Harry Reid, you might have seen this, I think, like, George Knapp and company have reported on this, that he sent to the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, and it was asking for one of the most serious SAPs you can ask for, what they call a bigoted waived special access program. So waived means it's limited congressional reporting, um, that is a class of special access programs, and bigoted means it's, like, by name. And it's like, it was like, uh, you could read the FOIA document. It was like, you know, Harry Reid, James Inhofe, uh, Lou Elizondo, et cetera. And I'm like, "Why are you asking for the most serious SAP to be created for a program that ostensibly is looking at Skinwalker Ranch and stuff? And it doesn't make any sense." So what really happened there, and, uh, you know, Harry Mead- Harry Reid, God bless his soul, made this disclosure, um, a couple weeks after we met, uh, in The New Yorker. And you can look this up. I think it was, like, a May 2021 New Yorker story where he says, "I knew for decades..." And he made this disclosure, not me, so I'm gonna say the name of the contractor. (laughs) Harry Reid said this. Uh, you know, "We knew that Lockheed Martin had this material for decades. I tried to get access, and I was denied," and specifically with the Lockheed Martin stuff, he was talking about during the AAOSAP program.And for the people who are on this program, I submitted this shit to the officer, got this cleared, so don't freak out, but I'm telling the truth here. Um, so Lockheed Martin wanted to divest itself from this material at a specific facility that's known to me, that I provided to the inspector general, um, like street address, all that shit, right? And the idea was, if they made a catcher's mitt, a security catcher's mitt for this shit at, uh, you know, most serious sap possible, the contractor and the other government customer, which was the Central Intelligence Agency, um, for that specific Lockheed material, and it was shit that they recovered from, like, the '50s and stuff. And it was, like, bits and pieces of- of- of- of, like, hull structure, shit like that. And, um, uh, so they were gonna tech transfer it, and the $21 or $22 million was actually for Bigelow Aerospace to build out, you know, facilities in Las Vegas and material analysis equipment. And I've s- I have- I saw the staff meeting slides. I saw the paperwork. Like, there's a f- paperwork trail I've seen on this shit, and I talked to the people involved in this program. And, you know, even Jim Lacatski, who ran the program, uh, who's a re- retired DIA officer, PhD in engineering, even made this disclosure in his book, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, uh, page 152 to 153. And he also made a disclosure a couple weeks ago, I think it was on Weaponize podcast with Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, where he's like, "Yeah, we had a whole craft and we broke into the hall and we gained access." And he ran that through the same, you know, security process as I did. And so Jim Lacatski, who ran this program, is also going on the record that he is aware, uh, personally aware of intact vehicles and everything, but, uh, long-

    6. JR

      So they gained access?

    7. DG

      Yeah, mm-hmm.

    8. JR

      What does that mean? And- and by what method-

    9. DG

      Yeah.

    10. JR

      ... did they gain access?

    11. DG

      The way he wrote it in his book, I can only infer it sounded forcib- forcible. So through some kind of, you know, means, I don't know if it was, like, CO2 laser or something. I don't actually know how they gained access, but imagine it was, uh, not permissive access. They, like, broke into the damn thing.

    12. JR

      So this thing-

    13. DG

      Yeah.

    14. JR

      ... is essentially, uh, sealed and it's-

    15. DG

      Yeah.

    16. JR

      ... some sort of, uh... What was the shape of this thing?

    17. DG

      Uh, he- Lacatski didn't disclose the shape on this particular vehicle, it- as far as I recollect.

    18. JR

      It- it's... What about the dimensions?

    19. DG

      N- I don't believe he did in his book, uh, but I think it's, like, chapter 11 in his new book or something. I glanced at it. But he did make that disclosure on video as well, and I do encourage both the AARO office, which is the DoD's UAP Task Force successor, and Congress to ask Dr. James Lacatski to come in for classified testimony, because the disclosure in his one book that he wrote with Colm Kelleher, George Knapp, and in the second book, well, the guy's saying he has close personal knowledge, he needs to go to Congress. So I- you know, I- I don't know James Lacatski, but I do encourage him to be a FAC witness. Uh, but going back to that transfer with Lockheed, long story short, can't get into all the nuanced details, but basically, the CIA, uh, said fuck you to DIA and Lockheed, and it was totally killed. So Harry Reid's request to get the material transferred to the AAOSAP program was totally killed because of bureaucracy and kind of fiefdom stuff. So they used that money, and then they, you know, they wrote those defense intelligence reference documents, the DIRDs, as a lot of people who's familiar with a- a- listening will know about. And then they did look at Skinwalker Ranch because they thought that studying kind of the more woo-woo phenomenon aspects of this... And I've never been to the ranch, so I've never experienced the ranch for myself, but, you know, obviously, I think we both know a bunch of people that have been to the ranch and have seen some trippy stuff, or at least allege that. Um, they thought that they would be able to gain currency with the- with "the program," you know, in- in this case, CIA, to unlock the key for the Lockheed Martin stuff. Uh, which actually, I'll tell you right now, it's, like, so weird to say that, but I- I ran that shit through security. Um, yet to me it's like an out-of-body experience to talk about that kind of, uh, detailed sensitivity, uh, stuff like that. But- but basically they studied the ranch to gain favor, to be like, "Hey, look at all this stuff we're figuring out, this paranormal stuff that's somehow connected to the phenomenon on the ranch." But ultimately, they never gained favor with the government customer, and then the program kind of died a slow death because of a lot of politics in the Pentagon. So that's kind of the long but short of it with the AAOSAP program that, you know, I wanted to make sure the public knew it's not what you think it was. There was some other stuff behind the scenes that, you know, I wanted to speak truth to power on.

