An ex-Pentagon official, who gained fame for blowing the lid off a $22-million, secretive government UFO program, has revealed an image of an alleged UFO 'mothership.'

Luis Elizondo, a career US Army counterintelligence specialist, previously ran the military's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Monday night in Philadelphia at a private UFO event, Elizondo dropped what he described as a craft 'looking like the mothership from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind,"' referring to the 1977 Steven Spielberg film. 

'Guess what we caught in Romania in 2022? By the way, the US Embassy,' as Elizondo told attendees at the paid event, gesturing to the photo: 'That.'

He went on to describe it as a 'huge mini city floating in the sky.' 

But the UFO, which resembles a gleaming disc-shaped craft, has already drawn withering critiques from skeptics, believers and even military UFO witnesses alike, who claim to have traced the photo to, not to the US Embassy, but a Facebook page.

One suggested to DailyMail.com that Elizondo has been lax in his vetting of such images in a bid to add sensational new material to his 'paid speaking engagements.'

Veteran US Air Force Staff Sergeant, Jeremy McGowan, who witnessed a dramatic UFO encounter himself in the Middle East decades ago, told DailyMail.com that Elizondo's dubious 'mothership' UFO fits a pattern with the man's past claims. 

'This unfortunate situation with Lue follows my experiences with him nearly exactly,' McGowan said. 'I witnessed him exaggerate or outright fabricate information that simply wasn't true.'

Elizondo unveiled the 2022 Romanian UFO photo at an October 28, 2024 event held at The City Winery, a wine bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for $50-$30 per ticket.

'There's a whole lot more here folks,' Elizondo told the audience in a leaked clip. 'I just want to give you kind of a small taste of what's going on "behind the scenes."'

'We're having pilots, military pilots and civilian pilots in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, report what unimaginably seems impossible,' as Elizondo began to explain his 'real photo' of a UFO.

'They described it literally 'the mothership,'' Elizondo said.

But despite credible federal reports of 'mothership' UFOs over domestic US military sites — investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an FBI task force, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) and 16 local sheriff's offices — internet sleuths quickly managed to poke holes in Elizondo's 2022 Romanian UFO.

John Greenewald Jr, a longtime government transparency advocate who runs The Black Vault, quickly tracked the photo back to a September 13, 2023 post in a Facebook group titled 'Mysterious Ancient Discoveries.'

'I reverse imaged searched it,' Greenewald posted on X. 'It got more than 182,000 likes and more than 23,700 comments.'

The higher resolution image of this apparent 'mothership,' which looks at first glance to be piercing clouds with its beatific shafts of light, appears more likely to have originated as the reflection of an indoor chandelier lamp reflected in window glass. 

The placement of Romania's coal-fired Arad Power Station indicates the image was not taken from the US Embassy, but a building near the Mureș River a few miles away.

America's Embassy in Romania is roughly 400 miles to the southeast of Arad, in the capital city of Bucharest.

While dedicated UFO skeptics were eager to pounce on Elizondo's inaccurate claims, UFO enthusiasts also expressed frustration over the episode. 

'Lue is 100 percent using us as pawns to line his pockets,' one contributor to the Reddit forum r/UFOs lamented. 'His most recent book was no.1 seller in the nation.'

'It's muddying the waters and detracting from the important convo,' another opined.

By midday Wednesday, Elizondo was publicly attributing the error to 'a friend in Government' who provided him with the photo 'a couple of years ago.'

Retired USAF Staff Sergeant McGowan, however, told DailyMail.com that Elizondo's error was far from a one-off mistake. 

'I've been on the receiving end where Lue has pulled out his cell phone and shown me what he described as highly classified video,' McGowan told DailyMail.com.

'For him to think I would believe he would simply carry classified info on an unsecure civilian cell phone is just insulting,' he added. 'And it wasn't just me, multiple podcast hosts were shown video Lue attributed to things they were not.'

For the past two years, McGowan has been notably public about this instance in which Elizondo showed him what he claimed was, in McGowan's words, 'a highly secret video smuggled out of Russia' taken by a Soviet Union probe near Mars.

The video, as McGowan recollected to DailyMail.com, looked to be a decades-old public UFO video from the Soviet's Phobos 2 probe, released by retired Soviet Air Force Colonel Marina Popovich in 1991.

Elizondo had shown the video to McGowan, in hushed tones, in January 2021.  

While Popovich, who wrote a book about her own UFO encounters as a test pilot, long maintained the Phobos 2 video depicted a legitimate alien craft, the odd video had nevertheless been public for about three decades, in other words.

'There is a striking similarity between that public video and what Lue showed me on his phone,' McGowan recollected. 

'Only saw it for a few seconds,' he said, 'so the granular details didn't get absorbed.'

McGowan, whose duties in the Air Force included service in Desert Storm attached to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and drug enforcement missions in Colombia, has been public for years on his own UFO encounter. 

In the mid-90s, while serving as a member of the JSOC J2 Security Team for 'Ellipse Foxtrot,' McGowan says he was a witness to unusual aerial lights appearing to survey a highly classified cargo container he had been tasked with guarding in the desert.  

He spoke to the History Channel about this UFO sighting in the Mid East for the 2020 docu-series 'Unidentified,' which had been hosted by Luis Elizondo.

As McGowan recollected about his appearance on the show in a Medium blog post, he had agreed to this on-camera interview in the hopes of getting back in touch with other witnesses to the event, but felt 'used' by the experience.  

'I was supposed to be introduced to investigators and researchers who could help me identify the person with me on that dune and saw what I saw!' he wrote in 2022. 

'I left with no answers [...] I sent a few emails to production that were ignored, and I was never extended the courtesy promised to me.'

Federal government concern about 'mothership' UFOs harboring swarms of 'drones,' have spilled out into public view following the release of internal reports via the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in recent years. 

Weeks of reports of mystery 'drones' swept eastern Colorado and nearby areas of Nebraska, Wyoming and Kansas over the winter holidays of 2019 into the new year.

The sightings worried citizens and local law enforcement alike, but odd craft and thier 'motherships' troubled the US military especially for their proximity to some of America's sensitive, nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

'They all seem clustered in an area that has quite a few Minuteman sites,' a redacted official confessed in one email released via FOIA by F.E. Warren Air Force Base.

F.E. Warren security staff spoke to local sheriff's deputies who ' reported seeing a 'mothership' six feet in diameter flanked by 10 smaller drones (some fixed wing, some not).'

'When deputies follow the drones, they clock them at speeds of 60-70 mph,' the redacted base official stated.