The former head of a secret government UFO program has spoken out in an interview with DailyMail.com – before revealing in a new book why he is certain the Pentagon has material from crashed ‘nonhuman’ spacecraft.

Luis Elizondo, 52, helped run the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) from 2009 to 2017, investigating UFOs that harassed Navy warships and nuclear silos.

DailyMail.com obtained an advance copy of his book, Imminent, in which he shockingly and unequivocally stated that a ‘Legacy Program’ is ‘in possession of advanced technology made off-world by nonhuman intelligence’.

The memoir is bursting with other jaw-dropping revelations and claims, including a 2016 plan Elizondo and colleagues hatched to catch a UFO in the ocean, and his family’s own disturbing experience with ‘green orbs’ floating through their house.

The ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official revealed Donald Trump was briefed on the government’s UFO program during his presidency, and detailed in his book some intriguing and previously unknown UFO incidents.

These included a 2013 dramatic saucer sighting at the secretive Los Alamos missile test range; laser-precise holes cut through armored tanks in the Kuwaiti desert in 2003; a giant craft beneath the waters of Puerto Rico in 1999; and foreign biological implants found in servicemembers after they encountered UFOs.

Some sections of the book were redacted by the Pentagon, which reviewed it before publication to prevent unauthorized spilling of secrets. Their review does not mean they are vouching for Elizondo’s claims.

A career senior defense intelligence officer who played a major role running Guantanamo Bay in the 2010s, Elizondo was long a creature of the shadows.

His father, who fought alongside young Fidel Castro and joined Americans in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, taught Florida-raised Elizondo to assemble an AR-15 at age seven. Soon after he showed him how to ride a motorcycle and fly a plane.

Elizondo thought he’d seen it all, serving in Afghanistan alongside General James Mattis and running antiterrorism missions against ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

But when top DIA rocket scientist James Lacatski called him in for a meeting in 2008, he got let in on something altogether stranger.

‘He looked over his glasses at me and he said, “What do you think about UFOs?”’ Elizondo told DailyMail.com.

‘I paused for a moment, and I said “I don’t have the luxury to think about them. I’m too busy chasing bad guys.”

‘He said to me: “Don’t let your own personal bias get the best of you, because what you learn here may challenge any preconceived notions.”

‘That’s really when I first learned what this program was about.’

Lacatski recruited Elizondo to manage security for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a $22 million DIA initiative that chased down servicemembers’ reports of UFOs, and researched ways to replicate their unearthly technology.

After funding ran out in 2012, Elizondo and his colleagues continued their work using resources cobbled together from their other jobs at DIA and varied military and defense agencies, under the new name AATIP.

In his memoir, Elizondo described some of the strange incidents he investigated while in government.

He said scientists were testing a classified device at the White Sands missile test range in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 2013, when ‘witnesses spotted several mysterious and luminous orbs moving over a nearby ridge’.

‘The orbs moved toward the test site, hovered over the device as if scanning it for intel, then zipped away, brashly flying over the heads of bewildered scientists,’ the ex-official wrote.

‘Later, several eyewitnesses saw a formation of disc-shaped objects that seemed to know precisely where the device being tested was located. This occurred several times over a few days.’

He described another case from 1999, in which a Navy chopper flew over Puerto Rican waters to retrieve a dummy cruise missile they were test-launching.

‘As the frogman dangled from his hoist, a large, circular object the size of a small island began to rise to the surface,’ Elizondo wrote.

‘The pilot told me that it was black as the devil and the water began to churn and roll like a witch’s brew. The crew panicked.

‘As the helicopter rose, the pilot noticed the missile getting sucked underwater.’

While serving with the US Army in Kuwait in 2003, Elizondo said he had an inexplicable experience.

Military police told him a Bedouin goat herder saw a ‘brilliant green flash’ over tanks stationed at the remote desert base of Arifjan one night.

When Elizondo came to investigate, they showed him a heavily armored M1 battle tank – designed to withstand a direct missile hit – with ‘a small hole punched through the armored side’ that was ‘perfectly round, no rough edges.’

‘The tank next to it showed precisely the same sabotage,’ Elizondo wrote. ‘Whatever caused this seemed to penetrate the sides of two of our best tanks with one clean hole through both.

‘It was as if someone had used a supersharp cookie cutter to take a core sample of the vehicle. The energy required to do such a thing would have been enormous.’

Things got weirder from there.

He described ‘implants’ found in military servicemembers who had a run-in with a UFO.

‘I once handled one of these implants myself, provided to me by a hospital in the Department of Veterans Affairs, where it had been removed from a US military servicemember who had encountered a UAP [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the government term for UFOs],’ Elizondo wrote.

‘The material, no longer or wider than a joint of one of your fingers, looked more like a microchip encapsulated by a slimy semitranslucent casing of tissue… Under a microscope, it was still moving somehow.

‘AAWSAP/AATIP had also obtained photographs of these sorts of tiny objects from living foreign military pilots.’

Elizondo claimed samples were sent to ‘the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and a US Army research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland.’

Elizondo and his colleagues’ ultimate goal was to get access to an alleged longstanding program hidden by defense contractors working with the Pentagon, that had recovered crashed UFOs – some dating back to the infamous reported flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

And in an interview with DailyMail.com, Elizondo revealed that his team got a meeting with this shadowy program’s administrators.

‘We were told by the people who had the material,’ he said. ‘They sat there and said “We’re happy to have this conversation with you. There’s some things you’re going to need to do if you want more access to it. But we’re happy to give this stuff to you.”

‘That’s a holy cow moment. That’s a seismic revelation.

‘There are countless examples of this type of material being collected, that when analyzed and scrutinized by scientific experts – I’m talking about US government top secret-cleared scientists – substantiate that what we’re dealing with is something that was not made by us.’

But he said these ‘gatekeepers’ tied his team up in red tape and ultimately failed to open their books – or secret bunkers – to the scrappy Pentagon team.

Elizondo added that for now he is unable to back up his claims with further evidence, as the rest, he says, is classified.

His claims echo those of Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency official, who told Congress in a public hearing last year that the government is covering up a UFO crash retrieval program that has half a dozen spacecraft and even alien bodies.

While working on AATIP, Elizondo said he and his family had their own close encounter.

‘My wife was a complete skeptic on all this – that is, until she saw an orb in our house for herself,’ he wrote in his book.

‘We had a long main hallway in the house, and one evening a green, glowing ball, probably about the size of a basketball, with soft edges that weren’t defined, floated down slowly from the kitchen to our bedroom door just below ceiling height, then disappeared into a wall.’

‘If it was just me that saw these things, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. But the fact is, my whole family saw them,’ the intelligence officer told DailyMail.com. ‘And other members in AATIP experienced this same thing as well.

He said he, his family and even neighbors saw these luminous green orbs repeatedly – but only while he worked in the UFO program.

‘There was a lot of weird stuff. The more you got involved with the portfolio, the more bizarre it got,’ he said. ‘I don’t talk too much about it because it just seems so bizarre.

‘It was only happening when we were involved with AATIP. It never happened before, never happened after.’

Elizondo and fellow AATIP member Jay Stratton hatched a plan in 2015 to catch a UFO.

He told DailyMail.com that their investigations pointed to these craft having an apparent interest in military operations, nuclear power, and were often seen around bodies of water.

So they coordinated with the Navy and other branches to create ‘Project Interloper’: an attempt to lure these mysterious craft and record them with high-tech equipment.

‘You take a nuclear carrier strike group, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, you have a nuclear powered submarine and other nuclear equities in the area, and you put it on the water,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘So you have the military, nuclear and water nexus. We were very, very confident we were going to get UAP encounters, because we had them all the time. That’s what they were attracted to, like flies to fly paper.’

The idea was to gather warships in the ocean, focusing their radar, sonar, and cameras where they believed the UFOs would appear.

‘There was an official plan that had support. It got briefed all the way to the Joint Staff,’ Elizondo said. ‘We had a lot of interest from the intelligence community. A lot of agencies were part of this. They were ready to put their effort and assets into it. And at the last minute it got denied.

‘That, for me, was one of the last straws. I was very, very frustrated. Despite our best efforts to get this up the chain of command, someone kept cutting this off and saying “we don’t want to talk about UFOs”.’

In 2017 he decided to quit in protest and publicly revealed AATIP’s existence to the New York Times – and the fact that Navy fighter pilots were routinely encountering craft with capabilities far surpassing known human technology.

The revelation sparked a renewed interest in UFOs, and a series of better-funded but equally jargon-filled successors to Elizondo’s AATIP, the most recent being the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

In between contracting for Space Force, as he did last year, Elizondo is working as part of an effort to persuade lawmakers to add new protections for more whistleblowers to come forward.

That is the only route, he believes, for bringing to light what the government really knows about UFOs.