User:Very Polite Person/Elizondo Kloor 2019 analysis

This page was made for this discussion: Talk:Luis_Elizondo#LuckyLouie_concerns_re_Keith_Kloor_2019_article_from_US's_National_Academies

https://web.archive.org/web/20190404113127/https://issues.org/ufos-wont-go-away/

Neutral:

In his annual performance evaluation for his job at the US Department of Defense (DOD), Luis Elizondo, a career military intelligence officer now in his late 40s, was lauded in 2016 for his ability to manage a highly classified program “in a manner that protects US national security interests on a global scale.” The office Elizondo oversaw had, among other things, “identified and neutralized 6 insider threats” and “co-authored 4 national-level policies involving covert action.” His work performance was rated as “exemplary.” The evaluator gushed that it “cannot be overstated the importance of Mr. Elizondo’s portfolio to national security.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

So it must have come as a surprise to at least some of Elizondo’s superiors when he departed the Pentagon a year later on a sour note. On October 4, 2017, Elizondo submitted a resignation letter—that he later made public—addressed to then Defense Secretary James Mattis, which warned that “bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” had prevented “anomalous aerospace threats” from being taken seriously within DOD leadership. There was “overwhelming evidence” of these threats, Elizondo wrote, “at both the classified and unclassified levels.” He referred vaguely to “many instances” of “unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” The letter urged Mattis “to ask the hard questions” about who else might know about these “phenomena” and their “capabilities.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

Days after exiting the Pentagon, Elizondo joined a new entertainment and research company cofounded by Tom Delonge, formerly the lead singer and guitarist of the band Blink-182 and a paranormal enthusiast, who was known for spending his time between concert gigs on the hunt for unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and Bigfoot. The for-profit venture was called To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science and included former Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, as well as several scientists contracted over the years by US intelligence agencies.

Neutral to Elizondo, moderately critical of news media:

In mid-December of 2017, several months after Elizondo left the DOD, the New York Times reported that he had recently overseen a “shadowy” $22 million Pentagon program that investigated UFOs buzzing US military jets and installations. The aviation writer Stephen Pope called the article “borderline-sensationalist.” The science journalist Jeff Wise said it “gave free rein to claims that the [Pentagon] program had found evidence of strange aircraft that flew in seemingly impossible ways.”

Neutral to Elizondo; noting his cagey language is not a criticism:

Regardless, the story was picked up widely in the media. Elizondo, who had served as a primary source for the Times reporting, talked cryptically about the government’s UFO program on the major news channels. His credentialed background and earnest bearing made people pay attention. Notably, the Miami native did not sound like a crackpot who had watched too many X-Files episodes. In fact, during his media blitz Elizondo carefully avoided mentioning the term “UFOs” or anything that might be construed as a reference to extraterrestrials. But in one instance he deviated from his careful phrasing when he said on CNN, “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence we may not be alone.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

News of the Pentagon’s UFO program continued to generate headlines as more tidbits dribbled out via Elizondo and the new company he worked for. Other high-powered members of the To The Stars Academy also began airing their concerns about unknown, physics-defying aircraft showing up in US airspace. One of these voices was Chris Mellon, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (In this capacity, Mellon oversaw the Pentagon’s most sensitive and closely held “black” programs.) On March 9, 2018, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?”

Neutral to Elizondo:

Still, the disclosure of the Pentagon’s UFO program, which officially existed between 2008 and 2012, has stirred interest on Capitol Hill. Members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have requested details on the program; the latter has quietly interviewed a number of the military pilots who claim to have witnessed UFOs while on training missions. Influential to this effort is Mellon, a Washington insider for decades, who left the Pentagon in the early 2000s, did a stint as Democratic staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and now works alongside Elizondo at the To The Stars Academy, which bills itself as an “initiative mobilizing the brightest minds from within the top-secret shadows of aerospace, science and the Department of Defense.” That placard is at the top of a company website page that sells branded T-shirts, hoodies, and other merchandise.

Neutral to Elizondo:

Mellon and Elizondo have also said that they are frustrated by the institutional secrecy that prevents a more concerted government investigation into the “phenomena,” as they call it. This argument, too, is similar to what other media-savvy voices such as Keyhoe were saying in the 1950s, when he was president of a nonprofit organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). Its leadership included retired military and intelligence officials, such as a former chief of the Navy’s guided missile program. Another prominent member was Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who had served as the first director of the CIA, from 1947 to 1950.

Neutral to Elizondo:

When Luis Elizondo was at the Pentagon in the late 2000s, he was asked to take over security for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). He had experience in technology protection, having previously worked with Boeing and its Apache Longbow helicopter, and also with Raytheon and some of its cruise missile technology. A new aerospace-related assignment made sense.

