What Elizondo’s Book Adds to the Historical Record
Disclosure Yearbook Series (2024)
Anyone following UFO disclosure has been anticipating Lue Elizondo’s book for years. He has been the central public figure of the post-2017 disclosure movement ever since he burst onto the scene in the famous New York Times story that described him as the former defense intelligence official running a secret UFO study program from inside the Pentagon. He went on to do whatever public outreach he could, from the 60 Minutes feature in 2021, to the History Channel’s Unidentified series (2019-2020), to a multi-year blitzkrieg of the UFO podcast circuit, and regularly advising members of Congress. As we learn in his book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, released August 2024, this was all by design. The messages he has been spreading since he resigned from the Defense Department in 2017—that we are not alone in the universe or on this planet, that our cohabitants are far superior to us and may pose a threat to our very existence, and that it’s high time the DoD/IC face up to this fact and tell the American people what it knows—are reiterated and contextualized in the book.
But Imminent provides another important public service by adding crucial factual details about the modern era of UFO disclosure to the historical record. Namely, who did what, and when, and why, and what it felt like, in that secret Pentagon UFO effort. As one man’s book, it only represents one man’s perspective. But Elizondo’s perspective is an essential thread, one that must be wound around others, which allows us to better understand the full picture.
Below are four key pieces of history that we learned from Imminent.
The Transition from AASWAP to AATIP, and How the Programs Differed
AASWAP was an official program housed within the Defense Intelligence Agency with congressionally mandated funding to investigate multiple facets of the UFO phenomenon both civilian and military. The program had a large staff that was active from 2008 to 2010. AATIP was an unofficial program with no congressional funding or mandate, that operated within the Pentagon and was focused exclusively on the military-UFO nexus. AATIP had a small membership that was active from around 2010 until 2017. The initial New York Times reporting conflated AASWAP and AATIP, but it has been publicly known exactly how they differed since at least 2021. That was the year that AAWSAP project leaders James Lacatski and Colm Kelleher, along with journalist George Knapp, wrote a book about AAWSAP’s efforts called Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. In the introduction, under the subheading “AAWSAP Was Not AATIP”, the authors explained that after AAWSAP ended, “the AATIP designation was used to describe a completely separate, small initiative that was underway at the Pentagon to study UAPs encountered by military personnel.” These UFO-interested DoD employees worked the “UAP problem” as a kind of side job “when their day jobs allowed them to.” In Imminent, Elizondo essentially agreed with this characterization while adding much more context.
In early 2009, Lacatski hired Elizondo to join AAWSAP as a senior intelligence officer to run counterintelligence and security for the program. Elizondo explains he had never given UFOs much thought at all, but quickly became activated by the topic due to the high caliber of military, intelligence, and scientific leaders who worked for AAWSAP and the evidence that they shared. So Elizondo was privy to how AAWSAP operated, as well as the bureaucratic pushback that eventually caused the program to be shut down. He was a key player in the decision to launch AATIP in the wake of AAWSAP. So his insights are grounded in experience with both programs.
AAWSAP investigated not only cases of UFOs and flying orbs, but mythological creatures, poltergeist activity, and demonic portals at Skinwalker Ranch. The very name Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program was in no way intended to accurately describe the work of the program. Much of the scientific studies and papers that came out of AAWSAP couched their findings in generic language for principles or concepts that could conceivably be applied to conventional weapons systems.
Elizondo’s preferred name for his program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was coy but literally descriptive of the effort. In his view, UFOs are advanced aerospace technologies that pose a threat that must be identified.
By the end of 2009, conversations were occurring between Elizondo, Lacatski, and Jay Stratton about the need to tone down AAWSAP’s paranormal aspects. Elizondo writes in Imminent, “we openly talked about the wisdom of Jim dropping the investigations AAWSAP had gotten involved with that many considered to be dealing with the paranormal and instead focused solely on UAP threats. I was convinced that if we produced some solid work under the AATIP banner, there wasn’t a person in the Pentagon or Congress who could look away.” According to Elizondo’s recollection, Lakataski felt all of these elements were “interrelated” and deserving of study, and in fact had to be studied in a unified way to get at the complex, messy truth of the phenomenon. Elizondo did not so much disagree as apply a cold-eyed reading of the bureaucratic and political reality: “The only problem: the briefing Jim wanted to share with leadership included words like archangels, angels, demons, and spiritual realm. A bridge, or two, too far for most.” When he transitioned to AATIP, “Jay and I agreed we had to focus on the nuts and bolts of UAP military encounters in order to effectively navigate future battles with Congress, the DoD, and other agencies.”
In other words, standing “under the AATIP banner” was to adopt an establishment, mainstream approach, whereas waving the banner of AAWSAP was akin to letting your freak flag fly.
In one sense, this divergence was nothing new. Ufologists have long noted the connection between UFOs and other numinous experiences, and have argued over where to lay the emphasis for just as long. But this disagreement had higher stakes than those older academic debates because of the direct implications for disclosure. Elizondo intuited that the only way to get military witnesses to talk about their UFO experiences, and to get them into the halls of power where those stories could be shared, was to construct an epistemological safe place around these taboo concepts. This was the beginning of a strategy that Stratton and Elizondo would apply throughout AATIP within the Defense Department, and that Mellon and Elizondo would wield to great effect after 2017 with Congress and the media. Reduce UFOs down to the quaint concepts of airspace sovereignty and aviation safety. It was only in these reduced forms that the concept of nonhuman beings and their technology could be metabolized within establishment thought. Elizondo was wrong that the Pentagon would not be able to look away from this potential threat (they did, and are still). But he was right about Congress. And that would make all the difference.
