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 the 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 discusses reports of a 2013 UAP incident at Los Alamos, New Mexico which occurred over several days and then also refers to his top level security clearance]
“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, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, then zipped away, brashly flying over the heads of bewildered scientists. Later, several eyewitnesses saw a formation of disc-shaped objects that seemed to know precisely where the device being tested was located. This occurred several times over a few days.
These witnesses included scientists, security personnel, and an FBI special agent assigned to the Albuquerque Field Office. The orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, then zipped away, brashly flying over the heads of bewildered scientists. Later, several eyewitnesses saw a formation of disc-shaped objects that seemed to know precisely where the device being tested was located. This occurred several times over a few different days.
(Redaction: In this and the redaction that follows, how a three-letter agency handled the matter internally was redacted by DoD.)
Somehow, someone had learned to penetrate US airspace completely undetected, fly unchallenged over one of the nation’s most sensitive military research areas, collect information on one of our most sensitive technologies, then━poof━disappear.
The initial DoD reports I saw painted a picture of government witnesses standing around watching an almost obvious display of out-of-this-world performance characteristics.
Who precisely had jurisdiction to investigate and take control of the situation? The answer depends on whom you ask. White Sands works with many masters and service providers. DoD has some jurisdiction because it’s their facility. The FBI is responsible for handling federal crimes within the continental US. The Department of Energy━a massive entity in its own right━has its own jurisdiction when it comes to nuclear secrets and technology. This is a classic example of government fiefdoms and stovepiping that obfuscates the truth about UAP. One thing was for sure: we were boxed out.
Around this time, I had reached a new plateau in my career. I had been granted the highest level of clearance a GS employee could expect to obtain. I was now permitted to access the full spectrum of intelligence and information━Confidential, Secret, Alternative Compensatory Control Measures (ACCM) Top Secret, Special Access Programs (SAPs), Controlled Access Programs (CAPs), and Covert Action.
Who precisely had jurisdiction to investigate and take control of the situation? The answer depends on whom you ask. White Sands works with many masters and service providers. DoD has some jurisdiction because it’s their facility. The FBI is responsible for handling federal crimes within the continental US. The Department of Energy━a massive entity in its own right━has its own jurisdiction when it comes to nuclear secrets and technology. This is a classic example of government fiefdoms and stovepiping that obfuscates the truth about UAP. One thing was for sure: we were boxed out.
Around this time, I had reached a new plateau in my career. I had been granted the highest level of clearance a GS employee could expect to obtain. I was now permitted to access the full spectrum of intelligence and information━Confidential, Secret, Alternative Compensatory Control Measures (ACCM) Top Secret, Special Access Programs (SAPs), Controlled Access Programs (CAPs), and Covert Action. In the parlance of the DoD, I was called a “superuser.” Certified as a Special Technical Operations (STO) officer, I had the same sort of clearance as the White House employees who carry the red phone or the nuclear codes for the president.”
[Luis Elizondo on The Five Observables: Hypersonic Velocity, Instantaneous Acceleration, Low Observability, Transmedium Travel, Antigravity]
“When trained observers like pilots witnessed UAP in action, what started the pilots about these objects? What impressed the aviation experts when we showed them the videos?
We realized all the advanced capabilities observed can be categorized according to five distinct performance characteristics. We called these the observables.
1: Hypersonic Velocity
The first observable is hypersonic velocity.
Sound travels at a speed of 762 miles per hour. Hypersonic means Mach 5, five times the speed of sound━about 3,800 to 4,000 miles per hour.
Do humans today have vehicles that can do over Mach 5? Yes, we do. For example, the X-15, the NASA Space Shuttle, and certain missiles can operate at speeds above Mach 5, but only in the upper atmosphere or in space, where the atmosphere is less dense. At low altitudes, the air is more dense, which makes high-speed travel exponentially more difficult.
The SR-71 Blackbird can just about hit Mach 5 at high altitudes. Made up almost entirely of titanium, any faster, the aircraft would be incinerated by the heat generated.
Additionally, when our aircraft go hypersonic, we usually hear a sonic boom as the sound barrier is broken. There are other associated signatures as well, such as heat ablation and atmospheric ionization, which can likewise be detected by our sensors.
UAP are routinely clocked traveling at Mach 17 and faster at low altitudes, even at sea level. That’s more than 13,000 miles per hour at low altitudes.
2: Instantaneous Acceleration
The next observable is instantaneous acceleration, which is defined as a sudden increase in velocity. The UAP we are observing are traveling at 13,000 miles per hour, sometimes faster, and instantaneously accelerating and stopping on a dime. This includes high-speed turns that would normally require a conventional aircraft many miles to complete.
Do humans have aircraft that can perform instant acceleration? No━not like this.
As an example, at full speed, the SR-71, known as the Blackbird, requires airspace roughly half the size of the state of Ohio to complete a right- or left-hand turn. By contrast, UAP make immediate right-angle turns at speeds up to ten times faster than the SR-71.
One of the consequences of instantaneous acceleration is the enormous g-forces generated. The term g-force describes how the impact of gravity and acceleration feels when it hits the human body. That thrilling feeling you get when a roller coaster dips up and down is all positive and negative g-force. You also get it when the coaster car is running at a relatively slow speed━then punches it.
Fighter pilots can experience up to 9 g-forces for a short duration of time. High-g maneuvers run the risk of blackout, injury, or death. For this reason, pilots wear special g-suits. Without them they’d be rendered unconscious as blood fights to reach their brains, or, worse, floods their brains.
One of the most highly maneuverable manned aircraft is the General Dynamics F-16. This older yet very capable aircraft can handle approximately 17 g’s before the craft experiences structural failure. Wings begin to snap off, and the plane literally starts to disintegrate.
In contrast, UAP display the ability to handle forces as high as several thousand g’s, well beyond the limits that the human body can withstand. Conventional aircraft would be shredded into confetti-sized pieces.
3: Low Observability
The next observable is a bit of an oxymoron, but it’s low observability.
All modern technologies have a signature, whether it be environmental, electronic, acoustic, thermal, or visual. For example, most aircraft leave visible contrails in the sky as they fly and the hear from their exhaust turns water vapor into a thin stream of cloud. We see these white streaks every day. UAP, however, leave almost no observable signature, no sonic booms or obvious sound at all, no atmospheric ionization, no heat ablation, no contrails.
Luckily, there are some instances where we have collected limited data on UAP, using visual collection systems, electromagnetic systems such as radar, and acoustic collection systems such as sonar. However, capturing clear data has been very challenging.
Sometimes it’s what you don’t see that matters most. UAP are diabolically hard to spot and identify with cameras, radar, or the naked eye.
4: Transmedium Travel
The next observable is transmedium travel, the ability to operate in multiple environments, or domains, such as space, our atmosphere, and underwater.
To be clear, we do have vehicles in our current inventory that are indeed transmedium. For example, seaplanes can fly and float, but let’s face it: a seaplane is neither a very good aircraft nor a very good boat. Why? Because to build the craft that can operate in both environments, air and water, its designers were forced to make compromises in performance in order to make the vehicle do what it needs to do.
UAP, on the other hand, have been observed operating superbly in space, in the air, and underwater. The same vehicle, in other words, can do all equally well. Moreover, they do this without compromising their performance.
As an example, when you throw a rock into a pond, you’d expect to see a splash and a ripple. That is not the case with UAP. These objects have been seen going from space into our atmosphere and then diving into the ocean without slowing down, without splashing, and with no obvious effect on the surrounding environment.
5: Antigravity
The next observable is best described in the vernacular as antigravity. Antigravity is a bad word in most scientific circles, but in essence, it means the ability to defy the natural effects of earth’s gravitational pull on objects in the environment. All of us experience gravity on earth equally because the mass of the earth is consistent. It pulls us all toward the center of the earth equally at 9.8 meters per second.
As a result, we experience gravity on earth as the equivalent of 1 g-force. Gravity is directly related to the mass of the object.
If I were standing on the moon and you were standing on Jupiter, each of us would experience gravity differently: the gravity on the moon is weaker because its mass is much smaller than Jupiter’s mass. This is all part of Newtonian physics. It wasn’t until Einstein that we learned that gravity is much more than simply a pulling force. Gravity is in fact the warping of space-time itself. That’s right, the very fabric of space is inextricably linked to the notion of time itself.
If I were standing on the moon and wearing a wristwatch, I would experience time slightly faster than I would on earth or Jupiter because the mass of the moon is much less and therefore warps space-time a little less.
UAP, however, seem to defy the natural effect of earth’s gravity without any obvious means of doing so━that is, no signs of propulsion or lift.
No wings, no rotors, no propellers. No control surfaces or means to maneuver.
UAP stand out because they can achieve all five of these observables. They may not display all of them in each individual encounter, but it looked to us as if they were capable of achieving them when pressed to do so.”
from Chapter 13 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Where the Evidence Lies
[Luis Elizondo on defense contractors privately owning recovered UAP materials, and the US Air Force’s involvement (control) in UAP and resulting lack of transparency]
“We were told specifically that a defense contractor, associated with the Legacy Program, was in possession of UAP materials of nonhuman origin, made by some civilization from some distant planet. When Jay went to inquire for us, the contractor acknowledged that, yes, they were in possession of this material. They said they would give us access to it but first we needed to get permission from the secretary of the US Air Force.
