58 pages • 1-hour read
Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs
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Themes
Bureaucracy as an Impediment to Truth
Throughout Imminent, Elizondo criticizes bureaucracy and red tape. He draws on his decades of experience in the military to critique the level of waste he sees in the US government. Elizondo appeals to ethos—the part of the rhetorical triangle associated with authorial credibility—by claiming that while his position entitled him to perks such as private jet travel, he refused these wasteful luxuries out of principle. Though he tried to avoid waste in his own government work, he could not escape the bureaucracy. For Elizondo, the complicated paperwork, the byzantine classification systems, and the inability to get direct answers from anybody are evidence of the way that bureaucracy slows the business of running the Pentagon. He castigates the bureaucrats in the Pentagon for being more interested in bureaucracy than actually protecting the country.
At the beginning of the book, Elizondo frames bureaucracy as the biggest threat to the United States. Complicated bureaucracies needlessly complicate the running of the military and get in the way of people who actually want to help, such as Elizondo himself. As he delves deeper into the UAP program, he portrays bureaucratic red tape as an obstacle to truth telling. This is a standard trope in anti-government conspiracy theories of all sorts. The heroic whistleblower is stymied not only by those in power who actively hide nefarious secrets but also by the many mid-level functionaries who, by insisting on Byzantine protocol, unwittingly abet the malefactors at the top of the hierarchy. When he was trying to retrieve biological materials, for example, Elizondo could not find anyone who could provide the right information or authorization. He was trapped in a maze of paperwork that separated him from the answers that he sought.
The UAP program turned Elizondo’s perpetual annoyance with government bureaucracy into outright loathing. The complicated bureaucracies seemed almost intentional to him, providing Pentagon insiders with an easy way to keep him from the truth. Coupled with Elizondo’s belief that UAP are a threat to the safety of the United States, the government bureaucracy itself became a threat. Anything that hid the truth about UAP from the world perpetuated the threat that Elizondo was trying to quell, so the government bureaucracy was as much a danger in his mind as any foreign adversary.
In the story he tells about his work in AATIP, Elizondo decided to turn the tables against the bureaucrats and administrators. Since he could not get funding for UAP projects without the administrators becoming involved, he used administrative tricks to mask the true intention of his actions. He enclosed his UAP research in other projects, diverting time and money in such a manner that the UAP projects did not appear in the paperwork. By turning the bureaucracy against its architects, Elizondo thwarted those who would hide what he saw as the truth. When he went public with his research and the Pentagon disavowed his claims, he argued that the bureaucrats were using administrative tricks to discredit him. From a benign annoyance, the government bureaucracy became slowly weaponized until Elizondo was a victim of “administrative terrorism” (215). Though he eventually triumphs in this narrative, the government bureaucracy emerges as a credible villain throughout the book, functioning as Elizondo’s primary antagonist.
The Conspiracy to Cover Up Evidence of UAP
Elizondo’s book draws on a long tradition of conspiracy theories claiming that the US government has actively covered up the presence of extraterrestrial spacecraft and even (sometimes living) extraterrestrial bodies on US soil. The book deals with purportedly secret government information, and there are many people within the government, Elizondo alleges, who wish this information to remain secret. Even when he was working in the Pentagon, he came up against secretive and anonymous groups who covertly attempted to dissuade him from uncovering more information about UAP. The foremost of these was the Legacy Program, the name given by Elizondo to a conspiracy between certain members of the government and private contractors. According to Elizondo, the Legacy Program orchestrated a highly profitable system whereby the government recruited private contractors in the aerospace and defense industries to collect both technological and biological material from UAP crash sites. With this material, the private contractors could reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology that could then be sold to the wider public, who have no idea of its origin.
As such, Elizondo alleges that the Legacy Program hid the truth about UAP from the public while profiting from a direct threat to the United States. Throughout Imminent, Elizondo describes how he dealt with pushback from the Legacy Program. They subverted his efforts with administrative tools or placed unsympathetic figures in the command structure above him. Elizondo never directly accuses anyone of working for the Legacy Program, but he felt their efforts against him everywhere in the Pentagon.