    20. JR

      So this, uh, particular vehicle that they had recovered from the 1950s, what- what was the source of it? Where did they find it?

    21. DG

      Uh, those details, uh, I did not get cleared, so-

    22. JR

      Okay.

    23. DG

      ... yeah.

    24. JR

      So they have in possession this thing, they gain access to this thing, and what do they report once they've gained access to it?

    25. DG

      Oh, those details I- I do not know. That's a- that's probably a question for Dr. Lacatski. Um, I presume he knows those details. I don't know.

    26. JR

      So this thing is housed somewhere?

    27. DG

      It is, yes.

    28. JR

      Currently?

    29. DG

      It may still be in the same location that I know about, yes.

    30. JR

      And how many people have access to this, and how did they prevent this information from being released?

  10. 40:59 – 54:40

    Adversaries, leaked intelligence, and the retaliation Grusch says he faced

    1. DG

      So, I'll tell you about some intel documents I read that kind of obliquely answers that question. So, uh, there were sensitive human-derived foreign intelligence that I read, um, 'cause I had access to kind of the AATIP, OSAP, uh, classified archives, and I was like thumbing through everything, and there was... Some other people were bringing me documents to evaluate. And I'll never forget, I had, um, I want to say stolen by the US, uh, intelligence ass- assessment from a certain foreign adversary discussing the US reverse engineering program. And I was like... And that was actually another like, "What the fuck?" And, and so I had an adversary also confirm this program literally because of exfiltrated intelligence. And so they certainly had a limited knowledge, at least fact of, that the US had a program like this, a particular adversary. And actually, I was like, "Well, I want more." Like, eh- I know who wrote this, liter- or who got it, right, uh, on behalf of the United States government. So I went to that certain agency through the, uh, approved and official way, and this is kinda part of the myriads reprisals against me. Uh, the agency was like, "Oh, yes, we have what you're looking for, Dave. Um, you're gonna need to sign a one-time read-in to something, you know, come visit us to, you know, go to the vault and read it, right, you know, hard copy."

    2. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DG

      "Uh, but yes, we have what you're looking for." And ultimately, uh, from what I was told by friends in higher places, my request kinda went up the flagpole at that agency. And all of a sudden, the agency ghosted my boss and I for like two months. And then when I really pressed them hard to gain access, 'cause I'm like, "I have a need to know. I need to evaluate this intelligence for fucking Congress." And they debriefed me-... uh, from all my accesses over in that other sister agency, and made up some bogus excuse, like I shouldn't have been briefed anything in the first place, literally. And basically gave me an administrative mid- middle finger, like persona non grata, don't ever fucking ask us about that shit again. And I, and I, I, I'm sure the person who made the oops, that told me they had what I was looking for, probably got admonished and slapped on the wrist, 'cause I never heard from that person again, even though it was somebody I actually used to work on occasion with. So, uh, that was also another way I knew, um, I was, uh, uh, you know, there was a lot of smoke and fire because I, you know, had stuff like that happen to me.

    4. JR

      So this ... k- but knowing that, f- our adversaries were aware of this reverse engineering program, are we aware of their reverse engineering-

    5. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    6. JR

      ... programs?

    7. DG

      Yeah.

    8. JR

      H- which, uh, countries have-

    9. DG

      Uh, you could-

    10. JR

      Some.

    11. DG

      ... you could probably guess.

    12. JR

      Okay. Yeah, the big ones.

    13. DG

      And, and you wouldn't be, uh, it won't be too shocking.

    14. JR

      Yeah. Okay.

    15. DG

      But I won't acknowledge what the US may know.

