Picture the clip that ran everywhere this fall. Joe Rogan leans into the mic and asks what the things looked like. And David Grusch, the former intelligence officer who told Congress in 2023 that the United States has been retrieving crashed craft for decades, starts with a disclaimer: “Now, I’ve never seen them in person.”
Then he describes them anyway, the way a friend described them to him. Seven feet tall, maybe more. “Sort of gorilla looking skin.” A tic tac shaped craft on the ground, dead greys at the site, and survivors that, in his telling, “posed a threat.” US personnel shot them. And, he said, US personnel “started, you know, getting hurt and dying.”
That’s the reptilian retrieval story, and it’s been bouncing around every corner of the internet since Joe Rogan Experience #2560 dropped on September 30, 2026. I’ve been doing Cryptic Chronicles since 2017, and I’ll be honest with you: when I first heard it, I didn’t hear something new. I heard Dulce. I heard Leonard Stringfield. I heard forty years of crash retrieval stories passed hand to hand in hotel conference rooms.
So that’s what this piece is. Every major claim Grusch has made in public, sorted by what he said under oath, what he says other people told him, what he’s added since, and what the government said back. Then we follow each claim down into the older ufology lore it echoes. Because the most interesting thing about David Grusch isn’t that his story is new. It’s who’s telling it, and where he told it.
Who David Grusch Is
David Charles Grusch is a former US Air Force intelligence officer and Afghanistan veteran who later worked at the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. From 2019 to 2021 he was the NRO’s representative to the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and Rep. Eric Burlison’s office later employed him. The Joe Rogan Experience’s own episode description lists him as former co-lead for UAP analysis at NGA.
He went public in June 2023. Journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published his story at The Debrief on June 5, after, according to Vanity Fair’s reporting, The New York Times passed on an early version, Politico could not meet the writers’ requested timeline, and The Washington Post was still fact-checking. Days later, NewsNation aired Ross Coulthart’s sit-down interview with him. By then he had already filed a whistleblower complaint through the Intelligence Community Inspector General, alleging that information about a crash retrieval program was being kept from Congress and that he’d faced reprisals for digging.
On July 26, 2023, he sat at a witness table in the Rayburn House Office Building next to former Navy pilot Ryan Graves and retired Navy commander David Fravor, the pilot from the 2004 Nimitz “tic tac” encounter. He took an oath. And he said it.
The Claims, Sorted
I’m going to group these, because his story has grown in layers, and the layers matter. A lot of headlines flatten “Grusch said a source told him” into “Grusch said.” Those aren’t the same sentence.
1. A decades-long crash retrieval program
This is the foundation, and it’s the one he swore to. His words at the hearing: “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.”
Note the shape of that. Informed of. Denied access. He did not testify that he’d walked into a hangar. Roll Call reported that he described the basis as photographs, official documents, and classified oral testimony from people with long records of service. He has said elsewhere that he interviewed about 40 witnesses over four years.
In the NewsNation interview a few weeks earlier, he went further on camera. Asked whether the US has intact craft, he said, “We do.” He described them as non-human origin vehicles that “have either landed or crashed,” and he told Coulthart, “We’re definitely not alone.” He also claimed briefings on materials with strange isotopic ratios and “heavy atomic metal, high up in the Periodic Table,” and said that workers on the program had been physically injured by the “nuclear, radiological, and biological risk” of handling unknown objects.
2. Non-human biologics
This is the exchange people remember. Rep. Nancy Mace asked him whether, if we have crashed craft, we also have the bodies of the pilots.
“As I’ve stated publicly already in my NewsNation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah.”
“Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?”
“Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to, that are currently still on the program.”
Read that twice. The bodies claim, under oath, was attributed. It’s the assessment of other people, relayed by him. He didn’t say he’d seen them, and when Mace asked how that was determined, documents, video, eyewitnesses, he said that was something he’d have to discuss elsewhere.
3. The Italy, Mussolini, and Vatican story
Here’s where Grusch reached back before Roswell. On NewsNation, Coulthart asked if he was describing a 90-year cover-up. “Just about, yeah,” Grusch said. “1933 was the first recovery in Europe, in Magenta, Italy. They recovered a partially intact vehicle.”
In his account, Mussolini’s government held it at a secure air base until 1944 or 1945, Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” its existence to the Americans, and “we ended up scooping it.” Asked if he was saying the Vatican knew about non-human intelligence, he answered, “Certainly.” On Roswell itself, he told Coulthart the details “were not approved for me to talk about,” though he suggested you “might want to trust some of these witnesses.”
