Lue Elizondo's New Book On UFOs

Elizondo, a former high-ranking official in the United States government's efforts to research UFOs, recently published a book on the subject, Imminent (New York, New York: William Morrow, 2024). I've listened to the audio version of it, and I've listened to a couple of recent interviews with Elizondo, one by Joe Rogan and another by Ross Coulthart. It's a significant book with a lot of valuable information in it. It will be read by many people and influence even more.

One of the reasons why I want to discuss it here is that it addresses some religious issues, more than I expected, and I want to discuss the behavior of some of the Christians Elizondo refers to. The book is also worth discussing for other reasons, some of which I'll get into below.

I have no way of knowing much about the accuracy of a lot of what Elizondo reports. He often refers to private conversations, what he saw in videos that are still unavailable to the public, scientific issues I know little about, and so on. I suspect most of what he says is accurate, but it's to be expected that he got some things wrong. He's covering a lot of ground. It's inevitable that there would be some faulty memories, misunderstandings, bad judgments he's made due to his biases, etc. We'll see what reception his book gets once it's been out longer. I've already seen Michael Shermer and Mick West, to cite a couple of examples, criticizing Elizondo and the book, but there are some problems with their criticisms. There's going to be a lot of back and forth about the issues involved for years to come.

Elizondo is aware of non-alien explanations for UFOs, and he occasionally refers to those other explanations in the book, but he takes the common approach of favoring the alien hypothesis over the alternatives without arguing for that preference. And he repeats what he's said before about the potential threat aliens could pose to humanity, how disturbing it is to people to think of humanity as being lower on the food chain than we'd prefer to think we are, etc. In previous posts, I've explained why I think attributing UFOs to human paranormal activity makes more sense than attributing them to aliens. See our posts with the ufology label here, for example. I've also explained why the evidence for Christianity gives us reason for hope about earth's future, even if hostile aliens exist. The post here addresses both of the topics just mentioned.

I agree with Elizondo in rejecting the demonic hypothesis, though I consider it more credible than Elizondo seems to think it is. A substantial minority of his book, more than I expected, is about his experiences with government officials who held the demonic view of UFOs, sometimes even trying to shut down government research into UFOs because of their alleged demonic nature. I've discussed that subject before, and talked about some of the problems with the sort of mindset exhibited by those Christians, here. Elizondo refers at one point to "radical Christianity" and compares it (inappropriately) to radical Islam. He mentions that he encountered people dismissing his work on remote viewing as demonic as well. It's a shame that so many Christians have a simplistic view of these issues, that Elizondo encountered so many such individuals, that they hindered his work so much, and that his discussion of them in his book reflects so poorly on Christianity.

However, Elizondo does sometimes make positive comments about the Vatican and about religion in general. He describes himself as "spiritual". Unfortunately, he gives more respectful treatment than he should to the alleged connection between UFOs and the Biblical accounts of Jacob's Ladder and the events of Ezekiel 1.

As I've mentioned before (when discussing near-death experiences and in other contexts), there's a major problem with Christian negligence regarding paranormal matters. I doubt that many, if any, of the parents, pastors, friends, and other people who influenced these Christians Elizondo refers to expected their simplistic approach to paranormal issues to ever get the sort of attention it's now getting and to do the sort of damage it's done. Part of the reason why Christians pass on such a simplistic view of UFOs and other paranormal subjects to their children, friends, and other people they influence is that they haven't given such issues much thought and haven't expected that negligence to matter much. It matters a lot, and it matters a lot in a lot of contexts. See my recent post about an interview with Jeffrey Long on near-death experiences for another example of how that sort of Christian negligence is bearing bad fruit. These paranormal issues are coming up in governmental circles, in hospitals, in hospices, on television, and in many other contexts, and Christians aren't handling it well. I've been working on paranormal issues for many years now, and the large majority of Christians I encounter respond to my work with some variation of apathy or contempt.

I appreciate Elizondo's criticisms of those who are overly optimistic about the benevolence of UFOs. Go here for some of his comments on the subject in his interview with Ross Coulthart. In the book, Elizondo is even more forceful, at one point referring to the benevolent view of UFOs as "foolish". The book discusses examples of UFO incidents in which people died, injuries people sustained, illnesses related to UFO events, etc.

One of the issues he discusses briefly is the killing of animals, such as cattle, by UFOs. I'd like to know more about how often animals are harmed in comparison to how often humans are. If animals get harmed substantially more often than humans, that would be another significant potential parallel between UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

One of the more disturbing UFO incidents Elizondo has discussed, such as in his interview with Joe Rogan, is an episode in which a military frogman was lowered from a helicopter to recover some military equipment from an ocean. As he approached the water, a large, black, circular object rose to the surface of the water and took the equipment before the frogman could retrieve it. That's another example of a trait of UFOs that's paralleled in other paranormal contexts, such as poltergeists. UFOs, like poltergeists, often wait until the last moment to do something (such as taking the object the frogman was trying to retrieve just before he got to it). See my discussion here concerning this trait that we see in both UFOs and poltergeists. Do a Ctrl F search for "Leslie" to find the relevant section of the post.

Elizondo mentions Jacques Vallee occasionally, but doesn't interact with the problems with the alien hypothesis that Vallee has said so much about (e.g., chapter 9, titled "The Case Against Extraterrestrials", in Vallee's book Dimensions [San Antonio, Texas: Anomalist Books, 2008]). For example, Elizondo appeals to the possibility that UFOs are visiting earth so frequently in order to do reconnaissance. But, as Vallee has explained, that reconnaissance hypothesis doesn't sit well with how advanced the aliens' technology is supposed to be, how intelligent and knowledgeable the aliens are supposed to be, etc. It's problematic for them to need to keep visiting earth so much, to keep doing it so inefficiently, to keep getting observed doing it, and so on if the aliens are as advanced as advocates of the alien hypothesis typically suggest. And there are so many other problems with the alien hypothesis: how closely the phenomena seem to align with human psychology, how nonsensical so much of the UFO behavior seems to be, the fragmentary nature of some of the phenomena, etc.

In the audio version of his book, Elizondo repeatedly reads out the phrase "redacted by DOD [Department of Defense]". I think there was at least once when he even made a reference to how what he was reading was a "footnote", even though he didn't read out other footnotes. It seems that he was going out of his way, at least in the audio version of the book, to emphasize the fact that the Pentagon prevented him from saying some things in the book that he initially intended to say. Despite an apparently large amount of restraint placed on Elizondo by the United States government, he provides a lot of useful information. The book is much better for gathering data about UFOs than for getting the best interpretation of that data.

The book mentions how some portion of it was written in April of this year, and the end of the book includes a discussion of David Grusch and events that occurred after Grusch went public last year. I don't know how long Elizondo worked on the book, but some portions of it were written as recently as late last year and the early months of this year.

Despite my disagreements with Elizondo, a lot of what he's done in this field is commendable. He also discusses other individuals who have done commendable work in this context, such as the late Senator Harry Reid.