2023-09-01 - County Highway "The Republic of Occluded Facts"
County Highway
Vol. 1 Issue 2 September-October 2023
The Republic of Occluded Facts
CH Exclusive Interview with UFO Whistleblower Dave Grusch
Reveals Black Projects, SAPs, NHIs
Are top Hollywood executives aliens?
by WALTER KIRN
One unsettling way to spend a week in our Republic of Occluded Facts is to drive to a small mountain town in Colorado, ditch your phone because it gets no signal (and is a spying device in any case) and speak for hour after trippy hour about aliens and their weird craft with a man who purports to know something of their history, a history he says our leaders lie about, out of fear, arrogance, and greed.
Dave Grusch, age 36, is a former intelligence agent, Air Force officer, and briefer of presidents on spooky matters, many related to satellites and space, known only to our military elite. He's a six-foot-six pylon of a guy with close-cropped hair and an open, unshaven face that goes pink in the sun but doesn't quite tan. I meet him on a warm alpine morning in a hotel parking lot, the very definition of neutral ground. Standing beside his spotless new Ford truck, which he plans to trade in soon - because that's how he is, a car guy who buys one rig then covets another, with custom high-performance modifications - we venture some small talk and size each other up, an art in which Grusch, an Afghan war vet, seems well-practiced. When my hands move, his eyes move. He has a planted way of standing that seems like it might provide the basis for a solid karate kick.
I agree in the parking lot to conceal the name of Grusch's hometown. Though he's lately become a public figure, "the UFO whistleblower," testifying in front of Congress about the nation's alleged astral secrets and appearing on podcasts and cable TV shows, he likes his privacy, he says he’s been through a lot. Intimidation tactics. Warnings. Threats. "I concealed carry," he told me soon after we met. "I'm carrying now." He lifted the hem of his worn red t-shirt and showed me a black 9mm sidearm tucked outlaw-style into the waistband of his hiking shorts.
Grusch's troubles, and his strange path to national celebrity, began several years ago with an assignment from a superior in the intel world to poke around inside the government and try to learn whatever there was to learn about so-called Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) and the incredible vessels they're thought to pilot. Grusch was thorough, wary of being misled. The investigation took four years.
"I already had a map because of the stuff I'd done in my career. I knew where the skeletons were and what doors to knock on. You bump into one thing and think you've found it, but it's only one slice. I would see one facet of the prism, but I wasn't able to look down on all the vertices. There was a lot of deception, a lot of lies, and some reverse interrogation."
In the end, Grusch compiled forty interviews, some from people he'd worked with in the past but hadn't suspected, who held pieces of the puzzle. The essence of what he says he found is that aliens are here, they've been here for a while (he's cagey about how long), and we have several of their ships, which we keep stashed away in secret hangars whose locations he claims to know. "We also have 'biologics,' meaning bodies, whose characteristics Grusch isn't free to specify though he says that they come in different shapes and sizes. Finally, he learned that these beings may not be friendly. "Indifferent to us at best," he says. He also suggests they belong to groups or species which, in some cases, dislike each other.
Grusch predicts that much more will be revealed soon, within a year, he hopes, but other forecasts are common on the UFO scene. (It's not just aliens who supposedly know things.) But the process may be speeding up: Grusch says he is working behind the scenes on legislation that should allow him, and others, to bring forth evidence that will pierce the veil, and launch a new era of interstellar cross-species exploration.
What he can say, and did say, to Congress, on TV, in a hearing held last August, is that decades of hiding and studying these wonders for purposes of developing high-tech weapons—a cloaked endeavor he calls "The Program"—has massively corrupted US officialdom and its corporate instruments in electronics and aerospace, who operate without proper oversight and have resorted to criminal misdeeds, including murder, he's said, to shield their work.
After an hour of checking each other out, Grusch and I climb into his truck and head for a nearby mountain trail. "I like to drive fast," he says, and he does so, protected by a slick new radar detector mounted in the cab.
The son of a Pittsburgh Lincoln Mercury salesman and the first person in his family to go to college (he studied physics at Pittsburgh University), the UFO whistleblower grew up in lean, uncertain circumstances. There was bankruptcy, food stamps, church assistance. It bred a fascination with distant worlds.
"Throughout the chaos of my childhood, I gravitated toward Star Trek and military stuff," he tells me. "I had a fascination with astronomy. I had a telescope as a teenager, observing Saturn and various star clusters. I used to work at the Buhl Observatory in college. I used to give night sky tours to the public. And I used to help produce planetarium shows."
Once out on the trail, surrounded by granite peaks which Grusch loves to climb as a "masochistic hobby," I press him for details on The Program. It's a frustrating interrogation. He swings between a boyish eagerness to share the secrets of the cosmos—"We are not alone!" "Maybe we're like chimpanzees to them"—and reclusive, disciplined discretion. At times, he falls silent in answer to my questions, but his silence reads in different ways. When I ask him, for example, if the "beings have been with us since ancient times," he gazes off at a mountain in the distance in a manner I find enigmatically affirming.
His most suggestive comment of the hike, one that haunts me throughout the day, involves the cultural history of The Program. When I venture the theory that knowledge of its secrets might induce in insiders something, a state I call grandiosity, Grusch says I'm on to something, describing a "gnostic" streak in certain initiates. "We are the gatekeepers, they think." There are also people of fundamentalist religious views who regard the matter with spiritual horror and would rather it never see the light of day. "Obviously there are some who are going to think these Non-Human Intelligences are extensions of demonic principalities."
