Luis Elizondo

Luis Elizondo is a former United States defence intelligence officer who served in the US Army and subsequently in several civilian intelligence roles, including at the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)) from 2008 to 2017.³ He enlisted in the Army in 1995, was trained as a counterintelligence special agent, and over a two-decade career conducted operations across South Korea, Latin America, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and other postings.² His work encompassed counterterrorism, counterespionage, and counternarcotics missions carried out in partnership with agencies including the CIA and the FBI, and he also managed elements of the Guantanamo Bay detention programme on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council.¹

In late 2008 Elizondo was recruited to support the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a sensitive Pentagon programme focused on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), initially handling counterintelligence and security.⁴ According to reporting by CBS News’s 60 Minutes, he took over leadership of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a successor or related effort, in 2010.⁵ This account is contested. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed to Politico in 2017 that AATIP was run by Elizondo,⁶ but a separate Pentagon spokesperson, Christopher Sherwood, later stated that Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to AATIP while assigned to OUSD(I),⁷ a position subsequently reinforced by Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough, who noted that while Elizondo did interact with the DIA office managing AATIP, he did not lead it.^8,9 An internal memorandum by Garry Reid, then head of OUSD(I), characterised Elizondo as having “aggrandized his role” in the programme.¹⁰ Against these denials, Harold E. Puthoff stated that as an AAWSAP/AATIP contractor he continued to attend meetings and provide briefings under Elizondo’s leadership and responsibility until Elizondo resigned,¹¹ and Elizondo himself has cited an email documenting the transfer of his AATIP responsibilities to Neill Tipton in 2017 as documentary support for his claims.¹² The dispute over the precise nature and extent of Elizondo’s role in AATIP remains unresolved and is the subject of the ongoing Elizondo Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) Claims Investigation.

Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon on 2017-10-04, stating that he did so to protest what he characterised as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to UAP research.¹³ His Elizondo Resignation Letter, addressed to then-Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, called for greater attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities."¹⁴ FOIA-released documents indicate that Elizondo offered differing explanations for his resignation at different times, and that an informal counterintelligence review of the circumstances was conducted, though no formal misconduct finding resulted.³ Shortly after resigning, Elizondo joined To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a commercial venture co-founded with Christopher K. Mellon, Harold E. Puthoff, and musician Tom DeLonge, among others.¹⁵

Following his resignation, Elizondo became one of the most prominent public voices on UAP. In a December 2017 CNN interview with Erin Burnett he described AATIP as having identified anomalous aircraft displaying no obvious flight surfaces or propulsion, extreme manoeuvrability, and hypersonic velocities, and stated his personal belief that “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."¹⁶ He is credited with articulating what he termed “The Five Observables” — hypersonic velocity, instantaneous acceleration, low observability, transmedium travel, and anti-gravity — as a framework for characterising UAP performance characteristics, and later identified a sixth observable consisting of biological effects on witnesses.¹⁷ Working alongside Mellon, Elizondo facilitated the declassification and public release of three military UAP videos (including the FLIR/Tic Tac, GIMBAL, and GoFast recordings), engaged journalists at the New York Times and Politico, briefed members of Congress, and participated in the History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. Pilot David Fravor, whose account of the 2004 Nimitz encounter features centrally in Elizondo’s public work, described Elizondo as having run AATIP at the Pentagon and as having contacted him in connection with that investigation.¹⁸ Elizondo and Mellon, along with Jay Stratton, subsequently developed legislative strategy aimed at compelling the Department of Defense (DoD) to address UAP systematically, contributing to language inserted into the COVID-19 relief bill that required a UAP report from the Director of National Intelligence, and to subsequent National Defence Authorisation Acts incorporating UAP disclosure provisions. By late 2020, Elizondo had departed To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which subsequently contracted significantly.¹⁹

Elizondo published a memoir, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, in 2024, whose Author’s Note is dated 2024-04.^20,21 In November 2024 he delivered written testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, asserting that UAP are real, that advanced technologies not made by any government are monitoring sensitive military installations globally, and that the United States is in possession of UAP technologies.²² He alleged the existence of what he described as a “culture of suppression and intimidation” targeting those who had come forward, including unwarranted criminal investigations and efforts to destroy witnesses’ credibility, and proposed that Congress create a single point of contact for a whole-of-government UAP approach, legislate protections for whistleblowers, and exercise subpoena power against hostile witnesses.²² Throughout his public career Elizondo has maintained that his government colleagues determined that the phenomena studied through AATIP did not appear to originate from any known country, a finding he has described as too important to keep from the public.