An Insider's Perspective Into the Pentagon's UFO Hunt (nytimes.com) 123
In his new memoir, Imminent, former senior intelligence official Luis Elizondo claims that a supersecret program has been retrieving technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin for decades, warning that these phenomena could pose a serious national security threat or even an existential threat to humanity. The New York Times reports: Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo's disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.
Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.
Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.
Religion for technophiles... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing is, obviously, not plausible in the least. There is not a single technological discovery that cannot be explained plausibly by regular scientific progress. There is not a single piece of solid evidence. And, in addition, these "aliens" seem to constrain themselves to the US, which, again, is not plausible at all.
The whole thing is advanced nonsense, nothing else.
WD40 (Score:5, Funny)
How do you explain WD40 then? It cleans, removes rust, lubricates, kills hornets. One can lasts a lifetime. Surely... aliens!
Re: WD40 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:WD40 (Score:4, Funny)
The fact that WD40 is not designed to be replaced often for additional profits proves it was not designed by humans!
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It's literally fish oil.
It'd be nice if you clowns would learn what the word "literally" means. And no, it's "literally" not, you 'tard.
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The literal meaning of "literally" is literally literal for illiterates. Hold on, my grammar checker just died...
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Sure is!
That is, as long as by "fish", you're referring to the species that were swimming around in Cretaceous.
Even fakery is lacking these days. (Score:2)
The real mystery about aliens for me is: why, with all of the amazing computer graphics tech we have, hasn't someone made a fake video of aliens that has convinced anyone or made much of a buzz? These alien promoters are so lazy. Yeah, I've seen some bad looking, poor quality videos passed around mentally unstable social media profiles, but nothing really good yet.
Re:Even fakery is lacking these days. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I am about to click on some paranormal documentary about UFOs, my son says "Don't do it. It will only make you mad."
To paraphrase the TV show, I want to believe, but these people are so damned stupid.
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Every time I am about to click on some paranormal documentary about UFOs, my son says "Don't do it. It will only make you mad."
To paraphrase the TV show, I want to believe, but these people are so damned stupid.
The intellectual level that needs to be satisfied for a successful con is really, really low. People will con themselves if triggered in the right way.
Re: Even fakery is lacking these days. (Score:2)
C'mon, Blink 182 doesn't have THAT kind of money!
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Making good quality fakes comes with real skills. Skills that allow you to see what is going on. Hence no true believer can make these. And for the rest? There is not enough money in a good scam in that area, so the people that could do it stay away.
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Just because you have not seen such unexplainable technologies doesn't mean that they don't exist. I haven't seen any either... but someone might? Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Re: Religion for technophiles... (Score:5, Informative)
That's correct, but strong claims require strong evidence.
All I'm seeing is someone fleecing the gullible. Unfortunately the Pentagon doesn't review for that.
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Looks like Men in Black are getting their bonuses this year.
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Pentagon is happy to let someone distract and obfuscate.
The secret projects are often full of true believers. Those who have a predisposition to believe. Ie, investigate psychic phenomena and staff it with people who believe it must exist, then clumsy charlatans can run rings around them.
Yeah. (Score:2)
Humans are eager to believe utterly ridiculous things if doing so will give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose, or even just break the monotony. The longstanding enterprise of religious belief is more than ample evidence of this.
If the story is interesting enough, humans don't require proof. Well, most humans don't. There are always some mean old skeptics going around pointing out how there is no evidence and the claims make no sense and sometimes even providing contrary proof. Everybody hates t
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Humans are eager to believe utterly ridiculous things if doing so will give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose, or even just break the monotony. The longstanding enterprise of religious belief is more than ample evidence of this.
If the story is interesting enough, humans don't require proof.
The average person is really stupid and cannot fact-check at all. This is just one instance of that.
Well, most humans don't. There are always some mean old skeptics going around pointing out how there is no evidence and the claims make no sense and sometimes even providing contrary proof. Everybody hates those guys, though.
You do not have to be a "sceptic" to identify bogus claims as bogus. You just have to be aware what is actually being put on the table and really see it. No idea why most people find that impossible to do, I already did that as a kid as a matter of routine and I never stopped. Fantasizing about things is good and right and entertaining, but you have to be aware what you are doing. People that mistake their pr
Re:Religion for technophiles... (Score:5, Informative)
Right but we also need to apply Occam's razor. If you constantly need to add conspiracies on top of others (you quoted Men in Black), you're drifting into religious madness. A reasonable expectation is that if alien tech had been analysed by a government agency, it would have been used at least in defence and aerospace. But we can say this was not the case, because:
1) (Occam's razor) all of our 20th Century progress can be simpler explained by incremental progress on seed ideas some civilian scientists from the early 1900s without access to UFOs. Jet engines, rocket engines, nuclear weapons and tech, semiconductor tech, electron microscopy, particle physics, computing... all was a slow, expensive, painful progress year on year over lengths of decades, not a sudden breakthrough of a previously unthinkable design.
