Collins Elite
This article is about an alleged faction within the US government investigations into UFOs. For the alleged Illuminati bloodline, see
Fritz Springmeier
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The Collins Elite is an alleged informal faction within the U.S. intelligence community, primarily associated with the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose members concluded that the UFO phenomenon is demonic rather than extraterrestrial in origin. The group was named and described by researcher Nick Redfern, who interviewed several alleged insiders including Ray Boeche, in his 2010 book Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife.
Origins and beliefs
According to Redfern, the Collins Elite formed in the late 1950s within U.S. military intelligence. According to Final Events, the nickname started as an in-joke — the group were quite low-ranking in the US military, and several had connections to a small town named Collins; others have speculated that the name actually refers to Fort Collins or Gen. J. Lawton Collins.
The Collins Elite came to believe that the activities of Aleister Crowley and his circle — specifically the Babalon Working, a 1946 magical ritual carried out by Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard — actually succeeded in opening an portal through which demons entered the world, and that the 1947 flying disc craze and the increase in alien encounters after that point was the work of those demons. They theorised that the demons, working with unscrupulous human allies, were deliberately passing themselves off as aliens to frighten humanity into accepting a world government to meet the supposed extraterrestrial threat, with the ultimate goal of enslaving humanity and harvesting human souls.
The group's members also came to believe that the ET abduction phenomenon was not contact with beings from other planets but rather a manifestation of demonic forces. One piece of evidence cited by the Collins Elite was that in many reported abduction events, invoking the name of Jesus Christ would cause the experience to stop.
Composition and ideology
The Collins Elite consists of "evangelical or traditionalist Christians" who "may be evangelical Protestants" or "traditionalist Catholics" positioned across the CIA, Air Force, Naval Intelligence, and other branches of defense intelligence. The group's origins may date as far back as the 1940s, in the era of Jack Parsons, and speculated they may trace back even further to the airship mystery of 1896-1897.
Role in UFO secrecy
The Collins Elite is one of four factions influencing UFO disclosure policy, alongside the "slow drip" disclosure faction associated with Avril Haines, the defectors from the privatized MJ-12 organization represented by David Grusch, and the "old guard" of MJ-12 who seek to maintain total secrecy. These competing factions operate within the broader, contested secrecy apparatus variously called the cabal, whose composition and aims are described very differently across sources. According to this framework, the Collins Elite view UFO secrecy as "basically a stopgap keeping the apocalypse at bay," believing that the UFO phenomenon is "inextricable from the occult" and "probably represents a demonic force." Distinct from the Collins Elite's apocalypse-stopgap secrecy, the 1996–97 release of the Alien interview video is read by Steven Greer and others as the work of a rival pro-disclosure faction within the same contested secrecy apparatus — one leveraging the threat of disclosure to bargain over the lucrative exotic-technology trade rather than to end secrecy, to which the anti-disclosure majority responded with skeptical debunking of the footage.[citation needed]
Influence on Pentagon policy
Figures associated with the Collins Elite perspective within the Pentagon have opposed disclosure on the grounds that the phenomenon "goes against my biblical beliefs." Critics argue that "the people that are trying to put the UFOs question in a religious box likely don't know who they are," and that such framing reflects a refusal to "widen our aperture" rather than genuine understanding of the phenomenon.
Luis Elizondo
In a 2024 interview with NewsNation, former Pentagon insider Luis Elizondo confirmed that the Collins Elite is "entirely real," describing encounters with "religious fundamentalists" within the intelligence community who held "a very strict interpretation of their philosophical belief system." Elizondo recounted a specific Pentagon hallway encounter: "Someone stopped me in the halls of the Pentagon and said, 'Have you read your Bible lately?'... 'What we're dealing with are our demons. These are demonic beings. And we shouldn't be looking at them.'"
Reception and analysis
Theologian Michael S. Heiser has reviewed Redfern's reporting, remarking that if the Collins Elite exist, their ideas about theology and demons are rather peculiar and seem to owe more to horror films than the Bible — one example he singled out was the idea of demons being unable to enter a certain area or being repelled by specific materials. The Collins Elite concept has been discussed extensively in online communities, with users linking it to the broader demonic hypothesis within ufology. Heiser also noted that the idea of demons being unable to enter the world unless a human performed specific magical rituals had no Biblical support and implied "comically feeble demons."
References
Stance on UFO investigation
A view associated with the Collins Elite, summarized in a fragmentary quotation: "And we shouldn’t be looking at them."