This was an important development. The contractor was acknowledging a long-standing memorandum generated by the Air Force which made the contractor beholden to the USAF’s strict handling requirements. This proved that the Air Force had indeed not only known about crash retrievals but had a historic control over them and leverage with this defense contractor and probably others. In the words of the contractor, after decades, they were no longer able to glean any meaningful understanding of the recovered material and they considered it now an expensive liability.
We already knew or suspected that a handful of aerospace firms had been cleared to accept and keep forever any off-world tech that came into the hands of the US government. But they weren’t talking━and would actively work to get you fired or your clearance canceled if you start asking questions. So this was very interesting, but too good to be true.
We now knew the Air Force had long been a key player in the Legacy efforts and this contractor probably had a good laugh sending us on this fools’ errand. In reality, they had no intention of giving this to us. It was an in-your-face reminder of the power of the military-industrial complex and specifically their power when it comes to the Legacy UAP program.
From the moment I came on board the team, I learned that the Air Force was stubbornly and mysteriously uncooperative on the topic of UAP. Their resistance was irritatingly real. I cannot enumerate the times we sent carefully crafted emails to Air Force liaisons requesting information or follow-up details on UAP incidents, only to have the requests denied or ignored entirely.
In my early days, I just assumed the USAF was in denial. Maybe they felt burned for the clown show they orchestrated with Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book? Maybe they were embarrassed that they didn’t have dominance in our skies. They were supremely responsible for protecting US airspace. But when it came to UAP, they had failed miserably. Maybe, to Air Force leadership, to speak truthfully of UAP meant owning up to that realization. Or maybe current leadership simply didn’t know much about the topic. Perhaps they had buried the past when they euthanized Project Blue Book in 1969. But I had grown older and wiser, and more informed. It had become extremely clear to me that the Air Force was part of the cover-up.
Days went by, and I grew increasingly angry. Here we were, ostensibly investigating the unthinkable, and others in government were actively hiding it from us. We knew that our adversaries had their own UAP research programs. We also had incursions of our most sensitive restricted airspace happening regularly, and urgent national security concerns we were investigating. How could others working for our government not share what they knew with us? This was unfathomable and egregious to me. This went against every instinct of national security. In essence, if you are not part of our solution, then you are part of our problem.
I thought about 9/11 and how it could have been prevented if agencies had shared information. In that case, you had CIA with information, FBI with information, other organizations with information, and frankly, if they shared it all together, they may have prevented the Al Qaeda attack.
We had to push the issue.
Knowing the US government had recovered both intact and partial craft, where were the biological remains? “Where the hell are the biosamples?”
After years of work on the topic, we still had not received an answer to this key question. What reached my ears instead were excuse after excuse. We had data, reports, photos, video, and countless eyewitnesses.
If you accept that the “modern” era of UAP sightings dates to 1947, that means those who came before us had almost eighty years to obfuscate and literally bury the truth.
Senior officials told me continuously and confidentially that big aerospace companies have been part of the Legacy Program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crash materials. The big names included Lockheed Martin, TRW, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and the Aerospace Corporation, all of which have long been principal members of the US military-industrial complex. I was also told that Monsanto, a biotechnology corporation absorbed by Bayer in 2018, may have historically been involved, most likely dealing with biological specimens.
Who knows how many extremely valuable inventions and technological advancements came off the back of this research, and how much money was made by these contractors.
If another organization had eighty years of information on what we were investigating, then we should have been working with them rather than in competition. We should have been working together to address the national security concerns. The existence of the Legacy Program would mean there was a deep conspiracy within the US government to keep the truth from US citizens. Such a program would require huge resources, not only to conduct daily operations. The costs of program security alone would be obscene. I later learned that the truth was far more complex and shocking than I’d imagined.”
[Luis Elizondo on nonhuman biological samples being moved from place to place so much that their original chain of custody may be lost]
“Eventually, after relentlessly pushing, I learned that nonhuman biological samples had moved many times and some were now either at Fort Detrick, Maryland, or with the US Food and Drug Administration. Ironically, the samples had been moved around so much that their original chain of custody might have been lost, with samples sitting in a refrigerator somewhere and no one having a clue what they were or where they came from. As for bovine samples related to alleged cattle mutilations, those could be found with the US Department of Agriculture. A veterinarian from Montana who happened to work with the USDA and conducted autopsies on some of the cattle expressed his concern to me that these poor creatures had been killed by a technology we have yet to see and that no one was taking it seriously, other than the ranchers. I had no way of getting to these or other samples, which only increased the frustration we all felt.”
from Chapter 14 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Searching for Breakthroughs
[Luis Elizondo on Garry Nolan and Jacques Vallée studying anomalous materials at Garry Nolan‘s laboratory]
“Meanwhile, Garry Nolan and Jacques Vallée were talking seriously about collaborating on an academic paper about exotic materials recovered from a UAP crash decades prior. In 1977, on a night close to Christmas, unusual lights were spotted in the skies over Council Bluffs, Iowa. When witnesses ran to where these lights neared the ground, they found not an aircraft but what looked like a small pool of molten metal. Had the craft melted when it hit earth? Had it melted in the air and oozed to the ground? Vallée had obtained materials recovered from this incident. He suspected the multicolored lights seen in the sky by witnesses came from a wobbling craft in distress. When no craft was actually found on the ground, it begged the question: Was the pool of molten metal some sort of by-product of the craft?
After some sightings, researchers had recovered a fine metallic fiber on the found. They called it “angel hair.” I have handled some of this material. It’s a little like steel wool. The working theory is that the exteriors of these aircraft are ablative in nature; that is to say, they are capable of self-sacrificing. When the skin of the craft interacts with the propulsion unit, the craft ablates, or peels off, some of its outer surface, resulting in these fibers.
Back in 1977, the Council Bluffs case had undergone an unusually rigorous amount of investigation by local and federal authorities. It was a blue-chip legacy case. Like our Nimitz encounter, this civilian event fit the profile of a case that could serve as a model for deeper study. Since 1977, metallurgical technology had improved enormously. Nolan had a battery of instruments in his laboratory that he thought would allow Jacques to get a better understanding of the sample in his possession.”
from Chapter 15 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: USS Roosevelt
[Luis Elizondo on Jay Stratton receiving emails from the Navy detailing the USS Roosevelt encountering at least 22 separate events of UAP/UFO activity throughout 2014]
“In 2015, Jay received a string of emails from senior leaders with the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. The emails provided details of UAP incursions involving the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt. He forwarded the email to me and called me to discuss the events. The carrier had already embarked on a ten-month deployment to the Persian Gulf. It turns out that during pre-deployment workups in late 2014, in the waters off Virginia and all the way down to Florida, the aircrew had twenty-two separate encounters with UAP. The Hornets aboard the carrier had recently undergone upgrades to improve radar systems that dated, in some cases, to the 1980s. Thinking these may only be artifacts or some other issue with the new highly sensitive radars, the pilots investigated and validated with their eyes and other sensors. There were scores of UAP operating in exclusive-use airspace, where no aircraft are authorized to fly besides US military aircraft.
Most of these UAP were small. Because of their location and their boldness, our personnel assumed at first that they were drones or probes operated by some classified US military program. Maybe the Navy had gotten its wires crossed with a top secret endeavor testing new equipment. Was that possible? We had processes to rule out that option, and it was ruled out quickly.
The military and its aerospace partners tend to avoid testing new equipment near pilots who haven’t been briefed on new technology. We have tons of remote secure airspace that is designated for this so-called blue-on-blue testing, and it is never done unannounced. There’s never any need to unroll top secret tech in the presence of personnel who have not been cleared. It’s too complicated, too sloppy, and too dangerous. You could easily lose prototypes that cost you millions to construct. Worst-case scenario, you could get pilots killed.
As I sat digesting the email and my call with Jay, I pushed my mind to consider all the details. The situation had all the hallmarks of the Nimitz/Princeton case back in 2004. Like the Nimitz, the Roosevelt was a nuclear-powered vessel. Two of the boxes were ticked: water and nukes. The classic UAP combo. It also appeared that the UAP were being provocative. According to witnesses, this was a protracted event, lasting not days, but months.Pilots and radar operators observed these objects and grew increasingly concerned. The crew reported the UAP displayed the same abilities that dazzled the Nimitz and Princeton crews a decade earlier. Some flew alone, while others flew in a synchronized formation, not unlike the video I provided Neill Tipton of the three objects flying in formation. If not the exact same technology, I was sure it was related. The objects would change elevation from 30,000 feet down to sea level in the blink of an eye. They would stop in midair, then shoot away in a different direction. Some were small, the size of a beach ball, while others were much larger. We also received reports of luminous underwater craft that illuminated in an eerie green glow while following our ships. There seemed to be a variety of shapes and sizes, and all seemed interested in our fleet.
In one instance two Hornets embarked on an exercise that required them to fly within one hundred feet of each other. Tight formations are critical in combat to control the airspace and keep a close eye on your wingman. Without warning, an object flew right toward the Hornets, zipped right between their wings, and disappeared. As the pilot told me, the UAP “split their formation”.
The worst situation for any pilot, a near collision.
The object drew close enough to the cockpits that both pilots saw it clearly. It was a transparent orb or sphere; inside it was a cube. The four points of the cube touched the inner circumference of the sphere. Truly bizarre.
When the pilots returned to the Roosevelt, some were shaken and concerned, and a few were terrified. As news of the encounter spread, the other pilots became increasingly angry. A UAP the size of a beach ball may seem small, but it only takes a small bird to stall a jet engine and bring down a plane. Navy brass was concerned and so were we.
