In a small Capitol Hill briefing room, amid talk of extraterrestrials and national security, a former intelligence officer held up a photograph he deemed worthy of the utmost consideration.

“This was taken by a civilian pilot,” said Luis “Lue” Elizondo, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer turned UFO disclosure advocate. He squinted at the printout in his hands. “You’d think this information would be important for somebody to look at.”

The grainy image appeared to show a disc-shaped, silvery object floating high above the arid expanse of the American Southwest. Elizondo told attendees it could be anywhere from 600 to 1,000 feet wide. The sighting of the huge object, he said, had occurred at an altitude of 21,000 feet near the Four Corners region where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet.

The moment came on Thursday during a panel hosted by the UAP Disclosure Fund. UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) is another, less charged term for UFO. The UAP Disclosure Fund is a political advocacy group lobbying for full declassification of government UFO data. Alongside Elizondo sat Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Republican Representatives Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, and nuclear physicist Eric Davis, who made his own claim — that there are four alien species who have visited Earth: “grays, Nordics, reptilian, and insectoid.”

Elizondo’s presentation was meant to reinforce the idea that aliens are among us. Instead, it unraveled within hours.

A Shadow of Doubt

The photograph quickly made its way to Reddit, where users in the UFO-friendly and aptly named r/UFOs forum took a closer look. One member, mattperkins86, compared it to satellite imagery and pinpointed the spot near Colorado Springs. The supposed “UFO,” it turned out, matched the shape and arrangement of two adjacent, perfectly circular crop fields.

Notably, the darker of the two fields appeared as a shadow under the brighter one — an optical illusion caused by their arrangement and lighting. “Not even a crop circle,” one user scoffed. “Just regular crops in a circle.”

Now that must be disappointing if you’re into this kind of thing.

Even Mick West, a well-known debunker and former video game developer who’s made a career unraveling UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) claims, chimed in. “The shadows simply didn’t line up the way they should if it was an object floating above the ground,” he wrote.

The supposed flying saucer wasn’t flying at all. It wasn’t saucer-shaped either. It was farmland.

The Bigger Picture — or the Lack of One

Elizondo later backpedaled. In a tweet, he said the photo had been handed to him just hours before the forum by a private pilot and that it “had NOT YET been vetted.” He insisted the dimensions were the pilot’s own estimate, based on “altitude and experience.”

“As you know, I am always first to admit mistakes, but this is not one of those times,” he wrote.

Despite the apology, presenting an unverified photo before a congressional audience — only for it to be immediately debunked — is not a good look.

“He HAD to have known that if this thing was fake, it was going to be found,” mattperkins86 wrote on Reddit. “So I am left thinking this is intentional, I guess.”

This isn’t the first time Elizondo has presented dubious footage masquerading as evidence in favor of UFOs. In 2024, he shared a different photo that he claimed showed a “mothership” UFO hovering somewhere above Romania. That, too, was debunked — this time as an unusually shaped cloud. According to Futurism, He once described military pilots receiving radiation burns from UFOs and said others had experienced “warping of space time.”

Despite the missteps, Elizondo remains a central figure in the UFO community, where he is known for his calls for greater transparency from the Pentagon on UAPs. In 2017, he resigned from the Department of Defense in protest of what he called the “bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets” surrounding the UAP issue.

But years later, his legacy is increasingly defined by a string of blunders. Even among the UFO conspiracy people, Elizondo is increasingly becoming annoying as each of his errors weakens the broader case for taking the phenomenon seriously.

The Search for More

Public interest in UAPs has surged since 2020, when the Pentagon declassified footage of strange flying objects captured by Navy pilots. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have since called for more openness, and Congress has held multiple hearings on the issue, hence this Thursday’s meeting. Some claim that the government is withholding evidence of extraterrestrial contact.

Yet the panel that followed, loaded with extraordinary claims but light on credible evidence, felt more like a sideshow than a scientific discussion. The image that launched it all? Still visible on Google Earth. Just two circles in a field.

“Jesus, this is embarrassing,” one UFO enthusiast Reddit user wrote.

The search for extraterrestrial life is among humanity’s greatest scientific quests. But as this episode shows, that search — especially when waged in the court of public opinion — requires more than blurry photographs and big promises. It demands rigor. And, just as importantly, humility.

Until then, the truth may still be out there. But so is a lot of farmland.