To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science

Two Intelligence Insiders’ Plan to Get the World to Pay Attention to UFOs

November 8, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Alejandro Rojas October 23, 2020 (openminds.tv)

• The news has been ablaze with UFO headlines. The US government has been forced to seriously confront the UAP/UFO issue. In fact, The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has requested a public report from the Director of National Intelligence on what has been done thus far with regard to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.

• This focus on the UFO phenomenon was the result of a string of media events: a tweet by Sky Hub founder Steve McDaniel followed by a Danny Silva blog; an article by Leslie Kean in The Huffington Post in May 2016; Open Minds UFO Radio interviews of Bryan Bender and NY Times writer Leslie Kean in the summer of 2017; a blockbuster NY Times article in December 2017; a Washington Post op-ed in March 2018; an article by Politico’s Bender in June 2019; a History Channel show; and finally the US Navy authenticating Navy cockpit video of UFOs, admitting that they are for real, and issuing Navy personnel guidelines for reporting them.

• The focus of all of this media attention over the past four years has been former Senate intelligence analyst Chris Mellon and former Pentagon intelligence officer and head of its UFO program, Luis Elizondo. (both are pictured above with Tom DeLonge) It began with Elizondo’s difficulty in being granted a meeting with defense officials to reveal unexplained craft. It would end with Mellon and Elizondo invited to Capitol Hill for high level UFO briefings. “They couldn’t any longer deny it… when they had active-duty pilots and others going on the record,” said Mellon.

• In the documentary “The Phenomenon”, Mellon says his professional interest in UFOs arose from early claims by astronaut Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a part of the famed ‘Mercury Seven’, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. Prior to this, in 1951, Cooper’s squadron of jet fighters had chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. In 1957, Cooper and his crew at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. Cooper never saw the film again.

• Just prior to the end of President Clinton’s second term, Clinton told his Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, to investigate Cooper’s claims. Cohen assigned the matter to Chris Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations for The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mellon would later become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for the Senate Committee. Apparently, Mellon wasn’t satisfied with the records that the US Air Force kept on UFOs, including Cooper’s. He was told that most of them had been removed in order to “clean up” or “save space”. Mellon’s curiosity was piqued.

• Mellon retired from the government and joined a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA. Then he learned about the existence of a Pentagon UFO program. The UFO topic “was something that I had always been interested in,” said Mellon. “So, I was surprised to see they had anything organized at all.” Mellon quickly offered to assist Elizondo to help get data of the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group encounter with a UFO/UAP to the Secretary of Defense. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not want to escalate the issue. “People were still afraid to touch it and afraid to let the secretary even be exposed to the issue,” says Mellon. Even with Mellon’s connections to senior officials in the Department of Defense, they were unable to secure a meeting with the Secretary of Defense.

• Mellon and Elizondo began to consider more drastic measures – to take their information directly to the media and the public in order to force Congress to take some action. They invited Leslie Kean to Washington on October 4, 2017. “I went down and went to Washington, and we spent three or four hours together,” says Kean. “Luis had resigned (his) position literally the day before we met.” “I was shown the videos… (and) was shown documents about Harry Reid’s involvement. [T]he story was kind of laid out for me at this meeting.” “I realized at that point that it was a New York Times level story, given the documentation that was available for the program and for the people involved and everything else,” Kean continued. “And so that’s how it all started.”

• The world was introduced to Mellon and Elizondo on October 10, 2017, with the press conference launch of Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’. Elizondo and Mellon had joined ‘To the Stars’ team of former high level UFO investigators. The announcement was accompanied by Kean’s article in The Huffington Post. Still, no one seemed to take notice of Elizondo who claimed that he ran a UFO program despite the government telling us for decades they had no interest in the topic.

• Then in December 2017, Kean along with co-writers Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, published a blockbuster NY Times article revealing that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Elizondo who claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day. The Times article also included two videos allegedly showing infrared camera footage from Navy F-18 fighter jets of a UFO, which Mellon had clandestinely received from an anonymous DoD official in a parking garage. (see previous ExoArticle on this)

• On March 9, 2018, Mellon wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post (see previous ExoArticle here) asking ‘Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? “Senators and staffers have been kept in the dark,” said Mellon. “There’s some important unanswered questions here.” Soon thereafter, the US Navy announced new formal guidelines for Navy personnel to report UFO encounters. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that report requirement (by the Navy) would not be in there, wouldn’t exist if we had not been engaged in bringing witnesses forward and advocating this and writing about it and so forth,” said Mellon.

• Mellon called upon Congress to require an ‘all-source study’ by the Secretary of Defense, and promoted research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability, as it pertains to national security. “[H]opefully (this attention) will force the Executive branch to get its act together… establish some accountability and force them to take a position in black and white, as opposed to just giving some briefings.”

• In less than three years, Mellon and Elizondo’s strategy has resulted in the US government admitting they take UAP seriously, reversing their decades-long denials of the fact, and the Senate Intelligence committee taking notice by asking for more information. “It’s a tremendous step forward,” said Mellon. “Regardless of what the phenomenon turns out to be in the end. At least now we can have some faith that a serious effort is going to be made to hold and analyze the data, probably implement a new collection strategy… So it has a lot of potential ramifications, all of them positive.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has requested that the Director of National

Intelligence organize research into Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP – aka UFOs) and provide a public report on what has been done thus far. It is an extraordinary move that further legitimizes a topic that has historically been relegated to mythological stories like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. However, the public did not know that there were those in the US military and intelligence communities who took the issue seriously and wanted more to be done to figure out what those UFOs are.

