(NewsNation) — He’s a former Pentagon insider, a veteran and investigator. Today, he’s quite possibly the most important voice in the modern UFO movement.

Luis Elizondo — risking his career, his family, and possibly his life — tells the story of what he claims the American government really knows about alien craft.

There are many people responsible for the resurgence of interest in potential alien life in the universe, but perhaps no one has played a bigger role than a muscle-bound man with tattoos, a soul patch and one heck of a story to tell. 

Luis Elizondo’s new book, “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs,” lays out allegations that the United States military has been running an unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) retrieval and reverse engineering program for years — and has even recovered nonhuman specimens.

“We’re not alone,” Elizondo told NewsNation. “We are not alone in this universe, and it is a simple fact. The U.S. government has been aware of that fact for decades now. I think if the American public knew just how deep this lie went, that we would have a very significant constitutional crisis on our hands.”

There’s controversy about aspects of Elizondo’s resume and what exactly he did in the Pentagon with UFOs. But everyone agrees he is an Army veteran who has served in hotspots around the world. He would then go on to oversee counterespionage and counterterrorism investigations for the Department of Defense.

To make sense of the man and his claims, you need to go back to when it all started in 2009 when Elizondo was working as an intelligence operations specialist for the Department of Defense. He’d risen to the coveted GS-15 pay scale: The highest level federal employees can attain. 

He’d set up a comfortable life in Kent Island, Maryland, with his wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters.

“We had a really nice place to live; this was a great place to raise our kids,” Jennifer said. “And it was just a really laid-back area to raise a family and to live here.”

But Elizondo said that all changed after he met Jim Lacatski, a renowned missile systems expert. He was running the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application (AAWSAP) program.

“I distinctly remember Jim pulling me into his office and asking, and I mean bluntly asking, ‘What do you think about UFOs?’” 

In response, Lacatski told NewsNation, “I was the sole program manager for the complete duration of DIA’s AAWSAP, September 2008 — December 2010, and worked alongside DHS in the follow-on Kona Blue program through 2011. Lue Elizondo was not involved in either AAWSAP or Kona Blue.”

Elizondo, at the time, said it was something he had little interest in.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in science fiction as a kid,” said Elizondo. “I wasn’t a big Star Trek fan or Star Wars fan. So, I consider myself kind of a gumshoe investigator, old school. Just the facts kind of guy. And Lacatski said, ‘That’s fair. But make sure that you don’t let your analytic bias get the best of you. You have to remain open-minded.’”

That’s when, according to Elizondo, Lacatski said he was studying and collecting information on UFOs.

Elizondo claims he was invited to join a program under the AAWSAP umbrella called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

That invitation would soon become an initiative.

“It was a bit of like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ going down the rabbit hole. And it kept getting deeper and deeper,” said Elizondo.

He said his first epiphany came during a meeting with a Brazilian Air Force general who’d come to brief them on a series of incidents in a city called “Colares.” 

“These people, the town’s people, were being plagued by UFOs. In some cases, they were being pursued, and reports of these laser beam-type emissions were coming down and harming people to the point where the Brazilian government actually deployed doctors and the military to investigate,” Elizondo said. “And then when they arrived, they substantiated, they encountered these UFOs, these UAP, as well.”

Operation Saucer was an investigation carried out between 1977 and 1978 by the Brazilian Air Force following alleged UFO sightings in the city of Colares. The investigation was closed after finding no unusual phenomena.

Elizondo, however, disagrees with that assessment.

“That was not the case,” he said. “And it was very clear that it was a very legitimate investigation. And what they found was that these things were coming in and out of the area and harming people.”

As Elizondo went further down the rabbit hole, he said he learned that many of the classic UFO cases were much more than legends, including the famous 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico.

“There was a UAP that crashed. In fact, there were two UAP that crashed, and one flew away while the other one did not,” Elizondo claims. “And it was recovered by the U.S. government. I’m not saying it doesn’t sound crazy; what I’m saying is it’s real.”