How AATIP Actually Functioned
AATIP was a real effort that had regular team members and a network of advisors, analysts and contacts in the field, all of whom who expended manhours and resources investigating military UFO cases and theorizing how UFOs operated and what they might be up to. AATIP did not produce anything like AAWSAP’s much-touted scientific studies and reports, but its output does include the five UAP observables; investigation of the 2013-15 Roosevelt UAP incursions and the start of the Navy’s formal UAP reporting (which led directly to the all-important 2021 Preliminary UAP Report); release of the three Navy UAP videos; a detailed plan to use nuclear assets to lure UFOs; Lue Elizondo himself, plus Chris Mellon, disclosure advocates. It is also the case that AATIP was unfunded, off the books, operating as a side project outside of the chain of command, and kept secret out of fear that if the wrong people in the bureaucracy found out about it the AATIP team would be directed to stop. The distinction is important because as late as 2024, DoD officials have argued that Elizondo’s AATIP (~2010-2017) did not exist. This is highly misleading, but from a strictly bureaucratic perspective it is not wrong. In Imminent, Elizondo explains how this situation came to be.
In his forward to the book, Chris Mellon explains what AATIP was up against: a Pentagon bureaucracy that viewed interest in UFOs with “unremitting disdain and contempt.” As such, “the handful of [AATIP] people at the Department of Defense (DoD) who had a serious interest in the issue were careful to conceal it from any but a few trusted friends. Prior to 2017, when DoD personnel discussed UAP it was usually behind closed doors or in whispers.”
Elizondo explained that AAWSAP was able to conceal the more unorthodox targets of its research by describing them in official documents and reports in ways that made them seem generic, ambiguous, and broadly applicable to conventional military assets. “This was another layer of protection, to hide the true mission of the overall effort,” he writes, adding, “I would do the same thing in order to keep AATIP viable.” This extended to how AATIP expended Pentagon resources: “In classic Pentagon style, everyone would fit their AATIP work into their already packed government workloads, and we would have to be very clever with the funding.” He boasts that Stratton drafted appropriation requests “so brilliantly worded that no one who wasn’t privy to our investigation would ever guess” AATIP was using the finds to study UFOs. In one interesting anecdote, we learn that Senator Harry Reid appropriated $10 million for AATIP, but because “the language in the bill was ambiguous enough” (again, no one in the know wanted to tip off everyone else not in the know) that an entirely different Pentagon office absconded with the $10 million and plowed it into their own pet project. AATIP was forced to take the loss. Elizondo explains, “We just couldn’t openly fight for our money. If we did, we would expose the program.” (It is a bit shocking but not surprising to read a concrete example of how the billions of dollars that get funneled into the Pentagon gets sloshed all over the place. No wonder some in Congress have been complaining that the DoD refuses to submit an audit.)
Because of their perceived need for secrecy, AATIP heavily policed who knew what about its work. Elizondo writes, “We had to keep our ‘bigoted’ list of AATIP’s members and allies small. We were afraid to make some people aware of the effort.” He admits that they had no qualms lying to certain people to maintain the secrecy. For example, when AATIP needed civilian scientists to analyze a piece of alleged UFO evidence, they would tell them it was “part of some foreign technology American forces recovered.” When AATIP needed Pentagon analysts to review their UFO evidence, for “some of these instances we couldn’t discuss the target, out of fear that we would compromise the entire effort. In those cases we wouldn’t tell the analyst what they were looking at.” Stratton excelled at getting Navy UFO witnesses to share details about their sighting, but to get some of them to push through the stigma of reporting a UFO, he would tell them that the technology they saw was part of a U.S. military special access program.
You could make the case that some of those techniques were not technically lying, but all of them illustrate the fact of AATIP’s unofficial status within the Pentagon. Elizondo and Stratton could not walk up to somebody, flash their ID and say, “We’re from the DoD’s UFO Investigation Unit, and we need your help to solve a potential UFO case.” Had they done that, it would not have taken long for higher ups in the bureaucracy to tell them to knock it off and get back to their official, sanctioned workflow.
Nonetheless, AATIP persisted through this secrecy, and they did manage to bring a small but wide-ranging number of confidants into the fold.
First, on the team and analyst level, AATIP went through an elaborate sort of UFO courtship ritual they called the Talk. Elizondo vetted potential recruits for six months, ensuring they were not only technically capable in their expertise, but personally and psychologically grounded enough to handle working on the UFO problem. During the final culmination of the Talk, the recruit was told that UFOs are real and AATIP is studying them, and then they were asked if they still wanted to sign on. The need for secrecy even within the DoD was paramount. Elizondo describes how he conveyed this message: “But if you ever mention this to anyone, I will fire you immediately and publicly deny we ever had this conversation.” When senior CIA leader Jim Semivan approached AATIP and asked to join, they did not open up right away. They considered trusting him as “taking a big chance.” Elizondo described how the Talk played out with Semivan: “We couldn’t afford compromising our true efforts, so we all spoke in a kind of uncomfortable code, hoping the other person understood what we are trying to say, without actually saying it.” Semivan became the first person from outside the core AATIP group allowed to join the team. In 2017, when Chris Mellon asked to be read into AATIP, they were “astonished” he had found out about them. Elizondo describes in the book how he erected an impassable barrier of security clearances to keep him out, but Mellon easily cleared it. And they were soon glad that he had.
Second, AATIP seems to have generated an informal network of military personnel in the field who would reach out when there was an active UFO incursion or a sighting. Over the years this network would provide AATIP with information, data, and even video. They also built up a network of high-ranking military personnel who would reach out, call, send information. Elizondo explains, “We had worked hard over the last few years to cultivate relationships with personnel who could turn to us first when they spotted a UAP. This was a live investigation that was happening in real time.” This was probably very limited, allowing only a fraction of actual UAP sightings to actually make it to AATIP. No where in Imminent does Elizondo overstate the case. But it does seem like AATIP was perceived as filling a gap that resulted from UFO stigma and the DoD turning a blind eye to the problem. Because UFOs did not register as a threat or anything related to any DoD mission, “it was crickets all the way through the chain of command.” This was “classic Pentagon thinking.”
It was a pain point for Elizondo that he could not ride to the rescue of his fellow brothers and sisters in arms, that he could do little more than listen, passively receive their stories. This thread of pain runs through Elizondo’s descriptions of his AATIP years. He wanted to tell his sources in the field, “not to worry. The cavalry was coming.” But he very often could not. This was because he commanded no cavalry. AATIP’s unofficial status and culture of secrecy meant he could not even inform anyone in the chain of command. Though not included in the book, in past podcast interviews he has recounted how he would get calls from Navy ship commanders in the middle of UFO incursions asking how long they had to keep crew belowdecks. Sitting in his Pentagon office, he was basically helpless and getting more and more frustrated.
Elizondo was always hesitant about overpromising his sources in the field on what he could deliver because he knew that he may well not be able to motivate the DoD bureaucracy to send in the cavalry. In a key passage in Imminent Elizondo describes the bind he was in when he would get these calls.
“Our men and women in uniform craved guidance on this issue, and the only way I could elicit a directive was to bump it up to the next level. I went so far as to pull some political favors based on the capital I had built doing favors for others over my long career. All to no avail. I was stuck in a catch-22. The read-on list [for AATIP] was slim, I had to be careful what I said about our effort. If I said too little, no one would want to help me. If I said too much, no one would believe me. Like the old Goldilocks bedtime story, the porridge had to be just right. But everyone in the chain of command desired their porridge to be a different temperature than everyone else’s.”
Making UFO acceptance palatable to the uninitiated is the perennial problem of UFO discourse in just about every sector of society, but no place has more barriers to acceptance than the military. This explains why the disclosure sweet spot was to rebrand UFOs as UAP (Elizondo attributes the new term to Stratton), and to focus almost exclusively on air sovereignty and air safety. AAWSAP’s porridge was scalding hot. AATIP had to water its porridge down to a thin gruel that could be sipped through a straw.
Let’s take a look at how this dynamic played out with two known military UFO cases.
In 2013, scientists at the Los Alamos testing range saw numerous highly maneuverable, fast-flying orbs and disc-shaped objects that seemed to be observing a classified military asset. The witnesses filed a report. This was one of the most redacted parts of Imminent (Elizondo kept the three long blacked-out paragraphs visible rather than excising them from his manuscript), so we don’t really know how AATIP knew what little it did know. They somehow got to read some initial DoD reports, but they were not able to participate in any formal investigation. Elizondo implies that there was some kind of turf battle over the investigation because the DoD, FBI, and DoE all have jurisdiction over Los Alamos, “a classic example of government fiefdoms and stovepiping.” He says AATIP “was boxed out” of the Los Alamos sighting, but a more accurate way to think about it is that AATIP was not able to use their networking and investigative techniques to break into the investigation. Boxed out implies that AATIP’s inquiries were actively rejected, but based on how Elizondo describes AATIP throughout his book it is highly unlikely the DoD, FBI, DOE, or those Los Alamos scientists knew AATIP even existed. Because it operated outside of the chain of command, outside of the DoD bureaucracy, it had authority nowhere—except for the informal authority of trust built up between a small number of colleagues.
The USS Roosevelt UFO incursions of 2013 to 2015 is an exception that proves the rule. This was one of the most consequential UFO waves. It produced two of the three now-famous Navy UAP videos. It involved frequent, on-going UFO incursions into east coast training ranges during test flights, including some near misses with fighter jets. The squadron filed safety reports, concerned about collisions. Ryan Graves was a fighter pilot assigned to the Roosevelt at that time and helped to raise the alarm, which he continues to do to this day in the media and before Congress. AATIP became heavily involved in this case in 2015 after the Roosevelt deployed to the Middle East. Elizondo explains that Navy Fleet Forces Command reached out to the Office of Naval Intelligence to look into the matter. It just so happened that Stratton worked at the desk in ONI that received these reports, and because he was a member of AATIP he was in a position to interpret the reports as a UFO sighting. Elizondo describes the mindset of the Roosevelt witnesses: “The authors of these reports hoped that their stern warning would somehow filter up to the presumed operators of top secret programs who, they believed, had recklessly put their people in danger. Most of them did not or could not contemplate the possibility of off-world technologies. Ones who did, carefully couched their language in generalities, hoping that an open-minded person in charge would notice.”
