Imminent, by Luis Elizonzo: A Review

★★★ 

If you follow my social media posts or read my blog, even if on occasion, then you know that I am a sucker for aliens: UFOs, UAPs, and the Big Question of "Are We Alone?"

Don't get me wrong. Certainly, it is easy to get swept up in wanting to believe. But the prevalence of quackery and the tendency to believe in conspiracies is a complete turnoff and undermines any serious treatment of the Big Question.

This is where science comes in. As Richard Feyman famously said, science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves. And herein lies a problem. Science has largely been absent from debates surrounding UAPs, UFOs, and the grand question of Are We Alone.

That is beginning to change.

Professor Avi Loeb, astrophysicist at Harvard, is spearheading two major efforts to explore the Big Question. First, Professor Loeb is leading The Galileo Project. The Galileo Project is purchasing multiple high speed cameras and deploying them strategically across the USA and elsewhere. These cameras are pointed skyward and are recording everything that comes into their view. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are being utilized to identify and categorize everything from birds to aircraft to UAPs/UFOs. The sky, Avi Loeb likes to point out, is not classified.

A second project that Professor Loeb is leading is an expedition to recover remnants of a meteor that landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. The meteor produced three major fireballs that were detected by US military satellites. Due to the speed of the meteor and its ability to reach the lower atmosphere, the US military determined that the meteor was interstellar. In other words, it came from outside our solar system.

Professor Loeb led an expedition to the Pacific in summer 2023 to retrieve remnants of the meteor from the bottom of the sea. The expedition successfully recovered 850 spherules that, in subsequent analyses, were determined to have a chemical makeup vastly different than any known material. Loeb and his team published their results after a thorough and rigorous peer-review process.  This is exciting. It is the first known piece of rock (or something) from outside our own solar system. Who knows how many billions of light years it had traveled before crashing into Earth off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

Professor Loeb will lead a second expedition in summer 2025 in an effort to retrieve even larger pieces of the meteor.

In 2017, scientists working with the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii discovered a second interstellar object dubbed 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "Scout"). 'Oumumua did a slingshot around the sun and passed between it and the earth as it was catapulted back out into deep space. 

In addition to being interstellar, 'Oumuamua was unique in other ways. It was shinier than any known natural object detected before, and it was deemed to be very thin and shaped like a disc. Further, 'Oumuamua sped past the earth with an increasing speed faster than the centrifugal force around the sun. In other words, something in addition to the centrifugal force was propelling the object to accelerate. Lastly, the object appeared to have been tumbling.

As scientists around the world struggled, and continue to struggle, to explain the additional acceleration, shape, reflectivity, and thinness of the object, Professor Loeb suggested that perhaps 'Oumuamua was artificial in nature. Perhaps it was some kind of alien probe, or space trash from a faraway galaxy.

While 'Oumuamua is gone and likely never to return, Professor Loeb is calling for investments in telescopes and instruments that can detect and analyze smaller objects either in earth's orbit, or speeding past. If other civilizations exist or existed billions of years ago, there is a possibility that space junk - failed satellites, defunct probes, and debris from broken satellites, probes, or craft - might be caught in Earth's orbit, much like how plastic bags and other detritus of modern life wind up in our oceans. Given that there are trillions of billions of planets in the universe, chances are astronomical that we are, in fact, not alone. Indeed, Professor Loeb insists that to think otherwise is hubris.

So, that's a lot about Avi Loeb. My apologies. The takeaway so far is that Avi Loeb is leading a scientific effort in developing precision instruments and utilizing the scientific method, including peer reviewed research, to answer the Big Question. And he is not the only one.

Which brings us to Luis Elizondo and his book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs.

Luis Elizondo is a whistleblower. He was a US Army intelligence officer that was recruited into a secretive unit within the Defense Intelligence Agency known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). That program, he quickly learned, investigated incidents involving UFOs. In his capacity at AATIP, he was privy to video, radar, sensor, and other recordings that documented UFOs, which are now referred to as UAPs (originally for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, but which now refers to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon; 'Anomalous' replaced 'aerial' because many recordings included UAPs that were trans medium. In other words, they appeared to have effortlessly transited from air into oceans, oceans to air, and air to outer space).

