Joe Rogan Experience #2065 - David Grusch

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

How are you, man?

Hey. Good, good.

Thanks for coming here. Appreciate it.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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 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. 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?"