I don’t know what I was expecting, but I fantasised about having a Woodward and Bernstein moment on my trip. In a dusty diner in the American south-west, a source would hand me a brown envelope containing indisputable proof of the alien invasion. However, none of the major players in the disclosure movement – those who have been lobbying the government to declassify the UFO evidence – replied to my emails or calls. These include Elizondo and the Blink‑182 frontman Tom DeLonge, who has an entertainment company devoted to uncovering alien life.
The radio silence prompted me to dig a little deeper into the stories of whistleblowers such as Elizondo and Grusch. It didn’t take much excavating to realise that the alien invasion wasn’t all that it seemed. […]
In 2008, Bigelow’s company was the only bidder for a $22m government contract to research the technical aspects of the putative advanced aerospace weapon systems of the programme’s title. It did not mention that it wanted intel on monsters, apparitions, orbs, portals, werewolves or dinosaurs, but that is exactly where the taxpayers’ money went.
Elizondo disputes the Pentagon’s statement that he never led AATIP. In 2021, he filed an official complaint, accusing his former employer of campaigning to discredit him. That year, a book co-authored by Lacatski cataloguing AAWSAP’s research claimed that AATIP was “an unclassified nickname” used for a “completely separate, small” initiative to study UFOs encountered by people in the military.
What is clear is that the full story of Elizondo’s background was not apparent in the initial reports around his whistleblowing. In his 2024 memoir, Imminent, he wrote about possessing psychic powers. He also claimed he had met “remote viewers” – people who believe they can see things that their eyes can’t, sometimes thousands of miles away. Elizondo claimed he managed on one occasion to pay a psychic visit to a jailed terrorist. If these details had been publicly available when he blew the whistle on the Pentagon, his story may not have taken off in the same way.
Elizondo did not respond to my many requests to interview him, but I seized an opportunity to meet him in Washington DC in May 2025, at a UFO hearing he was chairing. The meeting was organised by the UAP Disclosure Fund, “a nonpartisan nonprofit supporting UAP legislation, protecting whistleblowers, and raising public awareness for greater transparency”. We spoke briefly before his opening speech and he promised me time later. I then took my seat and watched him put forward the views he has been sharing for close to a decade: that UFOs are thumbing their noses at physics while posing threats to national security.
At one point during the three‑hour-long event, Elizondo held up a photo of what appeared to be a large, white floating disc casting a shadow on what looked like agricultural land. Elizondo described the object as “lenticular” and “anywhere between 600 and 1,000ft in diameter”. Elizondo claimed he received the image from a civilian pilot. However, internet sleuths were quick to point out that Elizondo’s lenticular object was almost certainly two irrigation circles, one white and the other black, creating the illusion of a flying disc.
Seven months earlier, at an event in Philadelphia, he had presented a slide purporting to show a giant light emerging from clouds in Romania. He said it looked like “the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. The image, which ended up online, was believed by many other observers to show a window reflecting a ceiling light. Indeed, if you look closely, you can see the outline of what appears to be a head of hair, presumably that of the photographer.
Then there were those videos recorded by the US navy. Mick West, a UFO video analyst, deduced that the object of the video that made an officer go: “Oh gosh,” was likely glare from a nearby heat source – probably a jet plane’s exhaust.
