Grusch private NYC presentation — r/UFOs first-hand account (Jan 2024)
What: the full attendee account of a private ~60-person David Grusch presentation in New York (ca. late 2023 / early Jan 2024). Thread: r/UFOs 191yshx, “David Grusch first hand experience: He was part of an extremely secret program…”, by u/aryelbcn, 08 Jan 2024 (~4.1k upvotes, “News” flair), elevating an earlier comment by u/Hvbears88 (the claimed attendee) in thread 18zv05e. The original Hvbears88 account was deleted with the user’s account; the complete text survives as an in-thread repost (“Full comments by u/Hvbears88”), reproduced verbatim below. Two photos purportedly showing Grusch at the talk were posted (“second person looks like Chuck McCullough”). Captured: 2026-06-06 via redlib mirror (reddit.com/old.reddit 403’d). Analysis: grusch-career-and-claims.
Reliability: low — read as lore, not testimony. An anonymous attendee’s recollection of an unrecorded private talk, relayed on Reddit, source account deleted. Secondhand-of-secondhand and unverifiable. Captured in full because it circulates heavily and bears on the Grusch record — with the caveats below on what it does and doesn’t actually claim.
Full account (verbatim, u/Hvbears88)
I actually went to a private 60-person presentation with David grusch as the speaker. This was mostly all private citizens. As in professors, lawyers, business people, a few scientists, retired military, current fbi, and other government agency members. In the end, we were allowed to ask questions. Some asked him about this, and what he said was that he was part of an extremely secret program that had figured out how to track and find uap’s in our atmosphere and near earth orbit. He said his oped will include much more details regarding this. It was hosted by a wall street big wigs and his lawyer friend. It was sort of a small saloon style talk. David also did it for free. Even went as far as to fly in to NYC just for this. He had arrived only a few hours beforehand and then left 1st thing the next day. The idea was to get a group of both skeptics and believers from all these different walks of life for a talk regarding David and the things he has said. Most of the people that left had left as believers. Or at the very least believed that David was not lying and truly believed everything he said.
He also mentioned a few other things that I haven’t heard him say before. Like that, he was told about a uap that was in our possession that had a diameter of around 40 ft, but once u went inside, it was the size of a football field. They believed that the object was somehow able to manipulate both space and time. He also said that the object was both using and creating energy that was more than a terawatt when measured. Which is an absolutely ridiculous amount of power, something along the lines of 1,000,000,000,000 watts.
He also mentioned that he had recently been informed that a US adversary was considering full disclosure to get out ahead of the US and that he passed this information along to the US government.
He also alluded to the retaliation that was had taken against him. It sounded pretty terrifying, and he wasn’t the only one to be retaliated against. Multiple people involved in not only his investigation but also his fellow peers in the uap task force, such as Jay stratton, were also threatened. He wouldn’t go too much into [it] since it’s an open investigation, but these people pretty [much] showed him that they could touch him or his family any time they wanted.
He also mentioned that the US has taken part in a fair amount of crash retrievals before 1933. Also that we wouldn’t be surprised by what the NHI look like, such as they look like the typical grey and they aren’t sure where these being have come from. There is also a chance that they are extra dimensional, but that it could also just seem this way because of the technology they use rather than them being actual extra dimensional beings.
Interestingly, he also mentioned how many people know the full scope of the phenomenon to be no more then 50 people, but it wasn’t clear whether this meant 50 people currently alive or 50 people ever in history.
All in all, it was extremely interesting and pretty hopeful for the future of disclosure (This was after the uap amendment was shut down.) and that he believes we will know much more in the near future. And apparently, it was the only private non goverment talk that he has done so far. … He is extremely smart… My opinion is that he is the real deal… So, either way you cut it, I believe he is telling the truth as he knows it.
About how they tracked UAP: No, i believe he said that this had something to do with a frequency that they can track or some kind of signature.
Edit: the user deleted his account.
Caveats the framework requires
- The “first hand experience” headline overreads the content. What’s attributed firsthand is being “part of a program that figured out how to track UAPs” — plausibly just his on-record UAP Task Force role (he represented the NRO on the UAPTF, 2019–21; tracking/identification is that body’s remit). The exotic items (the football-field craft, pre-1933 retrievals, the ~50-person figure) are explicitly framed as “he was told / was informed” — the same secondhand register as his sworn testimony (secondhand knowledge; denied access). The account does not, on its own text, establish a firsthand-involvement claim contradicting his testimony; the OP title does the overclaiming.
- The oft-quoted “2.995–3 GHz frequency” is not from the talk. That figure appears in the comments, where a user speculates and cites atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald — not in Hvbears88’s account, which says only “a frequency / signature.” Don’t attribute the number to Grusch.
- The retaliation/Stratton detail is the most cross-relevant new item — it aligns with Jay Stratton’s own later on-camera “if I wind up… floating in the Potomac” disclosure and the broader pre-emptive-threat pattern — but it is still this anonymous attendee’s paraphrase of what Grusch said, not independent confirmation.
The substantive claims echo Grusch’s on-record material — the “football-field-sized” craft (cf. his Le Parisien interview), the pre-1933 retrieval timeline (cf. the 1933 Magenta claim), and the small-compartment framing — at a strictly lower evidentiary tier (anonymous, unrecorded, deleted-source). The thread’s comments are mostly community speculation, not corroboration.