2) None of the tech we developed enables behaviour similar to the flying saucers; none of the tech we developed enables interstellar travel.
Of course, "it could exist but is hidden", yeah just like Bigfoot.
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none of the tech we developed enables interstellar travel.
I meant *crewed*. Voyager 1 cannot make humans colonize planets on remote stars.
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Speaking of razors, the 5 blade razor is clearly of alien design :-)
It's a big industry convincing people that there's a big secret "they" don't want you to know about. Doctors don't want you to know what magnets can fix your arthritis; big oil doesn't want you to know about the 50MPG engine (this is true today, but I heard this lark back in the 70s), government doesn't want you to know about extraterrestrials, and so forth. This appeals to some victims of scams, making them think that they're in a special
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I've had a loot at my company's code base. It is technology unexplainable by any living person.
Re: Religion for technophiles... (Score:2)
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See! Your alien repellant rock is working!
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is not even simple evidence given, so the whole claim can be safely classified as bogus.
I do not require a positive proof that I will not win the lottery either in order to be uninterested in playing. "But it could be..." is for those weak of mind. Should said extraordinary evidence become available, I will adjust my stance, but not before.
'Accidental' discoveries (Score:2)
If 'they' wanted to have a breakthrough discovered, getting someone to accidentally discover an effect or a combination of chemicals would seem a good way forward
https://www.sciencealert.com/t... [sciencealert.com]
It has a plausible explanation (Score:3)
UFOs liked flying over secret US aerospace facilities, because they are secret US airplanes. The government believes they exist, because they are government property, and keeps them secret because they are secret. The little grey men thing was a convenient way to discredit it and keep soviet spies away.
Re:Religion for technophiles... (Score:4, Insightful)
Note also that science and technology have developed exponentially for more than a century, which leads to another common fallacy among the believers: "So many new things have appeared since 19xx, that there's no way humans could have invented them in just a few decades. We got it from aliens!"
Therefore you see specious claims that modern microelectronics would not exist if we had not retrieved integrated circuits from a crashed UFO in Roswell. In reality you can arbitrarily pick any date in the 20th century and easily demonstrate exponential technological progress in far less than one person's lifetime. My favorite claim is that we got jet planes from aliens. After all, how could mankind go from the Wright Brothers flyer to the Heinkel He 178 in less than 40 years?
It had to be aliens. Jet planes were reverse-engineered from crashed UFOs.
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Note also that science and technology have developed exponentially for more than a century,
It actually has not. Still 30-50 years from lab-demo to widespread adoption. That is a long-term constant. The only thing that has changed is the numbers in which tech gets adopted, but not the quality of the technology. And Science is as slow as always.
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That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Unless you are an insider privy to the the supposed retrieved materials, then you are in no position to know anything about them. This isn't just a conspiracy theory that our government is withholding information, given that members of Congress have held hearings on this and themselves seem to believe that the military and investigative units are keeping information to themselves.
Some of the reports from (many) USAF pilots of frequent sightings of UAPs do have them behav
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Nope. That is a fact-based estimation. I do get that you have no clue what that is and that it is fundamentally different from your uninformed opinion. Hence, like most people, you will never have a clue about how reality actually works and only ever see a projection of your personal desires. Well, maybe in a few 1000 more reincarnations, but I would not expect too much in your case.
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Rubbish. Assuming you don't work for MIB, which seems a safe bet, then you know precisely nothing about what materials the government have or have not recovered.
Your "fact-based estimation" is just personal opinion.
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> There is not a single piece of solid evidence.
Utter nonsense. The Calvine Photo [linktr.ee] is damn good.
> And, in addition, these "aliens" seem to constrain themselves to the US, which, again, is not plausible at all.
You DO realize there are numerous sightings around [facebook.com] the world [wikipedia.org], right?
> The whole thing is advanced nonsense, nothing else.
You can keep sticking your head in the sand but by 2050 it will be common knowledge we are not alone. What will your excuse be then?
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> There is not a single piece of solid evidence.