For lunch, we zoom off to a toy-like tourist village of art galleries and ice cream shops. Given the peculiar morning I've had, the stroll with its brightly painted cones seems childlike and pitiful. They appear not to know that they dwell inside a puzzle world, where recently retired spies with heads full of paradigm-destroying secrets and loaded sidearms in their pants are lurking beside them, only steps away. Or is Grusch lying to me now as part of some vast government psy-op, designed to break our minds and render us helpless to further elite manipulation?
At the fancy bistro he takes me to, he orders a gourmet pizza topped with jalapenos and drizzled honey. He turns on his phone and a Google alert appears.
"The Washington Post is attacking me," he says.
I read the piece on my own phone as we eat. It's mostly a media story, throwing shade on the upstart NewsNation cable channel for devoting so much time to NHIs after running its first big interview with Grusch. The piece accuses the channel, heaven forbid, of chasing ratings. Irked by the article's insinuation that he is colluding in a grift, Grusch reverts to demolishing his pizza. Later, outside, he takes a phone call from a congressional aide and walks for ten minutes in circles around a park, furrowing his brow and nodding. It's a scene from a paranoid thriller, fun to watch.
We spend the afternoon together chatting beside a bubbling mountain stream. He clues me in about the mechanics of military secrecy, shooting down the common notion that our government is too incompetent or leaky to hold back the truth about NHIs. By burying pieces of the mystery inside already existing "Black Projects" and "SAPs" (Special Access Programs), the enterprise has been erased from view, he insists, even the view of many working on it who can't see the galaxy for the stars and planets. But surely, I say, our presidents must know, and our CIA directors and their ilk. "Not necessarily," he says. I ask him to name the person who would know the most out of everyone who at least knows something.
He offers a guess, off the record—a formidable figure from late twentieth century politics, though it's not anyone of the few that I anticipated. "I'm only guessing," he reminds me.
I tell him this style of interaction is maddening.
"Welcome to my world," he says.
A tender issue soon arises: A recent article in The Intercept exposed a difficult moment in Grusch's life, and used it to question his mental health. Several years ago, while living in Virginia, he fell into an alcoholic funk and muttered about committing suicide. He was then held for 72 hours in a drying-out facility. The reporter found police records of the incident after being tipped off, Grusch believes, by one of his bureaucratic foes.
He now offers his side of the story. The drunken incident in fact occurred, he says. But he insists it wasn’t as discrediting as it might sound to be. Like so many combat vets, he lives with a level of trauma, he explained to me, which he treated with booze. Strong spirits have had a bad effect on him, acting on his system almost like "opiates," a problem he says is common in his lineage. He sought treatment after the event and feels he's put his low period behind him. I hear in his up-beat tone a plaintive note. One I know from my own struggles with addiction.
This is surely a flawed human being before me, a suffering child of our indifferent universe. We are all flawed beings. But I’m convinced that his tales of his investigations with the universe of secrets, which surely does exist, is not merely an act. Earlier, recalling Afghanistan, where he identified targets for fiery death, he averred that his new mission—waking our no-longer lonesome species to the folly of seeking "feudalistic dominance"— feels redemptive, morally restorative. Though it does seem that battle excited him, too.
"At heart, I'm an operator," he told me after confessing to feeling a bit awkward wearing a suit to his congressional interview.
He gripped an imaginary weapon and swept its barrel through the air as though clearing an enemy position. His favorite allies in his wartime years? “The Germans and the Brits.” They got the job done. “And the Mongolians.” Toughest guys he knew.
We part for a couple of hours before dinner. I retreat to my motel cabin, lie down, and drift. Paranoia creeps in, possibly a manifestation of what Grusch calls “ontological shock,” which is when new thoughts and old thoughts can’t be reconciled. Do I trust his fantastic tale? Not sure. Do I trust the familiar, legacy tales? Not sure. Not as much as I did yesterday.
What I trust more than ever, strangely, is Hollywood. During our long and winding conversation, Grusch shared with me certain private notions about the NHI phenomenon—the creatures may be telepathic, they may use forms of high-tech camouflage; their ships may exist in dimensions beyond our four; their bodies may be drones or avatars which evoke familiar tropes from movies and TV shows. Are insiders at work in entertainment as well? Have monstrous secrets been seeded throughout our culture to prepare us for the coming shock? Are top Hollywood executives themselves aliens? It all seems possible.
We’re joined at dinner by Jessica, Grusch’s wife of several years, a former Air Force nurse from Akron, Ohio who served in Afghanistan herself. She’s quietly humorous, polite, possessed of perfect posture, and stoically immersed in a way that reminds me of my late mother, also a nurse from the Akron area. I find her presence balancing and calming. I sense young couple has faced some novel challenges, not least her husband’s evolution from a lethal, locked-on soldier-spy to a messenger of wild, disruptive truths. It's definitely been a journey, says Jessica. One theme at dinner is Grusch’s obsessive streak; he reveals that he’s been diagnosed as “slightly autistic” and acknowledges having trouble with social niceties such as remembering people’s birthdays. He shoots his wife a bashful glance and she returns a forgiving one. When it’s time for dessert, they both demur—counting their calories, American style— but then they relent, being naughty, and order cake.
After dinner I watch them drive off into the dark, up to their house on a ridge beneath the stars. “I always complete my missions,” Grusch said tonight, sawing into his thick steak. “I’ll complete this one.” He pledged. And I believed him.
I believed he’s a young man who won’t—who can’t—turn back.
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