Post by swamprat on Jan 3, 2021 13:48:32 GMT -6
The man behind all of the media noise about UFOs UAPs, the last 3 years. Written by my buddy Billy, from Sarasota.
From the shadows into the light – the man who broke the UFO embargo grew up in Sarasota
Billy Cox, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Published Jan. 3, 2021
SARASOTA – From his post as a senior intelligence officer for the Secretary of Defense, Luis Elizondo knew by 2017 he had two choices: 1) make peace with silence and continue sitting on the Cold War’s deepest secret, or 2) resign from a career he loved in order to fulfill his duty to serve the United States.
The dilemma: How to bypass obstructionists in the Pentagon in order to deliver the most accurate information available to top military leadership regarding a potential national security threat. The problem: That potential threat involved unidentified flying objects (UFOs), perhaps the most ridiculed and marginalized issue of our time.
Luis Elizondo meets with researchers of the Coalition for UAP Studies in Huntsville, Alabama in 2019.
If he decided to leave the Department of Defense, he would be challenging official history, twisted by decades of cultural punchlines about Little Green Men. It would require exposing a longstanding fiction imposed by the hopelessly obsolete Project Blue Book, shuttered in 1969.
For half a century, Blue Book was the military’s final word on the limits of its curiosity into the unsettling implications of UFOs enjoying unimpeded access into U.S. airspace. Although the world had long since moved into a new century, the standard press release routinely dispensed by the Air Force was a museum relic, as rote and intractable as the Berlin Wall was during Leonid Brezhnev and the Stasi.
It reassured inquiring minds that there was “no evidence” indicating the mystery was extraterrestrial, and that further investigation was pointless. “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force” ever represented a “threat to our national security,” asserted the USAF, which produced the Blue Book conclusions.
More significantly, however, the canned response included this whopper: There was “no evidence” that UFOs represented “technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.”
Elizondo, Riverview High School Class of 1990, knew better.
For four years, beginning in 2008, the Army veteran and counterintelligence agent had been the director of a secret Pentagon study on UFOs or, in more politically acceptable parlance, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The evidence he had assembled, in fact, explicitly negated Air Force claims about zero gaps between known technology and what UFOs were exhibiting. But efforts to walk that evidence up the chain of command were being repeatedly stifled.
Elizondo, however, had an ace to play. It was a card that former Blue Book director Capt. Ed Ruppelt alluded to as far back as 1956 but never made public: gun camera footage.
Elizondo had contemporary video, three separate clips showing three separate incidents of UFOs violating restricted air space, interrupting active naval exercises and outperforming frontline warplanes. Better yet, the images offered metadata, such as air speed and altitude, acquired through multiple targeting modes, including infrared. Two of the sequences contained pilot audio reactions.
The path that brought Elizondo to this history-making crossroads began in Sarasota, haunted with painful childhood memories of a broken family and financial devastation. But one of the saving graces was his decision to join the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps at Riverview.
JROTC provided structure and discipline at a time he was “making dumb decisions” and floundering. It was also the first time “I experienced what it’s like to be on a team, where they had your back and you had theirs.”
At the Pentagon, Elizondo belonged to a small but dedicated – and still unnamed – team that wanted the UFO story to come out. And that teamwork invigorated one of his favorite quotations, from Rudyard Kipling: “As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”
Elizondo’s long-shot plan to jump-start an adult conversation on UFOs faced more than bureaucratic intransigence. Nor were decades of hoaxes, crackpot messiahs, tabloid sensationalism and Hollywood freak shows the most formidable obstacles.
Political scientists Alexander Wendt (Ohio State) and Raymond Duvall (University of Minnesota) argued in 2008 that a meaningful appraisal of the phenomena would require the human species to reimagine itself somewhere other than at the top of the food chain. In an essay titled “Sovereignty and the UFO” published in the journal Political Theory, they were skeptical of humanity’s ability to relinquish its anthropocentric conceits.
“… the truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs,” wrote Wendt and Duvall, “human beings still have no idea what they are, and are not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of rule that requires and sustains it.”
