Luis Elizondo — Former U.S. intelligence officer and head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFO/UAP incursions into U.S. airspace. He resigned in protest and authored the book 'Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs.'
The gist
Luis Elizondo walks Steven Bartlett through his career path from Army counterintelligence and counterterrorism work into running the Pentagon's secret UAP investigation program. He argues that trained military pilots, backed by multiple corroborating sensor systems (radar, gun camera, FLIR), have repeatedly encountered craft that outperform any known human technology. He details the five 'observables' that define genuinely anomalous objects, explains the government's decades-long suppression and stigmatization of the topic, and describes the legal and political reasons some officials avoid the conversation. He also covers personnel injured in UAP encounters, alleged interference with nuclear facilities, and his philosophical view that 'aliens' need not be extraterrestrial at all.
Big reveals
- States the U.S. government ran a legitimate program encountering real objects over controlled airspace that outperform anything in the U.S. inventory.
- Reveals he resigned in protest because leadership refused to brief the Secretary of Defense on the UAP issue.
- Says the government possesses 'exotic material' that doesn't look like it was made by humans.
- Claims people have faced extreme disciplinary action, and potentially the death penalty, over this subject matter.
- Asserts elements in the Pentagon still actively discredit whistleblowers, citing colleague David Grusch's medical records being released within 24 hours.
- Confirms there are servicemembers on official U.S. government medical disability for injuries sustained in UAP encounters.
- Says there is evidence (a KGB report) suggesting a UAP turned ON a nuclear facility in Russia.
- Admits his life has been threatened many times, which is why he lives armed in Wyoming with six German Shepherds.
Things worth remembering
- The five 'observables' of anomalous craft: instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, low observability, trans-medium travel, and lack of obvious propulsion.
- An F-16 can pull about 17 G's before structural failure; observed objects perform at 2,000-3,000 G's.
- His book 'Imminent' went through a roughly one-year government pre-publication review (DOPSR) and still contains government-mandated redactions.
- Government reports of unresolved UAP incidents rose from 143 to roughly 300 to about 800 over successive reports.
- Analogy: microorganisms, the dominant life form by biomass, were only discovered ~120 years ago, suggesting unknown life can hide in plain sight.
- Light travels ~186,000 miles per second; the visible universe is roughly 27 billion light years across and estimated to be less than 10% of the whole.
- The Tic Tac incident is a series of encounters; SPY-1 radar could detect a baseball-sized object at 80,000 feet.
- After the Berlin Wall fell, ex-KGB officers briefly shared UAP-related information with the U.S.
- The 1977-78 Colares incident in Brazil was investigated by the Brazilian military, with reports of directed-energy-type injuries to locals and personnel.
- In 2014 Elizondo says he was placed on an ISIS/Al-Qaeda kill list due to his Guantanamo Bay portfolio.
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Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs
Luis Elizondo
“there's a book in front of me called imminent which is the book you've written it says inside the pentagon's hunt for UFOs” — Luis Elizondo 00:31:44Find it on Amazon