WASHINGTON — The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.
Retired Maj. David Grusch’s highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress’ latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.
Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.
“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 said.
Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims of a coverup. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said investigators have not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects.
Grusch says he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward. He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.
“It was very brutal and very unfortunate, some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally,” he said.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., chaired the panel’s hearing and joked to a packed audience, “Welcome to the most exciting subcommittee in Congress this week.” But members of both parties asked Grusch about his study of UFOs and the consequences he faced.
“I take it that you’re arguing what we need is real transparency and reporting systems so we can get some clarity on what’s going on out there,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
Some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not providing more details in a classified briefing or releasing images that could be shown to the public. In previous hearings, Pentagon officials showed a video taken from an F-18 military plane that showed an image of one balloon-like shape.
Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.
At that point, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”
can't believe there's still politicians suffering from weather-balloon hysteria. 
As much as I would love it to be true, none of this ever stands up to a smell test for me. Are the aliens only ever crashing on US territory? Why aren't other governments talking about this thing? Why is every other "whistleblower" really obviously a kook trying to make a buck or get some notoriety and fame?
I mean what would people do if suddenly we found out China has a weapon that powerful? It'd be like when the Soviets built their own atom bomb, a hysteria which sets them up for a real war. At the same time if any other country were to unilaterally announce that they've just reverse-engineered alien technology they'd be a global pariah. As long as those programmes are secret, and they'd all be at similarly high classification levels as the most secret shit in that country, it's a weapon that could be the secret death blow in a real war. We wouldn't have had to deploy it in recent low-grade wars for the same reason we don't use nuclear weapons or F-35s. There's no strategic or tactical gain while huge drawbacks exist.
Presumably they'd be crashing elsewhere if they're crashing at all, but how many of those places have such meticulous radar coverage from multiple agencies? American airspace is really heavily monitored in a way that'd be expensive for poorer countries to maintain. Similarly powerful ones all have a reason to keep that technology in reserve since they don't face the existential threat that countries like Libya/Iran/North Korea do.
Well, I think assuming that there would be weapon technology is a bit of a leap, to be honest. I think that most of this alien stuff requires that kind of leap to an assumption, which is why I'm skeptical. Regarding crashes, I'm not sure that radar is necessary to find them, unless they're simply invisible to the naked eye. If crashes are happening, someone would have come across one outside of the US somewhere. I'm also not sure what would cause a nation to become a pariah if they disclosed the existence of aliens. I would assume they would become quite important globally, and their access to alien technology, beings, or artifacts would be highly sought after by other nations.
Not even weapon tech but any kind of alien tech. If we found alien cupholders the polymers in them would probably advance us by centuries and give a military a massive edge. But that edge is only public when it's necessary to use it in a public way and when the benefits to that outweigh the drawbacks. We didn't immediately disclose the Manhattan Project because it'd turbocharge Nazi/Japanese/Soviet development of the same weapons while drawing massive backlash for developing something so much more powerful than anyone else could field.
The radar is important because that's tracking them as they fly. 2/3rds of the world is water and it's the US which monitors massive areas like Oceania. Geographically the US is a huge space under one authority, with Texas being twice the size of Germany. If any country had advance warning of a crash site it'd probably be the US and it's the fourth-largest country on the planet with the most extensive Navy and Air Force. I'd expect them to recover it in the same way I'd expect a disclosure to be a lone whistleblower like this instead of the feds spontaneously calling a press conference that will upset the entire course of history and geopolitical order.
But again, if they really have it and it's so critically important to keep its existence hidden, why is this guy walking around? It just doesn't make any sense. He could have had a car accident or a heart attack, the kooks would say kooky things and the mainstream would treat it like any other conspiracy theory and it would be forgotten except by paranormal websites and ufologists within six months.
He essentially has a dead man's switch by only having secondary information. Everyone is expecting something to happen to him from the Great Satan. The moment it does, it's going to cause a public and political outcry- especially now that he's almost a household name and the public seems generally positive about him. That could potentially piss off the people he's relaying information from, unrelated people who've seen the same things, or other second-hand whistleblowers. It would provide them a safer environment to give the same testimony and that extra confirmation would hurt the people who had him killed. The time to have assassinated him was the second before he blew the whistle but he isn't directly connected to those programmes so they probably couldn't have anticipated him being a leaker. Once the cat's out of the bag it seems like a much messier decision to me. I don't think they could contain that. He also seems to have a solid background for trustworthiness so I think character assassination would go over as well as actual assassination, and what media has covered him has done so positively.
Well, thus far he's provided nothing more than his own testimony. If there ever turns out to be evidence I'll be amazed and quite excited, but thus far I haven't seen anything that makes me think he's got more than a fanciful story to tell.
The lack of evidence is where I support the house's investigation. If there is something there, there's evidence to find. If there isn't, the one response the pentagon has been consistent with is stonewalling attempts at congress looking into it for some other reason. I want strong civilian oversight over every aspect of military research so we don't learn about the next atom bomb with the next Hiroshima. Anything black budget should be open to some kind of external scrutiny and any serious investigation into this guy's claims will at least expose something else they're doing with a blank cheque.