There was a time when the UFO news cycle moved at the pace of the Fortean Times letters page: a blurry Polaroid from Warminster, a farmer with a scorched field, then a long wait for the next one. In 2026 it moves at the speed of a podcast clip, and September closed with the biggest clip of the year. On 30 September, David Grusch – the former Air Force intelligence officer whose 2023 congressional testimony launched a thousand YouTube thumbnails – returned to The Joe Rogan Experience (episode #2560) for roughly two and a half hours, and came away having delivered what amounts to a monster manual.
The headline item is the taxonomy. According to Grusch, leaning largely on second-hand sourcing, our visitors come in several flavours: tall, pale, strikingly beautiful humanoids with bluish-white skin and greyish hair, associated with boomerang and crescent-shaped craft; reptilians, which he connected to Tic Tac-type craft and to encounters he described as lethal; greys, in both tall and short sizes; and something resembling a gorilla, which will gladden the heart of anyone who has sat through Robot Monster. It is not quite the vocabulary one expects from a former National Reconnaissance Office representative. It is more the vocabulary of the back pages of a 1978 Usborne book on the Unexplained.
Then came the shoot-outs. Grusch suggested that some of the craft the US has supposedly recovered came down not through mechanical failure but because different non-human groups were fighting each other, with greys versus reptilians the bout on the card. Earth, in this telling, is less a destination than a contested neutral zone – the premise of half the cosmic Marvel comics of the 1970s. He also described an incident in which reptilians allegedly survived a crash and were then shot by US personnel, though he acknowledges he never saw a reptilian himself, and the account remains hearsay.
The genuinely new element is where Grusch says he did see something. He told Rogan he viewed classified video from a recent retrieval showing “three or four” bodies, very human in appearance, which he compared to Greek gods. Captain Kirk once met Apollo and told him humanity had outgrown him; Grusch seems rather more impressed. He says he considered whether he was being fed a deception operation and tried to corroborate the event through other sources. None of the footage has been released, which remains the gap this entire subject has lived in since 1947.
The rest of the menu was generous. An underwater base for unidentified craft. A 2004 federally funded study which, he says, concluded that contractor fraud liability – not national security – is the main reason the government keeps schtum. A Cold War treaty clause on UAP reporting. A claim that officials in the George H.W. Bush era considered a staged disclosure, complete with a prepared government film; one pictures a VHS cassette, a synth score and a man in a cardigan standing beside a globe. And the idea that AI will eventually make the secret impossible to keep, by joining compartmentalised dots no human was ever cleared to connect. Colossus: The Forbin Project ended with the computer running the world; in Grusch’s version it merely runs the FOI department. He urged disclosure before Trump leaves office, and characterised the whole business as long-term “cohabitation” rather than invasion.
The most grounded tangent concerned David Rush, the former senior CIA official whose name reads like a Grusch typo. Federal agents searching his Virginia home in May found more than 300 gold bars worth around $40 million, and reporting has described allegations that he invented a bogus special access programme – a fake secret project, in other words – to move money around. Grusch’s point is hard to argue with: when nobody is permitted to look inside the box, nobody notices if the box is full of bullion. It proves nothing about aliens. It does suggest Auric Goldfinger missed his true calling in the intelligence community.
Reactions ran to type. Eric Weinstein noted that Grusch’s story has stayed consistent over the years; the sceptic Michael Shermer dismissed it as science fiction; the Pentagon maintains there is no verifiable evidence, and AARO said last September that it had found no sign of extraterrestrial beings or technology. Grusch, who has been a special adviser to Congressman Eric Burlison since March 2025, said he hopes this will be his last interview of its kind for a while. Having catalogued more species than the Mos Eisley cantina, he has surely earned a lie-down.
Meanwhile, back at the filing cabinet. On 14 September the Department of War issued a legal waiver allowing current and former personnel and contractors holding UAP-related defence information to share it with PURSUE – the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, an acronym so clearly reverse-engineered from the desired word that it deserves its own Blue Book file – without breaching their NDAs. Mind the small print. The waiver covers talking to PURSUE, not to Rogan. It does not extend to the intelligence community, where the alleged legacy programmes are said to live, although an IC equivalent has been hinted at. And the Pentagon declined to say who PURSUE’s representatives actually are. An anonymous hotline staffed by unnamed officials: very Men in Black, or possibly just very civil service.
On 18 September came the sixth batch of declassified files at war.gov/UFO, following releases in May, June, July and August: 72 files in all, comprising 15 videos, 56 documents and a single audio recording. That recording is the plum. It is an hour-long talk from March 1952 by Captain Edward Ruppelt, who led the Air Force’s saucer investigations, ran Project Blue Book and popularised the very term “UFO”. Of roughly 800 cases reviewed, Ruppelt says about a fifth remained unexplained, with reports clustering around Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Seventy-four years on, both the stubborn residue of unsolved cases and the official conclusion – nobody knows – have proved remarkably stable, which makes them the most consistent things in the field.
Also in the box: Blue Book’s file on the 1952 Tremonton film (verdict at the time: possibly seabirds), an Indo-Pacific Command infrared clip of a small white object over the Yellow Sea in 2023, and 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents from the old AAWSAP programme, covering warp drives, wormholes, antigravity and invisibility cloaking. These have been publicly available for years, so this is less a revelation than a reissue – the deluxe remaster with marginally fewer redactions. Reading them is like discovering a run of Analog back issues that someone has stamped TOP SECRET. One 2010 paper on alleged injuries to witnesses of anomalous aerospace events, including skin burns, hair loss and radiation-like illness, will be catnip to anyone who remembers the Cash-Landrum case.
Finally, over on the side of the aisle with peer review. A team using China’s FAST radio telescope published a search of 33 planetary systems in The Astronomical Journal on 27 August, using a machine-learning pipeline that whittled 139,127 candidate signals down to two. One proved to be interference. The other, a narrowband signal at 1148.4167 MHz from the direction of K2-155 – a red dwarf 238 light years away, home to the super-Earth K2-155 d – ticked several technosignature boxes: narrow, drifting, fixed in the sky. Then it failed others. It was strong in only one polarisation channel, and similar signals turned up near three other stars, so the likeliest culprit is terrestrial. Veterans of the 1977 Wow! signal will sigh knowingly; veterans of the Parkes perytons, eventually traced to astronomers opening the microwave door before the ping, will sigh harder.
So the October scorecard reads: one whistleblower with a field guide, one waiver, 72 files and one radio signal that is probably somebody’s kit. No saucer on the White House lawn as yet. PURSUE promises further releases on a rolling basis, Grusch promises he’s done talking for a while, and the truth, as Mulder never quite managed to prove, remains out there – possibly in a filing cabinet, possibly at the bottom of the sea, and possibly behind a door marked fraud.
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