US Government Has Retrieved Alien Tech And Bodies From Crash Sites For Decades
FATE Magazine- Apr 28
- 7 min read
When Luis Elizondo began seeing green glowing “orbs” floating in the skies above his Maryland home, he could easily have been written off as a crank.
But Elizondo’s line of work made him uniquely qualified to speculate on what exactly the unexplained objects might have been.
At the time of the sightings, Elizondo said, he was a senior defence official serving as director of the Pentagon’s shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
“My wife was a complete sceptic on all this — that is, until she saw an orb in our house for herself,” said Elizondo, who ran highly classified programmes for the White House and the National Security Agency. “We had a long main hallway in the house and one evening a green, glowing ball, probably about the size of a basketball, with soft edges that weren’t defined, floated down slowly from the kitchen to our bedroom door just below ceiling height, then disappeared into a wall,” he wrote in his book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, published today.
The “friends from out of town” appeared to be benevolent and behaved as if they were under “intelligent control”.
Elizondo, 52, served in Kuwait and Afghanistan before running anti-terrorism missions against Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. He worked for years as a high-ranking military intelligence officer before he was recruited into the AATIP in 2009.
The group was initiated by Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate majority leader, to study unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) at the urging of Reid’s friend Robert Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Elizondo made headlines in 2017 after he resigned, partly out of frustration with what he saw as internal opposition to the programme’s research but also in protest at the lack of resources to deal with what he felt was a serious national security threat.
“The department must take seriously the many accounts by the navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond next-generation capabilities,” Elizondo wrote in a parting letter to Jim Mattis, then the United States secretary of defence.
In doing so, he made public the existence of the $22 million (£17 million) programme and in the years since has almost single-handedly taken the discussion on UAPs from a fringe talking point into the mainstream.
Elizondo writes in his book that he believes UAPs — a term that has broadly replaced UFO — present “at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity”. His team investigated sightings, near-collisions and other encounters between UAPs and US navy jets, as well as collecting data from incidents involving military and intelligence operations.
In his memoir, Elizondo makes a number of revelations, including the existence of what he calls a “super-secret umbrella group” composed of government officials and defence contractors who he says have been retrieving technology and biological remains of non-human origin for more than half a century.
AATIP was like “one of those Russian dolls, one tiny secret tucked within another”, he writes. He describes one unit, the Legacy Program, as having black ops “so black they weren’t even black”. “We spoke of ‘purple novas’ — projects and programs so secret that not even the secretary of defence or the president would ever know of them.”
He recalls the moment he was asked to join the team. “Dr James [Lacatski] explained that for decades, civilians, military personnel and law enforcement officers had reported strange sightings across the world, and there was actually data to support what they saw. Jim emphasised that what they focused on didn’t conform to physics as we understood it.
“I was never particularly interested in UFOs or science fiction. My background was in science,” Elizondo writes. He studied microbiology and immunology at the University of Miami.
He focuses much of his attention on Roswell, which is at the centre of the most enduring debate on the existence of extra-terrestrial life. According to the conspiracy theory, the 1947 crash of what was said to be a US Army Air Forces weather balloon near Roswell, New Mexico, was actually a spacecraft.
Elizondo writes that the intelligence he studied pointed to two saucers colliding that day on July 8. “Our primitive EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) device must have somehow disrupted their propulsion bubble, rendering them vulnerable … like a 757 losing all power on its jet engines,” he concludes.
“Four deceased non-human bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash,” Elizondo claims in the book, which spent a year under Pentagon security review before being passed for publication. Several parts remain redacted.
He says the Roswell episode “codified” how the US government would react to future UAP incidents in the decades that followed. Officials “scripted the universal UAP playbook” in the hours and days following that mysterious incident. First, they “admit nothing and deny everything”. The next step is to “make counteraccusations, intimidate witnesses into saying nothing, discredit those who don’t play along, then stigmatise the topic and threaten anyone who utters a single word about this topic with the US Espionage Act”.
