Greys vs. Reptilians: What David Grusch Actually Told Joe Rogan, and What He Didn't

Three years after his congressional testimony, David Grusch went back on The Joe Rogan Experience. Episode #2560 went up on September 30, 2026 and runs two and a half hours. By the next morning one clip had eaten all the others: greys and reptilians, a crashed tic tac, and American soldiers shooting a seven-foot lizard.

That clip is real, and it is the most specific thing Grusch has said in public. It is also the part of the interview he is furthest from. So this piece does two things. It puts the exchange down as it was said, with the speaker attached to each line, because several of the words now being quoted as Grusch’s were Rogan’s. And it pulls out the other claims in the episode, some of which are more checkable and one of which we were able to check this morning.

The fight, line by line

The thread starts at about 1:09:56. Grusch has just said he never got access to the biological assessment reports. Rogan asks if he has talked to anyone who did. Grusch says no one on the analysis side, but “I know people that are good friends of mine that were on retrievals and saw them as well in person,” and “some of my colleagues saw them alive as well.”

Rogan asks what they saw alive. Grusch: “The pop culture… reptilian looking.” And the greys, “those are real.”

At 1:13:44 Rogan asks why these things keep crashing. Grusch:

“Some of it is NHI versus NHI… You think, would they get along? They’re so advanced. But we have records of them [messing] around with each other.”

At 1:16:00, asked what the reptilian craft looked like: “That one is tic tac looking.” He adds that it is “not always a tic tac” but “that tends to be them,” and “hopefully I’m not wrong, but I’m, you know, pretty good sourcing on that.”

Then, before anyone asks, he hedges the creature itself:

“When you see, like, malevolent behavior, that’s a humanistic lens. You’re seeing an animal lash out in captivity kind of thing. Or they’re in duress… Are they actually scary, or is it just because of the situations we’ve been in with them?”

AI reconstruction of a secondhand account. No image of this event has been published. Not evidence.

At 1:16:33 Rogan asks what they looked like. Grusch: “Now, I’ve never seen them in person.” Relaying his friend, he says “seven foot tall plus, sort of gorilla looking skin,” and then “there’s multiple types. There’s ones that are more humanoid looking.” The words “scaly” and “reptile gorillas” sit in the next few seconds of crosstalk; the auto-captions don’t label speakers and the line reads like Rogan paraphrasing with Grusch agreeing. Grusch then: “I’m not an expert on that one… I never saw it in person.”

At 1:18:49 Rogan: “And so there apparently is NHI versus NHI warfare.” Grusch: “We’ve documented that… in collection. What we perceive as warfare.” He allows that it might be “some other kind of weird” thing and that “there’s maybe an assessment on that.”

Here is the exchange the headlines are built on, at 1:19:20:

Rogan: When this reptilian craft crashed, the assumption was that it was some sort of conflict… Grusch: Correct… ‘cause there was dead greys there, too. Rogan: So the greys and the reptilians were duking it out. Grusch: Yeah. I guess. I guess, you know, I know the people who were there.

A minute later Rogan asks whether the craft had been hit by something. Grusch: “I don’t remember exactly what happened in that regard, but it did crash. And I don’t want to misspeak on what exactly happened.” Asked how often this happens: “I don’t know the total number of adversarial conflict crashes, but it seems to be at least a dozen or two. I don’t know.”

So the “fight” is an inference, and Grusch presented it as one: dead greys found at a reptilian crash, read by the people involved as a conflict. He did not describe a battle being seen.

”We shot the reptilians”

Rogan comes back to it an hour later, at 2:06:49, and this is where the American casualties come in.

Rogan: Do you know what supposedly happened to those living reptilians from the crash? Grusch: Deceased. They were killed. Rogan: So we killed them… Did we shoot them? Grusch: Yeah.

Why? “It posed a threat.” Could he say more? “I’ll let the people who were there tell their story.” Then, pressed: “It just posed a threat, and US personnel started, you know, getting hurt and dying.” How many? “I don’t know the exact numbers.”

AI reconstruction of a secondhand account, drawn from the description Grusch relayed. Grusch did not describe a tail; the image generator added one. No authenticated image of any such being exists.

Two more lines from this stretch belong in any honest summary. At 1:39:16 Rogan asks whether the colleague communicated with the reptilians. Grusch: “I don’t recall that. No, I don’t think so.” And at 2:09:02:

“I hope through this process some of those people are allowed to speak publicly about it. So you could just hear it from the horse’s mouth, not through me secondhand.”

