UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDPERSONNEL FILE
David Grusch
Former intelligence officer, USAF
David Grusch spent 14 years as an intelligence officer: in the US Air Force, where he reached the rank of major and served a combat tour in Afghanistan, and most recently as a senior civilian at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), in 2021–2023. From 2019 to 2021 he was the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, and at NGA he says he co-led the agency’s UAP analysis.
In 2022, while at NGA, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which Rep. Eric Burlison’s office says was found ‘credible and urgent.’ He went public in June 2023 with allegations that parts of the government had hidden UAP-related programs from Congress, and said he had faced retaliation for reporting them.
On July 26, 2023, Grusch testified under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee. He said he had been informed of ‘a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program’ to which he was denied access, and that the US had recovered non-human ‘biologics.’ He said he had not personally seen craft or bodies; his account rested on interviews with more than 40 witnesses over four years. He offered further details only in a classified setting.
The Defense Department has rejected these claims. On the day of the hearing, spokeswoman Susan Gough said its inquiries had found no verifiable information that such programs ever existed. AARO’s Historical Record Report, Volume 1, released on March 8, 2024, found ‘no verifiable evidence’ of government or private reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology. AARO’s former director, Sean Kirkpatrick, wrote that as of his departure in December 2023 none of the ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had brought their evidence to AARO.
In March 2025 Rep. Burlison named Grusch a special advisor supporting his work on the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. On June 9, 2026, Grusch joined Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett, Burlison and Jared Moskowitz at a Capitol press conference urging President Trump to release more government UAP records.
David Grusch testifying, July 26, 2023. Photo: U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security (cropped) · Public domain · source