None of the Italy claim has been documented publicly. Hold on to it, though, because it’s one of the places where his story most obviously plugs into older lore.
4. Hidden programs and Congress kept in the dark
The legal heart of his complaint is oversight. He alleged that special access programs had been used to hide this material from the congressional committees that are supposed to be briefed, and that money moved in ways that, according to New York magazine’s summary of his early interviews, he called “substantive evidence” of white-collar crime. Asked at the hearing by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she’d look, he said he’d give her that “in a closed environment.”
5. Retaliation and harm
Rep. Tim Burchett asked if he had personal knowledge of people harmed or injured in efforts to cover up the program. “Yes, personally.” Asked if anyone had been murdered, Grusch said, “I have to be careful [answering] that question. I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities.”
On Rogan in 2026 he took this further than ever before. According to NHI Anomalous’s line-by-line breakdown of the episode, he described being called into a 2022 meeting in a Senate SCIF where staff told him two people had wanted to kill him, and that the plan was stopped. None of the offices he named has publicly commented.
6. A race between nations
From his first interviews, Grusch has described this as more than an American secret. He’s spoken of a quiet competition among countries to recover and exploit material, and his Italy story puts the US on the receiving end of another nation’s 1933 recovery. Fox News even put the phrase “terrestrial arms race” in its headline during his first week public.
7. Where it’s gone since: 2026
Three things stand out this year.
On June 9, 2026, at a press conference on the Capitol steps with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Grusch was asked how many kinds of beings he knew of. NewsNation ran it under the headline that the government is aware of “several” kinds. I’ve seen his exact phrasing transcribed different ways, so I’m not going to quote it.
Then came Rogan #2560 on September 30. Two separate claims in that episode get mashed together, and they shouldn’t be:
- What he says he saw himself: video. Per NHI Anomalous and FactCheckJoe’s review of the episode, Grusch said he watched contemporary footage from a crash retrieval that panned across three or four dead beings who looked “very human,” with pale, bluish-white skin and long hair. He did not see bodies in person, and the footage has not been released.
- What he relayed secondhand: the reptilian retrieval. A colleague who worked retrievals, he said, told him about a downed tic tac shaped craft linked to reptilian beings, with dead greys also at the site. He described the reptilians, from that friend’s account, as “seven foot tall plus, sort of gorilla looking skin.”
A note on that word “scaly,” since it’s all over the memes and the graphics. IBTimes UK wrote that Grusch described the beings as “covered in scaly skin.” NHI Anomalous, working from the auto-captions, says the words “scaly” and “reptile gorillas” sit in crosstalk and read like Rogan paraphrasing while Grusch agrees. I couldn’t settle that from the recording sources I could access, so I’m going with the words both writeups agree were his: gorilla-looking skin.
He also said that the “fight” between greys and reptilians was an inference. Rogan offered “duking it out.” Grusch answered, “Yeah. I guess.” Asked what brought the craft down, he said he didn’t remember. Asked how often these “adversarial” crashes happen, he said it “seems to be at least a dozen or two. I don’t know.”
And then, over and over, the hedge. He said he hopes the people who were there can speak publicly, “so you could just hear it from the horse’s mouth, not through me secondhand.”
Rogan, to his credit, said the thing everyone at home was thinking: “If it was real, there’s no way it doesn’t sound kooky. Even if it’s real.”
What the Government Said Back
The official answer has been consistent, and it’s a flat no.
Right after the story broke, Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” NASA said it had found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life and no evidence that UAP are extraterrestrial.
Two days after the hearing, AARO’s then-director Sean Kirkpatrick wrote on LinkedIn that, “contrary to assertions made in the hearing,” Grusch “has refused to speak with AARO.” After he left the job, Kirkpatrick wrote in Scientific American that the cover-up narrative is “a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard,” often sourced back to “the same small group of individuals.”
In March 2024, AARO released its Historical Record Report, Volume 1. Its conclusion: no verifiable evidence that the US government or private companies have had access to, or reverse-engineered, extraterrestrial technology. It said the hidden programs named by interviewees “either do not exist; are misidentified authentic national security programs” unrelated to extraterrestrial technology, “or resolve to a disestablished program.” It did turn up one genuinely strange paper trail, a proposed program called Kona Blue that was meant to protect research on recovered technology, but AARO says it was never approved and never held anything. And as of IBTimes UK’s October 2026 reporting, AARO’s public position remained that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings or technology.
