WASHINGTON D.C.- Florida Senator Marco Rubio says elected officials have an obligation to listen to whistleblowers who have came forward this summer claiming the United States has a covert UFO crash retrieval program that has operated for decades with no oversight.

On June 5  David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, revealed publicly in an interview with The Debrief that he had given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about the covert programs, alleging that they are in possession of retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

Grusch served as a Senior Intelligence Capabilities Integration Officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, cleared at the Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information level.

“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch said about the secret retrieval programs in an interview with journalist Ross Coulthart.

“I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” Grusch continued. “People started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.”

Rubio, who has previously led a bipartisan push for full funding of the Pentagon’s unidentified aerial phenomena focused All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said more whistleblowers in addition to Grusch have came forward from the intelligence community.

“People who we entrusted to do some really important things for our county, are saying some pretty incredible things that I think we have an obligation to take seriously and listen to,” said Rubio in an interview with News Nation. “I don’t think you go from being the commander of a naval fighting wing off an aircraft carrier to being some lunatic that’s out to mislead the government.”

“We’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can,” Rubio said of additional whistleblowers. “And frankly, a lot of them are very fearful of their jobs, fearful of harm coming to them.”

Rubio says that if Grusch’s claims of a covert crash retrieval program being kept from oversight by Congress are true, it would be extremely problematic.

“If that is accurate what you’re saying is that there within the government of the United States is a group of people that believe that they possess something that they don’t need to share with anybody, including elected officials who they view as temporary employees of the government. In essence some sort of internal military complex that’s their own government and is accountable to no one.”