Rogan’s own reaction is the best line in the episode: “If it was real, there’s no way it doesn’t sound kooky. Even if it’s real.” Grusch: “I sound like a crazy person… but once again, it’s true, and I know who I talked to, I know what I saw.”

What we can say. Grusch is accurately reporting what he says a colleague told him, and he flagged the secondhand nature of it himself, repeatedly, without being asked. That is more care than the clips show. What we can’t say. Anything about the event. There is no date, location, unit, casualty figure, document or image, and the one source who could supply those is unnamed. American service members killed in action leave paper: line-of-duty determinations, casualty notifications, families. If this happened, that paper exists somewhere, and it is the thing to ask for.

The other highlights

The reptilians took the oxygen. These are the parts of the interview we think matter more, in rough order of how checkable they are.

The 1952 tape he cited says something slightly different

AI illustration. The real recording is DOW-UAP-D154 in PURSUE Release 06.

At 1:55:39 Grusch pointed to the 1952 recording that his former boss, Rep. Eric Burlison, pushed into the public record, and which landed in PURSUE Release 06 on September 18. In his telling, Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt tells MIT Lincoln Lab’s Beacon Hill group that “the Air Force has ruled out mass hysteria” and that objects near White Sands and Holloman were tracked at “an estimated 3,500 miles an hour.”

We pulled the government’s transcript of that recording (DOW-UAP-D154). The 3,500 figure is in it. So is the White Sands and Holloman interest. But Ruppelt does not rule out mass hysteria; he says press coverage “introduced a little bit of, probably a little bit of mass hysteria or something like that into the problem.” And in one case he explains a 3,500 mph track away himself: pilots had seen “a big balloon,” and radar operators giving a demonstration to “a bunch of colonels” got “a little bit flustered,” could not lock their automatic tracking, “so they assumed the thing must be going about 3,500 miles an hour.” Elsewhere he does say Air Defense Command radars “tracked objects going anywhere from 1,000 up to about 3,500 miles an hour.”

The tape is a genuinely interesting document, and Ruppelt is more candid on it than in his public statements. But Grusch’s summary is tidier than the source. That is worth knowing when weighing the parts of his account that can’t be checked.

A Senate vault, a kill plot, and whiskey

AI illustration of a scene Grusch described. Not a photograph of any real meeting.

From 0:16:57, Grusch said that in 2022, weeks after receiving a threat that “they can touch me and my wife,” he was summoned to an off-books Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in a SCIF with “a dozen, dozen and a half” senior staff for Marco Rubio, Mark Warner and others. People he knew there named two individuals who “wanted to kill you.” A senior staffer fetched whiskey, and “all of them started drinking in the SCIF.” The plan, he said, was stopped, and “I know how it was stopped.” He tied it to “certain presidential findings” that protect critical infrastructure, said he must have crossed “some sort of Rubicon” while preparing his Inspector General complaint, and said a Justice Department investigation is ongoing.

Grusch has alluded to threats before. This is the most detailed version, and it names the offices whose staff were in the room. Those offices have not commented. That is checkable in a way the reptilians are not.

The bodies he did see, on video

AI illustration based on Grusch’s verbal description. The footage he described has not been published.

The one thing Grusch said he saw himself, at 0:58:46: contemporary video from a retrieval, a pan, with “three or four” dead beings. “Very human.” “Very beautiful.” Skin “bluish white,” hair long, gender “amorphous,” wearing “some kind of form-fitting thing.” He said he sat on it “for years” and confirmed the event through other sources because he was wary of AI fakes and limited hangouts.

He connected it to retired Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland’s well-known advice to Tom DeLonge to “think of the Greek gods,” and then to McCasland’s disappearance. That part is on the record: McCasland, 68, was last seen at his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026, per the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. Grusch placed it “within a week” of Trump’s February 2026 UAP declassification order. He also said there was “a lot of reasons” for the disappearance, mentioned mental health and aging issues raised in public reporting, and said “nobody knows what happened.” We don’t either, and we won’t read anything into it.

The CIA officer with 600 pounds of gold

AI illustration. Not the FBI’s seizure photographs.

Grusch opened the episode, at 0:03:20, with David Rush, a CIA officer arrested in May. That case is real and well reported: the FBI found more than 600 pounds of gold bars, over $2 million in cash and dozens of luxury watches in his Virginia home, he is accused of creating a fake “black box” spy program to requisition it, and a tentative plea deal has since been reported (WSJ, CBS, Washington Post). The intelligence community inspector general is investigating how it happened.

What is Grusch’s, not the reporting’s: that Rush’s fake program sits in “that same ecosystem I bumped into,” and that unaccountable special access programs also hid trafficking, including of children, run by “officers of the government.” He said he briefed members in a classified setting and worked with DOJ. None of the public reporting on Rush mentions UAP. The Rush case shows that a fake compartment can be papered and funded without anyone checking. It does not show anything about crash retrievals.

Why they didn’t tell us: a 2004 vote about contracts

AI illustration of a meeting Grusch described. No record of it has been published.

From 0:45:01, Rogan raised the long-rumored 2004 disclosure exercise, often tied to Hal Puthoff. Grusch said he verified it with attendees: a “hypothetical scenario” at a federally funded research center in Northern Virginia in November 2004, sponsored, he said, by then national security adviser Steve Hadley (“I believe Hadley denies it”). Participants scored pros and cons, a computer tallied them, and “virtually every one” came out negative. The main driver, in Grusch’s account, was not public panic but federal contracts fraud: contractors with sole-source deals and exclusive access, and the fear of challenges under the defense acquisition rules. “It wasn’t, oh, millennials can’t handle it. It was like, yeah, we’re kind of culpable.”

That is the least cinematic claim in the episode and possibly the most useful, because it predicts what real disclosure will fight over: contracts and liability, not ontology. It is still sourced only to Grusch and unnamed attendees.

A base the size of city blocks, under the sea

AI illustration. Grusch gave no location, and no image exists.

At 2:19:01, careful because “it gets into sensitive Navy underwater things,” Grusch said there is “some sort of base of operations in certain locations,” “large, like multiple city blocks,” origin indeterminate, and “stuff comes and goes.” Underwater people he knows joke that The Abyss is “kind of a docudrama.” He declined to discuss the Baltic Sea anomaly beyond “there’s some interesting stuff there.” See our underwater bases explainer for the history of this claim.

The quick ones

• “Ghostbusters moment.” At 0:26:41 Grusch said government think tanks wrote reports for past presidents warning disclosure could “trigger a response” from a third party, and “there’s a real fear of like a Ghostbusters moment.” He said he doesn’t necessarily believe it.
• The prediction. At 0:28:51: “When people look back at this interview, it’s gonna be very haunting, because I think in short order, before Trump leaves office, we’re going to be in a new paradigm.” He cited Principal Deputy DNI Aaron Lukas signing NDA waivers; we covered the real waiver paperwork in the ODNI memo piece.
• Stephen Miller “physically blocked.” At 0:27:14 Grusch relayed Rep. Tim Burchett’s account, from Benny Johnson’s show, that Miller told him he was being blocked from material. Thirdhand by the time it reaches you.
• India’s 2019 ASAT test. At 0:38:25 Grusch said he was on duty in the NRO operations center when India shot down its own satellite in March 2019 without warning, and he was calling the embassy while orbital analysts worked the debris field. Not a UAP story, but a rare first-person scene, and he said NRO cleared it.
• Matthew Brown. At 2:20:41 Rogan asked about Brown’s claim that Grusch had steered him into whistleblowing. Grusch said he first talked to Brown around 2024, never saw the briefing Brown describes, and never made a “hazing brief” on the topic. See our Brown piece.
• Taxonomy. Tall “Greek god” beings associated with boomerang or crescent craft, greys in several sizes, at least two kinds of reptilian, “water cooler talk” of an insectoid he has “no knowledge” of. Our field guide lays out where each of these comes from.

What would move this

Grusch is not hiding the ball. He said, plainly and more than once, that he is passing on what others told him. So the tests are about whether those others appear.

1. A firsthand witness to the reptilian retrieval speaks on the record, under their own name, with a date and place. Grusch said he hopes they will.
2. Any casualty paperwork surfaces. Deaths of US personnel in an incident like this would generate records even if the cause were classified.
3. A Senate office confirms or denies the 2022 SCIF meeting. Grusch named whose staff were present.
4. PURSUE releases anything biological. Six tranches and 447 records in, it has released none. If the order Grusch credits is working, that changes.

Verdict. The headline is accurate as a report of what Grusch said. It is not a report of anything Grusch witnessed, and he was the first to say so. The most checkable claim in the episode is the 1952 tape, and when we checked it, it said something a little different from his summary.

Images on this page are AI illustrations and reconstructions made for this article from spoken descriptions. None is evidence of anything.