Utter nonsense. The Calvine Photo [linktr.ee] is damn good.
Well, if you call that amateur fake "pretty good", then you clearly are a Dunning-Kruger far left-side case. I saw a demo how to make these something like 30 years ago and the results were better quality.
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Ad Hominem attacks won't change the fact that the Taygetans are already here.
Having met and talked to a few alien species you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. But keep assuming the experiences about someone you've never even met. Maybe you can tell me my future since you are such an arm chair "expert" in my past.
There is already more than enough evidence for those that are curious and want to know. It is just a matter of time before it become undeniable. But keep sticking your head in th
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It only says non-human. Monkeys and elephants are non-human.
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What about technological progress of humanity in the last 300 years can be described as "normal scientific progress"?
We're currently on a hyperbolic curve with change coming much too fast to measure.
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Actually, no. We are still at 30-50 years from first lab-demo to widespread adoption. A lot of junk-tech (typically software) that simply vanishes again after a while makes that harder to see, but technological progress has _not_ accelerated.
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Up until 1400 or so, that was "500-600 years from first lab demo to widespread adoption".
Up until 1810 or so, it was still "50-100 years from first lab demo to widespread adoption".
Compared with that, 30-50 years is still coming down.
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"Up until 1400 or so, that was '500-600 years from first lab demo to widespread adoption'"
1) No, it wasn't.
2) The printing press enabled more rapid dissemination of technology, as did the development of perspective drawing and other drafting methods, which enabled a skilled craftsman to look at such a drawing and reproduce the item depicted.
3) We have even faster ways now to disseminate knowledge.
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That hyperbolic curve allowed us to create nuclear fusion reactors for generating electricity what, twenty years ago?
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We know how to do it, it just turns out to be completely impractical at temperatures compatible with life on planet.
We are of course using the one natural fusion generator available to us more and more every year, and have been since the 1970s. That's what solar converter cells do.
Is the Pentagon softening us up for THE TRUTH? (Score:2)
Let all these stories about aliens become slowly but surely more credible so that when the proof does slip out the population won't freak, and the establishment won't as easily be accused of having lied...
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The first time I heard THAT one was soon after E.T. was released. A bunch of other "friendly alien" movies were released about the same time. Obviously it was a ploy by the government to get us to accept aliens as friends when so they could be revealed to us. Yup, AAAAANNY day now! It couldn't be a bunch of mass market schlock shoveled out by the studios to make s quick buck following the success of E.T. and Close Encounters.
If that was the plan, the MiB definitely dropped the ball, because Alien (1979) c
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The whole thing is fanatics grasping at straws to justify their insanity. The only good thing about UFO believers is that they are usually non-violent.
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> There's all kinds of UFO sightings in other countries
Right now, most UFO reports are in Japan.
I cannot find this any more, but back in the 60s (IIRC) someone noticed that UFO reports travel around the world. They peak in the US for a while, then it's Japan and the east, then Europe.
I ascribed this to press attention.
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someone noticed that UFO reports travel around the world ...
I ascribed this to press attention.
Nonsense -- it's the Alien Tour Guides. If they kept on going to the same place all the time, they'll run out of customers.
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There aren't any UFO reports in Mexico, but there *are* reports there of OVNIs (Objeto Volando No Identificado--I'll let you guess the meaning :)).
Re:Religion for technophiles... (Score:5, Insightful)
> There is no known or believeable way that a single 80 tonne object was quarried, carried, and then floated (jesuz christ, on wha papyrus?) hundreds of kms
LOLZ.
People have been using water transport for large stone blocks for *all of recorded history*.
Most of the Colosseum was built using stone from a quarry 35 km away in Tivoli. That was 2000 years ago and is extensively documented. Do you think the people in Egypt were dumber than the Italians?
More recently, all of the huge stone buildings in the various capital cities in Europe were built by hauling blocks on barges drawn by horses on the extensive canal systems that stretched hundreds of km without the benefit of one of the world's most famous rivers helping them. This was 200 years ago when we still crapped in a hole.
Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean they didn't.
Re:Religion for technophiles... (Score:4, Funny)
>This was 200 years ago when we still crapped in a hole.
You've never been to france I guess.
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Not 80 ton, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C97Ns5dwtE [youtube.com] here's a guy who built a Stonehenge replica with 9.6 ton blocks without modern machinery.
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Always funny how non-engineers and bad engineers completely fail at estimating what good engineers can do.
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Lol, wut, to believe in the bible you have to believe in an absolute ton of stuff that has no evidence what-so-ever, basically you have to have faith that the fairy-tale is real. Is doesn't need debunking because it's so completely absurd and unproven that it's the other way round. To debunk something you need a half-sane assertion in the first place, the bible doesn't have that. So, a bit like UFO stuff.
For example, Jesus loves you and died for your sins, he's so good but Jesus is also god and god will inf
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I disagree. Large organized religion typically either comes with "you will believe this" in the more authoritarian streams and by patches upton patches upon patches for those the pretend to actually have some sort of "argument". Christianity even had to throw it all away and start over 2000 years ago because the story was so badly borked and still, a rather large faction stayed on the old version.
Sure, organized religion comes with a ton of material and a ton of complexity in its pretext stories. But none a
Not the alpha species? (Score:2)
Can we do these wars with volunteers only and far away from earth? After years of work my garden is in a very enjoyable state. It would be sad to see it ruined because some guys need to be the alpha for whatever stupid reason.
Pentagon Press (Score:2)
I'm confused.
Who wrote the book? this guy or the Pentagon?
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Flatland has released an official denial that any of its pentagons have released books on UFOs. They continued by saying that their lawyers are considering suing the US for false advertising as the US' Pentagon is clearly three dimensional and thus a hollow Pentagonal Prism.
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Flatland has released an official denial that any of its pentagons have released books on UFOs. They continued by saying that their lawyers are considering suing the US for false advertising as the US' Pentagon is clearly three dimensional and thus a hollow Pentagonal Prism.
Flatland is an awesome book. Wish I had mod points ...
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What about Circular reasoning? Couldn't that account for it?
Elizendo/Bigelow - same cabal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Elizendo/Bigelow - same cabal (Score:2)
Yes, he would have been 8 at the time so that explains it.
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Well... I'm not saying there is any evidence but if the goal of the program (if it exist, that is) is to retrieve and hide evidence of such events from the public, they must be doing a good job.
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Certainly key members of a psychic research group did become senior staffers at the Pentagon. Others of that group were key figures in developing the torture strategies used by the US after 9/11. They're also linked to figures involved in selling arms to Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
Turns out that was an interesting bunch of complete nut jobs.
I absolutely would not trust any of them to be honest.
Whether this guy was involved, or whether he got mixed up with them later wouldn't seem important. If he's lin
The Hearing (Score:5, Funny)
All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO): House Hearing:
Rep. Jim Jordan: This House Oversight Committee will come to order. The ranking member and myself will each be allowed 5 minutes opening remarks.
Rep JJ: Double, double toil and trouble...
Ranking Member: Get on with it, muppet.
Rep JJ: : Ms Marjorie Greene, you are first up for questions.
Marjorie Greene: Okay General, tell us what are these UFOs?
General Puff-n-Huff: I cannot Ms Greene, and they are called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs).
MG: Skip the nomen-name-ature, General. What are they?
G. PnH: It's hard to say, they do unspeakable things.
MG: What kind of unspeakable things?
G. PnH: I cannot say, they are unspeakable.
MG: Cut the crap, are they aliens?
G. PnH: Well, they do speak Spanish.
(Gen.'s aides start smiling viciously)
MG: Stop humoring me. Now, these UFOs, have you actually met any of their occupants?
G. PnH: Well, there was one little feller. He was a bit odd.
MG: Odd in what way?
G. PnH: He...uhhh... he wanted us to take him to our leader....errr....you.
MG: Me?! (now screeching) WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM???
G. PnH: We told him we didn't give out that kind of information, so we showed him Google Maps.
(General's staff now crying with laughter behind the General)
MG: HOLY SHIT!!!
G. PnH: It's okay. He already knew about Google Maps. Anyhow, he lent us one of their Jewish space lasers.
(General's staff are now falling out of their chairs with laughter)
MG: Well, how does it work?
G. PnH: We aren't sure yet, but we think it turns regular police into Nancy Pelosi's Gazpacho Police.
MG: I knew it!! I knew it!! (looks around at the doors nervously) What do they do?
G. PnH: Mostly they take each other out on same-sex dates.
MG: It turns them gay?
G. PnH: Yep, we call it the Gay Ray. I have one here (pulls out an evil looking device from his attache case and points it at MG).
MG runs screaming out of the room. The General, bless his twisted little heart, gets an evil grin on his face and starts pointing it in turn at members of the committee. A stampede forms a screaming scrum at the door.
G. PnH: Damn! Now that's what I call a weapon.
The Democrats, all of whom remained, rise and give him a standing ovation.
Ranking Member: So what does it really do, General?
G. PhH presses a tab and out pops a Pez.
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This new drug, LLM, is super string!
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That gives "strung out" a whole new meaning. I love it.
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Nonsense, no Jim Jordan committee was ever that organized and sedate.
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One might ask why none of the Democrats ran from the Gay Ray.
Oh, yeah....nothing to fear.
Here come the Men in Black (Score:2)
I'm not saying there is any evidence of UFO but if the goal of the program (if such a program exists, that is) is to retrieve and hide evidence of such events from the public, they must be doing a pretty good job.
The government can and does block publication (Score:3)
The easiest way not release Top Secret facts (Score:4, Insightful)
They haven't found me yet (Score:5, Funny)
My kids are absolutely certain that I am an alien. Sometimes, my wife is too. So if these guys are doing their job, surely I'll be getting a call any day now!
it's all manipulation, these people are liars (Score:2)
they've been lying to us and manipulating us from day one, this is what they do
these people cannot be trusted, they are corrupt and evil from the get go
power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and the people are an absolutely perfect example of corruption in action
Occam's Razor (Score:5, Insightful)
Either
(1) This guy is the first person in the history of a vast, 80 year old conspiracy to blow the whistle, or...
(2) this guy worked in a minor program charged investigating crackpot claims, realized how credulous people were, and decided to use that to supplement his modest government pension.
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(3) The guy is a legitimate crackpot who gravitated towards the minor program because of his personal beliefs, and from then on interpreted everything he saw as reinforcing those beliefs while discarding all rationality.
Somehow, I would prefer 3 over 2. Mental illness I can sympathize with, but a deliberate con not at all.
Or... (Score:2)
(3) He joined the contemporary version of Project Blue Book as an intern, and took all the hazing, jokes and their equivalent of "Go and get a new bubble for the spirit level" as absolute truth, and believed it utterly.
The search (Score:3)
The search for intelligent life is still ongoing. ET is just as frustrated as we are.
Wow, people are dumb. (Score:2)
Aye because the US (Score:3)
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is the galaxies no.1 tourist spot to visit for cow tipping and anal probing.
Or because there is life on this space rock. So far as we can tell, there are no other such rocks in space which have life. If these aliens are able to bridge the gap between solar systems, why wouldn't they visit a place which is teeming with life?
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Intelligent Aliens (Score:2)
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Who said anything about "consistently"?
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Sounds a bit like our own Voyager-1, right? Roughly 24 billion miles away (outside our solar system) now, and with the maneuverability and smarts of a TV set.
I guess space is a huge empty space, and navigating through it is much easier than swooping around dodging terrestrial obstacles. Who'd have guessed ?
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That argument, as well as... they have the technology to travel light years in distance but no cloaking? They would send manned, large craft, rather than small autonomous drones? At night, they would have lights on the outside? I honestly don't understand how anyone even remotely intelligent believes aliens are visiting Earth and crashing.
Is this the same guy? (Score:2)
Is this the same senior intelligence officer who testified to congress that the stars in Aquila were unidentified drones?
Idiots rule (Score:2)
The Pentagon is interested in UFOs because they might be from an enemy, for example stealth aircraft, or, um, balloons.
Claims Are Getting More Specific (Score:2)
The aliens obviously speak English (Score:2)
Gershwin's response (Score:2)
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He is obviously right (Score:2)
He is obviously right, and his revelations explain a lot. We can tell a great deal about the aliens because they have infiltrated government, academia and the media. If we look a the ideas they are advocating, we can tell what kind of planet they come from.
Its a planet in which there are an unknown number of genders which have an unknown relation to the different sexes. Some of them say there are two or three genders, others that there are hundreds. On their planet, also, the sexes are not binary but fo
Secrecy demands obfuscation... (Score:2)
...while the booboisie demand affirmation. They cannot care about anything different because intelligence is a matter of luck not choice.
UFOs usefully amuse the mob while adults go on with business. Leadership requires engaging humans by affirmation. They will tolerate nothing different so it's not merely acceptable to manipulate them for the greater good, they make it mandatory.
Aliens (Score:2)
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The more people who call bullshit on something, the less likely you think it's bullshit?
(Hmm.. so only thing empiricists need to do if they want mysticism to go away, is adopt mystic beliefs. Then religion will die off, because it will no longer be "confirmed" by atheists' rejection.)