And for what? It couldn’t have been a civilian drone. It was too far out and too far up. The UAP they’d been seeing recently had the ability to fly for more than twelve hours at a time without needing to refuel, recharge, or be recalled. Furthermore, there wasn’t any obvious staging area to launch or recover drones.
Someone speculated that it could have been an inflatable radar reflector, used for training and navigation, but balloons don’t travel against a head wind and normally don’t fly in a coordinated formation. This was not an inflatable radar reflector. The squadron filed safety reports, hoping to spark an investigation. During this period, numerous similar reports were filed through the Navy, in various operating areas worldwide, complaining of similar near disasters with UAP. The language in those reports is strikingly similar. At some point in the document, you would find a high-ranking official assert, “This is very dangerous. This could have caused a midair collision and threatened the lives of our aviators.” The incidents had become so numerous that they could no longer be ignored.
The authors of these reports hoped that their stern warning would somehow filter up to the presumed operators of top secret programs who, they believed, had recklessly put their people in danger. Most of them did not or could not contemplate the possibility of off-world technologies. Ones who did carefully couched their language in generalities, hoping that an open-minded person in charge would notice. This ultimately led the senior intelligence officer at Fleet Forces Command to reach out to Jay, who, in his role with naval intelligence on the Navy staff in the Pentagon, would be the appropriate front door for initiating a larger investigation, which Jay did with the full support of his leadership.
Back in the Pentagon, we were trying our best to investigate these incidents involving the Roosevelt. But it was if we were back at square one.”
[Luis Elizondo on creating a plan with Jay Stratton to suggest to Joint Chiefs of Staff a program intended to use nuclear assets over open waters to attract UAP attention and document it]
“Based on these twenty-two UAP incidents involving the Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, with eyewitnesses and video evidence, we knew we needed a robust plan of action. Jay spent weeks creating an operation plan (OPLAN), code-named “Interloper”. It was a classic “honey pot”. It was a classic “honey pot.” We would orchestrate a situation that was so irresistible and almost impossible for the enemy to ignore. With each new iteration of the OPLAN, Jay inserted more data in the proposal to bolster our argument. Dates, times, locations, call signs, and the ship names of all vessels that had UAP encounters. Jay also included radar data that substantiated the eyewitness testimonies of flustered pilots and aircrew. The Interloper document painted a very persuasive picture to whoever read it.
Unfortunately, by this time my friend Michael Higgins was no longer DIA’s director of operations and was on to his new assignment. His replacement was a man whom I did not trust named Garry Reid (no relation to our congressional benefactor, Senator Harry Reid). He had been brought to the OUSD(I) from the special operations community. I’d originally looked up to him but soon saw his propensity for favoritism and chauvinism. Collectively, he and his cronies reduced OUSD(I) to tatters, besieged by low morale and poor management. They spent more time trying to outmaneuver each other than outmaneuvering real enemies, foreign and domestic, and it was all at the expense of our workforce. Employees would soon file charges with the DoD inspector general about some of his behavior. The DoD’s Inspector General’s Office went on to investigate Reid on numerous allegations, including maintaining a sexual relationship with a subordinate employee, sexual harassment, and fostering a hostile work environment.
The IG’s Office would eventually conclude that Reid had violated Joint Ethics Regulations by creating an appearance of an inappropriate relationship or preferential treatment with a female subordinate and mishandling of Controlled Unclassified Information.
More on this later, but the bottom line: I knew right away I could not trust him, and he was unfortunately my senior rater and boss. The chain of command had been corrupted.
To move Interloper along, Jay and I circumvented the usual channels in favor of an ACCM process. That means the operation plan would be submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We were hoping to get around the OUSD(I) because the entire organization had become infested with compromised individuals. I no longer trusted my chain of command with anything sensitive, let alone with UAP information.
Jay had introduced me to the new Navy Controlled Access Program (CAP) manager, who was a friend of his. A GS-14 at the time, ——- was a seasoned intelligence officer. ——- soon became a trusted part of our team and was particularly savvy in navigating the forest of classification systems. In fact, I think it was ——- idea in the first place to coordinate Interloper through the Joint Chiefs.
——- was exactly the type of guy we needed on the team, and Jay had once again found us a great team member.
For weeks after, Jay and now ——- would reach out each time we received a fresh infusion of images or data, assuring our people at sea that we were continuing to press the matter. We felt good about receiving regular updates from the field and provided the field with encouragement that a solution was soon forthcoming. Still, we did not want the bureaucracy to make liars out of us. We did not want to promise the field that the AATIP cavalry was coming to solve their problems, only to realize that the cavalry could not be bothered to saddle up.
Jay and ——- busily coordinated Interloper with the Joint Staff and all seemed to be well on track. The NSA and CIA offered to provide assets as well, and we launched weekly meetings in the SCIF spaces we had available. Some of these meetings occurred at the Pentagon, while others were held at other agencies. With OUSD(I) now out of the picture, I believed we stood a good chance of reinvigorating AATIP.
The plan for Interloper was to use one of our nuclear-powered carrier strike groups as bait. We would pick a designated spot in the Atlantic and drop in a huge nuclear footprint, one irresistible to “our friends from out of town” as they were later called. Nuclear-powered carriers, nuclear-powered destroyers, nuclear-capable assets, nuclear-powered submarines━all in the same vicinity within a huge body of water. The trap would now be set. Nukes and water━irresistible. Our partner agencies would allocate hidden collection assets in the vicinity. When the UAP showed up to investigate our maneuvers, the trap would spring shut. We would then focus all our intelligence assets on data collection. The details of the technology we’d use remain classified, but they were capable, to say the least. The logistics of such an operation were daunting but achievable. After all, carrier groups routinely traveled together in this fashion.
One morning during this whole process, our email inbox rewarded us with two videos we received in a bath of data from Fleet Forces Command. Both videos had been taken from the air by pilots in the Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, using the same sort of ATFLIR pod that Commander Fravor’s squadron had used to capture the 2004 Tic Tac video.
The object in one of the videos also resembled a Tic Tac, at least in the sense that it was rounded, smooth, and egg-shaped. But where the 2004 Tic Tac was more than 40 feet long, this object━in the video that would later become famously known as GoFast━was no more than about 18 feet long, tops.”
from Chapter 16 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The “Aha” Moment
[Luis Elizondo on Hal Puthoff having material allegedly recovered from the Roswell crash]
“Hal had in his possession material allegedly recovered from the Roswell crash. It was an intricate and fragile piece revealing multiple microscopic layers of interlacing bismuth and magnesium. It also seemed to have a beveled edge. Was this part of the secret to UAP flight? Hal and other scientists theorized that propulsion units alone could not generate the bubble. The key was the harnessing of energy plus its interaction with the skin of the craft. Imagine the exterior of your car actually being an integral part of the car’s engine.”
from Chapter 19 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: …And the Horse You Rode In On
[Luis Elizondo on learning his UAP honeypot program plan written with Jay Stratton was rejected]
“Before 2016 ended, I received the news from Jay that the Joint Staff had rejected assigning OPLAN Interloper an ACCM designation, our plan to lure UAP out of hiding on the open seas. Where I saw a bold initiative to make sense of what our servicemen and -women witnessed in the skies, leadership saw a great bucket of weirdness that was not within their usual daily lists of tasks. They did not want to be associated with the historical stigma around UFOs. But what if it’s an adversary? What if China or Russia lapped us technologically? Or what if it’s a nonhuman adversary? Shouldn’t we do something?”
[Luis Elizondo on personally selecting the FLIR, GoFast and GIMBAL videos for official declassification]
“I was keenly aware of our responsibility to submit anything we would want publicly shared through the proper channels for review, even if it was unclassified or for official use only (FOUO). I knew I needed to select three unclassified videos to share. Knowing full well that these would be the least useful, I didn’t have a choice. I could not release a classified video into the wild in good conscience. Once the three videos were selected, I would have to submit the proper paperwork and wait for a decision.
But which videos to choose? I deemed the DHS video from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, as too sensitive because of its origin, a sister agency. Even if it was already leaked online, I wasn’t about to confirm it was indeed a US government video without DHS agreeing to that decision. Instead I picked three videos that depicted UAP characteristics. I anticipated that their low resolution would be an asset and hasten the approval process. I chose the FLIR video (aka Tic Tac from 2004), and the GoFast and GIMBAL videos from 2015. I described all three videos on a single Form 1910, which the DoD uses to request declassification of everything from documents to multimedia content.
In the space on the form where I was to list the reason for publication, I simply typed, “Not Applicable. Not for publication. Research and analysis ONLY and info sharing with other US government and industry partners for the purposes of developing a database to help identify, analyze, and ultimately defeat [unusual aerial systems] threats.” The reason I chose to say “Not Applicable” was simply that you publish a book; you don’t publish a video, you release it. I always prided myself on communicating as precisely as possible.
A few days later, I received an email from the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DoDOPSR), the government body that handles these requests. DoDOPSR understood we wished to make the videos available to partners in industry, that is, people we already worked with in aerospace and universities. DoDOPSR said they could not declassify this kind of media for release to a restricted audience. They urged us to change our request and instead request unrestricted release to make the videos public.
I wasn’t expecting that. It felt like an early birthday present. This would ultimately give us the flexibility to decide who our partners were going to be.
“You’d be able to do whatever you want with them after that,” they said.
