Late last year the topic of UFOs jumped back into the spotlight with revelations in mainstream media outlets of a secret UFO investigation department within the U.S. government. While much of the coverage was devoted to a couple of UFO videos that were released at the same time (which may have mundane explanations), one interesting part of the story was that the man who headed up the program, a military intelligence official named Luis Elizondo, had resigned shortly before the revelations and become an employee of Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy‘ UFO research group
Many people (including us here at the Grail) have advised being cautious of these ‘revelations’, not least because of similarities with previous ‘disinformation’ campaigns waged on ufology by government intelligence officials (see: Rick Doty). To Luis Elizondo’s credit though, in recent weeks he has put himself out there to be questioned on both his background, and the secret UFO program. And while I’m rather suspicious of numerous elements to this story, I think it’s also important that we keep approaching it with an open (though critically engaged) mind – so it’s worth listening to what he has to say.
Along with a television interview with Las Vegas ‘UFO journalist’ George Knapp, Elizondo recently spent a full hour answering questions on UFORadio, during which he covered his career prior to joining the government’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP); the AATIP timeline, budget, mandate and findings; UFO detection and reporting; the Nimitz UFO incident; and DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, among other things.
Elizondo also spent another 35 minutes answering questions from the public in a video for the 2018 International UFO Congress, embedded below.
These certainly aren’t ‘soft-ball’ questions, and to his credit Elizondo doesn’t respond defensively (at least overtly), even to questions that query the possibility of the entire thing being a disinformation campaign, and tells people to form their own opinion from the data rather than buy into any particular theory.
But it’s also worth noting that in all of these interviews, Elizondo manages to really give us no additional details of note. He can’t elaborate on details about the government’s research because of his lifelong requirement to not divulge classified information, and he won’t tell us more about the research being done by the To the Stars Academy because he thinks he should leave it to the scientists on the team. Additionally, there is at least a little myth-making happening when he answers the disinfo question (at 23:45), saying he gave up everything to pursue this topic and “have a conversation with the American people”…barely 12 minutes after saying (at 11:00) that he was actually happily leaving his job with the government to ‘fade off into the sunset’, when To the Stars Academy approached him about working for them.
Ultimately though, it’s good to see Elizondo out there answering questions, and hopefully we see more individuals associated with DeLonge’s academy doing so in future…let’s just hope we get some substantive answers.
