Okay, so maybe a 2009 Dragonball Z meme isn’t the best title for a review of Luiz Elizondo’s 2024 memoir “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs” — but, you know, then again, maybe it is!
Because there’s lots of “lazors” and other meme-worthy goodies in Luis’ apocryphal expose on ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ and the alleged cover-up perpetrated by the US government beginning after the Roswell incident in 1947.
Little green men, I mean c’mon. How cis of you.
For example, there was the time naughty alien orbs invaded his home and chased his giggling wife down the hallway into the bedroom.
I mean, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, each to their own, take one for the team, nothing wrong with that, et cetera. Let’s hope he takes after his daddy:
But then there’s his claim to have been trained as a supersoldier with ESP-like powers as part of ‘Project Stargate’, which he adds to his other heroic epithets — reluctant warrior, shadowhunter — missing the obvious one:
Absolute belter.
But I’m being unfair to Luis.
Most recently, on November 13 2024 the US House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee convened to hear submissions on UFOs titled, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.”
The truth is out there.
Hmm, a black blob.
It’s natural for skeptics — healthy, even — to register the idiosyncracies of individual proponents of all-things paranormal (i.e., Luis Elizondo’s tendency to self-aggrandize) and give that appropriate weight.
But stigmatising anyone who “believes in UFO’s” as a kook is an even kookier stretegy in 2025, when public trust of governments is at its lowest ebb. Maybe it would be better to unlock the vault and let us see what you’ve got.
Even better, let us all be guided by Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Hey! I’m on Pinterest!
But before we assert that the only possible explanation for UAP/UFO is extraterrestrial life, are we not obliged as junior scientists to discount Clarke’s third law?
Imagine an English longbowman in 900CE comparing weapons with a Chinese ‘fire lancer’ of the same period, and tell me he wouldn’t consider it magic. Europeans wouldn’t have firearms for another five hundred years.
What if the answer is that simple:
Aliens = prototype terrestrial technology so advanced that it seems like magic. Or for us secular viewers, so advanced it seems like proof of extraterrestrial life.
Science demands we rebut that Third Law first, and only then can we entertain all this ET nonsense.