Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs

“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.