Full Name: Luis “Lue” Daniel Elizondo
Born: ?, Texas, United States
Luis “Lue” Elizondo is a former senior intelligence official and special agent who was recruited into a strange and highly sensitive US government program to investigate UAP, funded through Congress and managed within the Department of Defense.
He also led classified investigations worldwide where he became involved with entities such as the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Specifically, Lue Elizondo worked within the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Eventually, he began managing Special Access Programs (SAPs) for the National Security Council (NSC) and the White House.
Luis Elizondo from the Introduction of his book Imminent:
“In late 2008, I began a new job over at the Pentagon after several tours with other US intelligence agencies. Shortly thereafter, my life changed forever when I was recruited into a strange and highly sensitive US intelligence program unlike any I had ever been a part of. The program investigated the global mystery that is “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, or UAP for short, also known to many as UFOs. For nearly a decade, I found myself on the front lines of the biggest paradigm shift in human history and learned the reality of our place in the universe.
Unidentified craft with beyond-next-generation technology━including the ability to move in ways that defy our knowledge of physics and to do so within air, water, and space━have been operating with complete impunity all over the world since at least World War II.
These craft are not made by humans. Humanity is in fact not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species. Yes, I know that’s going to take a bit of time to process, but buckle up. There is a lot more.
UAP, and the nonhuman intelligence controlling them, present at best a very serious national security issue, and at worst the possibility of an existential threat to humanity.”
from Chapter 1 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t
[Luis Elizondo on his military career background]
“In my twenties, I joined the US Army and was recruited into various sensitive programs in military intelligence. Later in my career, I did three combat tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East and went on to work all over the world with America’s most elite special operations and intelligence units.
As an operations officer and senior intelligence officer, I was assigned missions throughout the world, focusing on counterinsurgencies, counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and counterespionage. I ran Intelligence efforts against enemies including ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and the FARC. I led classified investigations worldwide with partners that included the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I worked within the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Eventually, I managed Special Access Programs (SAPs) for the National Security Council (NSC) and the White House.
Finally, in 2008, I returned to a job at the Department of Defense. While in that assignment, I worked for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)), focused on an information-sharing operation between the DoD, DHS, and state, local, and tribal law enforcement authorities.”
[Luis Elizondo on meeting with Jay Stratton and his “colleague”, whom Luis Elizondo refers to as Rosemary Caine]
“… Rosemary approached my desk. “We’re here to talk to you about something very important. A matter of national security. We are interested in your counterintelligence and security experience for a highly classified program led out of our office at DIA.”
They had come to recruit me to support an intelligence program over at the Defense Intelligence Agency. When a DoD program needs a new person, they sometimes work their network of colleagues to find the right candidate. In this case, Jay and Rosemary’s team needed a senior intelligence officer to set up counterintelligence and security for one of their programs.
Jay explained that he helped create something called the AAWSAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program, which would later become AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program).
They described it as a small but highly sensitive program focused on “unconventional technologies”, and said they reported directly to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to Congress.”
[Luis Elizondo on meeting with James Lacatski]
“In a calm voice, he told me AAWSAP worked on sensitive aviation technology and needed a senior counterintelligence agent to lock down all intel about the program from the usual antagonists, foreign adversaries. They employed many outside contractors, but Jim deliberately handpicked a small cadre of intelligence officers to manage and oversee the work performed by contractors.
Nestled deep inside DIA, a member of the US intelligence community (the IC), AAWSAP drew its authority directly from Congress, according to Jim.
He explained that AAWSAP focused on “unusual phenomena” and investigated unidentified aircraft, specifically ones that seem to display beyond-next-generation technology and capabilities━what we now call unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, or what were long referred to as UFOs. Jim explained that for decades, civilians, military personnel, and law enforcement officers had reported strange sightings across the world, and there was actually data to support what they saw. Data collected by the same intelligence gathering systems used to keep our country safe from our adversaries, arguably the most advanced in the world. Jim emphasized that what they focused on didn’t conform to physics as we understood it.
A few days later, I met Jim Lacatski again. This time, Jim shared that the program enjoyed the support of the DIA’s then director, Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, and was funded through the efforts of a bipartisan group of senators: Senator Harry Reid, Senator Ted Stevens, and Senator Daniel Inouye.
In this second meeting, Jim Lacatski formally asked me to handle counterintelligence and security for the program. He was still mysterious and didn’t tell me the name of the effort I’d be focused on.”
from Chapter 2 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Colares
[Luis Elizondo on his first meeting with the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) group]
“Shortly after I accepted the role, Jim and Jay invited me to a large group dinner for the team that was held in the private meeting room of a hotel in Roslyn, Virginia. I had no way to prepare for the meeting, and no idea what to expect. The program’s leadership and a few of the Nevada contractors were meeting for the first time. The lead contractor was flying in on his private Gulfstream V jet to attend.
Since I now knew my friend John worked as a liaison between his agency and the program, we walked to dinner together. In the lobby we met Jim and Jay, who led us to a private dining room decked out with a long table set for dinner.
The dinner was a baptism by fire. The billionaire hotelier, developer, and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow joined us. He was the contractor I had been told about. Tall, mustached, and shaggy-headed, Bob entered the room with a serious but friendly look on his face. I had never met a billionaire before and assumed that they were all the same━self-absorbed and cocky. Bob wasn’t. He greeted everyone warmly and joined thoughtfully in the conversation. It was at this meeting I learned of Bob and his long obsession with UAP and paranormal occurrences, and that he was unafraid to spend his own fortune to unravel these mysteries for humanity’s benefit. The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), his research organization, had studied UAP and the paranormal back in the 1990s. Senator Harry Reid counted Bob among his friends, and Bob’s firm, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), was the program’s prime contractor.
Also in attendance was Harold “Hal” Puthoff, a legendary figure in government and intel community research circles. He is a physicist, an engineer, and a man of deep mystery when it comes to some of America’s most sensitive and controversial projects. For over fifty years, he worked as the chief scientist on highly classified projects for the government. In various past capacities, he had regularly reported directly to the White House and the director of the CIA. This is a man who walks around with knowledge that the vast majority of the human population will never know. My respect for Hal is immeasurable. He was the program’s chief scientist.
Hal earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1967. His professional background spans decades of research at General Electric, Sperry, the NSA, Stanford University, and SRI International, and he has served almost every government entity (for example, the Department of Defense and agencies within the intelligence community, such as the NSA) as a senior scientific advisor. He published numerous papers on quantum physics, lasers, and space propulsion, and had patents issued in the laser, energy, and communications fields, which I suggest reading.”
[Luis Elizondo meeting and listening to General Uchôa speak about the Colares events in Brazil during the NIDS meeting]
“Jim introduced us all to a Brazilian general by the name of Paulo Roberto Yog de Miranda Uchôa, and his daughter and personal translator. Highly placed in their government, and well regarded, General Uchôa was Brazil’s top drug czar and a four-star general. In the 1980s, his late father, General Alfredo Moacyr de Mendonça Uchôa, launched the Brazilian Center for UAP Studies, and devoted more than thirty years of his life to that subject and other paranormal and mystical studies. The elder Uchôa had been known as “the Star General”.
Like his father, the junior Uchôa embraced interests that went further afield than his military and antidrug work. He had become the point man for a massive archive associated with Brazil’s most disturbing UAP encounters. The question I kept to myself: Was Uchôa involved in this case because of his family lineage and predisposition for the topic? Or was he the man regarded by his peers as the most qualified to “handle” Brazil’s biggest UAP events?
At this point in time, Jim’s program wasn’t sharing UAP data with other nations, out of a concern for national security. The meeting with Uchôa was different. He happened to be in town for another meeting and Jim was able to put this dinner together last minute, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting dinners of my life.
General Uchôa had befriended a Brazilian colonel, still living, who had originally investigated Brazil’s most fascinating cases, spanning thirty years. They hoped to assemble as much data as possible to share with us, in a remarkable act of international cooperation. Bob Bigelow’s team planned to compile a database listing every single factoid of the Brazil events, so it could be searched instantly and scanned for commonalities. When completed, this project would prove to be inordinately useful. Finding patterns in data is the key to analysis.
I learned that in the mid-1970s, for several years running, people living along the coast of northeastern Brazil noticed strange lights and aircraft that buzzed their small towns and villages at night. The objects ranged in size from baseball-sized orbs to huge aircraft that looked as if they could transport the occupants of an entire city. Flying discs, spheres, triangles, cylinders━the variety of the objects ran the gamut. Citizens in these rural villages were unaccustomed to nighttime illumination beyond the lights of passing cars and trucks. Now, suddenly, a villager walking to visit a neighbor after dark might be bathed in the glow of something massive hovering in the sky. For centuries, humans all over the planet have reported such things. But in Brazil, these flying phenomena seemed to be targeting human beings.
People reported being chased by a yellow orb. After several yards of pursuit, the light turned blue before delivering a nasty laserlike blast that burned victims or left them unconscious. Other people claimed that hovering aircraft attempted to lift them off the ground━with nets and hooks━and drag them up into the ships. Were these hooks and nets a metaphor for some advanced technology like a tractor beam, or were primitive tools like hooks and nets actually being used? It all seemed so strange to me.
As attacks increased, people quashed their natural curiosity and switched to outright terror. If a ship or orb or light appeared, they ran for their life. Dogs barked. Livestock scattered. Car engines stalled, forcing them to escape on foot or on the back of a beast of burden. One person reported that their donkey froze in place, paralyzed with fear; the witness then ducked under the animal’s body to shield themselves.
