M1 Abrams Tank with Unexplained Hole at Camp Arifjan

In 2003, while deployed as a counter-intelligence officer at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, Luis Elizondo encountered an M1 Abrams tank with a perfectly bored hole through its armour. No known conventional weapon — kinetic or shaped-charge — matched the damage signature, and the incident remained officially unexplained at the time.

The Incident

Elizondo describes in Imminent (2024) inspecting the Abrams personally and documenting the hole's clean edges, absence of thermal scoring consistent with an anti-tank warhead, and the uniform cylindrical profile that pierced the composite armour. Standard US Army technical-intelligence reviews could not identify a matching weapon class in the adversary inventory of the period. The tank and the damage were photographed and reported through US Army Intelligence and Security Command channels.

Significance

The case is cited by Elizondo as one of several anomalous material and damage signatures that predated his AATIP work and contributed to his openness to unconventional threat-assessment categories. Similar 'directed-energy' signatures later appeared in Havana Syndrome and UAP-proximate vehicle-damage reports, creating a broader anomaly cluster that AATIP attempted to analyse systematically.