David Grusch on The Joe Rogan Experience: The Reptilian, Deep Sea Base and Podesta Claims (30 September 2026)
A former intelligence officer made a series of extraordinary new claims on the largest podcast in the world, and within a day one named participant had contested one of them on the record.
What happened
Joe Rogan released a new interview with the former intelligence officer David Grusch on 30 September 2026. The episode is numbered 2560, and Apple Podcasts gives its running time as two hours, thirty six minutes and twenty five seconds.
David Grusch is a former United States Air Force intelligence officer who served as the National Reconnaissance Office representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and as a co lead for UAP analysis at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. He became publicly known in 2023, when he told Congress under oath that the United States operated a crash retrieval and reverse engineering programme. The 2026 interview went considerably further than that testimony did.
The claims he made in the episode, as catalogued the following day by the reporter Ben Schreckinger, include the following. That during his internal UAP investigation he viewed clear video of a crash retrieval showing humanoid beings with long hair and pale, bluish skin, which he described as beautiful. That he was informed of an incident in which personnel fought with and killed a reptilian being. That he reviewed evidence indicating violent conflict between reptilian and grey beings. That members of the intelligence community told him of a deep sea base multiple city blocks in size. That he found evidence of officers of a government agency engaged in the trafficking of children, and worked with the Justice Department on the matter. And that he was summoned to a meeting with senior Senate intelligence committee staff where he was told two people in government had considered killing him until the idea was, in his word, kiboshed.
Two further statements in the episode are checkable administrative facts rather than extraordinary claims, and both were confirmed. Grusch said he left his job as a congressional staffer on Representative Eric Burlison's staff around Labor Day, which a Burlison spokesman, Nate Lucas, confirmed to PARADIGM without being able to give a specific date. He also said that corporate counsel for the MITRE Corporation is preparing a response to a letter Burlison sent in May demanding the production of UAP related records.
Documents and images
What is the official position?
No agency has adjudicated any of the claims made in the episode. There is no official narrative for this event, which is why the archive files it as Unknown.
The one substantive response obtained from a named participant came not from an agency but from a private individual. John Podesta, who was White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton and chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, replied on the record by email to a query from the reporter Ben Schreckinger.
In the interview Grusch had said that the retired Air Force general Neil McCasland, the then head of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works Robert Weiss and others advised the Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge about UFOs because Podesta had, in Grusch's words, greenlit an acclimatization activity, a popularization activity ahead of the 2016 election. Grusch added that these people were given top cover to see Tom as a public figure who had the touch of the youth, rightly or wrongly, and that there was an attempt to prep the battlespace prior to 2016.
Podesta's reply disputed the characterisation while confirming that the conversation happened. He wrote: That is probably not how I would characterize our interaction. He continued that he had discussed launching a UAP declassification initiative with Secretary Clinton if she won the election, and that in several interviews in 2016 she acknowledged that and committed to launching such an initiative. On the call itself he wrote: My recollection is that Tom arranged a conference call with the individuals you mentioned and we discussed amongst other things, declassifying DOD files and reducing the stigma of professionals taking UAP's seriously. He closed by rejecting the premise directly: I have always maintained that the American people could handle the truth about UAP's and didn't really need to be acclimated.
PARADIGM reported that this was the first time Podesta had publicly acknowledged discussing UFOs with DeLonge, McCasland and Weiss. The underlying contact is independently documented: emails published by WikiLeaks show DeLonge corresponding with Podesta in 2015 and 2016 about UFOs, Roswell and his interactions with McCasland, and referring to a call in January 2016.
What the people involved say
The second contested point came from a source friendly to the disclosure effort rather than hostile to it. Hal Puthoff, who co founded DeLonge's company To The Stars, told PARADIGM by text message that he believes the musician encountered McCasland and Weiss before he encountered Podesta.
