Source: The Hollywood Reporter

The former director of a secretive U.S. government UFO program is ready to tell his full story.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’s effort to study UFOs around the world, has signed a book deal with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, after a competitive bidding war for the U.S. publishing rights.

The memoir “promises to reveal shocking never-before-shared details regarding what Elizondo has learned about UFOs and the profound implications for humanity, all of which will escalate what is already a hot topic globally.”

In May, Elizondo was featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes segment on the UFO phenomena, which has racked up 10 million views on YouTube, making it the show’s fourth-most-watched segment on the streaming service.

Former President Barack Obama added on The Late Late Show in May, “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

In June, the Pentagon released a long-awaited report on UFOs (which have been re-dubbed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — UAPs) that contained limited information about the task force’s findings. The report focused on 143 sightings by military aviators made since 2004 of objects that seemed to defy traditional classification and some of which seemed to break the laws of physics as well. The report offered five possible conclusions about what objects could be that ranged from the ultra mundane (birds, plastic bags), to the rather worrisome (top secret technology from U.S. adversaries like Russia and China), to the rather eyebrow-raising (“Other”). Most significantly to UFO buffs, the report did not rule out aliens and concluded more study was needed.

Said Elizondo in a statement: “The American people now know a small portion of what I and my colleagues in the Pentagon have been privy to: That these UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) are not secret U.S. technology, that they do not seem to belong to any known allies or adversaries and that our intelligence services have yet to identify a terrestrial explanation for these extraordinary vehicles. This conversation is only just beginning.”

Elizondo was a former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent and helped hunt drug traffickers, terrorists and spies. In 2008, he was asked to be part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million program sponsored by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to study UFOs. In 2010, he was made director of the program. In 2017, he resigned from his position in protest of excessive government secrecy regarding UFOs. Elizondo was also involved in To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences from 2017 to 2020, and appeared on History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. In 2019, a Pentagon spokesperson attempted to cast doubt on Elizondo’s leadership role within the AATIP, but Reid issued a counter-statement that firmly vouched for Elizondo’s position.

Elizondo’s book deal was brokered by Dan Farah of Farah Films & Management and Yfat Reiss Gendell of YRG Partners in Literary & Media with Mauro DiPreta, senior vp and executive editor at William Morrow.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter