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This is a topic that doesn’t belong into the provenance of any government or organization or institution.
~Luis Elizondo
~~~
On April 20th, the former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program, Luis Elizondo, met virtually with some heavyweights in the national media. Reporters “attending” and asking questions were Julian Barnes, intelligence and national security reporter for the New York Times; Gadi Schwartz, correspondent for NBC News; Alex Horton, reporter for The Washington Post; Kristin Fisher, White House correspondent for Fox News; Brandi Vincent, government and emerging technical journalist for Nextgov and Duncan Phenix for Mystery Wire and KLAS-TV out of Las Vegas.
As always, George Knapp and Mystery Wire had excellent coverage, including video of the fifty-four minute event, broken into three parts.
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Here are my notes, quotes and comments on what Lue Elizondo said during the virtual press conference. I’m also using my recollection of what Elizondo has said in previous interviews to fill in a few blanks. The transcript portion of this blog is edited for clarity and unless noted, everything here is me paraphrasing what Elizondo said during this event. If it’s a direct quote, I note that with quotation marks. My comments are in red.
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Luis Elizondo Media Event
The 180 Day report should be very interesting. The best case scenario is an interim report with a thorough, follow-up report some point in the near future. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we do know but the good news is we’re finally taking it seriously.” Could some of this technology in our skies be drones, or new, hypersonic test vehicles connected to adversaries or, possibly our own tech? It can definitely be all of those or may be none of those. Elizondo just returned from DC the day before this event and is still actively engaged in this effort. He and the other folks he’s working with are supporting the efforts of the UAP Task Force.
There seems to be a lot more support than last year and that includes bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Regarding the executive branch and bipartisan support coming from there, he goes on to mention the recent comments from former CIA directors James Woolsey and John O. Brennan and former Director of National intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who are all saying, “It’s real, there’s something there and we need to look at it. And these folks are from both sides of the aisle, whether they’re liberal, conservative or anything in between.”
Congratulations to the folks in the media who, not too long ago, wouldn’t have touched this subject because it’s, “fraught with stigma and taboo” and “decades and decades worth of nonsense.” While working for the government, Elizondo didn’t want to touch it, either but he had no choice as it was given to him. “There’s a reason why, when you say the word UFO, tinfoil hats come to mind. That’s just the reality of it.” But that’s changing, and once you remove the stigma and focus on the national security aspects, as in, “What is it?” “How does it work?” “What are its intentions?” it becomes clear this isn’t a silly conversation. We’re talking about someone, somewhere “displaying beyond next generation technology in our controlled airspace and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. If we just take the word UFO out of it and just say ‘Russia or China has the ability to fly in our airspace, unimpeded and without detection, within minutes of taking off,” that’s is a real problem.”
We deal with this issue every day “where a Russian Bear, surveillance aircraft will fly off the coast of California or Alaska and the first thing we do are scramble two F-22s and it’s all over on the front page of the news because it’s a provocation.” But in the (UAP/UFO) situation, when we have the same exact scenario, it gets ignored because there’s not a North Korean tail number of Russian star on the tail. “It’s crickets” and nobody wants to have the conversation, and that’s a problem.
Elizondo opens up the floor for questions.
Julian Barnes, NYT: “You sort of said that you expect an interim report, and then maybe a follow on report. Is this the DNI kind of biding time? What is the sort of best case scenario for what they may say beyond what has been told to us by the Navy? If it is an interim report, what’s the most we can hope for in terms of new information?”
Elizondo makes the argument that 180 Days is not long enough to remodel some kitchens let alone provide a complete report to Congress on decades worth of data on UFOs. He compares it to 9/11, which was a “horrible tragedy and a huge, intelligence failure on behalf of our country and it took nearly three years to come up with the 9/11 Commission Report and that was because of one failure. If it turns out that this (UFOs) has been occurring for decades, which it appears that it has been, then what we’re dealing with is an enormous intelligence failure, despite the very best of our 18 intelligence members from CIA, NRO and NGA and everybody else.” Despite the best in our human, signals and imagery intelligence, “we’ve been blindsided and somehow we’ve been leapfrogged by a foreign adversary. Can you imagine the intelligence failure that would be, despite the billons of dollars that we allocate to this effort? Furthermore, the fact that Congress wasn’t informed. The fact that we actually knew about it and it was occurring and we never informed Congress or the chain of command. So, therein lies the problem.”
