Newsweek has just published an editorial piece by Luis Elizondo, who says he is a former senior intelligence official for the U.S. government, arguing that the U.S. needs to be more transparent with the public about UFOs.
For reasons that are not clear, some time within the past five years media outlets and government officials have been replacing the term UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) with the term UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). The two terms are interchangeable.
Elizondo said he started his career in aerospace technology, and worked to make sure countries adversarial to the U.S. did not get their hands on advanced weaponry. He also worked as a counterintelligence agent investigating terrorism and spycraft.
Then in 2008, he took a job at the Pentagon helping to collate and distribute threat and intelligence information to local police agencies while making sure the information stayed as secure as possible. Elizondo says two “individuals” asked him to join a program “I hadn’t heard of before.” It was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (or AATIP).
It turns out the job included receiving and documenting reports of UAPs/UFOs, which he said often came from the Navy, and which he found “highly concerning.” Some of these objects “came dangerously close” to U.S. military aircraft, Elizondo said. Many also displayed what seemed like impossible or inexplicable maneuvers, even flying in formation. The ability to seemingly stop instantly and change directions, behavior shown by some of the apparent craft, seemed to defy physics. Elizondo said that whatever the origin of these craft, they had undergone a “quantum leap” beyond any technology known to the U.S., which posed a national security risk.
Referring to the famous navy UFO videos that began circulating in 2017, Elizondo said he was the one who cleared them for public release. The videos show apparent craft changing directions instantly, and traveling at speeds many times faster than the speediest U.S. planes, which can travel at up to Mach 5 (3,200 miles per hour).
Elizondo thinks the government has shied away from releasing more of these reports and videos because it does not know who or what is behind the craft, and does not want to appear before the public without a solution to something that might disturb people.
After his time working on the issue, Elizondo said that Americans “have a right to know about the presence of UAPs in our skies.”
Elizondo has a forthcoming memoir called Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs.