It didn’t matter where you sought shelter. The lights pursued people to their homes and farms. Beams shot through tiled roofs as if the roofs were made of gauze, and roved intelligently through interior rooms as if searching for something. A victim or some other target? Not sure.
People lived in fear. They knew from experience or hearsay that if the “laser” touched their skin, they’d be burned. Reports described blood being sucked from their bodies. Everyone called the lights chupa-chupa, which means suck-suck in Portuguese.
In 1977, the intelligence branch of the Brazilian Air Force descended on the region with twenty investigators and physicians led by Lieutenant Colonel Uyrange Hollanda. Initially, they planned to interview victims, catalog eyewitness accounts, and treat the wounded. The longer Hollanda’s team remained in the area, the more they witnessed these horrors for themselves. They captured footage and hundreds of photographs of mysterious objects and aircraft, one approximately three hundred feet long. Once, when an aircraft appeared during the daytime on a local beach, villagers fled, but Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, who had been treating villagers nearby, bravely remained. She hid and watched because, as she later said, the shimmering object in the sky was too beautiful to look away. It dazzled her in a way that was almost hypnotic.
Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world, the largest in South and Latin America, and densely populated. The wetlands alone are ten times the size of the Florida Everglades. Researchers estimate that 371 locations across multiple Brazilian states were frequented by these visitations, but the epicenter and the site of the most intense activity from 1977 to 1978 was the small coastal island of Colares, which then had a population of about ten thousand people. Today researchers refer to these encounters collectively as the Colares Incidents.
Before that evening, I’d never heard of these occurrences. At first, my rational mind fought to explain away what I was hearing. There had to be some other explanation, right? A group hysteria phenomenon, perhaps, where people in a small community all influence each other and exacerbate each other’s experiences. Or the testing of very human-based technology. In the 1960s, both the US and the Soviet Union flirted with the development of psychotronic weapons. They wanted to see if it was possible to stand far away from your enemy, aim some kind of beam at them, and influence their behavior and perception. Had Colares been the result of the Soviets’ late-1970s psychotronic technology? Had the Soviets waged a proxy war against the United States in Brazil? Had the whole thing been a terrifying psychological operation?
But what Uchôa described was not consistent with any known Soviet strategy or capability. His scenario was closer to H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. An airborne alien invasion.
I was appropriately skeptical, but, like I said, a few things in my past had prepared me to be open to what I was hearing. I also had great respect for the evidence that had been collected by scientists and trained investigators. As a special agent, I had come to appreciate the necessity to preserve data as evidence and remain fact oriented. Everything I heard that day had been vetted by researchers well beyond the Brazilian Air Force. An American researcher named Robert Pratt had alone interviewed 514 witnesses. The French scientist and accomplished researcher Jacques Vallée had also independently verified the happenings. Followed by waves of researchers since. By one estimate the body of evidence compiled on Colares includes more than 3,500 case files.
Uchôa’s voice cracked as he spoke of the human toll. Dr. Carvalho treated about 40 people in 1977. Most had burns consistent with exposure to either thermal or directed energy; the burns healed once the skin peeled off. But some were left with major scars. Others had rashes. In the fresh wounds of 23 people, Carvalho noticed that the center of the burn displayed two puncture wounds. And when she tested the victims’ blood, she found that all of them had low hemoglobin, which suggested that their fear of the chupa-chupa was not completely unfounded.
Pratt’s findings struck me as particularly harrowing. He logged more than 300 animals found dead of unknown causes during this time. 34 citizens complained of irritated eyes; 5 reported temporary blindness; 8 reported a negative change in their vision. 41 complained of a prolonged feeling of nausea, and sometimes vomiting. 55 individuals reported extreme headaches. I wondered if these people had experienced some form of radiation damage. If true, the kind of damage they were discussing was consistent with the harmful effects of, say, microwave radiation and the improper handling of medical isotopes or weapons-grade radioactive fuel.
46 people described feeling heat when the lights of the aircraft focused on them. 28 people felt a pocket of cold air. About 18 people insisted they’d been adducted by beams that sucked them into the craft. Pratt also verified that some of these people were found far away from the site of the original encounter, with no memory of traveling there.
14 people remained in a catatonic state for short periods following an encounter; 54 suffered a temporary paralysis in some part of their body. 36 people claimed chronic illnesses plagued them for years after. Of that group, 10 people died. That struck me. These people were dead. Ostensibly from a UAP.
In some cases witnesses managed to catch a glimpse of their attackers. Descriptions of the occupants of these otherworldly vehicles broke down into two types. Beings that appeared to be pale, tall, adult humanoids, and beings with disproportionately large heads and frail bodies about 3 or 4 feet tall. As I would later learn, those two descriptions━the so-called Nordics and Grays━fit the profile of alleged aliens from countless close encounters the world over. If this was some form of mass hysteria, then it had been affecting the entire globe for decades.
Thousands of people in the region remained traumatized by their encounters.
Uchôa distributed a few vintage photographs of the evidence compiled by Hollanda’s team. I found myself moved by the images of victims displaying their wounds and looks of resigned horror on their faces.”
[Luis Elizondo reflecting on an incident he investigated during his time on military duty in Kuwait]
“Talk of laser weapons sent my mind reeling. Back in Kuwait in 2003, I was assigned as the special agent in charge (SAC). One of my agents rang me in the middle of the night from one of our satellite offices in the middle of the desert, Arifjan. “Sir, you need to get out here now,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”
The drive was at least an hour and accessible only by a two-lane road that stretched into the desert darkness forever. Only when the neon glow of Kuwait City could no longer be seen beyond the barren horizon did we know we were only halfway to Arifjan. When I arrived at the coordinates I’d been given, I found a cordon of heavily armed American soldiers guarding a group of M1 main battle tanks. During the ramp-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the US employed staging areas to pre-position military equipment and vehicles with names such as “Camp New York”. At this camp, the US military would pre-position the tanks for their inevitable invasion into Iraq. The tanks were arranged in a platoonlike formation of approximately 10 tanks deep by 10 tanks wide.
Gathered at a corner of the formation loomed a cluster of Military Police (MP) and a few Toyota Prados cordoning off two tanks in particular. I rolled down my window and said, “What’s the issue?”
The MP NCO on duty said, “Sir, you gotta see this for yourself.”
Coffee in hand, I followed. The MP flicked on a flashlight. “Look at this,” he said.
“I don’t see anything. what am I supposed to be looking at?” I said.
He stabbed his light at the side of a tank. “Look right here, sir.”
The beam revealed a small hole punched through the armored side of the tank. Perfectly round, no rough edges. Superficially, I saw no signs of heat ablation or metal vitrification. He angled the flashlight. The hole went straight through the body of the tank and out the other side.
What the hell?
It was as if someone had used a supersharp cookie cutter to take a core sample of the vehicle. The energy required to do such a thing would have been enormous. The M1 tank is the crown jewel of the American field arsenal because it’s designed to take a direct hit from a missile and survive. The sides and front are the most heavily armored sections of the tank.
I knew of only one thing that could puncture the side of a tank━a sabot round, which is a little like a spear made of solid tungsten moving at hypersonic speeds. But a sabot hitting its mark would have caused the complete and utter destruction of the tank and destroyed its interior. This incident was of an eerily different order. There was no other visible damage, but this vehicle was toast, its defensive armor compromised.
The scarier part of the incident? In his excitement to show me the hole, the NCO failed to mention that the tank next to it showed precisely the same sabotage. Whatever caused this seemed to penetrate the sides of two of our best tanks with one clean hole through both.
“What do we know about this?” I asked.
The only clue we had came from a goat herder, a Bedouin who had tended to his flock in the night. He told the Military Police he’d seen a brilliant green flash in the night sky, directly over the tanks.
Back then, I had assumed the goat herder was mistaken, or that the weapon had been some sort of high-energy laser cooked up by the Russians. Nevertheless, the two tanks were immediately taken to the port, loaded aboard a transport ship, and shipped to the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona for analysis. I never did learn the findings. The powers that be classified the analysis a “Top Secret SAP”. SAP is short for Special Access Program, one of the most sensitive and highly guarded types of classified information.”
[Luis Elizondo‘s conclusion on his first meeting with NIDS]
“My mind snapped back to our dinner meeting, and the green, roving lights that had tormented Colares, Brazil. What if the goat herder was right all along?
In the 1970s, Brazilian officials shut down Hollanda’s investigation and circulated a story that no unusual phenomena were found. They locked down the files until the 1990s. The long-retired Hollanda died of apparent suicide shortly after their release.
Uchôa casually admitted that the Brazilian government had covered up what happened in Colares. His comment surprised no one at our dinner. Of course Brazil buried the truth. That’s what every government has done, and always will do.
I left the meeting having learned about a fraction of the highly secretive cold war that has been playing out globally since 1947. Through spy intelligence, we know the superpowers have long been in a race to reverse-engineer advanced “exotic” technology through efforts like foreign material exploitation. It now seemed this was also a possibility with crashed UAP.”
from Chapter 3 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: A Reluctant Warrior
[Luis Elizondo on joining the US Army]
“After enlisting, I could say my life had indeed changed for the better. I finally had the purpose I had been craving since JROTC. I was initially offered an officer commission, given that I already had a college degree. But if I went that route, I would have no choice in my Military Occupational Specialty; in other words, they would assign me to the needs of the Army, which would have likely been in the medical corps. So, instead I enlisted as an Army grunt. I received the best training one could ever ask for. Weapon skills, hand-to-hand combat, lifesaving techniques, et cetera.
