By Charlie Burton

Roger Kisby/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

There was a time when UFOs were for cranks. A time when serious news organisations wouldn’t cover them. A time when congress wasn’t demanding Defense Department reports on them. A time when their existence wasn’t freely acknowledged by American presidents (“There is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” said Barack Obama in May) and also by ex-spy chiefs (“There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” said former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe in March). When it came to UFOs, there was a time when the US government’s official line was that it didn’t study them.

Luis Elizondo was instrumental in changing that.

In late 2017, he met with the freelance journalist Leslie Kean and revealed the existence of a $22 million (£16m) Pentagon programme investigating military reports of UFOs – a programme he had been in charge of since 2010. He had left the job the day before and decided to turn whistle-blower in the name of national security. As he put it in his resignation letter to secretary of defense Jim Mattis: “Bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets continue to plague the department at all levels... The department must take serious the many accounts by the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond next-generation capabilities... There remains a vital need to ascertain the capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo

Roger Kisby/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

Kean joined forces with two other reporters, one from the New York Times, and on 16 December 2017 the story appeared on the paper’s front page. It detailed the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” set up in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena or “UAP”, the term that has replaced the now stigmatised “UFO”. Many UAPs, the Times reported, appeared impossible to explain, lacking any visible means of lift but able to travel at unfathomable speed. What’s more, the story stated, Elizondo and his colleagues had “determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country”.

But the reader didn’t have to take the Times’ word for all this. There were videos. An ally of Elizondo’s, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Chris Mellon, had helped the reporters obtain footage shot from the cockpits of US Navy fighter jets. One of the videos corroborates arguably the most compelling UAP episode ever to come to light.

An F/A-18 Super Hornet

Ian Hitchcock

According to reports, it took place in November 2004, when pilots were flying training missions from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. While squadron leader commander David Fravor was in the air, he was asked to intercept a mysterious aircraft. Upon arrival at its coordinates, what he saw was extraordinary: a 40-foot object, resembling a huge white Tic Tac, that had no visible propulsion system, rotors, wings or exhaust plume. Yet Fravor says it was able to jam radar, react to his movements and run rings around his F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet – turning so sharply it was as if the UAP had no inertia – before flying away faster than anything he had ever seen. Simply put, it defied the known laws of physics. Not only were there multiple eyewitnesses – including another pilot who filmed the Tic Tac using his plane’s targeting camera (this was the footage passed to the Times) – but the UAP was also detected by the radar of the nearby USS Princeton, an Aegis-class missile cruiser with state-of-the-art sensor systems.

Cmdr. David Fravor 

New York Times / eyevine

In December 2017, Fravor also went on the record with the New York Times and later, in 2019, so did further Navy pilots, who said that in 2014 and 2015 they encountered UAPs “almost daily”. The Times’ reporting radically changed the conversation. After decades of ridicule and taboo, UAPs were suddenly a legitimate political and journalistic talking point. Elizondo ran with the momentum, discussing his work with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) on major TV networks and, in tandem with the likes of Mellon, briefing officials behind the scenes in Washington and facilitating meetings between them and military members who had experienced UAPs. Through keeping the story alive, he hoped to compel the government to finally establish a more transparent, coordinated, thorough investigation into the phenomenon. 

It hasn’t all been plain sailing: in 2019, a Pentagon spokesperson called into question Elizondo’s claim to have worked on AATIP. In response, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to NBC News vouching for Elizondo’s story. “As one of the original sponsors of AATIP, I can state as a matter of record Lue Elizondo’s involvement and leadership role in this program,” Reid wrote.

A still from one of the US Navy videos showing a UAP  

U.S. Department of Defense

Now, Elizondo’s hopes for government action have started to be realised. On 27 April 2020, the US Department Of Defense confirmed the veracity of the Times’ UAP videos and released them officially into the public domain. In a statement, the Pentagon said, “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.” In August that same year, the Pentagon announced a new UAP Task Force “to detect, analyse and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security”. And in June 2021, the Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence released a report to congress about the government’s work on the UAP issue. Of the 144 encounters studied, it stated, 143 could not be explained. It didn’t blame extraterrestrials, but nor did it rule that explanation out.

Inevitably, Elizondo has attracted considerable interest. There was a bidding war for his forthcoming book, he was recently named one of People’s “100 Reasons To Love America In 2021” and he reveals to GQ that he is working on a new documentary about the UAP topic, although details are under wraps for now. But Elizondo says that he is doing more behind the scenes as a disclosure advocate than ever before. In addition to his role on the advisory board of the UAP think tank Skyfort, he retains high-level national security clearance and is employed as a government defence contractor, although he is not able to say what that work involves.

Luis Elizondo 

Roger Kisby/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

One of the consequences of his efforts, he says, is a significant piece of legislation that is going through congress. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act contains important developments for the study of UAPs. It requires that the secretary of defense sets up a permanent office to carry out the duties currently performed by the UAP Task Force but on a department-wide basis. This new office would have to submit an annual report to congressional committees on a range of its findings, including updates on efforts to track, understand, capture and exploit UAPs – as well as an assessment of health-related effects on those who encounter these strange flying objects. Elizondo calls it “historic”. 

GQ spoke to Elizondo as he prepared to head to Washington, DC, to brief members of congress on how to work with foreign allies on the issue.

GQ: What makes you convinced that these flying objects haven’t been made by the US, the Chinese or any other government?

Luis Elizondo: We know it’s not the US because the US has already come out and admitted it’s not us. So now let’s talk about the potential for it to be a foreign adversarial technology. Well, if that were the case, this would be the greatest intelligence failure that this country has ever faced, including that of 9/11. Because some country, for more than 70 years, has managed to be able to conduct operations with a technology that surpasses anything that we’ve ever had or currently have. And they’ve been able to operate in and around our restricted airspace unchallenged

But the second reason is there’s a time aspect. I have in my possession official US government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory. For some country to have developed hypersonic technology, instantaneous acceleration and basically transmedial travel in the early 1950s is absolutely preposterous.

The proposed new UAP office would have to report on health-related effects for individuals who have experienced UAPs. What kind of thing might happen if you were near one?

A lot. Let me give you a notional... I’ve got to be careful, I can’t speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, “Lue, it’s really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days.” Well, that’s a sign of radiation. That’s not a sunburn; it’s a radiation burn. Then [a pilot] might say, if [they] had got a little closer, “Lue, I’m at the hospital. I’ve got symptoms that are indicative of microwave damage, meaning internal injuries, and even in my brain there’s some morphology there.” And then you might get somebody who gets really close and says, “You know, Lue, it’s really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes’ worth of fuel. How is that possible?” Well, there’s a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment.

Have you personally ever had a UAP sighting?

I prefer not to answer that. I do not want my own personal experiences or opinions or perspectives to skew the collection of data.

Before you were approached to be part of AATIP, you were a counterintelligence special agent hunting terrorists and drug traffickers. Why did they approach you?

I have no idea. I think probably because I wasn’t prone to any flights of fancy. I wasn’t a particular fan of science fiction. I do have some background in advanced aerospace technology. When I was a young special agent, I did “tech protect” [counterintelligence work to stop US technology from falling into enemy hands] of advanced avionics and my background was a scientist. At university, I had three majors: microbiology, immunology and parasitology.

You came to this not particularly caring about UFOs, but I have read there was a moment where you said to yourself, “Holy f***. This is real.” What was that moment?

It’s funny because the people in the office kind of giggled and they were like, “Oh, he just had his epiphany,” because everybody has one eventually in that office.

But what convinced you it was a real thing?

It was the overwhelming weight of evidence and data. I was talking to pilots routinely. There’s videos out there [in government, that the public haven’t seen] – there’s one that’s 23 minutes long. There’s another one where this thing is 50 feet away from the cockpit. I mean, it ain’t ours. We know that. Sometimes you just couldn’t believe it – you’d have seven or eight incidents in a single day. I’d get these emails from an admiral or a ship’s captain saying, “Lue, what do you want me to do? I can’t keep people below deck forever. These things are swarming my ship, they’re all over the place.” That’s tough. I kept promising the cavalry was coming and I’d have answers for them and the cavalry never came. Senior leadership didn’t want to deal with it. 

Some people say the Times videos don’t show anything particularly amazing. What do you say to them?

The government has already admitted not only that they’re real, but that they truly are unidentified objects and they’re behaving in a very peculiar way. For example, you have an object that is at altitude, going at 120 knots against the wind, that is rotating at 90 degrees without losing altitude. Anybody who understands aerodynamics, when you’re flying an aircraft and you turn 90 degrees you lose lift, unless you’re in a hard bank. What makes those videos more compelling is not so much what you see, but what you don’t see. It’s the radar signatures, it’s the call signs from pilot to pilot, and pilot to ship, saying, “Hey, we’ve got a bogey up here.” And in one case you hear one of them say, “Look, we have a whole fleet of these things on the ASA [radar display].” Some of the pilots have come out and said there was actually a whole fleet of these things manoeuvring right off camera. The pilots are trained observers. They are trained to identify an aircraft silhouette at 20 miles away – an SU-22, a European Tornado, a Harrier or even an F-16 – and literally within a split moment’s notice be able to identify friend or foe and shoot it down. What they’re reporting doesn’t fit any type of parameters of any type of conventional aircraft that we know of.

When you initially spoke to the New York Times, were you worried about repercussions?

I was getting calls all the time that the FBI was going to come and Swat my house. There was a point when I got a call like, “Hey, dude, you might have people visit you, like, in the next hour.” So in the middle of the night, I had to stash everything [copies of emails] in my neighbour’s barbecue grill just in case, because that was all the proof and the evidence of the fact that our government was really involved in this topic. It wasn’t easy. It caused a lot of stress on my wife and my daughters. Until recently they were still trying to come after my security clearance.