Elizondo became alarmed at the sheer number of UAP incidents involving the US military. UAPs seemed to shadow and even harass US Navy ships. They descended on nuclear missile bases and, in their presence, nuclear systems shut down. In one incident, in Russia, nuclear systems turned on.

Elizondo insists that:

⎼ UAPs operate with impunity in controlled airspace. The US military has no means to counter them.

⎼ UAPs commonly display movements with G forces that no human pilot could survive.

⎼ UAPs have no wings and have no visible means of propulsion (like jet engines or rockets).

Despite these documented incidents and attributes, it seemed that the US Government ⎼ including the US military ⎼ did not take UAP encounters seriously. Worse, Congress had no de facto oversight.

Elizondo wants the US government to take UAPs more seriously and investigate what they are, especially since they appear to exhibit technological capabilities well beyond that of modern aircraft, ships, and spacecraft. In fact, they often seem to defy our current understanding of physics.

In his efforts to ring the alarm, Elizondo consistently ran into resistance and skepticism. He was also disturbed that compartmentalized programs of the US government could operate without any oversight. In fact, they operate as if they are above the law. Elizondo decided that the best path forward was to resign from AATIP and the US government, and go public.

With declassified videos and other evidence, including internal documents, Elizondo went to the New York Times. Astonishingly, the New York Times led as its front page article a blockbuster report exposing the Pentagon's secret UAP programs, including declassified video evidence of US Navy encounters with UAP provided by Elizondo.

Beyond the bullet points listed above, Elizondo makes a few more eyebrow raising claims:

⎼ That the US gov has crashed UFO/UAPs in its possession, including non-human remains.

⎼ That the US gov, and perhaps others, have a program to reverse engineer UAP technology.

⎼ That the Roswell crash in 1947 was real.

⎼ That some soldiers involved in UFO encounters had implants of unknown composition; he even got to view one through a microscope.

⎼ Shares that he personally believes that UFO/UAPs are non-human technologies, and that intelligent non-human beings are currently on Earth. He just doesn't know if they are from other worlds, other dimensions, or even pre-human Earth-based intelligence. He notes, however, that UAPs are prevalent over water and that, perhaps, Earth is a kind of gas station for interstellar travelers.

In one bizarre and distracting chapter that seemingly comes right out of the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, Elizondo talks about being part of a US Army program to "remote view" enemy troop movements and, once, locate a downed pilot before he was captured by the enemy during the Kosovo War. Elizondo posits that humans have a kind of sixth sense that might have been more prominent when we were primarily hunter gatherers, and that this 'sixth sense' can be nurtured into a skill like remote viewing.

Aside from exposing all of the above and also sharing his life story to date, his main goal, he argues, is to advocate for government disclosure and transparency. He also calls for the scientific community to shed the stigma associated with UFO/UAPs and seriously investigate them through the scientific method ⎼ exactly as Avi Loeb and others are doing.

Certainly Elizondo has done a public service by blowing the whistle on secretive programs that appear to operate above the law. The US is a democracy and no government organization should ever be unaccountable.

The weakness of Elizondo's book is that there is simply no evidence beyond the declassified materials ⎼ intriguing and exciting as they are ⎼ already in the public sphere, in large part thanks to him. And how can there be short of a US President making an announcement that We Are Not Alone, and releasing tangible, physical evidence that scientists can evaluate?

Despite all of Elizondo's claims, we have nothing to latch onto, at least in the public sphere. And scientists typically refrain from working with data that is classified because to do so would be antithetical to the scientific method whereby transparency is key. How can you trust an analysis when the data it is based upon is secret? In addition, any research being conducted in secrecy must be hobbled by the lack of transparency and trust that secrecy foments.

Elizondo's book was, ultimately, disappointing. How could it not be? No, it is the scientific work being done out in the open ⎼ like Loeb's expeditions, his Galileo Project, and the work being done by other scientists around the globe, and their resulting peer-reviewed analyses ⎼ that's where we should be looking for answers to the Big Question.

Elizondo, in fact, drives home that very point.