Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2194 - Luis Elizondo
Uploaded: 2024-08-23T17:00:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2194 - Luis Elizondo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2194 - Luis Elizondo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2194 - Luis Elizondo

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up, Luke?
How are you?
Hey, sir, I'm doing better than I deserve.
Well, that's a good statement.
You know, there's an old military saying, any day above ground's a good day.
There you go.
So tell everybody what your official job was.
Wow.
I had a lot of official jobs.
With the government in regards to, you know.
You know.
You know, those things.
Sure.
One of these things.
That's allegedly, that's a replica of the one that Bob Luzar worked on, the
sport model.
I've heard that before.
Designs by Perry, the E in Perry is a three, and he's a dude on Instagram that
sent me that.
Very cool.
Pretty dope, right?
Yeah.
We have another one that looks just like it at the mothership at the comedy
club.
When you walk in, you walk right through like a giant suspended UFO.
Very cool.
So obviously I have issues.
Well, you know what?
This is a neat town.
I was strolling the streets yesterday, and I came across the Texas Toy Museum.
Now, I'm not one for museums usually, but something I saw was automatically
transported me back to when I was a kid.
I'm an old guy, so I grew up 70s and early 80s.
How old are you?
52.
I'm 57.
You are?
Yeah.
Man.
Well, I look 10 years older than you.
I got a lot of long, hard miles on me, unfortunately.
I do too, believe it or not.
Well, you'll have to share with me your secret, because unfortunately, I tell
people this is as good as it gets.
I'm about as attractive as a cement truck, you know, so after the Army, I went
into the Federal Service and had a lot of jobs, mostly in counterintelligence,
which is looking basically what the bad guys know about us from an intelligence
perspective.
And in 2008, I changed my job.
One of my jobs, I was working at the Director of National Intelligence, which
for most people may or may not know.
It's kind of outside of D.C. and where I lived, I was on the other side of D.C.
living on a little island in the Chesapeake Bay, and so my commute was terrible.
I mean, it really, frankly sucked.
Did you have to take a ferry every day?
No, but it was about a three-hour commute each way, because you have to go
right past Langley.
Why didn't you move closer?
Well, you know, I wanted to give my kids a really good quality of life, and I
did not want to work in the city and then kind of expose them to kind of the
craziness, if that makes sense.
Especially D.C. D.C. is crazy.
Especially with kids, right?
Yeah.
Kind of nuts that they don't clean up the capital of the fucking country.
It seems like it's kind of indicative of the rot the whole country is involved
in.
It's such a disgrace, because you bring these foreign dignitaries, and the
first thing they see is just the dereliction of it.
And it's a very poor reflection on really what the American spirit is about.
But, you know, that's for another conversation.
Yeah.
It seems like they could fix that.
Yeah.
Especially in that place.
Yeah, one would hope, right?
Yeah, I mean, Jesus Christ, it's the nation's capital.
Yeah.
So I was offered a job to go back to the Pentagon in 2008 for a little while
and basically run the integration between national-level intelligence
information and local and state and tribal law enforcement.
So after 9-11, the country realized that we had a significant problem getting
national-level information down to the cops on the ground that could actually
do something about it.
Why?
Because he didn't have security clearances.
So they weren't allowed to be provided that information.
So one of my jobs was to try to help fix that.
And shortly thereafter, I got there in 2008.
It was probably early 2009 is when I was approached by two individuals who came
to me and they said, look, we'd like to consider you for a program that we're
part of.
It's a very nuanced program, very secretive program.
Now, when you're in the government, you hear that all the time.
It's not – you know, people look and they say, oh, you have a secret
clearance or a top-secret clearance.
Millions of people have some sort of security clearance in the government.
And a lot, a lot of people have a top-secret clearance.
So it's really not that uncommon.
It's really not that sexy.
So you didn't really know what you were getting involved in?
I didn't at all.
Not at all.
In fact – so, yeah, great question.
So, no, I didn't know what I was getting involved in.
And after several conversations, it occurred to me that their interest in me
was some of my background I had.
In my early career as a special agent in counterintelligence, I was protecting
technologies, critical technologies, critical avionic technologies, for example,
and some aerospace technologies.
So think of first-stage solid rocket motor booster technology, Tomahawk cruise
missiles, stuff like that, Apache longbow.
So advanced avionics was something I was kind of already familiar with.
And at the same time, I had the counterintelligence background.
So I was asked to come in and run the counterintelligence and security aspect
for a particular program, at which time I had no idea what the program even was.
So what does counterintelligence and security mean?
It just simply means making sure that our adversaries, like Russia and China,
can't penetrate our organization and steal our secrets.
That's all it is.
It's kind of a fancy word for just saying security, information security and
operational security.
So I remember I had a meeting.
They brought me to go see their director.
And it was in a – I would tell you the location, but I was told by the
Pentagon not to say the specific location of this office.
But it was somewhere in the D.C. area.
It was a facility that wasn't known publicly to be an intelligence – to have
an intelligence office in there.
So I can't say the specific location.
But I went there.
And I went up to the top floor.
I think it was the top floor, almost the top floor.