Stratton did notice. He happened to work at the “appropriate front door” for these reports, and initiated an investigation “with the full support of his leadership.” But this was not an AATIP investigation, it was an Office of Naval Intelligence investigation.
By 2016-17, AATIP realized that their lack of formal authority was a barrier to their effectiveness. After five or six years of being on the receiving end of many fascinating, hair-raising reports, but being very limited in their ability to do anything about it, they must have begun to feel like they were kids playing office. They needed rank. They needed to be placed in a box on the DoD org chart, however small. They needed to somehow collect enough solid, incontrovertible evidence that would “help open more eyes” and put an end to the Goldilocks dilemma once and for all.
Stratton and Elizondo hatched an audacious plan that would force the Pentagon bureaucracy to pay attention to UFOs and make AATIP an official program. The two-pronged strategy addressed both needs: evidence and rank. Stratton submitted to the Joint Staff a proposal named Interloper, which would place a large amount of nuclear assets at sea at one time, with crew prepared to aim every sensor and camera at the ensuing UFO activity that would be attracted by such a display. For his part, Elizondo worked with liaisons for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to get permission to personally brief Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on AATIP’s findings. Both of these requests were ultimately rejected. By the fall of 2017, Elizondo accepted that he was only going to be able to change DoD mindsets about UFOs from outside of government. He resigned on October 4.
There is a historical irony in what happened next. Through a series of National Defense Authorization Acts passed in 2021 and 2022, Elizondo and Mellon helped Congress create the UFO office that AATIP was trying to be. This office became AARO, which the DoD officially launched in July 2022. It was situated pretty high up on the org charts of both the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. By mid-2023 the director of AARO would report directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. In May 2023 it disseminated to the entire military through the Joint Staff a formal reporting structure that mandated UAP reporting, providing guidance to all personnel in the field what to do during a sighting, which would allow the whole military and Intelligence Community to spring to action. AARO became the cavalry that Elizondo always wished he had. The problem is it was led by a McClellanesque commander who had a strong disinclination to charge into the UFO fray. And it is to that commander we must now turn.
Elizondo and Sean Kirkpatrick’s Incompatible Interpretation of Events
Toward the end of 2023, AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick drafted a historical report on U.S. government involvement with UFOs. Here is how he described AATIP in that report [emphasis added-JS]: “Unlike AAWSAP, AATIP was never an official DoD program. However, after AAWSAP was cancelled, the AATIP moniker was used by some individuals associated with an informal, unofficial UAP community of interest within DoD that researched UAP sightings from military observers as part of their ancillary job duties. This effort was not a recognized, official program, and had no dedicated personnel or budget.”
The AATIP chapters in Imminent essentially corroborate this description. But beyond this minor technical question of AATIP’s status within the bureaucracy, there is a sharp break between Elizondo’s and Kirkpatrick’s interpretation of the quality of UFO evidence.
The AARO historical report concluded that there is a complete “lack of evidence of the extraterrestrial origin of even one UAP report” and that “all resolved cases to date have ordinary explanations.” The report provided a list of cultural factors that attempt to explain why “claims of extraterrestrial visitations” have persisted despite this lack of evidence, all of which point to misidentifications, misunderstandings, and wishful thinking. The report singled out an unnamed “group of individuals who have ties to the canceled AAWSAP/AATIP program” as falsely perpetuating stories about crashed UFOs, recovered alien bodies, and secret reverse-engineering programs, “despite the lack of any evidence.”
During his 2024 media campaign, Kirkpatrick framed his skeptical arguments in even starker terms. UFOs do not exist, and “nobody has produced any evidence of anything that violates the laws of physics, not a single shred.” Kirkpatrick and some of his interviewers came to depict the group of insiders as a UFO lobby group who had deluded themselves into thinking their UFO stories were true, which then got “spun up” through circular reporting. CNN’s Peter Bergen said in his interview, “there has been a sort of self-reinforcing loop… a conspiracy of like-minded individuals in the government and elsewhere to say that there is a conspiracy to suppress information about UFOs.” To which Kirkpatrick replied, “That is a self-licking ice cream cone. Exactly.”
In Kirkpatrick’s view, according to his own case-resolution reports, military UFO sightings are caused by things like stray balloons, fishing nets, and drones, and the witnesses and reporters only talk themselves into, or get talked into believing they had seen something more extraordinary.
It is revealing to contrast Kirkpatrick’s perspective of UFO witnesses and evidence with how Elizondo describes UFO witnesses and evidence in Imminent.
Let’s start with witnesses.
Witness Quality
Imminent is filled with descriptions of military personnel who saw something so seemingly impossible that it made them scared to report it. The core group of witnesses to the 2004 Tic Tac encounter were first interviewed by AAWSAP in 2009, though they would not make themselves public until the 60 Minutes segment in 2021. Elizondo writes that the “eyewitness testimony from trained fighter pilots,” who were in different jets and monitored by multiple Navy vessels, was corroborating because they “all reported the same thing, at the same time, at the same place.” And what they described—the flight capabilities of the Tic Tac—was so impossible that it convinced them that what they saw was non-human advanced technology. Elizondo describes how they were extremely hesitant to tell their story. When Stratton interviewed them, they “just didn’t want to talk… If they did, they asked Jay not to reveal their identities.”
Mellon wrote in his forward, “These individuals had no incentive to report these incidents. Indeed, they had a strong incentive not to report.” He added that it is “grossly irresponsible to disregard their accounts.” But this is exactly what post-AATIP government investigators did.
AARO met with one or more of the Tic Tac and/or Roosevelt military witnesses, but their perspective was never included in any AARO report. Their testimony was dismissed as unusable because, as Kikrpatrick reiterated in many of his interviews, “they are still human and they are still subject to error and optical illusion.” When confronted by one interviewer about how the Navy UAP videos corroborate aviator accounts, Kirkpatrick pushed back: “A pilot estimates range with his thumb and speed with his thumb, and I can't, you can't put any credibility into that. As much as I love our pilots and they're the best pilots in the world, when you're talking about trying to apply a guesstimate to something that somebody remembered from however many years or decades ago in a scientific, rigorous and technical evaluation, you're gonna come up with all kinds of interesting things.”
NASA’s UAP Study Team adopted the same approach during their 2022-23 investigation. They also spoke with military witnesses, and also ignored them. David Spergel, who chaired the team, said in a 2024 podcast: “We basically said we just don't know how to check personal testimony. And we know there's a lot of actually very interesting data on eyewitness reports for jury trials where judges have learned about the unreliability of eyewitness reports, and this is a bit of a delicate subject because you get people's testimony you don't want to say I don't believe you, but you really want corroborating evidence.”
No wonder military witnesses do not want to report.
This fear of reporting is apparently pervasive, and not limited to those two remarkable cases. Elizondo had to confront it again and again. He writes, “Jay and I spoke often about how we could sense these servicemen and -women trying to make the split-second decision—talk or clam up?—on the phone with us. How often we wished we could promise them protection or immunity from reprisals. But we had not such leverage in our toolkit.” Reporting a UFO in the military is akin to walking out on a narrow, slippery ledge all by yourself, provoking a very real sense of personal and professional danger. Admitting they saw something that is impossible rendered them exposed and vulnerable to all manner of judgements about their character, capabilities, and mental state. What would these military personnel have to have seen to generate this level of sustained anxiety? Would not their discomfort at their predicament motivate them at some point to say, you know what, now that I think about it, it was probably a swirl of trash bags, or a Chinese spy device—if that is in fact what it was? What is sustaining these witnesses’ anxiety is that the performance characteristics of what they saw already ruled out the conventional explanations, and so they find themselves the keeper of a very inconvenient, deeply uncomfortable mystery.
There are only two coping mechanisms for this condition, seek answers and connection by trying to report, or bury your head in the sand and pretend it didn't happen. The latter has become standard operating procedure in the military. In a key passage on how UFO stigma is reinforced, Elizondo writes, “Over the decades, military people had learned that UAP are to be explained away or, better yet, ignored. Talking about the subject is a definitive career killer… As a result, recruits learn to deal with UAP without question. You get so good at following orders that you don’t even follow the unspoken ones. If the admiral so much as raises his eyebrows, you shut up and move out smartly.” (One anecdote from the Tic Tac case, which would be amusing if it was not so pernicious, is the Navy commander assuring the radar operator that the mysterious blips on his screen was ice falling from space.)
Mellon equates this mindset to the self-deluding subjects of the emperor who wore no clothes: “some defense and intelligence personnel were pretending not to notice advanced aircraft that plainly did exist.”
UFO stigma is strong for a reason. In Elizondo’s and Mellon’s worldview, UFO stigma is a real and powerful social effect because witnesses saw something real and inexplicable.
If UFOs were really just airborne clutter and unidentified aircraft—or even undiscovered atmospheric phenomena, space ice or otherwise—you would think the military would have figured out a way to account for, categorize, and dispense with this social effect among the military ranks. After all, the military has been formally collecting data on this problem for almost 80 years (the first contemporary cases the military began to collect in its UFO database date to January 1947). Why not just calibrate sensors and train the pilots to clear up all the confusion? Kirkpatrick explained across his 2024 media campaign that this is precisely what he set up AARO to do:
“This is a domain awareness problem plain and simple. …We have lots of data across lots of sensors and we need to train the sensors and the data exploitation tools to look for some of the signatures that they aren't currently looking for.”
“The radars, the sensors have never been calibrated against balloons, ever. That was one of the things that we stood up AARO to go do.”
“There was nobody in charge of this particular problem.”
But why did this take 76 years? In 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell died in a crash from chasing a UFO that the Air Force said was a balloon. Why didn’t this sensor calibration campaign start then instead of 2023?
If all of this UFO confusion could be demonstrated to be a misunderstanding, the stigma would lose its taboo power quickly. Apparently, this cannot be demonstrated so easily.
Evidence Quality
The second contradiction Imminent surfaces is how much high-quality UFO evidence came into the hands of members of the AATIP team, about which all post-AATIP DoD officials plead ignorance when asked to speak publicly about UFO evidence.
All of the AATIP team members seem to have been flushed out of government involvement with UFOs by 2022. The publicly facing leaders who have been placed in charge of the UFO problem set since that time—Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines; Ronald Moultire of OUSD(I); Scott Bray of Naval Intelligence; Sean Kirkpatrick of AARO—have all been clear and consistent. None of them have personally seen any compelling evidence that UFOs represent advanced, non-human technology. And yet during the prior decade AATIP was awash in such evidence.