A GS-15 employee by now, the civilian equivalent of a colonel, Elizondo chose to attack that structure by working within it. Rather than list the red-flag terms “UFO” or “UAP” in the subject field of his request for the release of the smoking-gun videos, Elizondo soft-peddled the mission. He labeled the objects of his query as “UAV, Balloons, and other UAS” footage, geek shorthand for conventional Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones.
On August 24, 2017, the DoD’s Office of Publication and Security Review cleared the videos, nicknamed “GoFast,” “Gimbal” and “FLIR.”
None had been previously classified; in fact, the latter had been leaked to an obscure public website in 2007.
An acronym for Forward Looking Infrared – for the F-18 thermal imaging camera that captured a UFO off the coast of Baja, California, during maneuvers in 2004 – the FLIR sequence would be more famously referred to as the Tic Tac incident, for the shape of the object being pursued. Navy radar indicated it plunged from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in less than one second, a “liquifying” velocity.
“GoFast” and “Gimbal” were recorded by Navy jetfighters off the Eastern seaboard in January 2015.
“GoFast” captures the moment of jubilation when an F-18 targeting system locked on to a small, elusive white orb skimming above the Atlantic. More detailed than the Tic Tac, the “Gimbal” footage shows a UFO swiveling on its axis in flight. Both videos are considerably more dramatic than the Tic Tac because they contain the astonished pilots’ reaction.
“There’s a whole fleet of ’em, look on the AESA …” “My gosh!” “They’re all going against the wind, the wind’s 120 knots to the west.” “Look at that thing, dude! … Look at that thing! It’s rotating.”
Born in Miami, Luis Elizondo IV moved to Sarasota around 1975. That’s when his father, Luis Elizondo III, a food and beverage manager, helped open the Hyatt hotel in Sarasota. Dad would later work with the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort before branching out into the restaurant business. Among his startups, now defunct, was Michelangelo’s in St. Armands Circle.
Dad also spent two years in one of Fidel Castro’s prisons. A Cuban exile, the elder Elizondo volunteered for Assault Brigade 2506, whose ill-fated mission to overthrow the communist dictatorship with CIA support ended with the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961.
Elizondo describes his Sarasota childhood in self-deprecating terms, as socially awkward, “not popular at all,” “not good with the ladies,” and “the last kid ever picked on a team.” He says “I knew at a young age I would have to take care of myself – I did not want to get beat up anymore.” He credits dad for putting steel in his spine. “I grew up,” he adds, “in a paramilitary environment.”
He watched his parents’ marriage collapse, along with family finances. He worked odd jobs to make ends meet, from busing tables at Red Lobster on South Tamiami Trail to delivering copies of the Herald-Tribune. When times got tougher, he sold his own clothes at the Red Barn flea market in Bradenton.
Riverview High offered a glimpse of the way out.
“I was told, don’t go to ROTC because, at the time, there were a lot of troubled kids who went into it and not necessarily by choice,” he says. “It was wonderful for me because we had kids from all over Sarasota, from rich kids to kids from the beaches to Newtown. Nobody saw social strata or economic lines or ethnicity. There was only one color that mattered, and that was green.”
A member of the ROTC color guard, Elizondo also joined the drill team and the RHS wrestling team, his entrée into martial arts. But it was chemistry class that put the hook in him.
“I fell in love with science, because where there’s science, where there’s mathematics, there’s truth,” he says. “I often tell people, there’s a whole universe around you, and if you know how it works, it will give you a better appreciation of what life is about.
“There’s a pattern of reality that exists, whether it’s the neural connections in the human brain or the patterns of the lungs and the vascular system in the human body or the path that a river takes down a mountain or even these large, super Magellanic galactic clusters in the universe – and you realize these patterns are all the same.
“What science does is, it opens up the aperture that allows you to look at things in a fundamentally different way, in a way that we’re not used to looking at them.”