Shortly after, the approval showed up in my inbox. DoDOPSR had officially stamped my Form 1910 with the following words: UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION.”
from Chapter 20 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Three Heads of Cerberus
[Luis Elizondo on meeting with Neill Tipton and bringing him onboard AATIP]
“Not long after, ——- and I appeared in the office of Neill Tipton, my old boss. As always, he was friendly and humorous.
We laid out our plan. Neill would join AATIP and help support the effort. We would feed him the data, and the secretary’s front office would give him the necessary cover and protection. Neill had the requisite enthusiasm for the subject. He’d given us the benefit of his expertise in the past when we had investigated the Predator video, and he took the initiative to follow up on the case with an email. He was now among the top three senior officials in the OUSD(I), the equivalent of a three-star general.
All he had to do was say yes.
Neill sat back in his chair behind his new oak desk. “Only one condition,” he said. “You have to stay on as advisor and━”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I assured him.
Neill required the full briefing and something in writing. A few days later, I returned to Neill’s office, gave him the briefing, and handed over a large folder with hard copies of UAP reports. It was several inches thick. I also gave him access to our share folder on the OUSD(I) classified share drive. All I needed now was the SECDEF office to sign a memo shifting AATIP’s responsibilities to Neill.
Within a few days, I brokered a meeting between Neill, Brad, and Shari. I was confident that we were almost over the finish line. Everyone agreed that Neill would be the new UAP czar for DoD. That afternoon, I drafted a memo at the unclassified level and sent a copy to Neill and ——- for their review. Short and sweet, but enough for Neill to assume his new duty.
Neill read and accepted the contents of my memo, but he delayed signing it and said he would upon his return from a TDY━an official trip. And again, the secretary of defense was not aware. Once again, bureaucracy and stigma had made things difficult.”
[Luis Elizondo on his plan made with Jay Stratton, to officially resign from his government position and fight for UAP disclosure]
“At work, Jay Stratton and I made a plan that would go against all odds. A plan to bring about disclosure. I would resign and go public with the mission of bringing as much attention and credibility to the issue as possible. Jay would stay with the government and use the momentum gained by the public attention to move the ball forward within the government and brief any and all officials who would no doubt suddenly be interested. They had to learn the truth, and Jay would be positioned to inform them on a classified level. And he’d be positioned to run whatever version of AATIP came next. I’d also help educate Congress and facilitate introducing them to credible military and IC members who’d had UAP encounters. We would continue to work together, from different sides of the fence, to bring about disclosure and look out for the best interest of the American people and, frankly, humanity at large.”
from Chapter 21 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: Out of the Airlock
(October 4, 2017: Lue Elizondo submits his resignation letter to the Pentagon)
[Luis Elizondo on meeting with investigative journalist Leslie Kean, in the presence of Chris Mellon, Jim Semivan and Hal Puthoff, as organized by Chris Mellon]“Chris Mellon and Jim Semivan awaited me in the lobby of a hotel not far from the Pentagon. Hal Puthoff arrived shortly after, as did the individual we had all gathered to meet: an independent investigative journalist by the name of Leslie Kean, whom Chris had arranged for us to meet.
Leslie had been a longtime reporter for major metropolitan newspapers and was very interested in the UAP topic. Years earlier, she’d written a well-received book about military encounters with UAP and had won a major court victory against NASA over the release of documents relating to a 1965 UAP incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. She had known Hal for years; he had done a blurb for her book prior to release.
Meeting with Kean lasted an exhausting four hours. To be sitting among Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan as they spoke of their desire to smash the wall of secrets and lies invigorated me, but I was still extremely concerned about whether it could be pulled off.
I am certain this was the first time Kean learned of AATIP’s existence. That meant I was the Man Who Quit the Pentagon over UAP. Kean was dogged in her questions but respectful. I answered the questions that didn’t break any of my rules, and I politely declined the few that did.”
[Luis Elizondo on joining To The Stars Academy (TTSA) and becoming involved with Tom DeLonge of Blink-182]
“Chris Mellon, Hal, and Semivan urged me to consider a different path. If you want to reach the American people on this issue, they said, you need to connect with the media. They had an idea for a job that would give me income and a platform to educate the public. They had aligned themselves with the organization that rock star Tom DeLonge and Jim Semivan had put together, called To The Stars Academy (TTSA), and they planned to pursue a triple directive for UAP disclosure: fresh approaches to UAP science and engineering, educating laymen and journalists, and generating film/TV/publishing content about the UAP phenomena, based on true stories, all to educate the public and put an end to the stigma. That appealed to me. We needed as much serious public discussion of the issue as possible. Lawmakers would never budge unless pressed by the American people. Jim said TTSA could use my knowledge of the UAP topic and my help setting up security, and encouraged me to meet Tom.
Like all UAP buffs, he (Tom DeLonge) assumed that the government knew more than it was letting on. He was right, of course. To address this, he had put together a group of informed ex-government types to align with his cause, creating the best UAP brain trust ever assembled in the private sector. His organization would be a “public benefit” corporation, structured exactly as prescribed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors would pony up money to fund the entertainment/publishing piece, which, if successful, would fund the research component. For the record, I was never part of the board of directors, so I had no visibility into the nuances of the corporate structure plan. I was simply an employee of the company.
Tom had previously crisscrossed the county on a learning tour, meeting with various sympathetic former officials. In addition to Hal, Mellon, and Semivan, John Podesta, who had served as chief of staff to President Clinton, counselor to President Barack Obama, and campaign manager to Hillary Clinton, was involved. Podesta has long said that one of his regrets was not insisting on disclosure of UAP evidence when he was in the White House. DeLonge’s advisory board included Steve Justice, a highly respected aerospace engineer who’d spent 31 years working for Lockheed Martin’s highly secretive Skunk Works; my friend and colleague from Stanford University, Dr. Garry Nolan; and Dr. Norm Kahn, a former CIA expert on biological weapons.
Tom was passionate, convinced of his beliefs, friendly, and sincere. Everything he said was music to my ears. His operation seemed like it could be the perfect bullhorn to reach people who didn’t know UAP were real, and he made me an offer to join TTSA as chief of security and special programs. With the folks he had, TTSA would inevitably be developing technology that would need to be locked down━I had obviously done that in the past. And of course, I would work with them to take the UAP topic to the people. The salary offered was much less than I was earning at the Pentagon. To do this, Tom insisted that I relocate to California. He had a press conference lined up and planned to announce his team, so he wanted an answer quickly.
I mulled it over. I ventured forth every morning to see what other job offers I could drum up. I didn’t have much time to lock something down, because Jenn and I only had so much in our cash reserves to float. I needed income to keep us afloat while I mapped out my plan for public engagement. Eventually I concluded that working with TTSA was the best way to achieve my objective and earn an income at the same time. With her usual loving support, I accepted the job, and a short time later, TTSA was officially announced with me on board.”
[Luis Elizondo on being interviewed by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal for the New York Times]
“Later that month, I left our house for a short trip to Philadelphia to meet again with Leslie Kean, this time with her longtime colleague and friend Ralph Blumenthal. After our prior conversation in DC, Kean had devoted two of her Huffington Post columns to UAP, focusing primarily on the “extraordinary” development that was TTSA.
Now it was time for the bigger story I wanted to tell. Following our first four-hour meeting, she had immediately contacted Blumenthal, a contributor and former staff reporter for the New York Times, to see if he was interested. Ralph was a veteran newsman who was curious about the phenomena. For several years he had been quietly working on a biography of the late Dr. John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist who treated and extensively interviewed UAP experiencers, who were often traumatized people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, or at least encountered aliens in person.
The two reporters interviewed me in detail about UAP (which they still called UFOs at that time) and AATIP for a Times story. This would be an unprecedented and historic opportunity to reach and educate the public.
Mainstream outlets like the Times stubbornly avoided UAP stories. As long as the stigma made “real” scientists and experts think UAP were the domain of crackpots, the topic would be fodder for the National Enquirer. The Times taking the story seriously was a tectonic shift.”
[Luis Elizondo on waiting for updates about the release of the New York Times article, and getting support from now-retired Senator Harry Reid]
“The year was almost over, and every time I spoke with Leslie Kean, she assured me the Times story would publish “soon”. I heard the word soon so often that I fretted that her editors had been scared off by someone. Then one of her colleagues, the reporter Helene Cooper, phoned and confided that she had met with the now-retired senator Harry Reid, who had unabashedly corroborated his and his colleagues’ involvement in funding the original program that led to AATIP and my leadership role. It was a sweet moment of vindication for me. I was going public and Harry Reid had my back.”
[Luis Elizondo on Bryan Bender‘s article for Politico, with contributions by Chris Mellon]
“A reporter named Bryan Bender was also working on a story for Politico. Chris Mellon was the brainchild of that effort. I met Bryan once or twice over coffee in Annapolis. He was a very shrewd reporter who knew the ins and outs of the Pentagon better than most people who worked there. He had a huge pool of sources to tap into, although he never revealed any of them to me. Where Leslie and company seemed more interested in the UAP aspect, Bryan seemed more interested in the national security aspect and potential threat. Bryan asked all the right questions, and some really hard ones. A few times I had to politely decline. In a strange way, I think Bryan already knew the answers to the questions he was asking me. He reminded me of a counterintelligence officer conducting a light interrogation. Except Bryan had the decency to buy me a cappuccino. Bryan didn’t come across as a “UAP believer”. Rather, he seemed interested in the Pentagon having a program that wasn’t ever disclosed to the public or Congress, but I could be wrong.”
[Luis Elizondo on the release of the New York Times article, the Politico article, the Washington Post, and subsequent media releases]
“The New York Times broke the news online and was followed seconds later by Politico, then the Washington Post. Then every news platform in the world seemed to pick it up.
The Times stories appeared the following day on the cover of the print edition of the Sunday paper. They ran two articles, written by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper. Their front-page story revealed the existence of AATIP━that is, a secret program investigating UAP━and my role. Inside the newspaper, a second story interviewed Dave Fravor and Jim Slaight and revealed details of the Tic Tac incident in 2004. The online story also included links to two of the unclassified UAP videos, which were posted on TTSA’s YouTube page: the FLIR (aka Tic Tac) video and the GIMBAL video. (They released the GoFast video some months later.)
That’s right, the New York Times released legit UAP videos in a cover story.
The articles quoted Chris Mellon, Hal Puthoff, me, and some folks from the Pentagon. All of the articles revealed my involvement in AATIP. The Politico piece in particular spelled out that the Pentagon’s spokesperson, Dana White, had confirmed my role in the program. The articles also quoted my resignation letter. They traced the history of UAP investigations, and they unfurled descriptions of unusual aircraft sighted by pilot witnesses.”
[Luis Elizondo on the fact that his disclosure plan that he and Jay Stratton put together seemed to be working]
“Our plan was working. My going public caused Congress to pay attention and Jay started getting requests for briefings from members of Congress who previously would have never been aware of the facts, due to the stigma and layers of bureaucracy. Congress was finally getting aware and engaged. Jay, Chris, and I all funneled credible members of the military and intelligence community who had knowledge of UAP to Congress. Military pilots who had encountered UAP, and the data supporting what they saw, made the most impact on Congress at first. When you have a Top Gun Navy fighter pilot with years of experience, a trained observer, someone we trust to fly an $80 million airplane with live weapons in US airspace, telling Congress what they encountered was not man-made and we couldn’t defend against it, it makes an impression.”
[Luis Elizondo on Neill Tipton not assuming control of AATIP, and instead opting to remain silent about the program]
“Meanwhile, Neill got cold feet about taking my place at AATIP━something I wouldn’t have expected from him━and began to backpedal, telling people that he knew nothing about AATIP, its focus, or my involvement. I heard this through several sources at the Pentagon. Maybe Neill detected the anti-AATIP backlash, and he simply wanted to avoid the crossfire. Or, since he had just been promoted, he felt compelled to take the safe route and lie low. Either way, I was disappointed that my friend chose to do what he did, especially given the vast amounts of emails and witnesses who knew Neill was slated to take over AATIP when I left. But regardless, Jay was there to run point and move the ball upfield inside the government. As history shows, there was no one who could have done it better than him.”
[Luis Elizondo on learning that someone within the OUSD(I) authorized the deletion of his government files, folders, and emails]
“Sometime shortly thereafter, someone in OUSD(I) allegedly authorized the complete deletion of all my electronic files, folders, and emails, under the justification that they had “no historic value”. Or so claimed a Freedom of Information Act response from the Pentagon itself. If true, this was troubling, because my files had long been singled out for careful preservation by a court order, not due to UAP, but because of the work I’d done on Guantanamo Bay. This protective order had been in place for some time, signed by a judge. My emails and files had been flagged as evidence in a criminal prosecution of those criminally charged for being responsible for 9/11. Everyone knew that my files were earmarked for protection, no matter what. If they really destroyed them, they must have been so afraid of the content of those files that they were willing to break the law and jeopardize the entire 9/11 case to keep people from learning what we knew about UAP.”
from Chapter 22 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: All the Small Things
[Luis Elizondo on filming Unidentified for The History Channel with the TTSA team]
“All along, Chris Mellon and I planned to take the disclosure battle to Congress, but we knew that course of action would take time and we had more work to do educating the American public. Now we had just been handed a great platform for doing that.
The History Channel wanted to do a show with the TTSA team that would put seasoned investigators in the field, interviewing ex-military personnel about their UAP encounters. Maybe, if we got lucky, we would reach a ton of people about the phenomenon.
Chris and I had only one condition for agreeing to be a part of the show: it had to be authentic. No artificial drama or conspiracy theories, no scripts, and only current or former government witnesses. The goal could not be putting on a show. It had to simply be about sharing credible eyewitness testimony with the public.
Filming Unidentified was surreal for me. Less than a year after I’d left the Pentagon, we had a TV show about UAP. What an absolutely insane turn of events.
The show premiered in May 2019 and was well received. It certainly opened a lot of minds, but I was soon sucked back into the drama of my old life.”
[Luis Elizondo on being a victim of administrative terrorism, mostly from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), which was overseen by Garry Reid]
“Friends called to give me a heads-up about a fresh attempt by my detractors to smear my name. Reporters phones to ask why spokespeople in the Pentagon could not or would not corroborate some small factoid about my employment record. Each time this happened, it made me look like a liar with something to hide. It was clear that the Pentagon was backtracking on their previous statements about me and AATIP and trying to put the proverbial cat back into the bag at any cost.
I received a call one day from an agent with the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA), which Garry Reid oversaw. The agent referenced allegations that I had improperly declassified the UAP videos. I had to remind the young agent that double jeopardy is a no-no, and that AFOSI had investigated and adjudicated the matter favorably. I forwarded the AFOSI investigation summary for her to review. Several days later, she called again.
“Mr. Elizondo, the concern that has been raised now involves the release of those three videos.”
This was one of the few moments when I allowed myself to lose my temper.
“Ma’am,” I said, “this is not directed at you but whoever will be reviewing my file or listening to this recording. Let me make myself crystal clear: I know exactly where this is coming from and from who. Let me remind you that I too know something about investigations, the law, and my constitutional rights. I also know I have already been cleared of this. If you continue what you’re doing, I will take legal action and tell anyone who will listen in the media what exactly is going on here. I went to war to defend this Constitution and I will do it again.”
The phone calls stopped. This type of bullying, what we call administrative terrorism, goes on all the time. Most people don’t know their rights and get taken advantage of.
Shortly after, I filed an official complaint with the DoD’s office of the Inspector General (IG). I was stunned when representatives of the IG’s office contacted me shortly after to let me know that I might be called as a witness in the future on an entirely different matter. Later that month I noticed a small gray drone flying over my house. I lived in the middle of nowhere and yet someone was clearly interested in knowing more about me. As time progressed, others I worked with were also harassed, and the same type of drone was used to spy on them.
It had taken time for a female DoD employee’s complaint to work its way through the proper channels, but the IG was now investigating Garry Reid for a litany of issues that would later be made public. When they started asking questions, I told them the truth.
But then soon after, a targeted fake news story popped up online. It claimed, There is no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UAP program. Obviously, this wasn’t true, but whoever put the journalist up to it knew that fake news gets repeated regardless of it being fake. The timing of the article semeed calculated to disrupt or damage the launch of the History Channel show and felt like the work of Garry Reid.
Pentagon spokesperson Dana White, who had confirmed my leader role in AATIP for the Politico article, had left the Pentagon. The Pentagon’s spokesperson at the time, Christopher Sherwood, suddenly denied I had any involvement in AATIP. I had heard rumblings of such moves against me brewing for months from friends on the inside, but this article made it real. On behalf of the Pentagon, Sherwood told the reporters, “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program.”
Jay got an email from the Pentagon’s public affairs office saying that they planned to tell press that I was never involved with AATIP. He replied that it would be wrong of them to do that and said it wasn’t true, but they ran with the fake and damaging narrative anyway.
I phoned Sherwood directly at the Pentagon. The longer we spoke, the more transparent he became. I sketched out my dilemma. It didn’t matter that the Pentagon had vouched for me back in 2017. As long as I was in the public eye, reporters would routinely vet my background, and among other things, Sherwood told reporters that the three UAP videos had been cleared for research purposes only, not public dissemination.
While not apologizing, Sherwood indicated that he was not happy with the way my situation was being handled within DoD. He admitted he knew very well about my role at AATIP, but forces within the building instructed him not to admit it. For the record, I don’t hold Sherwood accountable for his actions. I suspect he was just doing what he was told.
Later I learned that even Brad Byers in the SECDEF’s office had called Sherwood expressing his concern over the story told by the Pentagon. Byers warned Sherwood that way too many people in senior positions knew of my role in AATIP, that the Pentagon was backing itself into a corner.
Not only was the public being fed fake news, but journalists were unknowingly serving it up; even public-facing information sites were manipulated. Shortly after, I was told to look at my Wikipedia page, which had been updated erroneously. The profile had omissions and many inaccurate points stated as facts. I remember thinking, This is absurd, but I’ll just update it. It’s Wikipedia, after all. But someone had somehow locked down the page and no one was able to correct it. And of course, all this fake news was spread on social media, and the powers that be threw gasoline on the fire.”
[Luis Elizondo on asking Tom DeLonge to confirm his salary at TTSA was secure as Lue was buying a house in California, then describes his salary getting cut in half, then eliminated altogether]
“California will never win any prizes for being an affordable state. Months after we moved west, I phoned Tom with the news that we had found a house we wanted to buy, but California was very pricy, so “before I sink the majority of my life savings into this house, I really need to know━straight up━is my income safe and secure?” Tom did not let me finish the sentence. He swore that my salary was secure. We bought the house, and a few months later, without warning, TTSA cut my salary in half. They said it was temporary, due to “corporate restructuring”, but it didn’t matter. We hemorrhaged cash, digging deeper and deeper into our savings to pay college tuition and keep the roof over our heads. What the hell had I done? Out of a sense of outrage and injustice, I had abandoned a secure, longtime job to pursue the cause of UAP disclosure. I felt I was making a difference, but my family and I were now in a tough spot.