UAP encounters: ‘Some people leave terrified … injured’

“I think in order to understand if something is a threat — from a national security perspective — it’s a very simple calculus: Its capabilities versus intent,” Elizondo said. “We see some of the capabilities, and by the way, we can’t replicate them. We have no idea the intent. So to presume or to assume that these things are friendly, or they’re hostile, there’s not enough data.”

Elizondo says the Pentagon’s UFO investigators were keenly interested in the impact UAPs were having on individuals, especially military personnel. 

“There are enough reports that substantiate that not all these interactions are necessarily benign or peaceful,” he said. “Some people leave terrified, some people leave injured. There are U.S. service people. There are people who are on 100% disability right now from the U.S. government because of an interaction with UAP. And it’s in writing, by the way, from the U.S. government because of their involvement in an incident.”

The Veterans Administration has granted full medical disability benefits to Airman John Burroughs for injuries to his heart and eyes that he claims to have suffered during the famous 1980 UAP incident in England’s Rendlesham Forest, a series of reported sightings of unexplained lights just outside Royal Air Force Woodbridge, which was used at the time by the United States Air Force.

Elizondo said that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“We came across information (unrelated to Rendlesham Forest) that suggested that people were having things put inside their body that they did not give approval to,” Elizondo said. “Something invasive that was not put there by their permission.”

A photo, he claims, shows one of those “interesting things.” It’s allegedly a biological sample that was removed from a U.S. service member and submitted for analysis.

“If you look here, there’s actually a piece of the chip sticking out and what appears to be these fibers that were moving on their own,” Elizondo said. “And then it looks like this, this chip, or whatever this foreign object is, encapsulated by some sort of biological material. In this particular case, this was moving on its own. It actually had its own metabolic activity. And it terrified one of the doctors who was looking at this under a microscope.”

But are UAPs abducting people at random? Or are they drawn to certain individuals? Elizondo claims research has revealed a fascinating pattern among UAP experiences — in a fascinating part of the brain.

“This is a part of the brain known as the caudate putamen, and it is a very specific part of the brain, and it’s responsible for all sorts of stuff — some have even speculated precognition (foreknowledge of a paranormal kind).”

Elizondo said that part of the brain is larger in people with alleged psychic powers, or what he said the U.S. government has called “remote viewing.” 

Stanford immunologist Dr. Garry Nolan has been researching this topic, and while his conclusions are not definitive, there are two working theories: One, people with naturally large caudate putamen might attract UAPs like antennae. Another: That UAP encounters with people can cause that part of the brain to get larger.

Elizondo argues that people with enhanced caudate putamen might have talent both for remote viewing — and communicating with — UAPs. It’s an important point because it’s an established fact that the Pentagon has had an interest in remote viewing for military purposes.

“A lot of people that were in the remote viewing program had MRIs done on their brains, and a vast majority have that specific morphology,” Elizondo said.

Remote viewing was discredited by the CIA when the agency determined that it didn’t work.

“It absolutely works,” according to Elizondo.

He says he knows it works because he was trained in remote viewing himself.

That alleged capability for remote viewing — and its potential connection to nonhuman intelligence — may sound like a gift. Elizondo, however, says it was also partially a curse. He says that’s because after years of studying UAP encounters, he began experiencing what’s known in UAP circles as “the hitchhiker effect,” the alleged phenomenon of UAPs appearing at his home, perhaps because he was attracting them.

“We would have these weird glowing balls of light in the house,” he said. “They were they were green, they were small, they were diffuse, kind of like like a little neon ball.”

His wife, Jennifer, said she would “routinely” see orbs.

“Small little spherical lightish green type of color. And be just walking down the hall and I would just stop and it would just continue to go right through the wall,” she said.

Jennifer said strange happenings “turned the house upside down.”

Then, a video that would shock the world — and change it.

