Who Goes There?

Will the Real Lue Elizondo Please Stand Up?

Ufology has never had a character as polarizing or important as Luis Elizondo. His controversial status tells us much about where the Disclosure movement is today.

LUE ELIZONDO HAS BECOME the face of America’s renewed interest in UFOs since the New York Times revelations of 2017. If it’s possible to be overexposed as a UAP explainer, then he may qualify. He’s been everywhere — from 60 Minutes to Tucker Carlson to Unidentified to what seems like a thousand podcasts. With each one, his schtick becomes a little clearer, and he drops another nugget here and there and then, once in a while, he uncorks a whopper which, if true, would change the game as we know it or should have already.

Is it all true? Well, according to Elizondo’s Twitter feed, and his pinned Tweet, it sure is:

By the way, the TV game show To Tell the Truth is where the phrase, “Will the real (insert name here) please stand up?” comes from. Three people take questions from a panel, all pretending to be the same person. At the end, the panelists vote and, after they’ve committed themselves, the question gets asked and the real person stands up. From a ufological perspective, back in 1966, abductee Barney Hill even appeared, and most of the panel picked him.

Elizondo has become a mystery man of sorts in the past couple of days. On November 9, he posted this cryptic Tweet:

I have no idea about his health and welfare. I hope it’s good and the concern was all a Twitterstorm in a Teapot. As of this writing, we’re still in his “strategic pause” and I’m sure more than a few are wondering exactly what he means by “preparation for a major assault.” The obvious question: offense or defense?

The Four Narratives of Lue

As best as this writer can determine, there are four narratives to describe how people have seen Lue Elizondo —

1. He’s the greatest truth teller to take on UFOs ever.
2. He’s still a government shill being put before the public to do the bidding of the Deep State.
3. He’s a liar and who never ran the UAP program he said he did.
4. He’s a grifter just out to make money off Ufology.

Which version you think is going to stand up at the end of To Tell the Truth depends a lot on how you see the UFO/UAP reality issue and your own place in it. Your mileage may vary.

I asked that question in a Twitter poll which, admittedly, is about as far from scientific as you can get, but it does measure passion among a subset of Twitter folks who have opinions. Here’s that input from 482 voters over a 48 hour period:

So, based on this snapshot of the Twittersphere, half the people think he’s an independent truth teller and the other half are split. Given that Twitter can be a bitter, partisan battlefield, it probably also means that Elizondo is thought of even more highly out there in the country at large. It’s too bad mainstream pollsters don’t yet test this kind of material but that will happen soon enough as the story continues to develop over time.

I like Lue Elizondo. The way he rolls actually works for me. I voted in the first category, but it is more than possible he still works for the government and still tells a version of the truth. That seems like a good bet actually.

Elizondo has certainly given us the opportunity to gauge who he is over these past four years. I’m betting that most people reading this have formed an opinion of the man by watching him react in different situations. They’ve certainly seen his answers evolve over time. As an aside, word is that Elizondo always sits with his back to the wall so he can see the door. I do that, too, but only because I’ve watched too many Godfather movies. He probably does it because old habits die hard.

There’s an article in the latest British version of GQ that appears to confirm the employed by the government narrative.

In addition to his role on the advisory board of the UAP think tank Skyfort, he retains high-level national security clearance and is employed as a government defence contractor, although he is not able to say what that work involves.

Being employed as a government defense contractor is not a disqualifier for activism, but Elizondo probably should discuss this at a slightly deeper level soon. Maybe he can’t explain everything but he might do a slightly better job at explaining why he can’t.

That article is full of other great material, including statements that Elizondo says he believes are true about UAP —

• space/time bending or dilation,
• radiation effects,
• government possession of crash wreckage
• a 23-minute video
• a video where the UAP is 50 feet from a jet cockpit

Meantime, here is the always interesting analysis from Ryan Robbins about both the GQ article and Elizondo.

Anyway, I do believe this following version of who he is, neatly summarized by The Hollywood Reporter in their coverage of his upcoming book deal:

Elizondo was a former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent and helped hunt drug traffickers, terrorists and spies. In 2008, he was asked to be part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million program sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to study UFOs. In 2010, he was made director of the program. In 2017, he resigned from his position in protest of excessive government secrecy regarding UFOs. Elizondo was also involved in To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences from 2017 to 2020, and appeared on History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. In 2019, a Pentagon spokesperson attempted to cast doubt on Elizondo’s leadership role within the AATIP, but Reid issued a counter-statement that firmly vouched for Elizondo’s position.

That fits the facts as I know them. If you dive into #ufotwitter, of course, you’ll find a lot of finger-waggers ready to tag him as just a tool or worse, a liar who never really did what he said he did.