There’s also the question of Grusch himself. After the hearing, Rep. Burchett said officials told lawmakers Grusch didn’t currently hold the clearance to discuss these matters in a SCIF. In August 2023, The Intercept reported on police records from 2014 and 2018 involving his mental health, and questioned how he kept his clearance. Grusch later sued the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office over the release of those records. I mention it because it’s part of the public record and you’ll see it raised, not because it settles anything. A man can have hard years and still be telling you what he was told.
And to be fair to the other side: not every lawmaker shrugged. Senator Marco Rubio said people with “first-hand knowledge” had come to his committee. Congress passed a UAP records provision directing the National Archives to collect documents on “technologies of unknown origin” and “non-human intelligence.” The idea that oversight had gaps got taken seriously even by people who weren’t buying the aliens.
How the Claims Map Onto Older UFO Lore
This is where it gets fun, and a little eerie. Almost every piece of Grusch’s account has an ancestor. That doesn’t make his story false. It does mean we’ve heard most of it before, which is exactly why where he said it matters.
Crash retrievals: Roswell and its children
The template is Roswell, July 1947. The Roswell Daily Record ran the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region” after the base announced it had a “flying disc,” and the Army walked it back within a day as a weather balloon. In the 1990s the Air Force said the debris was really from Project Mogul, a classified balloon train built to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. The bodies-and-saucer version of Roswell didn’t take off until 1978, when retired officer Jesse Marcel went public, and the 1980 book The Roswell Incident built it out.
Notice how Grusch handled Roswell: “not approved” to talk about it, but trust the witnesses. He positioned himself as confirming the legend without adding to it.
Then there’s the rest of the family:
- Aztec, New Mexico, 1948. Variety columnist Frank Scully popularized it in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, complete with little bodies and indestructible metal. It was exposed in 1952 as a con by Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, who were later convicted of fraud. Pieces of it, the bodies, the strange metal, got folded into Roswell lore anyway.
- Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, 1965. Witnesses described an acorn-shaped object coming down in the woods and the military showing up. Explanations have ranged from a bolide to Soviet satellite debris, and NASA said in 2005 that fragments were examined and tied to a Soviet satellite, while admitting the records were lost. It’s “Pennsylvania’s Roswell” for a reason.
- Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 1941. A story that surfaced decades after the fact, about a minister called to a crash site to pray over the dead. It lives almost entirely in ufology retellings, with no documents behind it.
- Leonard Stringfield. If one person built the modern crash retrieval genre, it’s him. Through the 1970s and until his death in 1994, Stringfield self-published “Status Reports” collecting anonymous accounts of recovered craft and bodies from people claiming military backgrounds. Sound familiar? Unnamed insiders, relayed by a trusted intermediary. That’s Grusch’s structure too.
The insiders: Lazar, Corso, and the Wilson-Davis notes
Grusch isn’t the first person with a government résumé to say the craft are being reverse-engineered.
In 1989, Bob Lazar told George Knapp on Las Vegas TV that he’d worked on alien craft at a site called S-4 near Area 51. His claimed education and work history have been widely challenged as fabricated. In 1997, The Day After Roswell, credited to retired Army Lt. Col. Philip Corso and ghostwritten by William Birnes, claimed Roswell tech had been seeded into American industry. Critics found many factual and chronological errors in it.
The closest cousin is the so-called Wilson-Davis memo: notes dated October 2002, attributed to physicist Eric Davis, describing a supposed conversation in which Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson was blocked from a crash retrieval program run by a contractor. Wilson has denied the meeting happened and called it fiction. But look at the plot. A cleared official tries to access a contractor-held retrieval program and gets the door shut in his face. That’s very close to Grusch’s own “to which I was denied access.”
Hidden programs: MJ-12 and the paper ghost
Before there were special access programs in the conversation, there was Majestic 12, a supposed committee formed under Truman to manage crashed saucers. The MJ-12 documents surfaced in the 1980s and the FBI called them “completely bogus.” Most ufologists now treat them as a hoax, and some of the people involved later admitted to feeding UFO researchers deception material.
