(NewsNation) — Luis Elizondo calls his testimony before a Congressional hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena a “win-win” for the country.
“This was really a historic day, both for Congress and for the American people,” Elizondo said. In his testimony Wednesday before two panels of the House Oversight Committee, Elizondo’s words were blunt and unequivocal.
“Let me be clear: UAP are real,” Elizondo testified. “Advanced technologies not made by our government, or any other government, are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe.”
In a Wednesday night debrief on NewsNation’s “CUOMO,” Elizondo said he feels like the tide of public opinion on UAP is turning.
“Hopefully, the public is getting an understanding of how long our government has actually been involved in this topic, despite decades of denial.”
Elaborating on what he told lawmakers, the former head of the Defense Department’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, shared a history lesson, comparing the technology of confirmed UAP sightings in the 1950s with the technology of that time.
“Documents have been submitted to Congress that show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we’ve been dealing with this issue since the early 1950s. I’m talking about objects that, still to this day, can operate beyond any type of performance characteristics of our modern aircraft.
“These aircraft were captured on radar (in the 50s) doing 10,000, 13,000 miles an hour … and are able to execute an immediate right-angle turn, do 180 degrees, pop in and out of our atmosphere and even underwater. Where were we in the 1950s? We had barely broken the sound barrier and hadn’t even made it into space.”
Elizondo’s mandate at AATIP was to investigate the national security implications of military encounters with UAP — a mission he said was as important as anything else taking place at the Pentagon.
“We have absolutely been able to confirm the existence of some sort of technology that has the ability to operate with anonymity (in) controlled U.S. airspace, operate over our sensitive U.S. military installations, and possibly … interfere with our nuclear equities. Now, if that’s not a national security concern, I don’t know what is,” he said.
