David Grusch went back on The Joe Rogan Experience on September 30, nearly three years after his first appearance and a little over three years after he told a House Oversight subcommittee, under oath, that the United States holds recovered craft and “non-human” remains. Episode #2560 runs two hours and thirty-six minutes and had more than 1.5 million YouTube views by the afternoon of October 1, according to the video's public counter. Grusch went well beyond his 2023 testimony, with accounts of bodies on video and of craft brought down by conflict, and nearly all of it is secondhand: things he says he saw on video, read in files, or heard from colleagues he will not name.
Two passages stand out. In one, Grusch floated the idea that some of the glowing orbs reported by pilots could be “sentient plasmoid,” and said academic papers on the idea already exist. In the other, asked why these craft keep crashing, he answered that “some of it is NHI versus NHI” and that the government has “documented” what it perceives as conflict between different non-human intelligences. This briefing identifies a paper that fits his description, shows what is actually in it, and sets out the rest of the interview with the evidence for each claim marked.
A note on quotes: the passages below are taken from the episode's published transcript on Podscripts, which is machine-generated. We have quoted it as written, with ellipses marking omissions, and given the timestamps so every quote can be checked against the audio.
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The Space Shuttle Columbia's tethered satellite snaps loose. Camera footage of glowing objects drifting near the tether becomes the most-cited “space plasma” video on the internet. NASA said the objects were misidentified debris.
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Grusch testifies under oath that the U.S. has a crash-retrieval program and recovered “non-human” biologics. He offers no documents in open session.
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Grusch's first appearance on Rogan's show.
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The Pentagon's UAP office publishes Volume 1 of its historical report and concludes it found no verifiable evidence of recovered extraterrestrial technology.
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Rhawn Joseph and five co-authors publish the 109-page paper arguing some UAP are plasma life forms.
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Grusch joins Rep. Eric Burlison's office as a special advisor on UAP. On Rogan he called Burlison his former boss and said he has since left.
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Grusch's second Rogan appearance. Sentient plasmoids, NHI conflict, recovered bodies.
The Paper He Didn't Name
The plasmoid passage begins about 52 minutes and 55 seconds in, when Rogan asks what these things are and what they can do. Grusch divides the subject into “physical and non-physical” UAP and continues:
“So, for example, the orbs, could that be sentient plasmoid, possibly? … So plasma that has consciousness.” David Grusch, JRE #2560, 00:53:00
He hedged it immediately: “I mean, this is, of course, a theoretical framework. And once again, I don't have a PhD. But it's theoretical that there is a life form that is a plasma-based life form. And there's already papers on the open Internet about this.” At 00:53:46 someone in the studio asks for the title. No title is given. Grusch calls it “a academic assessment of a possibility of the orbs” written “a couple years ago,” and moves on.
So the interview itself does not identify the paper. The best match we found is Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Extraterrestrial Life, Plasmoids, Shape Shifters, Replicons, Thunderstorms, Lightning, Hallucinations, Aircraft Disasters, Ocean Sightings, published on October 28, 2024 in the Journal of Modern Physics. It is open access, 109 pages long, and its authors are Rhawn Gabriel Joseph of the Astrobiology Research Center in California, Olivier Planchon of the French national research agency CNRS, Christopher Impey of the University of Arizona's astronomy department, Richard Armstrong of Aston University, Carl Gibson of the University of California, San Diego, and Rudolph Schild, formerly of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The same group published a shorter companion paper in the same journal in March 2024, Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere: Plasmas, UAP, Pre-Life, Fourth State of Matter. Either fits “a couple years ago.” We have not confirmed with Grusch which one, if either, he meant.
What the Paper Actually Shows
The paper's evidence is mostly freeze frames from NASA Space Shuttle video, chiefly STS-75's tether footage and night passes over thunderstorms, which its captions say were processed with filtering and anti-blur software. Its abstract says these “self-illuminating, pulsating, plasma-like UAP/UFO (‘plasmoids’)” are “attracted to electromagnetic activity,” make “90 to 180-degree turns,” collide with one another, and gather above storms in “the air corridor favored by commercial and military aircraft.” Going further than Grusch did on Rogan, it hypothesizes that plasmoids “may be responsible for at least some unexplained, inexplicable aircraft disasters,” and that their effect on “mental activity” might induce “hallucinations of ‘alien abductions.’”
On the central question, the authors split. Page 1851 reads: “Three of the authors of this report (Joseph, Armstrong, Schild) believe these plasmoids are alive, have achieved consciousness, and represent a fourth domain of life.” The next sentence pulls back: “But then what looks like purposeful behavior and complex social interactions leads us back to the dangers of anthropomorphizing.” Impey, Planchon and Gibson are not listed among the believers. The paper also says plainly that plasmoids “cannot account for all UAPs, which may include extraterrestrial spacecraft from other worlds.”
The magnification is the paper's weakest point. A shuttle video frame holds a fixed amount of detail, and filtering software can make a blur look like a shape without recovering structure the camera never recorded. When the paper reports “nucleus/voids” and structures it compares to the “nervous system of invertebrates” inside objects that are small specks in the original frames, much of what it reports may come from the processing.
Grusch's Other Answer: A Craft Inside the Glow
Right after the plasmoid remark, Grusch offered a second, more mechanical possibility: “could the orbs actually be physical craft, but they have a sheath of plasma around it?” He tied that to magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, or MHD, which pushes a conductive fluid with crossed electric and magnetic fields. He compared it to the silent “caterpillar drive” in The Hunt for Red October and said that in air “you have to create a plasma.” His conclusion: “one of the byproducts of an air breathing MHD system is plasma around it. So depending on the size of the orb, it is conceivable that there's a physical craft behind it as well.” He credited the idea to a Defense Intelligence Reference Document from AAWSAP, the 2008 to 2010 Pentagon program whose studies were republished in PURSUE Release 06, and again called it “a theory.”
The two ideas pull in different directions, since one makes the orb the organism and the other makes it a by-product of a machine. Grusch offered both in about two minutes and endorsed neither.
“They War in the Sky”
The conflict claim came at about 1:16:50, when Rogan asked why these things keep crashing. “So some of it is NHI versus NHI,” Grusch said, using the government's shorthand for non-human intelligence. “They war in the sky.” He returned to it five minutes later: “there apparently is NHI versus NHI warfare. We've documented that. … In collection, what we perceive as warfare.” Pressed on whether it might be something else, he said: “it looks like conflict. It smells like conflict.”
The example he gave is a retrieval in which a craft he associates with reptilian beings crashed with dead gray-type beings at the same site, which Rogan summarized as the two “duking it out.” Grusch answered, “Yeah. I guess. I guess,” and said he knows people who were there. Asked how often it has happened, he said: “I don't know the total number of like, adversarial conflict crashes, but I mean, it seems to be at least a dozen or two.” Later, near 2:13, he said U.S. personnel were hurt and killed when living beings at a crash site “posed a threat,” and declined to give details: “I'll let the people who were there tell their story.”
Here the plasmoid paper and Grusch's account brush against each other. The paper devotes a section to plasmoids “targeting, colliding, piercing” each other in shuttle footage and suggests such collisions, seen from the ground, “might be interpreted as spheres at battle.” That is a different claim from Grusch's, because the paper describes electrically charged plasma colliding in the upper atmosphere while Grusch describes physical craft brought down with bodies aboard, and neither supports the other.
The Rest of the Interview
Bodies on video. Grusch said he watched “audiovisual” footage of “dead cadavers on the ground” at a retrieval, which he called “contemporary” but would not date, to protect sources. Asked what they looked like, he said “human looking” and “very, very beautiful,” with “blueish, white” skin, and said there was genomic work comparing their genomes with ours, the result of which he does not know. He did not see the bodies in person. That is consistent with his sworn testimony in 2023, when Rep. Burlison asked whether he had seen any of the bodies and Grusch answered, “That is something I have not witnessed myself” (official hearing transcript). On Rogan he said he had since seen video, and that he “sat on that stuff for like years” before trusting it.
The 2004 disclosure exercise. Grusch described a November 2004 session at a federally funded research and development center in Northern Virginia where invited thinkers scored the pros and cons of disclosure and, in his telling, came out against it. The main worry, he said, was contractor liability rather than public panic: “these set of contractors got sole source contracts and exclusive access to this for internal research and development,” and the government feared legal challenges that could leave it liable for “billions of dollars.” “But that was the main reason,” he said. He said the meeting was framed as “just a hypothetical scenario” and that the reported sponsor, then-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, “denies it.” Part of this is on the government's record. AARO's 2024 historical report confirms that “an organization in Northern Virginia did conduct a study between 2004 and 2007” on the societal effects of disclosing evidence of extraterrestrial life, but says two former senior White House officials told it “the White House did not request it.” So the study is verified, the White House sponsorship is disputed, and the contractor-liability conclusion rests on Grusch alone.
Amnesty, with conditions. Grusch said he supports amnesty for people who served in the programs, structured “like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” and said he has friends who run the program who signed agreements carrying penalties up to treason.
The 1952 tape. Grusch said Burlison's letters produced the 1952 Edward Ruppelt recording released in PURSUE Release 06, which he described as an internal briefing to Lincoln Laboratory scientists. The PURSUE database dates the talk March 26, 1952 and places it in Boston; our Release 06 briefing covers what the recording contains. He also said Burlison's office sent formal written questions this summer to the MITRE Corporation, another federally funded research center, and that its counsel is working on a response. We have not seen that correspondence.
An Australian view of Blue Book. Grusch pointed listeners to a May 1971 memorandum by Harry Turner, then head of nuclear intelligence at Australia's Joint Intelligence Organisation, which he summarized as concluding that Project Blue Book “was a facade.” The Turner report was classified secret and is now held by the National Archives of Australia. It is one of the few things in the interview a reader can go and read, and it is one Australian analyst's view of American policy from the outside.
Timing. Asked about politics, Grusch said a “threshold announcement” could come before the midterms or the 2028 election and acknowledged it “could be used in political ways, too.”
What This Doesn't Prove
Two and a Half Hours, and Little a Reader Can Check Directly
1. Every extraordinary claim is secondhand or unseen. The bodies are on video Grusch watched under conditions he calls “sketchy”; the conflict crashes are “documented” in collection he cannot share; the deaths are stories he says others will tell. None of the crash, body or conflict claims comes with a document, a date, or a named witness. In March 2024, AARO's historical report concluded it had found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government ever recovered or reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology. Grusch disputes that report; he has not publicly produced anything that refutes it.
2. The plasmoid paper's venue is a warning sign. The Journal of Modern Physics is published by Scientific Research Publishing, an open-access publisher that, according to Wikipedia's entry on the company, is listed in Cabells' Predatory Reports and once accepted a randomly generated nonsense paper subject to minor revisions. Its lead author, Rhawn Joseph, founded the Journal of Cosmology, whose claim to be peer reviewed was disputed by scientists, as the same encyclopedia documents. That does not settle whether the paper is right, but “published in a physics journal” carries less weight here than it sounds.
3. The shuttle footage has a long-standing ordinary explanation. According to Wikipedia's account of the incident, NASA explained that the STS-75 objects were “misidentified debris,” and skeptics pointed out that objects that far away would have been large enough to see from the ground. If they were as large as the paper's own estimate of 0.1 to 4 square kilometers, the same objection applies. Small particles of ice and debris close to a camera focused at a distance appear as out-of-focus discs that all carry the same shape from the lens, and Figure 3 looks consistent with that.
4. The two halves of the story are not connected by evidence. Grusch did not name the paper, and the paper says nothing about crashes, bodies, or reptilian beings. The paper is a speculative reading of public video, and Grusch's crash accounts are unverified descriptions of classified material, so neither can be used to support the other.
What to Watch Next
- Whether Grusch names the paper. He told Rogan another interview is “not out yet.” If he cites the Joseph paper, its weaknesses become part of his argument; if he cites something else, this briefing will be updated.
- The witnesses he says will talk. Grusch repeatedly said the people present at these retrievals should tell their own stories. A named witness, on the record, would be the first real test of the conflict-crash claims.
- MITRE's answer to Burlison. Grusch said the company's counsel is working on a response to the office's written questions, which would be the first document to come out of these claims.
- PURSUE Release 07. Grusch said Burlison's letters produced the 1952 tape in Release 06. The next tranche will show whether anything he described on Rogan is in the government's own release queue.
The Honest Conclusion
The “sentient plasmoid” idea Grusch raised is real in the sense that a published paper argues it and half its authors say they believe it. The paper's evidence is enlarged shuttle video that NASA long ago attributed to debris, published in a journal with a poor reputation. Grusch himself called it theory, offered a mechanical alternative in the same breath, and did not say which paper he meant.
The conflict claims are a different category, specific and dependent entirely on Grusch's sources. He was a credentialed intelligence officer and said so; he also said, more than once, that he cannot show his evidence. That leaves readers where they have been since 2023, waiting for evidence that matches the account.
Joe Rogan Experience #2560 on YouTube, and the machine transcript on Podscripts with timestamps.
Joseph et al., the 109-page plasmoid paper, free to read. Figures 2, 3 and 39 are reproduced above.
The companion paper, Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere.
Grusch's sworn testimony, the baseline for everything he has said since.
The historical record report, Volume 1 (PDF), the government's answer to the crash-retrieval claims.
The Ruppelt recording (PR160) that Grusch credits to Burlison's letters.
Sources: The Joe Rogan Experience #2560, David Grusch (September 30, 2026) · Podscripts, JRE #2560 transcript · Joseph, Planchon, Impey, Armstrong, Gibson & Schild, Journal of Modern Physics 15:1760–1868 (October 28, 2024), CC BY 4.0 · Joseph et al., Journal of Modern Physics 15:322–376 (2024) · House Oversight hearing (July 26, 2023) · Rep. Eric Burlison, Grusch appointment (March 27, 2025) · AARO Historical Record Report, Volume 1 (2024) · Wikipedia, UFO sightings in outer space (STS-75) · Wikipedia, Scientific Research Publishing · Wikipedia, Journal of Cosmology · DVIDS, DOW-UAP-PR160 · TruthCapsuleTV, PURSUE Release 06 briefing. Figures from Joseph et al. (2024) are reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license; the photograph of Grusch is a frame from the House Oversight Committee's public broadcast of the July 2023 hearing.