For the record, I don’t blame Tom. I believe Tom was forced to make some financial decisions that were likely beyond his control.
We thought about selling the house quickly and downsizing, but we also hoped my TTSA salary would bounce back, so instead we rented the house out immediately and moved into our RV with our two dogs.
When Covid hit, the office at TTSA was shut down and I worked from the comforts of our RV home.
Just a few days before Christmas, I got a call from Tom, who was friendly but blunt. Our business relationship was over. Despite all our successes, the business had not brought in the money he expected or needed. Tom and I had done beautiful work together. The second season of Unidentified had aired and been well received like the first season. The show escalated the conversation about UAP.
I wish things had gone differently, but I give Tom credit for his role in the disclosure movement. Our conversation ended with a mix of regret and excitement. Another chapter closed.”
[Lue Elizondo on taking a consultancy gig with a “small aerospace firm”, meanwhile Chris Mellon, Hal Puthoff and Steve Justice also depart TTSA]
“When I resigned from the Pentagon in 2017, I had jumped at the opportunity to join TTSA because I thought I needed the platform to spread my message and rejoin Hal, Jim, and Chris. A few days later I began to realize the work we had done now allowed us to be our own platforms. Also, I still had value inside government, and I took a consultancy with a small aerospace firm to bring in income.
Meanwhile, Chris Mellon was working his relationships on the Hill and setting the stage for our next move, as our battle for disclosure continued. Chris, Hal, and Steve Justice also soon moved on from TTSA.”
from Chapter 23 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The War Plan
[Luis Elizondo on the multiyear strategy for disclosure created with Chris Mellon and Jay Stratton, nicknamed “The Five Pillars of Engagement”]
“Chris recognized the vital role that Congress could play in advancing the UAP issue, so we and Jay had made a multiyear strategy, a war plan of sorts, to educate Congress and eventually legally address the hurdles that faced disclosure.
The first step of the strategy would be to engage key professional staff on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) as well as members of Congress. Due to the stigma and political risk politicians were concerned with, we decided to focus on the growing UAP risks to flight safety, as well as the historic lack of transparency from the executive branch, going back to the 1940s. If Congress and the key staffs could be made aware of the facts, they might be motivated to achieve lasting change via new laws and expanded oversight.
Being a former deputy staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee himself, Chris uniquely understood the value of a legislative strategy and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, few in Congress had any real previous understanding of the UAP issue and generally saw it as an odd “nonissue” for kooks and as politically risky.
We would seek to build advocacy with both sides of Congress, but we first gained particular momentum with senior staff members of the two committees.
With the help of our growing support base, we labored away at shifting the conversation about UAP in Congress. We relentlessly worked to uncover credible eyewitnesses of UAP, specifically intelligence and military officers, whom we could invite to share their testimony with senators, representatives, and various congressional committees. For every witness we brought forward, there were several who wouldn’t speak to Congress due to the nondisclosure agreements they had signed with various intelligence agencies and branches of the military. Those who had wanted the UAP topic kept hidden from the public since the 1940s had done a damn good job of overusing the classification system to classify things that shouldn’t be classified and getting witnesses to sign scary NDAs. The witnesses we met with who were afraid to speak to Congress genuinely feared being sent to jail or killed.
We also needed the DoD and other departments and agencies to provide more data and analysis. The media, which can be temperamental and fickle, would have to be firmly on board. Somehow we would need to gain the cooperation of friendly foreign nations as well, since they had collected a vast amount of data too. Last but not least, we needed to engage the public and make them aware, bring them into the conversation. Without their support, neither the media nor Congress would be motivated to do very much.
We called our plan the Five Pillars of Engagement.
We identified key members of the media who covered national security issues and were open to the idea of UAP and learning about who stood in the way of a national security issue.
Meanwhile, Jay and I worked our network of friends in the military branches, FBI, CIA, and even the Department of Energy.”
[Luis Elizondo on Jay Stratton getting tasked with creating a whole-of-government interagency task force, which would go on to become the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force]
“As we made progress outside and inside the government, leadership in Navy intelligence, who understood the national security threats related to UAP and now felt public and congressional pressure to do something about it, tasked Jay with quietly building out a whole-of-government interagency task force, a program with more authorities than AATIP ever had. So Jay started putting that together, handpicking his members/reps from all the intelligence agencies and civilian-led agencies, from the FBI to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to NASA to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Once it was put together, this would go on to become the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. Jay being positioned to escalate and elevate the issue like this was exactly what we hoped for. The plan was working.
Jay needed a rep from Space Force (USSF), but that agency was still getting set up at the time and didn’t have a UAP program, so we brainstormed a way to get past this hurdle. Our solution was that I should try to be a consultant for USSF to help them build their UAP effort and serve the UAP Task Force Jay was building. After some friends connected me with USSF leadership, they expressed an interest and concern with UAP, although they were not ready to tell the world. Soon after that, I started working as a contractor for USSF on the UAP front and getting their unofficial help behind the scenes on my public efforts while also contributing to Jay’s UAP Task Force.
“After a couple of years of Jay quietly building the UAP Task Force behind the scenes, the secretary of defense announced the UAP Task Force and named Jay as its first director.
From the moment the UAP Task Force became official, the Legacy Program started quietly pushing back on Jay behind the scenes, creating one bureaucratic hurdle after another for him, the task force, and everyone involved.”
[Luis Elizondo on Chris Mellon proposing the idea to request an unclassified public report on UAP from the Director of National Intelligence]
“During this period, Chris and I were working quietly and diligently behind the scenes to help Congress understand the complexity of the situation and identify a path forward. We had established a beachhead on Capitol Hill, but we needed a way to maintain momentum and expand our base of support; otherwise we’d never be able to pass the legislation needed to compel DoD and the IC to action on the UAP issue. Chris, who had served for over a decade on Capitol Hill, proposed a simple but brilliant solution: have one of the oversight committees request an unclassified public report on UAP from the Director of National Intelligence. The beauty of this approach was that it offered a way to elevate the UAP issue and burnish its legitimacy without requiring the expenditure of public funds or the support of the Appropriations Committees. Chris touted the needs for this in op-eds and personal meetings with Senate staff, and even drafted a version of the report requirement, which he posted online for all of us to see.”
[Luis Elizondo on Senator Marco Rubio and his support for the proposal, along with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and representative Tim Burchett]
“Thankfully, Senator Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was courageous enough to support this important proposal, notwithstanding the inevitable mindless criticism his support would generate from those hostile to the idea of transparency.
In private moments elected leaders or their staffers could not help sharing anecdotes drawn from their personal lives or the lives of family members who had their own encounters with UAP. If you treat the subject as permissible for discussion, people open up in surprising ways. In an age marked by lack of compromise, we found that politicians on both sides of the aisle welcomed dialogue on the issue and shared their personal stories openly with us.
Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic senator from New York State who served on the armed services subcommittees, told her staff how she learned of the UAP issue, and how she would spend quality time with her two children watching the show Mellon and I made for History Channel. Tim Burchett, a Republican representative from Tennessee, had also watched. Coincidentally, his district was near Oak Ridge, home to the nation’s uranium stockpile and a former World War II “Secret City” of the Manhattan Project and the site of countless UAP sightings. He was particularly alarmed by the connection to US nuclear capabilities. A born-again Christian, Burchett could not help but be intrigued by the possible connection of UAP to the otherworldly visions of Ezekiel and Elijah in the bible. Burchett was a man on a mission, completely devoted to his constituents and to his faith; not a DC politician, but a blue-collar guy who used to own a trailer repair shop. He respected those who served in our military and pursued the truth.”
[Luis Elizondo on Jay Stratton receiving requests for briefings from members of the White House National Security Council, who then briefed Donald Trump]
“Each time I drove back to the DC area, donning my suit and my Covid mask before heading up to the Hill, I felt encouraged by the progress being made by the plan Chris and I put in motion. We were making enough noise in the press that Jay was getting requests for briefings from members of the White House National Security Council, who then briefed Trump on some level, but I am not sure how much information they actually shared.”
[Luis Elizondo on other US presidents being briefed on the UAP issue]
“Since the Legacy Program and the UAP issue really began in 1947, only some presidents have been briefed by those involved on the basic facts about the situation, but they are not provided with all the details. As Hal mentioned once, and according to some involved in Legacy UAP, presidents simply don’t have a need to know everything, and they will only temporarily be in their position.
As far as I know, the following US presidents were briefed in some way: Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.
Carter came across as an open-minded, intellectually curious leader, one who matter-of-factly revealed the existence of the psychic Stargate program to the media. Nixon was considered a loose cannon, so he was not taken completely into confidence, but I have reason to believe he was shown images of nonhuman bodies.
I was told Gerald Ford was not briefed, probably because he had too much on his plate picking up the pieces of the Watergate debacle. Maybe the Legacy Program thought he would tell the world. Hardly a UAP neophyte, however, Ford had grappled with the subject early in his congressional career, during the famous 1966 sightings in Michigan. The Ford Presidential Library has since released at least 15 documents related to the notorious Blue Book “swamp gas” finding, of which Ford remained forever skeptical.
