Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a top intelligence official in charge of an enigmatic Pentagon program investigating UFOs and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were frustrating the effort.
Elizondo’s revelations caused a sensation. They were bolstered by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional investigations, legislation, and a House hearing in 2023 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. In the book, he claims that for decades there has been a program to recover crashed objects of nonhuman origin that has operated as a super-secret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been recovered from these crashes.
“Humanity is, in fact, neither the only intelligent life in the universe, nor the alpha species,” Elizondo wrote.
The book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOswas published by HarperCollins on August 20 after a year of security reviews by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon’s authorization does not imply approval. The New York Times obtained an advance copy of They are looming under embargo.
The Pentagon’s program currently dealing with UFO sightings — or “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) as they are now called — “is continuing its review of the historical record of U.S. government UAP programs,” said Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokeswoman.
To date, Gough added, the program “has not uncovered any verifiable information to corroborate claims that there have been or are currently programs involving the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials.”
Elizondo was for years a high-ranking military intelligence officer, running highly classified programs for both the White House and the National Security Council. In 2009, he was recruited for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigated reports of UFOs.
In ImminentIn his paper, Elizondo describes his struggle within the program to investigate the phenomena, and his effort, since his resignation in 2017, to push for greater transparency about what is officially known about UFOs. He also wrote about personal encounters with UFOs — green orbs that he said visited his home while he was working for the Department of Defense.
In the book, he expressed alarm at the potential danger to humanity posed by the existence of a technology that he said was far beyond what the United States or other countries had or could explain.
Elizondo wrote that the craft and “the nonhuman intelligence that controls them present, at best, a serious national security problem, and at worst, the potential for an existential threat to humanity.”
In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, wrote that without Elizondo, “the U.S. government would continue to deny the existence of the U.S. and fail to investigate a phenomenon that may well be the greatest discovery in human history.”
The program led by Elizondo investigated sightings, near misses and other encounters between UAP and Navy aircraft. It also collected data on incidents related to military and intelligence operations, including footage of extraordinary aircraft maneuvers that were repeatedly captured by sophisticated sensors.
Within the program, he said, he learned that vehicles displaying “beyond next-generation technology” had been observed as far back as the 1940s. By the early 1950s, when UFOs became a national security concern during the Cold War, strict secrecy was imposed. “Whoever controlled that technology could control the world,” Elizondo wrote.
Much of the information collected by this program remains classified, but two unclassified Navy videos of UAPs were cleared for public release at Elizondo’s request and published by The New York Times when it broke the news of the Pentagon’s secret UFO unit in December 2017.
In an interview, Elizondo said he had firsthand knowledge of what he was talking about, but that his security clearances prevented him from revealing the source of the information. He obtained Pentagon approval to publish his book in part by attributing some of the information to other sources whose comments had been previously approved. Elizondo also said he was not authorized to discuss his involvement in other classified projects beyond the program he once led.
With no prior interest in UFOs, Elizondo grew up in Florida, the son of an American mother and a Cuban father, who fought alongside Fidel Castro before breaking with him and joining the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
His father taught him to shoot, ride motorcycles and fly planes; he went to college and joined the military. He served in Afghanistan and also led counterterrorism missions against ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and later ran secret programs at the Guantanamo naval base and prison.
In 2007, the Defense Intelligence Agency launched the UFO-related Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, funded by $22 million hidden in an undeclared budget secured by Harry Reid, then the Senate Majority Leader.
In 2009, Elizondo became the senior officer running that program’s successor, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, alongside James Lacatski and Jay Stratton. Lacatski, a rocket scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Stratton, an intelligence official at U.S. Strategic Command, were part of the precursor program.
Frustrated by what he described as internal opposition and a lack of resources to deal with what he considered a serious threat to national security, Elizondo resigned and decided to voice 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 Oct. 4, 2017.
Following Elizondo’s departure, the program was rebranded as the UAP Task Force. By 2022, it had morphed again, now into the more visible, Domain-Wide Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), charged by Congress with studying reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena and disseminating information to the public.
Elizondo said he met with the AARO director and his staff for three hours at a secure facility on Feb. 2, 2023, and gave them classified information about the history of the accident recovery program.
Elizondo continues to enjoy the highest security clearances and acts as a consultant for the government.
A veteran scientist with top security clearances whom Elizondo cites in the book, Harold E. Puthoff, was part of Elizondo’s UFO program. A physicist and engineer with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, Puthoff worked as chief scientist on highly classified projects for the government for 50 years, often reporting directly to the head of the CIA and White House advisers.
“Elizondo has provided us with information that appears to be first-hand and I have no reason to discount it,” Puthoff said in an interview. “He certainly had clearances to obtain primary information.”
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Elizondo also wrote in the memoir about personal encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena, describing basketball-sized glowing green orbs that invaded his home on and off for more than seven years. The objects were capable of passing through walls and behaved as if they were under intelligent control, he wrote.
His wife, his two daughters and his neighbors also witnessed the orbs.
As for “our friends outside,” they do not seem 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 writes. “We know that we are not alone.”
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