    16. JR

      Right.

    17. DG

      So ...

    18. JR

      So, are we aware of numbers in terms of like a, at least a rough estimate-

    19. DG

      Mm-hmm.

    20. JR

      ... of how many are available to these other ...

    21. DG

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      How many?

    23. DG

      Uh, can't g- that, that's like super sensitive.

    24. JR

      But there's more than one?

    25. DG

      Yeah. (laughs) You could read into that, yeah.

    26. JR

      I could read into that.

    27. DG

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      And has anyone made any progress?

    29. DG

      Yeah, I can't get into if we've made progress, if they've made progress, 'cause that's like straight up some national security stuff. But like, I want the, uh, just to be clear, I want the US populous to learn a lot of this, and this is why, you know, another reason why I went public is like, I need to call everybody out. I'm not here to admonish the entire government, mind you, but there is an element of the US government and its cleared defense contractor base that, you know, we have a three branch government oversight issue, like going back to Harry Reid. Harry Reid didn't even get access, and I fucking talked to him myself to con- confirm that. And he said he was gonna go talk to Biden. Um, 'cause I think there needs to be a disclosure plan. This goes back to what's currently in legislation right now that's super fucking important. Um, because 90 some, 90 some odd percent of this should, should be open for public discovery, public, um, analysis in academia. This should be like, at very least, true nuclear programs such as nuclear physics, you study in university. Nuclear weapons, classified, because that makes people in the pink mist. That's really sensitive. We don't need everybody to know how to do that. So, I think the stuff that is like legit weapons-related stuff, that's like straight up national superiority stuff, sure. Reasonably classify that, but, but this, these programs, we need a change. And that's why you saw the Schumer Amendment, right? And I think you might've read that on air or something in a previous episode if I remember correctly. You know, Chuck Schumer ... And I knew about the amendment a couple months before I went public, and that's kind of another reason why I did what I did. I'm like, "Fuck, I'm like the only guy that kinda has the opportunity to do this." I know what's in the chute, so to speak-

    30. JR

      (coughs)

  11. 54:40 – 2:30:46

    What are they? ‘Non-human intelligence’ framing, interdimensional ideas, and ‘biologics’

    1. JR

      What do they think these things are? The people that you talk to.

    2. DG

      Yeah. So they, specifically the people on the program that handle the material, that were in executive-level briefings with intel community leaders and other folks over the years, last 20 years or so, they did use the term extraterrestrial, ET or whatever.Okay. That isn't a possible origin. But the Schumer Amendment, if you read it, it specifically uses non-human intelligence, NHI, very deliberately because we wanna catch everything. Because what if some of this stuff is not ET and they're going to use it as an escape clause. Like, "Well, this stuff, that we don't even know if it's extraterrestrial, so this doesn't apply." So, that's why we wanted to be as broad as possible. I mean, besides ET, I mean, a lot of it would be my own, uh, personal opinion. I think we have a couple conceivable buckets, and I'm using the work of Jacques Vallée, other people that have thought deeply on the issue, on how the phenomenon has changed since an- antiquity. It showed its- showed itself in a different way. Like, a good example is like witches sitting on your chest phenomenon with p- p- you know, uh, paralysis in medieval and enlightenment area- you know, era, became this alien abduction phenomenon, uh, in the modern area. Er, uh, era, excuse me. And is it, is it the- the recipient and their analytical overlay cognitively seeing the phenomenon based on a modern interpretation? You know, inside out. Or is the phenomenon ... This is like Jacques Vallée's book, Passport to Mag- Magnolia. Magnolia, I can never pronounce it right, 1969 where he talks about the phenomenon seems to, like, masquerade itself as different stuff over the years, but, you know, we've seen roughly the same stuff. If you look at the Foo Fighters of World War II. Uh, there are declassified Air Force OSI reports from the '50s, you- people can Google the talk about flying butane tanks with the same measurements approximately what we saw in the 2004 Tic Tac incident, but they called it flying propane or, you know, butane tanks in the '50s. So, uh, from a morphology, or in the Air Force intel we call it vis recce, visual reconnaissance, like, they basically look the same and we can back azimuth that, you know, decades if not hundreds of years in the past, you know, Wheels of Ezekiel, right? They're seeing these, like, disc-type objects, right? And unless Ezekiel is, uh, tripping or this is an allegory or fable in the, in the Bible, you know, let's say the event happens. Just like the- in the Vedic texts, you have the battles. The blue people in the, uh, battles, uh, in the sky that sound like nuclear and directed energy weapons. Like, what's going on there? I mean, maybe that's a Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson type thing. They could- they know more than I. So, there is a real phenomenon that, uh, origin undetermined, but it- it's trippy and sometimes it presents itself in, like, a non-corporeal form too. You know, orbs, balls of energy, uh, you know, they- that- they don't appear as, like, some kind of bipedal hominid like some people have expoused. So, I think that might be, call it interdimensional, call it shadow biome, crypto terrest- I mean, there's a lot of different theories. Yeah, yeah.