As for Reagan, I have reason to believe that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed the Star Wars program, which Reagan championed, was concerned with UAP, not just nukes. Reagan’s biographers also describe him as fascinated by the topic, and we know that he once suggested to his USSR counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the US and the USSR should work together in the event of an alien invasion. In a United Nations speech, he said:
Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?“
[Luis Elizondo on inserting language into the second Covid bill requiring the DoD to release a UAP report by the following summer]
“We did in fact manage to insert language in the second Covid bill stipulating that the DoD had to release a UAP report by the following summer. Such a report would not require spending new dollars; DoD already had the data. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the chief sponsor of the bill. If you look at what appears in Senate Report 116-233, you’ll find that much of the wording came directly from Chris Mellon’s pen.
The Committee remains concerned that there is no unified, comprehensive process within the Federal Government for collecting and analyzing intelligence on unidentified aerial phenomena, despite the potential threat. The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent…
Therefore, the Committee directs the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies as the Director and Secretary jointly consider relevant, to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as “anomalous aerial vehicles”), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified…
The report shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex.
The full language in the bill amounted to 422 words and was unprecedented. Not since the 1960s had Congress instructed the DoD to take any action regarding UAP, let alone issue an unclassified report that could be shared with the American people and the world.
President Trump signed the Covid bill into law in late December 2020. I would argue that most Americans never knew that bill included historic legislation about UAP.”
[Luis Elizondo on his and Chris Mellon‘s media appearances including CNN and Fox News, and then being invited for a historic UAP-related 60 Minutes story]
“Mellon and I were running full throttle on our public engagement. We had appeared on news platforms like CNN and Fox News many times, and now arguably one of the most influential news programs in telivision history decided it wanted to cover the UAP topic for the first time in its decades of investigative journalism. We were floored. This was an award-winning show that everyone watched: all the politicians, DoD officials, intel community officials, and their families. Next thing I knew, Mellon, Senator Rubio, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Commander Dietrich, me, and some others participated in what would go on to be a historic 60 Minutes story.
It aired in May 2021 and went on to be one of the most-watched segments in the history of the show. I was told well over 20 million people watched it and that the number keeps going up. This was a major win for disclosure, escalating our public engagement, and changing the tone of the conversation. And it happened at exactly the right time.”
[Luis Elizondo on the Preliminary Report released by the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021, contributing the greatest of credit to Chris Mellon for his work in making it happen]
“The result of all the hard and strategic work to get a public report was the widely publicized “Preliminary Report” produced by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and delivered in June 2021. It was in many ways inadequate, but it did identify 144 military UAP incidents from 2004 through June 2021. And as the climate around the UAP topic improved, stigma started to fade, and members of the military began to realize they could and should report UAP incidents, the number of reports quickly increased. This official government UAP report have proven so important, and of such great public interest, that Congress then required it on an annual basis. This is proving to be a critically important way to ensure the public and Congress are aware of how extensive and serious the UAP issue remains.
I regard this as one of Chris’s greatest contributions to our overall efforts and to history in general. It was his idea, he made it happen, and it was a key strategic move at a critical time. I say “one of” because we have had an extraordinary degree of collaboration on all our efforts since the day I met Chris.
The report concluded that these UAP were likely not weather anomalies and represented something… tangible. All the cases in the report went back only a year and a half, with the Nimitz being the stated exception. The report focused primarily on Navy reports, and claimed that Air Force information was not yet available and that only 10 percent of all encounters for that time frame were actually reported. By that assessment, a staggering 1400 incidents from 2019 to 2021 remained unreported. I believe this alone raised eyebrows and convinced legislators to pay attention.”
[Luis Elizondo on the lack of any UAP data coming from the Air Force]
“75 years after Roswell, the Air Force was still holding out on the American people. The then secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, told reporters that he was not sure that UAP warranted his attention. While not denying that these objects were real, he called for evidence that these objects were a threat before he and his colleagues would lift a finger. As I’ve mentioned, that struck me as a logical fallacy. If you don’t know what something is, how can you dismiss it as a threat?
Think about how absurd it is for almost all the reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena to come from the Navy, not the Air Force.
Fired up, I engaged with the public on social media and in the press. I put out a statement that read:
The American people now know a small portion of what I and my colleagues in the Pentagon have been privy to: that these UAP are not secret US technology, that they do not seem to belong to any known allies or adversaries, and that our intelligence services have yet to identify a terrestrial explanation for these extraordinary vehicles. Out of 144 incidents, the UAP Task Force was only able to identify 1. This conversation is only just beginning.“
[Luis Elizondo on the work he, Chris Mellon and others contributed towards language in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)]
“Every year, Congress authorizes the US defense budget in what is called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The US government spends more on military than any nation. Lately it’s been around $800 billion per year.
To the senators, the representatives, and their staff that we called friends, it seemed only right that the DoD should come clean on UAP. Republican senators Roy Blunt of Missouri, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida; Democratic senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Martin Heinrich of Arizona; and Democratic representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona all worked together to craft aggressive language, with some help from Chris and me. Chris somehow convinced them that more is better when it comes to prescribing what the DoD should do.”
[Luis Elizondo on the funding previously allocated to the UAP Task Force by Congress being blocked by those in the Legacy Program, and Jay Stratton retiring from the government to join the private sector]
“Around this time, the Legacy Program and those associated with it, the powers that be, took their pushback to the next level and somehow managed to block the funding that had been appropriated to the UAP Task Force by Congress. At that point, after 16 years of investigating UAP for the US government, longer than anyone I’m aware of, Jay decided it was time to retire and head to the private sector, where he could more freely continue his work. Our plan had already achieved so much, but we still had another chapter ahead of us.
Before Jay retired, we worked with Congress to get new legislation proposed that would create a permanent UAP program directly funded by Congress, so no one could block or misuse the funding. This new program would have to report directly to Congress on all UAP matters.”
[Luis Elizondo on the formation of the next UAP investigation office, initially named the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG)]
“Two days before Thanksgiving in 2021, DoD announced the creation of a new UAP investigation office called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. AOIMSG for short. The new office would be tucked into the auspices of the OUSD(I). The DoD attracted a great amount of press attention for this move. Headlines about the Pentagon’s “new UAP office” appeared on news websites around the globe.
I suspect a lot of people would have bought DoD’s gesture hook, line, and sinker if Chris Mellon and I did not spread the word that it was a con. My old office, the OUSD(I), was precisely the same organization that had underplayed and tried to kill AATIP and then the UAP Task Force.”
[Luis Elizondo on the Pentagon (notably people involved in the Legacy Program) trying to control narratives at times when it seems the truth may come out]
“The Pentagon’s playbook, really controlled by those in the Legacy Program pulling the strings, is hilariously predictable. Whenever they think the truth may emerge, they try to change and control the narrative.
Congress sensed that DoD wanted to steer the office toward studying man-made air trash and clutter and away from UAP, using the term “Temporarily Non-attributable Objects” instead of UAP. Seeing the game that DoD was playing, a few days later, Congress revised the upcoming bills, stating that DoD could not treat man-made objects as part of their UAP investigations. If a UAP was found to be man-made, the new permanent UAP office Congress wanted would have to delegate that case to another DoD department. Only objects that had no known human origin could be defined as a UAP. This language, if passed, would prevent DoD from simply chalking up everything to balloons and plastic bags in the atmosphere. Furthermore, Congress now included space and undersea anomalies as part of the UAP definition, and changed it from “unidentified aerial phenomena” to “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, to cover all domains.
If this language passed, the DoD could no longer sweep the phenomena under the rug. Congress would establish a permanent UAP office that had to deliver briefings to Congress and the American people on a regular basis. They had to investigate the aerospace and biological implications of UAP. And they must employ what is known as the “1 percent doctrine” in all their methodology. If there’s a 1 percent chance that an encounter is a threat to the military or the American people, they must investigate it. They will no longer get a free pass to dismiss a report simply because they “don’t know what it is”.
In September 2021, the House passed the bill and advanced it to the Senate.
The Senate finally passed the bill on December 15, 2021━the UAP language untouched━and sent it to President Biden for his signature.”
[Luis Elizondo on the legacy and impact of Harry Reid and staying connected with him up to his final days]
“Former senator Harry Reid━who was our ally and champion at AATIP, who stood up for me in the painful months after my resignation when DoD was trying to erase and smear me━continued to be a major supporter throughout this entire process. From validating us to other elected officials to vouching for us with the 60 Minutes producers, whatever help we needed, he was there. All the while, he was in the final days of a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Some of his critics mocked his support of the UAP issue, but he was truly ahead of the curve.
We all knew he was near death. You could see the toll the disease was taking on him. Poignantly, Senator Reid said he would keep fighting his cancer until Biden signed the act. In honor of his longtime support, we kept Senator Reid briefed on the situation to the very end.
Biden signed the second UAP bill into law two days after Christmas in 2021. It was another historic moment for the history books. A day later, my old friend Harry Reid died peacefully in his sleep. He was true to his word. May he rest in peace.”
