Incremental_Logic

Two years before UFO “whistleblower” David Grusch went public with wild claims about crashed UFOs and recovered “non-human biologics,” he was introduced to a Peter Thiel-connected venture investor who was evaluating a new space-defense startup. 2021: EVEN ROGERS Jesse Michels came out of Peter Thiel’s investment world and has become one of the most visible media personalities promoting claims of crashed UFOs, “non-human intelligence” and government cover-ups. His videos have reached millions of viewers and helped bring the modern UFO “disclosure” movement to a much larger audience. In 2021, Michels says he met an Air Force officer in Colorado while evaluating a prospective space-defense company. Michels did not name the officer, but Even Rogers later confirmed on X that he was the officer Michels was referring to. According to his LinkedIn, Rogers at the time was still serving as a U.S. Air Force officer, working in “Joint Fires” at U.S. Space Command — essentially military space operations, including developing tactics to defend U.S. assets in orbit. Michels at the time was a venture investor working at Peter Thiel’s family office in Los Angeles. Michels was later publicly identified as an investor at Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm. During an interview with podcaster Julian Dorey, Michels says in 2021 he met David Grusch “in a venture capital context”. “It actually was in a venture capital context. I was looking at a company that was into space. It actually had come out of Space Force. The guy who started it was an officer in the Space Force, and he started a company in this area, and I was diligenceing it.” In other words, Michels was evaluating Rogers and his prospective company as a potential investor. The company did not yet formally exist — Michels was looking at the early concept that would eventually become the space-defense startup True Anomaly the following year in 2022. According to Michels, the UFO conversation happened at the end of his investment inquiry. He told Rogers: “I'm also really into this other stuff. I'm really into the UFO thing.” And Rogers responded: “I'm a believer. But I don't know that much.” Rogers did, however, know someone Michels should meet — David Grusch. Michels says Rogers personally brought Grusch to Michels' house. At the time, David Grusch was reportedly working on UFOs inside the government. In 2021, he served as the National Reconnaissance Office’s representative to the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, and later that year became the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s co-lead for UAP analysis. Property records show he was also working as a real estate agent in the Colorado Springs area. Michels says Grusch was cautious during that first meeting and was essentially “sussing me out.” But Michels came away extremely impressed. He describes Grusch as highly intelligent, sincere, intensely detail-oriented and different from the “snake oil” personalities Michels had encountered in the UFO world. The relationship continued. Michels says he eventually got to know Grusch “decently well” before Grusch went public in June 2023, and became aware of Grusch's frustration with attempting to pursue the UFO issue from inside government. So this is how Jesse Michels says he first entered David Grusch's orbit: not through journalism or a UFO conference, but through venture-capital diligence on a military space startup. 2022: TRUE ANOMALY Rogers left military service in 2022 and, according to one published profile of Rogers, co-founded True Anomaly and became its CEO only 12 days later. True Anomaly's business is not “UFOs”, but it could be argued that hunting unidentified objects is part of the company’s mission. The company builds highly maneuverable spacecraft, sensors and software intended to identify, approach and respond to unknown, and potentially hostile, objects in orbit. Today it describes itself as focused exclusively on “space defense” and calls its Jackal spacecraft a “fighter-interceptor.” FUNDING BOOM AFTER GRUSCH Before Grusch went public with his extraordinary UFO claims in June 2023, True Anomaly had only raised about $30 million in funding. But in the months following Grusch’s June 2023 viral appearances in the mainstream media and subsequent headline-grabbing July testimony before Congress, True Anomaly’s fortunes accelerated: in September, it won a $17.4 million U.S. Space Force contract, and in December it announced a $100 million Series B funding round. That’s an increase of more than 330% in funding in the six months after Grusch went public. Should note that there is no evidence these developments were connected to Grusch or the UFO story, but the timing is notable. True Anomaly continued to rake in large amounts of funding in subsequent years. $260 million Series C funding was announced in April 2025 and $650 million Series D funding announced in April 2026. In four years, True Anomaly has raised more than $1 billion. THE JD VANCE CONNECTION Early funding was mostly led by Eclipse Capital and Riot Ventures but two firms that became extremely early backers were Space VC and Narya Capital. Space VC says it backed True Anomaly from the pre-seed, ‘PowerPoint’ stage, while Narya was among the investors participating in its early Series A. Narya was co-founded by Colin Greenspon and JD Vance, who is currently the Vice President of the United States. Before Narya, Vance had worked at Mithril Capital, the venture firm co-founded by Peter Thiel. And when Vance launched Narya, its financial backers included Peter Thiel, along with Marc Andreessen, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others. Vance left his active role at Narya in December 2022 after winning his U.S. Senate seat. But Vance did not sever all economic ties to the fund. According to his federal financial disclosures, Vance retained a $500,000 – $1 million interest in Narya Capital Fund I, along with substantial carried-interest rights. True Anomaly is a portfolio company of that fund. Coincidentally, over the last year, Vance has made multiple viral headlines talking about potential threats posed by UFOs, which he says could be flying demons. One other interesting connection comes from one of True Anomaly's earliest investors, Space VC, which was founded by Jonathan Lacoste. In 2024, aerospace-engineering startup Rollup publicly thanked its investors by name: “Thiel Capital (Jesse Michels)” and “Space VC (Jonathan Lacoste).” Meaning Michels and one of True Anomaly's earliest investors later appeared together in the same hard-tech investment syndicate. SO WHAT? There is currently no public evidence that Jesse Michels personally invested in True Anomaly. There is no evidence that Michels introduced Rogers to Narya, Space VC, Eclipse or any of True Anomaly's other investors. And there is no evidence that True Anomaly's funding was somehow predicated on UFOs. Those would be claims that go beyond the evidence. But the documented chronology is interesting on its own: In 2021, a Peter Thiel-connected venture investor was conducting investment diligence on a still-unformed military space company whose future CEO, according to Michels, told him he was a UFO believer. That future CEO then personally brought David Grusch to the investor's house and the investor was very impressed. The company was founded the following year and quickly attracted capital from a VC network that included a Peter Thiel-backed fund co-founded by JD Vance. And within a few years, that company had raised more than $1 billion to build advanced military technology for identifying, approaching and potentially intercepting objects in space. None of this proves a conspiracy. But the Michels–Grusch–True Anomaly story looks increasingly like a microcosm of a broader pattern: Silicon Valley money flows into defense startups, those startups pursue billions in Pentagon contracts, and many of the same people financing and building that technology are also helping elevate the UFO issue. Whether those connections are consequential or merely the product of a small, tightly connected national-security tech world is an open question. But if “disclosure” means revealing the full truth, then that should include the money, relationships and incentives surrounding the people driving it. --------------------------- Credit to @ParaN_rmal for doing the initial work and tipping me off. --------------------------- Sources in replies