Aliens are already here and a threat to us all. The Pentagon is covering it up. And I have proof: The chilling warning of a former US intelligence officer with top-level security clearance

A powerfully built man who served in the US military in Afghanistan and Kuwait, and also ran anti-terrorism missions against Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Lebanese militants Hezbollah, Luis Elizondo doesn’t seem like the type to scare easily.

However, even he admits his ‘blood ran cold’ when his children reported seeing a green, glowing orb hovering in the air near them inside their family home in Maryland outside Washington DC.

The three-dimensional ball was ‘translucent and suffused with an eerie green light’ and ‘behaved as if guided by some intelligence’, stopping dead still in the air before drifting off down a hallway and disappearing. Elizondo says on another occasion he saw the same thing – a glowing green object, the size of a basketball and with ‘soft edges that weren’t defined’ floating slowly from their kitchen to his bedroom door just below ceiling height before disappearing into a wall.

His wife, Jenn, also saw it for the full ten seconds it appeared – a fact that gave him huge relief given ‘she was an immense sceptic on all this’.

Exactly what Jenn was a sceptic about – and what he has come to firmly believe – is the existence of aliens and UFOs that have visited Earth and boldly buzz about our skies. Furthermore, the US government is fully aware of this, but chooses to conceal from the public in the mother of all cover-ups.

These stunning allegations have now been made by Elizondo in a shocking new book, Imminent – Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs. It’s a book that has been hailed by some as all the more significant because Elizondo isn’t some crackpot amateur UFO sleuth but the former military intelligence officer who actually led that hunt.

The 52-year-old claims to be the former head of the US Defence Department’s shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

And he would like us to know that he didn’t start seeing those small green luminous balls until after he went to work for the AATIP and recognised them for one of the most common types of UFO – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – that are reported.

In his mind, it could hardly have been a coincidence. Some of his colleagues had reported similar sightings where they lived. Was some ‘more advanced intelligence’ checking out the humans who were investigating them, Elizondo wondered. Inevitably, his book has sent ructions through a UFO world that has spent decades fighting desperately to be taken seriously. He ticks all the boxes in terms of being a ‘credible witness’.

He had top security clearance and worked for a secret US government UFO investigation unit for seven years.

Elizondo claims the evidence for extraterrestrials is hiding in plain sight, here on Earth.

But he says it is being withheld from us by obstructive Pentagon officials who fear disclosure will cause mass panic.

He alleges that clear footage – unveiled a few years ago – of UFOs captured by US fighter pilots, proves that highly advanced spacecraft have been buzzing us for decades. And even worse, our relatively feeble defences are powerless to stop them.

‘These craft are not made by humans,’ Elizondo boldly and bluntly states.

‘Humanity is in fact not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species.’

These UFO ‘craft’ have been operating with ‘complete impunity all over the world since at least the Second World War’, he insists, and have the ability ‘to move in ways that defy our knowledge of physics… within air, water and space’.

UFOs, he intones, present ‘at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity’. To put it mildly, it sounds like the sort of issue someone should have mentioned some time ago. No one has, he says, because a secret cabal of US government officials and major defence contractors have been retrieving the UFOs and their alien occupants since 1947 and hiding them away.

It’s all terrifying stuff that is straight out of an episode of the sci-fi TV series The X-Files – only in this case it emanates not from Hollywood but from a man who worked for years as a high-ranking military counter-intelligence officer before he was recruited into the AATIP in 2009.

The group was set up in 2007 at the behest of Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, to study UFOs at the urging of an influential friend, Robert Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace.

Bigelow has said he’s ‘absolutely convinced’ that aliens exist and have visited Earth.

Elizondo has made waves before – in 2017 he resigned from his Pentagon job in protest at government secrecy and a lack of resources. He and others caused a huge stir by leaking shocking footage of supposed UFO encounters in the form of US Navy cockpit camera footage showing a bizarrely shaped, immensely fast object – resembling a giant white Tic Tac mint – whizzing through the skies, able to stop and start suddenly mid-flight, and generally baffling airmen.

And his latest intervention has bolstered the fantastic claims of another senior Defence Department whistleblower, Major David Grusch, before Congress last year. Grusch testified that the Pentagon is hiding the remains of aliens captured from the wreckage of at least a dozen separate UFO crashes in remote parts of the US.

Now we have the similarly compelling testimony of Elizondo – not a man, at least by his own account, to be easily taken in by wacky conspiracies and mumbo-jumbo.

Born in Texas in 1971, his Cuban father had been a guerrilla fighter who took part in the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation to oust Fidel Castro. Elizondo studied microbiology and immunology at university and served in the US Army for 20 years as a counter-intelligence agent.

He saw active service in South America, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan and proudly defends his interrogation of suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

He describes how a lawyer for one of the 9/11 suspects labelled him the ‘US Czar of Torture’ in open court and says the European Court issued an open arrest warrant ‘for me and anyone involved in’ the extraordinary rendition of high-value detainees.