Do you have a sense of why they didn’t raid you and throw you in jail and instead let you carry on talking?

My personal opinion, which I rarely give because I have no way to substantiate this, [is] there were enough people on the inside that said, “Look, he was briefing the senior brass and you need to be careful because if you squeeze Lue too hard, you’re gonna have very, very senior people come to his defence.”

In your interviews, you tend to emphasise the interdimensional hypothesis that UAPs might not be from “outer space” but from another dimension. Do you think that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is even likely?

I think it’s just as likely as something that is interdimensional. I also think it’s possible that it’s something that has been on Earth for a very long time.

But you don’t have data that has particularly led you to think it could be interdimensional?

There’s information that both supports and negates that. What we do know is there’s a correlation with [UAPs being near or emerging from] water and then there’s also a correlation toward [UAPs appearing near] nuclear technology. 

What’s your theory about the water correlation?

Could be as simple as a fuel stop. If you wanted to warp space time, there’s only two ways to do it: lots of energy or lots of mass. So if you wanted to mine something for its energy, you would start with hydrogen, because it’s a simple element. Even though hydrogen is abundant in the universe, it’s found primarily in a gaseous state, which makes it hard because it might take you 100 years to mine a nebula cloud sufficiently to use it as fuel. There is only one type of hydrogen configuration that is super dense that’s found in the universe and that’s liquid water. So in a relatively small amount of time you can mine enough hydrogen to do whatever you need to do with literally a bucket of water.

Let’s talk about crash retrievals and debris. Do you believe we have recovered a craft?

I have been told I have to be very careful how I answer this question. I am not allowed to expound upon anything I’ve already said. What I have said is that it is my opinion, my belief – a strong belief, hint, hint – that the US government is in possession of exotic material associated with UAPs. That is all I’m allowed to say.

Do you believe organic matter or beings have been recovered?

I am respectfully going to pass on that question. There’s a couple questions that I’m really not at liberty to discuss. That’s one of them.

Do you believe these ships may be manned? 

They’re intelligently controlled, for sure, because they’re responding and reacting to our actions. That is for certain. They are absolutely intelligently controlled by something.

Is it your opinion that they’re more like drones or do you think they’ve got things inside them?

I suspect they have things inside them.

Why do you think they seem interested in military sites, nuclear sites particularly?

I’ve got some very specific theories. Nuclear technology is a gateway to understanding unlocking the atom. And once you do that, you have a potentially limitless supply of energy. It could very well be that we are a violent species that is on the cusp of understanding space-time and no longer going to be stuck in our little cage. And that could be a problem for an advanced species. Because, you know, we are not necessarily very peaceful to each other.

What’s the consensus around how these things fly?

Right now one of the leading theories out there is that someone has figured out a way to manipulate space-time and, in essence, master the idea of antigravity.

So if you see a UAP moving left to right, it’s not “flying” left to right, it’s bending that space towards it?

Correct. Current hypothesis is that it creates a bubble around it and that bubble is insulating itself from the space-time that all of us experience. And so, therefore, the way it experiences space-time within the bubble is fundamentally different from outside the bubble. 

How many presidents have been briefed on the issue and do you know who engaged the most?

I know, as a matter of fact, three presidents have been briefed at some point, but I’m not going to disclose who they were and what was discussed. That’s not up for me to talk about.

In cultural depictions of UFOs, who do you think has got the closest to reality?

I would have to say Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. I just recently saw it for the first time and I was shocked at some of the performance characteristics and how they depicted the UAPs, because that is exactly how they’ve been described in some, up until recently, very classified US documents.

What in particular?

The description of how they do right-angle turns at very fast velocity, the illumination, the shapes of some of these craft. [Steven] Spielberg definitely had somebody on the inside that was giving him information, for sure. I mean there’s a lot of that movie that, if you know what you’re looking at, is very, very close to real life.

Some suggest that the post-2017 UAP disclosure narrative is actually just a government disinformation effort or psyops campaign. What do you say to that?

At no time since I’ve been involved with AATIP has my government been involved in an active disinformation campaign, other than initially denying that it was real. The United States government is not in the habit of conducting disinformation on American citizens. There was a time when our government did do that and got caught and so congress passed laws to make sure that will never happen again. 

What can you tell us about what’s coming up in 2022, in terms of new evidence that may come to light or new developments?

I think we’ll see a lot more participation by the international community and a lot more transparency. We’re going to begin sharing information a lot more and I think people may be surprised just how much information is possessed on this topic by other countries. My only hope is that the UK will be able to do the same thing. Much for the same reason that the United States didn’t want to admit that UFOs were real, I suspect the UK [doesn’t] as well. What I can tell you is during my time in AATIP it was very apparent to me that there were certain elements within the royal family that were very interested in this topic. I will not elaborate any more than that. And I hope that those voices within the royal family can be heard, because it is an important topic, perhaps one of the greatest topics that affects all of mankind, all of humanity. And I think if we’re smart, this will be a topic that will help unify us and not divide us.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

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