And I met for the first time a gentleman named James Lekatsky, Dr. James Lekatsky,
Ph.D.
And this guy was the epitome of a rocket scientist.
And when I say the epitome, I mean, he was probably – and there's no exaggeration
– the number one rocket scientist in the U.S. government.
Now, he's a humble guy, so he'll probably tell you he wasn't.
But he really was.
He's an amazing human being and very smart.
And after a very brief conversation, he looked at me and he said, I want to ask
you a question.
I said, OK, sir.
And he said, what do you think about UFOs?
I said, well, I answer truthfully.
He said, I don't.
And he said, well, what do you mean?
You don't believe in them?
And I said, no, that's not what I said.
You asked me if I think – what do I think about UFOs?
And frankly, I don't think about UFOs.
I really don't have the luxury to think about them.
I'm too busy, you know, working intelligence operations and whatnot.
And I remember him looking over his glasses and very seriously staring me
straight in the eye and says, well, don't let your personal bias get the best
of you because what you may learn may surprise you and may challenge any preconceived
notion of what you think something is or is not.
And so let me backtrack for a minute.
I've never been a UFO guy.
People come up and look, oh, you're that UFO guy.
I'm really not.
I was never really into science fiction as a kid.
I wasn't into the Star Trek or the Star Wars like a lot of people were.
So that was not my disposition.
You know, I grew up, I guess, playing G.I. Joe and stuff like that.
So that wasn't my background.
And certainly in college, I studied microbiology and immunology with a focus on
parasitology.
Not parapsychology, the study of parasites, parasitology.
So the scientific method has always been something that has been near and dear
to me.
And then, of course, later on as a special agent, you know, that when you're
conducting investigations, for me, I was always very fact-driven.
Kind of the old gumshoe, if you will, just the facts man sort of guy.
So I was never really prone to any type of, if you will, affinity towards
science fiction or even the UFO topic.
I just never really considered it.
So he says this to you, and then how—so we're talking about, like, what, 16
years ago?
15, 16 years ago?
Yeah, I do the math, right?
So it's 2024, 2000, early 2009.
So this is the beginning of your journey towards this sort of bizarre subject
of whatever these things are.
Yeah.
So you don't have any real previous interest.
He says this to you.
And then what's the steps after that?
Like, how do you get introduced to this idea that these things are alien crafts?
Yeah, so great question.
So for some people, there's kind of two ways people process this information,
at least in my experience.
And there may be others.
This has just been my observation.
Some people have this kind of revelatory moment, this epiphany where it's this
aha moment where, oh, my gosh, this is real, right?
For other people, it's kind of more of a slow, gradual realization.
And I think for me, I was probably in the second category, more of a slow,
gradual realization that this isn't, you know, a cover for something else.
This is really about UFOs.
So how do you first get introduced to these things?
Well, so I didn't get introduced to these things.
It was, first of all, I was introduced to the reporting, right?
Right.
So there was these official reports that we were getting from the field.
There's official videos and whatnot that describe vehicles doing things,
maneuvering in ways that, frankly, outperform anything we have in our inventory.
Now, keep in mind, my background was at some point in aerospace.
So I knew all the capabilities of an F-16 or, for example, an F-22 or the F-35.
And at the end of the day, as advanced as they are, they're still conventional
aircraft.
You know, they still have the old, there's an adage they use for jet engines.
It may seem a little awkward here, but it's suck, squeeze, bang, and blow.
That's what a jet engine does.
Forgive me, that's what it does.
Right.
You know, and so it's a conventional type engine.
Of course, you have a propeller, too, that can displace air and whatnot.
These vehicles were different.
These vehicles, for the most part, didn't have any type of associated
characteristic that you or I or any normal person would associate with the
plane, with an airplane, an aircraft, right?
And yet it's flying.
So how does an airplane work?
Well, let's say this cigar, for example, is an airplane, and there's four
fundamental forces.
And so you have thrust, lift, drag, and weight.
And if you understand those, you can create, you can build wings, and you
create lift, and you can fly.
And then you have to have an engine for that thrust and whatnot.
The things that our military pilots were encountering didn't have that.
They didn't have wings.
They didn't have rudders and ailerons and control surfaces.
They didn't have cockpits.
They didn't have engines.
There were no obvious signs of propulsion.
They were doing things and maneuvering in ways that, frankly, defied anything
that we had in our inventory.
And we were pretty certain the enemies didn't have either.
Our adversary didn't have these technologies either.
And even more perplexing is that they were being encountered over controlled U.S.
airspace and over sensitive military installations.
So, you know, from that perspective, you've got a real national security
concern on your hands.
So, you said video.
Mm-hmm.
What was the first thing?
Do you remember the first thing that you saw?
Boy, there's so many.
You know, I think part of the challenge is that most people here in this
country, they're familiar with the three videos, right, that have been famously
released by the Pentagon.
The Go Fast.
Go Fast, Gimbal, FLIR, correct.
But those are the least compelling of all the videos that the government has.
Those were unclassified.
And so those were the ones, those were kind of the low-hanging fruit that could
be released to the general public.
Th