Mellon writes in the forward that the evidence he saw through AATIP convinced him that there could be only three explanations: breakthrough adversary technology, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, or some other non-human craft. He added, “the ET hypothesis actually seemed the most viable explanation for some cases.”
Elizondo places much stock in the caliber of expertise on the AATIP team, from Stratton to Hal Puthoff, to all of the technical experts working in DoD/IC who advised on AATIP’s evidence: “If they all thought the UAP technology we had observed was unlike any other found on the planet, I was inclined to believe them, our witnesses, and the evidence.”
One specific example Elizondo mentions is from the 2013 Los Alamos sighting: “The initial DoD reports I saw painted a picture of government witnesses standing around watching an almost obvious display of out-of-this-world performance characteristics.” Of course, the words painted, almost, and obvious may be doing a lot of inferential work in this sentence. But the reports are presumably recounting the witnesses’ impression, not Elizondo’s. And there are many examples in the book of others getting that same impression. AATIP would sometimes provide their evidence to rank-and-file DoD analysts, without telling them what it was or where it came from. Elizondo recounts in the book that their responses sometimes went like this: “It’s not one of ours, that’s for sure. Hard to believe it’s man-made.”
Then there are the compelling UFO videos AATIP was able to review. There were the three Navy videos, GO FAST, GIMBAL, and FLIR, that became famous. But these were captured on sensor systems, not cameras, and so they do not show video imagery. They were the only videos that AATIP was able to declassify and release to the public. Elizondo has long alleged there are videos taken by cameras, not sensors, that show UFOs up close and in high definition. He goes into more detail about these in Imminent.
Mellon writes in the forward that some of the first “compelling official evidence” he had seen of the government’s awareness of UFOs was in 2017 when Elizondo showed him gun-camera UAP videos. He described the sensation of watching these videos as an “out of body experience.” Mellon had long been merely interested in UFOs, but after receiving the AATIP evidence in early 2017 he became activated: “Now, very suddenly, the issue was becoming both concrete and profoundly concerning… My mind was churning, trying to recalculate and repair its suddenly altered map of reality.”
There are two frequently mentioned videos, each of which get a brief description in Imminent. One is of a wedge-shaped craft that blasts by a Navy jet within 50 feet of the cockpit, filmed by the aviator. The other, filmed by a predator drone, is 23 minutes long, of three UFOs darting about, jumping 60 miles “in the blink of an eye” (Elizondo characterized their movements as “playful”). And Elzondo has mentioned other videos in the government’s possession. During his fall book tour he mentioned one that was recorded by a U.S. asset over a foreign adversary’s nuclear site, thus highly classified, likely never to see the light of day.
Kirkpatrick has presumably never seen these videos. Or at least he’s never publicly acknowledged seeing anything like them. Instead, he only ever talks about videos and sensor data that show balloons and drones. In one of his interviews he described a spherical object captured on a FLIR sensor flying at one and a half mach, genuinely anomalous. To add to the intrigue, it was buzzing a volcano—“you know everybody loves the UAPs are attracted by volcanoes.” AARO puzzled over it for a year before determining that it was a weather balloon and the speed only appeared that fast because of parallax. In keeping with AARO’s tendency to only release debunked UAP cases, this one is “in the queue to be declassified.”
There are two other types of evidence that AAWSAP and AATIP teams claim they had, that DoD officials have since denied any knowledge of.
One is the secret program that is alleged to have recovered and attempted to reverse engineer crashed UFOs. Elizondo writes in Imminent, “I learned the larger program is referred to as the Legacy Program and involves various elements of the US government and US defense contractors” (note the proper noun singular).
Kirkpatrick used a large portion of his historical report to debunk this particular claim. He has repeatedly said throughout 2024 that there is zero evidence of such a secret program and that he had access to special access programs. (Interestingly, in 2023 when the UAP Disclosure Act was being drafted to compel release of records pertaining to government involvement with UFOs, Kirkpatrick submitted AARO’s recommendation for a revised version of the amendment that deleted the referenced to “Legacy program”.)
Finally, both AAWSAP and AATIP had a medical advisor on the team, Dr. William Livingston, who compiled medical evidence of biological effects of UFOs. Elizondo was interested in this because of his college degrees in microbiology and immunology. He writes: “People would be surprised to learn that the US government has awarded multiple servicemen 100 percent disability, in writing, due to medical issues resulting from their close encounters with UAP.” It was very likely Elizondo’s influence that had Congress require part of AARO’s annual report to include any new examples of these biological effects. But each time AARO has issued this report, it has said that no such evidence has surfaced.
How is this contradiction about evidence resolved? So far, it has not been, and this remains a major sticking point in the discourse over UFO disclosure. Each side, of course, has their own preferred resolution. Kirpatrick believes that the AAWSAP/AATIP people claiming to have seen compelling UFO evidence are either lying, grossly exaggerating their claims, or deluded. To believe that the AAWSAP/AATIP evidence is real and as compelling as they make it out to be, you would have to believe that this evidence—the videos, the medical files, the sensor data, the insider accounts—have been systematically withheld from DoD/IC leadership, or that they have seen it and are are lying about it.
After Kirkpatrick’s historical report was released in early March 2024, Elizondo released a message on social media calling it “intentionally dishonest, inaccurate, and dangerously misleading.” He said that he knows of “ample classified evidence that has been provided to AARO and contradicts this report.” Mellon called it “pathetic,” and argued AARO suffered from a conflict of interest because it’s a case of the DoD/IC investigating itself.
Elizondo and Mellon were writing their respective prefatory sections of Imminent in April and May of 2024, a month after the above exchange, and four months into Kirkpatrick’s media campaign denigrating their work, though not them by name. Kirkpatrick is never mentioned in Imminent, nor are his conclusions on the historical report. We know that Mellon, and perhaps Elizondo, were involved in AARO’s research collection efforts for the report. Perhaps Elizondo will tell that story another day.
The AAWSAP/AATIP perspective, embodied by the public profiles of Elizondo and Mellon (among a few others) was never really challenged publicly until Kirkpatrick left government and presented his own theories of their behavior. For now, they remain two perspectives in orbit of one another, poles apart, repelling and attracting one another in equipoise. It’s anyone’s guess when or if one will be able to knock out the other. Will Kirkpatrick have enough staying power and persuasion rebuilt the conventional wisdom that UFO evidence is paltry at best? Or will the robust evidence surface, and new sightings continue to prolong the mystery, making his strident skepticism less certain?
Disclosure Will Be Very Difficult
Imminent follows a rough chronological narrative, from Elizondo’s youth and military service, to his induction into the UFO world through AAWSAP, his AATIP years, and finally his post-government years working to achieve disclosure as a public figure. This narrative ends on a positive note with the passage of the 2023 NDAA. Elizondo includes a long list of all UFO disclosure requirements stipulated by that law, requirements to report sightings and medical cases, to investigate special access programs, to produce a comprehensive historical report, and provide whistleblower protections. It is the culmination of all that AATIP tried to achieve. It also shows that Congress has been persuaded by the case Elizondo and Mellon have been making since 2017. Congress members’ recent statements and actions on UFOs is one of the main reasons that disclosure has seemed so, well, imminent. At the end of the day, congressional action on UFOs is the most public evidence of the reality of the UFO phenomenon. Elizondo tells readers to go read the full text of the 2023 NDAA because “it will leave you with no doubt at all about the truth.” Our political leaders “signed this language into law for a reason.”
But the fact remains that very little of what that law tried to accomplish has worked so far. DoD built AARO to study the domain awareness problem posed by conventional airborne objects, not UFOs. The required reports, case resolutions, and histories are all written from the perspective that UFOs do not exist, and that the evidence AATIP thought it had was all a big misunderstanding. Insiders and witnesses who came forward to speak with AARO were told they had misunderstood what they saw or that their testimony was not usable as evidence, and a number of others concluded that AARO’s legal protections were not sufficient to allow them to talk. Elizondo does not dwell on this, though the writing was on the wall as his book was going to the presses.
He does repeatedly remind readers just how hard disclosure is going to be.
For one thing, Elizondo makes clear his belief that there are those serving in the DoD/IC who know UFOs are real and are intentionally covering it up, “a deep conspiracy within the US government to keep the truth from US citizens.” He calls it “unfathomable and egregious” that people working in the government are “actively hiding it from us.”
And like Mellon and many others, Elizondo singles out the Air Force as a main culprit. Though members of the Army and Navy became part of AATIP’s unofficial network of sources, the Air Force remained a black box. From his earliest involvement in UFOs, Elizondo learned that the Air Force was “stubbornly and mysteriously uncooperative.” He writes, “I cannot enumerate the times we sent carefully crafted emails to Air Force liaisons requesting information or follow-up details on UAP incidents, only to have the requests denied or ignored entirely.” Which led him to conclude, “the Air Force was part of the cover-up.”
Elizondo also touches on the bureaucratic and the psychological barriers to disclosure—the reasons the cover-up is being maintained. Through all of AATIP’s investigative efforts, “the big questions were always there. How do we get around the stigma, and fear of the topic being made into a mockery, so that we can brief this information? How do we unwind eighty years, maybe more, of official denial?” That last point has got to be one of the major sticking points for disclosure, as it is hard enough to get a government to admit it lied, but to admit that they’ve been lying about something this big for this long—it’s going to take a Rube Goldberg assemblage of political suasion, permission structuring, and buck passing to get currently serving public officials to that point, not to mention iron-clad evidence that forces their hand.
As for the wider public who would receive that admission: “Is mankind really ready for the truth? Most of us only want to hear truths that fit comfortably into our timeworn, preexisting narratives. When we are forced to confront the truth, we routinely suppress it in favor of making ourselves feel better.”
Early in the book, Elizondo includes a long description of what it will take to knock down these barriers, though he admits that the “level of coordination required” makes it “almost an impossibility.” Note the dozen factors Elizondo envisions would be required to bring about official UFO disclosure:
“After all I’d learned, total government transparency on the topic of UAP seemed like a pipe dream. To pull it off, you’d have to figure out a way to smash the existing government fiefdoms to bits, while not threatening the institutional status quo, while not breaking any laws, while informing government leaders and decision makers of the problem, while not running afoul of religious and theological belief systems. And that’s the easy part.
“One must also unify and rally international allies, allay public fears and insecurities, challenge scientific and academic communities, and have a robust public outreach campaign—all at the same time. To accomplish this would require a herculean effort, not unlike a World War II military campaign.”