“We have an intelligence community for a reason, partly to support our military, partly to avoid strategic surprise, and the intelligence community was failing on both counts,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon told OpenMinds.tv in a recent interview. “The intelligence community was completely unresponsive, completely dropping the ball. I mean, it could be Russian, it could be Chinese, it could be something else.”

Mellon served for ten years as a Staff Director of the SSCI. From 1998 to 1999, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, and from 1999 to 2002, he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
In a recent interview for a documentary called The Phenomenon, Mellon says his professional interest in the topic of UAP began with a request by astronaut Gordon Cooper.

Cooper was a part of the famed Mercury Seven, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. He claims to have had two UFO incidents. The first was in 1951. He claims his squadron of jet fighters chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. He also claimed that in 1957 a crew he managed at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. He reviewed the film and reported it. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. He never saw the film again.

According to Mellon, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, tasked him to investigate the matter.

“Astronaut Cooper had spoken with the President,” Mellon says in The Phenomenon. “At a cabinet meeting, he raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”

“The Air Force colonel that I spoke with got very frustrated, and when I asked him what happened to all of these records,” explained Mellon. “He said, ‘Well, that was all cleaned up or thrown out to save space.’ Something like that. It sounded ludicrous, but that’s what he told me.”

Mellon’s interest in the UFO topic was the focus of an article in The Huffington Post in May 2016 titled Is There a UFO Cover-up? A Government Insider Speaks Out. The article was written by Leslie Kean and was about Mellon joining a group of scientists interesting in developing a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA.

Kean was also one of The New York Times authors, along with Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, who broke the news in December 2017 that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who claims he retired to get more attention to what he felt was important information regarding UFOs. He also claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day.

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Were Aliens Present at the Birth of Jesus Christ? Ask Tom DeLonge

September 27, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Joe Divita September 16, 2020 (loudwire.com)

• Over this past summer, former rock star Tom Delonge spoke with The Guardian about his lifelong obsession with aliens. Lately, he has become a high-profile voice within the UFO disclosure community as a founder of ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ which helped to release the US Navy cockpit videos of UFOs and is now working with the US Army on UFO related research. He is also featured in History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.

• DeLonge doesn’t consider the government cover-up of extraterrestrials and UFOs to be ‘conspiratorial’. “Anybody can go on to the CIA website and read thousands of reports (on UFOs),” says DeLonge. “There’s just a vacuum of conversation. Our government has had decades of the very difficult burden of dealing with something that is extremely advanced but poorly understood. They need time to dig into this, to understand it, to gather data and analyze it.”

• “People need to buckle up, open their minds and stop talking about, you know, aliens and extraterrestrials, because I have a feeling that that’s not exactly what it is,” DeLonge said. “I can’t say much, but I do know there have been moments when certain presidents have come close (to disclosing the alien presence).” The issue is whether the public can digest full disclosure of extraterrestrials and UFO technology. “That’s scary for people in the Pentagon when they’re trying to keep civilization duct-taped together,” says DeLonge.

• DeLonge believes that the evidence shows that alien beings have been present on this Earth for thousands of years. He cites cave drawings depicting abductions and even suggested that a spacecraft may have presided over the birth of Jesus Christ. “Things were written in text thousands of years ago, like hearing voices in your head, or a burning bush that was talking. The ancient texts may have called it God, but I’m just saying it’s not that simple.” DeLonge continued, “The star of Bethlehem – was that a star or a craft? Because a star is really big. It wouldn’t be hovering over a manger.”

• [Editor’s Note] Here, Tom DeLonge is setting up the next nugget of UFO disclosure that the Pentagon will allow him to reveal. Apparently, he and his Pentagon pals don’t think that the public can handle full disclosure of the truly ubiquitous extraterrestrial presence, much less how far the US deep state has expanded its secret space program using extraterrestrial technology. So first, they want the public to start getting used to the idea that UFOs and the beings that fly in them are real. Then they will let us in on who these beings really are. This long drawn out type of ‘limited hangout’ disclosure – only giving bits and pieces of the picture – is what the deep state military industrial complex has in mind, and it will take decades if they have their way.

Don’t be surprised if we are told that the UFOs are really our Earth human descendants who in the future have gained advanced spaceship technology and, due to a time warp, they keep appearing now and then in our skies. Earlier in the summer, Corey Goode was briefed on this ‘limited hangout’ scenario. Corey reported his briefing to Dr Michael Salla as follows: “POTUS’ ‘Roswell Briefings’ are basically this: Roswell was not an alien event. It was a mishap from us in the future. POTUS is told that the majority of the lights seen in the sky are from our own craft operating in the future and creating a temporal butterfly effect. They are told that what the ancients saw in the sky was often the exact same phenomenon….” Corey Goode continues: “POTUS is under the impression that because of tests being run in Roswell during the same time that future craft were operating in that space at a later time… that it caused the craft to pull into the past and crash, thus beginning the new tech boom after WWII.” You can read an extensive essay on limited hangout scenarios and what else Corey had to say in Dr Salla’s previous ExoArticle: “Roswell UFO Crash to be Officially Disclosed as Time-Traveling Future Humans”.

**a UFO hovering over the ‘Baptism of of Jesus Christ’**

Former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge has become an increasingly high-profile voice within the extraterrestrial community. He’s not just spewing

**painting of the birth of Christ with a UFO in the background**

conspiratorial nonsense — his To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science struck a research deal with the U.S. Army and the nation’s Navy even published UFO videos shared by To The Stars. Now, he’s suggested that aliens presided over the birth of Christian deity Jesus Christ.

