Review of "Imminent" by Luis Elizondo

IMMINENT: INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S HUNT FOR UFOs
Luis Elizondo | William Morrow | August 2024 | 304 pages | $29.99

​Memoir, as a literary genre, sits somewhere between autobiography and creative writing, often sacrificing strict accuracy for deeper emotional truths. At its best, memoir can reveal the inner life behind the façade of an individual. A great memoir cuts deep, revealing the innermost secrets, and the dark parts of the soul, that make a person who they are. A bad memoir is an exercise in self-aggrandizement, begging the reader to agree with the author’s awesomeness. Luis “Lue” Elizondo’s Imminent is not a good memoir. Others will pick apart its factual foundations (nothing in the book would qualify as scientific evidence) and hold up his firehose of UFO lore to specific scrutiny, but I want to talk about his book as a piece of literature and how it fails both as art and as a piece of persuasive UFO propaganda.

​Imminent is an uncomfortable hybrid of memoir and standard-issue UFO book. A little more than half of the book is Lue Elizondo’s professional journey from the Army to the intelligence community to the History Channel to “media personality,” as his publisher now bills him. There is some material about Elizondo’s childhood, and a bizarrely proud confession that as “torture czar” at Guantanamo Bay he committed what sound a lot like war crimes, but almost nothing about his life beyond the paranormal and UFOs. One gets the impression there is not much to tell. A bit less than half is rehashed old UFO lore, including summaries of familiar UFO cases and a description of the various actors who make up the small group of believers that the Pentagon’s current UFO office, AARO, blamed for fomenting unwarranted UFO hysteria. The two parts of the book sit uneasily together, not necessarily because they are unrelated but because they are inartistically cross-cut with little consideration for narrative flow. The silly choice to use thick gray bars to black out parts of the book the Pentagon redacted (mostly building locations and officials’ names) rather than edit them out lends the book a juvenile air.
 
The book opens with Elizondo’s friend Chris Mellon lauding Elizondo as a “great man” of history and rhapsodizing about space aliens in terms that call into question his critical judgment and just how he was ever entrusted with a position of governmental authority. Then, Elizondo picks up the narrative with a roughly chronological account of his youth interspersed with material about his indoctrination into the UFO cult at the hands of Harold “Hal” Puthoff. (Elizondo’s hero-worship of Puthoff, a Uri Geller supporter who failed to distinguish between earthly industrial waste and advanced ET metamaterials, borders on sycophantic.) These early chapters are an uneasy mix of autobiography and polemic, floating in and out of chronological order seemingly at random and occasionally pausing to deliver potted summaries of famed UFO incidents.
 
Throughout these chapters, certain themes repeat. Elizondo describes his embarrassment at not being seen as traditionally masculine, his humiliation at the hands of bullies who attacked him for his lack of masculinity, and his intense desire to ingratiate himself with groups of men he perceived as either smarter, tougher, or more manly than him. Unfortunately, despite describing his bullying and hatred of bullies over and over again, Elizondo lacks the self-reflection to consider how the incidents of his youth he considers formative shaped his persona and his drive beyond pushing him into JROTC, where he says he found “protection.” Nor does he reflect on the contrast between the effete youth in fancy clothes he says he once was and the hyper-masculine performance he now effects, or between his professed hatred of bullies and his own adult behavior, particularly on social media.
 
This lack of deep insight gives his memoir a superficial air. We move breezily through twenty-five chapters that should be rich with insight and revelation, but we never learn much more about Elizondo, who never tires of extolling his own greatness. In his telling, he is the fulcrum around which the Pentagon revolves, on a first-name basis with everyone important, up to the Secretary of Defense, who all carefully follow his every move. And yet, these power players are also somehow both empowering him to explore the paranormal world of flying saucers and space demons while also lying to the public and working to make sure no one, including Elizondo, knows anything about it. Elizondo depicts the Pentagon as a department riven top to bottom with unstable people who believe they are spiritual warriors holding back the tide of a literal demon invasion. It’s all very confusing if you aren’t part of the insular UFO community for whom the Collins Elite and the Invisible College are as familiar as SEAL Team Six.
 
