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“Senior officials told me continuously and confidentially that big aerospace companies have been part of the Legacy Program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crash materials ..."
| “Well, I got a couple of thousand damn questions, you know? I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy. . . What the hell is going on around here? Who the hell ARE you people?” — from “CE-III” Since Lue Elizondo’s just-released memoir is already a New York Times No. 1 bestseller, it’s easy to imagine the big-screen treatment opening with a replay of a closing scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” |  Billy Cox lifeinjonestown |
The little alien is greeting Earthlings with Curwen hand gestures that groove to the movie’s five-note tonal signature. ET’s huge eyes glisten with emotion, and his/her/its facial expression lays it on thick with beatific awe. The camera pulls away as human volunteers suit up and file aboard for the ride of a lifetime.
Before the grand finale, however, the fairy tale ending jumps the rails. The film stutters, then shrivels amid white-orange heat, and cuts to a nightmare unfolding in Colares, Brazil. The small coastal village and surrounding locales are under assault by UFOs, of all shapes and sizes, orbs, discs, cylinders, you name it, triangles. Disembodied lights chase residents inside their own homes. The afflicted break out in blisters and rashes; others endure nausea, blinding headaches, puncture wounds, abduction, temporary paralysis, catatonia.
Government investigators descend on the region to document the chaos, compiling as many as 3,500 case files. By one estimate, the incidents leave 300 animals dead, dozens of victims with chronic illnesses, and claim the lives of 10 Brazilians. Authorities are at a loss to identify the aggressors or their motives, and no one is held accountable.
In 1977, as “Close Encounters” was thrilling the global village in theaters, this real-life flip side of Steven Spielberg’s space-brothers fantasy was happening simultaneously, under the radar, in South America. But the repercussions from those events hadn’t been fully realized until last week’s publication of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs.
Anticipated in growing circles with the fervor of a Harry Potter book-drop, Imminent fills in some of the blanks on the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which the NY Times parlayed into a groundbreaking expose in 2017. But as the handiwork of censors’ pens at the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review indicates, there’s more to the story than we’re allowed to know.
In this latest installment on the Pentagon’s twisted relationship with infinitely advanced nonhuman technology, former counterintelligence agent and AATIP director Lue Elizondo goes big from the outset.
More than 30 years have passed since “Close Encounters,” and in 2009, Elizondo gets recruited by U.S. Strategic Command intelligence officer Jay Stratton for an opaque assignment. A former Army combat veteran with counterintelligence experience in “locking down” classified defense technology from foreign spies, Elizondo will create a secure space for a mysterious project called the Advanced Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP). But it falls to a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst named James Lacatski to read him in on it.
For two years AAWSAP sponsored a secret UFO study set for termination in 2010 by squeamish higher-ups at the Pentagon. Undeterred, Stratton and Lacatski, a rocket scientist, hatched a successor called AATIP. It would be funded by resources under the broad umbrella of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or ISR. Keeping it alive would require discretion and finesse.
Elizondo signs on, but he doesn’t get the full monty until attending an informal private dinner meeting off-site. Guests include remote-viewing pioneer physicist Hal Puthoff, hotel tycoon/aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow (the prime contractor leading AAWSAP’s UFO investigation) and Brazilian Gen. Paulo Roberto Yog de Miranda Uchoa.
And that’s when Elizondo learns about the hair-raising scenes from Colares in the 1970s.
This is the stage-setter for Elizondo’s immersion into the wild-ass behavioral range of the phenomenon. What begins as a catch-up course into the military’s long dyspeptic history with the UFO/UAP enigma rachets into a full-spectrum assessment of the challenge it poses not only to national security, but for the human race at large.
Elizondo’s work with AATIP soon puts him on the scent of even more deeply concealed UFO projects. And these “Legacy Programs,” he charges, have been working the problem for generations, beginning with the Roswell crash in 1947.
“Senior officials told me continuously and confidentially that big aerospace companies have been part of the Legacy Program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crash materials,” he writes. “The big names included Lockheed Martin, TRW, McDonnell Douglas, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and the Aerospace Corporation, all of which have been principal members of the US military-industrial complex. I was also told that Monsanto, a biotechnology corporation absorbed by Bayer in 2018, may have historically been involved, most likely dealing with biological specimens.”
Retired DIA program manager Lacatski himself has independently contributed considerable detail to the back story. He co-authored Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program in 2021, and in 2023’s Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, he claimed to have personally “gained access” to the interior of a recovered craft. But Lacatski stepped up only after Elizondo left the reservation seven years ago and made history with the NY Times.
Operating quietly for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)), AATIP’s collective blood ran cold during a presentation by physicist Puthoff, whose intelligence work for the Pentagon spans decades. Working the math on a whiteboard, the CEO of EarthTech International unveiled a formula for UFO propulsion that operates entirely within the laws of general relativity. By using high energy to compress space into a “warp bubble” that can be wrapped around an object, said object can move freely without being encumbered by gravity, light speed, the environment, etc.
