Sunday's postcard, and Part IV of UFOs

August 20, 2023

Aging pickup truck at the home for retired farm equipment in Sprague, WA

Crushing David Grusch

The predictably strange and ugly aftermath of a historic Congressional hearing on UFOs

In the maelstrom of the hottest summer—with devastating fires, a Supreme Court behaving like an imperious street gang, and the most recent former president being served with multiple criminal indictments—three men stood in the middle of an overflowing Congressional committee room on July 26th and swore to tell the truth about something otherworldly. It was as historic as it was surreal.

Ryan Graves, David Grusch, and Dave Fravor at the July 26th public hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security, The Border, and Foreign Affairs

From left to right as they raised their right hands before members of the House Subcommittee on National Security, The Border, and Foreign Affairs were Ryan Graves, David Grusch, and Dave Fravor. Graves and Fravor are former Navy pilots, there to share their experiences about encountering what the government now calls “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAPs) but which the rest of us are used to calling UFOs. [Note: for the remainder of this dispatch “UAPs” = “UFOs” and vice-versa.]

Grusch was there to convey an even more outlandish story, one he’d been sharing in closed Congressional hearings for several months prior. A decorated former combat veteran who’d served in Afghanistan, Grusch spent 14 years in what was once a promising career as an intelligence officer, liaison, and advisor. Holding top security clearances that gave him access to some of the nation’s closest-held secrets, he was assigned to two entities—the National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). During that time—2019 to 2021—he became the NRO’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force. The task force was a multi-agency effort to get a handle on what pilots like Graves and Fravor had been experiencing and documenting—the frequent encounters with UFOs that military aviators were witnessing. In the course of that work, Grusch says he learned, from multiple sources, that so-called “legacy” programs—effectively hidden within a network of obscure government branches and defense contractors—harbored damaged but intact UFOs recovered from crash sites and, in some instances, non-human “biologics.”

Artist rendering of pilot Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting of UFOs near Mount Rainier in 1947 (courtesy Wikimedia Images)

Although Grusch had been quietly cooperating and testifying before Congressional committees since last year, his story wasn’t publicly known until June 5th, when journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal introduced him as part of a jaw-dropping story entitled Intelligence Officials say U.S. has retrieved craft of non-human origin. The headline seemed as though it had been snatched from a back issue of a checkout stand tabloid, but Kean and Blumenthal have solid journalistic credentials. Their article included four named sources—including two former Pentagon officials—lending corroboration for Grusch’s work and/or his statements about the existence of recovered, alien craft. Their main source for the story, Grusch, had sought and received clearance from his former employer, the U.S. Government, to convey the information he shared with the two reporters.

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—-tjc