David Grusch the UAP whistleblower told Congress of hidden craft

Three former military officials testified to the U.S. Congress on 26 July 2023. They were whistleblower David Grusch, Ryan Graves and David Fravor. They told the House Oversight panel a blunt thing. The government holds far more UAP data than it has shared. They also named secret “Legacy Programs”. These were funded with misused public money and hidden from lawmakers.

The hearing drew bold claims. Witnesses spoke of strange sightings. They spoke of “non-human” remains said to be held by the U.S. government. Lawmakers from both parties raised security worries. Some said the executive branch was hiding UFO facts. A lot has happened since. Grusch lost his security clearance. AARO rejected his main claims. Two more hearings brought new witnesses. Grusch went back to Capitol Hill, now on the staff of the task force chasing the answers.

Where the David Grusch Case Stands in 2026

The David Grusch UAP case has been unfolding since 2023 and has moved through several stages. He testified under oath in July 2023. He said the U.S. government hides UAP crash programs. He then lost his security clearance. By April 2025, he had it back. AARO has found no solid proof for his claims. Two more rounds of hearings followed. Grusch now advises Rep. Eric Burlison on a House task force on secret files. In February 2026, President Trump told agencies to release UAP files. In April 2026, Grusch spoke on the first UFO panel at the National Space Symposium. The sections below cover each step.

UFO journalists: George Knapp (left), Jeremy Corbell (right), whistleblower David Grusch (center)

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Democrat Robert Garcia made a simple case. The sheer number of reports and witnesses called for a real inquiry. UAPs, he said, could be a threat to aircraft. Experts note that most sightings have plain causes. They can be balloons, drones, tricks of the light, or aircraft lights. The Pentagon denied any proof that UAPs are alien. But it did not rule it out.

UAPs, whatever they may be, may pose a serious threat to our military or civilian aircraft. And that must be understood. The more we understand, the safer we will be.
Representative Robert Garcia

Ryan Graves, David Grusch, David Fravor taking the oath

UFO Pentagon program

Grusch is a former U.S. intelligence official. He said he had spoken to more than 40 people. Each one, he said, knew the government held a lot of UAP data. The trail also pointed to a hidden science program. The money for it is classified, so no one knows its source. Grusch told the committee he could name “cooperative and hostile witnesses”. They could tell Congress more.

Another key voice was Sean Kirkpatrick. He then ran the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). In April 2023, he said the government was looking into more than 650 UAP cases. None of them, he said, broke the laws of physics.

I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue.
Ryan Graves, ex-F-18 pilot

The 2023 testimony also brought one of its boldest claims. Grusch said the U.S. holds the remains of “non-human” pilots. He said the government has known about “non-human” activity since the 1930s. Grusch had not seen the remains himself. But he had spoken to officials who said they had. They claimed to have seen recovered craft of unknown origin. The biologics claim drew headlines worldwide. It shaped every Pentagon denial that came after.

Pentagon’s response

The Pentagon rejected the cover-up claims. Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough was clear. Its investigators had found no solid proof for them. No program, past or present, had ever held or reverse-engineered alien material. Gough said the department would report to Congress on UFO matters quickly and fully.

Grusch also said why he became a whistleblower. The Pentagon had assigned him to study UFO matters. He pushed ahead with the work. Then he faced payback. His drive to finish the job was not welcome. He would not give the exact steps used against him, since the case is open. But he said the tactics were harsh. They hurt his career and his personal life. Whistleblowers who expose official secrets are an old story. It goes back to Watergate’s “Deep Throat”. What set Grusch apart was the extra layer of secrecy.

Earlier disclosures and the 2022 hearing

The 2023 testimony was not the first push to open up UFO matters. Congress had already held a public hearing in 2022. Pentagon officials showed declassified images and recordings there. They showed unexplained flying objects. U.S. media said one clip showed a small object fly past a military pilot. Other footage showed glowing triangles.

