Mysterious glowing green orbs the size of basketballs invaded the home of a senior defense official tasked with finding the truth about UFOs, he has claimed in a new memoir.
Luis Elizondo has written about his time at the head of a top-secret program to work out what the Pentagon calls Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (U.A.P.s) in an autobiography which took a whole year to pass Department of Defense censors.
The book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, was obtained by The New York Times and details some of Elizondo’s experiences as an intelligence officer at the secretive Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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Much of his time there remains classified but the book describes how his work came home with him—for seven years. He claims that his D.C.-area home was “invaded,” The Times reported, by green, glowing, basketball-sized orbs. They could pass through walls and appeared to be “under intelligent control,” according to The Times.
Elizondo writes in the book that his wife, their two daughters and their neighbors witnessed the green orbs, which they called “our friends from out of town.”
Elizondo, who is now retired from the DIA and has testified to Congress about the Pentagon’s knowledge of UFOs, says that knowledge of their existences goes back to the 1940s.
This sign off route U.S. 285, north of Roswell, New Mexico, points to the alleged 1947 crash site of a flying saucer on the Corn Ranch. In his book, Elizondo says that Pentagon knowledge of UFOs began in the 1940s.
Getty Images“We can no longer stick our heads in the sand. We know we are not alone,” he says in the book.
Elizondo writes in the book that he served in the Army in Afghanistan, was involved in counterterrorism operations and worked at Guantanamo Bay. But when he was tasked to join the UFO program, he was taken aback by the scale of Pentagon knowledge and the secrecy surrounding it.
Since the 1950s, he says, the Pentagon had gained a body of knowledge kept in conditions of the most guarded secrecy, at first to stop the Communist Soviets learning it. “Whoever controlled such technology could control the world,” he wrote.
His program investigated encounters reported by Navy pilots with unexplained phenomena in the sky and collected recordings of apparently impossible maneuvers by strange craft. Three of the videos they collected have been seen after they were cleared by the Pentagon in 2020, three years after they were first revealed by The Times. The move confirmed their authenticity as coming from Navy pilots, although not whether alien intelligence was involved.
The videos that have come into the public domain were taken from cameras on Navy planes, which picked up apparent aircraft making movements no conventional planes could make.
Department of DefenseElizondo writes that his job made him convinced of the existence—and superiority—of extraterrestrial intelligence. Of the apparent spacecraft, he wrote, “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.”
The limits on what Elizondo could write add their own layer of intrigue to the memoir: the ex-intelligence officer said he cannot discuss other secret alien-hunting programs, suggesting strongly that they exist and have never been fully disclosed.
His program only came to public knowledge because of the way it was set up, by then Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2007, with $22 million slipped into other spending. More money followed but the unit was shut down in 2012. Elizondo continued his work with the Navy but resigned five years later in a letter to then Defense Secretary, retired Marine General James Mattis, which said, “There remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”
Elizondo became the most vocal former Pentagon UFO official on the subject of UFOs when he left, casting a public spotlight on this shadowy area of federal government activity. Just after retiring, he told the Daily Beast that the Pentagon’s UFO inquiries continued under new leadership. “I know that our U.S. military takes very seriously their job of defending our nation and I believe they will take the actions necessary to ensure our defense against all threats.”
The Pentagon continues to operate alien programs, the memoir strongly suggests. Censors at the Department of Defense took a year to clear the book for publication.
Carlos Barria/ReutersIn his memoir he reveals he has briefed his successors on the Pentagon’s crash retrieval program, and names Harold E. Puthoff as having worked for 50 years as the government’s chief scientist on aliens. Puthoff is a controversial figure. He has a Stanford PhD but has faced accusations of pseudoscience. Until the memoir, Puthoff, now 88, had not been reported to have worked for the government.
Puthoff told The Times that Elizondo “has briefed us on information that he obtained that appears to be firsthand data and I have no reason to discount that. He certainly had clearances to get primary information.”
What Elizondo claims about government knowledge going back to the 1940s goes further than official agencies have admitted to. The CIA has declassified hundreds of documents which detail its UFO investigations since then, but all have findings which are, at most, inconclusive.
The Air Force ran a Project Blue Book looking into 12,618 apparent UFO sightings between 1947 and 1969. But, it said, “There has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles.”
