The Secret History of Dick Cheney's Prison for Space Aliens

​As many of you are undoubtedly aware, David Grusch made some rather bizarre claims on the Dr. Phil podcast this week, and one of the wildest was the allegation that Dick Cheney ran a space alien prison for extraterrestrials with psychic powers: “I know people who have had direct interactions in a detainment situation, which sounds very Star Trek and sounds very crazy, but it is true,” Grusch told Phil McGraw. “And I talked to a cabinet member, a former cabinet member about that, who directly worked the issue for a particular former vice president. You can guess which one, Darth Vader.” “Darth Vader” was a nickname given to Cheney, who served as George W. Bush’s vice president from 2001 to 2009, because of his hardline policies and aggressive defense of executive power, a moniker he embraced and said he was “proud” of.

​I was curious, though, about this notion that Cheney oversaw a gulag for Greys, so I decided to do a bit of research to uncover how the story developed. After looking into the claim, it seems that the story has gradually grown over time from a relatively innocuous origin until Grusch put the final touches on a massive conspiracy, now that Cheney is dead and can no longer sue for libel.
 
Our story begins back in the Gerald R. Ford Administration. As a member of Congress, Ford had been interested in UFOs and even held a Congressional hearing on the subject. Therefore, when he entered the executive branch and Richard Nixon’s resignation thrust him into power as president, members of the ufology community assumed they had an ally in the White House. Chariots of the Gods author Erich von Däniken sent a letter offering his advice, and former Project Blue Book scientist J. Allen Hynek, now with the Center for UFO Studies, similarly sought the administration’s support. A March 1975 letter from Hynek to Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, can be found in the Ford Administration archives, along with Rumsfeld’s brief reply. Hynek’s letter implies previous correspondence, but Rumsfeld’s brief pro-forma reply indicates no particular interest. At any rate, we know from the debate over how to best dismiss Erich von Däniken’s offer of assistance (which I obtained exclusively from the National Archives) that the Ford Administration had no special interest in UFOs, and indeed they made no public effort to continue Ford’s personal interest in the subject.
 
Nevertheless, the brief communication from Rumsfeld was enough to spark a bit of conspiratorial connection because when Rumsfeld left the White House a few months later to become Ford’s secretary of defense, he personally recommended Dick Cheney to serve as his successor as White House chief of staff. Cheney, ufologists assumed, first gained knowledge of UFOs from Rumsfeld during the transition, and he was serving as chief of staff in 1976, when the Defense Department informed the White House of a major UFO sighting in Tehran. (Skeptics would later conclude the sighting was of the planet Jupiter.) However, the communications were routine notices about events involving sensitive areas in the Middle East, and there is no evidence Cheney saw or acted on the report.
 
Cheney went on to serve as secretary of defense himself for George H. W. Bush, during the period when the government’s Project Stargate—the program for psychic powers and remote viewing—ended and some of its members transitioned into UFO research. Cheney then served as CEO of Halliburton until he led the vice-presidential selection search for Republican candidate George W. Bush in 2000 and selected himself.
 
While running for president, the younger Bush promised during a campaign event in Arkansas that he would task his vice president, Cheney, with investigating UFOs. This public connection seems to be the genesis of the idea that Cheney was somehow deeply involved in UFOs, something which does not appear in the public record prior to this point.
 
This suggestion that Cheney would be in charge of investigating flying saucers prompted UFO researcher Grant Cameron to call in to Diane Rehm’s WAMU radio talk show in April 2001 during a public Q&A to ask Cheney about his UFO involvement, shortly after Cheney became vice president. “Well, if I had been briefed on it,” Cheney replied, “I’m sure it was probably classified, and I couldn’t talk about it.” UFO researchers at the time fixated on Cheney’s offhand remark that UFO secrets would be classified, implying there was UFO information beyond the Project Blue Book findings, and ignored his later comment to a follow-up from Rehm that neither he nor the Bush Administration had come across the subject since taking office nor had any meetings about it.
 
Shortly after, a man named going by the name Connon O’Ryan, who claimed to have been a CIA assassin, alleged that he saw Cheney inspecting dead aliens and crashed saucers in a facility near Area 51 in 1991, when Cheney was the elder Bush’s defense secretary, and that a photograph of Cheney posing with a captured UFO exists. O’Ryan, as the man was then known, had allegedly first made the claims to ufologist Wendelle Stevens in 1991, though they were not published at the time, but now he made them publicly in the 2001 documentary UFO Hypotheses: S4 Informers Vol. 1.
 