He writes of at least three other incidents where “non-human cadavers” were recovered from supposed air force crashes, including one in December 1950 in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, and four in 1989 in Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union.
Elizondo’s book mentions an autopsy report from another, unspecified, incident: “The report stated that the brain had no convolutions (the wrinkled exterior portion of the brain). Rather, what was described was a smooth surface, similar to lower-functioning animals here on earth. It also described a conjoined gut and liver, and a three-chambered heart, like reptiles.”
The biological matter was said to have been examined at Fort Detrick, Maryland, a military base that was at the centre of the US biological weapons programme from 1943 to 1969.
Until Elizondo went on the record with The New York Times in 2017 about the AATIP’s work, the US government’s official line was that it did not study UAPs. “When governments lie to their people, all of democracy is at risk,” he said of his decision to leave his job and turn whistleblower. “Secrets always have expiration dates.”
Elizondo’s disclosures, supported by videos and testimony from navy pilots, led to congressional inquiries and in 2023 a House of Congress hearing in which Major David Grusch, a retired US intelligence official, testified about the federal government’s recovery of non-human “biologics”.
In 2021 the Pentagon released a report to Congress that contained limited information about the task force’s findings. The report focused on 144 sightings by military aviators, offering five possible conclusions about what objects could be that ranged from the more mundane (birds and plastic bags), to the more sinister (next-generation technologies developed by US adversaries like Russia and China) and the non-specific “Other”. The report did not mention alien life but concluded that more study was needed.
Among the mysteries was footage in 2004 recorded from the cockpit of a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet off the coast of San Diego. In it, the pilots can be heard communicating about an object that looked like a 40ft “Tic Tac”, astonished at its speed and how it seemed to rotate, inexplicably, in the air. The UAP jammed their radar in what was considered at the time “an act of war”.
Elizondo describes this encounter as being considered the “gold standard” in the field, due to the way the investigation was handled and the fidelity of information collected. “Frankly, there’s nothing we have that compares to the capabilities of these objects, these vehicles, that they have been demonstrating in front of us,” Elizondo writes. “If it’s not our technology and it’s not adversarial technology, it must be someone’s technology.”
After his departure, the program morphed into the more visible All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, mandated by Congress to study reports of UAP and release information to the public.
• Tic Tacs and time machines: a history of America’s UFO obsession
Elizondo had an unusual childhood, growing up in Florida as the son of an American mother and a Cuban father, a guerilla fighter whose ill-fated mission to overthrow the communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro with CIA support ended in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961.
“I grew up in a paramilitary environment,” he writes of his upbringing. His father taught him to shoot, fly a plane, and construct rocket launchers out of PVC pipes. “While other kids my age read the Boy Scout Handbook, I paged through books Dad had pressed into my hands: The Anarchist’s Cookbook and How to Survive in Vietnam.”
Elizondo went on to run military intelligence operations in Afghanistan, South America and later Guantanamo Bay’s top-secret Camp Seven. He took the job within the AATIP to spend more time with his family. “I thought of how I had spent too many years away, missing birthdays, Christmases, school plays, science fairs, and bring-your-dad-to-school days,” he writes.
• There are no UFOs, says US … but Pentagon has detection kits ready
He said the sightings at his home — which were “on and off” for nearly seven years and regularly witnessed by his wife, two daughters and neighbours — intensified during his time in the Pentagon task force. “Why were these probes sent to scope out my house?” he asks in his book. “Maybe another, more advanced intelligence was looking into me and my colleagues because they knew we were looking into them?”
He continues: “The more you got involved with the portfolio, the more bizarre it got. I don’t talk too much about it because it just seems so bizarre.”
Elizondo still holds the highest security clearances and continues to consult for the government. “Just as we inform the public about the existence of nuclear weapons being possessed by rogue nations, we should be transparent about the fact that there are things in our airspace that we don’t fully understand,” he writes.
Read the entire article where it was originally published here:https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/pentagon-ufo-expert-says-secret-group-has-non-human-material-k9556s7rc
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