Elizondo on Jillian Michaels: demons, hybrids, and missing scientists

Jillian Michaels published a long interview with Luis Elizondo on May 17, 2026, titled Are UAPs Demons? What the Vatican Told Elizondo. The episode reads as a status report on the UAP conversation as it now stands outside the UAP community: hybrids, missing scientists, Vatican conversations, directed-energy claims, Operation Stargate, and a shadow-government line that briefly overlaps with Steven Greer.

The opening: threats, German shepherds, and a live FBI investigation

Michaels opened with the claim she has been building on air: scientists connected to sensitive aerospace and defense work killed or vanished under strange circumstances, members of Congress talking about hybrid breeding programs, the U.S. military saying there are UAP at the bottom of the ocean, and a president in the process of declassifying the lot.

Elizondo answered in the personal register first. He said he had been in a near-fatal motorcycle accident about two months before the interview, with a punctured lung, severed spleen, traumatic brain injury, 32 or 35 skull and cranial fractures, and a detached retina. He is fine. He then pivoted to the UAP beat. Years ago, he said, he had been warned by certain people to be careful what he said on the topic. Some of those people, he said, are now missing or dead, and there is an ongoing FBI full-field investigation into that pattern.

He said he lives where he lives with five German shepherds and a lot of firearms. Then the line that does a lot of work in this episode: a lot is happening behind the scenes that the public may be surprised to hear.

The hybrid allegation and the Burchett clip

Michaels played a Newsmax clip of Rep. Tim Burchett. In it, former Rep. Matt Gaetz describes being briefed by a U.S. Army source about locations of alleged hybrid breeding programs, with human specimens drawn from war zones and migrant caravans. Burchett's response: he is still a member of Congress and cannot comment too much on what Gaetz said, but he has been briefed by just about every agency that goes by an alphabet, and if the material he has seen were released, it would keep people up at night.

Elizondo kept to his lane. He said he had spoken with Burchett and his colleagues, and that Burchett's point about access to sensitive information is correct. On the hybrids themselves, he drew a line between what he has been told and what he knows. He had heard, while at the Pentagon, about an alleged long-standing arrangement with non-human intelligence. The UFO community, he said, sometimes calls these myabs deals: quiet cooperation in which access to certain human specimens is part of the exchange. He was not privy to the specifics. From what he had been told, the relationship, if true, dates to the 1950s and has continued. He has met former Air Force and intelligence officers who swear they have seen military personnel working nonchalantly around recovered craft, and pilots who describe UAP being escorted by American and allied fighters. None of that is firsthand. He said so.

He then pushed the legal point. If any of this is true, taking people against their will is kidnapping and any physical contact is assault. The U.S. government would be on the hook for both, at scale, and that, he said, is the part that has kept people quiet.

How Elizondo frames "demons"

The title of the interview is the title question: are these things demons?

Elizondo's answer was deliberately unreligious. He uses the word, he said, broadly for things that do terrible things to innocent civilians, including the human kind. He has spoken with people at the Vatican, he said, who told him there is a long Christian history of UAP and UFO-like accounts: flaming Roman shields, called eclipus, following armies from battle to battle; the Nuremberg sky battle of 1561; the wheels of Ezekiel; the book of Enoch. He did not say the Vatican had confirmed any of this in a doctrinal sense. He said people he trusts inside that conversation said it was there.

He floated one operational read: the word "demon" may have been useful to certain people inside the topic as a way to keep others from looking. That was his read of the conversation, not a settled definition.

Huntsville, Amy Eskridge, and directed energy

Michaels then played a clip framed with a long bio: a woman named Amy Eskridge, double major in chemistry and biology with mastery of electrical engineering and physics, co-founder of the Institute for Exotic Science in Huntsville, Alabama, daughter of an anti-gravity researcher, found dead at 34 in June 2022. The official ruling was suicide by firearm. Eskridge had told colleagues she was being stalked, that she was being targeted by directed-energy weapons, and that if any report said she had killed herself, she had not. Michaels said she had seen photographs of Eskridge's hands that looked like microwave damage.

Elizondo confirmed he had met Eskridge and her father in Huntsville in 2018, at a dinner with eight to ten people including an ATIP scientist. Both father and daughter, he said, were absolutely convinced they had built a working anti-gravity device and could demonstrate it. They told him they were being harassed. He was scheduled to take a demonstration the month after she died. He never got it.

He used the case to walk through directed-energy weapons: lasers, microwaves, Havana syndrome, the radiation-burn pattern that U.S. pilots showed after close UAP encounters, the first embassy fatality attributed to Havana syndrome the year before. None of that proves anything about Eskridge's death. He said he is not a doctor and cannot say whether she suffered from mental illness, only that her concerns about being targeted were real to her and were shared in front of witnesses he names.

From there he detoured through Huntsville's history: Operation Paperclip, the German rocket scientists brought in at the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun and the Saturn V as a direct descendant of the V-2, the Nazi bell-shaped Die Glocke device in the Wunderwaffen lore, and the way postwar secrecy around anti-gravitics could plausibly be read as a thread running from the 1940s to a small lab in Rocket City in the 2010s. He did not claim a clean line. He laid out the historical surface and let it sit.

Remote viewing and Operation Stargate

The interview then moved into remote viewing, which Elizondo treats as real and as a separate disclosure problem from UAP hardware.

He described the U.S. Army's program, Grill Flame, then Sun Streak, then Stargate, as a serious intelligence effort, said the data worked, and said the Chinese and Russians took it seriously too. He had been recruited into the tail end of the program by a remote viewer named Eugene Lesman before Congress pulled funding. He described the operating-theory version of consciousness that came out of the program: time as a "cigar" with a small burning present, human consciousness as a possibly quantum process, and the present as a thicker slice for some trained operators. He cited Hal Puthoff as a personal friend and the long-running instruction that remote viewing should not be used for personal gain. The remote viewers, he said, once made roughly $2 million on the stock market in a month; the program was shut down soon after, and not for that reason alone.

He was clear about the gap. The program worked in his telling. The mechanism is still not understood. A great many people in government, including some in Congress, found the entire subject theologically and politically uncomfortable. Stargate is part of the disclosed record. The interviews around it remain, mostly, claims.

The shadow-government line and Steven Greer

Michaels played a clip of Steven Greer telling Newsmax there are two governments, the elected one and a shadow one, and that the shadow one keeps presidents and CIA directors out of the deepest compartments. She asked Elizondo to react.

Elizondo said he agreed with Greer on that single point, and that he had seen the dynamic from inside. The AATIP-era contradiction was sharp, he said: the U.S. government was publicly denying UAP existed while spending $22 million a year studying them, and the president and the secretary of defense at the time were not briefed. He walked through the legal architecture that allows for that: covert action under the National Security Act, the gang of eight and the gang of six on the Senate and House intelligence committees, the limits of constitutional secrecy, and the fact that those limits are routinely exceeded. He cited Eisenhower's farewell warning about the military-industrial complex as the right historical anchor. He stopped short of saying who runs the shadow side, and he said the FBI investigation is the one to wait on.

What the interview actually establishes

Read as a record, the interview establishes that Elizondo:

• Says there is an active FBI full-field investigation into deaths and disappearances of U.S. scientists with defense and aerospace connections, and that he and David Grusch have personally been threatened.
• Calls the hybrid-breeding allegation something he has been told about by named, credible sources, not something he has personally verified.
• Frames "demon" as a working word for something unknown, with Vatican-side conversations as a thread, not a finding.
• Names Huntsville, Paperclip, and Amy Eskridge as a continuous arc, with the arc built mostly on what he was told in person.
• Treats Operation Stargate as a real, declassified U.S. program whose mechanism remains poorly understood.
• Agrees with Steven Greer that a shadow-government problem has existed since the late 1940s or early 1950s, and ties it to oversight gaps around special-access programs.

It does not establish that any of the strongest claims in the interview are true. It establishes that the man with the longest public track record in UAP disclosure is willing to say all of this on a long-form podcast with a mainstream fitness and wellness host whose audience reaches well past the UAP community. That reach is the part that matters, not the truth of any individual sentence.

What to chase next

The most concrete threads in the interview are also the most checkable:

• Who is on the FBI full-field investigation, and what case list it is running on.
• What Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison have been shown in their briefings, on the record, that supports the hybrid-breeding line.
• What is in the Vatican archive on eclipus and the 1561 Nuremberg event, and what modern scholars have made of it.
• What remains declassified on Stargate, beyond the program's existence and deactivation.
• Whether any of the missing U.S. scientists connect to a defense program that also has a UAP record.

Those are the questions the next UAP Logbook notes will work through.

Sources

• Jillian Michaels: Are UAPs Demons? What the Vatican Told Elizondo, YouTube, May 17, 2026.
• Cleaned transcript: content/research/youtube-6SyeUHMxZaM/6SyeUHMxZaM-transcript-clean.txt
• Original VTT: content/research/youtube-6SyeUHMxZaM/6SyeUHMxZaM.en-orig.vtt