Seeing the big picture crucial to UFO discussions, Luis Elizondo says

George Knapp: It feels like something’s going on. And I know there’s some sensitivities involved. But I mean, is that feeling correct?

Luis Elizondo: Well, you’ll have to excuse my response on this, but George, in the end, I’ve always said it doesn’t matter what my feelings are, right? I may feel something. But I also may be wrong. So, I sense that the conversation is occurring now among the American people and amongst some of our senior levels of government. That has never happened before, and I’m very optimistic about that. How about feel about it is probably irrelevant, but I will tell you if you’re asking. I feel good about it. I feel that finally, people can have a rational conversation. And people much smarter than me can figure out what the hell these things are.

THE INTERVIEW

Knapp: Well, the reason you left is because it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

Elizondo: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Knapp: Same argument that this essentially makes.

Elizondo: I actually left out of loyalty, not disloyalty, because of I love the department and the leadership so much, particularly (Secretary of Defense James) Mattis, that there was no other way for me to communicate that these things that we were seeing and experiencing were real, and that they were being collected by not just grandma in the backyard shooting a camera and seeing some lights back there. This is by trained observers flying multimillion-dollar weapon platform systems, sometimes over US cities that we trust to fight and win wars on our behalf. And they’re telling you they’re seeing something. They’ve seen something that they don’t know what it is. And we have to pay attention. Which is backed up by electro-optical data, which is backed up by the radar data, which is backed up by, you know, more and more and more layers. At some point, you have to look and say, you know … there’s an old saying we have, if you see it once, it’s an anomaly. If you see it twice, it could be a coincidence. If you see it three times, you’re probably looking at a trend. Right? And so that’s what we’re seeing. And when you’re building this mosaic, you’re building this, for lack of better terms, this jigsaw puzzle. You know, people will say, “Well, how do you even know where to begin?” Well, you begin with the first piece. Right? You take a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and I’m not very smart, so I’m not very good at building these things, so what I usually do is take the four corners first, and I set those pieces aside. Because you can tell that they’re the four corners. Then I take all the pieces have the straight edge because I know they’re going to be the border, and I set those aside. Right? So that’s in another little bin. And then what I do is I take all the pieces that are kind of the similar colors, and I’ll take those and probably figure they’re probably the part of the same scene, and I’ll set those aside. And before long, my daughter and I went from having a 1000-piece jumbled mess, to now we have five or six bins that we can see, okay, these are common pieces that are going to help us now put together the picture. And so very much — and it’s a very poor analogy — but very much to that same methodology we did that within AATIP. We tried to find those commonalities and “binned” those in what we now know as the five observables, that have come out as the five observables, and that has helped us really focus in on collecting the data pieces that are very important, or the pieces of data that we don’t have yet.

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Luis Elizondo 2018 interview