Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior U.S. intelligence official who ran a shadowy Pentagon program investigating UFOs and publicly denounced excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were hampering the effort.
Elizondo’s revelations caused a sensation at the time. They were supported by exclusive videos and testimonies from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional investigations, legislation, and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government had recovered crashed objects of nonhuman origin.
Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. He claims that the decades-long UFO recovery program operates as a top-secret group of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he writes, nonhuman technological and biological remains have been recovered from these incidents.
“Humanity, in fact, is not the only intelligent life in the universe and is not the alpha species,” Elizondo writes. The book, “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs,” was published by HarperCollins on August 20, after a year-long security review by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon’s authorization does not imply approval. The Pentagon program that currently deals with UFO sightings — or UAPs, for “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” as they are now called — “continues its review of the history of U.S. government UAP programs,” said Sue Gough, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense.
To date, Gough added, the program “has not uncovered any verifiable information to support claims that programs relating to the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or currently exist.”
Elizondo has been a senior military intelligence officer for years and has run highly classified programs for both the White House and the National Security Council. In 2009, he was recruited into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates UFO reports.
In “Imminent,” Elizondo described his struggle within the program to investigate the phenomena and his efforts, after his resignation in 2017, to push for greater transparency about what is officially known about UAPs. He also wrote about personal encounters with UAPs — green orbs who he said visited his home while he was working for the Department of Defense.
In the book, he expressed concern about the potential danger to humanity posed by the existence of technology that he said far exceeds what the United States or other countries have or can deploy. Elizondo wrote that the craft and “the nonhuman intelligence that controls them represent, at best, a very serious national security problem and, at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity.”
In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, former deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, wrote that without Elizondo, “the U.S. government would still be denying the existence of UAPs and failing to investigate a phenomenon that could be the greatest discovery in human history.”
The program, led by Elizondo, investigated sightings and other encounters between UAPs and Navy jets. It also collected data from incidents involving military and intelligence operations, including images of extraordinary aircraft maneuvers that were repeatedly captured by sophisticated sensors.
Elizondo says that through the program he learned that these vehicles—which had been observed since the 1940s—demonstrated “technology beyond the next generation.” In the early 1950s, when UFOs became a national security concern amid the Cold War, strict secrecy was enforced. “Whoever could control this technology could control the world,” Elizondo writes.
Much of the information gleaned from this program remains classified, but two unclassified Navy videos on UAPs were cleared for release at Elizondo’s request and published by The New York Times when it broke the story of the Pentagon’s covert UFO unit in December 2017.
In an interview, Elizondo said he knew what he was talking about, but for security reasons he could not disclose the source. He obtained approval from the Pentagon to publish his book by partially attributing some of the information to other sources whose comments had been previously approved. Elizondo also said he had not been authorized to discuss his involvement in any secret projects other than the program he headed.
Elizondo, who grew up in Florida, was born to an American mother and a Cuban father who fought alongside Fidel Castro before breaking with him to join the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. His father taught him to shoot, ride a motorcycle and fly a plane, then he attended college and joined the Army. He served in Afghanistan and led counterterrorism missions against ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and then ran covert programs at the naval base and prison at Guantanamo Bay.
In 2007, the Defense Intelligence Agency launched the first UFO-related program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program, funded with $22 million hidden in an undeclared budget and secured by Harry Reid, then Senate Majority Leader.
In 2009, Elizondo became an officer and entered the program that replaced the original, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, along with James Lacatski and Jay Stratton. Lacatski, a rocket scientist with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Stratton, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Strategic Command, were both part of the precursor program.
Frustrated by what he described as domestic opposition and a lack of resources to address what he deemed a serious threat to national security, Elizondo resigned and decided to air his concerns to the broader intelligence community, Congress, and the public.
“There remains a vital need to ascertain the capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the military and the nation,” he wrote to James Mattis, then secretary of defense, in his resignation letter dated October 4, 2017.
After Elizondo’s departure, the program became the UAP Task Force. In 2022, it reverted to the more visible All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which is mandated by Congress to study UAP reports and release information to the public.
Elizondo said he met with AARO’s director and staff for three hours in a secure facility on February 2, 2023, and provided them with classified information about the history of the accident recovery program. Elizondo continues to hold the highest security clearances and consults for the government.
Elizondo also recounted personal encounters with UAPs in his memoir, describing glowing green spheres the size of a basketball that invaded his home at regular intervals for more than seven years. The objects could pass through walls and acted as if they were under the control of an intelligence. The spheres were also seen by his wife, two daughters, and neighbors. As for “our friends from out of town,” they do not appear to be benevolent, he wrote; perhaps they are neutral. Or they could be a threat to humanity. “We can no longer bury our heads in the sand,” he wrote. “We know we are not alone.”
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