Elizondo attended the University of Miami, where he double-majored in microbiology and immunology, with minors in chemistry and math. The degree would’ve qualified him for Officer Candidate School. Instead, he entered the Army as a grunt, in 1995: “My father said, in order to lead, you’ve first got to know how to follow.”
Not quite four years into his hitch, Elizondo held a specialist’s rank when he was recruited by a “special program” involving national intelligence. He went on to draw multiple assignments that sent him into the shadows of South America, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. He would report to the Secretary of Defense, the Office of National Intelligence, the White House and other bosses he still can’t talk about today.
By the autumn of 2017, as director of the little-known National Programs Special Management Staff tucked inside the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), Elizondo was ready for Plan B.
In a letter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Elizondo said his research suggested “a direct correlation” between UFOs and “our nuclear and military capabilities.” The phenomenon’s displays of “beyond next generation capabilities” could present “a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors and soldiers.” However, “bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” continued to bury the evidence, and there was no way forward.
Elizondo submitted his resignation letter on Oct. 4, 2017.
On Oct. 11, he stepped out from behind the curtain, onto a stage in Seattle, and into a novel partnership perhaps best described as uniquely American.
It was an all-star cast.
There was Hal Puthoff, the pioneering engineer renowned for pursuing quantum physics through experiments involving ESP and remote viewing, via the CIA’s Stargate Project. There was Jim Semivan, who spent 25 years as a spy with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. And there was Steve Justice, formerly of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced technology division, whose Tennessee twang could make arcane jargon understandable.
Most notably, there was Chris Mellon, a veteran Beltway insider and Elizondo’s most indispensable ally in Washington, D.C.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and Bush administrations, former Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Mellon became a player in the 1980s when he conceived and drafted a bill establishing what would become U.S. Special Operations Command. He formally ended his 19-year career in government in 2004, but he retained key contacts and connections.
Also: Mellon and Elizondo had been collaborating behind the scenes to unclog the UFO stovepipe at DoD.
“Chris is one of the greatest strategists I’ve ever worked with. He’s always thinking of second- and third-order consequences, and that’s very rare. When you’re playing checkers,” says Elizondo, “Chris is playing three-dimensional chess.”
From the shadows into the light – the man who broke the UFO embargo grew up in Sarasota
Billy Cox, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Published Jan. 3, 2021
SARASOTA – From his post as a senior intelligence officer for the Secretary of Defense, Luis Elizondo knew by 2017 he had two choices: 1) make peace with silence and continue sitting on the Cold War’s deepest secret, or 2) resign from a career he loved in order to fulfill his duty to serve the United States.
The dilemma: How to bypass obstructionists in the Pentagon in order to deliver the most accurate information available to top military leadership regarding a potential national security threat. The problem: That potential threat involved unidentified flying objects (UFOs), perhaps the most ridiculed and marginalized issue of our time.
Luis Elizondo meets with researchers of the Coalition for UAP Studies in Huntsville, Alabama in 2019.
If he decided to leave the Department of Defense, he would be challenging official history, twisted by decades of cultural punchlines about Little Green Men. It would require exposing a longstanding fiction imposed by the hopelessly obsolete Project Blue Book, shuttered in 1969.
For half a century, Blue Book was the military’s final word on the limits of its curiosity into the unsettling implications of UFOs enjoying unimpeded access into U.S. airspace. Although the world had long since moved into a new century, the standard press release routinely dispensed by the Air Force was a museum relic, as rote and intractable as the Berlin Wall was during Leonid Brezhnev and the Stasi.
It reassured inquiring minds that there was “no evidence” indicating the mystery was extraterrestrial, and that further investigation was pointless. “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force” ever represented a “threat to our national security,” asserted the USAF, which produced the Blue Book conclusions.
More significantly, however, the canned response included this whopper: There was “no evidence” that UFOs represented “technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.”
Elizondo, Riverview High School Class of 1990, knew better.
For four years, beginning in 2008, the Army veteran and counterintelligence agent had been the director of a secret Pentagon study on UFOs or, in more politically acceptable parlance, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The evidence he had assembled, in fact, explicitly negated Air Force claims about zero gaps between known technology and what UFOs were exhibiting. But efforts to walk that evidence up the chain of command were being repeatedly stifled.