“November 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was doing what they called workups right off the coast of San Diego. As they are doing this, there are two different radar arrays that are picking up these objects over the course of several days that were dropping from 80,000 feet, and within about a second or less, all of a sudden being 50 feet over the water and hovering and then popping back up again,” Elizondo said.

He believes these were “absolutely” intelligent technology.

“It’s responsive and reactive. And it’s not human. It’s not ours,” he said.

Though the Nimitz incident had occurred back in 2004, Elizondo didn’t see the video until 2009. Then, in 2015, it happened again.

Naval aviators attached to the USS Roosevelt recorded two other videos during exercises off the coast of Florida that caught the attention of intelligence consultant and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Mellon.

“The Navy was experiencing a number of incursions into restricted airspace,” Mellon said. “And I met Elizondo at the Pentagon and began to hear about these incursions. And the more I learned, the more I realized that we had a potential disaster on our hands.”

The videos remained undisclosed to the public for years, and it’s easy to see why. These weren’t just strange objects in the sky. They conformed to what the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) would establish as the five observables.

“The five observables include instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, low observability, medium travel and anti-gravity. In essence, the ability to defy Earth’s natural gravitational force without the associated technology,” Elizondo said.

He said AATIP also identified another pattern. In several instances, UAPs have allegedly appeared near American nuclear facilities or weapons systems. Both the Nimitz and the Roosevelt are nuclear-powered.

“We do know that there is a very significant interest that UAP has towards our nuclear technology,” Elizondo said.

A daunting thought, to be sure, but Elizondo says AATIP also developed a hypothesis that the UAPs might have an Achilles heel: a vulnerability that the American military can exploit.

“The general consensus was that these vehicles, their propulsion units are susceptible to an electromagnetic pulse, meaning they are using a technology that the electromagnetism — if they were to encounter a certain frequency, it would interfere with their ability to fly and maneuver,” Elizondo said.

Building on that hypothesis, Elizondo says his team devised an audacious, secret plan to disable and capture one of those objects.

“We had proposed a honey trap (Operation Interloper) to try to collect data and information on these UAP,” he said.

“You have a nuclear-powered carrier, with other nuclear-powered vessels, potentially nuclear-powered submarines — which also may have potentially nuclear weapons,” he explained. “So the idea is to create a nuclear footprint that is so irresistible to these things that we would create a trap, and then that trap would be sprung.”

Operation Interloper, however, never made it past the planning phase. 

Elizondo said the shelving of Operation Interloper was just one of several puzzling and frustrating setbacks to AATIP’s mission. Eventually, he came to believe it was more than just bureaucratic inefficiency and that someone was trying to block his team from making progress.

“I took an oath to the American people to defend this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said. “And turns out that the enemy was elements in our own government. It’s the bureaucracy.”

That realization would lead to the biggest and riskiest decision of Elizondo’s life. 

“To accomplish my mission, I knew I had to leave,” he said.

His next chapter

If it’s true that the Pentagon’s so-called Legacy Program has been secretly retrieving and studying nonhuman craft and even bodies, where are they? Area 51? Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio? Or somewhere else? 

No one has come forward with those specifics, not even famed military intelligence officer turned UFO whistleblower David Grusch, who went public on NewsNation last year.

There comes a point in Elizondo’s book where he names names. He mentions Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and BAE Systems as being some of the private corporations that are involved in working on retrieved alien technology.

Lockheed Martin flatly denied the allegations in a statement to NewsNation.

“Questions about UAPs are best addressed by the U.S. government,” a company spokesperson said.

Raytheon also denied the claims.

“This almost certainly goes without saying, but no, we’ve never had access to alien technology,” the company said in a statement to NewsNation.

Elizondo also claims some nonhuman alien biosamples are now being kept at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

He claims some of the answers — and perhaps the biological samples — can be found at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Certainly, we know that a lot of these samples were farmed out to experts, like the NIH, and the FDA, which absolutely fall under the authorities of this building. Logically, it makes sense that there are people in that building right now that may know the location of where these biological samples are,” Elizondo said.