This is the genesis of the claim that Cheney was deeply involved in a conspiracy to cover up UFO truths. Undoubtedly due to potential libel claims, Cheney conspiracy theories rarely saw print prior to his 2025 death, but they circulated orally in the UFO subculture. We can just see their outlines from occasional references that did make it past publishing companies’ lawyers. In 2015, UFO novelist Larry Holcombe alluded to their existence in his only nonfiction book, The Presidents and UFOs: “it has long been felt by UFOlogists that both Rumsfeld and Cheney were (and still are) deeply involved in UFO issues going back many years.” Because Cheney was widely seen as the brains behind the George W. Bush Administration, many conspiracy theories about the Bush years centered on him. Cheney, after all, had served Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and therefore made an ideal connecting thread to cast as puppet master connecting the decades.
  
Since at least an interview in Hustler (!) in 2005, and probably before that, ufologist Steven M. Greer has accused Cheney of being a member of a covert group running the global UFO coverup. In his 2017 book Unacknowledged he phrased it this way: “Who’s in this covert group? There’s a committee of two to three hundred people who are on the policy board for this issue. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who went from head of the National Security Agency to the board of SAIC―which is one of the crown jewels of this covert entity―is a member. So is Admiral Harry Trane. George Bush Sr., Cheney and Rumsfeld are involved, as is the Liechtenstein banking family.” The group, he says, decides which officials can be trusted with UFO information. In 2006, Dan Burisch listed Cheney as a member of Majestic-12, the 1980s-era hoax ufologists believe to be a secret cabal of government officials running a covert alien program.

In July 2009 ufologist Michael Salla published O’Ryan’s claims anew in the Honolulu Exopolitics Examiner, identifying O’Ryan’s real identity as Derek Hennessey, an S-4 security guard. The news peg that gave this spurious credibility among ufologists was a recent report in the New York Times in July 2009 alleging that Cheney had run a CIA assassination squad as vice president without Congressional approval. Salla alleged that the program had been in operation since 1991, and his story heavily implied, though it did not explicitly state, that Cheney’s role was connected to Majestic-12. Hennessey claimed to be in possession of photos of the saucers and dead aliens, which closely align with the photographs Grusch claims to have seen. Both, for instance, describe the photos as depicting stereotypical “Grey” aliens.
 
In September 2023, David Grusch told journalist Walter Kirn for a print-only County Highway interview (later pirated on Reddit) that Cheney was “the person who would know the most out of everyone who at least knows something,” but Kirn did not publish the name at the time, describing him only as a major late twentieth century political figure. Kirn noted in the article something that quickly fell out of Grusch’s—and Kirn’s—later discussions. Grusch claimed in 2023 not to actually know whether Cheney was really in charge, similar to his other early claims to have no firsthand knowledge of other UFO evidence. “I’m only guessing,” Grusch told Kirn.
 
But a guess doesn’t really make news or win attention. In June 2024, Greer confidently expanded Cheney’s role from merely being one of three hundred conspirators to being “at the top of the pyramid,” in an appearance on the PBD Podcast. Jesse Michels soon reported that Grusch had named Cheney in his interview with Kirn, prompting Kirn to confirm it in a September 2024 podcast appearance with his cohost Matt Taibi. At that point, Kirn claimed Grusch had said Cheney sat atop “the classified UFO information pyramid.” The coincidence of language is obvious, but the meaning behind it is less so. Kirn had previously reported that Grusch was just guessing, but now Kirn’s own story changed, making Grusch’s more like Greer’s.
 
And Grusch has run with the new story, dropping many of the qualifiers and making it sound like he had firsthand knowledge that he denied having when he first started speaking publicly about UFOs. A journalist ought to ask him: Were you lying then or are you lying now? (Grusch partly attributed the recent claim to unnamed people and a former official, but this would mean he has no direct knowledge of the claims, only secondhand stories given to him after he came forward.) However you look at it, Grusch’s new claim about Cheney overseeing a detention center for psychic aliens seems to derive from these many earlier claims, with heavy influence from Hennessey’s allegation, which it closely resembles, and a close relationship to Greer’s most recent conspiracies.
 
What we don’t have is any independent evidence that Cheney ever did any of this. Instead, the evidence seems to point to a more parsimonious conclusion, rooted in Grusch’s own earlier denials: He is repeating UFO podcast lore and pretending, whether consciously or not, that it is his own evidence.