Elizondo, however, had an ace to play. It was a card that former Blue Book director Capt. Ed Ruppelt alluded to as far back as 1956 but never made public: gun camera footage.
Elizondo had contemporary video, three separate clips showing three separate incidents of UFOs violating restricted air space, interrupting active naval exercises and outperforming frontline warplanes. Better yet, the images offered metadata, such as air speed and altitude, acquired through multiple targeting modes, including infrared. Two of the sequences contained pilot audio reactions.
The path that brought Elizondo to this history-making crossroads began in Sarasota, haunted with painful childhood memories of a broken family and financial devastation. But one of the saving graces was his decision to join the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps at Riverview.
JROTC provided structure and discipline at a time he was “making dumb decisions” and floundering. It was also the first time “I experienced what it’s like to be on a team, where they had your back and you had theirs.”
At the Pentagon, Elizondo belonged to a small but dedicated – and still unnamed – team that wanted the UFO story to come out. And that teamwork invigorated one of his favorite quotations, from Rudyard Kipling: “As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”
Elizondo’s long-shot plan to jump-start an adult conversation on UFOs faced more than bureaucratic intransigence. Nor were decades of hoaxes, crackpot messiahs, tabloid sensationalism and Hollywood freak shows the most formidable obstacles.
Political scientists Alexander Wendt (Ohio State) and Raymond Duvall (University of Minnesota) argued in 2008 that a meaningful appraisal of the phenomena would require the human species to reimagine itself somewhere other than at the top of the food chain. In an essay titled “Sovereignty and the UFO” published in the journal Political Theory, they were skeptical of humanity’s ability to relinquish its anthropocentric conceits.
“… the truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs,” wrote Wendt and Duvall, “human beings still have no idea what they are, and are not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of rule that requires and sustains it.”
A GS-15 employee by now, the civilian equivalent of a colonel, Elizondo chose to attack that structure by working within it. Rather than list the red-flag terms “UFO” or “UAP” in the subject field of his request for the release of the smoking-gun videos, Elizondo soft-peddled the mission. He labeled the objects of his query as “UAV, Balloons, and other UAS” footage, geek shorthand for conventional Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones.
On August 24, 2017, the DoD’s Office of Publication and Security Review cleared the videos, nicknamed “GoFast,” “Gimbal” and “FLIR.”
None had been previously classified; in fact, the latter had been leaked to an obscure public website in 2007.
An acronym for Forward Looking Infrared – for the F-18 thermal imaging camera that captured a UFO off the coast of Baja, California, during maneuvers in 2004 – the FLIR sequence would be more famously referred to as the Tic Tac incident, for the shape of the object being pursued. Navy radar indicated it plunged from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in less than one second, a “liquifying” velocity.
“GoFast” and “Gimbal” were recorded by Navy jetfighters off the Eastern seaboard in January 2015.
“GoFast” captures the moment of jubilation when an F-18 targeting system locked on to a small, elusive white orb skimming above the Atlantic. More detailed than the Tic Tac, the “Gimbal” footage shows a UFO swiveling on its axis in flight. Both videos are considerably more dramatic than the Tic Tac because they contain the astonished pilots’ reaction.
“There’s a whole fleet of ’em, look on the AESA …” “My gosh!” “They’re all going against the wind, the wind’s 120 knots to the west.” “Look at that thing, dude! … Look at that thing! It’s rotating.”
Born in Miami, Luis Elizondo IV moved to Sarasota around 1975. That’s when his father, Luis Elizondo III, a food and beverage manager, helped open the Hyatt hotel in Sarasota. Dad would later work with the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort before branching out into the restaurant business. Among his startups, now defunct, was Michelangelo’s in St. Armands Circle.
Dad also spent two years in one of Fidel Castro’s prisons. A Cuban exile, the elder Elizondo volunteered for Assault Brigade 2506, whose ill-fated mission to overthrow the communist dictatorship with CIA support ended with the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961.