The defense companies he names, the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services all categorically deny Elizondo’s claims. He claims those denials are only possible because he could never get the evidence to prove their involvement once and for all.

“The FDA has not had and does not have biological samples from nonhuman intelligence in our possession,” the agency said in a statement to NewsNation.

Elizondo wanted to investigate those alleged samples and said he was denied access.

“We began to run into some fierce resistance,” Elizondo said. “The more we continued to investigate, the increased level of that resistance became clear that there were elements … the only way I can describe them as religious fundamentalists.”

Or a group euphemistically dubbed the “Collins Elite.”

The Collins Elite has long been rumored to be a cabal of religious fanatics within the Pentagon. Many consider them a myth, but Elizondo thinks otherwise.

“That group is alive and well,” he said. “It exists. I encountered elements of that group firsthand. There are religious fundamentalists inside the Pentagon and inside the U.S. government — and specifically the intelligence community — that have a very strict interpretation of their philosophical belief system.”

He recounts one specific encounter with a high-ranking member of the so-called Collins Elite — a conversation that sounded like a threat to him.

“Someone stopped me in the halls of the Pentagon and said, ‘Have you read your Bible lately?’ And I was kind of surprised by the question. ‘I know what the Bible says. What, may I ask specifically, do you mean?’ He says, ‘You know, what we’re dealing with are our demons. These are demonic beings. And we shouldn’t be looking at them.’”

Aside from potential religious motivations for the secrecy, Elizondo suggests there could also be geopolitical considerations at play: possibly Russia and China.

“There’s always a concern when a foreign adversary is looking at something,” said Elizondo. “There is this cat and mouse game where we don’t want the adversaries to know what we have. We also don’t want adversaries to know what we don’t know.”

Whatever the motivations for the alleged coverup, Elizondo says it went beyond bureaucratic foot-dragging.

“Oh, (people were) absolutely (threatened),” he said. “You know, some of our folks were told, ‘If you’re not careful, we’re gonna do exactly to you what we did with the Rosenbergs.’”

Elizondo describes the mounting obstructions of denied requests, scrapped plans, threats and the refusal to disclose any of this to the public, Congress or the president. 

By early 2017, it had become too much for Elizondo.

He resigned from the AATIP after going public.

In the letter addressed to then Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Elizondo said he was quitting because “despite overwhelming evidence certain individuals in the department remain staunchly opposed to further research on the controversial topic of anomalous aerospace threats.”

“They made my life hell,” he said.

Hard times ahead

On Dec. 16, 2017, the world woke up to a bombshell: Elizondo, working with Chris Mellon, had gone public with the now-famous USS Nimitz video. 

“I contacted three different news organizations. Eventually, the New York Times editors were persuaded they had enough to do a cover story,” Mellon said.

The Times published an explosive article revealing the Pentagon’s secretive UFO program.

Elizondo suddenly became an international public figure once the story broke.

“It was terrifying,” he said. “I had spent my entire life living in the shadows as an intelligence officer. Anonymity is your friend. Coming out was, for me, one of the most difficult experiences.”

Suddenly, Elizondo’s face became synonymous with the UFO question. Now, with his days at the Pentagon behind him, he has devoted himself to the cause. He took a job with To The Stars Academy, a UFO research and advocacy group founded by Blink-182 singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge.

Together, they appeared on History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” which garnered him even more fame.

That attention, however, came at a price.

“I did not think that our lives would be this turned inside out for this many years. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting,” said his wife, Jennifer.

The Office of Special Investigation (OSI) within the U.S. Air Force opened a criminal investigation into Elizondo.

“The initial allegation was that I was responsible for unauthorized disclosure and that I stole classified videos out of the Pentagon and a whole bunch of stuff,” he said. “And long story short, the Air Force OSI came back and said, ‘Nope, actually, we seized the computers. No wrongdoing. He didn’t take anything home. He never had a conversation about anything classified. Everything’s unclassified.’”