Once qualified as a soldier, I was trained as a counterintelligence special agent, what everyone in the Army called a 97-Bravo. I learned how to conduct surveillance and countersurveillance, read body language, and conduct source recruitments.
My first assignment was to South Korea, just after Jennifer and I, now married, had conceived our first child. Leaving her at home, pregnant, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. It was the kind of sacrifice that every military family knows only too well. Off I went, heeding the call, and missing Jenn’s entire pregnancy. I spent much of my time in Korea working with the Korean CIA (KCIA), with the Korean National Police (KNP), or on a Special Projects surveillance team. By the time I returned home, our new daughter was three months old. Jenn had a job at a bowling alley at our new military assignment, on post, and I worked two extra jobs on the side to augment my Army salary of $17,000 a year. I received special permission from my commander to moonlight as a security officer and, once again, a bouncer in order to help make ends meet.
The 902nd MI Group out of Fort Meade, Maryland, was my second assignment, but my duty station was Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I conducted counterintelligence investigations in three states━Nevada, California, and Arizona━to protect the new technologies developed by our government. Laser weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles, rocket engines, and tons of aerospace. My primary job was to lock down sensitive, top secret technology from foreign spies who were targeting major defense contractors like TRW, Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed. I also investigated anyone with a security clearance who may have been involved in some sort of criminal behavior, and covered “walk-ins”, which sometimes resulted in what was known as the “Nuisance File.”
On one particular day, a nervous and disheveled ex-military guy entered my office and said, “You have to help me. The government’s after me. I’m a contractor for the US Air Force and my code name is Lone Wolf on the Range.”
“Why are they after you?”
“They want me to make planes invisible with my special mathematical formula.”
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Wacky “walk-ins” were common; duty agents like me were expected to screen and triage these reports.
I remember this one because, a few weeks later, I received a visit from two Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) agents.
“Did you ever talk to a guy who says he can make planes invisible?”
I nearly chuckled. “Yeah. Why, was he bugging you guys too?”
In a very serious tone and without hesitation, one of the OSI agents said, “That guy actually works for us, and we need whatever file you have on him.” I laughed uncomfortably. Is he in trouble? Off his meds?
Their response was even more perplexing. “He is a contractor for one of our most sensitive technologies.” Astronished, I sheepishly handed over the documents. They left with the file and any remnants of truth enclosed within it. I heard nothing more about the case. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I often think about that and what notes were made to my file.”
from Chapter 4 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Secrets Within
[Luis Elizondo on beginning his work for AAWSAP/AATIP]
“Soon after I started working with them, Jay and Jim began briefing me on the program in a SCIF. That’s short for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. These are bland conference rooms that resemble acoustically tricked-out shipping containers. They block sound and radio and electromagnetic waves. Sometimes you have white-noise machines to further drown out any opportunity for someone to eavesdrop on you. When you enter a SCIF to discuss top secret matters, you show your credentials, relinquish your cell phone, and don’t utter a word until someone ensures everyone is appropriately cleared and closes the vaultlike door from the inside.”
[Luis Elizondo on AAWSAP/AATIP‘s focus on Skinwalker Ranch and its mythos]
[Luis Elizondo on searching government files for words such as unknown technology, unusual performance, anomaly, unidentified, UFO, UAP, lights + sky, unidentified + radar]“While the program was primarily focused on UAP, a small part of the effort also investigated unexplainable phenomena at a 480-acre property in Utah called Skinwalker Ranch. Bob Bigelow was the contractor running point on the investigation and had bought the land in the mid-1990s so that his scientists could study some of the unusual occurrences long associated with the property.
At the beginning, that’s all I knew. It would be months before I fully comprehended the breadth of the Utah study.
It turns out that since the contract started in 2008, teams of researchers had been going out to the ranch to investigate and collect data on anomalous activity, including UAP sightings. AAWSAP’s investigators treaded the property with a good deal of perfectly functioning modern electronic equipment, determined to figure out why visitors would see strange apparitions and report terrifying experiences that not only injured people, but followed them home and began to harass their loved ones. I later learned that Jay had coined the term that now describes this━”the hitchhiker effect.”
What a mind-blowing revelation. The US government had committed itself to studying and analyzing anomalous activity that bordered on paranormal. Jim and his team had gone down this path for the simplest reason imaginable: the science warranted further investigation of these strange phenomena, and they could not yet rule out the possibility that these anomalous events and UAP were inextricable linked.”
“When I wasn’t chasing down leads at Jim’s suggestion, I spent my time reading historical government records on UAP, which I had access to thanks to my credentials. A lot can be learned by studying history, especially history not widely known by the public.
At Jim’s suggestion, I used my government computer to search terms including unknown technology, unusual performance, anomaly, unidentified, UFO, UAP.
The words lights plus sky yielded good results. The terms unidentified plus radar were also good for digging up incidents that were not flagged by their original writers as UAP incidents.
I was dumbfounded by how many compelling reports resided on top secret servers I had access to. However, I was also aware of which “hot words” could get you into trouble. Hot words could alert other individuals that you were poking your nose into areas for which you lacked clearance. This would trigger an extensive investigation into your activities to determine whether you had a “need to know” or were trying to get information about someone else’s program.”
[Luis Elizondo on consulting senior Pentagon staffer “graybeards” including one whom Luis Elizondo refers to as William “Will” Livingston]
“I also made it a point to learn as much as I could from our outside scientific consultants. In the Pentagon, we referred to senior or emeritus staffers as “graybeards”. Keepers of knowledge, wise retainers of sensitive information that was never written into any reports. I could sift through reports till doomsday, but I owed it to myself to lock down in a SCIF and get the lay of the land from these graybeards over a cup of coffee.
The list of in-program graybeards was short. One was a man I’ll refer to as William “Will” Livingston. For years he presided over the little-known “weird desk” at the CIA, in charge of investigating unusual medical issues, implants, and abductions, all related to UAP encounters and anything strange. It was the real X-Files of the CIA. He was the keeper of all those secrets. Will is a patriot of the American cause, passionate about his work and pursuing truth. A medical doctor and surgeon based out of Detroit, Will was part of every program that was too sensitive to be publicly acknowledged━hence his involvement.
At the time we met, he was in his sixties and had seen the best and worst of government bureaucracy━and it showed. He came across as a curmudgeonly grandfather, jaded and frustrated by a system he had spent so many years defending and supporting. Will had little patience for incompetence. But he was also exceedingly kind and patient if you were willing to learn. When we first connected, I told him how the Colares, Brazil, case shocked me. I had assumed that if UAP were indeed real, they zipped in and out of our atmosphere harmlessly. I didn’t know that they could harm or kill people.
“It just never occurred to me that there would be biological effects,” I said.
Will hinted that I was in for a rude awakening. “UAP aside, any technology that can perform like that,” he said, “something for which we have no explanation of how it works… Why would you presume there wouldn’t be any negative biological consequences if you fool around with it?”
Good point, I thought to myself.
In the back of my mind, I of course wondered if the government had capturesd of retrieved UAP or their occupants. Did we ever conduct autopsies on deceased crash victims? You can’t grab a rotisserie chicken and a case of beer in this country without spotting tabloids in the supermarket checkout screaming about yet another alien autopsy. Were they true? If there was anyone on this planet who would know the answer to that question, it would be Will. In fact, at the time I wondered if Will himself had performed any such research.
I restrained myself from asking those hot-button questions. I was too new to the team. My colleagues would share the truth in time when they came to know and trust me. I felt sure of it.”
[Luis Elizondo on meetings with Harold “Hal” Puthoff and Eric Davis]
“I also spent as much time as possibly with Hal Puthoff. It wasn’t until much later that I met Eric Davis, an astrophysicist with high-level national security clearances who also worked with Hal as a contractor for the program. Eric’s reputation was well known in th IC, and I was told that he even provided the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). Eric has long consulted with a number of aerospace and defense contractors, including the one founded by Hal, EarthTech. Younger than Hal, the mustached, spectacled Davis was known to wear Hawaiian shirts in settings where others sported dress suits. I learned and began to appreciate that Eric was never afraid to be who he was, a genius maverick. He rejected political gamesmanship, and with him, what you see is what you get. Over time he would become my trusted friend.
I considered Eric one of the greatest living researchers and one of the most honest men I have ever known. He has an eidetic━that is, “photographic”━memory, and remembers details beyond normal human capabilities. He was also an excellent intelligence officer, good at ferreting out secrets that have been hidden in the UAP world. In recent years he has become best known in UAP circles as the alleged author of the legendary Wilson/Davis memo.”
[Luis Elizondo on Eric Davis and the Wilson/Davis memo]
“The story goes that in the late 1990s, Eric met and chatted up Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, who was Director of Intelligence (J2) for the Joint Staff.
[note: Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson’s other credentials included the Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support at the Central Intelligence Agency; Vice Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff; and Director of Intelligence for the United States Atlantic Command. Later Wilson became the 13th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.]
After their conversation, Eric wrote up a 13-page summary of their talk, which he confidentially shared with a small group of like-minded, UAP-interested colleagues and officials.”
[Luis Elizondo on Dr. Edgar Mitchell and the leaking of the Wilson/Davis memo from his estate]
“Hal and Eric gave a copy of this memo to Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the famous American astronaut who was part of the Apollo 14 mission and a close friend and confidant of Hal and Eric. The sixth person to walk on the moon, Mitchell was a naval aviator, an engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree. He was also a longtime champion of the UAP topic, due to his childhood growing up on a ranch in the Roswell, New Mexico, area and what he had since learned as an astronaut. He once confided to Hal and Eric that his family was among the Roswell families who were threatened by the FBI after the famous Roswell crashes. FBI agents visited ranchers in the region, going door-to-door to deliver the threatening message: if you speak about the crashes, you will be killed. Plain and simple.
