Greer's Elizondo vehicle story
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 10
| Claimant | Steven M. Greer, founder of CSETI and the Disclosure Project |
|---|---|
| Date | 2021, in an online video |
| Claim | Attorney Daniel Sheehan told Greer that Luis Elizondo had said he had been inside a facility storing an extraterrestrial vehicle |
| Chain | Elizondo → Sheehan → Greer (third-hand) |
| Source video | Now private on YouTube; could not be viewed |
| Confirmation | None from Elizondo or Sheehan |
| Topics | Beings & bodies (topic) |
| People | Steven Greer, Luis Elizondo, Daniel Sheehan |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 199 |
| Year | 2021 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 2021 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 9 |
In 2021 the UFO activist Steven Greer said in an online video that the lawyer Daniel Sheehan had told him something Luis Elizondo said. In Greer's telling, Elizondo had said he had been in a facility storing an extraterrestrial vehicle.[8] The claim is third-hand, passing from Elizondo to Sheehan to Greer. Neither Elizondo nor Sheehan has confirmed it publicly, and the video has since been made private.[8] At about the same time Elizondo was pursuing an Inspector General complaint against Pentagon officials. The complaint alleged a campaign to discredit him.[5][7]
The claim
The claim appeared in a 2021 YouTube video, cited about two minutes in. YouTube now reports the video as private, so its exact words could not be checked.[8] As summarised, Greer said Sheehan had told him that Elizondo said he had been inside a facility holding an extraterrestrial vehicle.[8] Greer did not say where the facility was or when the visit took place. No other source for the claim has been found.[8]
The people
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- Steven Greer. A former emergency physician, he founded CSETI in 1990 and the Disclosure Project in 1993. On 9 May 2001 he staged a National Press Club event with about 20 retired military and government witnesses. He said some 400 witnesses were ready to testify, and called for congressional hearings.[1][2] His briefing document ran to 492 pages and claimed that alien craft had been "downed, retrieved and studied since at least the 1940s".[3] The PDF of that document on the Internet Archive could not be read for this article.[4]
- Daniel Sheehan. A Washington lawyer, he acted as counsel for Greer's witnesses in 2001. That year he told reporters he had been shown photographs of captured UFOs, with what looked like alien writing, in the 1970s.[1] He later represented Elizondo in his legal disputes, and has spoken of the "surprising alignment" of Elizondo and Greer.[9]
- Luis Elizondo. A former Army counterintelligence officer, he worked in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence from 2008 and resigned in late 2017. He has said he ran the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).[5][6]
Elizondo's disputed role
Official accounts of Elizondo's role have conflicted:[5][6]
- 2017. The Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed him to Politico as an AATIP leader.
- 2019. A spokesperson said he "had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program".
- Reid. Senator Harry Reid affirmed his "leadership role".
- Garry Reid. The DoD intelligence official Garry Reid wrote that Elizondo "aggrandized his role".
Elizondo's Inspector General complaint described "a coordinated campaign to discredit him". It also alleged a personal vendetta by a Pentagon rival over the release of the Navy UFO videos.[5] Politico reported on the complaint in May 2021; its page refused automated access.[7] The AATIP program's official funding ended in 2012. Elizondo said work continued informally with Navy and CIA support.[6]
What Elizondo has said
Elizondo has made broad claims, but not the specific one Greer attributed to him:[5]
- Exotic material. He has said he believes the government has "exotic material" associated with UAP.
- His memoir. In Imminent (2024) he wrote that a crash-retrieval program had run in secret for "decades", under "a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors". He wrote that technology and biological remains had been recovered, including four non-human bodies from Roswell.
- His testimony. In November 2024 he told a House hearing that the government had secretly retrieved UFOs and alien bodies.
None of these accounts, as reported, includes Elizondo saying he personally stood in a facility with a craft in the way Greer described.[5]
Elizondo's other claims have run into problems:[5]
- The locked drawer. He told the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office that files proving a secret alien-evidence program were in a locked drawer in his old office. FBI agents searched it within hours and found nothing of the kind.
- The "mothership". A photograph he presented in 2024 as an alien mothership near the U.S. embassy in Romania was traced to a reflection of a light fixture.
The Pentagon said in 2024 that it had found no verifiable evidence of any program to possess or reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials.[5]
Greer and Elizondo
Greer's claim placed the government's own former UFO official inside a craft-storage facility, which would support Greer's long-standing case for a hidden program.[3][8] Greer's documents of 2001 had already alleged such programs, classed as "cosmic top secret", decades before Elizondo went public.[3] The ABC News space consultant James Oberg said in 2001 that Greer promoted a "bizarre theory" of a worldwide UFO cabal.[1]
Assessment
The story is third-hand and rests on a video that is no longer public.[8] Neither the man it quotes nor the man said to have relayed it has confirmed it. Elizondo's own published accounts, though they allege a crash-retrieval program, do not describe the visit Greer reported.[5] No facility, date or corroborating witness has been identified.[8]
People and topics
- Steven Greer — Physician who founded CSETI and the Disclosure Project.
- Luis Elizondo — Former Army counterintelligence officer who says he ran AATIP.
- Daniel Sheehan — Constitutional lawyer who said he saw classified Blue Book photos and later represented Luis Elizondo.
- Imminent — Luis Elizondo's 2024 memoir.
- Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.
On the Timeline
- Mellon's first steps as president (5 May 2021) — Christopher Mellon says what he would do first about UAP if he were president.
- ODNI Preliminary Assessment on UAP (25 June 2021) — The ODNI's preliminary UAP assessment is published (see the Library record).
See every 2021 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- Steven M. Greer — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
References
- 'Group calls for disclosure of UFO info' — ABC News (2001) · abcnews.go.com · archived copy
- Greer's Disclosure Project — Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- A historian on the Disclosure Project — History News Network · historynewsnetwork.org · archived copy
- Disclosure Project briefing document (2001, PDF) — Internet Archive · archive.org · archived copy
- Luis Elizondo — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- politico.com · politico.com · archived copy
- youtu.be · youtu.be · archived copy
- "Danny Sheehan | JFK, Elizondo & Greer, New Administration", UAP Files Podcast S3E9 · uapf.substack.com
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Luis Elizondo”, “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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