David Grusch: UAPs, Intelligence Disclosures & Non-Human Intelligence 2026

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #2065. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding National Security Intelligence, UAP Disclosure Ethics, and Aerospace Sovereignty. Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up? How are you, man? Hey, good, good. Thanks for coming here. Appreciate it. Yeah, no, it's a pleasure. 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. 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 in civil service in a government way at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. A couple of years ago at a senior level. So I was a major in the Air Force and a GS -15 at NGA, which is like a full bird colonel 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. You know, 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, huh, 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 Lou Elizondo previously was like, yeah, Dave, have you ever heard of this guy, Lou Elizondo? 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 Lou Elizondo 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 with that named the AATIP 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, Lua Lizondo, that I heard about. Oh, 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 into black holes, time warps? It just didn't make any sense to me back in like 08, 9 when I was a 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. 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, Lou Elizondo, Leslie Keen, 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, et cetera, which we can get into later.
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 what became – stood up in like I guess it was 2018, which was the unidentified – well, it was Aerial, now Anonymous Philomena 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 had 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 the shit is. It's either going to be weather shit. Maybe it's an adversarial program. Maybe it's like a U S program. People are misidentifying on rare occasions. So, fuck it, I'll go see where the data takes me. And, you know, early 2019 or so, I joined the UAP task force. And then I started, you know, interviewing pilots, flag officers, you know, general officer equivalent type Navy folks. And, you know, they were seeing some really crazy shit. you know, event that I talked about previously publicly in a YouTube video on the Yes Theory channel. You know, there was this one 30 year senior Navy officer that, you know, he was going to work sober, no predisposition for fantasy, all that kind of stuff, because I interviewed the individual for a couple hours and he saw this, you know, crazy triangle hover over his car going to work at a certain naval facility. And it like blew his mind. He was serious. the paint on his car turned milky white after the incident. So that's to me, that sounds like ionizing radiation. So like ultraviolet, just like how your, your headlights get all foggy over time. If you park your car out in the sun, same phenomenon just happened, you know, within 24 hour period. And I'm like, Whoa. If this is true and the oral testimony and crazy radar data that I saw when I was on the task force, stuff making turns that didn't make any sense, well, holy shit, what is this stuff then? This anomaly with his paint, is this documented? Is this photographs? Yes, I saw photographs. It was documented, yeah. And is there a conventional explanation? I mean, based on what he described, something to rapidly ionize his paint like that within a day? I can't think of anything off the top of my head in terms of some conventional aerospace technology. And this was a certain facility in the continental U .S. This was not overseas. So it's not like our adversary is flying some spooky thing in U .S. airspace. So this thing hovered over his car for how long? A couple minutes while he was traveling at about 60 miles an hour, so it was pacing his vehicle. How far away from his vehicle?