Who Is Karl Nell?
A former Colonel has made some incredible claims. True or not, he has seen behind the curtain.
In my previous post about David Grusch, I offered a brief introduction to Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who backed up Grusch’s claims on the record. Nell was quoted in the Debrief article that first brought Grusch’s claims to light, and he never distanced himself from the story, though I noted that in the ensuing months that he has “kept a low profile”.
That is no longer true. Nell has returned to the spotlight – or a spotlight, of sorts – over the weekend, and it’s worth taking a closer look at who he is and why he might become an important figure in the movement for UAP disclosure in the coming months.
To recap, Nell verified Grusch’s claim about “the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin”, as he put it; as well as Grusch’s claim that “at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence.”
The Debrief asserted that Nell “was the Army’s liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022 and worked with Grusch there”. As far as I can tell, it isn’t possible to verify this from publicly available records; but a look at his LinkedIn profile is instructive.
The earliest entry in his employment history is a role as “Commander / Operations Officer” with US Space Command, where he oversaw military satellite communications systems. That was from 1990 to 1994. From there he want to AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then to Lockheed Missiles and Space, where he served as “Senior Systems Engineer / Lead SATCOM SRE”. His duties there again involved working with satellite technology, including “resolving satellite anomalous behavior in [the] safest, most efficient, cost-effective manner.”
During that time, he was also active as a US Army reservist. “Commanded 80-soldier Special Operations Forces (SOF) PSYOP / MISO company training for possible USEUCOM peace operations to Bosnia-Herzegovina,” his profile says. “PSYOP / MISO” stands for “psychological operations / military information support operations”, referring to work that involves disseminating information meant to influence the attitudes and behaviours of others.
From there, Nell went on to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the US military’s in-house intelligence arm. His resume gets particularly jargony here, explaining that he was “the Foreign Material Program command representative to USCENTCOM / CFLCC in Kuwait” during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and that he served “as C/J-2 for the one-star Combined Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center (C/JCMEC) in Iraq.” Essentially, this means that he led efforts to recover and analyze enemy materials—presumably things like electronics, documents, etc.
None of this is weird or suspect in relation to the UAP issue, by the way. But I’m building to something here. Bear with me.
Nell went on to spend 13 years at Northrop Grumman, a major aerospace and defense company. A lot of his work there involved overseeing Systems Engineering and Integration (SE&I) efforts, including SE&I services for a “$1-billion equity-backed, satellite & terrestrial, 4G-mobile start-up.” Here again, his experience with satellites is brought to bear.
(Bit of a side note: This was well before Nell’s time with the company, but Northrop Grumman developed the B-2 Spirit bomber jet—at Area 51. It’s a good location for projects requiring a high level of secrecy and security.)
After 2011, Nell had stints with a couple of private companies, helped to spearhead a restructuring of the US Army Reserve, and served as a Colonel with the US Africa Command.
Finally, we come to the latest entry in his CV: “Modernization Advisor to Vice Chief of Staff of the Army”, for the Army Futures Command. He helped to lead a huge restructuring of the Army, including leading SE&I for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which involved collaborating with various agencies including the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the Space Security Defense Program. “Only space-qualified Army participant in joint,” Nell’s profile says.
What does this all add up to? Over the course of his career, Nell gained experience in working with space-related technologies, collecting and analyzing foreign materials, overseeing large-scale modernization efforts, and working across various government agencies. He also would have had very high security clearances for much of this work. If you were setting up a reverse-engineering program for UFOs, this is exactly the kind of guy you’d want involved.
So, the Debrief article from June says that Nell was “the Army’s liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022” and that he worked with Grusch in that capacity. And his own resumé suggests he certainly could have worked in that role, in terms of capabilities and qualifications. But Nell himself hasn’t said a whole lot—until this past weekend, when he spoke at the first ever Sol Foundation Symposium.
The Sol Foundation describes itself as an organization that “brings together experts from academia and government to address the philosophical, policy, and scientific problems raised by the likely presence on the Earth of UAP.” It’s new – I hadn’t even heard of it until a couple of weeks ago – and it has an air of credibility to it; its Executive Director, Garry Nolan, is a Stanford University professor, and its inaugural Symposium was held on the university’s campus with a number of prominent speakers.
Still, the Sol Foundation nevertheless maintains a bit of a shroud of secrecy—perhaps out of necessity, given the sensitive information that was discussed at its conference. So far, no recordings of the Symposium’s talks have been released, forcing observers to rely on reports from the few people who attended.
One of them was Matt Ford, a UAP-focused YouTuber who previously built a career in lighting design for television. He saw Nell’s talk, which, according to his own account and others, involved a hypothetical timeline for a “controlled disclosure” of UAP information designed to avoid freaking out the public.
Discussing it with his YouTube co-host, Ford dwelled on the “sombre” atmosphere of Nell’s talk at the Symposium.
“People like Colonel Karl Nell were not coming from a place of, you know, ‘If we are being visited and if these things are real…’ It was all, ‘This is what is happening. It is real. There are serious consequences to this,’” Ford said, adding, “The mood in the room during – at least the day that I was in there – it was sombre… There was not any real joking around. I think people were frankly rather shocked by how they were framing the seriousness of the consequences to this news and how it can just go wrong in terms of societal order, risk of military conflict and misunderstanding…”
So much for keeping a low profile. In this select crowd, at least, Nell appears to have been willing to go beyond the claims he and Grusch made earlier about a secret government UAP program, and to map out how this might actually be communicated to the public in a way that avoids what he reportedly called “catastrophic disclosure.”
Why does this matter? Because Nell’s name is apparently being thrown around in conversations about who could be the next leader of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a kind of successor to the UAPTF.
AARO is controversial in the UAP community. Its mandate is to track and investigate reports of UAPs, but not expressly for the purpose of informing the public; it’s a unit of the Department of Defense, and its Director reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. As Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, wrote in a recent opinion piece, “asking AARO to investigate this issue is roughly comparable to asking the Intelligence Community to investigate the Iran-Contra Affair.”
It doesn’t help that AARO has been headed by Sean Kirkpatrick, who has said both that his office received reports of UAPs making “very interesting apparent maneuvers,” and that he has not seen any “credible evidence” of “objects that defy the known laws of physics”. Mellon, for his part, disagrees, noting at least one documented incident (the USS Nimitz event, which we don’t have time to get into here) in which a UAP “accelerated to supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom” and “overcame g-forces that would destroy anything built by man”.
Kirkpatrick has also said that David Grusch has “refused to come and share” what he knows about UAPs with AARO, to which Grusch has responded, “I have zero emails or calls from them. That is a lie.”
Fortunately for everyone, Kirkpatrick has determined that he has “accomplished everything I said I was going to do,” and will leave his post in December. That leaves an opening for an AARO director who might be perceived as more transparent, or perhaps a director who is at least transparent about not being transparent—somebody like Karl Nell, who wants a “controlled disclosure”. That doesn’t mean Nell’s appointment is likely, necessarily; Ross Coulthart, a bona fide journalist on the UAP beat for NewsNation, says there is “pushback from Defense”, which is going to want its own candidate.
In any case, given Nell’s participation in the Sol Symposium, and what he claims to know about goings-on behind the scenes, it seems likely that he’ll have a rising profile in the UAP story in the months and years to come, whether he ends up heading AARO or not.