Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence and military official who claims the government is covering up a UFO retrieval program, called for executive action after lawmakers settled on watered-down disclosure legislation.
In an interview with NewsNation, part of which aired on Monday night, Grusch called the gutting of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023, championed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), “the greatest legislative failure in American history.”
David Grusch has Firsthand Knowledge 💥🛸
David Grusch says that the watering down of the Schumer/Rounds amendment is the greatest legislative failure in American history.
Grusch also reveals that he does in fact have firsthand knowledge and will be able to tell more in a "few… pic.twitter.com/Ge4AQJiwPd
— Mike Colangelo (@MikeColangelo) December 11, 2023
The legislation, offered as an amendment to the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sought to set in motion a process for releasing UAP-related records within 25 years of their creation and put together an independent review board to advise the president on whether to keep certain information concealed for national security or other serious reasons.
From the conference process, in which negotiators worked to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the NDAA, came a report that stripped out language calling for a independent review board and other provisions such as eminent domain authority and a “controlled” disclosure process, instead leaving it to the National Archives to collect UAP documents from across the government while giving federal agencies room to keep them secret.
Grusch offered a different route toward transparency, saying, “We need to advocate for the Executive Branch, you know, the office of the president through executive action to instate such a body to advise him on the best course of action.”
But, acknowledging a “mixed bag of success,” Grusch also praised lawmakers for advancing some transparency-minded language in the NDAA, in particular a section in the conference report that restricts funds to special-access programs that have not been reported to specific committees in Congress and congressional leadership.
Grusch emerged publicly in June when The Debrief broke the story about his allegations of a multi-decade retrieval and reverse-engineering program being illegally kept from Congress and government watchdog investigations into his findings and claims of whistleblower retaliation.
After testifying before Congress in July, during a hearing in which he claimed “non-human” biologics have been recovered from UFO crash sites and spoke about what he learned from 40 witnesses he interviewed while part of a UAP task force, Grusch has faced some skepticism, including from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) — who was also critical of Schumer’s disclosure legislation.
Grusch told NewsNation that he still faces restraints in what he can divulge to the public but plans to “generally” discuss some of his first-hand knowledge in the near future that he was not previously at liberty to acknowledge.
“I couldn’t be very up front about my first-hand knowledge until recently. I got some other security approvals through the Prepublication and Security Review process and I did have some first-hand knowledge of some specific parts of the program,” Grusch said. “I’m currently drafting an op-ed that I’m going to release in a few weeks and I will be discussing what I actually do know first-hand.”