County Highway

One unsettling way to spend a weed 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 conceal carry,” he says, and soon after lifting his shirt to show a black 9mm Glock-style pistol in 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 what it was hiding 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 the past, but it was incomplete. 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 from people he’d worked with in the past but hadn’t suspected 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.

He also suggests they belong to groups or species which may, in some cases, dislike each other. “Indifferent to us at best,” he says. He also suggests they belong to groups or species which may, in some cases, dislike each other. Grusch predicts that much more will be revealed soon, within a year, he hopes, but such forecasts are common on the UFO scene. (It’s not just aliens who supposedly warp time, it’s the humans who discuss them.) 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.

His most suggestive evidence, however, strangely, in 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 circles? 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 seven 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 tough-minded 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 this 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 stoicism, but then they relent, being naughty, they, and order cake.

After dinner, I watch them drive off into the dark to their house on a ridge beneath the stars. “I always complete my missions, 100 percent,” Grusch said tonight, while digging into his thick steak. “I complete this one.” He pledged. And I believed him. This is surely a human being here before me, a suffering child of our indifferent universe. We are all flawed beings. But I’m convinced that his tale of his investigations within the universe of secrets, which surely does exist, is not merely an act. Barely 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.

After confessing to feeling a bit awkward wearing a suit to his congressional interview—“At heart, I’m an operator,” he says—the 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.