When Mitchell died, his safe was opened and the memo was found and circulated publicly by his estate. That is how the memo leaked.”
[Luis Elizondo on the Wilson/Davis memo, continued]
“The Wilson/Davis memo created a sensation for good reason. Vice Admiral Wilson, curious about certain black program line items in the budgets that crossed his desk, began asking questions. He got a meeting with representatives of a certain aerospace corporation━and their attorney. Wilson put his cards on the table: Just what were they doing with this specific line item?
He discovered that the contractor was part of an extremely secret program focused on retrieving and reverse-engineering crashed advanced vehicles of unknown origin and not made by humans. I learned the larger program is referred to as the Legacy Program and involves various elements of the US government and US defense contractors. The contractors took the wreckage into their possession, and the security enveloping these projects was beyond top secret. In fact, the contractor’s attorney brashly informed the admiral that if he continued to ask questions, it could get him fired and cause him to lose his pension. The admiral backed down. He confided the details of this encounter to Davis and never spoke of it again, even after the memo leaked.
The memo is terrifying on many levels. The American taxpayer has been footing the bill for these retrievals and the subsequent analysis and reverse-engineering efforts but with no proper congressional oversight. Even worse, people and government programs die, while corporations endure. Long after anyone in the government with knowledge of the program retires or dies, these materials remain in the vaults of these corporations and in a sense become private property. Imagine the value of the objects in the custody of these companies and what sort of advancements they have been benefiting from off the back of this. Imagine, too, the level of bureaucracy that would permit a US admiral to be threatened by a corporation for asking questions related to his own budget and work he legally has oversight of on behalf of the American people.
The Wilson/Davis memo was another reminder of the power of American military defense contractors that were grandfathered into the efforts to recover and reverse-engineer crashed or otherwise recovered UAP, ostensibly giving them incredible advantages over their competitors and the rest of humanity. These companies truly have more power than the government officials who are supposed to be overseeing them. In reality those officials get no oversight or awareness at all. Defense contractors’ iron lock on UAP materials supersedes every kind of normal or routine security protocol in the government.”
[Luis Elizondo on Eric Davis and his 2020 claim to Leslie Kean for the New York Times that the government was in possession of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”]
“To get back to Eric Davis, I can say that he has certainly attracted a fair amount of attention himself. In 2020, he was plucked from obscurity when he told a New York Times reporter that the government was in possession of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
After Eric learned more about what was going on, he went on to brief DoD agencies and staff members from both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on this very topic as well. Eric attended several senior-level meetings, to which I was invited, with various branches of the US military. During these meetings, Eric detailed the Legacy Program’s long-running efforts involving UAP. Within the IC and DoD, his credibility is unimpeachable. And since then, Hal and other credible, highly placed individuals have informed me of the same information.”
[Luis Elizondo on his first UAP history lesson with Hal Puthoff in a SCIF, where Hal Puthoff explains that the Roswell event was real and included the recovery of 4 nonhuman bodies]
“I don’t recall how my first UAP history lesson in a SCIF with Hal began, but I remember Hal tossing off the most enticing one-liner I’d ever heard:
“Well… it all goes back to Roswell in 1947.”
“Wait━Roswell was real?” I asked.
Hal looked at me, clearly weighing whether to bring me further into his circle of trust.
“Yes, Lue, it was real.”
“You mean to tell me that a UAP actually crashed and we covered it up?”
“That’s exactly what happened,” he replied.
I went quiet, and let his words sink in.
Hal went on to tell me something else that truly blew my mind.
Four deceased nonhuman bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash.
After processing that, I fired off a slew of questions. In head, out mouth…
“Have we recovered nonhuman bodies from other UAP crashes?”
He looked at me as if debating how to answer. It was clear to me he wasn’t ready to tell me the answer. I was still the new guy. “We’ll tell you more soon enough,” he said.
“Is every incoming president told the truth?”
“No.”
“Well, what about Congress? What about the Gang of Eight?” I said, referring to the legendary bipartisan group of political leaders supposedly charged with knowing all of America’s black programs.
Hal explained, “The sad truth is, DoD regards presidents, elected officials, and political appointees as temporary hires. They do not need to know since they will not be in their position for very long. Unless something happens or they really push for it, US presidents do not get briefed, and those who have been briefed have only been given the most basic information.”
[Luis Elizondo describes a few famous historical UFO sightings between 1952-1954]
“March 1952: Two fiery discs zigzagged low over uranium mines in the Belgian Congo, where much of the raw material for the US’s first atomic bombs was extracted. At one point, the UAP stopped over an open part of the mine, as if to peer into or perhaps map it. They zigzagged away. A fighter plane gave chase but couldn’t keep up with the craft’s erratic changes in elevation. Finally, the UAP left the human pilot in the dust, racing toward Lake Tanganyika━the second-deepest freshwater lake in the world━at a speed close to the speed of sound. The pilot surmised that the objects had to be robotic because no human pilot would have been able to survive the g-forces of a craft moving in such a way━quickly, erratically, and going from a lulling standstill to an impossible rate of speed in seconds. UAP activity around uranium mines and large bodies of water continues to this day.
July 1952: Harry S. Truman was president. Multiple UAP resembling lights penetrated downtown DC and buzzed the White House and the capital city over two consecutive weekends. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses, and many local newspapers put the story on their cover. The strange objects did what no known aircraft then or since can do: they soundlessly parked themselves in the air, then zipped away at incredible speeds. When Air Force pilots pursued them, the objects abruptly changed direction and disappeared. In some cases, the lights split in two, each piece going in a different direction. One pilot shot at them, later justifying his action as a last-ditch measure because he knew that his state-of-the-art fighter aircraft had no hope of overtaking them. Interestingly, I heard reports that when the pilot shot at one of the objects, a piece of one aircraft fell to the ground and was recovered. But after a thorough investigations, officials chalked up the DC incident to… flocks of birds.
October 1954: Fans at a soccer game in Florence, Italy, spied a smooth, white, cigar- or egg-shaped vehicle over a stadium. Same deal: no obvious wings. The game stopped while onlookers watched as the object shot around the sky. Are we supposed to believe 10,000 rabid Italian soccer fans hallucinated the whole episode?”
[Luis Elizondo on historical government UAP/UFO investigation projects Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1949) and Project Blue Book (1952-1970)]
“The Air Force had studied UAP in 1948 and 1949, under the auspices of two year-old studies known as Project Sign and Project Grudge. Sign’s findings were inconclusive but open to the possibility of extraterrestrial origins for the craft. Grudge swiftly swept in and debunked the phenomena as the result of natural causes. Now, as we embarked on the Cold War in the 1950s, the US government became overwhelmed by civilian reports of flying saucers like the one Lonnie Zamora saw. Investigating the backlog of cases threatened to be a massive drain on manpower and technological resources, at a time when the US felt compelled to keep its eyes fixes on the Soviet Union. Solution: we palmed the UAP “problem” off on Project Blue Book.
In the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ex-KGB leaders inform the world about a cigar- or rod-shaped UFO interacting with several MIG fighter pilots, allegedly even obtaining gun camera footage of one.
March 1966: Neighborhoods in Michigan were terrorized over several days by strange craft that dove, hovered, climbed, and disappeared—only to reappear. One of these objects briefly landed in a nearby swamp. When a farmer and his son went to investigate, they observed a pyramidal object that was wingless, jetless, propeller-less. How could it fly? At the insistence of a leading Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford, Dr. Hynek’s Project Blue Book reviewed the matter thoroughly, and unfortunately announced that the witnesses had seen… swamp gas. A clear cover-up, it was an effort to tell the American people, “There’s nothing to see here, folks.”
A report prepared by Australia’s Department of Defense in the 1970s summed up the Blue Book strategy as follows: “By erecting a façade of ridicule, the US hoped to allay public alarm, reduce the possibility of the Soviet[s] taking advantage of UAP mass sightings for either psychological or actual warfare purposes, and act as a cover for the real US program of developing vehicles that emulate UAP performances.”
Australia is one of the “Five Eyes” intelligence partners; that is, five nations—including the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—that have a long history of sharing intelligence cooperatively. We can rely on their frank assessment of the American program.
Bottom line: Professor Hynek wanted to do real science. The Air Force wanted him to debunk UAP, silence witnesses, and beat the truth back into the shadows. And so we got tales of swamp gas and flocks of birds and weather balloons. To his credit, Hynek later regretted the role he played in suppressing evidence under the aegis of the US Air Force.”
[Luis Elizondo on UAP sightings over nuclear facilities including incidents where the UAP interfere with the facilities]
“Though it is not common knowledge among civilians, UAP have trifled with nuclear weapons all over the world, bringing the global superpowers close to war.
There are many events I am not legally able to speak about, but there are some I can.
March 1967: UAP resembling zigzagging “stars” appeared over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. One of the objects, emitting a bright red light, hovered over missile silos. Shortly after, multiple US government Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles—our ICBM nuclear warheads—went offline, one after the other. Inoperable.