Elizondo takes us through his Pentagon career (after his stint as a torture specialist), starting from his recruitment to serve as a “remote viewer” using psychic powers to attack America’s enemies from afar. He tells us about his time at AAWSAP investigating the supernatural “mysteries” of Skinwalker Ranch and his clandestine effort to use government resources to hunt UFOs after AAWSAP ended. He then relays in the last third of the book the familiar narrative of how he conspired with Chris Mellon to smuggle three alleged UFO videos out of the Pentagon and to dramatically resign from the Department of Defense so he could join Blink-182 rocker Tom DeLonge’s UFO infotainment company and launch it with a New York Times story giving a semi-fictionalized account of his UFO hunt. Elizondo gives himself a hero’s edit here, sidestepping any ethical questions or legal issues and instead depicting himself as the single most important UFO whistleblower in human history, a revelator of knowledge akin to the Biblical patriarch Enoch, whom he also mentions in his book, along with Enoch’s buddies, the Nephilim and Watchers.
 
All your favorite UFO friends are here, from Jacques Vallée to Robert Bigelow to Tom DeLonge, and Elizondo seems blind to the portrait he painted of a small group of true believers driving the government off a cliff with their insular, evidence-free, and fantastical claims—exactly as AARO said. When Elizondo says he believes bizarre things because he blindly trusts the ufologists he sees as smarter and more powerful than him, it about sums up his entire book.
 
The book concludes with a few chapters on more recent events in which Elizondo casts himself as the driving force behind Congress’s push to legislate UFO fantasies into law. After years of claiming that Congress was acting independently of him and that he only had glancing contact with legislators, he now depicts himself as almost single-handedly targeting legislators, convincing them of the alien menace, and helping them write legislation. All your favorite UFO fanatics are here, thanked in the acknowledgements and discussed in the text—Elizondo claims them all as “friends,” close colleagues, and helpers including three (Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Ross Coulthart) who also pretend to be objectively covering him for major news media, something that the New York Times and NewsNation should never allow for obvious ethical reasons.
 
But what struck me more than the shopworn facts and lack of anything resembling tangible evidence was the wildly ineffective tone Elizondo deploys. In a book that supposedly is designed to serve as a warning about a cosmic threat, the tone is jocular, chatty, and informal. In places, there are jokes. Elizondo never conveys the gravity of the threat he claims to see, nor does he depict the people investigating aliens as grimly serious about their grave task. It’s all smiles and giggles and teasing as one looney tune after another prances in, hints that he knows horrible secrets, and then plays coy little games to avoid saying anything solid. Elizondo clearly wants you to think of him and his friends as your buddies. That might be good for business if your business is being a “media personality,” but it takes away from the weight of the events. I would have written a much more serious memoir, with a sharper focus and a darker tone.
 
As written, Imminent fails to live up to its title. It never feels raw, immediate, or important. Elizondo’s language, while serviceable, is bland. His book never builds narrative drive, frequently abandoning what little momentum Elizondo generates to pause for long digressions into fantastical interdimensional speculation and potted histories of shopworn UFO stories. It’s frankly baffling. Regardless of my feelings about the truth of Elizondo’s claims, there is an actual story that could have been made from this. A stronger editorial hand could have shaped this into a powerful narrative by relying on the emotion and the drama of Elizondo’s pursuit of “disclosure” in the absence of anything resembling facts. But instead, we have an amateurish production that resembles an error-ridden phishing email, convincing only to those desperate to believe. It is much less informative than another memoir-cum-UFO investigation by a former government employee, Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, which was more serious, more insightful, and had better evidence—in 1956.
 
On a more technical level, the book seems hastily produced and poorly edited. Some material appears more than once, sometimes on the same page. Elizondo tries to hide the identities of some individuals, presumably for privacy or security reasons, though they are listed under their real names in the acknowledgements. It’s no wonder that William Morrow, Elizondo’s publisher, declined to make the book available for review ahead of publication. It’s no one’s best work, but it doesn’t have to be. It will sell no matter what to believers who only want to be told what they think they already know. Critical thinking would only get in the way.