The “Collins Elite,” in Elizondo’s story, is a religiously motivated conspiracy within the United States government. According to Elizondo, the Collins Elite is the name given to a group of Christian fundamentalists who were theologically opposed to investigations into UAP activity. Since the existence of aliens threatened their fundamentalist Christian doctrine, they wanted to bring a halt to Elizondo and his investigations. Their religion motivated them to halt research into the truth, Elizondo suggests. Shadowy Christian groups seeking to suppress information that contradicts their dogma form another well-worn conspiracy-theory trope, seen most notably in stories about the Knights Templar (for example, in Dan Brown’s 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code). Unlike the Legacy Program, members of the Collins Elite were less secretive. They confronted Elizondo in the hallways of the Pentagon and explicitly warned him not to investigate “demonic” activity. Elizondo characterizes himself as a spiritual man, if not overtly religious, but he found the religious zealotry of the Collins Elite appalling. He accuses them of putting their personal beliefs above the truth and above their country. To Elizondo, the Collins Elite is a conspiracy of zealots who actively undermined US security.
In mainstream culture, belief in UFOs and aliens has been highly stigmatized. People who investigate such matters are mocked or pitied. When Elizondo decided to come forward with his investigation, he was acutely aware of this conspiratorial stigma. For conspiracy theorists, this stigma is part of the conspiracy—an intentional effort to discredit those who know the truth. Elizondo went to great lengths to distance himself from more familiar UFO conspiracy theorists while, at the same time, arguing that public criticism of such figures furthers the widespread coverup. He and his team embarked on a rebranding exercise, popularizing the term “UAP” to distance themselves from the stigma associated with the term “UFO.” As Elizondo seeks to build ethos—or credibility—throughout the book, his challenge is to avoid being seen as a conspiracy theorist while he is alleging an enormously far-reaching conspiracy. To do this, he falls back on one of the most familiar rhetorical techniques in the conspiracy theorist’s playbook: implying that those who mock or criticize conspiracy theorists are in on the conspiracy.
The Quest for Redemption
Imminent is ostensibly a book about UAP. In writing the story of how he became interested in UAP, however, Elizondo introduces an element of redemption into the narrative. He was heavily influenced by the chaotic and colorful life of his father, Luis D. Elizondo III, a fighter in the Cuban Revolution. After the Revolution succeeded, Elizondo’s father turned against Fidel Castro. He bitterly regretted that his efforts had installed Castro in power, and while living in the United States, he dedicated his life to trying to depose the Cuban leader. Elizondo’s father’s life became a quest to undo what he had done, to seek redemption through battle and struggle. He was part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he taught his son similar paramilitary techniques, hoping that he might achieve redemption one day vicariously through his children. This lifelong battle for redemption, to undo the mistakes of the past, threatened to consume the life of Elizondo III, yet it left a remarkable impression on his son.
Growing up in his father’s shadow, Elizondo found comfort in the military. He joined the Army in search of the comradery and brotherhood that he lacked elsewhere, and he participated in several wars in the Middle East. He then returned to America, where he worked in counterintelligence as part of the controversial Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. Throughout the book, Elizondo refers to the litany of legal issues that stemmed from his involvement in this project. He alludes to his regrets about the wars in the Middle East and hints at the use of torture in places like Guantanamo Bay, though he justifies his actions by insisting that he was fighting against terrorism. Like his father, however, Elizondo seems to subconsciously regret his involvement in past military actions. He cannot extricate himself entirely from the military, but he latches onto the UAP investigation as a path toward redemption. He might not be able to undo the mistakes of America’s past, but he can achieve redemption by preventing future mistakes. As such, he constantly refers to the intelligence failure of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a mistake that must not be repeated with regard to UAP. The wars in the Middle East and the controversial practices at Guantanamo Bay are evidence of the wide-ranging ill effects of that failure.
By sharing what he claims to know about UAP with the public, Elizondo frames his story as one of redemption for his past actions in the Middle East and in Guantanamo. In this redemption narrative, he fights against the conspiratorial elements within the US government and against a largely indifferent institutional structure by appealing to the skeptical mainstream press. Elizondo views himself as taking on the biggest bullies of all, the Pentagon insiders, just as his dad once took on the Castro government. He promises to continue this battle, as he does not yet feel as though he has succeeded enough to redeem himself. Now, he suggests, everyone else must become involved. To prevent future catastrophe, the reader has a responsibility. The entire society, Elizondo suggests, can achieve redemption for the many mistakes of the past by avoiding a cataclysmic mistake in the future. The book is not just about redemption for Elizondo as an individual but redemption for society as a whole.
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