Ex-Pentagon Official Discusses Government's Hunt for UFOs: 'I Have To Be Careful What I Say' (Exclusive)

In a wide-ranging interview with PEOPLE, Louis Elizondo tells PEOPLE that the US government has retrieved "non-human" technology and specimens from crashed spacecraft

It's been seven years since Luis Elizondo began making headlines after resigning from his job as a senior intelligence official for a top-secret Pentagon program that investigated UFO's — also known as UAP's or unidentified anomalous phenomena — and going public about his frustration over the lack of transparency on the issue.

The longtime military intelligence veteran spent nearly seven years as director for the Department of Defense's clandestine Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. What he learned during his tenure convinced him that the countless sightings and encounters with highly advanced aerial phenomena by military pilots and personnel posed a potentially grave threat to our national defense.

Instead of dismissing these reports, he wanted Pentagon higher-ups to wake up to the possible dangers our nation — and planet — face by these unexplained phenomena.

"The amount of stigma and taboo that was placed on this topic for so long has really paralyzed the conversation," the former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent — who served in Afghanistan and ran antiterrorism missions — told PEOPLE in 2021. "But these things are real. We don't know what they are yet, but they are real, so we should probably take them seriously."

Related: 4 Shocking Moments from Congress' UFO Hearing, from 'Non-Human' Pilots to Possible Contact with Aliens

By 2023, Elizondo's revelations had led to congressional inquiries that included mind-blowing testimony and videos from Navy pilots recounting their run-ins with aerial craft that defied our understanding of physics and a one-time intelligence official who alleged that the U.S. government possessed objects of nonhuman origin taken from crash sites.

Now, Elizondo has written a book — Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt For UFOs — that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the secret program he once helmed, what they learned, and why he felt compelled to resign and go public.

"It had to be reviewed by the Pentagon, which took almost a year," says Elizondo, who corroborates the astonishing claim that technology and non-human remains have been retrieved from the location of crashed craft.

He adds, "I tried every way I could to make it unclassified and they still redacted portions of it, which I actually left in the book [in blacked-out sentences and paragraphs] so everybody could see what sections the Pentagon didn't want you to read."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Elizondo discusses the revelations contained in the pages of his new book and why he believes that our government can no longer ignore what he says has the potential to become the greatest existential danger that humanity has ever faced.

Tell me more about your motivation to write this book?

I think Americans can handle the truth, and I think Americans deserve the truth. The truth is, "We don't know what's in our skies." So that was my motivation. More importantly, we are encountering these things over controlled U.S. airspace, over sensitive military installations, and we've been dealing with it for decades. I still have my security clearance and, now, when I go back to the Pentagon, people come up to me and shake my hand and say, "Man, this is so great. Thank you so much for what you do."

Because before, if you said the term UFO or UAP, you had to whisper it in the back corner of a scif [a U.S. Department of Defense term for a secure room where sensitive military and security information can be discussed]. Now you can be at the lunchroom at the Pentagon and talk about UFOs all day long in the open and no one criticizes you. Now it's a conversation about national security. It's no longer a conspiracy theory. It's now, unfortunately, a conspiracy fact.

So you essentially see UAPs as a national security threat?

I never say threat. There's a difference because in order to understand what a threat is, there's two parts of a calculus — capabilities versus intent. We've seen the capabilities, but we still have no idea of the intent.

Let me give you a simple analogy. I'm sure you lock your doors at night before you go to bed. And, if you have it, you turn on your alarm system. Let's say one morning you wake up, go downstairs to make a cup of coffee and you suddenly see size 12 muddy boot prints on your living room carpet that were not there the night before. No one in your house has been hurt, nothing's been taken. But despite your doors being locked and the alarm being turned on, there are now muddy boot prints on your living room carpet that were not there the night before. My question is—is that a threat? And my response is — it could be if it wanted to be.

So what should our government's response be?

We should probably be diligent and try to figure out how it's getting in. We've got things that are coming into controlled U.S. airspace over sensitive military installations, interfering with our nuclear capabilities. In some cases, they are creating air hazards with our military weapon platforms like F-18s. They've been seen by eyewitnesses, and it's been corroborated by and recorded by gun camera footage. It's also been corroborated by radar. In some cases we're seeing up to seven sensor units all reporting the same information at the same time, at the same place, under the same circumstances.