September 1971: Despite almost all of the planet’s population having no clue, a treaty was signed by the US and the Soviet Union, titled “Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics“. Article 3 of the treaty states, “The Parties undertake to notify each other immediately in the event of detection by missile warning systems of unidentified objects, or in the event of signs of interference with these systems or with related communications facilities, if such occurrences could create a risk of outbreak of nuclear war between the two countries.” This language is a direct result of UAP interference with nuclear weapons in the US and the Soviet Union, and both nations being well aware of the stakes for humanity.
United Kingdom, 1980: UAP appeared out of the night sky over a very sensitive joint UK-US military facility near Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England. These UAP hovered specifically over an underground bunker where the two allies had secretly stockpiled nuclear weapons. How did these airborne visitors know the location of the weapons, and what was their intention? Multiple servicemen saw the UAP up close and have since gone public despite being told not to talk about it. Very few people know that all communications on the base went to “flash override”, which completely shuts down all communications lines so that only the president of the United States can communicate directly with someone on the base. The flash override protocol was designed to give the president the ability to control nuclear weapons in the event of a surprise attack. After the event, it was reported by servicemen on the base that an identified private plane landed on a runway just outside the base and that a group of men, said to be from a defense contractor, exited the plane and were driven onto the base. The same men were later seen loading crates onto the plane before leaving for the US. The next day, the servicemen who were eyewitnesses were called to the base’s office of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Some of the servicemen have since revealed what happened in that room. They were told to never speak about what they saw, and they were administered some sort of drug and hypnotized, presumably to distort their memories. The ones I personally spoke to said there was someone from the CIA in the room with the men from OSI. Years later, one of the servicemen saw a photo of a certain CIA official who had long worked on the UAP topic and claimed that CIA official was in the room the day after the event.
More than thirty years later, the late Senator John McCain successfully had the service records of one of the service members involved in the incident declassified. As a result, two witnesses were awarded permanent disability by the US government for their involvement and injury at Rendlesham.
Ukraine, 1982: UAP flew over Byelo Air Base in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Seconds later, the launch sequence for the base’s missiles switched on without any human ever entering the launch codes. Operators frantically rushed to shut the system down but could not. When the launch sequence reached its very last rung, it shut down of its own accord. We know that this happened.
On more than one occasion, the US dispatched bombers in anticipation of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union before the US realized that UAP had caused the Soviets to ready their missiles in error. Those nuclear missiles activated were pointed at us. That’s how close we’ve come to disaster. On other occasions, UAP have taken US nuclear weapons offline, so we couldn’t launch if the president had given the order.
Life as we know it would be over if any of these events led to nuclear war. All because of the actions of UAP, which so many people are foolishly inclined to believe are harmless.”
[Luis Elizondo on historical UFO/UAP sightings in relation to bodies of water]
“Summer 1981: A TWA pilot nearly collided with a round glowing object studded with windows over Lake Huron, the second largest of the Great Lakes.
March 1988: A Coast Guard team summoned to investigate a large object and other smaller lights spotted by a family along Lake Erie watched as the “parent” object appeared to descend close to the lake ice, causing it to rumble and crack. The smaller lights, which resembled triangles, lingered nearby. Shortly after, the large object seemed to land on the ice. The smaller objects zipped inside it, and they all later disappeared. The ice below seemed to heave and crack under an invisible weight. Was it due to something physical? Or was it a result of ultralow-frequency acoustics that perturbed the thick ice?”
[Luis Elizondo on Soviet investigations of UFO/UAP crashes in the Ural Mountains and worldwide]
“A contact showed me a small Russian booklet of maps that pinpointed the location of two crashes along the Ural Mountains. There was also the occasional Intelligence Information Report (IIR) that would detail what the former Soviet Union was doing to pursue the topic of UAP. Such reports often mentioned incidents all over Europe, Turkey, Ukraine, and China.”
from Chapter 6 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Orbs
[Luis Elizondo on his family’s firsthand experiences with orbs in their family home]
“I never had any interaction with orbs until I started working with the program.
I was shocked to find that a lot of my colleagues and I began experiencing firsthand some of these orbs at our homes. In fact, my wife was a complete skeptic on all this━that is, until she saw an orb in our house for herself.
We had a long main hallway in the house, and one evening a green, glowing ball, probably about the size of a basketball, with soft edges that weren’t defined, floated down slowly from the kitchen to our bedroom door just below ceiling height, then disappeared into a wall. Hoping Jenn caught a glimpse of it, I turned to her, catching the perplexed look on her face. She indeed saw it the entire ten seconds it was in our house.
Another time, the kids reported seeing an orb appear in the air, hover near them for a few seconds, and then float away. They described what they’d seen as best they could, first to my wife, and again to me when I asked. Their description made my blood run cold. The object had been three-dimensional but still translucent and suffused with an eerie green light. The object behaved as if guided by some intelligence. It parked itself in the air, then drifted off down the hall before disappearing entirely.”
[Luis Elizondo on other reported cases of orb sightings]
“After the pilot Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 UAP sighting, which was a couple of weeks before the Roswell crashes, he and his family allegedly had balls of light in their home.
You’ll recall that the citizens terrorized in Colares, Brazil, in the 1970s often claimed to have been pursued and attacked by lights or orbs. Will Livingston, the team’s medical consultant, had also studied a case of blue orbs that passed through a woman’s body, causing her to become ill. At Skinwalker Ranch, two dogs owned by a rancher chased a blue orb into the field, only to vanish in a yipe, leaving behind nothing but two grease spots on the sagebrush that contained remnants of the two dogs’ biology━body fluid, blood, and small amounts of tissue━literally all that was left of the poor creatures. To researchers it looked as if the orbs had somehow vaporized the dogs, scorching nearby vegetation. A beam of directed energy, from a powerful laser or radioactive weapon, was the presumed cause.
Two colleagues in particular were under medical care for both cutaneous and visceral injuries that were sustained from interactions with UAP while working with AAWSAP/AATIP, and we had numerous reports of negative biological effects associated with UAP encounters, especially orbs. The injuries sustained seemed to stem from some sort of directed-energy exposure, almost like radiation.
Unfortunately, multiple members of our team (excluding myself) experienced severe biological effects resulting in life-threatening medical issues. These biological effects also extended to their family members, including their children. While I am not able to go into details here, I learned of military servicemen and intelligence officers who succumbed to their injuries and lost their lives due to the biological effects of UAP encounters. And I learned of military and intelligence officials who were struggling to survive as a result of biological effects traced to their UAP encounters.
Another colleague and good friend, who wasn’t part of AAWSAP/AATIP but worked around us often, experienced these symptoms. He was the epitome of an Army officer and senior counterterrorism operator. He is a true American hero. I did not know until much later that he had his own UAP encounter as a boy. He went on to learn about some shocking things that happened in his own childhood, tied to his encounter, things he had no memory of.”
[Luis Elizondo on his family’s firsthand experiences with orbs in their family home, continued]
“Over time, more orbs appeared in our home. Not too frequently: a whole month might go by, and then one would arrive. Since “our” orbs manifested as clear or green, I did not feel compelled to warn my family to avoid them. I didn’t want to frighten them further. As far as I knew, only blue was problematic.
Nevertheless, we couldn’t shake the things. I’d be sitting at the dining room table, working at my computer or catching up on some reading, and I’d suddenly notice one of these damn balls hovering nearby. Other times, we’d be outside, grilling or hanging out near our koi pond with neighbors, when an orb would appear randomly, linger for a few moments, then mosey over toward the trees on the edges of our property. Our neighbors witnessed this too. It got to the point where neighbors would sometimes joke, “Is this one of our government’s secret programs you are working on, Lue?” Laughing uncomfortably, I’d think to myself, You have no idea how close to the truth you are.
Like the rest of the family, I had tried to ignore the visitations, hoping that they would stop. But they didn’t. During times of high atmospheric energy, such as storms, the occurrences became more pronounced. There are people who would conclude this was somehow connected to lightning, but it wasn’t. Nor were there any high-voltage power lines anywhere in the vicinity.”
from Chapter 7 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Tic Tac
[Luis Elizondo on the “Tic Tac” UAP encounter]
“Jay Stratton investigated the incident before I joined the team. He had written a detailed AAWSAP/AATIP report on the event, which is how I first learned about it.
Everything that happened that clear day in November 2004 was a perfect storm of intelligence and operations. In essence, we had three separate sensor types all trained on the target. We had multiple radar systems, both airborne and aboard a ship. We had FLIR (forward-looking infrared) images from the targeting pod externally mounted to our fighter jets, and we had eyewitness testimony from trained fighter pilots, who all reported the same thing, at the same time, at the same place. Thirteen years later, the truth of what happened that day would end up on the front page of the New York Times, for all the world to see.
Here is a breakdown of that event: Five vessels had begun traveling together in US waters off the coast of San Diego in what is known as a carrier strike group. The purpose of this deployment was to conduct “workups”, or training exercises, prior to the carrier strike group’s deployment to the Arabian Sea. The lead vessel was the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. On its most recent training exercises, it had shared the waters with two destroyers, the USS Higgins and the USS Chafee; a state-of-the-art SPY-1 radar-equipped missile cruiser called the USS Princeton; and a nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Louisville. At the time the incident took place, the Nimitz and the Princeton traveled close together. The other vessels were otherwise occupied.
For nearly two weeks leading up to the incident, the radar operators aboard the Princeton had regularly logged UAP activity in the air surrounding the vessels. Over one hundred UAP.