Neutral to Elizondo:

But AATIP was different than anything he had worked on before. It was created in 2007 to study “anomalous aerospace threats,” a euphemism for UFOs. His job, he explained to me, was “making sure the Russians, the Chinese, our foreign adversaries, weren’t penetrating [AATIP] or developing some sort of deception campaign.” He cut himself off at this point. “I have to be careful, because we can get into classified stuff pretty quick.” After a brief pause, he continued: “Anytime you have a game-changing, advanced technology, your adversaries will want to know what it is, because it could be used against us. So there’s this huge effort try to figure out what the other side has.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

Evidently, there were security issues with the new UFO program that had to be addressed. “I knew there were counterintelligence problems that needed to be fixed,” Elizondo said. “I’m kind of like the plumber that needs to fix leaks.” He eventually took over the program and insists that he kept it afloat until he left in 2017, although funding officially dried up in 2012.

Neutral to Elizondo:

Whatever Elizondo learned while running AATIP seems to have convinced him that UFOs are real. And because he wasn’t able to convey this to higher-ups in the Pentagon’s chain of command, he decided to quit and let the world know about the program. “That was the only way to continue the mission,” he said to me just before he was scheduled to speak at a “symposium” organized by the Mutual UFO Network, an organization of UFO believers, in the summer of 2018. He was the keynote speaker, part of a featured lineup that included a former logger whose story of alien abduction was made into the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky.

Neutral to Elizondo:

Until he showed up at the UFO gathering, Elizondo was careful not to do or say anything that would lump him in with the Elvis-on-Mars crowd. He was mindful of the stigma attached to a subject he wanted taken seriously by the Department of Defense. But now he was the headliner at a conference titled “UFOs, Extraterrestrials, and the Future of Humanity.” Why participate in that?

Neutral to Elizondo; the question at the end is not reasonably seen as a negative:

“I’m trying to get the conversation going,” Elizondo said to me, during a wide-ranging interview in his hotel room several hours before his scheduled talk. This perplexed me. The hundreds of attendees at this conference already believed in UFOs. A number of the panels were geared for “experiencers,” people who thought they had been touched in some way by space aliens. If Elizondo wanted UFOs to be treated as a national security matter, why come to venues such as this?

Speculation/author opinion here, but moot as he left TTSA per all data soon after:

I thought that perhaps he was looking to attract new investors for the To The Stars Academy, which was on its way to crowdfunding more than two million dollars. There is, after all, a thriving UFO marketplace, fueled by conventions, podcasts, and popular pseudo-documentary shows such as the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens.

Neutral to Elizondo:

Elizondo resented the suggestion (already made by others) that he was in the UFO racket. “This is not a moneymaking endeavor for me,” he insisted, referring to his new company and role as a public figure speaking out about the threat posed by UFOs. (He said he refused to take a fee for his appearance at the conference.) Okay, then why did he come out from the shadows after a long, distinguished career as an intelligence officer? Why go public about a Pentagon program that had been deliberately shrouded in secrecy?

Neutral to Elizondo:

But Elizondo also resented the suggestion that he was a whistleblower, as some have characterized him. He was speaking out, he said, because he felt duty bound: “I’m doing this for the same reason I hunted terrorists in Afghanistan, the same reason I caught spies in South America, for the same reason I left the [Defense] Department—because there is a problem. We have pilots, soldiers, [radar] operators, men and woman who have seen something and in some cases are even being punished for reporting it. These are loyal Americans, people who run multimillion-dollar weapons platforms with live munitions over US cities and we don’t trust them to say, ‘There’s something there and I don’t know what the hell it is.’ ”

Notes that some in the UFO community circa 2019 wonder about Elizondo authenticity because of this Richard Doty mentioned:

Within the conspiratorial ranks of the UFO community, there are many who wonder about that. Their suspicions about Elizondo have their roots in the story of Richard Doty, a former special agent for the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Some years ago, Doty came forward to say that he had deliberately given false information to numerous self-styled UFO researchers when he was assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1980s. Doty fed his unwitting stooges fake evidence of captured aliens and flying saucers inside top secret military bases, which breathed life into the Roswell legend. A fascinating 2013 documentary called Mirage Mencaptures the extent of his deeds—in his own words and those of the UFO researchers who interacted with him.

Neutral to Elizondo:

Elizondo has heard the rumors about himself floated on the internet—that he is a latter-day Richard Doty. These suspicions were also whispered to me in the hallways of the UFO conference he was headlining when we first met. “No, I am not running a government disinformation campaign,” he said to me when I caught up with him again at the end of the event. We talked over burgers and beers at an airport bar. For someone who had been an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, Elizondo has a likable, disarming presence, which is a handy trait to possess if your goal is to earn the trust of those who might otherwise be suspicious of you.

