Lue Elizondo Claims Vatican Showed Him an Ancient UFO Account (But It Didn't)

​Glenn Beck interviewed Lue Elizondo by phone for his podcast yesterday, and Elizondo made an unfounded claim that the Vatican showed him evidence of ancient flying saucers. Beck—who has used his platform in the past to claim a lost white race inhabited ancient America—promoted the supposed revelation online with hyperbolic headlines: “Former UFO official saw ANCIENT EVIDENCE of aliens at the Vatican?!” Meanwhile, the supposed “evidence” is (a) not secret, (b) well-known, and (c) has nothing to do with aliens except in the minds of ufologists, as I will show you below. This, though, is yet another example of what ignoramuses who don’t know what they are talking about do not actually create knowledge by bouncing their ignorance off one another. 

​Elizondo’s interview was mostly a rehash of his usual schtick. He made his usual claims—that the government is hiding UFO evidence, that some Pentagon officials fear UFOS are demons, that they provided UFO technology to certain defense contractors, etc., but with the bizarre caveat that he thinks the cover-up is because companies that did not receive alien tech will sue, claiming it was an unfair trade advantage (!). 

​Look, there's back, you know, with the military-industrial complex, there's still rules and laws that have to be followed, and you have to have free and fair competition. That is that is how this system works. And if it turns out that maybe some general somewhere in the halls of the Pentagon um gave a company an unfair advantage, you can imagine in 10 years, 20 years, Company A becomes a multi-billion-dollar aerospace company where Company B goes bankrupt. 200 jobs are lost and investors, you know, lose their investment, right? So, there's Securities [and] Exchange Commissions violations. I mean, you could you could in theory rack up not just billions but trillions of dollars worth of liability and damages. So that is a very real issue.

​Elizondo, who for years had argued that UFOs were not balloons and that balloons were a distraction from UFOs, also took credit for the detection of spy balloons as a result of searching for UFOs.
 
In response to a question about spirituality, Elizondo claimed that the world is rooted in spirituality and that humans are essentially spiritual beings encased in matter. He repeated the claim that certain elements of military and intelligence leadership believe UFOs to be demonic and believe in Erich von Däniken’s old claim that Ezekiel saw an alien spaceship.
 
This led to his most bizarre claim, that the Vatican houses evidence of ancient aliens and showed him the secret files dating back to the Roman Empire:

I spent some time at the Vatican and I'll tell you, I'll share this. It was kind of interesting and I'll make it quick. Um, there they opened a scroll. It was a very old parchment. It was in Latin and one of the senior academics there at the Vatican said, “Look here: Read this part,” and it talked about eclipus [sic]. Eclipus is a Latin word for, like, think of eclipse, and it was the word they were using for the Roman shield because the Roman shields were round and lenticular and they looked I guess like suns. And he said, “Here, it is,” and this was a discussion between a Roman soldier and a Roman general where they the way they described these flaming Roman shields in the sky that would follow them from battle space to battle space. Um and so you know, this this is going way back and this is this is in this is a document that's in the possession of the Vatican itself. So the Vatican in has also had a deep interest in this topic. 

​One Latin word for eclipse is eclipsis, from the Greek ekleipsis, though defectus was more common. But, as we will see, Elizondo is misunderstanding a Latin word he doesn’t actually know.
 
The story Elizondo is telling is somewhat mangled, but it is recognizably from a specific Latin text, and not one that is either unique to the Vatican nor particularly obscure. The story is rooted in Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander 4.3 (c. 50 CE), which is indeed a Latin text, but is about Greeks—specifically the flying shields seen by Alexander during the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE:

Further, the besieged heated brazen targets [i.e. shields] to a red heat, which, filled with burning sand and boiling slime, they suddenly discharged from the walls. None of their pestiferous devices was more terrible: whenever the burning sand insinuated between the armour and the body, it was impossible to dislodge its and where the caustic touched, it consumed the flesh: the wretches tortured by it, flinging down their weapons, and tearing off every defensive covering, lay, unrevenged, receiving incessant wounds. The crows and grappling-irons shot from engines swept off a number of men. (trans. P. Pratt)

​Now, that might not seem like flying shields following the soldiers around, but that’s because I’m quoting the actual text. The story that “great shining silvery shields” buzzed the Greek army after descending from the sky is taken from Frank Edwards’s 1959 book Stranger Than Science, where the radio host generously rewrote the text, undoubtedly copying from earlier revisionist UFO writers:

Alexander the Great was not the first to see them nor was he the first to find them troublesome. He tells of two strange craft that dived repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred. What did the things look like? His historian describes them as great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims . . . things that came from the skies and returned to the skies. (ellipses in original)

​Now, you might ask how I know that Curtius Rufus is the actual text that Elizondo is referring to, filtered through crappy pseudoscience and UFO books. I will tell you. The first words of the quoted material above are, in Latin, “Clipeos vero aereos multo igne torrebant…”. The word clypeus (or clipeus, accusative plural: clipeos) means a round shield. It also sounds a lot like the eclipus fake-Latin word Elizondo tried to use.
 
That should be sufficient evidence that Elizondo is referring to a known and standard Latin text. It is certainly possible that a UFO believer in the Vatican showed him the text that Edwards and later UFO authors like Jacques Vallée—who used an image of the incident on the cover of his book Wonders in the Sky—made famous. (It was even on Ancient Aliens!) But that isn’t the same as the Vatican hiding written proof of ancient aliens.
 
Now, if Elizondo had a smidge of knowledge or the intellectual curiosity to do some actual research, he would have discovered all of this in a few minutes. It’s not a secret. That neither he nor Glenn Beck gave the truth even a moment’s thought before repeating a false claim that the Vatican is housing secret records of flying saucers should tell us everything we need to know about the quality of ufology and the intellectual value of podcasts.