Back to the 180 Day Report and Elizondo’s best-case scenario. An interim report is provided to Congress. “I suspect it’s going to list a lot more of the unknowns than knowns. Basically, say, ‘Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know. And here’s our plan of attack to answer those questions for you. And give us a little more time and we’ll write another comprehensive report, hopefully, this time, a little bit more satisfying.'”
When Elizondo was working in intelligence, some investigations, such as an internal audit, would take eight months just to get the necessary clearances for access to the information and another year to do an assessment. There’s really no way to meet the intent of Congress and provide them with a “comprehensive, vulnerability assessment” of UFOs in 180 days. If we get an interim report, he expects it will include an admission that there’s something there but we don’t know what it is, and they may conclude, “It could be some sort of a new, super advanced drone technology but it could be something else. And here’s our best plan for trying to figure it out.”
Gadi Schwartz, NBC News: “I know that we’ve seen what is possibly a slide from a briefing, that may have shown something that was deemed declassified. When it comes to requesting documents and understanding that declassification process, are there parts of those slides, or are there parts of those briefings that have already been declassified and are available for public or Congressional Review already? And if that’s the case, where do they live? Is it the DoD? Is it with (Pentagon spokesperson) Susan (Gough)? Is it with the Navy? What would be the process of going about requesting those documents?”
Elizondo: “It’s not a one-stop shop, unfortunately. I think that’s the intent of the UAP Task Force, to create that centralized belly button that we haven’t had. Unfortunately, that information resides in disparate locations throughout the IC, Intelligence Community and in various pockets. That’s been the problem. It’s not centralized located and not centrally accessible. This is why this 180 Day Report is gonna be so tough. You asked, is it possible to have unclassified information within a classified presentation? Absolutely, we do it all the time.” The three videos released in 2017 and released again in 2020 were “unclassified to begin with but they were residing on a classified system,” and that’s not uncommon. That’s why the DOPSR process had to be used in order to make them releasable.
“When we do presentations, and briefings – informative briefings to our chain of command and Congress – it’s routine that you may have a slide that’s classified Secret or Top Secret but pieces of information are unclassified. And then let’s not forget, if you have enough unclassified information jammed together, you could actually have yourself a classified product, so that’s not unusual, either. Should one go to Susan Gough to get this information? No, because she is a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) and not operationally engaged. Her job is to simply communicate with with the media and the public. And unfortunately, sometimes that communication hasn’t been very consistently delivered in the past. But that’s neither here nor there.”
Well, since we’re here…
7 Church asks if Lue will have anything to do with UAPTF. Simply put, yet.
Church brings up Sue Gough. Folks like SG come and go.
Dana White confirmed Lue's role in AATIP.
Lue: [Susan Gough] "doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground."
Yes!!!
— Joe Murgia (@TheUfoJoe) February 3, 2021
Elizondo thinks the best way to acquire this information is via the FOIA but “you would have to know where every bit of this information is and where it resides.” There were plenty of times, during his time with government, where he had information that was releasable via FOIA but it was “embedded into a much more comprehensive product and there was no way of stripping that out.” FOIA can be effective but it’s a bit of an art and sometimes, when they say no, you have to resubmit. It won’t always get you what you’re looking for and it’s laborious, exhausting and takes time but it’s the best we have right now. “Right now, what the media is doing is best thing you can do. Taking this topic seriously, looking at it from a national security perspective and applying pressure. Asking the PAOs the hard questions. Is this releasable and if not, why? How do we get to yes, how do we make this information releasable?
“Another way is to go engage elected officials directly. A lot of these people have been been given classified briefings, very nuanced information and sensitive information. And maybe there’s a way that they can tell you, as the media, ‘Hey, look, this is what I was briefed on’ without going into any specific details. There are members of Congress in the Senate right now that have been extremely forthcoming on this topic and I suspect they’re going to continue to be to be increasingly transparent as more information comes to light.”
(I’ve made the argument that there must be a way to allow members of Congress who, according to Elizondo, came out of briefings saying, “this ain’t ours” to speak to the media about what they’ve seen. Senator Marco Rubio saying, “I saw videos of craft making 90 degree turns, stopping on a dime, then taking off like a bullet. It was amazing!” would do it. The main argument about letting us see those videos is it gives away “sources and methods.” A comment from a Senator will do no such thing. Below is the Q&A between Jimmy Church and Lue Elizondo from February of this year. I can’t find the tweet it came from to give credit to that person.)
