On November 10, 2023, David Grusch contacted the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the urging of congressional staff members. According to an internal AARO memorandum dated January 8, 2024, he agreed — at that moment — to proceed with an interview. The document ends there, mid-sentence, the page cut off by a FOIA redaction. Whether Grusch ever followed through is, officially, unknown.

That truncated sentence is the sharpest edge in a document that repays careful reading. The memo — case number 330UAP000032, reviewed by AARO's chief of staff and released in part on March 27, 2025, then cleared for open publication by the Defense Department's Office of Prepublication and Security Review on June 13, 2025 — is a formal accounting of every attempt AARO made to sit down with the man whose public testimony before Congress in July 2023 triggered the most intense congressional scrutiny of UAP in decades. The attempts span nearly five months, involve at least two redacted intermediaries, a Professional Staff Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Every approach before November 10 failed. What happened after remains a gap the document does not fill.

Seven attempts, zero interviews on the record

The sequence the memo lays out is worth tracing precisely, because it tells a story that neither Grusch's supporters nor AARO's critics have fully reckoned with.

Between June 8 and June 13, 2023 — weeks before Grusch testified publicly — AARO's director engaged in a dialogue with a redacted individual described as "a known close associate" of Grusch, encouraging that person to have Grusch contact the office. On June 12 and 13, the director discussed Grusch's refusal with a Professional Staff Member of the Senate intelligence committee. The PSM offered to get Grusch's email address, which AARO did not have. The director made it clear the office lacked even basic contact information for the man.

On June 26, AARO staff reached out to a second redacted interviewee and asked for Grusch's phone number. That person relayed the invitation. It was rebuffed. Two days later, after Grusch's public congressional appearance, the AARO director went back to the Senate intelligence committee's PSM and asked for any information Grusch had reported to Congress that AARO might be able to verify. The director also reminded the staffer of an existing agreement: if a witness was apprehensive about coming to AARO, the office would send a staff member to congressional spaces to conduct the interview there, recording the information into the U.S. government record in support of the Historical Record Report.

On July 27, AARO staff interviewed one of the redacted associates — who mentioned he would be having dinner with Grusch the following day — and asked him to extend yet another invitation. The memo notes the office made clear the interview would be conducted in a secure facility and that the tone would be "friendly and non-confrontational, as are all AARO interviews." On October 6, a secure call with another close associate produced a similar request. Then came November 10 — and the cutoff.

"friendly and non-confrontational, as are all AARO interviews."

The formal conclusion of the memo states plainly that invitations to interview Grusch "regarding his claimed knowledge of U.S. Government possession of extra-terrestrial material and reverse-engineering programs were met with negative results."

That characterization raises its own tension. AARO, in multiple public settings, was simultaneously telling Congress and the press that it had found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity or off-world technology. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then AARO's director, told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities in April 2023: "I should also state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics." He added, pointedly: "Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of."

The two statements exist in uncomfortable proximity. AARO was publicly citing insufficient data as the reason it could not close anomalous cases — while privately documenting its inability to obtain the testimony of the government's most prominent UAP whistleblower. Kirkpatrick's April 2023 testimony to the subcommittee predated the first outreach to Grusch by about six weeks.

What the Historical Record Report says — and doesn't

The January 2024 memo was written in support of AARO's Historical Record Report, Volume I, published in February 2024 and cleared for open publication on March 6, 2024. That report is, by any measure, a serious piece of institutional work: a chronological accounting of U.S. government UAP investigatory programs stretching from Project SAUCER in 1946 through AARO's own establishment on July 15, 2022. It documents the Robertson Panel, the Condon Report, the National Academy of Sciences' assessment of that report, the Roswell inquiries, AATIP, the UAPTF — the full institutional lineage.

In its section assessing interviewee claims of hidden UAP programs, the report reaches several specific conclusions. A sample of alleged alien spacecraft is described as "an ordinary, terrestrial metal alloy." The 1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate on UFOs is "assessed to be not authentic." Claims involving a former CIA official and the movement of alleged UAP crash material were "denied on the record." The report also states that AARO "has discovered no official UAP nondisclosure agreements."

Each of those findings is a government claim, not an independently verified fact. The report itself was written by the office whose conclusions it is presenting, reviewed and cleared by that office, and released by that office. That's not an argument that the findings are wrong. It is an argument for reading them with appropriate precision.

What the Historical Record Report does not contain is any testimony from David Grusch — the single most prominent source for the most explosive claims the report was partly designed to assess. That absence is structural. It is documented in the January 2024 memo. And it is not resolved by anything in the public record.

Douglas Dean Johnson, who tracks UAP legislation and related developments at douglasjohnson.ghost.io, has published a guide to UAP-related legislative proposals under consideration in Congress — including provisions that deal both directly and indirectly with AARO's mandate and the historical record process. Johnson, writing under his own name and flagging his Twitter handle, functions as an informed tracker of the legislative landscape, though his publication operates outside institutional journalism and his work should be read as advocacy-adjacent analysis rather than neutral reporting. His guide, originally posted in September 2023, reflects a moment when the legislative environment was actively shifting around AARO's authorities.

The FY24 National Defense Authorization Act, which codified AARO's historical review authorities at 44 U.S.C. 2107, is cited on the face of the Grusch memo itself — the legal authority under which the January 2024 document was eventually reviewed and released.

A separate piece on Johnson's site, published in May 2024, asks who Tonya P. Wilkerson is and what she has to do with UFOs. That question — her name appears in connection with AARO-adjacent activity — remains unanswered in any document currently available in the public record. Her role, if any, in the events described in the Grusch memo is unknown.

The identities of the two redacted individuals — described in the memo as Person (b)(6) and Interviewee (b)(6), both characterized as close associates of Grusch — are similarly protected. So is the identity of the Professional Staff Member from the Senate intelligence committee who served as an intermediary. And the identity of the PSM from Senate Armed Services who was also asked to encourage Grusch to cooperate.

The memo cuts off at the moment it matters most: November 10, 2023, Grusch contacts AARO, agrees to proceed, and the page ends. If a follow-up interview was conducted, it has not been released. If it was not conducted, that fact has not been officially confirmed.

The next document to watch is whatever record, if any, AARO holds of events after November 10, 2023 — either a completed interview transcript, a cancellation record, or a follow-up memo documenting that the agreement Grusch made that day was never fulfilled. That document, or its confirmed absence, is the one piece of evidence that would settle the central question the January 2024 memo leaves open.