Imminent: A book review of a book I have not finished, but only because I've been taking my time listening to it while I drive to the casino to play poker.

The nation’s bestselling book this week, Imminent, is about the search for UFOs. Lue Elizondo, the goateed bad-ass-looking dude you may have seen being interviewed on any number of news channels and podcasts, is the former director of AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon. AATIP had one job – figure out what the hell are the UFOs flying above the nation’s airspace.

The program was a closely held secret in the Pentagon, a way to compartmentalize it from others who saw the search for answers either pointless, demonic, or – as Lue came to believe – from those who would expose their work on a legacy program of reverse engineering downed craft. The allegation of such a program, or programs, was made public by Major David Grusch in 2023.

This is Lue Elizondo. He’s younger than me. Just goes to show you what worrying about national security threats will do to your forehead. (Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times)

Eventually, Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon after not being able to persuade his bosses that the UFO problem was a legitimate national security threat. That resignation eventually led to the publication of 2017’s bombshell New York Times story, “Glowing Auras and Black Money: The Pentagon’s Secret UFO Program,” which revitalized a moribund UFO community. This new interest led to Congressional hearings, including the one in which Maj. Grusch testified, and the introduction, by Sens. Charles Schumer and Mike Rounds, of the UAP Disclosure Act, which would force disclosure of any otherworld materials in the possession of private aerospace contractors.

That bill was eventually killed in last year’s Defense Appropriations Act when a couple Congressional Republicans, led by Rep. Mike Rogers, killed the bill. Then, Schumer and Rounds introduced it again this year. Why would the nation’s second most powerful Democrat risk his reputation on UFOs (UAP), and a bill which mentions the phrase “non-human intelligence” fourteen times? Maybe more interestingly, why have no Republicans used Schumer’s interest in this subject to ridicule him? Jimmy Carter got all kinds of shit after claiming he’d seen a UFO. Why haven’t his fellow members of the Gang of Eight - the bipartisan group of Congresspeople who receive the most classified intelligence - made any noises about it at all, except for Republican Marco Rubio, who has been supportive of the measure.

I’m only about halfway through Elizondo’s book, but it’s already startling. Not so much because of incidents he recounts, all of which will already be familiar to people interested in the topic, but because of how he assembles the pieces, tying together all the individuals who have had a hand in moving disclosure forward, and how they’ve done so.

Why would that be so startling?

Because he’s talking about his contemporaneous peers. He names names of living people who could easily refute his remarks. In fact, one of those people, James Lakatski, one of the senior intelligence officers who first brought Lue into the program, has taken some issue with the way Lue characterized their individual responsibilities with the Pentagon, if not the material presented. The fact is, the basic thesis of Lue’s narrative -  we are not alone – has not been challenged by any of the people he cites.

One of those people is Hal Puthoff, a laser physicist who has been involved with this, and other esoteric and secretive subjects for the United States Government for more than five decades. Early in Elizondo’s tale, Hal Puthoff tells him, “Roswell was real.” Roswell, of course, is the site of the 1947 incident that some believe is a UFO crash site. Puthoff has not denied telling Elizondo this. Is that a confirmation from somebody that would most likely know the facts of the case, or is that simply a ”can neither confirm nor deny” non-statement statement? I don’t know.

In recent days, another figure from the book, Dr. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who has done a lot of similar work as Puthoff for the intelligence agencies, has confirmed that he wrote the famous “Wilson-Davis Memo”. This memo, found in the possession of astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell after his death in 2016, purports to be the notes of a 2002 meeting between Davis and Admiral Thomas Wilson, in which Wilson confirms to Davis that UFOs are “real” and that the US has a reverse-engineering program. Wilson has always denied that any such meeting took place. Funnily enough, within the memo, Wilson tells Davis that if the meeting were ever to be made public, he would deny that such a meeting took place.

It seems to me that we’re now past the point of answering the same question again and again: yes, UFOs are real. The Pentagon has said so, whistleblowers have said so, other governments have said so, retired astronauts, generals, and admirals have said so. I hope Imminent is the last book that has to make that particular case*.

While researchers have accepted this fact for decades, the mainstream public is only now beginning to take the situation seriously. I don’t mean that people should be freaked out about it, but the mainstream public ought to be turning their attention from “Are they real?” to “What are they?”

Because that’s where the conversation gets interesting.

Occam’s Razor would have us believe that they’re simply secret American tech. The problem with that theory is that, if it’s true, it would be the largest scandal in American history. Consider that these are craft with impossible flight characteristics that have been regularly appearing in the skies since at least the 1940’s. They have no obvious means of propulsion, they have no wings, they have no heat signature. Consider how many lives over the last hundred years could have been saved if the world had access to the kind of energy source that must power such craft. Whatever it is, it isn’t oil. Consider the other technologies involved: chemistry, metallurgy, and a physics that we can’t even begin to replicate. If that’s American tech, and it has been in our possession for so long, why hasn’t it been commercialized or deployed in combat? The simplest answer actually makes the least amount of sense.

So if it’s not ours. And it’s not anybody else’s… whose is it? That’s the question I would like the mainstream public, and media, to begin covering with more regularity. There are many, many theories out there. All of them have some merit, none of them explain everything. I’ll go a step further: in my opinion, the nuts-and-bolts objects that have been zipping across our skies with impunity are actually the least interesting part of the story. Lue edges around the larger story, of which the UFO piece is only a component, which is the nature of consciousness and reality itself. The theories to explain these things go from the wild to the bizarre to the spiritual.

I’m getting the quote wrong, but somebody once said something like, “You start out by studying UFOs and you end up becoming a Biblical scholar.” A better quote, though, comes from the naturalist J.B.S Halden, who wrote, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” That’s what gets my gears going, not the thought that we may one day trade fancy spices with aliens, but that the existence of another entity with intelligence that meets or exceeds our own – whatever form that entity may take – would open an entirely new world for us to explore. Of course, they could also destroy us, but am I really going to get bent out of shape about a little human extinction? Nah.

*A caveat: I want to acknowledge that 95% or more of “UFO sightings” can be explained prosaically. I also want to acknowledge that of the 5% that remain, many will eventually be found to have prosaic explanations. That still leaves a lot of unexplained cases.