Grusch says a UFO base is hidden deep in the ocean – but there is no evidence
David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, claimed on Joe Rogan's podcast that the government knows about an underwater facility spanning several city blocks that is used by extraterrestrials. The claim was made on September 30, and so far no public evidence supports it.
David Grusch, who served fourteen years in the Air Force and then worked as an intelligence officer for the National Reconnaissance Office, appeared on Joe Rogan's show on September 30 and added new details to his earlier claims. He said the government is aware of at least one giant underwater facility used by extraterrestrials as a "base of operations." In his words, "There's clearly some sort of base of operations in certain locations. It's large. Don't know when it got there... Like multiple city blocks type stuff," and he added that "stuff comes and goes" from there. Citing national security reasons, he did not disclose the exact location or how the military learned about it, saying only that the information came from Navy circles, which called the facility a "docudrama" of the 1989 film The Abyss.
Grusch also made an even more serious claim: he said he had seen allegedly contemporary, high-quality footage of bodies recovered from the wreckage of a crashed spacecraft of non-human origin. According to his claim, the beings had pale, bluish-white skin and are currently being kept in a frozen storage facility for further examination. Asked whether this footage could ever be made public, he answered "Probably," but added that because of the current low level of trust in government, physical evidence will also be needed, not just video.
What do we know, and what don't we?
We know for certain that Grusch testified under oath before Congress in 2023, and at that time he claimed that the government has for decades been running secret programs to recover and reverse-engineer crashed spacecraft of non-human origin. From 2019 to 2021 he represented the National Reconnaissance Office on a task force investigating UFOs, then became a whistleblower after, according to his claim, elements of the government obstructed Congress's oversight work on the matter. We also know that Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett, a member of the House oversight committee dealing with UFO reports, previously made a similar claim: according to him, unidentified underwater craft are regularly sighted in five or six specific deep-sea areas, presumably near the Bahamas, in the Atlantic Ocean, moving much faster than the Navy's vehicles.
What we don't know: neither Grusch nor Burchett has released any verifiable evidence, footage or document that would support these claims. Grusch did not name the location of the base, nor did he reveal on the basis of what specific data or methods the Navy sources he cited reached this conclusion. The military and the White House have maintained for decades that no physical evidence has been found that would prove the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial life.
The story thus stands, for now, where most similar whistleblower claims do: it rests on the credibility of a former official and on secondhand information that can be neither confirmed nor refuted from the currently public data.
The sober take
So far, no public document, footage or independent confirmation supports Grusch's claim, and the military and the White House have stated for decades that they have found no physical evidence of the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial life.