What Grusch did was move that same idea out of forged memos and into the vocabulary of modern oversight law: SAPs, IC IG complaints, Gang of Eight notifications. Same ghost, newer clothes. And notice AARO’s Kona Blue finding cuts both ways. Someone inside government really did propose a protected program for recovered technology. It just, per AARO, never got approved or held anything.
Bodies: nurses, morticians, and a fake autopsy
“Biologics” is a careful, sterile word, but the lore behind it is old. Roswell storytelling from the late 1970s on added an Army nurse who supposedly saw small bodies and a mortician who said the base asked about small caskets. Then in 1995 came the Alien Autopsy film promoted by Ray Santilli, broadcast around the world. Santilli later conceded the film was a staged recreation, not original footage.
Keep that in mind when you hear Grusch describe a video of human-looking bodies. He seemed to know it too. According to the episode breakdowns, he said he sat on what he’d seen for years and checked it with other sources because he was wary of fakes.
Reptilians: older than the internet, younger than you’d think
Here’s the claim that lit up the graphics, so let’s be careful with it.
Reptile-people go way back in myth: the Nāga of South and Southeast Asian tradition are serpent beings, half human. But the modern “lizard people” idea took shape in pulp fiction. Robert E. Howard’s serpent men, who could disguise themselves as humans, showed up in 1929. Television’s V put lizard aliens in human skin on screens in the 1980s.
In ufology proper, the thread runs through cases like Herbert Schirmer, the Nebraska patrolman whose 1967 report is in the Condon Committee’s files as Case 42. The Condon report itself describes a landed saucer and about 20 lost minutes, and notes that under partial hypnosis “new information was added.” Later retellings of that session gave his occupants a winged-serpent emblem, and that detail later got drafted into the reptilian story. In 1988, Bishopville, South Carolina had its Lizard Man scare. Those were swamp cryptid sightings, not UFOs, but they kept the image alive.
The underground side matters even more. The Dulce Base legend began with Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz, who by the early 1980s believed he’d found an underground alien facility beneath Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. Others built on it until it included a joint human-alien base and, in Michael Barkun’s summary, “firefights between aliens and the Delta Force.” Historians have noted how much Dulce owes to the Shaver Mystery of the 1940s, the pulp tales of malevolent beings underground. Stringfield himself, when a tabloid quoted him on Dulce in 1988, said, “I never read such a distortion of facts in my life.”
Then in the 1990s came David Icke, who turned reptilians into a theory of world control. That version has been rightly criticized for borrowing from antisemitic conspiracy material, and it’s a completely different animal from what Grusch described. He didn’t talk about shape-shifters running the planet. He relayed a story about a crash, a threat, and a firefight.
And that’s the eerie part, honestly. A firefight between US personnel and reptilian beings at a crash site. Strip the names off and you’re standing at the gate of Dulce. The “Draco” label you’ll see online comes from that later internet and New Age lore, by the way. It isn’t a word I found Grusch using in the writeups I relied on.
Many nations racing
The multi-nation race is a Cold War reflex in UFO culture. Roswell itself turned out to be about spying on Soviet nukes, and Kecksburg’s best mundane explanation is a Soviet satellite. Grusch’s version just pushes the competition back to 1933 and adds Italy and the Vatican. NewsNation showed what it called an internal memo from Mussolini’s secret services, but Coulthart’s segment didn’t establish where that document came from, and nothing public ties it to a recovered craft.
What’s Still Unverified
Let me lay it out plainly, because the graphics won’t:
- No craft, no material, no body has been produced publicly. AARO says it found no verifiable evidence of any.
- The biologics claim is secondhand under oath. He said “non-human” was the assessment of people on the program.
- The reptilian retrieval is secondhand by his own repeated admission. No date, place, unit, casualty figure, or named witness has been made public. As NHI Anomalous pointed out, US service members killed in an incident leave paperwork somewhere. That paperwork, if it exists, is what to ask for.
- The bodies video he says he saw has not been released.
- The Italy/Vatican 1933 recovery has no public documentation.
- The murder and threat allegations have not been confirmed by any named office or agency.
What he did add, and what nobody before him quite managed, is the setting. Stringfield had anonymous letters. Lazar had a TV interview. Corso had a book. Grusch had a former intelligence officer’s résumé, an Inspector General complaint, and a sworn appearance before a congressional committee, and he said the old stories out loud in that room. Then members of Congress wrote laws about it. That’s new, whether or not a single word of the underlying story holds up.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Here’s where I land, after sitting with that Rogan segment and the writeups of what he actually said.
