The Capitol Hill UFO briefing last week made headlines, but Joshua Golembeske says the most jaw-dropping moment never made it to air.

Golembeske, lead UFO investigator and head of content at Gaia.com and host of Cosmic Disclosure, was in the room for the press event featuring whistleblower David Grusch and four sitting lawmakers. I reached out to get his account of what actually happened — and what he described goes well past anything the news cycle covered.

“I spoke directly with a former member of the UAP Task Force who told me something wild,” he told VICE. “She believes she may have encountered two extraterrestrials in public. They were humanoid enough to blend in, wore disguises, but when they revealed their eyes, something was clearly off.” He went on: “She confirmed the story through her own contacts — there are NHI living in certain locations in the US, human enough to walk around undetected. I need more evidence before I’d call it confirmed truth, but it’s a stunning development.”

UFO Investigator Says He Heard Claims About Disguised Non-Human Intelligence at Capitol Hill Briefing: ‘The Biggest Story in Human History’

That was off-camera. On-camera, the energy in the room was, by Golembeske’s account, dead serious across the board. “Whistleblowers are being threatened. Scientists connected to legacy UAP programs are vanishing — General McCasland among them. And unnamed officials are actively trying to get President Trump to shut disclosure down,” he said. “In my opinion, this is the biggest story in human history.”

On David Grusch

Grusch, the intelligence officer whose 2023 congressional testimony cracked open the mainstream conversation around UAP retrieval programs, was a central figure at the briefing. Golembeske didn’t hedge on his assessment. “This is a man whose job was to hand the President the daily intelligence briefings. His claims have been corroborated by multiple other whistleblowers, both publicly and behind the scenes. Whatever you think about the subject matter, David Grusch is an American hero trying to do the right thing at serious personal cost.”

When Grusch was asked in 2023 whether the US had made contact with non-human intelligence, he said he couldn’t answer in a public setting — only in a SCIF. Congress was then denied access to that SCIF. “If the answer were simply ‘no,’ he would have said no on the spot,” Golembeske said. “He didn’t.”

What the government isn’t saying yet

The language coming out of these briefings has shifted. Terms like “non-human intelligence” and “sentient plasmoid life” are now entering the congressional record alongside “bipedal type life,” and Golembeske says that distinction is deliberate. “We’re not just dealing with little green men from another planet. There are likely multiple distinct phenomena happening simultaneously.”

As for physical evidence, he didn’t equivocate. “One hundred percent. I believe we have both craft and bodies in our possession.” He named specific sites — Wright-Patterson in Ohio, S-4 at Papoose Lake, where Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering nine non-human craft in the late ’80s, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He also pointed to private industry. “George Knapp testified before Congress that Bigelow Aerospace actually negotiated a deal with Lockheed Martin to acquire unusual material — described as ‘not made here’ — stored at a classified facility in California. The major defense contractors have stayed completely silent on these claims. That silence is its own kind of answer.”

The legislative wall

On the question of whether Congress can actually force disclosure, Golembeske didn’t hold back. The UAP Disclosure Act was introduced in 2023 as a serious piece of legislation — an independent review board, mandatory records collection, and even eminent domain authority over materials held by private aerospace contractors. It went into the National Defense Authorization Act conference process and came out gutted. “It’s been reintroduced in 2024 and again in 2025, and it keeps getting blocked,” he said. “What’s missing is an independent Review Board with actual authority — not advisory, not advisory-adjacent, but a body that can compel disclosure the way the JFK Records Act did.”

He added that the people blocking it may have more than secrecy to protect. “They may be protecting themselves from criminal exposure.”

The Spielberg factor

The timing of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day hitting theaters the same week as the Capitol Hill briefing wasn’t lost on Golembeske. “It doesn’t feel like a coincidence — not with the press conference this week and multiple document and video drops from the Department of Defense,” he said. “The film is fictional, but it’s built on real themes: secret technologies, crash retrievals, ET contact, consciousness. The subject matter is accurate in ways that go beyond what most mainstream productions have touched.”

If full disclosure does come, he expects a gradual rollout by design. Official acknowledgment first, then craft imagery, then footage of ET races and plasmoid phenomena, and eventually the question he thinks changes everything. “Why are they here? That’s the Pandora’s box. Once that opens, nothing goes back to the way it was.”