"… allegations have now been made by Elizondo in a shocking new book, Imminent – Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs. It’s a book that has been hailed by some as all the more significant because Elizondo isn’t some crackpot amateur UFO sleuth but the former military intelligence officer who actually led that hunt.

The 52-year-old claims to be the former head of the US Defence Department’s shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

And he would like us to know that he didn’t start seeing those small green luminous balls until after he went to work for the AATIP and recognised them for one of the most common types of UFO – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – that are reported.

In his mind, it could hardly have been a coincidence. Some of his colleagues had reported similar sightings where they lived. Was some ‘more advanced intelligence’ checking out the humans who were investigating them, Elizondo wondered. Inevitably, his book has sent ructions through a UFO world that has spent decades fighting desperately to be taken seriously. He ticks all the boxes in terms of being a ‘credible witness’.

He had top security clearance and worked for a secret US government UFO investigation unit for seven years. Elizondo claims the evidence for extraterrestrials is hiding in plain sight, here on Earth.

But he says it is being withheld from us by obstructive Pentagon officials who fear disclosure will cause mass panic. He alleges that clear footage – unveiled a few years ago – of UFOs captured by US fighter pilots, proves that highly advanced spacecraft have been buzzing us for decades. And even worse, our relatively feeble defences are powerless to stop them.

‘These craft are not made by humans,’ Elizondo boldly and bluntly states.

‘Humanity is in fact not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species.’

These UFO ‘craft’ have been operating with ‘complete impunity all over the world since at least the Second World War’, he insists, and have the ability ‘to move in ways that defy our knowledge of physics… within air, water and space’.

UFOs, he intones, present ‘at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity’. To put it mildly, it sounds like the sort of issue someone should have mentioned some time ago. No one has, he says, because a secret cabal of US government officials and major defence contractors have been retrieving the UFOs and their alien occupants since 1947 and hiding them away…"