How to Take on the System and Win

A UFO whistleblower shows how it's done.

Matthew Green

Jan 07, 2025

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Survival Tool#44: Act in Line With Your Values

It’s Toxic Workplace Survival Guy’s perennial question:

“Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

Luis Elizondo decided to go.

A seasoned U.S. intelligence official whose career culminated in an extraordinary role running a secret Pentagon UFO investigation unit, Elizondo’s story illuminates weightier themes than how we’re going to tolerate our Monday morning team meeting — not least the question of whether we’re alone in the cosmos.

But the reasons Elizondo quit, and what happened next, are instructive for anyone starting to confront the uncomfortable truth that our employer is unwilling or unable to allow us to act in alignment with our deepest values. (Survival Tool#1: Admit Your Workplace Is Toxic).

As Elizondo recounts in his memoir Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, published last April, he and a close-knit group of senior government advisers and intelligence officials concluded that the mysterious craft were real. Not only that, Elizondo feared UFOs could pose a threat, both to the flabbergasted U.S. fighter pilots filming them moving with a speed and precision that upended the known laws of physics, and perhaps on a much more consequential scale, too.1

Predictably, the group’s efforts to persuade the Pentagon to adopt a more coordinated, transparent approach to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon,” or UAP — as UFOs are known to the military — hit brick walls at every turn. Elizondo is convinced that the backers of a decades-old, above-top-secret effort to retrieve crashed UFOs and reverse engineer their propulsion technology — which he calls the ‘Legacy Program’ — were their primary blockers. (Survival Tool#42: Be Aware of Your Host Organism).

As incontrovertible evidence of the awe-inspiring capabilities of the UFOs mounted, Elizondo realised that his only realistic shot at pushing for greater disclosure would be by going public with information he could legally reveal, hoping to galvanise pressure on Congress to act.

But he faced a monumental dilemma.

Elizondo had served the Pentagon for more than 22 years, running operations all over the world, and had reached a senior — and by his account comfortable — position in the intelligence establishment. He described the Pentagon as “my life” — not only the source of his livelihood, but the foundation of his professional identity, and sense of his place in the world. With his daughters headed for college, he needed more income — not less. (Survival Tool#27: It’s Okay to Take a Pay Cut).

Money aside, Elizondo knew that retribution would swiftly follow if he carried out his plan — even though he intended to honour his oath to uphold state secrets, and only speak about unclassified aspects of his work.

Elizondo writes:

“I expected a campaign of allegations questioning my integrity, my mental state, my performance and my work ethic. If that didn’t work, my enemies would take it to an even dirtier level. I had spent my lifetime protecting my fellow Americans, my family, and our future. Now, I was putting it all in jeopardy. I would lose my income and my ability to provide for my family. My pension would also be deferred.”

His wife Jennifer wasn’t at all certain that it would be a good idea for him to quit:

“‘UFOs, Luis?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’
‘Well, UAP.’
She was more than a little irritated. Of all the causes in the world, why did I have to pick the one that sounded the craziest of them all?”

But Elizondo’s growing certainty that a non-human intelligence was directing the activities of the countless UFOs observed by the military convinced him that he had a patriotic duty to share what he could, and Jennifer would go on to provide staunch support.

As Elizondo put it:

“The way I saw it, I really only had two choices: (1) make peace with silence and sitting on humanity’s biggest secret, leaving the American people and the rest of society in the dark and leaving a very real national security threat unaddressed, or (2) resign from a career I love in order to fulfill my duty to serve the interest of the people of the United States, and to do the right thing, by going public and revealing the truth about UAP to the American people….I couldn’t ask any of my colleagues to sacrifice their careers. It had to be me. I was the senior guy at this point.”

‘Murdering Yourself’

Since resigning in October 2017, Elizondo has become a successful author, media personality, consultant and lecturer — but at the moment he decided to dynamite his Pentagon career, none of that was a given. He told himself he’d work in construction or as an auto mechanic to make ends meet. He and Jennifer would live for a time in a mobile home, while she stacked shelves in Target, as they navigated the more precarious career options open to a high-profile UFO whistleblower.

A close colleague in the intelligence world rated Elizondo’s chances of securing greater disclosure at less than five percent — then revised that estimate down to one percent after he’d had a few more minutes to think about it. “You’re murdering yourself,” he warned.

Elizondo describes how he incurred the furious enmity of a powerful Pentagon boss; was subject to surveillance, including by a drone overflying his house; and investigated under suspicion of improperly declassifying UAP videos that were featured on the front page of the New York Times. (No impropriety was found).

Elizondo also faced a smear campaign by the Pentagon, which refused to confirm to journalists that he’d ever been in the units he’s served in overseas. Press officers even span a story that he’d had no connection to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, the UFO unit he’d run.

But Elizondo’s efforts paid off. His revelations were instrumental in catalysing the first Congressional hearings into UFOs in 50 years, and he worked relentlessly to identify military and intelligence witnesses to testify on Capitol Hill, while briefing politicians and the media. After denying for decades that the visitors were real, the Pentagon was finally forced to acknowledge there was “something” out there that it couldn’t explain. In, 2020 U.S. President Joe Biden signed legislation requiring the Pentagon to produce an unclassified report on what it knew about UAP, with Congress passing further historic measures to mandate greater disclosure and protect whistleblowers in the years since.

‘Forever Branded’

Elizondo’s career was not without controversy in other respects. On a good day, running covert U.S. intelligence operations against insurgents and criminal cartels around the world is going to involve navigating some ethical grey areas. On bad days, who can say what kind of orders Elizondo would’ve had to take — or give?

Elizondo was notably tasked for a time with managing aspects of Guantanamo Bay and the secret prison there known as Camp 7 — which he described as “a purgatory of sorts, where the US had placed the worst of the worst suspected terrorists.” He also recalled that his Guantanamo duties brought him “endless rounds of drama and stress” — though presumably less so than for the inmates. An attorney for one of the 9/11 suspects labelled him in open court as the “US czar of torture.” From that moment, Elizondo writes, “I would be forever branded by some as the nation’s Darth Vader.”

On some readings, Elizondo’s role in Guantanamo, and his years of involvement in clandestine U.S. operations, will overshadow his contribution to UAP disclosure.

For anyone seeking to understand the truth about UFOs, however, Imminent is an essential read. The book pairs well with The Program, a 2024 documentary by director James Fox that investigates the covert crash retrieval programme described by Elizondo, and the Congressional push for disclosure in which he played such a pivotal role. Elizondo himself testified at the last hearing, in November.

For those of us navigating toxic workplaces, Elizondo’s story shows that acting in line with our values can feel daunting — but ultimately yield huge dividends, not only for ourselves, but for society at large. (Survival Tool#39: Draw Courage From the Truth-Tellers).

Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Former Minority Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who collaborated closely with Elizondo to support the Congressional push for greater disclosure, had this to say in his foreword to Imminent:

“In my view, absent Lue’s persistence and courage, the US government would still be denying the existence of UAP and failing to investigate a phenomenon that may well prove to be the greatest discovery in history. I find it heartening to see that as large and complex as American society has become, individual actions can still make all the difference.”

Many of us will hit an inflection point where we must choose between what we believe in, and the demands of our workplace. (Survival Tool#38: Reflect on Your Life’s Larger Themes).

Elizondo’s story reminds us to choose wisely.

Summary

Our choices matter, not just to us, but in shaping the kinds of societies we want to build. By acting in alignment with our deepest values, we create opportunities for Life to deliver results far beyond our expectations — if we can find the courage to overcome the inevitable short-term stresses of flying the golden cage.

Toxic Workplace Survival Guy