The Pentagon has publicly denied his claim that he was the head of AATIP — both in prior public statements and directly to NewsNation.

“The department is fully committed to openness and accountability to Congress and the American people, which it must balance with its obligation to protect sensitive information, sources, and methods,” said Sue Gough, Department of Defense spokesperson. “As we have said many times before, the department and AARO will follow the data wherever it leads; however, to date we have not found any credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity.”

“I refer you to the Historical Record Report Volume 1, available on www.aaro.mil. AARO continues its review of the historical record of U.S. government UAP programs and intends to publish a Historical Record Report, Volume Two. To date, AARO 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. AARO welcomes the opportunity to speak with any former or current government employee or contractor who believes they have information relevant to the historical review.”

“I’ll take ISIS, I’ll take al Qaeda. Whatever, those those don’t scare me. Those don’t bother me. What bothers me is when people question my loyalty, my intentions of what I’m trying to do. That cuts deep,” Elizondo said.

Jennifer said the government’s alleged mistreatment of her husband was “shameful.”

“We need to have an intelligence community that is willing to speak truth to power,” said Mellon. “Here comes a guy who does that and clearly is correct. Does he get an award for identifying a huge, major vulnerability in America’s air defense, like he should? No, he gets harassed by these bureaucrats because he’s doing stuff that is inconvenient.”

Amid reputational attacks, Elizondo and his family were uprooted from their home as his new job at To the Stars Academy called him to California.

Then, the job fell through.

Elizondo and his wife have now gone from steady, well-paid jobs to a precarious financial position.

“I had to get a job at Target. And then after that, I got a job at Home Depot,” Jennifer said.

The family went from their house to a mobile home.

“Everyone thinks we have all this money,” Jennifer said. “Come live for a day in my life. I guarantee you will run back to yours.”

Elizondo said he feels “terrible” because of the stress that he’s put his family through and “what they’ve had to endure.”

Vindication

Some relief finally came for the Elizondo family in April 2021 when U.S. Sen. Harry Reid wrote a letter confirming Elizondo’s role in AATIP.

Personal vindication aside, Elizondo said he’s most proud of the momentous shift that’s taken place in the national conversation on the UAP question — both among the general public and in Washington.

Lawmakers in 2022 passed legislation that called on the U.S. Department of Defense to create a UAP office that would report to Congress. That office is now known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

“I’m most proud of the fact that now it’s being openly discussed in the halls of the Pentagon and downstairs in the cafeteria,” said Elizondo. “That, to me, I think is a hell of an achievement because that means that the stigma and the taboo is finally evaporating, and we can begin to see the topic more clearly.”

With the testimony of the first AARO director, Sean Kirkpatrick, in 2023, it seemed the UAP renaissance had officially commenced.

Age of Enlightenment?

On July 26, 2023, Navy pilot Ryan Graves, Navy Cmdr. David Fravor and former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified at a congressional hearing seen around the world.

“It was a very profound and proud moment for me,” said Elizondo. “You had three military personnel testifying on the reality of UAP. Now, that’s historic.”

It felt for a moment like the dam was breaking and that full disclosure was about to happen.

But it didn’t work out like that. First, AARO refuted Grusch’s claims. Then, like Elizondo, Grusch became the subject of a discrediting campaign, including his medical history.

“They start seeing dissension, and they start misinformation and trying to question his loyalty in his credibility,” said Elizondo. “They try to discredit him just like they tried to do me. Just like they try to with anybody else who comes out and steps out of rank.”

AARO has publicly declared that it has found no evidence to support any claims of a government UAP retrieval program. As for the UAP captured in those famous videos, they remain unidentified. 

“At no time did I provide false information to Congress. In fact, my team and I provided actual evidence to back up all of our findings and research, something that all of the other claimants have failed to do,” Kirkpatrick said in a response to NewsNation.

The Pentagon says AARO will follow the data wherever it leads and that they’ve found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

Elizondo said he would “absolutely” testify before Congress if given the opportunity.