    3. JR

      What are the primary theor- the primary theories are from another planet or-

    4. DG

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      ... from another dimension?

    6. DG

      I think those are the primary. I mean, there's certainly origins that we probably can't conceptualize as humans because we're just- our meat is stuck in 3D and we don't understand and, you know, our IQs are only so high. So, there might be some origins that we don't understand.

    7. JR

      In terms of, like, interdimensional travel?

    8. DG

      Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, if you talk to mainstream physicists they say, like, crossing dimensions physically is kind of a trope of sci-fi, and, you know, I- that's why I used an example and I know some physicists don't like me talking about this theory, but it is a theory. You know, like, so the holographic principle which was originally conceived to explain how information is encoded on an event horizon of a black hole, which is a distance away from the singularity of a black hole where if you cross it, you're fucked. 'Cause you're gonna get ripped to shreds or you're not coming back. And, uh, that principle talks about how information basically from higher dimensional space can be encoded in lower dimensional space. And the easiest example is, like, us casting a shadow on a sidewalk, right? Three-dimensional object, 2D shadow on a sidewalk. If you lived in two-dimensional space, Flatland, you'd be tripped out. "What the fuck am I seeing?" But they just don't know that it's really just a person in higher dimensional space. So, as some of the- I mean, obviously we have physical material that's in three-dimensional space that we've recovered, but at least maybe some of the phenomenon is really operating in higher spatial dimensions, but is either being projected or quasi-projected into our 3D plus time space, which is really trippy to think about, but we literally do it on a day-to-day basis, like casting shadows. So, and that might be some of what we're seeing too, but, I mean, I presume we know more. The people I talked to did not, uh, espouse they had full knowledge either. Like I said, the- the- the normal colloquialism was to say ET or extraterrestrial. So, yeah.

    9. JR

      Could you dumb down-

    10. DG

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      ... this concept of interdimensional?

    12. DG

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      Like, what ... I know in physics they have theorized that there are multiple dimensions other than those that we can currently detect.

    14. DG

      Yeah. And a lot of that is based off of, like, Lorentz ... This is my bachelor's degree talking.

    15. JR

      Okay.

    16. DG

      I know there's gonna be, like, some physicist who has a PhD who's like, "Oh, Dave, you fucked that up." But-

    17. JR

      Right.

    18. DG

      But basically, you know, from high energy particle collisions and based on the deflection angles and all the stuff what happens when the particles collide, you know, uh, confirm certain theoretical frameworks about extra spatial dimensions and, you know, I can't speak, uh, with any real authority on, you know, precisely how that works, but a lot of-... um, you know, whether it be string theory or quantum mechanics or based off of higher spacial dimensions. And, um, you know, so that is a mainstream physics, uh, theoretical framework. That's not like wacky or loony or anything like that, so. Uh, but that's basically, uh, a possibility. But like I said, like, we don't really have a good theory if you, if you work, if you lived in like 5D space, for example, it's almost like, um ... Remember the ending of the movie Interstellar, right?

    19. JR

      Yes.

    20. DG

      Where, where he's pushin' the books.

    21. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    22. DG

      He's like in a tesseract, you know-

    23. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    24. DG

      ... which is like a four to five D structure, but he's trying to interact with 3D space. And of course he like leaves that space to come back to his daughter many years later at the end of, ending of the movie. Great movie. But, um, so, uh, that's a way to conceptualize it in something you may have watched in film. It's kinda like the ending of Inter- Interstellar.

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. DG

      Oh yeah, yeah there you go.

    27. JR

      This is, this is ...

    28. DG

      Yeah.

    29. JR

      Which is based on what? Like what theory?

    30. DG

      So the physicist Kip Thorne was the very famous guy. He was a big black hole and wormhole guy. I think it's Caltech or somewhere in California. Kip Thorne actually did all the physics equations and everything for Christopher Nolan to make sure that they were conceptualizing and visualizing, uh, black holes and wormholes and all that stuff correctly in the movie. We saw like the, the halo around the black hole, uh, when they were comin' in with the ship and everything. That's actually based off of real physics models that, uh, Kip Thorne did the calculations for, which is pretty cool actually that Christopher Nolan took it to that level, you know.

Episode duration: 2:41:00

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