George Knapp: We’re talking about this 2009 unclassified letter in which you’ve got to read between the lines a little bit, but it is pregnant with possibilities. I mean, the implications of what you see in those is that this is real. That assessment runs very contrary to the statements that the Pentagon has made — Pentagon spokespeople — since you came forward.
Luis Elizondo: There’s a lot of pockets within Department of Defense that may not necessarily know exactly what, you know, another pocket is doing, right? The right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. They try. I don’t think it’s deliberate or on purpose. I don’t think it’s a misinformation campaign. I think If there was a question as to what the government knows, or doesn’t know, you’d probably have to bring that up to the government to answer. I certainly don’t want to guess why the government said what they did. I can only imagine for two reasons: A. national security. And if it’s not national security, they just didn’t know.
THE INTERVIEW
- Luis Elizondo keeps his distance from ufologists for a reason
- Sorting out the AATIP, AAWSAP and BAASS UFO studies with Luis Elizondo
- AATIP’s UFO findings more than Pentagon admits, Luis Elizondo says
- Seeing the big picture crucial to UFO discussions, Luis Elizondo says
- AAWSAP got UFO studies – and a lot more – started in 2007
- Forces at Skinwalker Ranch may confound science … but not forever
- Luis Elizondo on what should be secret, and studying ‘metamaterial’
- To The Stars Academy knows more UFO videos are out there
- Public role has tortured him, but Luis Elizondo saw it as the only way
Knapp: AATIP — the program was killed.
Elizondo: Right.
Knapp: And it was killed because it didn’t find anything.
Elizondo: Right.
Knapp: This letter we’re talking about says they did find stuff.
Elizondo: Well, and I’ve made that very clear before without necessarily referring to the to the memo. AATIP did find a lot of stuff. And this wasn’t just a one-off looking at the Nimitz incident. There were many, many incidents we looked at. And we looked at them on a continuing basis. And we thought we saw some congruencies throughout these incidents time and time again, some repeated patterns of behavior. And as an intelligence officer, when you see those repeated patterns of behavior, that is key that something’s going on. That there is something there — predictability — that you can use then, later on, to figure out how the things work and what the things really are.
Knapp: The arguments that were made in that letter are still valid today.
Elizondo: Absolutely. In my opinion, absolutely. They’re more valid now than they ever have been before.
NEXT STORY: Seeing the big picture crucial to UFO discussions, Luis Elizondo says
