Luis Elizondo is a former U.S. intelligence officer and director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), who in 2017 helped release three military UFO videos to the New York Times, igniting the modern era of mainstream UAP disclosure. This interview, conducted across multiple locations and years, covers his personal encounters, the science behind UAP propulsion, the nuclear connection, implants, remote viewing, the occult roots of the American space program, and his assessment of whether humanity is ready for the truth.
Who Lue Elizondo Is and Why He Matters
Elizondo grew up in a family of Cuban exiles deeply involved in Cold War covert operations; his father fought alongside Castro, then against him at the Bay of Pigs, and later joined the militant exile group Alpha 66.
He had a career in U.S. defense and intelligence running operations against ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and FARC, and held a leadership position at Guantanamo Bay.
He served as a liaison to the Special Access Oversight Committee, which handles the most sensitive unacknowledged military programs, and according to Matthew Pines was a member of the Army Intelligence Support Activity (Gray Fox), an elite unit that operates before Delta Force and JSOC.
In 2017, after being blocked from briefing General Jim Mattis on UAP, Elizondo and former deputy assistant secretary of defense intelligence Chris Mellon went off-script, got three military UFO videos cleared for release, and brought them to the New York Times, triggering the current wave of mainstream UAP interest.
The 1952 Washington D.C. Flyover and a Living Witness
At a Masonic lodge in Washington D.C., the team met 82-year-old Maurice Hill, the groundskeeper, who turned out to be one of the last living witnesses of the famous July 1952 UFO flyover of the capital.
Hill and his father were sitting on their back porch half a block from Pennsylvania Avenue when they saw luminous objects over the Capitol building.
Hill also described a separate encounter in the early-to-mid 1970s in D.C. where he saw a massive jellyfish-shaped object, reddish-black lava-like bubbling on its underside, rising slowly like a parachute at roughly 30–50 feet altitude.
This corroborated a 2018 video released by UFO researcher Jeremy Corbell showing a jellyfish-shaped UFO captured in Iraq, a form Elizondo says is reported more often than people realize.
Elizondo explains that “angel hair”—a residue or sloughing off of the outer layer of a UAP—is sometimes found on the ground and may be related to an ablative or sacrificial outer skin that is consumed each time the craft is energized.
Unexplained Implants and Biological Evidence
Elizondo handled an implant removed by a Department of Veterans Affairs surgeon from a U.S. veteran who had close contact with UAP.
The object was a small, iridescent, multicolored metallic square embedded in soft, gelatinous tissue, with multicolored fibers (yellows, greens, blues) extending from the central mass into surrounding biological material.
Under the microscope, the pathologist observed it moving under its own metabolism.
Elizondo notes that Whitley Strieber has a documented implant in his ear that evaded surgical removal, and that another person at a major aerospace corporation has had a moving object in their body for years that relocates to different parts of the body.
Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford immunologist, has found that people who interact with UAP often show abnormalities in the caudate putamen region of the brain, which is associated with intuition and possibly precognition—either attracting UAP like an antenna or being altered by the encounter.
The Nuclear Connection
UAP show a consistent, unequivocal interest in nuclear capabilities, dating back to World War II “Foo Fighters” (luminous objects that chased Allied aircraft over occupied Germany in 1944–1945) and continuing through the Cold War to the present day.
Robert Hastings documented over 100 cases of UAP incursions at nuclear weapons facilities; Elizondo confirms that everything Hastings reported was corroborated by classified government data.
Declassified government documents include verbatim UFO incident reports from the 1950s and 1960s over the Savannah River facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Los Alamos—and it is still happening today.
Elizondo believes the interest is more about the power and energy unlocked by nuclear processes than about destructive force.
David Grusch revealed that UFO secrecy protocols were overlaid on the Manhattan Project’s classification system: custody passed from the Manhattan Project to the Atomic Energy Commission to the Department of Energy, creating a parallel clearance system (NPRQ) that exists outside normal oversight.
Physics of UAP Propulsion
Elizondo explains that UAP likely manipulate the spacetime metric rather than moving through space in a conventional way.
If you compress spacetime between two points, you can traverse what appears to an outside observer as an enormous distance in almost no time, while inside the bubble you experience normal passage of time.
This is “temporal dimension hacking”—the craft is not accelerating, it is warping the space around it.
The energy required to do this is immense; using mass would require more mass than exists on Earth, so the craft must harness energy at the Planck scale.
The craft’s outer surface may itself be the engine, creating a bubble through interaction between an energy source and the hull material, which is why the outer layers appear ablative and sacrificial.
Elizondo is highly confident in this model and notes that mathematicians and physicists have produced formulas supporting it.
A News Nation slide shown during the interview referenced “interference syndrome injury” and a “DOE gravity propulsion expert,” suggesting that elements of physics related to gravity manipulation have been classified as state secrets since the nuclear era.
AATIP, AATIP’s Origins, and the Jim Ryder Connection
AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) was an offshoot of AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program), a $22 million Pentagon program (2007–2012) funded by Senators Harry Reid, Daniel Inouye, and Ted Stevens (a WWII pilot who had his own Foo Fighter encounter).