“It is no longer a theoretical challenge,” Puthoff informed his small audience. “It is now a technological challenge.”
Recalls Elizondo: “The voices in the SCIF went silent — and stayed silent.”
If in fact physics is on the brink of a technological breakthrough, nobody has a monopoly on the math. Given the murderous history of our species, engineering that math into weapons platforms would be the first order of business. In that event, a level playing field would obviously threaten technologically superior observers keeping tabs on our progress. A threat of that nature would lend more coherence to their motivations; government files, after all, are crammed with reports of UFO interactions with military assets, from drones to nukes to jet fighters to aircraft carriers to restricted infrastructure.
How might “they” respond if we cross that threshold?
“The worst-case scenario for us is that they’re bad,” Elizondo writes. “If they’re bad, they could be conducting what the military calls an IBP operation – initial preparation of the battlefield.”
Stratton proposes a “honey pot” experiment, dubbed Operation Interloper, to acquire more data that might ultimately expose their vulnerabilities. The bait would be a nuclear-powered strike group – carriers, destroyers, subs, many of them with histories of UFO interactions – dispatched on maneuvers in the Atlantic. The fleet would be armed to the teeth with the latest innovations in sensor technology; given UFOs’ patterns for operating above and below oceans, the ambush stands to reap a windfall of knowledge.
With OUSD(I) “infested with compromised individuals,” according to Imminent, Stratton and Elizondo decide to circumvent the chain of command and run the Interloper proposal straight up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The inevitable brick wall dashes those aspirations at the end of 2016, when JCS rejects the idea. “Where I saw a bold initiative to make sense of what our servicemen and -women witnessed in the skies,” Elizondo writes, “leadership saw a great bucket of weirdness that was not within their usual daily list of tasks.”
What follows is a masterclass on the art of legal subterfuge.
Hoping to pre-empt catastrophic communications failures that preceded Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Elizondo in Imminent describes AATIP’s plan for the official verification and release of the Navy’s now-iconic Tic Tac, GoFast, and Gimbal videos. There’s a critical assist from rainmaker and former Deputy Assistant SecDef for Intelligence Christoper Mellon. Then comes an unlikely private platform from rock star Tom DeLonge, called To The Stars Academy, which enables a public discussion. It culminates in a media strategy to unclog the bureaucratic stovepipes, if only briefly.
The payoff results in unprecedented — and continuing — congressional legislation to excavate the truth behind the coverup. The fate of those endeavors, however, is pending.
Pulling the trigger by taking it to the press is also a kamikaze move that requires a proactive resignation from a career Elizondo loved. Imminent details its aftermath, the professional retaliation, its impact on his family, and the loss of income that has led to a still unsettled lifestyle. As for the “great bucket of weirdness” the DoD leadership so rigidly shrugs off? It continues to slosh over the edges, with or without Pentagon approval.
In a 2022 analysis for the EdgeScience journal, microbiologist and chemist Colm Kelleher – who co-authored Lacatski’s two books – wrote of a “hitchhiker effect” that can sometimes rattle paranormal researchers. He classifies the consequences for many of those who studied UFOs and related oddities at Bigelow’s “Skinwalker Ranch” in Utah as “profoundly altered perceptual environments.” But the particulars read more like notes from John Carpenter’s scratchpad:
“Nightmarish dogmen,” “black shadow people standing over their beds,” “orbs routinely floating through their homes,” and an “inferno of unexplained phenomena.” Furthermore, Kelleher wrote, all five DIA investigators who pursued anomalies out west reported experiencing spectral pop-ups long after they completed their field work. Some families and neighbors of the researchers also talked of seeing apparitions, a development Kelleher likened to a social contagion.
Once he committed to joining AATIP, the Imminent author wasn’t spared either. Soft green, basketball-sized orbs began materializing in the hallways of his home and disappearing through walls. Elizondo’s wife and kids saw them as well.
“Was this some sort of adversarial technology being used to conduct surveillance against my family and me? Or worse,” he writes, “was this all part of the UAP issue? Maybe another more advanced intelligence was looking into me and my colleagues because they knew we were looking into them?”
Imminent thus becomes the latest addition to an immense and expanding UFO corpus, but it is arguably its most exceptional. In the foreword, Mellon characterizes Elizondo as “a singular individual whose intrepid actions changed the course of history.”
“Absent Lue’s persistence and courage,” he continues, “the US government would still be denying the existence of UAP and failing to investigate a phenomenon that may well prove to be the greatest discovery in history.”
Time will decide that – just as it may reveal whether the terror in Colares was an outlier or an indicator of more authentic intention by an Other we want to believe is benevolent or, at worst, apathetic. We are a dangerously insecure species addicted to fairy tales. But as Imminent makes clear, we are also in dire need of leaders with enough guts to tell us when they’re over.
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