#2065 - David Grusch

**Joe Rogan** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**David Grusch** (0:13)
Hey, good, good.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Thanks for coming here. Appreciate it.

**David Grusch** (0:16)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a pleasure.

**Joe Rogan** (0:18)
You've been on a whirlwind sort of tour.
I guess we should start from the beginning. Yeah. So, first of all, lay out to people what your job was with the military and how this all started for you. Yeah, yeah.

**David Grusch** (0:34)
So I was an Intel officer in the Air Force for 14 years, seven active, seven reserve. Then I kind of had like a parallel tract in the civilian Intel world when I became a reservist. And ultimately, I got brought back in civil service in a government way at the National Geo-Spacial Intelligence Agency. A couple of years ago, I'm at a senior level. So I was a major in the Air Force in a GS-15 at NGA, which is like a full bird kernel equivalent civilian employee. You know, I'm very humbled that I was able to kind of get that kind of job. But my career mostly, I didn't even really think about this topic. UFOs were not on my radar. I wasn't really a believer. I was agnostic about it.
Most of my career, I did a lot of behind the door, special access program, technical type activities. I was kind of a space intelligence expert, a cyber intel expert.
And like I said, this was not on my radar at all. I would joke with my buddies because I used to handle the presidential daily brief for the National Reconnaissance Office director in my military capacity as a reservist. And I was well clear to hundreds and hundreds of compartmented programs. And you know, the joke was like, when are we going to get the read on for the crazy shit? And that never happens.
And I do remember that the day that I really can remember that I was like, what's with this UFO stuff? I was briefing a senior person at the CIA into a couple hundred special access programs.
So I was at the headquarters at the agency. And you know, after the indoctrination, I was giving to the senior person.
This person who worked with Luella Zondo previously was like, yeah, Dave, have you ever heard of this guy, Luella Zondo? He's running some UFO program at the Pentagon. We all think he's crazy. And I'm like, I don't know who this guy Luella Zondo is. And I don't know of any kind of UFO program. So that sounds nuts to me.
But lo and behold, and that was like early 2017 And lo and behold, in December 2017, that New York Times article came up that named the ATIP program and the OSAP program. So Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program and Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program being the other acronym. And I was like, holy shit. Wait, that's that guy Luella Zondo that I heard about. Ah, you know what? I think I have heard of OSAP. When I was a lieutenant, I used to read these reports from the Defense Intelligence Agency on black holes and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's like stupid. Why is the DIA looking in the black holes? Time warps. It just didn't make any sense to me back in like 08, 9 when I was lieutenant.
And all of a sudden I'm like, well, maybe there's something to this UFO thing. I'm not saying I was like a believer either way on the subject, but this was a topic of concern apparently for the Pentagon. And in 2018, I started doing kind of what I call my open source literature review. Like, let me spin myself up on this topic, watching Chris Mellon, Louis Elizondo, Leslie King, all these people talk about the subject. And then, you know, just trying to understand, so what is this with UFOs? Has this been going on for a while? The answer is yes, like Foo Fighters, sightings of weird stuff in antiquity, etc. Which we can get into later. But, and so early 2019 comes along, and my boss at the National Reconnaissance Office in kind of my Air Force major capacity, forwarded me an email from the, what became, stood up in like, I guess it was 2018, which was the unidentified, well, it was aerial, now Anonymous Phenomena Task Force, UAP Task Force. So the UAP Task Force director sent my boss an email saying, hey, we're looking for a rep to the task force. And as like any good officer, I was like, well, I'll put it on my performance report. Hey, I was on a task force. And, you know, that would look good. And I, being well cleared and also a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's in intelligence analysis, I'm like, you know what? I'll figure out what this shit is. It's either going to be weather shit, maybe it's an adversarial program, maybe it's like a US program, people are misidentifying on rare occasions.