Behind the scenes of a UFO whistleblower’s odd visit to Capitol Hill

David Grusch landed at Dulles International Airport on July 25, the day before he would testify under oath to Congress that the U.S. government is secretly handling extraterrestrial technology. The former intelligence officer was not picked up by his lawyer, I. Charles McCullough III, a former inspector general for the nation’s intelligence community. Nor was Grusch swept up by a posse of national-security pros or old-school publicists.

Instead, Grusch, who is 6-foot-6, squeezed into the back of a dark SUV with a pair of YouTube creators who had the air of intellectual frat dudes: Ammar Kandil, 29, a founder of Yes Theory, a “digital-storytelling” collective with a huge fan base and an array of affirmational stunt videos; and Jesse Michels, 31, an investor in Peter Thiel’s technology ventures who hosts an interview series with “heretical thinkers” such as the cosmic philosopher Jacques Vallée, on whom Steven Spielberg based a key character in his 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

The whistleblower and the influencers seemed like natural collaborators. Yes Theory’s motto is “seek discomfort.” And Grusch, 36, was about to make Washington uncomfortable.

“How do you expect this to go?” Michels asked Grusch on the ride into Washington.

Grusch worried that his testimony, limited by security-clearance red tape, might be a letdown for those versed on the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena (or UAP, the modern term for UFO). Grusch said that while deplaning moments earlier, he had still been pleading with the Pentagon’s security office to clear more material for public consumption.

“Shouldn’t it be the president saying this stuff?” Grusch said, glancing out the window of the SUV, cameras capturing his prehearing jitters. “Like, I don’t want to be the purveyor of disclosure because I don’t have all the data.”

This behind-the-scenes peek at Grusch’s visit to Washington is part of “Close Encounters of the Human Kind,” a documentary by Kandil, who stars with Michels as confidants to Grusch in the days before and after his visit to Congress. As Grusch was testifying under oath about “Non-Human Reverse Engineering Programs,” he also was starring in his own personal odyssey through modern-day UAP discourse, which has grown louder and more mainstream in recent years as the U.S. government has acknowledged that sometimes the phenomena defy explanation.

The documentary’s subtitle is “7 Days With The Man Claiming Aliens Exist (under oath in congress),” although Grusch’s purported knowledge is secondhand and he has offered no hard evidence in public. To Kandil, this is sort of beside the point.

“Our audience responds the most to moments of humanity,” said Kandil, in an interview Saturday with The Washington Post, the day before the documentary was uploaded into the feeds of Yes Theory’s 8.5 million subscribers, who responded with comments including “The Truth Will Set You Free” and “feeling uplifted for the compassion expressed for all of humanity.”

There is something bigger here than bewildering aviation technology or clandestine government programs, Kandil thought. Something less alien. Something, ironically, more human.

The documentary came together just a week before Grusch’s testimony. Michels, who met Grusch two years ago through a mutual friend in the Air Force, set up an introductory phone call with Kandil. Grusch liked the uplifting, adventurous vibe of Yes Theory’s videos, which include Will Smith bungee-jumping out of a helicopter, two men illegally hiding out in Singapore’s airport for four days, and a prank involving a Justin Bieber look-alike who ate a burrito from its middle instead of from one of its ends. Yes Theory’s platform was a way to tell a story outside the bounds of traditional media or congressional oversight.

“I thought it would make sense to go through you guys,” Grusch tells Yes Theory on camera.

Cut to: the exterior of the Rayburn House Office Building on July 26. Grusch, Kandil and Michels made small talk about the summer humidity. The influencers asked how the whistleblower was feeling, and he said he had been “restless” the night before.

Inside the committee room for oversight and government reform, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) asked Grusch: “Do you have any personal knowledge of people who have been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology?”

“Yes,” Grusch replied.

Later in the hearing Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) asked whether the government had retrieved bodies from crashed UAP.

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” Grusch said.

Mace asked: Were they human or nonhuman?

“Nonhuman,” Grusch said. “And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.”

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Kandil was transfixed by Grusch’s testimony, but he didn’t see fellow content creators lighting up at the committee’s dry, repetitive focus on the national-security interests of the United States. He thinks the key for this kind of news to reach an untapped, younger audience is hardly rocket science.

“The packaging needs to feel like it’s YouTube-native,” Kandil said in an interview. In the modern streaming era, this means emphasizing a character’s relatability as much as the person’s credentials or claims.

As Kandil explains, “stepping outside your comfort zone” — as Grusch did over the summer in Washington — resonates with young people raised in a “hyper, instant culture” that is “constantly telling you to take the easier route.”

It hasn’t been easy for Grusch. Since July, he has been portrayed as a kook, a conspiracy theorist, a peddler of scuttlebutt. Last month, NASA administrator Bill Nelson — while unveiling a report on UAP that found no evidence of extraterrestrials — said there was “a lot more to learn” on the subject, but when asked about Grusch’s testimony, he belittled it as the equivalent of saying “a friend” has “a UFO locked up in a warehouse.”