This is not even meant to be a comprehensive list, but he’s not riffing either. The description closely tracks with the objectives of the public awareness and pressure campaign that he and Mellon designed after he resigned in 2017, which they called the Five Pillars of Engagement (Congress, media, the public, DoD, and foreign nations). Some of those objectives have been more successful than others, and none has been more successful than their congressional outreach. The members of the U.S. Congress who have been active on UFOs talk and behave and though they understand that all of the factors in Elizondo’s list are going to have to be done eventually, and that they will be the ones who have to orchestrate all of it.
There is one additional factor that may be needed, which Elizondo does not mention, but is apparent at key points in his narrative—luck.
Chris Mellon suggests in his forward that Elizondo is a prime example of the “Great Man” theory of history, which he defines as “a singular individual whose intrepid actions changed the course of history.” There is some truth in this theory, but it is also true that much of history turns on random chance and lucky breaks that cause small events have much wider downstream consequences. Elizondo has successfully leveraged his experience and public persona to bring about this disclosure movement, but he also got lucky. In some ways, the disclosure movement that began in 2017 was very much a historical accident. It should not have happened the way it did—and the alignments that allowed it to happen may not recur for a long time.
Take those three Navy UAP videos. The impact of those videos cannot be overstated. Not only are they the best visual evidence of UFOs we have that we know to be genuine (the unmitigated shock in the voices of the Navy aviators was also a critical piece of their legitimacy). They also corroborate the accounts of military witnesses who have gone on the record. They were released to the public and distributed by The New York Times at the same time as the revelations about Congress's secret AAWSAP funding and Elizondo’s personal story. They provided a video and auditory corollary to what former military and government officials were saying about the government’s very recent involvement with UFOs. These videos became the visual backdrop to almost every UFO news story from December 2017 to the present day. It is very easy to imagine that had those videos not been part of the package, the rest of the content would have seemed less official, less contemporary, and less real. And as a result, most people would have dismissed it as more of the same—another weirdo says he saw a UFO, big deal—and moved on. The videos did not make the story credible by themselves, but they tipped the scales enough to make people pay attention and take the story seriously, many of us for the first time.
But it was by accident that Elizondo and Mellon acquired permission to share those videos. AATIP’s plan was to declassify some of their evidence and videos so they could be shared on a secure government server with hand-picked experts. Their intention was to share this evidence with DoD partners, “people we already worked with in aerospace and universities,” not to the media. For the three videos, Elizondo submitted the standard paperwork to have something declassified, Form 1910, with the DoD Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR). This initial request was rejected because some legal or bureaucratic restraint prohibited DOPSR from releasing material to a restricted audience. They instructed Elizondo to resubmit the form but change the request to unrestricted release—a simple clerical adjustment that allowed Elizondo to share the videos with anyone he wanted. Consider if this clerical decision had gone another way—no videos, perhaps no disclosure movement. Had DoD leadership been aware of AATIP, and that AATIP thought those videos were of genuine UFOs, someone might have insisted that a stricter DOPSR process be applied. If they could have peeked into the future and seen the impact of those videos, how they would help motivate Congress to impose UFO requirements on the DoD year after year, there’s a good chance the release would have been denied.
Another example of luck is how the 2013-2015 Oceana training range incursion reports fell into AATIP’s lap. These sightings were another important part of the post-2017 package that made the UFO story Elizondo and Mellon were pushing seem official, recent, and real. They produced yet another camera-ready former military officer, Ryan Graves, who gave his firsthand account to The New York Times and 60 Minutes, and then to Congress. They seemed to be instrumental in convincing members of Congress to begin working on the problem during UAP briefings in 2018 and 2019. Leaving one of these briefings on June 19, 2019, Senator Mark Warner said, “One of the key takeaways I have is the military and others are taking this issue seriously, which I think in previous generations may not have been the case.” His office then released a statement, “If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn’t matter if it’s weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can’t ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily.”
The only reason AATIP was able to collect so much evidence and witness testimony about these incursions was because Stratton happened to be assigned to the desk in Naval Intelligence that received the initial reports in 2015. If he had not been, it’s possible AATIP would have had a very limited understanding of the UFOs that buzzed the Roosevelt. It would have been “boxed out” like it was from the 2013 Los Alamos sighting. (It was also something of an accident that AAWSAP was able to investigate and disseminate the Tic Tac case just four or five years after the event. Hell, if Harry Reid had never walked into Robert Bigelow’s UFO conference in 1996, none of us would know each other.)
As the saying goes, luck is preparedness meeting opportunity. AATIP was well prepared to make use of the evidence it received, but they were also in the right place at the right time. The disclosure movement that began in 2017 was, in Elizondo’s words, “an unprecedented amount of UAP information to drop in the world’s lap” all at once. It was enough to maybe—just maybe—turn the tide of history that had not been turned in eight decades of trying. But big chunks of that evidence package would have been subtracted had history turned out just a little differently. If it’s going to take another Tic Tac, another Oceana, to push disclosure even further, it may be a long time before preparedness and opportunity come together again. How many sightings like those have occurred, or are occurring now, that we will never know about? This is why UFO disclosure and ultimately UFO acceptance is such a challenge. The sightings are happening, they are recent, and in some cases officially reported within the government, but they do not get entered into the public record or become official historical events because of the culture of secrecy, the social and psychological barriers to reporting and sharing information, and the elusiveness of the phenomenon itself.
Despite all the challenges and setbacks recounted in Imminent, Elizondo has been a lucky man. Let’s hope his luck continues.