Season 2 of the musician/alien researcher’s History Channel program Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation aired over the summer and he spoke with The Guardian about his lifelong obsession with aliens.

DeLonge isn’t quick to attribute every mysterious aircraft sighting (now referred to as UAP — unidentifiedaerial phenomenon) to otherwordly inhabitants/cosmic joyriders. “People need to buckle up, open their minds and stop talking about, you know, aliens and extraterrestrials, because I have a feeling that that’s not exactly what it is,” he said.

Quick to disown the idea that his research and other efforts are mere ballyhoo and that there is a dedicated practice of governments covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life, potentially even on Earth itself, DeLonge charged, “It’s not conspiratorial. Anybody can go on to the CIA website and read thousands of reports. There’s just a vacuum of conversation. Our government has had decades of the very difficult burden of dealing with something that is extremely advanced but poorly understood. They need time to dig into this, to understand it, to gather data and analyze it.”

**what are medieval artists trying to tell us?**

He also understood the sensitivity of such rattling revelations if world leaders were to disclose with the general public that alien life had indeed been confirmed. “I can’t say much, but I do know there have been moments when certain presidents have come close,” explained DeLonge. “The issue always becomes: how are people going to digest this if we hit them over the head with a giant sledgehammer? That’s scary for people in the Pentagon when they’re trying to keep civilization duct-taped together.”

As for the idea of an enduring presence of alien visitors on Earth, DeLonge cited cave drawings depicting abductions and even suggested that a spacecraft could have been presiding over the birth of Jesus Christ.

“Things were written in text thousands of years ago, like hearing voices in your head, a burning bush that was talking. The ancient texts may have called it God, but I’m just saying it’s not that simple,” DeLonge urged, wondering aloud, “The star of Bethlehem – was that a star or a craft? Because a star is really big. It wouldn’t be hovering over a manger.”

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Ex-Air Force Members’ Stories Will Convince You UFOs Are Real

September 3, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Patrice A. Kelly August 27, 2020 (filmdaily.co)

• Are UFOs real? According to Luis Elizondo, former military intelligence officer and past head of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, “I think we’re at the point now where we’re beyond reasonable doubt that these things exist. We know they’re there – we have some of the greatest technology in the world that has confirmed their existence.”

• Since the term ‘UFO’ describes aerial objects that defy explanation, some believe that they represent technology deployed by a hostile human source. Evaluating the potential threats posed by UFOs should, therefore, involve the collaboration of leaders around the world, said Elizondo, who is now a director of global security and special programs at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a private agency pursuing evidence of UFOs.

• The U.S. government has been collecting reports on UFOs since the 1950s – in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, from 1952 to 1969, and through the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a federal agency that compiled witness accounts of UFO encounters from the 1950s through the 1980s.

• On November 14, 2004, Cmdr. David Fravor (pictured above) and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission in their F/A-18F Super Hornets, 100 miles out into the Pacific from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. An operations officer aboard the USS Princeton asked if they were carrying weapons. Commander Fravor replied that they only carried ‘dummy missiles’ as they had not been expecting any hostile exchanges off the coast of San Diego. “Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” the radio operator said.

• For two weeks, the Princeton had been tracking UFOs. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up. The radio operator instructed the pilots to investigate. The two fighter jets headed toward the “merge plot” with objects. When they reached that point, they could see nothing around them. Then Fravor looked down at the ocean. Although the seas were calm, waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.

• Hovering fifty feet above the churn was an oval aircraft of some kind, whitish, around forty feet long. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction. Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him, as if the UFO were coming to meet him halfway. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. Then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Fravor.

• The operations officer on the Princeton told the jets to rendezvous at a ‘cap point’ sixty miles away. The jets were near the cap point when the Princeton radioed: “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is (already) at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor related. By the time the two fighter jets arrived at the rendezvous point, the object had disappeared.

• The fighter jets returned to the Nimitz, where everyone on the ship had learned of Commander Fravor’s encounter and was making fun of him. Fravor’s superiors did not investigate further and he went on with his career, deploying to the Persian Gulf to provide air support to ground troops during the Iraq war. But recalling that day off of San Deigo, Commander Fravor said, “I have no idea what I saw.” “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.” Fravor added, “I want to fly one.”

There’s no question that the world has an ongoing fascination with UFOs. Although reports of sightings are often met with derision– as delusions of people who wear “tin-foil hats” – there is no doubt that many people have seen something unexplained whizzing through the sky. So the question becomes – are UFOs real?

According to Luis Elizondo, former military intelligence officer and past head of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), they just might be.

They do exist . . .

“I think we’re at the point now where we’re beyond reasonable doubt that these things exist,” Elizondo said. “We know they’re there – we have some of the greatest technology in the world that has confirmed their existence.”

Though some label UFOs as alien spacecraft, the term merely describes aerial objects that defy explanation. One possibility is that they represent technology deployed by a hostile human source, so it’s impossible to say for sure that UFOs are harmless, Elizondo said.

Evaluating the potential threats posed by UFOs should, therefore, involve the collaboration of leaders around the world, remarked Elizondo, who left the Pentagon in 2017 and is now a director of global security and special programs at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a private agency pursuing evidence of UFOs.

