By KEN KORCZAK
Former U.S. Intelligence insider Luis Elizondo makes his case for official UFO Disclosure. But is there a lot more going on behind the scenes?
Think about this:
The United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Pentagon’s Department of Intelligence, spent an entire year going through every page of Luis Elizondo’s new book, Imminent.
After a rigorous line-by-line review, the Pentagon was okay with Elizondo writing that:
1. Alien beings (or some form of Nonhuman Intelligence) are real, they’re here and they are operating super-advanced crafts in our skies and underneath our oceans.
2. The Roswell crash of 1947 really happened and top scientists, including Dr. Hal Puthoff, have been analyzing and studying materials from that recovered “ET” ship for decades.
3. The U.S. Military — especially the U.S. Navy — has been grappling with hundreds of incursions and interactions with advanced (almost certainly alien or nonhuman intelligence) “spacecraft” for decades, and our military has no idea what to do about it.
4. Elizondo reports that a government contract scientist informed him that “four deceased nonhuman bodies” were recovered from the Roswell crash vehicle.
5. Elizondo “personally handled” materials from a UFO crash retrieval, he said in a subsequent interview.
6. Numerous people have had “alien implants” removed from their bodies, and these materials are also under study and have been for decades. Of course, this suggests that people have been abducted and experimented upon by nonhuman intelligent beings.
It bears repeating: The Pentagon green-lighted revealing all the above by one of their former deepest, top-security intelligence operatives.
As they say: Let that sink in.
Furthermore, Luis Elizondo did not need to request official whistleblower status and protection from the Office of the Inspector General. Elizondo has never been stripped of any of his still active security clearances. He did not violate the NDAs he signed.
In light of all this, reasonable people may well ask: Does this mean Elizondo’s revelations are Disclosure (with a capital D)?
Well, not so fast.
The Pentagon’s pass to Elizondo’s book of UAP bombshells is not the same as the government admitting that his views represent official position. So, this is not Disclosure. Not yet.
But wait a minute!
Can it at least, then, be considered “tacit disclosure?”
In other words, is it the Pentagon’s “long play” to allow people like Luis Elizondo, David Grusch, Navy Top Gun fighter pilots and others to come forward and announce — “The aliens are here and they’re real and the government knows it!” — while at the same time holding back from an official sanction of this information? Is there a larger purpose?
Well, maybe. But like everything in the UFO realm, it’s complicated.
Consider that many people in positions of power at the Pentagon pushed back against Elizondo. They came after him hard. Both Elizondo and Grusch were threatened, they were cajoled, they were mocked, they were harassed. Both men endured smears and lies about their character and personal lives. Elizondo has said in numerous subsequent interviews that his “life was turned upside down” and “made into a living hell,” and that hell “included my family.”
Much of that came from inside the Pentagon.
Also:
Consider the first report issued by AARO, the new group established by Congress to get to the bottom of the UFO issue. The guy who headed AARO, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, wrote in the March 2024-issued report:
“There was no evidence that any USG [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP [unidentified aerial phenomenon] represented extraterrestrial technology.”
Thus, the latter serves as the “official” government position on UFOs. Yes, it’s the same old screed — “nothing to see here, not a shred of evidence, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
Elizondo provides some measure of explanation for the seemingly schizophrenic positions of the Pentagon and IC community on the UAP issue. I might sum up his view in three words:
“Internecine government factionalism.”
Elizondo’s former colleague at To The Stars Academy (TTSA), Tom Delonge, put it more strongly in a recent interview:
“There is a war going on inside the government.”
Elizondo paints a picture of a monstrously complex, highly convoluted and mind-numbing bureaucracy composed of numerous levels within the government, both military and civilian in scope.
Within the endless bowels of Congress and the mazes of Pentagon hallways, a countless series of competing forces, agencies people and opinions roil & boil against each other as they vie for power. They jealously advocate for pet programs, cleverly “steal” money appropriated by Congress for one program to divert it into another.
Elizondo identifies five key players within the internal factionalism game:
1. Legacy Programs. (The efforts that have been at work for decades, starting with the Roswell crash recovery, to study, reverse engineer and exploit alien technology).
2. Religious Fundamentalists. (High government officials who know UFOs and aliens are real, but they believe them to be “demonic” based on a Christian-Biblical perspective).
3. Special Access Programs administered by private defense contractors.
4. The Good Guys. (Those who know UFOs and aliens are real and believe the public deserves to know at least the fundamental truth that we are not alone.)