That is a chronology claim, and if correct it damages the causal structure of Grusch's account rather than the fact of the meetings. Grusch's version requires Podesta's approval to come first and the advisors to follow from it. Puthoff's version has the advisors already in place. Neither man produced a document in support, and the archive records the disagreement rather than settling it.
To The Stars did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Weiss, who retired from Lockheed Martin in 2018, did not immediately respond to a request left with Ultra Maritime, a company on whose board he serves.
The third named participant cannot be asked. William Neil McCasland, a retired United States Air Force major general who commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, has been a missing person since February 2026. CBS News reported that McCasland, then 68, was last seen at his Albuquerque home on the morning of 27 February 2026. The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office issued a silver alert, its sheriff John Allen said multiple agencies were assisting including the FBI Albuquerque Field Office, and the office said neighbourhood canvassing and interviews had not uncovered evidence of foul play. His whereabouts remain unknown.
The archive states plainly what that does and does not mean. A man's disappearance is a tragedy for his family and is not evidence about UFOs. It is relevant here only because he is one of the three people named in the disputed account, and because it is the reason that account cannot be checked against his own recollection.
Is the David Grusch on The Joe Rogan Experience: The Reptilian, Deep Sea Base and Podesta Claims (30 September 2026) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how could this be mundane. Almost all of it could be. A podcast interview is testimony, not evidence, and nothing in this episode is accompanied by a document, a photograph, a file number or a named corroborating witness. Grusch has consistently described himself as reporting what others told him rather than what he saw directly, and several of the most striking claims in this episode are explicitly second hand: he was informed of the reptilian incident, he was told of the deep sea base. The one claim he frames as first hand, that he viewed video of pale, bluish skinned humanoids, is a description of a viewing that no one else can confirm and that produced no releasable artifact.
The ordinary explanation for an interview like this is therefore not that anybody lied, but that a well placed officer is relaying the internal lore of a compartmented programme, and that such lore is not self verifying. The two claims in the episode that could be checked by a reporter in a day, the Burlison staff departure and the MITRE letter, both checked out, which is worth stating because it is evidence about the speaker's general reliability on verifiable matters. The claim that could be checked against a living named participant, the Podesta account, came back contested on the record within twenty four hours. That is the most informative single datum this case contains.
It is worth being precise about what Podesta actually contested. He did not deny the call. He confirmed it, named the subject matter as declassifying Defense Department files and reducing stigma, and disputed only the framing of it as an acclimatization programme he had authorised. A reader is entitled to notice that the gap between the two accounts is narrower than the headline suggests, and also that Podesta's own words concede the premise that the public does not yet have the full picture.
Pass two, if it is real. If Grusch's account is accurate then the United States government has held, for decades, physical evidence of non human intelligence and at least one record of a lethal exchange with it, and has run an influence effort through a musician and a presidential campaign chairman to soften public reaction in advance. That is an enormous claim and the evidence presented here does not carry it. The honest position is that this episode moved the public record in exactly one respect: it provoked John Podesta into acknowledging, for the first time, a 2016 UFO conversation with a Lockheed executive and an Air Force general.
The archive tiers this Unknown. There is no official narrative to weigh, the central claims are unfalsifiable from outside, and the two parties who contested the one checkable allegation did so on chronology and characterisation rather than by demonstrating anything false. Grusch has not recanted and no analyst has shown a method defeating any specific claim, so nothing here approaches the standard this archive requires for a Disputed or Discredited verdict.
Sources
- www.paradigm.news/p/exclusive-podesta-responds-to-gruschs
- podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2560-david-grusch/id360084272?i=1000792423503
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYPXINFcvmI
- www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1wv9kux/podesta_acknowledges_ufo_call_with_tom_delonge/
- www.cbsnews.com/news/retired-air-force-major-general-missing-new-mexico-william-neil-mccasland/
- www.military.com/daily-news/air-force/2026/03/15/missing-air-force-general-case-draws-fbi-and-online-conspiracy-theories.html
- www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/david-grusch-on-joe-rogan-experience/
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