[Luis Elizondo on the May 17, 2022 public hearing which was the first congressional hearing on UFOs/UAPs in over 50 years, held by the House Intelligence Subcommittee to address national security concerns and public transparency regarding unidentified aerial phenomena]
“In May 2022, one requirement of the new law went on full display. Congress held a historic public hearing on UAP. The hearing lasted 90 minutes. The very fact that it happened was monumental, and it made it clear to many civilians and elected leaders that they needed to press the UAP issue going forward, and that DoD was covering up the topic. Unlike the 180-day report, which covered 143 unresolved cases, the DoD witnesses revealed that they now had more than 400 logged in the last year. The hearing confirmed UAP are indeed real and not a glitch of technological systems or a weather anomaly. It confirmed UAP are not our technology and are a potential threat to air safety and our national security. And when asked about any research into other UAP programs, the head of the Pentagon’s intelligence efforts, Ronald Moultrie, said, “Other than AATIP and Blue Book, no.” This was a silent victory for me. At least now the Pentagon acknowledged the existence of my old program, AATIP, and its efforts focusing on UAP. All this under oath. And Congressman Mike Gallagher introduced the Wilson/Davis memo, mentioned earlier, into the Congressional Record on national television. Another shocking admission which completely took me by surprise was that the Pentagon was unaware of the incursions of UAP near sensitive nuclear facilities. The Pentagon admitted it was unaware of its own reporting going back to instances including ICBMs being taken offline. Had the Pentagon done even a cursory review of its own records, it would have realized that the Pentagon itself had written reports on these incursions. Those are just some of the highlights, and I encourage you to watch the entire hearing online. Needless to say, it was an embarrassing moment for my old office, OUSD(I).”
[Luis Elizondo on the announcement of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022, the drama that ensued during the summer of 2022 between Congress and DoD, and the NDAA getting sighting into law on December 23, 2022 by President Biden]
“In July 2022, AARO━the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office━was announced. This new permanent UAP office had to report to Congress. At least its new name was now easier to pronounce.
The summer of 2022 continued to prove that our tactics were bearing fruit. A farcical power play sprang up between Congress and DoD on the subject of UAP. In many ways, the drama was a rerun of the previous summer. Every time Congress provisionally inserted UAP language into upcoming bills, observers at DoD tried to head them off at the pass.
Congress pushed the proposed legislation into the annual National Defense Authorization Act that year━the budget that spells out what money Congress will outlay to the Department of Defense in the following year (in this case, 2023). I contributed to the creation of the language and worked hard to get Congress members to help support it, but I must say this one was truly Chris’s magnum opus. Chris perfected the language Congress ran with and he masterfully worked his relationships to get all the support the proposed legislation needed.
The language would leave no doubt as to the veracity of the UAP issue. For example, it described how this new office would report to Congress on all cases pertaining to UAP from January 1, 1945, on. That date was critical. 1945 was the year that marked the deployment of the atomic bomb and soon after that the Roswell crash.
The language detailed how the intelligence community would support this new UAP office. They would, for example, set up a database where miltary personnel could report UAP. It also provided protection from reprisals for those who came forward with their stories. This meant that anyone━civilian or military━who ever signed an NDA relating to UAP would be free to speak to Congress in a classified setting. Engineers who analyzed legacy crash materials could finally talk. Pilots and radio operators could finally talk. Members of highly secretive crash retrieval teams could finally talk. And it would be illegal to fire them, punish them, or take action to ruin their pensions, careers, or security clearances in response. In fact, whistleblowers could sue to recover damages.
The day this detail hit the news, the naval pilot Ryan Graves━a key eyewitness in the USS Roosevelt sightings━used Twitter to summarize the shift in congressional thinking. “This is a watershed moment”, he wrote. “The Senate is explicitly stating… we have sufficient evidence of non-man-made objects to mandate study of them by law. Listening yet?”
In July 2022, Congress unanimously voted for inclusion of the most historic UAP legislation written at that point in the National Defense Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2023.
On December 15, 2022, the Senate approved the NDAA with the UAP language and sent it to Biden to sign. We were so close to achieving change that was unimaginable just a short time ago. But the powerful forces were relentless, just as we were, and we worried each day until…
On December 23, 2022, President Biden signed the historic UAP legislation into law when he signed the NDAA.
The UAP legislation language is 15 pages and available online. I highly suggest you read it all very carefully, because it will leave you with no doubt at all about the truth. Remember, Congress, the Senate, and the president of the United States all signed this language into law for a reason. In the meantime, I’m proud to say it included protection for whistleblowers so they can legally break their NDAs to speak confidentially with select members of Congress in a classified setting without consequences; acknowledgement of the capture, recovery, and reverse-engineering of UAP and action to cause reporting on these matters to Congress; acknowledgement of health issues caused by UAP and action to cause reporting on these matters to Congress; acknowledgement of the Cold War race playing out with other nations and action to cause reporting on this to Congress; the establishment of the AARO, and reporting to Congress on all UAP activity since January 1, 1945, including a compilation and itemization of the key historical records of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena; any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress; successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena; and any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities. And that’s not even close to everything covered.”
from Chapter 24 of Luis Elizondo‘s book Imminent: The Next Level of Disclosure
[Luis Elizondo on David Grusch, a whistleblower who previously worked for the NRO and NRA, as well as the UAP Task Force]
“Meanwhile, the new UAP whistleblower legislation led to even more credible military and intelligence witnesses coming forward and telling the world what they knew about the deeply hidden programs to capture, reverse-engineer, and exploit UAP.
One of those whistleblowers was my friend and colleague David Grusch. David was a National Reconnaissance Office employee and worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). He was those agencies’ rep on the UAP Task Force. Dave also worked with me at Space Force and helped contribute to the UAP Task Force as well. Not only did Dave tell Congress and the inspector general what he knew about the Legacy Program, but he also went public and did a series of interviews telling the world what he knew. Among other points, Dave said:
The UAP Task Force was refused access to a broad crash retrieval program, retrieving nonhuman origin technical vehicles, you know, call it spacecraft, if you will, nonhuman exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed… There’s a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the US populace, which is extremely unethical and immoral.“
[Luis Elizondo on the Congressional hearing featuring David Grusch, Commander David Fravor, and Lieutenant Ryan Graves which was on July 26, 2023]
“In July 2023, members of Congress held another historic bipartisan UAP hearing. This time the hearing had highly credible military witnesses, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Graves, and Dave Grusch, who were now testifying to the American people in Congress under oath. This was a tremendously proud moment, to watch my friends and colleagues bravely testifying before Congress, the American people, and the entire world. They were compelled to share the truth, and they are heroes for doing so. The world watched as these men spoke about the recovery of nonhuman bodies and technology, the deeply hidden program to recover and reverse-engineer nonhuman technology, and anomalous transmedium vehicles that violate our airspace, defy our understanding of physics, and would be impossible to defend against.
My hope was that these individuals who had bravely come forward to testify would embolden and encourage more people, more witnesses, more members of the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, to do the same thing.
The sad reality, however, was there were still those in the Pentagon who did not support these developments. Information was provided to a journalist that tried to paint David as unreliable in a story that used anonymous sources to smear a decorated combat veteran with accusations I won’t dignify by repeating them. In essence, the press and the Pentagon punished David for doing the very thing they asked all of us to do.
On a positive note, following that hearing, Congress was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the UAP issue and uncover the truth about the hidden program.”
[Luis Elizondo on the UAP Disclosure Act]
“In the summer of 2023, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Senator Rubio, and Senator Gillibrand sponsored the most historic UAP legislation yet, the UAP Disclosure Act.
This historic legislation proves that Congress is aware of the Legacy Program’s possession of nonhuman bodies and advanced technology not made here on earth and not made by human beings. It shows that Congress now knows the truth and they want the American people to be informed of the reality of this topic as well.
It proposed that the US government be able to exercise eminent domain over biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence and any type of recovered technology of nonhuman origin that is in the possession of any element of the government or defense contractors.
Another aspect of this legislation creates a review board that answers directly to the president in order to create a road map for controlled disclosure to the American people.
The language in this historic piece of legislation is a direct result of whistleblowers briefing members of Congress and their staff at the classified level and even under oath about the reality of nonhuman intelligence and the Legacy Program’s efforts to capture, collect, and reverse-engineer these vehicles of nonhuman origin and, in some cases, collect nonhuman specimens.
Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. These are individuals who reported to Congress, who had direct knowledge of and worked with the Legacy Program to capture and reverse-engineer vehicles that were made by nonhuman intelligence.
Senator Schumer put out this statement:
The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public. I am honored to carry on the legacy of my mentor and dear friend, Harry Reid, and fight for the transparency that the public has long demanded surround these unexplained phenomena.
Unfortunately, members of the House, specifically Congressman Mike Turner, who is very much supported by the defense contractors involved in the Legacy Program, fought against the UAP Disclosure Act and killed much of what the act tried to make law.
Still, Senators Schumer and Rounds fought for the act to get passed with some historic wins, and in late December 2023 Biden signed it into law.
Most notably, the new law pulls the funding of any activity involving UAP that has not been approved by the appropriate committees. In essence, it makes it very illegal for the Legacy Program or anyone to use taxpayers’ money for UAP-related matters unless it’s been approved by Congress, which hopefully will lead to Congress finally having oversight.
The new law also directs the National Archives to collect government documents about “unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and nonhuman intelligence.” Any UAP-related records not already disclosed must be made public within 25 years of their creation, unless the president determines that they must remain classified for national security reasons. But the proposal for a presidential review board was killed, so, as Senator Schumer publicly said, “It is really an outrage the House didn’t work with us on adopting our proposal for a review board. It means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades.””