Luis Elizondo, Former AATIP Director
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), made the assertion among a number of other jaw-dropping claims in his book, Imminent, which comes out on August 20.
The 52-year-old states in his memoir that a long-standing secret government program is "in possession of advanced technology made off-world by non-human intelligence", according to an advance copy obtained by The Daily Mail.
In addition to revelations about Elizondo's work in AATIP, the ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official also details a number of previously unknown UFO incidents, including alleged foreign biological implants found in military personnel after they encountered UFOs.
"I once handled one of these implants myself, provided to me by a hospital in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where it had been removed from a US military service member who had encountered a UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomenon]," Elizondo wrote, according to the report.
"The material, no longer or wider than a joint of one of your fingers, looked more like a microchip encapsulated by a slimy semitranslucent casing of tissue ... under a microscope, it was still moving somehow. AAWSAP/AATIP had also obtained photographs of these sorts of tiny objects from living foreign military pilots."
Elizondo claimed samples were sent to "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland".
Speaking to The Daily Mail, Elizondo explained how he was first recruited into the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a US$22 million ($32 million) DIA initiative that would later morph into AATIP, during a 2008 meeting with top DIA rocket scientist James Lacatski.
AAWSAP was initially formed in 2007 to investigate service members' reports of UFOs and research ways to replicate the technology.
"He looked over his glasses at me and he said, 'What do you think about UFOs?'" Elizondo said. "I paused for a moment, and I said, 'I don't have the luxury to think about them. I'm too busy chasing bad guys.'
"He said to me, 'Don't let your own personal bias get the best of you, because what you learn here may challenge any preconceived notions.'"
Prior to joining AAWSAP, Elizondo was a senior defence intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and worked in counter-terrorism against ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and played a major role running Guantanamo Bay in the 2010s.
After AAWSAP funding ran out in 2012, Elizondo and his colleagues continued their work using resources cobbled together from their other jobs under the new name AATIP.
He said their ultimate goal was to gain access to an alleged secret program, hidden by defence contractors working with the Pentagon, that had recovered crashed UFOs dating as far back as the infamous Roswell, New Mexico incident in 1947.
Elizondo claimed his team eventually got a meeting with the program's administrators. "We were told by the people who had the material," he told The Daily Mail.
"They sat there and said, 'We're happy to have this conversation with you. There's some things you're going to need to do if you want more access to it. But we're happy to give this stuff to you.'
"That's a holy cow moment. That's a seismic revelation. There are countless examples of this type of material being collected, that when analysed and scrutinised by scientific experts - I'm talking about US government top secret-cleared scientists - substantiate that what we're dealing with is something that was not made by us."
But Elizondo said these "gatekeepers" tied his team up in red tape and ultimately never handed over the material or provided access.
Elizondo has not backed up his claims with further evidence, claiming it is all classified.
Some sections of Elizondo's memoir were redacted by the Pentagon to remove classified information via its prepublication review process, but this does not mean the government is vouching for his other claims.
Elizondo's claims are echoed by David Grusch, a former US intelligence officer turned whistleblower who also went public in June 2023 with allegations of retrieved non-human craft - and even recovered alien bodies.
Concerned the US government was not taking the UFO issue seriously enough, Elizondo quit in 2017 and went public, revealing the existence of AATIP to The New York Times in a landmark expose which sparked renewed mainstream interest in the topic.
The New York Times article detailed US Navy pilots' encounters with UFOs and included three videos of unidentified craft.
The Pentagon confirmed in 2019 that AATIP "did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena", but Elizondo has accused his former employer of attempting to discredit him for speaking out.
Facing growing calls for transparency from Congress, the Pentagon established a new UFO investigation agency, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), in July 2022. But AARO's first report, released in March, concluded there was "no evidence that any [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology".
"AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the US government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology," Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in a statement after the release of the report.
In a statement, Elizondo described it as "dishonest, inaccurate and dangerously misleading" and an "obvious attempt to diminish and embarrass whistleblowers".
"Many of us who have worked the UAP topic for the government are aware of the ample classified evidence that has been provided to AARO and contradicts this report," he wrote. "This report only makes it more abundantly clear to Congress that they must take more legislative action to demand transparency on the UAP topic on behalf of the American people."
Reader Comments
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this guy is nothing but telling us what he is paid to say. he is and always was a government stooge working for some alphabet agency or the other.
"these sorts of tiny objects from living foreign military pilots. "
They are just 'foreigners' - maybe Mexican?
I hope so; I cannot wait.
- That Exotic Material has complete possession of the United States.
If the US does have any alien advanced tech then why are they currently losing every war they have started since the early 80's?
This info is no more than propaganda in the hope of convincing their enemies, and these days the USadmin has so many by their own hand, to not mess with the all powerful Oz type creatures at the MIC. It's all a bluff.
Maybe providing bullshit for general consumption is written into the contract?