New claims from a veteran investigative journalist suggest the modern UFO retrieval story didn’t start with David Grusch in 2023. It may have started in a room at Holloman Air Force Base in 1954, with President Dwight Eisenhower himself allegedly in attendance.
NewsNation special correspondent Ross Coulthart raised the claims on his “Reality Check” podcast, describing what he says were secret meetings between Eisenhower, senior military officials, and, according to some accounts, nonhuman intelligences. If accurate, the meetings would predate nearly every disclosure story that has surfaced in the decades since.
The Majestic-12 Connection
Coulthart ties the alleged 1954 meetings directly to the Majestic-12 documents, a set of files that first surfaced in 1984 through UFO researcher Jaime Shandera. The documents claim President Harry Truman created a secret committee in 1947 to manage the recovery of alien spacecraft.
Their authenticity has never been confirmed. In fact, a subsequent Air Force investigation determined at least one version of the documents was fake, and the FBI officially marked its file on the material “BOGUS.” Despite that, Coulthart says he believes a substantial portion of the broader MJ-12 material may still be genuine, and that the alleged Eisenhower-era meetings could be the connective tissue between Truman’s original 1947 committee and the retrieval programs described more recently by whistleblower David Grusch.
Where This Fits in the Bigger Picture
Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, testified before Congress in 2023 that the U.S. government has operated a decades-long program to recover and reverse-engineer non-human craft. If Coulthart’s timeline holds up, it would mean that program didn’t begin with Grusch’s generation of whistleblowers. It would mean it was already institutionalized at the highest level of government almost seventy years ago.
It’s worth being clear about where the evidence actually stands. No government agency has confirmed the Holloman meetings took place. The Majestic-12 documents remain disputed, and mainstream historical accounts of Eisenhower’s February 1954 disappearance attribute it to a dental emergency, not a briefing on retrieved craft. Coulthart himself acknowledges the provenance of the MJ-12 material is unconfirmed even as he argues for its partial authenticity.
What makes the claim notable isn’t proof. It’s the shape of the timeline. Truman allegedly starts a retrieval committee in 1947. Eisenhower allegedly locks it down as a formal program in 1954. Grusch says a version of that same program is still active today. Whether or not every link holds up, it’s the same story being told in three different eras, by three very different kinds of sources.
Source: NewsNation