The book claims that in 2009 he was selected to head a secret Pentagon team, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme, an outfit so secretive that it was buried inside another defence project to ensure it was hidden from what he calls ‘the prying eyes of our detractors’.

Elizondo says he had no interest in UFOs or even sci-fi when he joined the project.

‘My background was in science,’ he recalls sniffily.

However, his recruiters urged him to approach the subject with an open mind as there was ‘data’ to support ‘strange sightings across the world’ going back decades. He was told he would be focusing on areas that ‘didn’t conform to physics as we understood it’.

His eyes were opened, he says, after he saw the amazing 2004 footage captured by the crews of F-18 Super Hornet US Navy planes on exercise off the California coast after they were diverted to investigate mysterious radar echoes.

On arrival they saw a strange white object hovering above the Pacific that was shaped like a Tic Tac mint. This object had no wings or visible means of propulsion yet moved at fantastic speed.

Cockpit videos captured by one of the F-18 crews were one of three pieces of UAP footage released to the media in 2017 and authenticated by the Pentagon four years later.

Elizondo claims the footage shows that UFOs pose an urgent security threat because they can evade our defence radars and run rings around our most advanced aircraft. He also weighs in on perhaps the most abiding UFO conspiracy theory – a 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, at which the supposed downing of a military weather balloon was widely seen as the crash landing of a spacecraft.

In fact, claims Elizondo, two flying saucers collided that day after their ‘propulsion bubbles’ somehow failed and they descended ‘like a 757 losing all power on its jet engines’.

And alluding to the now-famous pictures of skinny humanoid creatures with slitty-eyes – widely thought to be clever fakes – he writes that ‘four deceased non-human bodies’ were recovered.

He says the Roswell incident ‘codified’ how Washington would handle future UFO incidents in succeeding decades – ‘admit nothing and deny everything’, but also intimidate witnesses into silence, discredit anyone who doesn’t play ball and ‘stigmatise’ the entire issue of visitors from outer space.

And so bombshells like the autopsy report on an alien from another incident which Elizondo cites – in which the brain was described as having a smooth surface like ‘lower-functioning animals here on Earth’ and a ‘conjoined gut and liver, and a three-chambered heart, like reptiles’ – were naturally never made public.

The book’s stunning claims are endorsed in a glowing foreword by Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence under President Clinton and George W Bush. Mellon is another highly placed UFO believer who has been pushing for Congress to examine evidence collected from pilots and whistleblowers such as Elizondo and Grusch.

So should we all immediately drop what we’re doing and head to the hills?

Perhaps not just yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it remains the case that senior US ‘whistleblowers’ have been making similar allegations for decades but never managed to back them up with proof, asking us instead to believe their incredible stories based on trust in their credibility.

When pressed to produce evidence for their fabulous stories they often fall back on security oaths that prevent them from telling us what they know – or threats from the ‘Men In Black’.

Elizondo, who certainly doesn’t back his claims with definitive evidence, has already been proven to be unreliable – he is on record as promising that official disclosure about the existence of UFOs was imminent way back in 2018.

In Britain, Nick Pope, who worked for the MoD’s UFO desk for three years, broke ranks in 1996 to proclaim that ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth and that something should be done about it urgently’. Much like Elizondo, Pope claimed to have seen evidence in then secret files that convinced him that something bizarre, and potentially hostile, was visiting us.

But when in 2008 the MoD began to release those files, the ‘evidence’ was conspicuous by its absence.

Critics have noted that for a man who should know he has a struggle on his hands to be taken seriously, Elizondo hardly does his credibility any favours when he admits to some deeply weird beliefs that sometimes veer into the supernatural.

As well as his mention of the ominous floating green balls that he claims appeared on and off for seven years, he describes working telepathically with colleagues in so-called ‘group remote viewing’ to disturb the dreams of a terrorist thousands of miles away.

He also alludes to the idea that aliens are possibly angels or demons visiting Earth, and claims his former boss at the Defence Intelligence Agency – who he does not name – believed UFOs didn’t need further investigation as they were ‘obviously’ the work of the Devil.

Sceptic Mick West, who specialises in analysis of UFO videos, told the Mail that Elizondo’s bizarre anecdotes ‘suggests that he really believes a wide variety of unusual things that deeply involve a supernatural interpretation of reality not yet based on any verifiable facts’.

So are those who stalk the corridors of power – even in the West’s most powerful defence and intelligence agencies – just as prone as the man in the street to being gullible about flying saucers and little green men?

Without concrete proof – the ‘smoking gun’ that remains elusive in the UFO world – it seems that might well be the case.

After all, even Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who led the RAF to victory in the Battle of Britain, believed in fairies and insisted that UFOs came from Mars and Venus. It looks like we can wait a little longer before we press the ‘Invasion Earth’ panic button.