Neutral to Elizondo:

The big draw, though, was Elizondo, who gave a talk on the opening night. He didn’t offer anything new or noteworthy about the UFO program he once led at the Pentagon, although he did say the “effort” was ongoing. (A public affairs officer at the Pentagon has said the program expired in 2012.) Elizondo told the audience that he had remained in close touch with his successor. In fact, he said that earlier in the week he had “received a call from a friend of mine, a very dear colleague of mine, who’s still at the Pentagon, who works this effort, very closely.” Elizondo thenpaused briefly. “You can read between the lines. When I say ‘is working this effort,’ I don’t mean the past, but actively working this. So it definitely continues. It’s still going. That, too, will come out hopefully soon in a very official way.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

Elizondo went on to insist that “disclosure has occurred” and that UFOs “are real.” Moreover, he added, “We have also established that fact from a national security perspective. You now have people at the highest levels of the United States government and international communities of their governments finally taking this serious, applying real resources, real talent, real expertise to look at this and finally figure out what this is.”

Neutral to Elizondo:

I approached Elizondo after his presentation to say hello and see if I could get another interview with him. He was cordial and open to talking, but said that it would have to be off the record. I found that disappointing, but understandable. Since we first met nearly a year ago, he had not been pleased with critics on social media and blogs who were scrutinizing his every move and utterance. He and his UFO company were under a sharp microscope. For example, in late 2018, Elizondo had traveled to Rome to give a presentation to European UFO buffs that was videotaped and quickly posted to the internet. Skeptics found the talk littered with dubious historical claims, including a reference he made to the 1947 “Roswell incident” that suggested the real truth was still unknown. “I’m not going to speculate in this room what crashed at Roswell,” he told that audience, before proceeding to cast doubt on the official explanation given at the time, as if he was unaware of Project Mogul’s disclosure.

Notes in a presentation that Lue mistakenly presented a wrong image at a public speech:

In his Rome talk, Elizondo also discussed a famous 1952 incident when flying saucers were reported over Washington, DC. There is no historical photo that captures the supposed UFOs, but in his talk Elizondo showed a slide that suggested one existed. “It was actually a still [image] from a CGI [computer generated animation],” says John Greenewald, a longtime FOIA archivist who writes about the Pentagon’s controversial UFO history in a newly published book titled Inside the Black Vault: The Government’s UFO Secrets Revealed. As soon as this was pointed out to Elizondo on the internet, he apologized for the error on his company’s Facebook page.

Notes the status of the classification of the UFO videos, which is completely settled now, so not relevant:

There are other discrepancies that have put him on the hot seat. He and his company have facilitated the release of video footage that show military pilots engaging with supposed UFOs. Several of these, including a grainy 45-second video of the Nimitz incident, have gone viral online, due in part to the recent media coverage that he and Mellon have received. Elizondo has insisted that the videos were declassified and released by the Pentagon in 2017, which the Pentagon denies. Even odder, a video of the Nimitz incident—the same one the New York Times embedded in its 2017 article and claimed to have received from the Pentagon—was already bouncing around on the internet in 2007.

Neutral on Elizondo:

Whatever its provenance, it is this video and others like it that Elizondo and Chris Mellon cite as compelling evidence of aerial wizardry by UFOs that pose a threat to US national security. As one might expect, an online army of eyes with many years of aviation and aerospace experience have minutely examined the videos. The crowdsourcing consensus, helpfully compiled into a detailed rundown of the incident at a popular skeptic’s blog, is that the “anomalous phenomena” asserted by Elizondo and Mellon are more likely explained as sightings of some sort of classified missile or aircraft, perhaps a drone, being tested at the time.

Neutral on Elizondo:

That would make sense given the mysterious scrubbing of electronic data relating to the 2004 incident, as reported by various crew members on the Nimitz and Princeton. Perhaps the aerial phenomena around which Elizondo and Mellon seek to cast such a veil of mystery can instead be chalked up to a familiar cause of UFO sightings over the past seven decades—advanced military aircraft and weaponry that the Pentagon is trying to keep secret.

Honestly, this is a neutral finale, merely comparing them as a what-if to Barnum given "UFO histories":

For those unsure what to believe, Elizondo offered these words of wisdom to a suspicious questioner at the 2018 International UFO Congress in Phoenix: “I would say remain skeptical. Healthy skepticism is very important; in fact, it’s imperative. In fact, in my job as an intelligence officer, I was paid to be skeptical. I think you should always question all the information that comes before you by anybody who says anything, and I think that’s true not just with people like me, I think it’s true with government, religion, and everything in between.” For a journalist trying to make sense of it all, the skepticism comes naturally. If Elizondo, Mellon, and the To The Stars Academy seem to be working in the great American tradition of P. T. Barnum, the irony remains that the Pentagon may well have its own good reason for keeping the UFO story alive. Not that they’d ever admit it.