Contrary to popular belief, AAWSAP was not originally set up to study Skinwalker Ranch phenomena.
The original intent was far more ambitious: Lockheed Martin, through VP of Space Systems Advanced Technology Center Dr. James Ryder (now deceased), proposed transferring a recovered UAP—pieces of a hull structure from the 1950s held at a specific Lockheed facility—to a special access program so that outside civilian scientists could study it.
The CIA blocked the transfer, and AAWSAP was redirected to study Skinwalker Ranch, orbs, cattle mutilations, and electromagnetic anomalies instead.
Elizondo notes that Lockheed Martin spends roughly $85 million on a single F-35 fighter jet, so $22 million would be far too little to represent the full scope of a genuine off-world craft investigation—implying a much larger, more secretive program exists behind AATIP.
Jim Ryder gave a talk called “The Garment of God” in which he discussed love as a physical force, ESP, psychic abilities, an electrically polarizable vacuum, and speculated that gravity is an electric dipole—remarkable positions for a senior defense contractor executive.
Remote Viewing and Psychic Espionage
Elizondo personally participated in remote viewing experiments while managing high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
He and colleagues entered a SCIF and attempted to remotely view a detainee; afterward, a major news media article described the detainee’s experience of five white figures standing over his bed and shaking it—corroborating the remote viewing session.
Hal Puthoff, the godfather of the CIA’s remote viewing program, once predicted a fatal fire on the D.C. Metro red line within 90 days, sensing fire and smoke; the fire occurred on the 89th day.
Elizondo believes remote viewing is a real, scientifically explainable phenomenon, possibly based on quantum entanglement or an as-yet-undiscovered field that does not attenuate over spacetime—which would explain why submarine crews deep underwater have also successfully remote viewed.
Statistician Jessica Utts and skeptic Ray Hyman both reviewed the declassified Stargate documents and concluded there was something real in the data.
Elizondo speculates that human consciousness may be a quantum process, citing Roger Penrose’s theory that the brain could be a room-temperature quantum system, and notes that quantum computing research suggests information can theoretically be sent backward in time.
NASA’s Occult History and Esoteric Roots
Several top American astronauts were Freemasons: Buzz Aldrin, Gordon Cooper, Donn F. Eisele, Gus Grissom, James Irwin, and Edgar Mitchell; John Glenn held the 33rd Masonic degree and urged Harry Reid to investigate UFOs.
Buzz Aldrin established a Masonic lodge on the Moon called Tranquility Lodge 2000, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas, and brought a Freemasonic Scottish Rite flag to consecrate it.
Jack Parsons, the founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and father of American rocketry, was a devoted occultist and follower of Aleister Crowley who recited Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” before every rocket test.
Parsons claimed to encounter a blond-haired alien following a sex magic ritual in the Mojave Desert in 1948; a past life regression identified him as Simon Magus (Simon the Sorcerer), who used black magic to levitate.
On the Russian side, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky believed he was in touch with angelic beings who communicate knowledge to humanity.
Elizondo frames the relationship between science and religion as two sides of a pyramid that converge at the apex—science asks “how,” religion asks “why,” and at the highest level they become indistinguishable.
The Manhattan Project Legacy and Key Scientists
Elizondo met Edward Teller as a child on an Air Florida flight; his father, who had friends in the government, believed Teller would have been involved in UFO-related programs.
A 1971 Australian Joint Intelligence Organization document by Harry Turner, citing CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence data, lists both Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer as scientists involved in anti-gravity research.
David Grusch has stated that Oppenheimer was involved in setting up the original UFO secrecy protocols with the Atomic Energy Commission.
Wernher von Braun, the “grandfather of the space program,” was a Nazi rocket scientist brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip; Elizondo recounts Yuri Geller’s story of von Braun showing him a piece of a crashed UFO in his private safe and confirming it was not from Earth.
Carl Sagan, while publicly nominally skeptical, was a secret consultant on Project A119—a top-secret Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon as a show of force against the Soviets—and met frequently with CIA officer Kit Green toward the end of his career. His early journals are filled with passages about UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
Personal Encounters with Orbs
Elizondo describes regularly seeing green orbs at his home in Wyoming, witnessed by his wife, children, and neighbors.
The orbs began appearing when he joined AATIP and were also reported by other members of the program with the same descriptions in different colors.
During the interview visit, the team witnessed a green orb appear over a shed while Elizondo was explaining that the sun is a nuclear fusion reactor—a moment Elizondo treated as unremarkable.
Elizondo has had orbs appear at very close range; he never felt static charge or fear, only curiosity.
He acknowledges alternative explanations (ball lightning, St. Elmo’s fire, atmospheric ionization) but notes the consistency of descriptions across unrelated witnesses in the program.
Is the Phenomenon Demonic?
Elizondo discusses the “Collins Elite,” an evangelical Christian group within the CIA that conducted ceremonial magic protocols at Area 51’s “STARGATE” facility and concluded the phenomenon was demonic and should not be studied.