“The deeper you get into covering UFOs, the more almost all of this feels like an intergalactic game of telephone,” author and UFO researcher Garrett M. Graff told Vanity Fair, after Grusch’s claims were first reported by the Debrief.

In August, the Intercept dug up a 2018 incident in which Grusch was “committed to a mental health facility,” suggesting that the Afghanistan veteran’s post-combat demons might cloud his judgment.

“David Grusch has this intensity, and we know the type,” said retired Navy pilot Ward Carroll on his YouTube show in August, referring to the military’s administrative ranks, adding: “Sometimes they’re a little eccentric.”

Grusch, who declined to be formally interviewed for this story, is portrayed in the documentary as a man on a diligent mission — or a “journey,” as he puts it at one point. He speaks of his trauma from combat, of his Roman Catholic upbringing, of his neurodivergence.

“Hopefully I can make a difference,” Grusch said on the ride from the airport to Washington, and be “the guy that will inspire more people to go public.”

After the congressional hearing, Kandil posted a cryptic message on his personal Instagram account: “Hey, I’m doing a meet up tomorrow around UFOs. If you had one question to ask at the hearing, what would it have been?”

The next day, July 27, Kandil hosted a Q&A with Grusch and 30 fans of Yes Theory at a hotel less than a mile from the Capitol. “The true public hearing,” Kandil called it, with “skeptics” and “believers” alike. Fans drove overnight from outside the D.C. area to be there.

Grusch, who a day earlier was grilled under penalty of perjury, found himself in the middle of a YouTube fan meetup with far lower stakes — although the documentary’s pulsing musical score suggests that great revelations were at hand.

“Are we safe as, like, a human species?” asked one attendee. “Because, I mean, I might have watched too many movies.”

“The universe certainly has a yin and a yang, so there’s certainly dark with light,” Grusch said. “So I think it’s a mixed bag.”

Grusch then recounted one story about “a very senior Navy individual” who told him about an incident where a “a 300-foot triangular craft” hovered above his car. “He couldn’t even process what he was seeing,” Grusch told the meetup. “But then he took pictures of his car after the incident,” he said, and the “upper-facing decks of his car were all hit with ionizing radiation, ultraviolet, because the paint became milky.”

Did Grusch see the photos? Would it matter if he did? If his tale proves anything at all, it’s Grusch’s sincere desire to connect with — and believe — his fellow humans. He told the meetup about his Catholic upbringing, and the “woo-woo” nature of faith in any transcendent mystery — how he drifted from it, and how, in a way, he has returned.

“Oddly enough,” Grusch told the meetup, “I’ve kind of come full circle.”

The UAP discourse has rounded a bend, too. The documentary arrives at a moment when the conversation has intensified in politics, popular culture and the Pentagon.

In 2017, the New York Times revealed a secret U.S. government program devoted to investigating reports of UAP. In August, the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office launched a digital hub for all things anomalous, including a map of reported “hot spots” and records of typical UAP characteristics (“round” and “white”). Last month, NASA appointed its first director of research on UAP.

A bipartisan amendment to the annual defense authorization bill would declassify government documents related to UAP.

“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, nonhuman intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in July.

One of the 10 most-watched TV shows on Netflix is the Spielberg-produced “Encounters,” a four-part docuseries revisiting unexplained sightings through a humanistic lens. Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets quarterback, barely raised an eyebrow when he recently disclosed a UAP run-in on HBO’s “Hard Knocks.” Ditto for Olivia Rodrigo, one of the biggest names in pop music, who told Rolling Stone that in lieu of “Twitter conspiracies” about a rumored feud with Taylor Swift, she prefers to “only look at alien conspiracy theories.”

Although UAP discourse has trended toward the mainstream, it still can feel like a fringe topic. Congress and NASA make it seem too technical and bureaucratic. Paranoid stories of close encounters, sprinkled across Reddit, are too odd and tinfoil-hat.

Kandil thinks his documentary — which had accumulated over 750,000 views by Thursday morning — can move the conversation forward, to new demographics and new platforms, through modern ways of storytelling suited for TikTok tastes. Grusch thinks his “journey” can inspire people with firsthand knowledge to come forward.

But real answers to the UAP question are not to be found in behind-the-scenes journeys, in the enthusiasm of subscribers or in the promise of evidence. They are to be found in measurable, tangible facts.

“So, this David Grusch guy is basing his entire claim on conversations that he had,” not “actual evidence,” said Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, in a phone interview. Loeb says he watched half the documentary; he saw a narrative, not any actual disclosure.

“We need to look through telescopes and be collecting data through instruments, not through people talking about it on social media,” said Loeb, who heads the Galileo Project, which searches for science-based evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. “Somebody interviewing another guy who tells the story — who cares?”

Fans of Yes Theory might care. People who want to believe might care, as would people who just like a good, relatable story. But people like Avi Loeb?

“I just want to see the data,” Loeb said. “And Grusch is just another story.”