“Did I really want to mess that all up chasing flying saucers?”

Elizondo leads the reader through his personal journey of learning about UAP. The rhetorical question here represents his thought process as he asked himself reader whether he was willing to give up a stable career to pursue an interest in the unknown. The answer was demonstrably “yes,” but the rhetorical framing allows the reader to sympathize with Elizondo’s voyage of discovery.

“Finding patterns in data is the key to analysis.”

Elizondo worked for decades in the world of counterintelligence. He was evidently talented in this field, and he sprinkles his prose with allusions to the techniques he cultivated over the course of his career. He speaks with authority about the necessity of pattern recognition as a way to add credence to his later statements about UAP. He builds trust in the audience by talking with authority about a familiar topic so that he can maintain his authority (and his audience’s trust) when he talks about something less familiar.

“The success stories of remote viewing were legion and seemed almost magical. The stories I can’t share are even more mind-blowing.”

Throughout Imminent, Elizondo decries the intelligence community’s tendency to classify information and withhold it from public consumption. He criticizes this practice as hiding the truth. When he is speaking about something like remote viewing, however, he relies on the classification system to obfuscate the evidence for his claims. He is not permitted to share the evidence that this technique works, so the reader must trust him. For all his criticism, Elizondo is equally as reliant on the classification system to shield his claims from scrutiny.

“Like Neo in the movie The Matrix, I inhaled that red pill.”

Throughout the book, Elizondo employs this visual motif several times. The red pill signifies a desire to learn more; by taking the red pill, Elizondo signified his active desire to uncover hidden truth. Notably, Elizondo did not just take the red pill; he inhaled it. The strength of language used to convey the image speaks to Elizondo’s enthusiasm to learn more about UAP.

“Our job was challenging enough without having to grapple with theological questions.”

By its very nature, investigative work into UAP leads to questions that are incredibly complex and almost impossible to answer. The men in Elizondo’s group quickly found themselves grappling with questions far beyond their area of expertise. The complexity of these questions illustrates the importance of the investigation: Elizondo was wary of where these investigations would lead, yet he could not shy away.

“You are always isolated from the ones you love.”

Elizondo is deeply committed to his family, yet he was forbidden from sharing his classified work with them. This caused friction in his domestic life, as he could not explain the sources of his emotional and career turmoil to his family. In a similar way, Elizondo loves his country, and he regretted that he could not share what he knew with the public. His marriage became a small-scale representation of Elizondo’s belief in the dangers of withholding information.

“If any of these other parents had known what I was reading, they would have called me crazy.”

The more Elizondo learned about UAP, the more he began to think of his place in society. He regarded himself as privileged to know this life-changing information, but the other parents at the lacrosse practice were blissfully unaware. Rather than feeling smug that he knew more than they did, Elizondo pictured a world in which they knew the contents of his reading materials. Increasingly, he was becoming convinced that these other people had as much right to know about UAP as he did.

“If we were clever, I could ‘dual-use’ my existing funding to investigate UAP.”

Elizondo loathes the government bureaucracy and reliance on administrative red tape. Yet, when he found a project that he was passionate about, he is willing to turn this bureaucracy to his advantage. Elizondo turned the bureaucracy back on the Pentagon, using their own money to secretly fund research that was seemingly forbidden. By turning the tables against his enemies, Elizondo was ironically able to use the bureaucracy to positive ends. To beat the administrators, Elizondo had to use their own tools against them.

“I did not want anyone who was a science fiction buff, or anyone who was obsessed with UAP.”

When recruiting for his small team, Elizondo was keenly aware of exactly the kind of person he wanted. He did not want someone who was overly interested in UAP, as such a person may exaggerate evidence out of a desire to see what is not there. Rather, he sought UAP agnostics, those who could be convinced by credible data. This claim serves the secondary purpose of increasing Elizondo’s credibility, as it implies that he, too, is an objective researcher and not someone driven by a pre-existing desire to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence.

“I felt guilty for the diagnosis because other veterans had it much worse than me.”

Elizondo has many complicated feelings surrounding guilt and responsibility. He felt guilty about receiving medical aid from the government even though he was injured in the line of duty. He justifies this guilt by insisting that there were people worse off than him, turning his guilt into a crusade on their behalf. Similarly, his guilt about his involvement in the controversial and secretive torture program at Guantanamo Bay fueled his desire to reveal the truth about UAP to the public. His complicated feelings about his medical aid echo his complicated feelings about government secrecy, in which his guilty feelings led to a Quest for Redemption in the form of a campaign to help others.

“How could they presume to know how an alien brain worked?”

At first, Elizondo hoped to learn the truth about UAP by consulting with scientists. In terms of the vehicles involved in UAP sightings, many of the scientists told him what he wanted to hear and vindicated his search for nonhuman technology. When biologists gave him information that did not vindicate his beliefs, however, he began questioning their expertise. Elizondo was increasingly determined to only accept evidence that confirmed his prior beliefs and question everything else. 

“My work with Guantanamo Bay brought endless rounds of drama and stress. An attorney for one of the 9/11 suspects labeled me in open court as the ‘US Czar of Torture.’”

Providing counterintelligence work for the controversial detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay was Elizondo’s main job. His UAP work was a small part of his portfolio at the Pentagon. The book occasionally hints at the way in which his main role filtered into the work he was truly passionate about. The UAP investigations seem almost like escapism, a way for Elizondo to work for the Pentagon without having to think about his role in a torture scandal. He shields this controversy from the narrative in the same way he tried to shield it from his mind: by focusing on UAP.

“I thought about 9/11 and how it could have been prevented if agencies had shared information.”

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, loomed large in Elizondo’s mind. The violence of the attack caused a lingering psychological trauma in which he constantly asked himself what more could have been done. In this way, 9/11 became the justification for everything that Elizondo did. Anything to avoid another 9/11, he told himself, which propelled him forward on The Quest for Redemption and toward his eventual decision to go public with what he knew.

“Specifically, Cherokee blood.”

Elizondo searches for explanations as to why certain people are more predisposed toward talents such as remote viewing. He links them by blood, referencing their Indigenous heritage. Elizondo includes himself in this group, though he notes earlier in the book that he comes from a particularly multi-ethnic background. This is one of several examples of Elizondo espousing an unverified theory that is never referenced again. The belief that certain Indigenous groups possess quasi-magical psychic powers is a racist trope common to many conspiracy theories.

“Staring them in the face is what looks like a stereotypical flying saucer out of some 1950-era movie.”

Earlier in the book, Elizondo speaks of the importance of pattern recognition when working in intelligence. When he describes the famous UAP videos, however, the blurred, grainy images conform to expectations fueled by decades of culture surrounding aliens and UFOs. Elizondo takes this as evidence, believing that the images confirm the earlier descriptions of UAP. This is pattern seeking, rather than pattern recognition, and it is a defining feature of conspiracy theories. Elizondo and others see ambiguous phenomena and interpret them according to patterns established in the folklore of UFOs and UAP.

“After all, we have a history of being a very violent species and annihilating anything we perceive as a threat.”

As Elizondo became more convinced that nonhuman life has visited earth, he reflected on the nature of what they might have witnessed. More than most, Elizondo knows the violent nature of humanity. He has fought in wars, and, in this moment, was working counterintelligence for a controversial detainment facility that holds people accused of terrorism. When he is decrying the violence of humanity and the way in which aliens might judge humanity as a species, he is subconsciously reflecting on his own role in this violence.

“I had ingested the red pill and didn’t like what I saw.”

Elizondo continues with the visual motif of the red pill. His quest for the truth led him to some uncomfortable realizations, not least about his own government. He was still desperate to know the truth, but he came to accept that this truth might not taste as sweet as he imagined.

“A week later, lawyers from the 9/11 terrorist defense team had cooked up a legal petition painting me as the devil incarnate and claiming that I was preventing their detainee clients from having a fair trial.”

As the book progresses, Elizondo sprinkles in more anecdotes about the legal issues he was facing for his involvement in Guantanamo Bay. Always, these legal issues are presented as minor annoyances that interfered with matters of real importance: the truth about UAP. Elizondo subtly uses his UAP investigations to alleviate any guilt and deny any responsibility for his actions at Guantanamo Bay. These minor legal issues were a threat to the actual truth, rather than a justified consequence of his involvement in an illegal torture camp.

“Jay came up with the idea of calling these objects unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP, instead of UFOs.”

By this time, the team members were no longer debating whether UAP are real. They had switched instead to public relations issues, devising new methods in which to disseminate the UAP information that they took for granted to be real. Because there was too much social stigma surrounding the term “UFO,” they rebranded their subject to make it more palatable for a wider audience.

“It was the right thing to do.”

As Elizondo explains the process by which he arrived at his decision, he issues this direct statement amid the discussion about how his family would be affected. The sentence seems like a proclamation, intended as much for the narrator as the audience. Elizondo was about to turn his family’s lives upside down, so he needed to assure himself that he was right to do so. The directness of the statement speaks to his need to reassure himself as much as anyone else.

“That’s right, the New York Times released legit UAP videos in a cover story.”

Shortly after his decision to go public, Elizondo began to measure his success through his media reach. To Elizondo, The New York Times is the world’s biggest paper. It is America’s paper of record, and to appear in the Times is a validation unto itself. Elizondo is writing in disbelief and pride at the same time, having reached a kind of mainstream and authoritative audience that he never believed could be possible.

“This type of bullying, what we call administrative terrorism, goes on all the time.”

As much as Elizondo’s life has changed, his distaste for bureaucracy has never gone away. Typically for Elizondo, however, he frames this confrontation in familiar terms. He has spent years fighting against terrorists, both in the Middle East and in Guantanamo Bay, so his description of his confrontation with the Pentagon administrators casts them in familiar terms. They were terrorists, and he was against them. In many ways, Elizondo was fighting the same battle all over again.

“In an age marked by lack of compromise, we found that politicians on both sides of the aisle welcomed dialogue on the issues and shared their personal stories openly with us.”

Throughout Imminent, Elizondo avoids traditional political partisanship. He does not identify himself as a supporter of any political party. Instead, his political views are conditioned on the degree to which politicians are willing to side with him. He praises politicians from both major parties who side with him and criticizes those who side with the Pentagon insiders. To Elizondo, the real political divide is not between Republican and Democrat but between those who want the public to know the truth about UAP and those who do not. This, to Elizondo, is true bipartisanship.

“And try again we will.”

The final chapters of Imminent describe a string of victories, and Elizondo heralds the changes brought about by himself and his team. Their decision to go public is vindicated, he suggests, but he admits that they did not achieve total success. There were setbacks (which he blames on Pentagon insiders), though the determination to inform the public does not change. Elizondo will not be cowed; he and his team will always “try again” (246).