UFOs or UAPs

UFOs are also known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. The U.S. government has been collecting reports of these enigmatic objects since the 1950s in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, from 1952 to 1969, and through the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a federal agency that compiled witness accounts of UFO encounters from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Nimitz sighting

One of the most famous cases of UFO sightings happened to pilots assigned to the USS Nimitz on November 14, 2004, over the Pacific Ocean. Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission 100 miles out into the Pacific when the radio in each of their F/A-18F Super Hornets crackled. An operations officer aboard the U.S.S. Princeton, a Navy cruiser, wanted to know if they were carrying weapons.

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UFO Lobbyists Are Trying to Get the Truth From Congress, and They’re Winning

October 13, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E125 UFO Lobbyists Are Trying to Get the Truth From Congress, and They’re Winning” on Spreaker.

Article by MJ Banias October 4, 2019 (vice.com)

• In 1996, Steven Bassett registered as Capitol Hill’s lone UFO lobbyist in Washington D.C. and founded the Paradigm Research Group. Registered lobbyist Teresa Tindal has recently joined Bassett in fighting for greater transparency about UFOs. They want nothing less than ‘full disclosure’ where the government admits to the extraterrestrial presence and the massive cover-up to hide the truth from the public. Says Bassett, “A significant percentage of all people on Capitol Hill are convinced there is an ET presence. They are just not able to speak to it publicly.”

• Tindal points out that polls show most people believe in ET life. “It is… the most powerful political initiative as it affects absolutely every aspect of life,” says Tindal. “[P]oliticians will be looking to control the issue.” There is even a Twitter hashtag #askthequestion that is meant to raise awareness of the disclosure process for the 2020 election.

• Bassett calls out the UFO lobbyist organization, ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’, headed by Tom DeLonge and Luis Elizondo as a limited disclosure effort, heeding certain conditions laid down by those still inside the government who are providing cover against those who would try to shut them down. Consequently, the ‘To The Stars’ team does not admit to the extraterrestrial presence. Obfuscating the existence of ET technology, Elizondo claims, “We simply don’t know at this point if non-human technology is even part of the equation.” DeLonge also publicly denies the extraterrestrial presence saying that humanity was visited by aliens in its distant past, and now all human culture is one big “cargo cult,” meaning that any ancient aliens are long gone.

• Another D.C. lobbyist is UFO researcher Chase Kloetzke who meets with lawmakers about “the phenomenon”. But she says that she can only get so far. UFOs are considered sensitive information. “It’s all classified. To be part of any discussion in D.C. about UAPs, you need a security clearance.” Says Kloetzke, “This topic is now in the hands of the Pentagon, military strategists and intelligence agencies.”

• But Kloetzke can confirm that the ‘To the Stars Academy’ is a key player in all of this, and that the Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, which studied UFOs until its purported termination in 2012, is “still in play.”

• Why is Kloetzke determined to lobby in D.C.? “I realized years ago that any kind of disclosure or confirmation will only be ‘official,’ if it comes from D.C.,” said Kloetzke. “We have unknown objects in our skies. Confirmed! … [W]e can now… start the process of public information.”

How do you make the government take UFOs seriously? With a UFO lobbyist, of course.

In December 2017, the New York Times wrote about a de-funded secret Pentagon UFO program called AATIP, and revealed that several Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 engaged in bizarre encounters with anomalous aerial objects off the coast of California and Florida. Eventually, three videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” were released and have since been confirmed by the Navy as real.

For years, Steven Bassett was Capitol Hill’s lone UFO lobbyist. He became a registered lobbyist in 1996 and set up an advocacy organization, the Paradigm Research Group

(PRG), which has the goal of using “all means possible to confront the United States government regarding its policy of a truth embargo on the events and evidence demonstrating an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and the formal acknowledgment of that presence,” according to Bassett’s website.

“It’s not about UFOs. The term is a product of government propaganda in service to the truth embargo and no longer of value,” Bassett told Motherboard. “It’s about extraterrestrials and the Disclosure process.”

For those not fully immersed in Ufological culture, “Disclosure” is the total and final admission by the government that extraterrestrials are not only visiting Earth, but that there is a massive government cover-up to hide the truth from the public. The UFO community has even taken to Twitter to raise awareness of the Disclosure process for the 2020 election with the hashtag #askthequestion.

“A significant percentage of all people on Capitol Hill are convinced there is an ET presence. They are just not able to speak to it—publicly,” Bassett said.

Bassett’s PRG organization has recently hired Teresa Tindal, another registered lobbyist who is now also fighting for greater transparency about UFOs. Like Bassett, Tindal is convinced that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth and interacting with humans. She believes that the government is complicit in a massive cover-up.

“The cat’s out of the bag and politicians will be looking to control the issue,” Tindal told Motherboard. “It is, after all, the most powerful political initiative as it affects absolutely every aspect of life. Polls show most people believe in ET life.”

“We simply don’t know at this point if non-human technology is even part of the equation,” Elizondo stated. “It is a nonsensical assertion at this point in time because we simply need more data to even make that initial assessment.”

Elizondo’s boss, To the Star’s founder Tom DeLonge, has made his personal beliefs clear on the issue. In his book, Sekret Machines: Gods, co-written with Peter Levenda, DeLonge sums it all up by arguing that humanity was visited by aliens in its distant past, and that all human culture is one big “cargo cult.”

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Tom DeLonge’s Graphic Novel ‘Strange Times’ Is Getting a TV Adaptation

December 20, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Katrina Nattress December 10, 2018 (iheart.com)

• In 2015, Tom DeLonge combined his passions for skateboarding and UFO to create a graphic novel entitled Strange Times. On December 10th, the entertainment industry reporter Variety announced that the graphic novel is being adapted for a television series, with DeLonge producing along with writer Aaron Karo, Strike Entertainment’s Russell Binder, and the Cartel’s Stan Spry and Jeff Holland.

