Matthew Pines is an American national-security analyst, writer on Bitcoin and geopolitics, and technology entrepreneur who became one of the more prominent voices from outside the traditional UFO community to endorse the claims of whistleblower David Grusch. In a November 2023 post that circulated widely again in 2026, he wrote: "What Grusch says is true. I know, tough to believe." His commentary on podcasts and social media has framed disclosure as a geopolitical and economic problem as much as a scientific one.

Pines holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and an MSc in philosophy and public policy from the London School of Economics. He built a career in security strategy spanning more than a decade, advising multinational companies and critical technology firms on geopolitical and cyber risk. He worked at the Krebs Stamos Group, which was acquired by SentinelOne and rebranded as PinnacleOne, where he served as director of intelligence. In parallel he became a national security fellow and later executive director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, writing on digital assets and great-power rivalry in papers such as "Great Power Network Competition & Bitcoin."

His UAP commentary grew in 2024 and 2025 through long-form interviews in which he compared the spread of belief in non-human intelligence to the adoption of cryptocurrency and described disclosure as a chaotic, drawn-out social process. Some of those appearances were billed as interviews with an adviser to Skywatcher, the private UAP venture associated with Jake Barber and Alex Klokus. A clip that circulated in May 2026 showed Pines warning that the reality of the phenomenon could disrupt "our way of life" and describing craft said to move through space, water and air at extreme speeds.

Pines's characterizations of other insiders have been disputed. Researcher Joe Murgia wrote in September 2026 that Pines had wrongly said former Pentagon UAP official Jay Stratton personally saw non-human craft and "non-human biologics," noting that Stratton had never said he saw biologics or bodies. Murgia also asked what had become of a new format for witness testimony that Pines had said, years earlier, he would present.

On September 1, 2026, Alex Wissner-Gross announced that Physical Superintelligence PBC, which he co-founded with Pines and Klokus, had raised a $58 million seed round to build a research laboratory for "transformative physics breakthroughs" using artificial intelligence. Journalist Ross Coulthart presented the venture as Klokus's next step after Skywatcher, and it moved Pines from commentary into building a funded physics company. His combination of cyber-intelligence credentials, Bitcoin-policy work and open belief in Grusch's account gives him an unusual position between technology investors and the disclosure movement.