Luis Elizondo

Luis Elizondo is an American author, media personality and former U.S. intelligence officer specialising in counter-intelligence and UAP research. After studying at the University of Miami (major in microbiology and immunology, minors in chemistry and mathematics) he joined the U.S. Army in 1995 and served in Military Intelligence with deployments to South Korea, Afghanistan (post-9/11 under General James Mattis) and the Middle East. From 2009 to 2012 he led the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), before resigning in October 2017 out of frustration over the lack of transparency and emerging as one of the most prominent disclosure figures.

• Degrees from the University of Miami: microbiology/immunology, chemistry, mathematics; research experience in parasitology
• U.S. Army from 1995; Military Intelligence in South Korea, Afghanistan (under James Mattis) and the Middle East
• Recruited as a civilian Special Agent in 1998 — protecting advanced aerospace technologies, investigating espionage and terrorism
• 2009–2012 head of the Pentagon's AATIP program, including analysis of physically impossible UAP encounters
• Resignation in October 2017; central role in the NYT exposé on AATIP that same year
• Congressional testimony on UAP; appearances on 60 Minutes, CNN and History Channel's Unidentified
• NYT bestseller Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs (2024), with references to crash retrievals, non-human biologics from Roswell and personal orb encounters

Elizondo is the bridge figure between classified Pentagon interior and public disclosure debate: he moved AATIP's work from classified file cabinet to the front page of the New York Times and, from an insider's perspective, made the UAP question truly mass-accessible for the first time. Without his 2017 resignation and the 2024 book, the modern disclosure wave would hardly have gotten rolling in its present form.