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Never saw anything unusual himself
Nothing spooky
David Grusch has a physics degree and has watched the sky since middle school. In all that time he has seen a couple of interesting things that could have been satellite passes, and nothing spooky. He grew up on X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, read A Brief History of Time and Isaac Asimov as a teenager, and learned about the Drake equation.
The first clues
The first clues came sideways. Around 2009 he read AAWSAP defense intelligence reference documents about magnetohydrodynamic propulsion and cloaking and had no idea why the DIA was looking into it. About ten years into his career, imagery analysts mentioned being told to airbrush stuff out of photos, and it was round. A year of what he calls Smoking Man recruitment promised bizarre accesses, then went nowhere.
The Pentagon question
In spring 2017, while briefing the CIA's deputy director of staff, the chief of a very sensitive office pulled him aside and asked about a program at the Pentagon. He had been briefed on almost every DoD program and drew a blank. In early 2019 he joined the Navy task force that became the DoD UAP task force, as the NRO representative.
Why do satellites fool amateur astronomers?
Satellites reflect sunlight, so they appear as steady points moving silently across the sky. Before 2018, Iridium satellites produced flares as bright as magnitude minus 8, which outshone every star and planet. The International Space Station reaches about magnitude minus 5, brighter than Venus at its best. Starlink satellites launched in groups in 2019 formed lines of lights that many viewers had never seen before.
What was the AAWSAP program?
The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program ran from 2008 to 2012 under the Defense Intelligence Agency. The contract went to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, a company founded by the hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. It produced dozens of technical reports called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on subjects such as advanced propulsion and invisibility. Funding was about 22 million dollars.
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