They performed acrobatics that would challenge any aircraft the radar operators had ever seen. They even popped up on the radar at 80,000 feet, where you begin to get into space, well above the normal envelope of aircraft, even military aircraft, with only a few notable exceptions, which include the U-2, the Blackbird, and the alleged Aurora. What’s more perplexing was that the objects would drop from 80,000 to 50 feet in a fraction of a second, then go right back up. There is no aircraft made by humans that can do that.
The Tic Tac encountered by the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group exhibited propulsive performance characteristics that imply a propulsion system power generation/output of 1.1 trillion watts. That is more than 100 times the daily electrical utility power generation in the US. Simply put, that is the power required to do what these things do.
If an aircraft performs such a feat, you’d expect to hear a “crack” or sonic boom as it flies beyond the speed of sound. Operators in the vicinity detected no such boom. There was no acoustic signature, as we tend to say. It was as if the rules of normal physics didn’t apply.
The carrier strike group had relied solely on electromagnetic systems to track these things. Until then, no one had gotten eyes on the objects. That was all about to change. On this particular November morning, the radio operators spotted what looked like a fleet of UAP━fourteen of them, to be precise━in the vicinity of a training area designated for military maneuvers. Two US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets were conducting training exercises when they were asked to go get their eyes on the UAP.
In each US Navy aircraft sits a pilot, known as the “front seater”, and a Weapon Systems Officer (WSO), colloquially pronounced “Wizzo”, also known as the “back seater”.
The senior pilot in the air that day was Commander Dave Fravor, who was considered one of the best Navy pilots. One of a rare breed, Fravor was often one of the few individuals who were known to run toward danger, not away from it. Commander Fravor graduated Top Gun with honors and was now the skipper of the elite Black Aces. His call sign, “Sex”, was an inside joke bestowed upon him by his colleagues upon graduating flight school━a rich and deep military tradition. On this particular mission, Fravor’s aircraft call sign was FASTEAGLE 01. In his back seat was Commander Jim Slaight, call sign “Clean”. An experienced and effective WSO, Slaight was often known as the “warheads on foreheads” guy, due to the precision with which he dropped his bombs.
Making up the other half of the team was another US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet piloted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Alex Dietrich, who was more skilled and deadly than her call sign━”New Girl”━suggested. Fresh out of training, Dietrich flew circles around her peers, probably the reason she was handpicked for her assignment with the Black Aces. A few years later, I heard a story that Alex had more confirmed kills in a period of time than the entire US Marine Corps. I never knew if the story was true, but I would not doubt it. Accompanying Dietrich as her WSO was another aviator known by the call sign “Noodle”. Together, New Girl and Noodle made up FASTEAGLE 02.
Fravor and Dietrich were flying their aircraft at approximately 20,000 feet when they both looked down into the sea. It was a gorgeous day, the sea calm. In this one spot in the Pacific, the water churned and roiled. It looked the way the surface of the water would look if a ship or some other vessel had sunk. There were whitecaps floating on the water and a giant patch of bubbles rising from them.
At this moment, all four pilots noticed something even stranger. A bizarre object darted back and forth over the whitecaps, about 50 feet above the water. The object was about 46 feet long━about the length of a semitruck━and shaped like an elongated oval or cigar. The pilots would later recall the object’s gleaming whiteness, as if its exterior were covered with a white, candy-coated shell. That description would later inspire the UAP’s nickname.
More unnerving was the way the Tic Tac performed over the roiling water. It moved unlike anything anyone had ever seen.
As Fravor closed in, the Tic Tac instantly trained itself on Fravor’s fast-approaching aircraft. The Tic Tac gained altitude as if intending to meet Fravor and Slaight somewhere in the middle, but the Tic Tac mirrored Fravor’s maneuver in a way that never permitted him to get any closer.
Top Gun instincts kicking in, Commander Fravor aggressively headed directly for the Tic Tac.
As Fravor and Slaight approached the Tic Tac━”poof”━it disappeared over the horizon in a split second. Never before had Fravor or Slaight encountered anything like this type of performance. Fravor felt his heart leap in his chest. Whatever this technology was, it was faster and more capable than anything we had in our inventory by an order of several magnitudes.
A few moments ticked before the Princeton contacted both Hornets.
“You’re not going to believe this, Commander” the operator told Fravor. “Whatever that thing is, it’s at your CAP point!”
“What the━” Fravor muttered.
How was such a thing possible? The combat air patrol (CAP) point is a designated point that is preloaded into the aircraft and is used as a meeting point for navigation and exercises. Few people know the location of a CAP point; it is impossible to extract from aircraft systems themselves. Yet the Tic Tac somehow knew the intended meeting point of the two Hornets, though it was sixty miles away. Not only did the Tic Tac have secret information, but it managed to scramble to that location within seconds after leaving Fravor and Slaight in the dust.
Low on fuel, Fravor wisely decided to end the exercise. Both jets zipped back to the carrier.
Upon hearing about this incident, another pilot eagerly offered to go find the Tic Tac. To everyone’s surprise, he found it. Seeing it on radar, and then with the naked eye, the pilot attempted to gain a lock on the Tic Tac. Cycling through various modes on his aircraft radar, he found it difficult to obtain one. UAP have been known to jam radar.
Navy fighter pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood managed to capture some video footage of the UAP, using Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared Radar (ATFLIR or FLIR for short). There is quite a bit of mind-boggling information in that short video clip. First, the UAP defies the pilot’s attempt to get a good lock on it. Second, it has no wings, no air intake, no exhaust plume, no cockpit, and no distinguishable control surfaces. Third, it displays no heat or acoustic signature. Fourth, it’s flying at hypersonic speeds and able to execute a maneuver almost instantaneously.
The craft’s instant disappearance was also alarming. Both Underwood and Fravor/Slaight reported the UAP disappearing over the horizon in an instant. How was that possible?
We simply don’t know of any aircraft that can go that fast. Nowhere near it.
An enemy armed with this technology could instantaneously deliver a destructive payload anywhere in the world with complete anonymity and impunity. There is nothing we could do to stop it. So this was not an encounter the military should take lightly.
What if this technology was already in the hands of an adversary of ours, rendering all other aircraft in our arsenal obsolete? Were we playing checkers against an enemy who had already mastered three-dimensional chess?”
[Luis Elizondo on historical UAP cases with elongated, cylinder-shaped objects reported to have been seen]
“August 1947: A civilian pilot on the East Coast reported an encounter to USAF Air Command with a cylinder-shaped object, “blunt at both ends”.
December 1953: Swedish airplane pilots observed a silver or white “flying lozenge” that left them flabbergasted. It “seemed more to be a robot”, the report read.
April 1964: The FBI reported finding a downed craft that was “shaped like a butane tank” and about as long as a telephone pole. The witness━who claimed the object narrowly missed his father’s farmhouse in Socorro, New Mexico━was “deemed sober and frightened”. The so-called butane tank report is from the same week as Lonnie Zamora’s sighting of a white, egg-shaped object that blasted off from the desert floor.
Tic Tac-shaped UAP are not new. They are very possibly old technology. They━whoever they are━have flown them for sixty or seventy of our human years, at least. Egg-shaped or lozenge-shaped vessels defied physics when we were oh-so-proudly building our second generation of fighter planes.”
[Luis Elizondo on the “Tic Tac” UAP encounter, continued]
“Back in 2004, very little follow-up had been conducted when the pilots returned to the Nimitz. Several of the pilots later told Jay that they had been debriefed by intelligence officers. They saw no evidence of a subsequent investigation. Kicked up the chain of command, their story died.
The senior master of arms on board the USS Princeton later told me that during a routine SITREP (“situation report”) with senior brass aboard the ship, the captain dismissed the entire incident, saying, “Well, you had your fun with this. Let’s get back to work now”. By then, many crewmen aboard the Nimitz and the Princeton had shared the video via the government’s classified email system.
Underwood, an otherwise serious and focused pilot, never indulged in flights of fancy. Neither Fravor nor Dietrich had displayed any propensity to exaggerate. Their crews perceived them as the best of the best. Fighter pilots are trained to spot, and know the differences between, an Su-22, a MiG-25, and other similar-looking fighter jets from twenty miles away. They must then make a split-second decision: Is the object friend or foe? Should we shoot it down or protect it?
Beyond a few questions a NORAD investigator put to Underwood, I was told no other internal agency investigated the encounter.
Think about it: an incident worthy of revectoring fighter aircraft conducting workups, complete with radar hits and camera footage, yet none of the higher-ups appear to give a damn.
As Jay interviewed these witnesses, he encountered instances where people just didn’t want to talk. Jay was a shrewd investigator with a poker face. He knew just how to ask the right questions to get the right answers. I couldn’t understand the resistance some people had, especially top brass, about an incident that was five years in the past at that point. Even those who had retired and entered civilian life still chose not to go on the record. If they did, they asked Jay not to reveal their identities.
Over decades, military people had learned that UAP are to be explained away or, better yet, ignored. Talking about the subject is a definitive career killer. Historically, the moment a pilot’s integrity or judgment is questioned, they are usually grounded and relegated to “flying a desk” the remainder of their career. As a result, recruits learn to deal with UAP without question. You get so good at following orders that you even follow the unspoken ones. If the admiral so much as raises his eyebrows, you shut up and move out smartly.
This stigma created a culture of silence. And those who saw or learned too much were silenced further with nondisclosure agreements and threats.