While I’ve not done a deep dive into clarifying his credits, lots of others have. They include 60 Minutes which led their piece with him, plus Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times, plus journalists like George Knapp and Ross Coulthart, and a lot of others. So, I’m sure I’ll be dismissed as a tool myself, but based on these sources, my impression is that Lue is on the level with his resume. Privately more than publicly, some of the people who are on Team Lue still think he might be playing for the government on a deeper level behind-the-scenes (not just by working for a contractor), but they don’t seem to mind. As my Trail cohort David Bates puts it:

This is a complicated question. My two cents: I think he’s aware that there are factions within the government at odds over Disclosure, and he’s clearly aligned with those pushing for it. I don’t think this necessarily means he’s taking orders or that he’s part of some grand, masterfully orchestrated plan, but he’s not going to do anything that would complicate things for like-minded colleagues.

Not that this clears him of some kind of agenda or bias. After all, he is admitting to being involved in military intelligence operations, working at the Pentagon, having government classification, etc. So it’s probably a fair question to ask, given the government’s use of denial and ridicule over the years, if he wasn’t drafted into being exactly who he’s being right now. Still, I accept his explanations. Here’s why:

I spent the earlier part of my career in journalism, TV news actually, as a local news reporter/anchor, then a CNN correspondent, and as an investigative reporter for PBS. I’ve done a thousand stories, and been lied to straight to my face. I’ve also heard the truth and usually know it when it hits me because of all those interviews. Having listened to Lue Elizondo speak for probably dozens of hours by now, he seems authentic. There, I’ve said it.

It Means What It Means

In fact, my biggest beef with Lue by now is the constant dance where he references his NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), hems like he has to choose his words carefully, then lets fly with some wild statements on what he believes to be true. Among them:

• We have crash wreckage.
• Roswell is 100%.
• We have biological samples.
• We have video and photographic evidence that blows away what the public has seen already.
• There are photos (or videos) that show some kind of “occupancy” inside these craft.

It’s a lot. As David Bates pointed out last month, Elizondo always couches this as it being his opinion because, well, his NDA. In the podcast Theories of Everything, we get the perfect example of Luespeak:

“Have there potentially been biological samples recovered? Yes. I’m not going to expound on that … and be careful when I say that. I’m being purposely very open and vague at the same time, right? What does that mean? Well, it means what it means.”

Still, you have to wonder how he came to form these personal opinions if he hadn’t been privy to some evidence and conversations over the years that lead him to these opinions. On that same podcast, he was asked if there are photos that show occupants inside “craft” and this was the answer:

“There are some very compelling photos out there that seem to show something inside, some sort of occupancy, and I’ll leave it at that ….”

So it’s not a violation of his NDA to confirm there are these “compelling” photos? Except it’s doubtful he got to look at them while kicking back at Applebees, right? It seems clear to me that he saw them on his job but there are others who disagree.

It’s understandable why some see the NDA thing as a crutch to invoke when helpful, and to ignore when he wants to get something off his chest. For me, however, I don’t care how he rationalizes it. I just want him to keep saying the truth as he knows it.

Aside from the largely pointless bickering over what he really did or didn’t do at ATTIP, I’m not aware of anyone ever having accused him of just flat-out lying. The skeptics throw tomatoes because he can’t (obviously) prove all this, but they can’t charge him as being a liar, crazy or a fool. At least I don’t think so.

Plus, he routinely says that there is more mind-blowing stuff to come. More mind blowing than crashes and bodies and pictures of ET pilots? Count me in.

Memo: It is Not a Crime to Write a Book

Last September, Elizondo announced he was writing a book. The very act of becoming an author is something that a group within ufology routinely uses to dismiss the individual as only being interested in doing in order to cash in. This is false.

• First, everyone has a right to make a living.
• Second, I know from personal experience, having written three books, that an author should think very carefully about quitting their day job.

Let’s get to what the book is about then. Elizondo released this statement:

“The American people now know a small portion of what I and my colleagues in the Pentagon have been privy to: That these UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) are not secret U.S. technology, that they do not seem to belong to any known allies or adversaries and that our intelligence services have yet to identify a terrestrial explanation for these extraordinary vehicles. This conversation is only just beginning.”

Granted, Lue’s book is going to come from a big publisher, HarperCollins, so there will be massive interest in it, and he’ll make some dough. Still, I doubt that’s the reason he’s writing it and, again, so what? The man needs income streams as much as any of his critics. Would they work for free?

My hope, actually, is that his book is going to be the thing that ends all this finger-pointing. If it is extremely honest about his work life, it would fly very close to throwing that NDA aside and that just seems impossible to fathom. So it may not give us all that much more than we’re getting now on podcasts. Our wish list should include more specifics, but another upside is that he’ll be speaking to a larger, more mainstream audience. That will be a good thing.

My take? The real Lue Elizondo who stands up is going to be the one who’s been telling the truth all along.

Trail of the Saucers is published by Stellar Productions and Bryce Zabel, the co-host of the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel.