More whistleblowers in the Pentagon have come forward with ‘first-hand knowledge’ of secret UFO crash retrieval programs, US Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has revealed.

Former National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) officer David Grusch made worldwide news earlier this month when he spoke out publicly for the first time about his own investigation into the top secret programs as part of a Pentagon UFO taskforce.

But now the Republican Florida Senator Rubio has added that other officials with ‘very high clearances’ who have occupied ‘high positions within our government’ have briefed the Senate Intelligence committee on their direct knowledge of top secret UFO crash retrieval programs.

Sen. Rubio said that some of these witnesses who provided their ‘first-hand knowledge or first-hand claims’ were likely some of the same individuals referenced by Grusch in his explosive public comments and formal complaint to the US Intelligence Community Inspector General.

Grusch, an Air Force veteran who went on to posts at both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the NRO, told the inspector general that he had faced illegal retaliation for his inquiries into these same highly classified UFO programs.

For their part, the inspector general described Grusch’s complaint as ‘credible and urgent’ in July 2022 — forwarding the filing to the US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Rubio’s own Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, among others.

Sen. Rubio emphasized that there has been similar credible threats to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s other unnamed witnesses, their livelihoods and their lives. 

‘I’m not trying to be evasive,’ Sen. Rubio said, ‘but I am trying to be protective of these people.’

‘A lot of these people came to us even before these protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,’ Rubio told NewsNation Monday. 

‘Some of these people still work in the government, and frankly a lot of them are very fearful,’ the Florida Republican notes, ‘fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career, and some frankly are fearful of harm coming to them.’ 

Rubio’s comments speak to the urgency of the recent whistleblower protections enacted as part of a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act last year.

But the senator’s comments also add context to the recent moves by the Senate Intelligence Committee where Rubio is vice chairman.   

Last week, the committee adopted a unanimous provision requiring an immediate halt to all funding for secret US government or defense contractor programs to retrieve or reverse-engineer unidentified craft of ‘non-earth’ or ‘exotic’ origin.

Despite the boldness of these legislative moves, Rubio was more circumspect about the full accuracy of these high-level whistleblowers’ claims.

‘I don’t find them either not credible or credible,’ Sen. Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil. ‘Understand some of these claims are things that are beyond the realm what any of us has ever dealt with.’

In Rubio’s assessment, the sheer number and stature of the first-hand witnesses who have briefed the intelligence committee is — by itself — a cause for concern and worthy of more attention.

‘Most of these people at some point, or maybe even currently, have held very high clearances, and high positions within our government,’ Rubio noted. 

‘So, you do ask yourself, ‘What incentive would so many people, with that kind of qualification, have to come forward and make something up?”

‘These are serious people,’ Rubio said. 

Given the stature of these sources and the volatility of their claims, the senator called for ‘a mature understanding’ from his fellow legislators, policymakers, and the general public — saying that he sees a duty to ‘intake the information without any prejudgment or jumping to any conclusions in one direction or another.’    

‘We’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can,’ Rubio said.

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• Manager’s £6m release clause could be easily taken care of by PIF-owned side
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• Al-Hilal has already looked into Ruben Neves, Bernardo Silva, and Alvaro Morata 

By Tamara Prenn For Mailonline

Published: 02:55 EDT, 23 June 2023 | Updated: 03:24 EDT, 23 June 2023