By
Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
Aug. 16, 2024, 10:21 a.m. ET
Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort.
Elizondo’s disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive
videos and
testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which
a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.
Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret 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 retrieved from these crashes.
“Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species,” Elizondo wrote.
Pentagon clearance does not imply endorsement. The New York Times obtained an advance copy of “Imminent” under embargo.
The Pentagon program currently working to address sightings of U.F.O.s — or U.A.P., for “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” as they are now called — “continues its review of the historical record of U.S. government U.A.P. programs,” said Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson.
To date, Gough added, the program “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
Elizondo was, for years, a high-ranking military intelligence officer, and ran 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 investigated reports of U.F.O.s.
In “Imminent,” Elizondo described his struggle within the program to investigate the phenomena, and his effort, since his resignation in 2017, to push for greater transparency on what is officially known about U.A.P. He also wrote about personal encounters with U.A.P. — green orbs that he said visited his home while he worked for the Department of Defense.
In the book, he expressed alarm over 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 explain.
Elizondo wrote that the craft 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.
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 still be denying the existence of U.A.P. and failing 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 U.A.P. and Navy jets. It also collected data from incidents involving military and intelligence operations, including images of
extraordinary craft maneuvers that were repeatedly captured by sophisticated sensors.
Within the program, he said, he learned that vehicles demonstrating “beyond next generation technology” have been observed since the 1940s. In the early 1950s, when U.F.O.s became a Cold War national security concern, strict secrecy was enforced. “Whoever controlled such technology could control the world,” Elizondo wrote.
Much of the information collected by this program remains classified, but two unclassified Navy videos of U.A.P. were cleared for public release at Elizondo’s request and posted by The New York Times when it
broke the news of the Pentagon’s secret U.F.O. unit in December 2017.
In an interview, Elizondo said that he had firsthand knowledge of what he was discussing, but that his security clearances prevented him from explaining the source of his knowledge. He got Pentagon approval to publish his book partly by attributing some of the information to other sources whose comments had previously been approved. Elizondo also said he was not approved to discuss his involvement in any other secret projects beyond the program he once led.
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