"Our Friends from Out of Town"

       The M1 tank is "crown jewel of the American field arsenal", designed to take a direct hit from a missile, and the front and sides are the most heavily armoured sections. In 2003 they were lined up in the desert of Kuwait in units of 100: ten rows of ten tanks, preparatory to the invasion of Iraq. Then one night Luis Elizondo, in his capacity of Special Agent in Charge, received the call: "Sir, you need to get out here now. There's something you need to see."  So, having driven an hour into the desert to see for himself, Elizondo was shown a remarkable sight. A small hole, perfectly round, without rough edges, heat ablation or metal vitrification had been punched into the side of the tank. Not only that, but shining a light through it revealed an identical hole on the other side. It was just like a cookie cutter had taken a core sample of the armour - and the same holes existed in the adjacent tank. Nothing on earth could have done such a thing. The only clue to causation was that a Bedouin goatherd had seen a brilliant green flash in the night sky, directly over the tanks. But several years later Elizondo started to think it might have been produced by what his colleagues called "our friends from out of town"

      This is a story told by Luis Elizondo in his 2024 book, Imminent, inside the Pentagon's hunt for UFOs. As far as I am aware, no-one has challenged his credentials as the former head of the U.S. Department of Defense' s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the body investigating UFOs or, as they label them, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The book comes with a disclaimer from the Department of Defense and a foreword by an even higher level intelligence officer. Some sections are redacted for security reasons. I have no intention of reviewing the entire book, but only to highlight some incidents like the one above, which will be missed by those who have never read it.

The Man

      "Lue" Elzondo's own life is worth the read. His mother was a beautiful woman (there is a photo) with as complicated an ancestry as Tiger Woods but, if I am reading between the lines correctly), she was inept in her dealings with men. His father was a Cuban who fought alongside Castro, then fought against him at the Bay of Pigs, and served time in Castro's prisons.

     He was also determined to liberate his homeland, and to teach his son all the skills necessary. Lue learnt how to drive a car, fly a plane, make rocket launchers out of PVC pipes, explosives, and a 9-volt battery, and to assemble assault rifle in 60 seconds - all before the age of ten, when his parents split up. Traumatized by his parents' divorce and by financial difficulties, bullied and dyslexic, he became an angry young lad. Eventually, he was encouraged to join the Junior ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) which, at the time, was considered "the last train stop for bad kids, the final step before expulsion, juvenile detention, or worse." In fact, the comradeship it provided became his salvation. He went to college and in 1995, at the age of 23, he joined the military.

Remote Viewers

      It must have been shortly after this that he was introduced to the "remote viewer" program: America's psychic spies. I have written about them previously, here and here. It was about that time that the program was cancelled, so he never got involved in it, although he did say that the training helped him in his later intelligence work. In later years he met four others who had been trained as remote viewers, and one day they decided to concentrate their thoughts on a captured terrorist held in a prison thousands of miles away.

      Something happened all right. Months later, we learned that the terrorist had told his lawyers that the CIA had sent five angels to disrupt his sleep. Five figures washed in a white light stood over his bed and shook it violently, leaving him terrified. He felt that judgment was upon him. He shared the story with his attorney, and tale later ended up in a mainstream newspaper article about a secret CIA program being used to harass his client.

      Readers who have been following this blog since its inception (probably a very small company) may remember some amateur experiments during the Victorian era in which people were able to project their images to friends nearby. So this phenomenon is not without precedent.

Our Friends from Out of Town

      Elizondo was introduced to the government UFO program in 2008/2009. There are whole chapters on the performance of these strange objects, as well as a discussion of how they might function. What else did he learn?

     First of all, the Roswell UFO crash really did happen. There was also a non-human body recovered from a crash in Mexico, and allegedly four recovered from Kazakhstan in the then Soviet Union. He read documentation on the Legacy Program attempting to back engineer these crashed saucers. (But I doubt if it was particularly successful.) Biological and metal samples are held by corporations contracted to investigate them under ultra top secret coverage. He was also told that the bureaucrats involved consider Presidents to be just short term occupants of the office, and they provide them with only minimal briefings about the issue.

      In 1971 a treaty was signed between the US and the USSR concerning measures to reduce the outbreak of nuclear war. Article 3 bound each of them to notify the other if any action by a UFO were likely to trigger a nuclear war by accident. This was no idle threat. In 1982 a UFO flew over a missile base in the Ukraine and activated the whole launch sequence. The operators were unable to stop it, but it shut down of its own accord just as the sequence reached the very last rung. On more than one occasion the US dispatched nuclear bombers until they realized that a UFO had caused the Soviets to ready their missiles in error. At other times, UFOs took US nuclear missiles offline, such that they couldn't be launched even if the President wanted to.

     Two US servicemen received disability pensions as a result of interactions with a UFO in the Rendlesham Forest in England. The author knew of many others, some of them his colleagues, who suffered from what appeared to be radiation effects from UFOs. Some of them died.

The Colares Incidents

      In the process of being recruited by the UFO researchers, Elizondo was introduced to General Uchôa from Brazil, who described to him in depth the Colares Incidents. For several years in the mid-1970s the coastal areas of northeastern Brazil had been the focus of widespread UFO activity, the most intense centring on the coastal island of Colares from 1977 to 1978. I must admit, I had never heard of all this, despite the fact that I was following the UFO scene during this period, and Flying Saucer Review carried many articles about Latin America in general and Brazil in particular. But these incidents were investigated by the Brazilian Air Force and by an American and a French ufologist, resulting in 3,500 case files.

      Rural people unfamiliar with nocturnal lights other than from cars or trucks witnessed strange lights and aircraft ranging in size from gigantic mother ships down to basketball sized orbs: "flying discs, spheres, triangles, cylinders" - every variety you could think of. Eighteen people claimed to have been abducted aboard UFOs by beams of light. Some of them were confirmed to have been found far from the original observation without knowing how they got there. Two types of aliens were seen: what we now know as the greys and the Nordics.

     People reported being chased by a yellow orb. After several yards of pursuit, the light turned blue before delivering a nasty laserlike blast that burned victims or left them unconscious.   ....   It didn't matter where you sought shelter. The lights pursued people to their homes and farms. Beams shot through tiled roofs as if the roofs were made of gauze, and roved intelligently through interior rooms as if searching for something.

      More than 300 animals were found dead for no obvious reason. People lived in fear. A medical doctor described burns, rashes, nausea, temporary blindness, and many other ill effects. Ten people died.

The Orbs

       The amazing this was that when he joined the program, Elizondo's home was visited by mysterious orbs at irregular intervals. So did those of some of his colleagues. None of them were blue, and none of them caused any harm, but since his work was top secret, it caused difficulties knowing he was unable to give his family any clue about the context. The green glowing ball, about the size of a basketball, which both he and his wife witnessed, had soft edges that weren't defined, and after floating down the hall disappeared into a wall. One which his children saw, and which behaved as if guided by some intelligence, was "three dimensional but still translucent and suffused with an eerie green light." These don't sound like solid craft. The phenomena became more pronounced during times of high atmospheric energy, such as storms. This sounds a bit like ball lightning, but ball lightning is a rare phenomenon - how many people do you know have seen it? When it invades the homes again and again of groups of people investigating a strange phenomenon, then you must wonder what is going on.

        Well, that's just some of the high strangeness in the first third of the book. Read it all. I might add that my wife has never been interested in UFOs - they are not part of her world view - but this book was an eye opener for her.