So we're talking about something real. This is not just an atmospheric aberration or grandma seeing some lights in the backyard. This is real and it's impacting our ability to do our national security mission. So that's why I say that this is a national security issue. Is it a threat? We don't know. But from a governmental perspective, even if there's a one percent chance that this could be a threat, then we have to do our due diligence and make sure that it's not a threat.

So U.S. government actually has downed space craft that was manufactured by non-human intelligence?

I have to be careful about what I say and stick to what has been approved in my book. I'm not allowed to go beyond that. What I've said is that the U.S. government is in possession of exotic material that appears not to be made by human beings. Now, are these things extraterrestrial? All options have to be on the table until they're no longer on the table.

You also wrote that the U.S. government is in possession of non-human bodies?

We have biological samples. I want to be careful saying "bodies" because a body infers that you have an intact, entire cadaver or corpse. What I can say is that biological samples have been recovered. And of course, you can fill in the blanks on what that means. It appears that we as a country may be in possession of multiple samples.

Could other countries also be in possession of these specimens and non-human technology?

That is the concern — that other countries also have UFO programs. We know it for a fact because the Russians admitted it to us after the Iron Curtain fell and they shared their files with us. They [the Russians] got some pretty compelling information. And here we are pretending like it doesn't exist. Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese are going full tilt boogie. That's a problem.

Have you ever held a piece of alien technology in your hands?

I don't want to say "alien." We prefer to say "non-human." But, yes. It was a metallic surface that was beveled and had multiple layers of material inside of it. It had all sorts of interesting electrical properties. It was not natural. It was definitely engineered. When we showed it to scientists at one of the top aerospace corporations in the world, they just scratched their heads and said it can't be manufactured. And yet there it was.

Related: Pentagon Authorizes Release of U.S. Navy Videos Showing 'Unidentified' Flying Objects

Can you give me an overview — in terms of things like speed and acceleration — of just how truly astonishing this technology is?

Sure. Let's look at the five observables. The first observable is instantaneous acceleration — the ability to change direction and change your velocity very rapidly. When you do that, there are inertial forces [inside the craft] that are experienced. We refer to them as g-forces. A human being can withstand about nine g-forces for a very short period of time while wearing a g-suit to counteract the biological effects of heavy g-forces. If you experience g-forces for too long, you start experiencing biological consequences such as blackouts and, ultimately, death.

One of the most highly maneuverable aircraft we have is the F-16. At the unclassified level, that plane can pull about seventeen g's before you start having structural failure, meaning the plane literally begins to disintegrate in midair. The objects that we're detecting are performing up to a four-thousand g's. That's well beyond anything that we have from a material science perspective to withstand [these forces]. Biologically, it would turn you [or whatever is inside of it] into the consistency of pudding.

Next, you have the second observable known as hypersonic velocity, used to describe speeds of Mach five or above. One Mach is equal to the speed of sound, which is roughly 760 miles an hour at sea level. Do we have vehicles that can do Mach five hypersonic? Yes. We have, for example, the Lockheed SR-71. That plane can fly around thirty-two-hundred miles an hour. But when that plane wants to make a right-hand turn, it takes roughly half the state of Ohio to do it. What we are seeing are objects not doing thirty-two-hundred miles an hour, but they're doing ten-thousand to thirteen-thousand miles an hour. And they're doing immediate right-hand turns. The third observable is a bit of an oxymoron. It's called low-observability, meaning that it's hard to see on radar. You're getting these nonsensical returns [on the radar screen]. They are also hard to see with the naked eye. The pilots [who have observed them] will say, 'Look, I don't know what to tell you. I saw it, but I can't explain it. It didn't have wings. It didn't have a rudder. It didn't even have a cockpit. It looked like a tic-tac. Or it looked like a saucer or a triangle.'

The fourth observable is called trans-medium travel, the ability to operate in multiple domains or environments. What we are seeing are objects that can perform the same maneuvers in our atmosphere in high altitudes to potentially low-earth orbit and even underwater without any compromises. The last observable is anti-gravity. What that means, in a nutshell, is the ability to defy the natural effects of earth's gravity. These craft have no wings. They don't have any obvious sites of propulsion. There's no obvious means for them to defy earth's gravity. And yet somehow they're able to do that. So when you have a technology that can do all five of these things, you are forced to reconcile the fact that you're dealing with something that is certainly not conventional. Our government has already said, for the record, it's not our technology. And our government has also said, for the record, that it's probably not adversarial technology. So what does that leave?

