Lue Elizondo

Luis Elizondo, a former Army counter-intelligence officer who ran the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, now spearheads a public campaign for governmental transparency on unidentified anomalous phenomena.¹²

  Government service

    Early life and education

Raised in South Florida by a Cuban-émigré father and an artist mother, Elizondo earned a B.S. in microbiology and immunology from the University of Miami before entering Army intelligence in 1995.¹

    Combat and counter-espionage

He served multiple tours alongside Special Operations forces in Afghanistan after 9/11 and later directed global counter-terror and counter-espionage investigations as a Defense Department special agent-in-charge.¹

    Senior Pentagon roles

Between 2005 and 2008 he held assignments at the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, before managing a Special-Access Program inside the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.¹

    AATIP leadership

By 2012 Elizondo was leading the $22 million program that catalogued military encounters with unknown craft and assessed national-security implications.¹³

  Resignation and whistleblowing

On 3 October 2017 he resigned from the Pentagon, telling Secretary Mattis that unidentified craft represented an ignored aerospace threat.⁴ Two months later The New York Times and Politico revealed his role and published three Navy cockpit videos that had moved through AATIP channels.² The following day he joined Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy to pursue public disclosure.⁵

  Public profile

Appearances on 60 Minutes, Fox News, CNN and other outlets, the History Channel series Unidentified, and the 2024 memoir Imminent have kept UAPs at the center of congressional debate.^3678910

  Timeline of public milestones

  Network and collaborators

  Pushback and controversies

An internal 2017 Pentagon paper asserted that Elizondo “aggrandized” his role and hinted at a possible security-information investigation; subsequent DoD statements questioned whether he ever held official UFO duties.⁴² The 2024 AARO historical review cited his claims yet found no confirmed extraterrestrial hardware, a judgment Elizondo called selective in later interviews.¹⁶

An investigative Washington Spectator report (20 Jul 2023) said the Securities and Exchange Commission was preparing a fraud investigation into To The Stars Academy over investor solicitations that touted reverse-engineered warp-drive craft, naming Elizondo alongside Christopher Mellon and CEO Tom DeLonge as executives potentially liable.¹⁷

  Current status (June 2025)

Elizondo lives in Wyoming, sits on the board of the UAP Disclosure Fund and continues classified briefings with House and Senate staff while promoting Imminent on a national tour.¹⁶¹¹ He argues that congressional subpoena power is now the surest path to test legacy crash-retrieval claims.

  References

1. congress.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. politico.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. cbsnews.com ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. documents2.theblackvault.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. en.wikipedia.org ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. foxnews.com ↩ ↩²

7. history.com ↩ ↩²

8. amazon.com ↩ ↩²

9. harpercollins.com ↩

10. instagram.com ↩

11. defensescoop.com ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. nypost.com ↩

13. washingtonpost.com ↩

14. history.com ↩

15. history.com ↩

16. defensescoop.com ↩

17. washingtonspectator.org ↩