5. The vast global tentacles of the Military Industrial Complex writ large.
To all this, Elizondo describes another complicating layer:
COMPARTMENTALIZATION
Within the government, there remains a hardened culture of “stove piping.” One might also call it “purposeful radical compartmentalizing.” This is when diversiform agencies and programs work on the same basic project, but none of them communicate & coordinate with one another. They are not allowed to as a matter of policy.
This has long been the practice of the IC community. It has mastered the art of keeping its own highly skilled, brilliant people ignorant about the true nature & purpose of the very same projects they are working on! It is the same problem identified by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (best known as ‘The 911 Commission”) in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Commission found that the “three-letter agencies” — the CIA, FBI, DOI, NSA — and others were reluctant to share key elements of intelligence. The result was that blaring red alarms indicating Islamic terrorists planned a massive attack on U.S. soil were missed. It produced one of the largest intelligence failures in U.S. history.
Elizondo suggests that dozens of government research and intelligence agencies have been working on UFO issues for decades, but extreme secrecy, stove-piping, nosebleed levels of security, and a Byzantine system of over-classification have made it impossible for there to be a unified effort in sensibly handling what Elizondo calls “the UAP threat.”
Indeed, Elizondo and his №1 compatriot in the UAP effort — former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon — make a direct comparison between the intelligence failure of 911 and the massive failures that led to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Elizondo and Mellon contend further that this failure vis-à-vis the “UAP problem” could dwarf the tragic results of 911 and Pearl Harbor.
PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND
Now let me address an issue that Elizondo does not discuss in his book.
The bitter fact is that it’s not only the Powers That Be within the U.S. Government that keep a lid on what’s going on with UFOs. Much of the blame can be attributed to the UFO community itself — and I’m not referring to the skeptics — I’m talking about the “UFO believers.”
Elizondo has been viciously attacked by numerous factions within the rank-and-file of the UFO community itself.
For example, it took UFO advocate & Disclosure icon Dr. Steven Greer about 10 minutes to launch an attack on Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon when they came out of the UFO shadows in 2017 thanks to that New York Times article which told of the UFO “Tic Tac” encounters with Navy ships and pilots.
In numerous interviews, Greer announced that “one of his insider military contacts” immediately “issued my team a warning” about Elizondo, suggesting he was a “disinformation agent” still on the payroll of the Intelligence Community and Legacy Program defense contractors.
Famed constitutional attorney Danial Sheehan adds context to this. Sheehan has long served as legal counsel for Greer’s Disclosure Project. Sheehan was also approached by Elizondo to serve as his attorney. Sheehan agreed to take him on as a client.
In a recent interview, Sheehan said that when Greer learned about his representation of Elizondo, he immediately urged him to cut ties with Elizondo or he would lose his long-standing role as the Disclosure Project lawyer. Sheehan said he “received a letter” from “some mysterious attorney” in New Mexico telling him to drop Elizondo or lose Steven Greer.
Sheehan said he “ignored the letter.” He kept Elizondo as a client and, as far as he knows, he has yet to be canned by Greer’s Disclosure Project. Apparently, Sheehan is now a “gray area” in this matter, although he said he has “discussed it in a friendly manner” with Greer.
I take the pains to describe this scenario, not just to pick on Greer, but because it makes an ideal case study showing how the UFO community is not a monolithic entity. It’s not all “happy warriors” working tirelessly in unison for UFO Disclosure — in fact, the UFO folks are every bit as factionalized and agenda-driven as the U.S. Government and military community.
All one need do is spend 20 minutes over on the toxic UFOx (the former UFOTwitter) and monitor the fantastically dysfunctional back-and-forth “Elizondo commentary” among many of the most prominent & respected names in ufology. It reminds me of that classic line taken from the 1989 cult film Dr. Caligari:
“The inmates are running the asylum.”
My point is: It’s traditional within the UFO community to perpetually “blame the usual suspects” for the 75 years of lies, coverups and deceptions preventing the truth about UFOs from emerging. Those usual suspects are:
- The government
- The military
- The media
- The skeptics
- Private Defense Contractors
But a sixth group rightfully belongs to this list of infamy, and it holds equal blame — and in some cases more blame — than all of the above. That sixth group is the sainted UFO-advocacy community itself.
THE ‘LONG GAME’
Now I want to circle back to something I mentioned earlier in this article. It’s the proposal that the Pentagon is purposefully playing a “Long Game.” This is also not discussed by Elizondo’s book, but it is relevant to our discussion. What the Long Game suggests is that the Pentagon & civilian Government have adopted a policy that noted Canadian ufologist Grant Cameron calls “The Acclimatization Plan.”
