Luis Elizondo

Elizondo is the son of Luis Elizondo III, a Cuban exile who volunteered for Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored group of exiles formed in 1960 to attempt the military overthrow of the Cuban government headed by Fidel Castro, which culminated in the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to his 2024 memoir, Elizondo grew up being trained for Alpha 66, which he describes as a "slightly rebranded Brigade 2506". At the University of Miami, Elizondo studied microbiology and immunology. ==Government career==

United States Army intelligence Elizondo enlisted in 1995 and served in the United States Army with service in the Republic of Korea, Kuwait, and in the United States, and then as a civilian intelligence officer during which he ran military intelligence operations in Afghanistan, South America, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and its Camp Seven. Elizondo has reported that he worked with officials from the U.S. Navy and the CIA out of his Pentagon office for this program until 2017. to investigate aerial threats including unidentified aerial phenomena. Elizondo told a reporter he thought that he might have been selected for AATIP because of his scientific background, work as a counterintelligence agent protecting American aerospace technology, and lack of interest in science fiction. Writer Keith Kloor reported in 2019 that Elizondo was asked to take over management of security for AATIP, describing Elizondo as among a group of "believers in extraterrestrial visitations", and that performance evaluations of Elizondo's work as a government employee were favorable. According to the Department of Defense, the AATIP program ended in 2012 due to budget cuts. In the Inspector General's complaint, Elizondo also alleged that he was the target of "a personal vendetta from a Pentagon rival", who attempted to harm his career via investigations of Elizondo's role in the 2017 release of the Pentagon UFO videos. Government resignation In late 2017, Elizondo resigned to protest what he characterized as "excessive secrecy and internal opposition". ==Post-government activities==

United States Navy UFO videos After resigning in 2017, Elizondo gave three videos to reporters made by pilots from the United States Navy aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt which were then publicized in the New York Times. The Times story also publicized the existence of AATIP. The classification status of the videos and the validity of Elizondo's authorization to distribute them were questioned. In 2020, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told Popular Mechanics that "The videos were not cleared for general public release because DOPSR (the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review) did not receive final approval from Navy". To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences After resigning from the government, Elizondo joined To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA). Elizondo along with former Senate and Pentagon official Christopher Mellon left TTSA in late 2020 to focus on government lobbying for UFO transparency. Subsequent UFO-related activity In a 2021 interview with GQ, Elizondo stated that UFOs/UAPs were "just as likely" to have originated from outer space, as from another dimension, and they might use hydrogen found in water to "warp space time", though he said "I also think it’s possible that [UFOs/UAPs are] something that has been on Earth for a very long time." In 2025, Elizondo participated in the McMenamins Hotel Oregon UFO Festival at the McMinnville Community Center in McMinnville, Oregon. In November 2024 Elizondo testified before a joint hearing of United States House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security entitled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth" where he claimed the government has conducted secret retrievals of UFOs and alien bodies. Elizondo's claims have been criticized as lacking direct evidence, and a statement from a Pentagon spokesperson said the department “has not found any verifiable evidence that any UAP observation represented extraterrestrial activity nor has the department 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”. Elizondo is a research affiliate to The Galileo Project. In 2023, Art Levine reported that both Elizondo and Mellon had lobbied in support of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which included a provision to investigate UFO-related topics and to create the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Several hours later, in response to the claim, FBI special agents sealed and searched Elizondo's former office but found nothing of the nature he'd described. At a speaking event in 2024, Elizondo presented a photo that included what he claimed was an alien "mothership", that he said had been taken from the U.S. embassy in Romania, and which he asserted was given to him by a government contact. Subsequent research by John Greenewald and others found that the image was actually taken more than 400 miles away from the embassy, that it had first appeared on a Facebook group in 2023, and that it was a photo of a light fixture reflected in a window. In May 2025, at a hearing on UFOs sponsored by the UAP Disclosure Fund, according to Futurism Elizondo "showed off a peculiar image of what appeared to be a gigantic, disc-shaped object floating hundreds of feet above the ground," described by Elizondo as "potentially anywhere between 600 and 1,000 feet in diameter ... it's a lenticular object, and it is silver". Mick West agreed with analysis of commenters on Reddit's UFO community that the object was actually an irrigation circle. Publications ''Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs'' Elizondo's memoir, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, was published in August 2024 and debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. In the book, Elizondo states that late in his military and intelligence career, he was recruited by Pentagon officials to manage security and counterintelligence for a deeply classified UFO-related research program. In the book, Elizondo claims that four non-human bodies were recovered from Roswell. In his memoir, Elizondo claims that a UFO crash retrieval program has been operating in secret for "decades" administrated by "a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors", and that "technology and biological remains" of extraterrestrial origin have been retrieved from these crashes. Reckoning: The Unspoken Truth about UFOs and the Urgency of Now Elizondo's planned second book, Reckoning: The Unspoken Truth about UFOs and the Urgency of Now, is scheduled for release in August 2026, according to publisher HarperCollins. The book is to be released by HarperCollins' Mudlark imprint, ==See also==