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.
Enrichment, 6 October 2026. Two developments have firmed up around the McCasland thread, and they pull in opposite directions.
First, what Grusch actually said about him in this same episode. Los Angeles Magazine reported on 5 October 2026 that Grusch invoked McCasland while describing what he claims is government video of deceased, human-looking beings with pale or bluish-white skin, recalling that McCasland had allegedly told Tom DeLonge to "Think of the Greek Gods". "And now I kind of understand what he meant," Grusch told Rogan, and when Rogan returned to the comparison Grusch said it was "clearly" what McCasland had been hinting at. He then turned to the disappearance. "There's a lot of reasons why McCasland's disappearance was very concerning," he said. "He walked out of his residence in Albuquerque and vanished. Nobody knows what happened to the guy." He closed with "Just saying, I know a lot about General McCasland," and did not elaborate, produce evidence, or connect the disappearance to any programme.
The deflating context from the same interview belongs beside that, because Grusch supplied it himself. He acknowledged McCasland had experienced mental-health and age-related issues, which he characterised as "nothing major". He explicitly declined to rule out suicide, noting he had lost friends to suicide during his military career. And when Rogan raised the broader claim that scientists connected to UAP or reverse-engineering work had been dying or disappearing, Grusch pushed back on it: "To be fair, it was a little overblown," he said, adding that he did not believe there was "a ton of correlation". The witness at the centre of the story declined to endorse the theory his audience was reaching for, and that refusal is evidence about the witness.
Second, the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office has corrected several claims that circulated about the case, in a statement to Los Angeles Magazine published 26 June 2026. The office said its reports do not reference the Pentagon, contrary to published accounts describing McCasland as trying to leave a "Pentagon's secret research center". It said his wife never claimed he was making a "desperate attempt" to resign. Most consequentially, it said he held a standard retiree security clearance rather than an active operational clearance, which undercuts the premise doing the most work in the speculation, namely his assumed current access; a committee colleague who had said on body-camera footage that she believed he held top-level clearances later clarified that she was not certain. The office said the detective on the case was involved solely in her capacity as a Missing Persons detective, against reports tying her to an anti-gang and trafficking unit. And it stated plainly: "At this time, there is no known connection between this case and human trafficking, gang activity, or other missing scientist cases." The office had also previously said McCasland stepped down from several retiree-affiliated working groups because of what he described as "brain fog", though the outlet notes it could not find support for that in its own FOIA return and has asked for clarification, so that detail is carried here as the office's statement rather than as an established fact.
The physical record from the same sheriff's material: the last confirmed image of McCasland is REI surveillance footage from 26 February 2026 showing him carrying a large white item, a boxed item and what appears to be a first-aid kit, consistent with preparation for a planned trip with friends. Hiking boots, a Garmin watch, his GPS equipment, his medication, which his wife confirmed he did not need to survive, and his iPhone were all located. His wallet, a .38-caliber revolver with leather holster and a distinctive red backpack remain missing.
None of this resolves the disappearance, which remains an active missing-persons investigation with no evidence of foul play reported. What it does is separate the documented record from the speculation built on top of it, which is what the sheriff's office has asked the public to do.
UPDATE, 7 October 2026: the record on the disappearance of Neil McCasland is fuller than the coverage of it, and it points away from the reading now circulating.
On 6 October 2026 the Daily Mail ran a piece headlined "UFO ties of missing scientist who vanished days after Trump's alien files order fuel new allegations", which was posted to r/UFOs and travelled widely. The framing rests on proximity: McCasland disappeared on 27 February 2026, eight days after the 19 February announcement on releasing UFO files, and Grusch, on the podcast episode this case is about, called it "very bizarre" and noted it fell "within a week of Trump coming out".
What that coverage does not foreground is that the substance of the disappearance has been on the public record since the spring, and it describes something else entirely. A 911 call from the day McCasland vanished, obtained by Law and Crime Network and reported on 3 April 2026, records his wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, telling the dispatcher that she had "some indication that he planned not to be found". She said he had changed his clothes, turned his phone off and left it behind, which she called "kind of deliberate, because he's always got his phone". She said that the couple had been seeing a doctor for anxiety, short-term memory loss and lack of sleep, and that her husband had been saying that "if his brain and body keep deteriorating, he doesn't want to live like that", though she had not taken him to be serious at the time. She had left for a doctor's appointment at about 11:10 that morning and returned at noon to find him gone, with the cars and bikes still in the garage, so she believed he had left on foot. The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office reported that a .38 calibre revolver, his hiking boots and his wallet were missing from the house.
His wife told police in February that she did not believe foul play was involved. As of the October coverage, local police had reported no updates in the case, and he remains missing.
This archive records all of that for a specific reason. The temporal coincidence is real, and it is the only element of the story that supports the reading being drawn from it. Set against it is a documented account, from the person closest to him and from the sheriff's office, of a man in cognitive decline who appears to have left his home deliberately and on foot, carrying a firearm, having said he did not want to live with further deterioration. Those facts were available six months before the story was recirculated as fresh allegation, and the October coverage is new framing rather than new information.
The honest position is that nothing here bears on whether Grusch's account of McCasland's role is accurate, and that the disappearance itself is most consistent with the explanation his own family gave the police on the day. It is not evidence for a UFO-related disappearance, and this case does not treat it as such.
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/
- lamag.com/science/david-grusch-makes-cryptic-new-claims-about-missing-air-force-general-neil-mccasland/
- lamag.com/crimeinla/exclusive-sheriff-pushes-back-on-reports-surrounding-retired-missing-air-force-general-william-neil-mccasland/
- www.yahoo.com/news/articles/wife-missing-air-force-general-195720227.html
- www.newsnationnow.com/missing/missing-air-force-general-wife-911/
- www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16187503/missing-air-force-general-ufo-ties-albuquerque.html
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