Phil McGraw is an American television personality and psychologist, known for hosting a long-running daytime talk programme; he has hosted the show for 25 years.1 He has practised as a psychologist for close to 50 years2 and has held a pilot’s licence since he was 16.3 Earlier in his career he worked extensively in litigation as a trial scientist,4 during which he observed that litigation clients would sometimes hide a key document in plain sight by burying it among thousands of others so it was lost in the volume.5 He serves on the Presidential Commission for Religious Liberty,6 a body that involves the US Department of Justice.7 In 2026 McGraw produced televised commentary on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), reviewing declassified government files and interviewing figures including whistleblower David Charles Grusch.
Credible witnesses, including military pilots, commercial pilots and people with trained instrumentation, made observations of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings that were being suppressed.8 Such witnesses were sometimes threatened with prison time,9 substantial fines,10 or prosecution under the Espionage Act.11 Documents still due for release contain gun camera footage12 and radar tracks13 relevant to these sightings. McGraw has likened this pattern of suppression to a psychological operation of the kind used in past war efforts, in which the media apparatus was said to have been co-opted to fabricate atrocities and build public support.14 He considers there to be a fragmentation of UFO-related information within the US government,15 and has said that some of those controlling it treat the President of the United States as though he were a temporary employee not given full candour.16 McGraw recounted that in 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining told the US Army Air Forces that the phenomenon under investigation was “something real and not visionary or fictitious”.17 The US Air Force denied for decades that this assessment even existed.18 In 1949 a classified conference was convened at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to address a wave of unexplained sightings over America’s nuclear weapon sites.19 More recently, there have been sightings of anomalous phenomena over the Pantex Plant nuclear site in Amarillo, Texas,20 and five cities with nuclear concentrations have had a high incidence of verified UFO sightings over nuclear installations.21 In 1953, the CIA’s Robertson Panel recommended a public education campaign built on publicising already-debunked cases while saying nothing about unexplained ones.22 A later directive, JNAP 146E, extended flight restrictions to retired pilots after they were found to fall outside the jurisdiction of an earlier directive, JNAP 146,23 and imposed the Espionage Act on the pilots it covered.24
Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify and disclose UFO-related information to the public,25 which McGraw said followed Trump’s decision that it was time for transparency on disclosure.26 A fourth tranche of UFO files was subsequently released,27 which McGraw reviewed before it became public.28 He concluded from that review that there has been a massive cover-up,29 and that there is no question unexplained phenomena are occurring in Earth’s atmosphere.30 By the time a fifth tranche had been released, five tranches of UAP material were in the public domain in total.31 McGraw considers the released videos, radar tracks and infrared material to be heavily degraded versions of what exists, noting that gun camera video is normally crystal clear when it is meant to be.32 He believes Trump intends genuine transparency and that the degraded state of the releases does not originate with him, but that material becomes garbled once it enters the bureaucratic apparatus,33 and that the redactions and cherry-picking evident in the disclosures so far indicate an ongoing tug-of-war over the full truth of what the government knows.34
Central to McGraw’s reasoning is the scale of interstellar distance. The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometres per second,35 and travelling to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) at that speed would take approximately two and a half million years.36 McGraw has noted a time dilation theory under which a traveller could reach Andromeda in around two and a half decades of subjective travel time while roughly two and a half million years passed on Earth,37 and concludes that a non-human entity that had travelled from outside the galaxy would need to be technologically superior to humanity given the travel time involved.38 He has put the speed of Voyager 2 at approximately 29,000 kilometres per hour.39 McGraw has said that no conventional runway-takeoff fighter aircraft comes close to that speed, and that humans cannot travel at the speed of light,40 reasoning that any visitors must therefore be hugely more advanced technologically.41 Drawing on his own experience flying with the Blue Angels, during which he experienced forces of approximately 7.49 G,42 he has set this against reports that some UAP have been recorded on radar moving at approximately 64,000 kilometres per hour while executing a 90-degree turn,43 and against estimates that some UAP manoeuvres would generate between 10,000 and one million G depending on configuration,44 compared with a rocket sled record of approximately 25 G sustained for about half a second.45 McGraw considers that a human being would liquefy internally under such forces,46 and that current human metallurgy could not withstand the manoeuvres attributed to some UAP47 — a line of reasoning he applies in support of the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
As a psychologist, McGraw has argued that disclosure of craft not of this earth and of intelligent non-human life forms would have a significant impact on part of the population and could cause some people a serious psychological reaction,48 and that the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychiatric Association and medical associations need to plan in advance for that impact.49 American teenagers and pre-teens are already experiencing the highest levels of anxiety, depression and loneliness since records began.50 McGraw argues that planning is needed in case five to ten per cent of the population has an adverse reaction to disclosure,51 that elderly people need protection from scams such as being urged to sell everything to pay for a bunker to survive an alien invasion,52 and that the evangelical community could face difficulties with its belief systems if human exceptionalism does not hold true.53 He considers that the US government’s method of operation has been to hide UAP information from the country going back as far as 1947,54 and has said that while publicly telling Americans there was nothing to UAP, the government was simultaneously spending large sums investigating the phenomenon and keeping that secret.55 McGraw has described himself as furious that the government has been lying to the public for 79 years about UAP.56 On Project MKUltra (MKUltra), he considers there to be no question that drugs were used with the aim of enhanced interrogation and no question that human rights were violated,57 and that there is a definite desire to keep the programme’s details from coming out because they are unflattering to the government.58
McGraw has taken a particular interest in the case of Grusch, a former intelligence officer who has testified to Congress about UAP. He has said there was a focused effort to assassinate Grusch’s character, using Grusch’s position on the autism spectrum to discredit him,59 and considers the attempts to discredit Grusch part of a psychological operation.60 McGraw maintains that although Grusch’s character has been attacked, he has not been proven wrong,61 and considers that Grusch has shown courage in bringing hidden matters to light.62 He has noted that Grusch has been open about his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from Afghanistan.63 According to Grusch, his wife wrote in McGraw and Oprah Winfrey as write-in candidates for president and vice president in 2008.64 Grusch has also said he believes he could take McGraw, if cleared by the president, to facilities in the western United States where a craft and a cadaver could be seen.65 McGraw has discussed the UAP subject directly with Trump, Stephen Miller, Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna,66 and believes there are people from Trump down who genuinely want transparency but that the effort gets garbled as it moves downstream.67 He has also suggested that some of the observed phenomena, if reverse engineered, could relate to the concealment of non-human intelligences engaging with the planet, driven by money and power.68 McGraw has said he maintains independence in his coverage, stating that those granting him access do not script him but trust him to be authentic, transparent and candid with the American people.69 According to journalist Ross Coulthart, searches for UAP rose by approximately 400% after McGraw began discussing the subject.70