…
Spearheaded by Jay Stratton’s meticulous examination and later thrust into the limelight by a New York Times headline, this episode broke new ground in UAP discussions. It underscored not just the appearance of advanced performance characteristics of the observed object but also the profound implications such technology holds for both national security and our understanding of the physical world. This case, embedded in the collective memory of the carrier strike group personnel and later the global community, challenged us to reconsider the boundaries of our technological knowledge and the mysteries that remain in our skies.”
from Chapter 8 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Angels or Demons
[Luis Elizondo on AAWSAP’s funding efforts and pushback by the DIA]
“The program had taken on a slew of subcontractors to help with the research, but the primary firm was Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), owned by former hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, who, as I mentioned, at the time owned Skinwalker Ranch. I liked Bob and admired his tenacity and patriotism. He spent much of his own money fronting some of the costs for AAWSAP. Unfortunately, that was part of the problem, according to DoD. In an effort to “do the right thing”, detractors at DoD said the wrong things were done.
In addition, to accelerate its UAP work, AAWSAP gained access to a database of civilian eyewitness accounts, intending to track down the eyewitnesses and debrief them about sightings and aircraft encounters. The names and contact information of those US citizens had allegedly been stripped out before anything went to the government, but the redacted reports had allegedly been uploaded to DoD databases, not by BAASS but by someone in AAWSAP’s government chain of command. If true, this act alone is a serious violation of multiple DoD regulations and possibly Executive Order 12333. This may seem like a simple oversight, but it was all the ammunition the detractors needed to create a false impression that AAWSAP had gone rogue.
…
According to its detractors, AAWSAP had become an oversight nightmare from a legal and administrative perspective. Let me be clear: the nightmare was largely manufactured by the enemies of AAWSAP at DIA but was certainly effective. Personally, I never understood the need to go down the civilian experiencer route in the first place. Private research organizations already did that and did it well. We worked for the Pentagon. It was safer to confine ourselves solely to military and intelligence encounters with UAP. It was hard enough to speak to politicians and intelligence officials about UAP. I can’t fault those who thought they were saving our government time and money by acquiring that data, especially if those individuals were not trained intelligence officers or did not know the legal boundaries of collecting and using certain information. I chalked it up to an honest administrative mistake while trying to do the right thing.
Still, Jay and I didn’t like what DoD was doing to Jim. I respected Jim’s abilities, his scientific instincts, and his willingness to apply intellect to cosmic questions. He had dared to ask questions others were too timid or too ignorant to ask. The thought of the institution attacking him offended me. Further, the fact that no one later acknowledged the contributions of Jim or of Bob and his team of contractors was simply wrong. Many of these individuals were top scientists themselves or had extensive military and law enforcement training. Rather than being criticized for their efforts, they should have been lauded for their courage and tenacity.
I had recently accepted a new position as Director of National Programs, Special Management Staff, nestled within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The program managed national-level special-access programs directly for the National Security Council and the White House. Specifically, I worked largely on the US government’s efforts at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Now that I had broader authorities than before, Jay, John Robert, and I decided to move the remnants of the effort away from DIA and house it within my portfolio of national programs, ensuring the prying eyes of our detractors would no longer have any visibility. At the same time, Jay, myself, and a handful of government civilians and contractors would continue to run AATIP under the proverbial radar. If I did it this way, I knew no one in DoD would have access to the program, unless I specifically allowed it.
If we were clever, I could “dual-use” my existing funding to investigate UAP. That means that if I sent out a FLIR video to be analyzed, I could use the same budget line to analyze whether the object in the video was a Russian MiG-25 aircraft━or a UAP.
The only contractors who would remain involved with Jay and me were Hal, Will Livingston, and Eric Davis. They each had legendary careers operating behind the scenes on our nation’s most classified programs. Over the previous decades, they explored some of humanity’s greatest mysteries for our government. They knew information that less than 0.01 percent of the human population knew.
I am sure our decision was unpopular with many who were part of the original AAWSAP, but it was the only way Jay and I could figure out a way for AATIP to survive the constant barrage of internal attacks.
Hal, Will, and Eric would have unparalleled access to help Jay, John, me, and the others. In classic Pentagon style, everyone would fit their AATIP work into their already packed government workloads, and we would have to be very clever with the funding.
Hoping to help Jim Lacatski defend himself against the bureaucratic onslaught at DIA, I contacted a friend and former boss of mine, Michael Higgins. I had always considered Michael Higgins an honorable man. He was old-school. After leaving the US Marine Corps, he became an elite trigger puller for one of the three-letter intelligence agencies. He wasn’t a DC debutante or a member of the Junior League. He was a street fighter with the savvy of the Cheshire cat. Not a man to be trifled with, but a man I trusted implicitly. As it so happened, he had recently taken over as the DIA’s new Director of Operations.
I called Michael from a secure telephone. “Michael, I need you to protect one of our scientists. He is a good man who has done great things for our country, and your agency is trying to persecute him. I need to call in a favor and make sure he is protected from internal DIA forces”.
Michael simply replied, “You got it, Lue. I will look into it.”
I don’t think Jim ever knew what I tried to do for him, and I never told him. I suspect Jim would never have agreed for me to call on his behalf because he was always a patriot and would never call on favors to save himself. That was the kind of man Jim was.
Jay and I had done the best we could for Jim. Now I needed to see what I could do for the remains of his programs. We knew that the original money Senator Reid and his cohorts had secured for the program had run out. The original funding was programmed for the years 2008-12. Reid thought he could come up with another fresh infusion of funding to tide our investigations over until 2013-14.
At the time, the hot buzzword in Congress, the Pentagon, and the IC was ISR, which stood for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. At the same time, our enemies on the battlefield had become pretty adept at what we called the “counter-ISR” mission. They actively weaponized their own drones and aerial platforms, ensuring that never-ending game of cat and mouse continued apace.
At the height of the Global War on Terror, politicians fell over themselves writing checks for anything under the rubric of ISR. It wasn’t a stretch to consider AATIP as part of the ISR mission.
After all, AATIP tracked and studied UAP with advanced capabilities that had shown an unusual interest in our military and our most sensitive sites. Whoever or whatever was controlling the UAP was clearly doing some form of ISR. Jay and I strategized on how the new appropriations language should look. To get around the stigma surrounding UAP, Jay drafted some language that would serve as an appropriations request, and it was so brilliantly worded that no one who wasn’t privy to our investigation would ever guess we were focused on the issue of ISR by UAP.
I remember a conversation about funding that I had with my new boss, Neill Tipton, who was assigned to run the Intelligence Sharing and Foreign Intelligence Relationship Office. Neill had served in the Army, and later worked sensitive programs for several of the three-letter agencies. He was a good man and a passionate deep-sea fisherman who in his work life found himself swimming in a pool of sharks. As a Defense Intelligence Senior Level (DISL), he lacked the teeth brandished by his colleagues who were full-fledged members of the Senior Executive Service (SES), the highest civilian rank one could attain in the government. This meant Tipton would need to play the political game within the building if he ever wanted to see SES.
“Neill,” I said one day when I visited him at his office in Arlington, “by now you probably already know that I am involved with another… nuanced project.”
“I know,” he said. “I see a lot of strange people you bring here once in a while. I don’t like to ask questions.”
“I appreciate that, but I am here to ask you for some help. I need to know if you are still working with those guys across the hall.”
“Of course I am,” he said. “I helped build the program. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, it looks like I may be getting some funding for one of my programs, and I need to make sure I don’t step on anyone’s toes or take away from anything you have going on.”
Neill looked at me a bit confused. “Are you working an ISR project?” he asked.
That was the question, wasn’t it? Deep down, I knew that we could justify studying UAP if asked, because the questions we ask when studying, say, the signatures of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) could easily be the same as those regarding the study of a UAP.
Sheepishly, I responded, “Um, kiiiind of… but not really.”
Neill hesitated for a moment, assessing my body language. “Sure, Lue, whatever you need,” he said finally. As I was heading out, he blurted, “Just don’t get me into trouble.”
I worked for Neill before, but this was the beginning of a longer, more interesting professional relationship with Neill. In the coming months and years, I would have occasion to share some unusual videos with him, to get his insights into potential UAP technologies.
Long story short, Jay ran point on pulling off miracle after miracle and succeeded in getting Senator Reid to give us new funding━$10 million! We rejoiced for all of ten minutes, until we learned that another DoD program had absconded the funds. Jay and I felt kicked in the teeth. This happened because the language on the funding bill was ambiguous enough for someone in a powerful position to justify kicking the money to another line item.
To make matters worse, the world’s biggest catch-22 hung over our heads. We knew who had taken the money, and how he expected to use the funds. We just couldn’t openly fight for our money. If we did, we would expose the program. If we didn’t fight for the money, we would have no other funding source.
Neill Tipton urged me to speak to his boss, John Pede, who was no stranger to black budgets. When I bumped into Pede in the hallway and explained the situation, he said, “Damn, Lue, wish I had known earlier. I know the money you’re asking about; it’s being used to pay for some academic studies. Had I known earlier, I could have helped.”
He was right. We had kept our “bigoted” list of AATIP’s members and allies small. We were afraid to make some people aware of the effort. I guess we might have been overly protective of the topic, so protective that we lost the money we needed to continue.
“I wish I could tell you what we need it for, but I am not at liberty to discuss the details at this time,” I told Pede.
He smiled. “Believe it or not, I think I know what you are working on,” he said, winking. Pede always struck me as having a brilliant mind. I suspected maybe he really did know.
Officially, we were on the skids, but we knew we could make it work on a shoestring. I had my own modest budget, and we could probably request other small funding disbursements on a case-by-case basis through a government process called “Overguidance.””