He personally visited Skinwalker Ranch and smelled sulfur, after which he had a difficult couple of weeks.
He cautions against the stigma around the word “paranormal,” noting it simply means “above or beside” in Latin, and that all of science was once considered paranormal before becoming normal.
He draws a parallel to how every era’s technology seems magical to previous generations—a garage door opener would seem miraculous to Da Vinci.
The Question of Multiple Alien Groups and NHI Nature
Elizondo notes that over 50% of cases in the Edgar Mitchell database report hominid-like creatures, which he feels is more consistent with time-traveling future humans than with convergent evolution on a random exoplanet.
He references Mike Masters, an evolutionary biologist at Montana Tech, who argues that inductive logic points to UFOs being us from the future rather than extraterrestrials.
Elizondo is cautious about Tom DeLonge’s claim that some non-human intelligences (NHI) are malevolent “archons” in the Gnostic tradition, saying he avoids sharing his own opinions and that what matters is what the public thinks.
He raises the possibility that NHI may be engaged in counterintelligence against humanity—managing what evidence disappears, surveilling our most precious nuclear assets, and potentially suppressing scientific breakthroughs to prevent us from destroying ourselves, likening it to the “three body problem.”
He notes that Kelly Johnson, the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works founder, had his own UFO sighting at sunset—a fast-moving black object—and that the CEO of Lockheed also had a UFO experience.
National Security Concerns and the “Manhattan Project 2.0” Problem
Elizondo is deeply frustrated by the balkanized, corporatized U.S. system in which legacy UFO programs are siloed across aerospace contractors (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE) using FOIA exemptions, while Russia and China have centralized, nationalized programs coordinating their best and brightest.
He compares the situation to a “Manhattan Project 2.0” that the U.S. is at risk of losing.
He draws a direct parallel to 9/11: the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense all had pieces of intelligence but failed to share them, and the same information siloing is happening with UAP.
He argues that the U.S. won the Cold War not by keeping better secrets but by moving information more efficiently within its system—a lesson unlearned.
China has publicly discussed its “Five Continents Initiative” on UAP; South American countries are open about it; Japan recently begged the U.S. to enter a bilateral UAP information-sharing agreement.
Elizondo insists he is a patriot who will always choose national security over disclosure when forced, but draws a sharp line between legitimate classification and unilateral government decisions to withhold information from Congress and the American people without due process.
The George W. Bush Disclosure Attempt
Elizondo recounts a story (originally told publicly by Dr. Hal Puthoff) about the George W. Bush administration conducting a net assessment on UAP disclosure in the early 2000s.
Bush, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley were involved; Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, had been briefed into UAP reality during his time as CIA director.
The assessment concluded that full disclosure was not good for humanity.
Elizondo distinguishes between “full disclosure” (revealing technological advances to adversaries) and “disclosure” (acknowledging we are not alone), arguing America deserves the truth but some classification is warranted to avoid a new weapons race.
Are We Ready for the Truth?
Elizondo frames the question as a binary: either UAP are real, or there is mass hysteria among admirals, generals, trained pilots, nuclear weapons officers, and CIA/NI directors—which would itself be a catastrophic problem.
He is skeptical that humanity will handle the truth well, noting that every past technological advantage has eventually been weaponized, and asks who has the moral authority to distribute such power peacefully.
He suggests the solution may not be dividing the “toy” (the technology) but creating a framework where everyone uses it simultaneously—a collective, emergent shift in consciousness.
He acknowledges that trust in government and media is at an all-time low, that events like COVID accelerated public awakening, and that the uncontrolled dissemination of information (pilots posting TikTok videos, Saudi Arabian pilots uploading orb footage immediately after landing) makes continued secrecy untenable.
He believes we are at the cusp of a massive paradigm shift and that his generation’s role was to strike the match, but the current generation is the wind that turned it into a wildfire.
Lue’s Personal Toll and the Importance of Love
Elizondo describes himself as physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted from a multi-front battle against elements that want him silenced.
He says there are days he regrets coming out publicly, and days when conversations with people like the interviewers make it worth it.
He rejects the image of himself as a Moses-like oracle, insisting he is just a messenger on the same journey as everyone else, with no special answers.
He has two daughters and says his greatest accomplishment is being their father; his hope for them sustains him despite his cynicism about individual humans.
He believes love is the most important force in the universe—the reason we exist—and that in the absence of love there is fear, which drives hatred and violence.
He references a Dr. Mack interview with a Zimbabwean schoolgirl who, when asked why the visitors came, said: “I think in space there is no love, but down here there is.”
He advises STEM students to study not only with their minds but with their hearts, because understanding what is outside requires first understanding what is inside.
What Is Imminent
When asked what “imminent” means (the title of his autobiography), Elizondo says it does not necessarily mean an imminent threat, but rather that time is no longer a luxury—the collective conversation about UAP must happen now.
He hints that he is holding back hard truths he is not yet cleared to share, and that the full story is more significant than what has been disclosed so far.
