By Michael Kaplan and Steven Greenstreet
UFOs exist — but the government doesn’t want you to know it, according to the ex-Pentagon official who says he ran the program investigating “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP.
Recalling the revelatory instant when he recognized that UFOs were bona fide, controversial whistleblower Luis “Lue” Elizondo exclusively told The Post, “It was a holy-s–t moment: ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s real. Well, crap, now we have to do something about it.’ ”
However, Elizondo has not been able to get the feds to act on what he describes as a serious national security risk due to a litany of roadblocks — including a cover-up of the existence of UFOs because of religious objections, concerns over tarnishing its own reputation and fears of inciting public panic.
With a bombshell government report on UFOs set to be released before the end of June, Elizondo — who says he came into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2008, and headed it from 2010 until 2017 — has revealed the shocking things he alleges to have learned, and the chilling reason why some in the Pentagon don’t want this information made public.
As part of his job, Elizondo said, he had access to the Pentagon’s UFO data and interviewed military eyewitnesses who encountered UAP on an almost “daily basis.” Meanwhile, Navy pilots have testified about engaging 50-foot Tic Tac-shaped vessels only to see them disappear in the blink of an eye.
Other pilots said their fighter jets had a “near collision” with a strange “sphere encasing a cube.” Elizondo scrutinized all this evidence, including radar and electro-optical data, that showed unknown aircraft zipping 60 miles in five seconds and descending at speeds of 14 miles per second.
“Do the math,” Elizondo, also a former intelligence officer for the US Department of Defense, told The Post. “You’ll see that it’s very fast.” (BTW: We did the math — and 60 miles in five seconds is 43,200 mph.)
Despite those mind-blowing discoveries, Elizondo was always swimming upstream. He tried to share frightening evidence with closed-minded non-believers who shunned his research, which he has compared to an “intelligence failure on the level of 9/11.”
Luis “Lue” Elizondo has told The Post about shocking things he alleges to have learned — and the chilling reason why some in the Pentagon don’t want this information made public.NY Post composite
Elizondo allegedly pushed his superiors — who included Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis — to take his findings seriously.
He also claims “very senior” officials blocked him from informing Mattis, and he resigned from the Pentagon in frustration. (Reps for Mattis declined to comment when The Post reached out for comment.)
But Elizondo never stopped investigating UFOs and publicizing what he found. Now he is no longer alone. Washington, DC, power players are due to share details about the “reality” of such UFOs via their much-hyped tell-all report. It’s vindication for Elizondo and others in his camp.
The official resignation letter of Luis “Lue” Elizondo.
As the report’s publication looms, Elizondo is coming out swinging. During a series of exclusive interviews, he clued in The Post on the reality of UFOs, the amazing things that they can do, the religious beliefs that led federal officials to dismiss their veracity, what the government knows but doesn’t want to tell, and the ways in which UFO technologies can benefit humanity.
But institutional silence may soon be broken amid what Elizondo sees as a tipping point for the unexplained. “The level of interest is reaching a critical mass,” he said. “I think [government officials realize that] it would be like putting the cat back in the bag or like putting toothpaste back in the tube. Now that the government has acknowledged the reality of Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon [or UAP, which is synonymous with UFO] … it’s going to be real hard to backtrack.”
Looking back on his years in the Pentagon, Elizondo remembers that his biggest concern involving UFOs was not based on a fear of extraterrestrials. It centered on America’s Earth-bound enemies: “We [were] behind the power curve” — as a result of military bosses turning blind eyes to unexplained phenomena. “We knew that foreign adversaries in other countries are interested in this topic. So there comes a real problem from a national security perspective.”
Here are some of Elizondo’s most compelling revelations and insights:
Face it: UFOs are ‘real’ and not ‘silly’
Elizondo said he’s seen enough to be confident that UFOs are very real and that our government — thanks in part to a mandate former President Donald Trump put into his $2.3 trillion appropriations bill for 2021 — is not a moment too soon in taking these incursions in the sky seriously.
EXCLUSIVE – Ex Pentagon official Luis Elizondo reveals UFO bombshells | The Basement Office
PART 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkBsbiaIzqw Lue Elizondo is a former intelligence officer with the Department of Defense. He claims he was the director of AATIP, the Pentagon’s “UFO program”, from 2010-2017.
Having spoken to US military sources who’ve witnessed UFOs, watched videos of them and seen photographs, Elizondo is a true believer in the presence of unexplained phenomena. He thinks the rest of us should be as well. “This isn’t a silly conversation,” said Elizondo. “This is a conversation about someone, from somewhere, displaying beyond next-generation technology” — which allows craft to fly without wings or obvious airworthy construction — “in our controlled airspace. And there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.”
In encouraging exploration of UFOs, Elizondo raised topics that many of his Defense Department superiors found off-putting. As a result, there appears to be a long-running campaign to discredit him and to keep his findings out of the limelight. Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood released a statement saying, “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] program.” Sherwood’s statement was soon followed by a slightly modified one from spokesperson Susan Gough: “Mr. Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities for AATIP.”
It’s a diss that former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who once took credit for arranging $22 million in annual funding for the AATIP, has consistently challenged. Reid spent the last few years publicly defending Elizondo’s leadership role with AATIP and, just this week, released a new statement re-emphasizing this. “Mr. Elizondo has spent his career working tirelessly in the shadows on sensitive national-security matters, including investigating UAPs as the head of AATIP,” Reid wrote on his letterhead. “He performed these duties admirably.”
Gadi Schwartz on X (formerly Twitter): “We did, the Senator concurs… pic.twitter.com/41ZJJLvnRJ / X”
We did, the Senator concurs… pic.twitter.com/41ZJJLvnRJ
Elizondo also stuck up for himself, bluntly telling The Post, “There are some people in the Pentagon that still don’t like me very much. I think they’re pissed at me for the way I left. They’re now trying to thread the needle, saying, ‘He had no assigned responsibilities with AATIP.’ I had no assigned responsibilities because I was working Gitmo for [the Department of Defense]. These assigned duties [exploring the reality of UFOs] were coming from the legislative branch.”
Insisting that he had plenty of assigned responsibilities in this area, Elizondo added…
