'Imminent': What Luis Elizondo's Pentagon-Cleared Book Claims, and What the Pentagon Says

The book had to survive the Pentagon before it could reach a bookstore.

Luis Elizondo's memoir, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs," came out from HarperCollins on Tuesday, August 20, 2024, after what The New York Times described as a yearlong Pentagon security review. Some passages still arrived blacked out.

What made it through is a former Defense Department official's on-paper version of the biggest claim in the UFO world: that the U.S. has been quietly recovering craft, and bodies, that aren't ours.

The Pentagon's answer was short. It had found nothing to back that up.

Who wrote it

Elizondo is the former Army counterintelligence special agent who resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 and became the public face of the New York Times story that revealed AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

In 2017 the Times described him as running that program. That description has been disputed for years. In 2019, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough said Elizondo "had no assigned responsibilities for AATIP," according to statements published by The Black Vault. Former Sen. Harry Reid wrote that Elizondo's "involvement and leadership in this program" was a matter of record, the same outlet reported.

"Imminent" doesn't claim the top job. The Debrief noted that Elizondo writes that the people he worked with "were my equals."

The headline claim: a crash-retrieval program

According to the Times, which obtained an advance copy, Elizondo asserts in the book that a decades-long crash-retrieval program has operated as a supersecret umbrella group of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors.

He writes that technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes, the Times reported.

He doesn't hedge on the bigger picture either.

"Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species."

The craft and whoever controls them pose "at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity," he writes.

The day before publication, he went on "CBS Mornings" and said the phenomena are "not made by humans," according to CBS News.

How it got past the censors

This is the part that gives the book its weight, and the part most often misunderstood.

The Daily Beast reported that the manuscript "took a whole year to pass Department of Defense censors." The Times reported the same yearlong review, and then added the key caveat: "Pentagon clearance does not imply endorsement."

Prepublication review checks for classified information. It does not fact-check. A cleared book can still be wrong.

The Times also reported how Elizondo navigated it. He won approval in part by attributing some information to other people whose comments had already been cleared. He told the paper his clearances prevented him from naming the source of his own firsthand knowledge.

The Associated Press review noted several passages are redacted, and that Elizondo writes repeatedly that he cannot say more.

The orbs in the house

The most personal story in the book has nothing to do with Pentagon vaults.

According to the Times, Elizondo describes green, glowing orbs about the size of a basketball that entered his home, on and off, for more than seven years. He writes that they passed through walls and seemed to be under intelligent control. He says his wife, his two daughters and neighbors saw them too.

No independent documentation of those events has been made public. The account rests on Elizondo and the witnesses he names.

What the Pentagon said

The Defense Department's response, given to the Times by spokesperson Sue Gough, did not engage the book line by line.

Gough said the department's current UAP program "continues its review of the historical record of U.S. government UAP programs." She said it "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims" about programs possessing or reverse-engineering extraterrestrial materials.

That echoed the March 2024 Historical Record Report from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which "found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology."

AARO's report also took a position on Elizondo's old program. "AATIP was never an official DoD program," it said, describing the name as an informal label tied to the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP effort. The Debrief noted that James Lacatski, AAWSAP's former director, has also said AATIP began as an unclassified nickname for AAWSAP, while The Debrief itself said AARO's report contained factual inaccuracies.

The supporters and the reviewers

Elizondo didn't publish alone. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon wrote the foreword, the Times reported. Physicist Harold Puthoff, quoted in the book, told the paper that Elizondo "has briefed us on information that he obtained that appears to be firsthand data."

The AP's reviewer found the book thorough but heavy on acronyms. Elizondo argues that Defense Department leaders often thwarted his team, and that the defense establishment treats elected lawmakers as "temporary hires," according to the AP review. The reviewer pushed back on the title's urgency, arguing that the government's slow pace suggests it doesn't see an imminent threat.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• "Imminent" was published in August 2024 after a yearlong Pentagon security review, and clearance does not mean endorsement.
• Elizondo alleges a decades-long crash-retrieval program has recovered nonhuman technology and biological remains.
• The Pentagon says it has found no verifiable information to substantiate claims of programs possessing or reverse-engineering extraterrestrial materials.

What we don't

• Who Elizondo's firsthand sources are. He says his clearances prevent him from naming them.
• What sits under the redactions, and whether any of it bears on the crash-retrieval claims.
• Whether AARO's ongoing historical review will address the book's specific allegations.

A claim with a security stamp, but no proof

Here's the honest scorecard. "Imminent" is not evidence. It's testimony, from a man who worked inside the Pentagon's UAP world and who now says the most explosive thing anyone in that world can say.

The Pentagon checked his manuscript for secrets and let it go. Then it said, in effect, that it has looked for the program he describes and found nothing verifiable.

Both of those things can be true at once. That's the uncomfortable middle the UAP story keeps landing in.

Three months later, Elizondo would repeat much of this under oath before Congress. But in August 2024, the question was simpler: is a Pentagon-cleared memoir from a former insider enough to move you, or does it change nothing until someone shows the hardware? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

• A memoir offers an insider's perspective into the Pentagon's UFO hunt (The New York Times, syndicated) — The New York Times via The San Juan Daily Star, 2024
• Imminent: Former Counterintelligence Agent's New Memoir Reveals an Insider's Look at UFOs — The Debrief, 2024
• Luis Elizondo discusses new book "Imminent" and the Pentagon's UAP investigations — CBS News, 2024
• Pentagon Alien Hunter Luis Elizondo: Why I Know We Are Not Alone or Safe — The Daily Beast, 2024
• Book Review: Former Pentagon insider says US holds back UFO info in 'Imminent' — Associated Press via North State Journal, 2024
• Pentagon Reinforces Mr. Luis Elizondo Had No Responsibilities on AATIP — The Black Vault, 2019
• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024
• Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program — The New York Times, 2017