UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDPERSONNEL FILE
Luis Elizondo
Former head of AATIP (per his account)
Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo spent about 20 years in military intelligence and counterintelligence work, including operations in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Guantanamo, before working in the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He says he was asked in 2008 to join the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), part of a $22 million effort sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and that he took it over in 2010.
AATIP’s funding ended in 2012, but Elizondo says he and a few others kept the work going. His resignation took effect on October 4, 2017; he has described leaving out of frustration that the issue was not being taken seriously. He then joined Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy and was a central figure in the New York Times story of December 16, 2017, that revealed the program and the Navy videos.
On November 13, 2024, Elizondo testified at a House Oversight hearing titled ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.’ In written testimony he said ‘UAP are real’ and that ‘the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries.’ Asked about crash-retrieval programs, he said he could only discuss them in a closed session, and he alleged that officials had harassed people who spoke up.
His role has long been disputed. In 2019 Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood told The Intercept that Elizondo ‘had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program’ while at the intelligence office, although a different spokeswoman had told Politico in 2017 that he ran it. Elizondo maintains he led the program. Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first director, has written that the crash-retrieval narrative grew largely out of AATIP and a small group of people connected to it.
In August 2024 Elizondo published a memoir, ‘Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs’, which repeats his allegations that the government holds non-human material and has kept it from Congress and the public. The Pentagon has said it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology. He is the central figure in the documentary ‘The Age of Disclosure’, which premiered at SXSW in March 2025 and was released on Amazon Prime in November 2025.
Luis Elizondo, 2021. Photo: Max Moszkowicz (cropped) · CC BY 3.0 · source