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Gadi Schwartz, NBC News: “I know that we’ve heard the five observables before and the video and a lot of the evidence that we’ve seen doesn’t necessarily show those in those snippets, but in the totality of an experience, we’re led to believe that these things are happening. In terms of signals intelligence, satellite imagery, sonar, radar, what have you, we get teeny tiny pieces of something that’s kind of in context, sometimes completely out of context. When it comes to what the UAP Task Force has, what the DoD has, and what Congress eventually will have, what does that picture look like? And is there better proof than a picture or is there a better proof than a video that may or may not be declassified?”
Absolutely. Like an investigative reporter, an intelligence officer never relies on single-source reporting. The danger in just releasing a video or photo is “you don’t have the other data backing it up, such as the radar data, maybe from multiple radar arrays, or other camera footage from a different angle, and some of the pilots’ testimonies. You’re only getting a snapshot in time, at that time, and that’s problematic because it’s hard (not?) to jump to conclusions and it’s natural for us to try and fill in the blanks with our own information. That’s problematic.” The job of the UAP Task Force is to collect all the data. The images we see in a video (or photos?) that’s released in an unauthorized way, you don’t get the complete picture. With two of the videos that came out in 2017, at least you have the audio from the exasperated pilots talking about a whole fleet going against the wind and “What the hell is that?” That helps because it adds context to what you’re seeing in the video but you still need to be careful about drawing any conclusions.
“The more we sensitize our intelligence apparatus and our national security apparatus on the reality of these things and the more we compel our sailors and soldiers and airman and whatnot, to report this – our Marines – the more they’re going to be looking at the sky and the more they’re going to see.” A lot of what they’ll see is going to have a prosaic explanation such as a balloon, drones or test flights of rockets and aircraft, and we need to be prepare for that and come up with a filtering system for the UAP Task Force so that we can separate the wheat from the chaff and only include data that “comports with the five observables.” In the future, maybe we’ll find more observables. Maybe six, or it might be ten. We know five right now and compared to our conventional technology, they’re “pretty exotic.”
Let’s not forget that this is a global phenomenon and we not only have our friends and allies wanting to, “enter into bilateral agreements for sharing UFO/UAP-related information, but we also have foreign adversaries as well that are looking into this.” This is not just a U.S. issue. Russia and China are as interested in this subject as we are. And just like with Foo Fighters (Lue didn’t reference Foo Fighters ~Joe), they’re probably wondering if it’s our super-secret technology, while at the same time, we’re wondering if it’s theirs. But it’s not our technology we’re using against ourselves.
Gadi Schwartz: “Having been where you sat, what type of evidence have you seen that is unexplainable today? Whether it be satellite or sonar or radar, or pictures or video or testimony? I know you can’t get into specific encounters but when it comes to the type of evidence that currently exists within the government, what type of evidence is there?”
There’s not a gold standard but Elizondo wishes there was. He’s seen many extraordinary things but he won’t elaborate or share anything about the classified cases but as he’s said before, they have videos that are 20-25 minutes long and other cases where these objects are very compelling and fifty feet from the cockpit.
The connection between our nuclear capabilities and UFOs is brought up and it’s important so I’m going to include all of what was said.
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Elizondo: “The most concerning, not most compelling, but the most concerning are those incidents that involve our nuclear equities. There seems to be a very distinct congruency between associated UAP activity and our nuclear technology, whether it be propulsion or weapon systems or whatnot. And that’s concerning, to the point where we’ve actually had some of our nuclear capabilities disabled by these things. Again, let’s put this in the context of foreign, adversarial technology. If Russia or China had the ability to disable our nuclear strike capability or defense capability, that’s pretty significant. That’s a concern for us. It should be.”
Gadi Schwartz, NBC News: “Just to clarify, you’re saying that our nuclear capabilities – whether they’re weapons, or whether it’s some sort of nuclear power plant – you’re saying that these things have been disabled by something we can’t explain?
Elizondo: “There is absolutely evidence that comports to the notion that UAPs have an active interest in our nuclear technology, and have, in the past, interfered with some of our nuclear capabilities. That’s fact, yes.”
Alex Horton, Washington Post: “You had mentioned that some of these things could be drones or hypersonics, etc.” Occam’s Razor would suggest, you know, sometimes it could be. There is a delta between what the DoD and others would acknowledge, publicly, is beyond their capabilities but privately, no, it is perhaps the norm or observed by other places, especially adversaries like Russia and China. These videos started to come out around 2017 and we’re four years later. Are there capabilities or moments or further analyses, that you’re aware of, where some of these well-known videos or others…you say, ‘Well, we’ve looked at it further and that could be a drone or it could be a hypersonic and here’s why.’ Can you describe any of those moments where further investigation revealed, perhaps, something that was terrestrial and explainable?
Elizondo says their intended focus and hope in AATIP was to always try to “deliberately find the conventional explanation for what we were seeing” as they didn’t like unanswered questions. Going in, they “always presumed, initially, that there was some sort of conventional explanation. But this is the birth of the five observables. We have the technological capability to demonstrate one or maybe two of the observables. But not all five.”
The Five Observables
Instantaneous Acceleration
Hypersonic Velocity
Low Observability
Transmedium Travel
Positive Life or Antigravity
Elizondo goes through the five observables in detail, so for those new new to the topic, watch this.
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Elizondo: “And so, when you have all of those observables being displayed by a single vehicle, or a single thing, whatever this is, now you’re forced to scratch your head and ask the hard questions. Are we really dealing with some sort of adversarial technology or are we dealing with something fundamentally different? And therein lies the question and that’s where we are today. This is why it’s important that we leave all options on the table until they’re no longer on the table. I caution people running down the rabbit hole, prematurely. There’s a lot of possibilities of what this could be. But at the same time, I think we need to keep all options on the table until they’re no longer options.”
Alex Horton, Washington Post: Is there “evidence that you’ve seen or understood that specifically suggested or concluded that it had an effect of forcing something offline? Or could it be something like it was an unknown thing or a potential hazard and someone, you know, a human being made the choice to take something offline as a precautionary measure?”
(Once again, this is too important not to transcribe the entire answer.)
Elizondo: “Great question. Well, there’s actually a third option, too and I’ll get to that. So the first option is, is there a direct interference? Yes, there appears to be some sort of direct interference, at times. Could this be a human doing something to disable it as a preventive measure? No, that does not appear to be the case. We have no information substantiating that. Now, the third option is it could be a result of some sort of technological interference, very much like the old car radios and an alternator. A lot of times, you’d get that feedback in an old radio as the alternator spun up because the electromagnetic, if you will, emanations coming from the alternator would interfere with the radio and so you’d get this weird buzzing noise on the radio. It’s not necessarily the intent of the alternator to interfere with radio, it’s just a byproduct of what it does. So that is also an option. It could very well be that this technology, because of its application, could be interfering with our nuclear technology. That is certainly possible as well. We don’t have enough data, yet to say conclusively one way or the other.”
(I always wondered what that high-pitched, whining noise was on my AM radio as I listened to sports in the car. Thanks to Lue, now I know!
On a more serious note, in the past, Elizondo has spoken about and George Knapp has reported on, nuclear missiles in the old Soviet Union (Ukraine) being put into launch mode as a UFO hovered nearby.
From the Knapp report:
“In 1982, a UFO hovered over a nuclear missile base in the Ukraine for hours. Unexplainably, codes were entered and the missiles were ready for launch, until the UFO vanished.”
If that’s true, I think the “UFO technology/propulsion unintentionally affecting the missiles” theory is weakened considerably. I wish Elizondo had brought up the Soviet incident.)
~~~
Kristin Fisher, Fox News: “Thank you so much for doing this, this is fascinating. I cover the White House for Fox so I’ve got a White House, sort of, related question for you. I know you said there’s bipartisan support for this in the executive branch but I’m curious, based on your experience and what you’ve noticed so far, how seriously do you think that the Biden White House is taking this threat? And what sort of outstanding questions do you have for them in the lead up to this report being released?”
Elizondo thinks, “there is a sufficient amount of critical mass within the executive branch where the Biden administration is aware of this.” He goes on to point out that there are a lot of pressing issues and distractions going on right now, including Covid, transnational terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and humanitarian and political issues. They’re busy dealing with those distractions and have a lot on their plate. If he were to recommend anything to the Biden administration, it would be to “dedicate the necessary amount of resources and attention to this, so we can get some of the answers. The government has already said, for the record, this is real. We’re beyond that. We’re beyond the rubicon at that point. It’s crossed, this is real. Whatever this is, this is real. If it turns out, let’s just go down this road for a moment, [to be] foreign, adversarial technology and it turns out the United States has had strategic surprise and that we have been leapfrogged technologically by decades, by a foreign adversary, this would be one of the greatest intelligence failures in the history of this nation. It would be absolutely catastrophic and I think we’d then have a lot tougher questions to then ask ourselves.”
He hopes that the administration takes it seriously and states that he’s always been non-partisan. His job was to serve the president and “execute the will of the president because that’s the will of the people. This administration should take this topic seriously, which I think they will, I think they do. That’s great! They’ve got a lot to deal with and this is just one of them. So, by no means am I saying this is the most important thing they need to deal with but it is certainly something they should deal with at some point.”
Kristin Fisher, Fox News: “You say that there is a lot of possibilities about what this could be, from a foreign adversary to something else entirely. Could you just walk me through what the possibilities are? I feel that it’s a very basic question but I’d love to get your take on it.”
Elizondo: “It’s one of the most important questions, though, and here’s why. My background is in science. I graduated college…microbiology, immunology and parasitology. And as an investigator, it’s always, ‘just the facts, ma’am,’ kind of guy. No nonsense. So, that’s the way I pursue things. We as human beings, a lot of scientists speculate because we are what we call cardio social animals. We look in terms of of extremes. Everything we do is almost in a binary sense. If someone were to describe you something, it’s usually in terms terms of it’s good, it’s bad, it’s hot, it’s cold, it’s black, it’s white, it’s up or down, it’s left or right. And that is because some scientists now speculate because most of our time in our mother’s womb was listening to the rhythmic beat of our mother’s heart. And that’s true with all of us that were, you know, born. And that’s maybe why we look in terms of this phenomena this way. It’s either from Earth or from outer space, right? But we realize that’s not necessarily true.
“In the world of quantum physics and nature, we realize that there’s many other options in between. And every time we try to put something in a nice, neat little box in the world of science, or nature, we’re usually proven wrong. And I think this topic is no different. And this is why I say all options need to be on the table. Most of us would say, “Well, if it’s not us, if it’s not Russian and it’s not U.S., then it must be….I hate to use the word but extraterrestrial. Not necessarily. (Not sure why he hates to use that word as it should always be one of the possibilities considered. ~Joe)
There’s all sorts of other options that this could be. This could be something that’s frankly, as natural as us, could be from this planet and we’re only at the point now, technologically, where we can interact. And that’s…as crazy as this may sound, and certainly I’m not saying I prescribe to this, it’s just an option.
“We all were aware of Newtonian physics at the end of the Renaissance, and Sir Isaac Newton introduced the notion of gravity and whatnot and force equals mass times acceleration. And along comes this guy with funny hair last century named Einstein and proposes relativity, and a whole different model of the universe in which that space and time are actually connected. space and time can be stretched, it can be compressed and our whole notion of the universe, actually, should be different.
And then, forty years ago, we really have the beginnings of quantum physics and really a better understanding. And as bizarre as quantum physics is, we’re now recognizing that’s really one of the fundamental ways to understand the universe we live in. And as crazy as it may be, someone once explained it as, “You have a box and a dog walks into a box and out walks two cats.” And yet, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. And so my point being is that there are a lot of options here and this is why I say we need to keep all options on the table until they’re no longer on the table. I don’t know the answer. Frankly, I don’t think anybody does. And anybody who tells you they do, I would approach them very cautiously. The bottom line is we don’t know and we we need to ask all the questions. And this is why probably, this is a bigger question than just for national security. This is not just a potential national security threat, we probably need to bring in academics and scientists and a whole bunch of folks to have this conversation. Yes, there’s a national security issue here but there’s also probably more to it.
(As far as quantum physics, I know about Schrodinger’s Cat and the double slit experiment but I don’t know about a dog walking into a box and two cats walking out. Is the Aguadilla UFO video, where an object splits into two, related at all?)
~~~
Brandi Vincent, Nextgov: “I’m really curious about lawmakers’ appetite for this on the hill. You mentioned those briefings you’ve been to recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? The lawmakers engaging you, you mentioned bipartisan, please elaborate. Are they engaging with you, with the invitation on their behalf or was it more you reaching out to them? And would you say that the number of those interested in this is growing?”
Elizondo doesn’t want to share anything specific about these lawmakers and his interactions with them without their permission, as many of them are in the process of fact-finding and he doesn’t want to interfere with that process. But…”What I will say is that it’s been my honor and privilege from time to time to to interact with with certain people on the legislative and the executive branch of our government to help facilitate this conversation, and be able to hopefully provide some lessons learned when I was the director of AATIP where maybe some things we got wrong, so they don’t make the same mistake and we can spend taxpayer money in a responsible way. Let’s not reinvent the wheel here or in this case, let’s not make some of the same mistakes. But I will tell you, every time I’ve had this engagement, for the most part, there’s a unanimous reaction of, ‘Yes, this is a potential national security issue.'”
(I’ve never heard Elizondo reference mistakes made by AATIP so hopefully, one day, he gets to elaborate on that. He mentioned reinventing the wheel so that could be a reference to other, alleged UFO programs that have supposedly been going on for decades. If those programs collected boatloads of data and were running at the same time as (or before) AATIP, they may have been collected similar data and were redundant. Thus, a waste of taxpayer’s money.
In the next part of his answer, he went into his Muddy Bootprints story that he’s told numerous times. It deals with whether or not we should see this phenomenon as a threat. If it’s new to you, read (or hear) about it here. ~Joe)
This could be a threat, if it wanted to be, so we need to figure it out and senior people in the executive branch and legislative branch are looking at it in the same way. However, “There are some pockets of elements within the executive branch, particularly, that are very resistant to this topic. And unfortunately, [they] were one of the reasons why I had such a difficult time when I when I first left the department. They were not happy about having this conversation and they felt that it made them look inept. They felt it, in some cases, that it challenged their philosophical and theological belief systems.”
(I didn’t know some of these folks felt this would make them look inept but it makes sense. We have objects of unknown origin, operating with impunity over some of our most sensitive air space and the people who are supposed to protect us can’t do anything about it. I’ve heard Elizondo talk (and write) about the folks who didn’t want this subject studied because it was a “threat to their belief system.” On July 29th, 2018, on “UFO Classified,” Dr. Eric Davis expanded upon that point.
“You’ve got a mix of people. You’ve got those Collin’s Elite and they are not an organized group of people, by any means. It is just individuals, here and there, that were born and raised in Kansas or Oklahoma or parts of Texas or elsewhere in the South or the Midwest. And they were raised in fundamental and evangelical churches, protestant churches. Some are even very fundamentalist catholics and there are some of them that are even mormons. And they have very extreme views about UFOs, and the aliens or the UFOnauts that occupy them and they think they’re Satanic and the UFOs are demonic technology. And so they are the roadblocks. They provide obstruction whenever they’re in the chain of command, whenever they come across something like this, they’re very sensitive to it and they’ll do whatever they can to expose such a program, shut it down, block it, run interference, do anything they can to either stop it, keep it from being implemented, or keep it from getting funded or keep it from getting new funding.”
~Dr. Eric Davis
~~~
Elizondo continued to describe reactions of certain people during his briefings on UFOs: “They just couldn’t process it. I would sit there and give an hour briefing, I’d bring pilots in and the radar data and the operators and we’d give this big briefing with videos and photographs. And at the end of the briefing, I would just get this blank stare. And they would just look at me and say, ‘So, how are those Miami Dolphins doing this season?'”
(I can relate. A few years ago, I was driving for Uber and whenever possible, I would bring up UFOs. One conversation went like this…
Me: Did you hear about the F-18 pilot who chased a UFO? Lots of military folks are seeing these things.
Passenger: Yes! I saw that! Very interesting! What are those things?
Same Passenger, Two minutes later: So, what do you think about that game on Sunday between the Patriots and Packers?)
~~~
People will process this information differently but Elizondo remains optimistic because everyone seems to be taking it seriously, albeit with caution, and with diligence. And they’re asking the right questions. Whether you’re Republican, Democrat or Independent, he applauds anybody for taking this on and he’s happy to see the conversation finally taking place.
Question: “Can you just elaborate really quickly on your motivation? What drives you? Your journey with this has been a long one so what keeps you pushing forward?”
Elizondo gets emotional and talks about his oath to serve and defend this country and goes into his family background and why he joined the military. For THE best look at Elizondo’s life from an early age, I highly recommend this fantastic article by Billy Cox of the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
Elizondo passionately explained, “it’s about the truth. This is a topic that doesn’t belong into the provenance of any government or organization or institution. I took and oath and when I left the government, I was never relieved of that oath. They never said, ‘Okay, Lue, you don’t have to do this any more.’ Ironically enough, I left department to finish the very job that they gave me in the first place. It wasn’t out of disloyalty I left the department, it was actually out of a profound sense of loyalty. Serving with people like Sean Cahill over here who were witness to something extraordinary and yet their chain of command didn’t want them to report it. In some cases. people lost their jobs, they lost their flight status, they’ve lost their security clearance and were told that they were crazy. And yet it turns out this was real! This was real!”
(We’ve heard the story about Elizondo’s predecessor, rocket scientist, James Lacatski, whose career was ruined by these folks, but I’ve never heard Elizondo talk about people losing their flight status, security clearance or being told they were crazy. I really hope the national media digs in, finds out who these assholes are and tell the world what they did.)
Elizondo continues: “I can’t imagine the burden this has been on the shoulders of some people. As tough as it was for me, I had it pretty good compared to some other people that lost their careers over this and that’s not right. That’s wrong. And I’m doing this for our men and women in uniform who are still coming into contact with UAPs, as of today, like, this week. This hasn’t stopped, this is continuing to occur. And so, I do this for them, they need a voice. Someone has to be willing to talk to our elected officials and our officials in government to have the conversation. It doesn’t matter how inconvenient it is, how uncomfortable it is or how unpopular it is. As I’ve said before, this is not a conversation like fine wine, where the longer we keep a cork on it, the better it gets. This is a conversation like rotten fruit or vegetables in the refrigerator and the longer it stays in there, the more it’s going to stink. We know now beyond a reasonable doubt…”
Elizondo says his job as an investigator was very simple: collect and speak the truth and present that information to the jury, aka The American People. His opinion is irrelevant. If the American people decide they don’t see this as a priority and don’t want to do anything about it, he’s okay with that. He’ll go retire and work at Walmart and, “leave all this craziness behind because it’s taken a tremendous toll on me.”
(I feel for Elizondo and don’t want to make light of what he’s gone through. But on a lighter note, I can see it now!
Elizondo: Hi, I’m Lue and welcome to Walmart. Have you heard about The Five Observables?
Elderly shopper: Is that a Motown band?
Elizondo: Have a nice day. 😎 )
~~~
He says all of this has taken a tremendous toll on him but to not allow people to have that conversation because of fear of reprisal, social taboo and stigma is far more dangerous than anything coming into our airspace that we can’t control.
Duncan Phenix, KLAS and “Mystery Wire”: “Can you address the concern that some people have with these sightings, such as the recent pyramid video? Is it equipment issues or errors or are military personnel also seeing UAP with their own eyes and reporting what they personally experienced?”
(This subject has been part of a heated debate recently on social media so I’m going to include all of Elizondo’s words. The story was broken by filmmaker, Jeremy Corbell and KLAS journalist, George Knapp. ~Joe)
Elizondo: “Yes, and yes. There’s tremendous, eyewitness accounts that’s backed up by electro-optical data and radar data to substantiate that the event is real, and it’s occurring. And in other cases, you have a hyper-sensitization of individuals, and they’re reporting strange things in the sky and it turns out that sometimes those strange things aren’t so strange. And that’s what one would expect, right? So the more people that look up in the sky, the more people are going to notice things and the more you’re going to get misidentifications. But that’s okay, because that’s the job of the UAP Task Force – should be, anyways – to create filters to separate the wheat and chaff and be able to determine what is regular and what’s not. I mean now, with today’s technology, I can get on my personal device and look at flight tracker, and I can see if that’s a 737 I see over the horizon with blinking lights, I can see if it’s a helicopter, or I can look on the horizon over the water and use my application using AIS to determine…is that a ship and I’m actually looking at a shrimp boat and the lights off of a shrimp boat, you know? That’s okay.
“The problem is that a lot of these aren’t…they’re not drones, they’re not an effect of the infrared camera, because you might have five or six different infrared cameras looking at the same thing. And they’re not all failing you, they don’t all have…suffer from the same issue. So that’s when you have to scratch your head and say, ‘Okay, we’re actually dealing with something here.’
“Let’s not forget, our men and women in uniform are trained observers, just like law enforcement. And if I haven’t said this before, I’ll do it now. This is an example. These are training aids that I had when I was literally in the military as an intelligence officer in Korea. And you can see here these are silhouettes of aircraft, enemy aircraft. And pilots are trained to the same level, if not more, to be trained observers in the air.
From: https://www.freevector.com/military-aircraft-silhouettes
~~~
They have to make a split second decision. Is that an enemy aircraft? Is it an Su-22? Is it a MiG-25? Is it a European tornado? Is it an F-16? What us it? And they have to be able to do that from 20 miles away. Their life depends on it. And so when they’re reporting to you that they are encountering something that could do barrel rolls over their aircraft that doesn’t have wings doesn’t have control surfaces, rudders, cockpits, anything that we normally associate with a traditional aircraft, you gotta say, ‘Okay then…well, what is it?’
“Is it some sort of foreign technology? Sure, I guess it could be, could be some sort of new type of drone. But you know, drones still have to abide by our understanding of the laws of physics. And therein lies a question, again. Okay, if it’s a foreign, adversarial drone, how come we don’t have anything, to do to…I mean, look, we have counter drone technology on ships, I’m not going to say what they are, but we can knock them out of the sky. Drones aren’t a problem for us. That’s a fact. We have radar on ships, we know if it’s a plane. We know if it’s a military aircraft. These are simple things to figure out. It’s not like someone gets on the ship one day with some infrared binoculars and says, ‘Hey, that’s [something] strange in the sky, I’m going to go ahead and record that.’ The reason why they’re recording is because it’s probably something interesting in the skies. In some cases, yeah, there could be a readily, explainable explanation for it but from my experience, there’s a lot that aren’t and are very compelling. And they’re displaying the five observables, which is a totally different conversation. That’s…we’re definitely not talking about a drone at that point.”
Question from Reese at Washington Post: I would love to know what visibility, if any, the folks one this call have into what would be included in the (180 Day) Report and what role, if any, are you playing in actually compiling it?
Elizondo says to ask the government if he has any role as he doesn’t want to answer and say anything that puts them in an uncomfortable position. As far as the 180 Day report, he thinks, “it’s very unlikely that we’re going to have a comprehensive report that Congress expects and deserves, frankly, at the unclassified level, in time. I think what we can hope for is a report, an interim report, that’s going to say, ‘Here are the knowns, here are the unknowns, and by the way, there’s a lot more unknowns than knowns and here’s our plan for addressing those unknowns. And we’re gonna provide you another report, periodically, until we find those answers.’ My hope would be that we have an enduring capability. A Task Force, by government definition, is a temporary capability. A lot of people don’t know that but that’s what it is. Whether it’s an ISR task force, or the IED task force that we had established during Iraq, these are all temporary bodies and I think this topic deserves an enduring capability.
“And, frankly, maybe even beyond ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence, maybe we need a whole of government approach and bring in folks like NASA and FAA and NOAA and everybody else. Maybe Department of Energy, bring everybody to have…in academics and scientists from renowned universities. Bring in some of our international friends and allies to have this conversation, maybe even the United Nations.
“I think we need to manage our expectations. If we think that we’re going to have a simple solution here, come June, I think there’s very little chance of that happening. I think we’re gonna wind up with more questions than answers. I think they’ll maybe [be] some answers but there’s probably going to be more questions in the long run.
“Let me say this, if no one’s gonna say anything. Folks, sincerely, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for doing what you do. I know journalistic integrity is very important, just like as an intelligence officer, right? We kind of have the same mission: collect the truth and speak the truth and try to leave our personal bias out of it. And I know that all of you are taking a chance on even listening to a conversation like this. But I will tell you that it is deeply appreciated. When I have a chance, an opportunity to talk to people on the street, they’re happy that this topic is been covered and finally being covered in a serious sense, without all the nonsense baggage that’s attached to it. So, I want to thank you all for your time this afternoon and again, just doing what you do. As a civilian now and out of the government, thank you. I appreciate it very much. Thank you folks very much. Always happy to to help out any way I can.
(Major kudos to all members of the media who are taking this seriously. We need them if we’re going to get to the bottom of what this phenomenon represents.)
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corbell, Elizondo, knapp, sap task force, uap, uaptf, ufo
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