• The story focuses on five mystery-solving skateboarders who are constantly outrunning Deep State government agents. “My love for all things paranormal and skateboarding are sometimes only superseded by my love for offensive humor,” DeLonge said in a statement. “This series combines them all into one.”

• “This is exactly what my company To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science does,” said DeLonge. “All the stories and themes I work on are meant to be shared through multiple mediums and on different platforms — film, TV, books, music and so on.” “’Strange Times’ began as an interactive website where people shared weird, paranormal stories — a lot of them with credible evidence. That helped inspire the story behind the graphic novel and also a prose novel that I published.”

• [Editor’s Note] Stand by for Corey Goode’s long-anticipated graphic novel, due for release in February 2019.

Though Tom DeLonge is still a beloved musician, the former blink-182 guitarist/singer has been focusing a lot of his energy on other endeavors. He just published a new children’s book and has been busy researching UFOs. In 2015, he combined both passions and published a graphic novel called Strange Times. Now, that project is getting a TV adaptation.

On Monday (December 10), Variety announced that the series is currently in development at TBS. The story focuses on five mystery-solving skateboarders who are constantly outrunning Deep State government agents. “My love for all things paranormal and skateboarding are sometimes only superseded by my love for offensive humor,” DeLonge said in a statement. “This series combines them all into one.”

The rockstar expanded on his creative vision in an interview with Variety.

“This is a dream I’ve had for over 10 years and it’s finally a reality,” he gushed. “All the stories and themes I work on are meant to be shared through multiple mediums and on different platforms — film, TV, books, music and so on. ‘Strange Times’ began as an interactive website where people shared weird, paranormal stories — a lot of them with credible evidence. That helped inspire the story behind the graphic novel and also a prose novel that I published.”

“This is exactly what my company To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science does,” he continued. “We hope to create something that could be described as sort of a ‘science fiction Disney,’ where our entertainment franchises are worlds that are inspired and informed by our own next-generation science division.”

DeLonge is set to executive produce the series with writer Aaron Karo, Strike Entertainment’s Russell Binder and the Cartel’s Stan Spry and Jeff Holland.

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Do Aliens Exist? Blink 182 Co-Founder and Ex-Pentagon Official Are Determined to Prove We’re Not Alone

September 22, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Keith Kloor September 20, 2018 (newsweek.com)

• On July 29th, Luis Elizondo, the former career military intelligence official in charge of the Pentagon’s UFO research program from 2007 to 2012 and current member of rock star Tom DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars Academy’, spoke at the annual Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

• Elizondo’s background is typical of a straight-arrow military officer with a distinguished career. He is the son of a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Elizondo worked as a bouncer while attending the University of Miami. After graduating in 1995, he joined the Army and trained to be a military spy. Later, at the Pentagon, Elizondo showed no sign of being a disgruntled employee, spending much of his career chasing militants in South America and the Middle East.

• In 2010, Elizondo was made the head of a small group within the Pentagon charged with investigating reports of “unexplained aerial phenomena” – a less controversial term for UFOs. It was an ¬obscure, low-budget initiative created in 2007 at the behest of then-Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and operated jointly by Elizondo and Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace. But the results of their UFO investigations made Elizondo a true believer. Although the Pentagon program was officially shut down in 2012, Elizondo insists it remains ongoing.

• Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 protesting what he considered lackluster support and unnecessary secrecy. “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this (UFO) issue?” Elizondo wrote to Defense Secretary James Mattis in his resignation letter, “Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels, certain individuals in the Department (of Defense) remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security.”

• When Tom DeLonge launched ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ in October 2017, Elizondo joined and quickly became its public face. Its mission: to advance UFO research, produce science-fiction-themed entertainment about UFOs and, with luck, glean some insight into the super-advanced technology displayed by UFOs (such as spaceships that can seemingly defy gravity) that the Pentagon keeps ignoring. Over the past year, the Academy claims to have attracted more than 2,000 investors and raised roughly $2.5 million.

• ‘To The Stars Academy’ also boasts such heavy-hitters as Chris Mellon, the former deputy ¬assistant secretary of defense for intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations who had oversight of the Pentagon’s super-¬secret ‘special access programs’ and highly classified ‘black operations’; Jim Semivan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service; and Hal Puthoff an electrical engineer who conducted controversial research on psychic abilities for the CIA and the DIA.

• The $22 million Pentagon UFO project marked the first time that the U.S. government admitted to studying UFOs since the Air Force’s ‘Project Blue Book’ was shut down in 1968. Despite Senator Reid’s assertion in an interview with New York magazine that “we have hundreds and ¬hundreds of papers… 80 percent at least, is public,” and Mellon’s statement in Washington Post op-ed, that referred to a “growing body of empirical data,” Elizondo says that much of these “large volumes” of academic studies and data are “FOIA-exempt,” meaning the public is not given access to them.

• There are those in the UFO community who are skeptical of DeLonge’s motives. They believe he simply wants to profit off his UFO-related books, websites and merchandise, and that his antics are part of the business plan.

• As the Academy’s head of Global Security and Special Programs, Elizondo serves as a liaison to the government, including Congress, the Pentagon and the intelligence services. Elizondo thinks that the next six months or so will be pivotal to the success of ‘To the Stars’ when he expects to be able to present more data on UFO sightings. “I’m not worried about credibility,” Elizondo says. “I’m worried about facts.” Reminded that the only facts the public has now are grainy videos, he insists, “There is data. It’s not out yet.”

• Elizondo understands why many remain dubious. “I get it. I’m a career spy,” he says.” “No, I am not running a government disinformation campaign.” “I took a huge risk in leaving a safe job to do this. If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll be working at Walmart.” “But…as crazy as it sounds, this is real.”

“I know what I saw.”

It was late July, and Teresa Tindal, a 39-year-old administrator for a consulting firm, was describing the incident that made her a believer: a round, golden object hovering in the evening sky over Tucson, Arizona. Weather balloon? No way. It could only be one thing: a UFO.

This kind of certainty had brought her—and 400 other people—to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium, the “premiere UFO event of the year,” according to its literature. They had gathered to talk about extraterrestrials, UFOs and how to avoid being abducted by an alien mothership (hint: yelling at it doesn’t work). “There are too many people that have seen things,” Christine Thisse, 44, a soft-spoken mother from Michigan, told Newsweek.

There were the typical guest speakers giving talks with titles like “Unexplained Disappearances in Rural Areas” and “Report From Mars,” in which a physicist lays out his theory that 75,000 years ago an intergalactic nuclear war wiped out a Martian civilization. And there were famous abductees, like Travis Walton, a former logger whose story of alien captivity became the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky.

But this year offered another attraction—a new, and extremely unlikely, superstar: Luis Elizondo. Seven months earlier, The New York Times had published a front-page story on the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, a “shadowy” initiative at the Pentagon that “investigated reports of unidentified flying objects.” Elizondo, a burly Miami native with a billy-goat beard and colorful tattoos, was the career military intelligence official put in charge of the program a few years after it formed in 2007, until, according to the Pentagon’s press office, it was discontinued in 2012. (Elizondo insists the work is ongoing.) Last year, he resigned from the Pentagon, protesting what he considered lackluster support and unnecessary secrecy—red meat for the X-Files crowd. “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” he wrote to Defense Secretary James Mattis in his resignation letter.

In the private sector, Elizondo soon found an unlikely ally in his quest for the truth: Tom DeLonge, the former frontman for the pop/punk band Blink-182, the group behind a song called “Aliens Exist.” Turns out DeLonge actually believed it. In 2017, he launched To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, and Elizondo quickly became its public face. The mission: to advance UFO research, produce science-fiction-themed entertainment about UFOs and, with luck, glean some insight into the super-advanced technology displayed by UFOs (such as spaceships that can seemingly defy gravity) that the Pentagon keeps ignoring.

The academy claims to have attracted more than 2,000 investors and raised roughly $2.5 million, and Elizondo found a mostly enthusiastic crowd in Cherry Hill. “Sometimes people may have associated you with being fringe—being out there,” he told the MUFON audience over a buffet dinner. “All along, you were right.” Not everyone was convinced: Some cited a lack of evidence in his presentation. Tindal was suspicious of the Pentagon connection. “It could be a cover for something else,” she said.

But if Elizondo is trying to lend credibility to research on unexplained sightings, why would he partner with a guy whose band had a hit album titled Enema of the State? And why would he choose as a venue a UFO conference teeming with conspiracy theorists?

“We have to start somewhere,” he told Newsweek that day. “I don’t get invited to Stanford or MIT.”

Super Hornets and Tic Tacs

Each year, thousands of people report UFO sightings to various authorities—the police, the Pentagon, radio talk show hosts. By one count, more than 100,000 sightings have been reported since 1905. Nearly all can be explained away as clouds, meteors, birds, weather balloons or some other quotidian phenomenon. Efforts at rational debunking serve only to harden the conviction of the true believers, who are convinced that abundant evidence of alien visitations is hidden in secret military documents—literal X-files—locked away in the bowels of the so-called deep state.

The X-files conspiracy theory is the beating heart of the UFO community—an article of faith among enthusiasts and the basis of almost every call to action on social media (#Disclosure). It is also encouraged by some prominent people, including John ¬Podesta, who lamented on Twitter a few years ago that he’d failed to secure the #disclosure of the UFO files, “despite being President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.

When Elizondo went public, it gave a sheen of credibility to the conspiracy crowd. His background is typical of a straight-arrow military officer with a distinguished career. He is the son of a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs—the failed CIA-¬sponsored plot to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. Elizondo worked as a bouncer while attending the University of Miami. After graduating in 1995, he joined the Army and trained to be a military spy. Later, at the Pentagon, Elizondo showed no sign of being a disgruntled employee or a loon, spending much of his career in the shadows, chasing militants in South America and the Middle East.

In 2010, he started to run a small group charged with investigating reports of “unexplained aerial phenomena”—a less controversial term for UFOs. It was an ¬obscure, low-budget initiative created three years before at the behest of then-Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Details are murky, but the $22 million program seems to have been operated jointly by Elizondo and Bigelow Aerospace, a Nevada-based defense contractor whose billionaire owner, Robert Bigelow, is an avid believer in UFOs.

Two months before the Times published its front-page story, Elizondo retired from the Pentagon. He shows Newsweek what he says is a copy of his resignation letter, dated October 4, 2017, and addressed to Mattis. The letter expresses some frustration about the lack of attention his program was getting. And it suggests that something he learned at the Pentagon turned him into a true believer. “Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels,” he wrote, “certain individuals in the Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security.”