In his 2017 book, Managing Magic, Cameron argues that our government not only desires to reveal the truth about UFOs to the public, but they have been steadily and consistently working on a long-range Disclosure effort for decades. If Grant Cameron is correct, then the seemingly schizophrenic behavior of the Pentagon concerning Elizondo’s revelations starts to make sense.
Again, as I said at the top, the Pentagon spent one year reviewing Imminent and told Elizondo essentially:
“You’re good to go. Tell all the UFO secrets you want. Let it fly, brother!”
And yet — the official Pentagon line, as represented by the AARO report, is that there is “no evidence of alien or nonhuman intelligence” behind all the fantastic phenomena.
Cameron said this is exactly the way “acclimatization” works.
1. The government allows top officials and insiders to leak bombshell information.
2. The government then soon starts to “walk back” some of what it has allowed to “leak.”
3. If things get too hot or if the media & others press too hard for more information, the government falls back on rock-solid official denial.
Once the dust settles — guess what? Sooner or later, another top government insider “leaks” more bombshell UFO information — and the cycle starts all over again. Yes, it’s “rinse and repeat.”
–> Reveal & Release
–> Walk it back
–> Deny completely
–> Dish out more bombshell stuff after the public cools off but now has more information than it did before.
It’s a gradual and planned process of revealing that UFOs & aliens are real; the result is a measured public acclimatization to the most astounding information in world history.
In Managing Magic, Grant Cameron devotes nearly 300 mind-numbing pages to analyzing policy and making his case. Formulating no fewer than 64 possible scenarios, he fleshes out the U.S. government’s purposeful and planned program of acclimatizing society for the ground-shattering impact of revealing that the human family is not “on top of the intelligent species food chain.”
Indeed, we can even point to key, highly influential documents that have provided the underpinnings for the government’s “Disclosure Long Game.” Among the most important is the famous study published by the Brookings Institution in 1960. This 190-page document was commissioned by NASA’s Commission on Long-Range Studies. It was submitted to the House Committee on Science and Aeronautics in 1961.
In short, the Brookings Report makes a dire warning about the impact of disclosing UFO reality to the public and its effect on society. It describes the potential for large-scale disruptions of our most basic institutions, especially to religion, the world geopolitical order, the economy and individual citizens of all nations.
The authors of the Brookings Report implied nothing less than a global “crisis” that could significantly disrupt the underpinnings of what provides a sense of stability, meaning and sense of purpose to the daily lives of people. The report said:
“Societies sure of their own place have disintegrated when confronted with a superior society. Others have survived even though changed. Clearly, the better we can come to understand the factors involved in responding to such crises, the better prepared we may be.”
Furthermore, the Brookings Report is not the only document informing the government’s “long-game” in terms of Disclosure.
NATO conducted its own study and came to the same conclusion. (Note: This is according to former U.S. Air Force Command Sargeant Major Robert Dean. NATO disputes the report exists). Another such study was completed by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit global think tank. Yet another report was completed by Battelle, an influential organization that studies the connections between science, technology and their effects on society. Like Brookings, NATO and RAND, Battelle outlined the potential dangers of too much Disclosure too fast.
On the other hand, let us briefly consider:
CATASTROPHIC DISCLOSURE?
Today, a new term is frequently bandied about within the UFO community’s discourse. That term is: “Catastrophic Disclosure.” It was coined by retired Army Col. Karl Nell, a man deeply involved with the intricate behind-the-scenes negotiations that led up to the Congressional hearing that featured David Grusch and others revealing what they know about UFOs and aliens. Like Elizondo, Col. Nell reports that he confronted numerous programs and information about UFO activity inside the Pentagon.
Nell made his comments at a recent UAP conference conducted by the new Sol Foundation, a nonprofit group working toward Disclosure. Nell said the U.S. government should release what it can before the “catastrophic event” that would happen if a foreign country were to disclose it first. Catastrophic Disclosure would be “catastrophic for the United States,” Nell suggested. But he also said failure to come clean would also be “a catastrophe” in and of itself.
Whatever the case, Col. Nell implies that the “time is up” for the Pentagon’s Long Game and/or an Acclimatization policy as described by Grant Cameron. It’s been 75 years of leaks, strategic releases of key information and allowing leeway for folks like Elizondo, Grusch and Nell himself to speak out. The United States must now — at long last — lay its cards on the table before some other nation gets there first, Nell said, and before the “AUP secret collapses on its own weight” with “catastrophic” results.
MORE TO COME
I’ve only scratched the surface of the information revealed in Imminent by Luis Elizondo. I plan to complete a 3- to 4-part series of articles in relation to this book.
NOTE: For more in-depth book reviews and analysis of UFO-related books, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM