Top US officials have ‘first-hand knowledge’ of UFOs: Sen. Marco Rubio

High-ranking US government officials have “first-hand knowledge” of a secret Pentagon crash retrieval program for UFOs, Sen. Marco Rubio has claimed.

Rubio (R-Fla.), who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NewsNation Monday that “serious” whistleblowers — who “have held very high clearances and high positions within our government” — have come forward to the panel about several incidents in recent years.

“Some of these people still work in the government,” the 52-year-old Rubio told the outlet. “And frankly, a lot of them are very fearful, fearful of their jobs, fearful [of] their clearances, fearful of their career, and some, frankly, are fearful of harm coming to them.”

Rubio declined to say whether he found the whistleblowers “either not credible or credible, because we have no basis” to judge their stories.

“Understand, some of these claims are things that are beyond, sort of the realm of what any of us has ever dealt with,” he added.

Rubio’s comments bolster the testimony of an Air Force veteran and former intelligence official who recently told Congress he had “proof” that the US government had been covertly storing extraterrestrial aircraft for decades.

“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” 36-year-old David Grusch, told NewsNation earlier this month. “Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true.”

Grusch said the US government even received a tip from the Vatican about a UFO — and later recovered the alien craft from Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Grusch has cited his experience as an intelligence officer to back up his astounding claims, but has yet to make solid evidence public.

Rubio told NewsNation that the Intelligence Committee witnesses were likely the same people Grusch cited in his public remarks about the UFO program.

The committee unanimously voted last week to halt funding for government programs that study “unidentified anomalous phenomena” without providing information about their findings to Congress or Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

Grusch filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community over the alleged cover-up, which last year concluded that his claims were “credible and urgent,” according to the science, tech and defense outlet The Debrief. His claims were apparently forwarded on to Haines and the Senate Intelligence Committee, among others.

The Department of Defense has denied the allegations, saying in a statement that Grusch’s taskforce “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Grusch’s taskforce, which was renamed the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022, has also denied the allegations.

Its director, Sean Kirkpatrick, said during a NASA meeting in May that over the past 27 years, just two of the 800 UFO sightings reported to the Pentagon were “possibly really anomalous.”

Rubio cautioned his fellow committee members to approach the shocking claims “without any prejudgment or jumping to any conclusions in one direction or another.”