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DeLonge’s UFO Team Studying Alien Metal

August 16, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by MJ Banias August 4, 2018 (mysteriousuniverse.org)

• Tom DeLonge’s (pictured above) public benefit corporation ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ has announced its “flagship” research project, the ‘Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials’, known as A.D.A.M. To collect and evaluate material samples from crashed UFOs.

• These ‘meta-materials’ are typically an amalgamation of alloys not found on Earth and of “unknown origin”, constructed from multiple elements to form composite metals. They have the ability to manipulate and absorb electromagnetic waves to allow a spaceship to cloak itself from view or radar. It can also enhance a communication transmission signal.

• It seems that with the recent prominence of To The Stars Academy, people have been bringing to them small pieces of UFO debris they’d been keeping. “Due to the widespread publicity that TTSA has received, individuals claiming possession of materials that might be from advanced aerospace vehicles of unknown origin have come forth and have agreed to provide them to TTSA for analysis,” said Dr. Hal Puthoff who serves as Vice President of Science and Technology for To the Stars Academy. Meta-materials seem to be the ‘next big thing’ in UFO research.

• The project is being headed up by Dr. Puthoff’s own EarthTech International under a “very straightforward contractual relationship” with To the Stars Academy. “The results will be provided to TTSA for their dissemination as they see fit,” said Puthoff.

• Asked whether they had any strange meta-materials in their possession, Puthoff responded, “Materials with interesting claimed histories have been provided, but technical evaluation of them is yet to be carried out, so it is too early to say.”

• Critics in the UFO community have suggested that this is just an attempt by To the Stars Academy to remain relevant. Others have suggested that this is just one big government conspiracy to scoop up UFO meta-materials and hide them away from the public.

• Looking at the overall history of UFO studies, no single project or program has ever succeeded in solving the enigma. Will the A.D.A.M. Project create a new type of conductive material for everyday use while the UFO phenomenon itself remains as elusive as ever? How will we perceive meta-materials in two decades when it is in our everyday gadgets? Once we have become masters of meta-material technology, what will become the ‘next big thing’?

Last week, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), Tom DeLonge’s public benefit corporation dedicated to seeking answers to the UFO mystery, announced that it was launching its “flagship” research project.

The Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials, known as A.D.A.M., focuses on, “the collection and scientific evaluation of material samples obtained through reliable reports of advanced aerospace vehicles of unknown origin.”

This material often referred to as ‘meta-materials,’ is usually a bizarre collection and amalgamation of alloys. Not found in nature, meta-materials are constructed from multiple elements to form composite metals. The various elements are arranged in patterns, often on the microscopic level, to manipulate electromagnetic waves. They can bend these waves, absorb them, enhance them and block them for a variety of purposes. Technologically, this is an important frontier that has been talked about a lot in physics.

Building an aircraft, for example, out of a specific meta-material which absorbs EM radiation would fundamentally make it invisible on radar, and even, with the right combination of elements, the naked eye. Perhaps you wanted to transmit a signal, like a radio wave. If the antenna used to transmit the signal is made out of this fancy new meta-material, you could fashion it using certain patterns of elements that would significantly enhance the signal and cast it across a great distance.

The A.D.A.M. project is suggesting that anomalous aerial phenomena, UFOs basically, seem to be leaving similar materials behind. Basically, little bits of unknown aerial vehicles are showing up. While stories and accounts of UFO debris fill the narrative, like a crashed flying saucer outside of Roswell, meta-materials seem to be the next big thing in UFO research. While there exists significant disagreement on the whole UFO meta-material thing, the project is being headed up by Dr. Hal Puthoff and EarthTech International.

Dr. Puthoff has a long history in dealing with esoteric stuff, such as parapsychology and UFOs. That being said, he is an established scientist, educated at Stanford University, who focuses on exotic physics. While he has many critics, to any card-carrying member of the UFO community, he is a big name.

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These Are Real Pentagon Reports On Warp Drive, Extra Dimensions, Anti-Gravity, And More

May 26, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick May 11, 2018 (thedrive.com)

• A pair of official Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents have come to light showing the military’s keen interest in subjects such as warp drive propulsion, extra-dimensional manipulation, dark energy, and other highly exotic forms of space travel. The documents were first posted by Corey Goode late in 2017, and are now again revealed by George Knapp’s I-Team, part of Las Vegas CBS affiliate Channel 8 News, which has been investigating the government’s supposed connection with ‘UFOs’ for decades.

• Knapp has been digging deeper into Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, founded by UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, which was awarded the contract for the Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AAITP), a $22 million classified program supporting a team of nearly 50 scientists, analysts, and investigators that investigated UFO sightings between 2008 and 2012.

• A March 29, 2010 study dealt with “advanced space propulsion” for faster-than-light travel, “space-time altered regions”, and “gravity/antigravity” forces. “This paper has considered the possibility—even likelihood—that future developments with regard to advanced aerospace technologies will trend in the direction of manipulating the underlying space-time structure of the vacuum of space itself by processes that can be called vacuum engineering or metric engineering.” This study was authored at the time by Austin-based EarthTech International, Inc. CEO Harold Puthoff, Ph.D for the Pentagon program.

• An April 2, 2010 study covered similar ground, but also included discussions about “dark energy” and “extra dimensions.” This document states, “The idea that a sufficiently advanced technology may interact with, and acquire direct control over, the higher dimensions is a tantalizing possibility, and one that is most certainly worthy of deeper investigation.” Eric Davis, Ph.D., working with a prior Bigelow company National Institute for Discovery Science, authored this study along with independent consultant Richard Obousy.