Grusch has been oddly careful about what he says he saw versus what he was told. The internet hasn’t been. The version on your feed is “Grusch says we shot seven-foot reptilians.” The version on the tape is a man saying, again and again, “I’ve never seen them in person,” and asking for the people who were there to come forward.
And the lore? It’s like hearing a song you swear you know before the chorus hits. Dead pilots at a desert crash. A cleared man shut out of the room. Something tall and scaled under the mesa. Ufology has been humming this tune since 1947. Grusch sang it in a federal hearing room.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s a story that’s been circulating among a small circle of believers for so long that it looks like corroboration, which is basically Kirkpatrick’s argument. Or maybe it’s something weirder than either. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody outside a very small room knows, and I’m not sure they do either.
We’re digging into more of the 2026 UAP story on the show, so if this is your kind of rabbit hole, come sit with us at Cryptic Chronicles. Bring your skepticism. Bring your curiosity. You’re going to need both.
Sources are listed below. Quotes from Joe Rogan Experience #2560 are drawn from published episode breakdowns (NHI Anomalous, IBTimes UK, FactCheckJoe) and have not been independently re-transcribed by Cryptic Chronicles.
Sources
- The Debrief, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin,” June 5, 2023: https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/
- Vanity Fair, Charlotte Klein, “Why ‘The New York Times,’ ‘The Washington Post,’ and Politico Didn’t Publish a Seemingly Bombshell Report About UFOs,” June 2023: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/ufo-report-media
- AP via The Washington Post, Nomaan Merchant, “Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing ‘multi-decade’ program that captures UFOs,” July 26, 2023.
- Roll Call, “Whistleblower at UAP hearing claims U.S. found ‘non-human’ remains,” July 26, 2023: https://rollcall.com/2023/07/26/whistleblower-at-uap-hearing-claims-non-human-remains/
- Snopes, “No, Congress (or the US Government) Hasn’t Confirmed Aliens Are Real,” July 28, 2023 (C-SPAN timestamps of the Mace exchange): https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/07/28/alien-confirmation-hearing/
- The Guardian live blog, July 26, 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-david-grusch-whistleblower-live-updates
- NewsNation, “We are not alone: The UFO whistleblower speaks,” June 11, 2023: https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the-ufo-whistleblower-speaks/
- NewsNation interview transcript (UAP Research Wiki): https://www.uaprw.com/books/grusch-david/page/2023-06-11-news-nation-ross-coulthart-david-grusch
- Apple Podcasts listing, Joe Rogan Experience #2560 – David Grusch, Sept. 30, 2026: https://podcasts.apple.com/na/podcast/2560-david-grusch/id360084272?i=1000792423503
- NHI Anomalous, “Greys vs. Reptilians: What David Grusch Actually Told Joe Rogan, and What He Didn’t,” Oct. 2, 2026 (updated Oct. 27): https://nhianomalous.com/disclosure/grusch-rogan-2560-greys-vs-reptilians
- IBTimes UK, “David Grusch Says He Never Saw a Reptilian Himself…,” Oct. 3, 2026: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/david-grusch-says-he-never-saw-reptilian-himself-claims-us-personnel-shot-them-after-ufo-crash-1823425
- FactCheckJoe, claim review on the bodies video (JRE #2560): https://www.factcheckjoe.com/claim/90ae0cc4-52c8-4daa-927b-da16e22fa70b
- AARO, Historical Record Report Vol. 1, March 2024: https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/AARO_Historical_Record_Report_Vol_1_2024.pdf
- DoD, statement by Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder on the Historical Record Report: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3700894/
- DoD transcript, Acting AARO Director Tim Phillips media engagement (Kona Blue): https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3702219/
- Sean Kirkpatrick, “Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter,” Scientific American, Jan. 19, 2024.
- Politico, Lara Seligman, “‘Insulting’: Pentagon’s UFO boss torches claims of alien cover-up,” July 28, 2023.
- The Intercept, Ken Klippenstein, Aug. 9, 2023; Loudoun Times-Mirror, July 25, 2024 (lawsuit).
- Condon Report, Case 42: https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/case42.htm
- Wikipedia background pages (for secondary-source trails): David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims; Roswell incident; Aztec crashed saucer hoax; Kecksburg UFO incident; Majestic 12; Bob Lazar; The Day After Roswell; Leonard H. Stringfield; Dulce Base; Reptilian humanoid.
0 Comments