In his recently released memoir, a former US intelligence official named Luis Elizondo revealed the existence of “unusual aerial activities” that had been kept secret for decades.
"The former intelligence official shares in his memoirs some of what he knows about UFOs," The New York Times said.
"Elizondo was a long-time senior defense official and served as director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATIP) program," she added.
“His wife doubted what he believed, until one time she saw an asteroid enter our home while I was working at the Department of Defense,” said Elizondo, who ran top-secret programs for the White House and the National Security Agency.
The former defense official described the object as a "glowing green ball the size of a basketball that floated inside the house and slowly made its way into the private bedroom."
"This ball was able to pass through walls, and acted as if it was under intelligent control," he added.
Elizondo made headlines in 2017 after resigning as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating UFOs, publicly protesting the lack of resources to deal with what he felt was a “serious threat to national security,” according to the newspaper.
Elizondo’s revelations at the time caused a stir, were backed up by videos and testimony from Navy pilots who encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional investigations and a 2023 hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government had recovered crashed objects of nonhuman origin, the newspaper said.
“The Department must take seriously the numerous accounts provided by the Navy and others of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapons platforms and demonstrating beyond next-generation capabilities,” Elizondo wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the time.
He said in his book that he believed that “UAPs,” the term that has widely replaced UFOs, represent at best a very serious national security issue, and at worst a potential existential threat to humanity.
In his memoir, Elizondo reveals a number of things, including the existence of what he calls “a top-secret group of government officials and defense contractors who he says have been retrieving technology and biological remains of non-human origin for research for at least half a century.”
For decades, civilians, military, and law enforcement officers have reported strange sightings all over the world, and there has actually been data to support what they've seen.
Elizondo also wrote in his memoirs about his personal encounters with UFOs, describing glowing green balls the size of basketballs that invaded his home intermittently for more than seven years. He wrote that these objects were able to pass through walls, and acted as if they were under intelligent control.
He wrote that his wife, two daughters and their neighbors witnessed these flying objects.
The program led by Elizondo investigated "sightings, near misses, and other encounters between UFOs and U.S. Navy jets, and collected data from incidents related to military and intelligence operations."
He said he learned in his work as director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATIP) program that "the vehicles that appear are beyond the next generation, and have been observed since the 1940s, and in the early 1950s, when UFOs became a national security concern in the Cold War, strict secrecy was imposed."
Much of the information collected by this program remains confidential, according to the newspaper.
In an interview, Elizondo said he had direct knowledge of what was being discussed, but his security clearance prevented him from explaining the source of his knowledge.
Elizondo was raised in Florida, the son of an American mother and a Cuban father.