Scott Bray presented the materials. He is the Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Ronald Moultrie joined him. He is the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Bray said the “glowing triangles” turned out to be drones. The object in the first clip was still unknown.

Bray also shared a striking number. There had been at least 11 near-collisions between U.S. military aircraft and UAPs. The military, he said, had not tried to contact the objects.

Five claims from the 2023 testimonies

The 26 July 2023 hearing produced five main claims from the witnesses:

1. Grusch said the government was “absolutely” in possession of UAPs. He described a Pentagon program that had collected crashed UAPs. It was funded, he said, with misused public money.
2. Grusch said some people had been harmed by UAPs. He had interviewed people who recovered “non-human biologics” from crash sites. He avoided the words “alien” and “extraterrestrial”.
3. Witnesses and lawmakers called for a safe, open way to report UAP data. Pilots, they said, needed better briefings for UAP encounters.
4. Witnesses said the stigma around UFO reports hides the truth. The harassment of investigators does too. Both make the origin of UAPs harder to pin down.
5. David Fravor, a former U.S. Navy commander, described a Tic Tac-shaped object. He watched it speed up to “supersonic speeds”. He found no logical reason for it.

Backlash, AARO’s verdict, and Kirkpatrick’s exit

Weeks after the hearing, the mood shifted. Officials told lawmakers that Grusch had lost his security clearance. Without it, he could not discuss UAPs in classified rooms. In August 2023, journalist Ken Klippenstein went further. He reported leaked records of two psychiatric holds involving Grusch, in 2014 and 2018. Grusch sued Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman in 2024 over the leak. He asked for $2.5 million in damages.

On 1 December 2023, AARO’s first director retired. Sean Kirkpatrick left with sharp words. In a Scientific American op-ed in January 2024, he described the job. A “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings” had swamped his team. He added that “none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’”. After that, every UAP debate had a hard job. It had to sort honest insider accounts from self-feeding myth.

On 6 March 2024, AARO published Volume 1 of its Historical Record Report. It covered 1945 through October 2023. Acting director Tim Phillips summed up the finding. The office had “found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity”. He pointed to DHS’s rejected “Kona Blue” plan. That, he said, was the kind of paper trail critics had mistaken for a real crash program.

On 26 August 2024, the Pentagon picked a new AARO director. It named Jon Kosloski, a physicist from the intelligence community.

Grusch goes back to Capitol Hill

On 27 March 2025, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) gave Grusch a new role. He named him a Special Advisor on the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. The role began as a four-month posting. It has since rolled forward. The public LegiStorm staff register now lists Grusch as Senior Adviser to Burlison from April 2025. Burlison also shared one key fact. By April 2025, Grusch’s top-secret clearance had been restored. That clearance let him take the job.

Burlison framed it bluntly: “The American people deserve answers about UAPs. David Grusch has risked his career to expose critical information. His expertise will be vital as we work to uncover the truth and hold the government accountable.”

On the appointment, Grusch said how he would use his skills. He would “help the US Congress restore full oversight”. He would “hold those accountable who have broken the law and lied… to our Congress”. The words rang with the same drive as Sherron Watkins at Enron and other corporate whistleblowers. They were insiders who said they had warned, in writing, and been ignored.

With Grusch advising the task force, a second wave of hearings began. On 13 November 2024, House Oversight held “UAP: Exposing the Truth”. It was the subcommittee’s second UAP hearing, sixteen months after Grusch’s. The witness panel was unusual: Luis Elizondo, the former DoD UAP lead; Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (USN ret.); former NASA official Michael Gold; and journalist Michael Shellenberger.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO)
© U.S. House of Representatives (public domain)

Shellenberger handed lawmakers a whistleblower report. It described an alleged Pentagon program called “Immaculate Constellation”. The report said it was set up in 2017. Its job was to wall off UAP data across several intelligence streams. Sue Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson, denied any record of it. The day before, on 12 November 2024, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) had filed the first UAP Whistleblower Protection Act.

On 29 August 2025, Burchett and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) filed the bill again as H.R. 5060. It extends federal whistleblower protection. The cover reaches anyone who reports on tax money spent on UAP research and retrieval. It covers DoD staff, contractors, FBI staff and the wider intelligence community.

On 9 September 2025, Luna’s task force held its first UAP hearing. It is the same task force Grusch advises. The hearing was called “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection”. The witnesses included two Air Force veterans. Jeffrey Nuccetelli described alleged 2003-2005 events at Vandenberg AFB. Dylan Borland described an alleged 2012 event at Langley AFB. He also described a decade of payback after it. Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexandro Wiggins made history. He gave the first active-duty U.S. Navy testimony to Congress on UAP.

Wiggins described a glowing Tic Tac-shaped object. It rose from the ocean off the USS Jackson in 2023. It linked up with three more objects. Then it shot away in one near-instant burst of speed. At the same hearing, Burlison played a video. He said it showed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper fire a Hellfire missile at a fast UAP. The strike was off the coast of Yemen in October 2024. The missile seemed to hit the object, but did not destroy it.

Trump’s disclosure order, and Grusch’s 2026 message

On 19 February 2026, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He said he was telling the Department of Defense and other agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, [UAP and UFOs]…”. Six days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke to reporters in Colorado, on the “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. The Pentagon, he said, would be in “full compliance with that executive order”.

Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough shared a fresh number. AARO was by then “examining over 2,000 UAP cases”. That is up from roughly 1,600 in late 2024. About 1,000 of those reports sat in an active archive. They were waiting for more data. AARO had still not published its 2025 annual report. Nor had it published Volume 2 of the Historical Record.

In April 2026, Grusch joined Burlison and Michael Gold on a panel. It was the first-ever UFO panel at the National Space Symposium. Grusch told the crowd that legacy UAP programs had worked as “rice bowls of stove piping”. The data, he said, was not shared with his own team at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Nor was it shared with AARO. Asked about the President’s push to declassify, he was blunt:

I think there is a high expectation for the President to deliver, and I think if he does reveal everything that I came in contact with, he’s going to go down in history as a great figure.
David Grusch, National Space Symposium UAP panel, April 2026

He added a stark view. “The US government understands it represents a form of sentient non-human intelligence,” he said. He also said “the universe is teeming with life, it seems… and the US government does have a lot of information”. Will Trump’s order bring real disclosure, or another round of denials? That is the open question Grusch has chased since 2023. He chased it first as a witness under oath, then as the staffer who writes the questions.

David Grusch: key questions

Did David Grusch testify under oath?

Yes. On 26 July 2023, Grusch testified under oath. He spoke before the House Oversight national-security subcommittee. Ryan Graves and David Fravor testified beside him.

What did AARO say about David Grusch’s claims?

AARO’s March 2024 Historical Record Report was clear. It found no solid proof that any UAP sighting was alien activity. The office pointed to the rejected “Kona Blue” plan. That plan, it said, was the kind of paper trail critics had mistaken for a real crash program.

Have David Grusch’s UAP claims been verified?

No. No public, solid proof has been produced. Grusch testified that he had not seen the material himself. AARO has not backed up the claims. Outside experts call his account secondhand. The claims are still unconfirmed.

Does David Grusch still have a security clearance?

He lost his clearance after the 2023 hearing. By April 2025, Rep. Burlison said it had been restored. That let Grusch advise the House task force.

In the end, the hearings were about more than UAPs. They asked a deeper question. Could U.S. military pilots, sailors and intelligence officers speak openly about what they had seen? Ryan Graves gave a hard answer in 2023. Pilots, both military and civilian, did not feel safe reporting UAP events. A secure whistleblowing system could change that. Backed by law, it would give pilots a safe way to report what they saw. They would not have to fear being called crackpots. They would not have to fear losing their careers.