How much energy would it take to power such a craft?

So in some cases, [the energy required for maneuvers that have been observed by Navy pilots] was equivalent to the power output of the entire United States in a single day. In other cases, it would be equivalent to the power output of the United States in three years.

Are reports of encounters with these craft from military personnel happening every day?

I have to be careful about what I say, but these occurrences occur sometimes on a daily basis.

Any theories on why these alleged visitations are occurring?

Well, we know that they're interested in our nuclear capabilities. We know that they're interested in our military equities. In human terms, one could speculate that this is some sort of reconnaissance mission. But we don't know. We're looking through anthropomorphic eyes and intentions and motivations. As humans, we do that with each other. But does that necessarily translate to this? Maybe, but we can't, from a national security perspective, take that chance can we? Because remember, it goes back to the equation — capabilities versus intent. We see the capabilities. We have no idea the intent.

And clearly what engineers are attempting to do is to reverse-engineer this technology to understand how it works and then find a way to use it ourselves?

Of course. That's also maybe the reason why we don't want to have too much of a conversation about this topic. Maybe we don't want our adversaries to know what we may or may not have been able to glean technologically from this. And, by the way, I would never support compromising that information either way. So I don't comment on it. And I am certainly not going to confirm or deny whether or not the US government has indeed reverse engineered this technology.

You write about objects that have been surgically removed from the bodies of U.S. soldiers who claimed to have had contact with these non-human visitors. Can you expand upon that?

This was from a U.S. service member who claimed to have had a close encounter with a UAP — and it was not an isolated incident. In this particular case, you have what appeared to be some sort of very small technical device inside a human body and a surgeon from the Department of Veterans Affairs who successfully isolated it and removed it. But before he could remove it, according to the report, it kept trying to evade capture. Every time he would try to isolate it, it would move [within the veteran's body]. When he finally was able to remove it from the patient, and it was placed in a petri dish for analysis, it continued moving under its own power source, but ultimately it stopped moving. I can't tell you how long, but it continued to move by itself long enough for the pathologist to be very concerned. It was encapsulated in human biological tissue, possibly in an attempt to avoid detection. It appeared to be made from some sort of metal. It was square and almost looked like mother of pearl and metallic with different kinds of colors like purples and silver.

And what would be the purpose of these entities putting implants in humans?

Why do we microchip our dogs? So if they get lost, we can find them. Why do we microchip the wildebeest in the Serengeti? We want to look at their migratory patterns and their health and [learn about things like] its blood oxygen levels.

You also discuss in your book some of the health impacts that people, who have gotten too close to this technology, have experienced. Tell me more about that.

There were actually medical doctors on the U.S. government payroll that were looking at military personnel and intelligence officials who had a close encounter, got too close and suffered medical consequences both externally and internally. These have been documented. There are a lot of these patients. And these people have sustained injuries that were consistent with some sort of directed energy like what might happen if you get too close to a microwave oven. It was the late Senator John McCain who succeeded in getting two special police officers for the Air Force put on full medical disability because they got too close to a U.A.P. [near a military airfield in Suffolk, England, in 1980] and sustained injuries. I mean, if that's not proof that the government knows what's going on, I don't know what is. You don't put people on a hundred percent disability for getting close to a UFO unless you admit that UFOs are real.

Is it accurate to assume that what you write about in Imminent is just the tip of the iceberg of what you know and encountered while working on this program?

There's a lot more. There's other people who were in my program that will be coming out with additional information that I think will help move this conversation forward. I can't say anything publicly until they come out, but there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes.

Are you confident that our government is finally moving in the right direction on this issue?

Well, let's look at facts. Since last time you and I had a chat [in 2021], we have a former director of National Intelligence, a former director of the CIA, and a former president of the United States, who have all come out on the record to say, "Yeah, there's something to this. It's real." We have the creation of a UFO investigative body that is officially looking at UAP's for the government. You have landmark congressional legislation that's been passed, with more legislation that's coming. You have whistleblowers coming out and testifying before Congress under oath in front of the American people. Yeah, we've come a long way, my friend. But we've still got a long way to go.

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