• “These studies are so loaded with information,” said Senator Reid who sponsored the Pentagon program. “One thing we learned is over the decades a lot of things happen there’s no explanation for. Well there are now.” However, neither report suggests that the technology they described was anywhere near practical or that any foreign government was close to achieving a relevant breakthrough.

• Harold Puthoff is now VP of Science and Technology at To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a non-profit organization in Encinitas, California that reportedly is, at least in part, continuing the AAITP’s work independently. Luis Elizondo, who was the head of the AAITP Pentagon program, is now the To The Stars Academy’s Director of Global Security and Special Programs.

• A pair of DoD military videos showing ‘tic-tac’ shaped UFOs recorded by Navy F/A-18 fighter jets had been floating around in in the Pentagon’s AAITP (previously known as Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications) and in defense circles for over a decade. To The Stars Academy was instrumental in publically releasing these UFO videos in December 2017. (See original NY Times article) Open disclosure about the origin of the video on an official level, as well as subsequent interviews with the pilot that took it, elevated it to mainstream news.

• Bigelow’s special unit’s investigation concludes that the Pentagon’s AAITProgram went far beyond documenting and evaluating reports of UFOs. It took a holistic approach, evaluating the impact on human biology in association with UFO sightings, and delved into other paranormal domains. It also claims to be storing mysterious material from downed UFOs. The depth of the government’s investigation of UFO technology leaves us wondering what hasn’t been revealed, whether out of fear of embarrassment or risk to national security.

The modern understanding of the Pentagon’s relationship with unexplained flying phenomena has become remarkably more pointed in the last six months since the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was uncovered. Its disclosure came in between our own exclusive reporting on two very strange and well-documented encounters with strange aircraft operating in U.S. airspace. Now, new documents are coming to light that show the Department of Defense’s own spy agency was also interested in subjects that border on science fiction and the even the paranormal, including warp drive, extra-dimensional manipulation, dark energy, and other highly exotic forms of space travel.

The documents were first discovered by George Knapp’s I-Team, part of Las Vegas CBS affiliate Channel 8 News, which has been investigating the government’s supposed connection with ‘UFOs’ for decades.

Author’s note 5/14/18: It has come to our attention that the documents were in fact first posted by Corey Goode late last year shortly after the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was first disclosed.

Recently Knapp has been digging deeper into Bigelow Aerospace—which is located in Las Vegas—and its starring role in the previously classified program. It is no secret that Robert Bigelow, a former real estate developer turned inflatable space station entrepreneur, has been highly interested in UFOs, but the depth of the company’s official relationship with the Defense Department regarding the topic was something entirely unheard of before the disclosure of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program occurred in December 2017.

Abbreviated AATIP, that effort, and its funding, sprang from Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s interest in the topic, along with that of a Defense Intelligence Agency official. The program, which eventually cost $22 million and ran roughly between 2008 and 2012, began after Bigelow won the contract, apparently to investigate UFO sightings, along with pretty much everything else that goes along with the topic for better or worse, on behalf of the military.

A team of nearly 50 scientists, analysts, and investigators were assembled to work on the program, which was originally and very cryptically dubbed the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program before gaining its more recent moniker. The contract between the DIA and Bigelow made sure not to spell out its focus, instead referring to exotic technologies without mentioning UFOs.

The I-Team writes: “The agreement with DIA did not mention UFOs at all. It used more generic terms such as future threats and breakthrough technologies, and specified 12 focal points including, lift, propulsion, materials, versions of stealth as well as human interface and human effects.”

It was under the AAWSA name that the organization funded at least two studies into advanced propulsion and space technology research that border on the fantastical. The first of these studies, dated March 29, 2010, deals with “advanced space propulsion” for faster-than-light travel, discussing theoretical physical constructs such as “spacetime-altered regions” and “gravity/antigravity” forces. The second study, which the AAWSA program published on April 2, 2010, covers similar ground, but also includes discussions about “dark energy” and “extra dimensions.”

The AAWSA experts did this work under the auspices of DIA’s Defense Warning Office, which makes good sense, at least conceptually. This organization first came into being in 2002 and is “charged with identifying sources of increasing threats to U.S. interests in critical regions,” according to an official briefing.

“This office will also identify opportunities to affect adversary behavior prior to and in the early stages of a crisis.” that presentation notes. In 2003, these tasks expanded to also include work “to provide the earliest possible warning of technological developments that could undermine U.S. military preeminence.”

UFO sightings are often indications of advanced and secret military aircraft research and development projects. Having a team of experts try and determine if any of the reports translated to real programs, especially those that potential opponents such as Russia or China might have been working on, would be well with DIA’s mandate for the office.

That AAWSA team would have delved into known developments in associated fields would also make sense in this context. If America’s adversaries were rapidly advancing toward practical warp drives and other advanced propulsion and space research, DIA would definitely want to know in order to help inform U.S. policy responses.

“These studies are so loaded with information,” Senator Reid reportedly said at one point, according to Las Vegas’ Channel 8. “One thing we learned is over the decades a lot of things happen there’s no explanation for. Well there are now.”

Here is a 2:15-minute video clip from a May 28, 2017 60 Minutes segment with
Robert Bigelow that was filmed before revelations of his involvement
with the Pentagon’s Aviation Threat Identification program

44-second video of the “tic tac” UFO off of San Diego in 2004

36-second video of UFO skimming the ocean off of the East Coast USA

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Tag: To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science