[Luis Elizondo on learning about alleged alien implants and holding one he received from a hospital]
“Around this time, I spent several hours catching up with Will. Until then, I had not been deeply briefed on what he was doing. The good doctor now took me further into his confidence. Will was always a professional and never provided us with patient details. Will served as a medical advisor to AAWSAP/AATIP and Bigelow’s NIDS.
My specific interests involved alleged alien implants found in humans. From what I read, often living tissue grew around implants, but such growths never contained anything but the patient’s DNA in them. The growths sometimes sprouted multiple brightly colored hairs or filaments, similar to Morgellons fibers. When researchers scrape away the human tissue, they find objects that resemble a technical device in size and shape but without any circuitry whatsoever. I once handled one of these implants myself, provided to me by a hospital in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where it had been removed from a US military servicemember who had encountered a UAP. The material, no longer or wider than a joint of one of your fingers, looked more like a microchip encapsulated by a slimy semitranslucent casing of tissue. It looked very similar to mother-of-pearl. Under a microscope, it was still moving somehow. The doctor hypothesized that it had its own metabolism. AAWSAP/AATIP had also obtained photographs of these sorts of tiny objects from living foreign military pilots. Some of the specimens that have been removed from individuals were allegedly sent to various medical institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where some of the most deadly viruses are under lock and key and the watchful eye of armed guards. Although I asked often, Will never commented to me about any involvement he may have had regarding alleged implants, but it didn’t stop me from asking whenever I could.
I already knew from other research and interviews that doctors had seen cases where the alleged alien implant evaded extraction by moving subcutaneously when doctors tried to excise it. I heard similar stories when investigating implants removed from otherwise healthy soldiers. Physicians really had to work to pin down and cut out the objects. With my background in microbiology, I was perplexed how highly motile objects such as these could move without creating a devastating path of tissue destruction inside the human body. Where was the white cell response? Where was the destructive immune cascade? I knew from my time studying trypanosomes at the University of Miami that anytime these spirochetes moved about under the skin, they would elicit an enormous immune response. Where was this response with regard to the implants?
Doctors reported detecting the implant moving, but there weren’t any obvious signs of pathway destruction. Like a stealth bomber, the implant moved without any trace or signature, almost as if evading the natural human immune response. It was as if the body didn’t know the object was there in the first place. Maybe the implant encouraged the growth of human tissue around itself to keep the body from rejecting it. Post-extraction, some implants moved around the petri dish in which they were confined until they ran out of energy. One theory a doctor told me was that they drew their energy from their host’s body.
In one particular instance, a senior CIA official and his wife had a terrifying UAP experience in the backyard of their own home. When they awoke lying on the ground in the yard, the CIA officer had a small hole punched in the back of his neck, and his wife had a small metallic object recovered from her nose when she sneezed. Making things even more interesting, CIA doctors were notified of the circumstances and examined the patients.
What was the purpose of these implants? Were they tracking devices? Mind control? Did they collect and transmit data on the host’s metabolism? Another researcher reported finding long filaments, again akin to Morgellons fibers, moving under their own power while under the microscope, scaring the researcher to the point that she didn’t want to study the samples anymore. The objects seemed to have their own metabolism.
It was all fascinating, but at the time, Jay and I agreed we had to focus on the nuts and bolts of UAP military encounters in order to effectively navigate future battles with Congress, the DoD, and other agencies.”
from Chapter 10 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Secret in Their Brains
[Luis Elizondo on historical UAP encounters that may have caused negative health effects on the witnesses]
“December 1980: Two women and a boy driving on a lonely Texas road saw what resembled a diamond-shaped UAP descend and hover over a nearby tree. The boy, the grandson of one of the women, was too terrified to move. The women got out to have a look. They sensed a massive amount of heat emanating from the obejct. Later, after they fled the scene, their symptoms moved swiftly from headaches to severe skin burns, nausea, diarrhea, eye damage, lesions, exhaustion, hair loss, and the shedding of their fingernails. The boy, who remained in the car, also had eye problems and suddenly needed to wear glasses for his schoolwork. One woman later developed severe cataracts, the other breast cancer.
December 1980: I mentioned this incident earlier, but here we look at a different aspect. Strange lights appeared near a joint UK-US military facility in Suffolk, England, where the two allies had stored nuclear weapons in a secret bunker. Two security policemen, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, found a landed UAP in nearby Rendlesham Forest. Their recollections are fuzzy at best. The watches both men wore that night lost forty-five minutes of time when compared to the timepieces of the airmen back on base. (Hal Puthoff calls this the Rip Van Winkle Effect.) Burroughs later experienced a series of worsening health effects━vision problems, white gums, heart murmurs, heart tissue scarring━all of which culminated in heart surgery to correct damaged leaflets in his mitral valve.
August 2007: A mother and daughter driving at night on a road near Davis, California, saw three blue orbs appear on the road. Two of the orbs allegedly penetrated the vehicle; one passed directly through the older woman’s upper chest and exited her upper right arm. The older woman reported feeling nausea immediately; both women were unclear about how much time had elapsed during the encounter. Later, the mother began to gain weight, experience premature aging, and develop skin rashes, hair loss, blurry vision, hearing loss, and osteoarthritis. Two years later, doctors diagnosed this previously healthy woman with breast cancer; she later underwent a bilateral mastetomy.
I could go on. The history is well documented, and terrifying. One of the early Bigelow researchers, John F. Schuessler, collected examples of civilian bio-effects dating back to 1950. It’s truly puzzling material. The litany of complications reported touch upon all five senses, and beyond. Sleep issues. Nervous issues. Fuzzy thinking and time distortion are common. Some women insist that they became pregnant following UAP encounters. There are the “usual” reports of abductions and implants. And some people insist that they developed some sort of psychic abilities following encounters.
Certain medical professionals who joined us discussed biological effects extensively. We felt certain that the severity of the symptoms was determined by two data points: each victim’s own set of genetic circumstances, and how close the victim was to the UAP or phenomena at the time of the event. Soon it became evident that a graduated scale of symptoms could be explained by the person’s proximity to the UAP and exposure to radiation.
A really good question is whether these UAP health impacts are deliberate, or just a consequence of the UAP technology. That is, are the UAP intentionally targeting humans, or it the harm accidental? Outside of an event like Colares, I would argue the harm is unintentional. Jet engines were never developed to be deployed as weapons, but if you stand behind one when a commercial airplane is revving up, you’re going to be hurt━badly. Whatever technology makes UAP fly clearly generates a form of radiation that can be deleterious to living human tissue.”
from Chapter 11 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Biological Remains
[Luis Elizondo discusses reports on biological remains from nonhuman bodies recovered from UAP crashes]
“Several of the senior officials I worked with eventually told me that when one of my colleagues worked at the CIA some decades earlier, he was given an official report/autopsy of the dissection of a nonhuman body that was recovered from an unspecified crashed UAP. This colleague asked me not to use his name. The report stated that the brain had no convolutions (the wrinkled exterior portion of the brain). Rather, what was described was a smooth surface, similar to lower-functioning animals here on earth. It also described a conjoined gut and liver, and a three-chambered heart, like reptiles. The author of the autopsy came to the conclusion the cadaver did not appear to have the requisite brain capacity to design and create aircraft capable of such stunning maneuverability. It was postulated that it might be some sort of biological automaton, created by something else with a greater intellect. In that era at the CIA, brain/neuroanatomical science considered smooth exterior brain surfaces to be indicative of extremely low animal intelligence incapable of tool making; no sophisticated communication capability beyond sight/smell (pheromones)/primitive vocal noises; and no high-level cognition. Let me emphasize that this is what was told to me at the time. As you’ll see below, that thinking later changed.
Eric and some of our other colleagues were familiar with TRW’s rumored crash-retrieval program run out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and they shared this view, based on their recoveries. For background, TRW has long been a major US defense contractor and was eventually purchased by Northrop Grumman, another major defense contractor.
Credible sources, including those involved at AATIP, told me the facts from several historic UAP crashes from which nonhuman bodies were recovered by the US, in addition to the Roswell crash.
Among the significant early crash retrievals was one deceased nonhuman body recovered in December 1950 in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. Again, in 1989, four deceased nonhumans were also allegedly recovered from a crash of a large Tic Tac in Kazakhstan, Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, the opinion from decades ago about brains was recently proven wrong when numerous studies of all kinds of animals demonstrated that animal species having smooth exterior brain surfaces do have complex communication techniques, do make tools and teach their young how to use them, and do use math and geometry to communicate with mates (certain fish do this) or form sophisticated mental models of nature surrounding them. Even bees have sophisticated social hierarchical societies with high-level communication and aviation navigation methods and mental mapping, etc. So life forms with smooth brain surfaces can be high-functioning.
You have to admire the stunning anthropocentric bias of past assessments. How would these doctors know about the brain function of a nonhuman being? How could they presume to know how an alien brain worked? Were they even looking in the right place?
Was it possible that nonhuman life had built synthetic beings? My colleagues who had knowledge of official reports on biological remains posited that the nonhumans piloting UAP are either naturally evolved beings or engineered biological automatons.”
from Chapter 12 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Observables
[Luis Elizondo on]
“Los Alamos, New Mexico, 2013: Scientists and researchers at the legendary White Sands missile test range, the same location where the Manhattan Project constructed the components for the atomic bomb during World War II, were testing yet another device (whose nature I cannot divulge) when witnesses spotted several mysterious and luminous orbs moving over a nearby ridge.
These witnesses included scientists, security personnel, and an FBI special agent assigned to the Albuquerque Field Office. The orbs moved toward the test site.”