Elizondo describes his Sarasota childhood in self-deprecating terms, as socially awkward, “not popular at all,” “not good with the ladies,” and “the last kid ever picked on a team.” He says “I knew at a young age I would have to take care of myself – I did not want to get beat up anymore.” He credits dad for putting steel in his spine. “I grew up,” he adds, “in a paramilitary environment.”
He watched his parents’ marriage collapse, along with family finances. He worked odd jobs to make ends meet, from busing tables at Red Lobster on South Tamiami Trail to delivering copies of the Herald-Tribune. When times got tougher, he sold his own clothes at the Red Barn flea market in Bradenton.
Riverview High offered a glimpse of the way out.
“I was told, don’t go to ROTC because, at the time, there were a lot of troubled kids who went into it and not necessarily by choice,” he says. “It was wonderful for me because we had kids from all over Sarasota, from rich kids to kids from the beaches to Newtown. Nobody saw social strata or economic lines or ethnicity. There was only one color that mattered, and that was green.”
A member of the ROTC color guard, Elizondo also joined the drill team and the RHS wrestling team, his entrée into martial arts. But it was chemistry class that put the hook in him.
“I fell in love with science, because where there’s science, where there’s mathematics, there’s truth,” he says. “I often tell people, there’s a whole universe around you, and if you know how it works, it will give you a better appreciation of what life is about.
“There’s a pattern of reality that exists, whether it’s the neural connections in the human brain or the patterns of the lungs and the vascular system in the human body or the path that a river takes down a mountain or even these large, super Magellanic galactic clusters in the universe – and you realize these patterns are all the same.
“What science does is, it opens up the aperture that allows you to look at things in a fundamentally different way, in a way that we’re not used to looking at them.”
Elizondo attended the University of Miami, where he double-majored in microbiology and immunology, with minors in chemistry and math. The degree would’ve qualified him for Officer Candidate School. Instead, he entered the Army as a grunt, in 1995: “My father said, in order to lead, you’ve first got to know how to follow.”
Not quite four years into his hitch, Elizondo held a specialist’s rank when he was recruited by a “special program” involving national intelligence. He went on to draw multiple assignments that sent him into the shadows of South America, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. He would report to the Secretary of Defense, the Office of National Intelligence, the White House and other bosses he still can’t talk about today.
By the autumn of 2017, as director of the little-known National Programs Special Management Staff tucked inside the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), Elizondo was ready for Plan B.
In a letter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Elizondo said his research suggested “a direct correlation” between UFOs and “our nuclear and military capabilities.” The phenomenon’s displays of “beyond next generation capabilities” could present “a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors and soldiers.” However, “bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” continued to bury the evidence, and there was no way forward.
Elizondo submitted his resignation letter on Oct. 4, 2017.
On Oct. 11, he stepped out from behind the curtain, onto a stage in Seattle, and into a novel partnership perhaps best described as uniquely American.
It was an all-star cast.
There was Hal Puthoff, the pioneering engineer renowned for pursuing quantum physics through experiments involving ESP and remote viewing, via the CIA’s Stargate Project. There was Jim Semivan, who spent 25 years as a spy with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. And there was Steve Justice, formerly of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced technology division, whose Tennessee twang could make arcane jargon understandable.
Most notably, there was Chris Mellon, a veteran Beltway insider and Elizondo’s most indispensable ally in Washington, D.C.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and Bush administrations, former Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Mellon became a player in the 1980s when he conceived and drafted a bill establishing what would become U.S. Special Operations Command. He formally ended his 19-year career in government in 2004, but he retained key contacts and connections.
Also: Mellon and Elizondo had been collaborating behind the scenes to unclog the UFO stovepipe at DoD.
“Chris is one of the greatest strategists I’ve ever worked with. He’s always thinking of second- and third-order consequences, and that’s very rare. When you’re playing checkers,” says Elizondo, “Chris is playing three-dimensional chess.”
See next post for page 2