A former U.S. intelligence officer has claimed that the U.S. is secretly operating a UFO retrieval program and possesses “intact craft of non-human origin.” The whistleblower David Charles Grusch, who is a retired member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), said that he was part of a task force that was established to identify what were once called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOS, and now officially known as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. As first reported by The Debrief, Grusch disclosed confidential information about these projects to Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General and subsequently filed a complaint that said that he suffered illegal retaliation for doing so. Notably, the article was written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, the reporters who broke the news of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerial Threat Intelligence (AATIP) program in the New York Times in 2017. That story kicked off the current resurging interest in UAPs in the government and among the public. Grusch alleged that fragments of UAP have been recovered for decades by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. He said that post-retrieval analysis has determined that the fragments are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signature.” For years since the original New York Times story, whistleblowers, conspiracy theorists, and government officials have discussed the existence of "alien alloys" and "exotic" materials of an unknown origin, and the government has spun up various programs to study them. In an interview with News Nation, Grusch said the U.S. possesses “quite a number” of what the interviewer called "spacecraft from another species." Though he hasn’t seen photos of the spacecraft himself, he said he has spoken with a number of current and former intelligence officers who have provided him with evidence and oral testimony. There are currently no public details on what evidence or documentation, if any, Grusch may have. Two days before The Debrief’s piece, former Intelligence official Christopher Mellon, called on the government to be more transparent with its UAP programs in an article for POLITICO. Mellon wrote that he has helped Congress and the public discover the truth about UAP since 2017 and requested the government to reveal the truth of its findings because the American people “have a right to know the truth of this matter.” Mellon has been pushing for more transparency for years and was a part of Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy, which is dedicated to revealing more information about UAPs. “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered,” Mellon said to The Debrief. “However, it is a delicate matter getting this potentially explosive information into the right hands for validation.” Jonathan Grey, who is currently a generational officer of the U.S. Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance, also spoke to The Debrief about Grusch's claims. “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone. Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us,” he told The Debrief. Since 2022, Grusch said he has sent Congress hours of recorded classified information that included data about the materials recovery program. Grusch helped draft the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act with Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio, which stated that any person with relevant UAP information can share it with Congress without retaliation, overriding any non-disclosure agreements that may have been signed. He said that he interviewed a number of high-level intelligence officers and knows the individuals who are involved in the program, which he also claims was “illegally shielded from proper Congressional oversight.” A spokesperson for the Department of Defense told The U.S. Sun, “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. AARO is committed to following the data and its investigation wherever it leads.” AARO, which stands for the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, is an expanded version of the task force Grusch was once a part of and was established in July 2022 by Senators Gillibrand and Rubio as part of its FY2023 Act. The AARO is dedicated to investigating unidentified flying objects in the air, sea, and space. A similar whistleblower case occurred when counterintelligence specialist Lue Elizondo left the Pentagon in 2017 to go public about reports of UFO sightings. Elizondo claimed that the government was discrediting him for speaking out and failed to take him seriously. Since then, Elizondo’s claims have been increasingly scrutinized, as he has failed to provide further evidence when questioned. “He solemnly invokes his security oath like a catchphrase,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker after speaking with him. In a public meeting held by NASA’s UAP team last Wednesday, chairman David Spergel said, “One of our goals is to remove the stigma because there is a need for high quality data to address important questions about UAPs.”