The Vehicle
To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science was incorporated as a California public benefit corporation and launched via live-streamed event on October 11, 2017 — the vehicle through which the post-2017 UAP disclosure arc was operationalized. The choice of a rock musician as the public face, Tom DeLonge of Blink-182, was not an accident of personal enthusiasm. It was a design decision: a civilian-branded, entertainment-adjacent entity that could move classified material into the public domain without triggering the review mechanisms that would apply to any formally affiliated government actor.
The founding roster tells the story more plainly than the press releases. DeLonge held the public-facing position of president and CEO. The substantive institutional weight was carried by the others. Jim Semivan spent twenty-five years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, retiring at Senior Intelligence Service rank — the clandestine service equivalent of a general officer. Harold “Hal” Puthoff had directed the SRI International remote viewing program for the CIA and DIA in the 1970s, served as the foundational scientific architect of Project Stargate, and subsequently founded EarthTech International in Austin as his post-government advanced-physics research vehicle; in the 2000s he had been a primary contractor for the AAWSAP/AATIP program, producing Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on metric engineering, wormhole traversability, and anti-gravity for the DIA. Luis Elizondo had served as a counterintelligence officer across the Army and DoD, operating in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Latin America, before managing what he has consistently called the AATIP program from 2009 until his resignation in October 2017. Christopher Mellon had served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under both the Clinton and Bush administrations — the senior civilian intelligence oversight role inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Steve Justice had been Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division, the black-budget aerospace development organization responsible for the U-2, SR-71, and F-117.
Five individuals. One with twenty-five years running clandestine operations for the CIA. One with forty-plus years connecting government parapsychology programs to advanced-physics contracting. One who ran the Pentagon’s classified UAP program. One who oversaw all defense intelligence from a senior political-appointee position. One who directed classified aerospace development at the apex of the industrial-military complex. The nominal purpose of the organization was to release UAP material to the public through a combination of science research, aerospace technology development, and entertainment. That roster poses the institutional question: why did senior figures with those biographies operate through a pop-culture public benefit corporation when their careers already opened congressional briefings, formal declassification requests, and SSCI staff access?
Those channels could not compel the transfer the network wanted. TTSA became a workaround: a civilian pressure vehicle able to route bounded military material, insider testimony, speculative science, and entertainment through the classification regime’s outer wall. Its public posture belongs to people trying to force an inaccessible system to answer.
The Prelude: DeLonge’s Intelligence Network
The operational preparation for TTSA predates the October 2017 incorporation by at least two years. In emails surfaced by WikiLeaks in October 2016, DeLonge had been corresponding with John Podesta, then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, about arranging meetings with senior defense and intelligence officials to facilitate UFO disclosure. One exchange referenced Major General William McCasland, then-commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — an installation that has occupied a permanent place in UFO lore as the alleged repository of recovered Roswell material — as someone who was “very, very aware” of the reality of the phenomenon. That DeLonge was cultivating contacts at two- and three-star level within the Air Force while simultaneously corresponding with Podesta, a longtime disclosure advocate who had served as Clinton’s chief of staff, indicates that by 2015–16 a network of senior figures had already coalesced around the goal of managed public disclosure and had identified the civilian-entertainment vehicle as their preferred operational structure. TTSA was the institutionalization of a network that already existed.
The December 2017 Operation
The timing of the October 2017 launch and the December 16, 2017 New York Times story — “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean — was not coincidental. The gap between them was approximately sixty days. The three Navy gun-camera videos (FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast) that accompanied and followed the story had not come through a standard declassification review. They reached the Times through Mellon, who has described meeting an unnamed Pentagon official in a parking lot, receiving a package of videos that Elizondo had previously processed for declassification review but that remained formally unreleased, and delivering them to Kean and Blumenthal directly. Mellon has characterized his role as bending the rules for the larger good. The description is accurate but incomplete: the mechanics were those of a clandestine handoff, operated by a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense through a private entity incorporated two months prior, for the purpose of moving material that the classification system had not released into the public domain via the most credible available civilian press institution.
The Times ran FLIR1 and Gimbal with the initial story; GoFast was released through TTSA’s own channels in early 2018. TTSA simultaneously launched a crowdfunding vehicle registered with the SEC — a Regulation A offering that ultimately raised approximately five million dollars from retail investors — creating a paper trail of public ownership and commercialized purpose that served to anchor the organization’s civilian identity in the bureaucratic record.
The Laundering Architecture
The structural logic of the operation was elegant. The videos were not formally classified at the time of their release — they had been processed through initial review — but they had not been cleared for public release. By routing them through a private entity to a major newspaper, TTSA created a fait accompli: the videos were now in the public domain, widely viewed, and undeniable. The Pentagon could either confirm them or deny them. Confirmation would constitute de facto declassification through public acknowledgment; denial would require the Pentagon to dispute footage that multiple former and current officials knew to be authentic, generating a credibility problem.
The Pentagon chose neither immediate confirmation nor denial. In September 2019, the Navy acknowledged that the videos depicted genuinely unidentified phenomena — a partial confirmation that stopped short of formal declassification. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense formally declassified all three videos, stating that the release was intended to “clear up any misconceptions” about their authenticity. The clearance had taken two and a half years. The operative sequence — classified material to private entity to public release to forced official acknowledgment — is the signature of a managed release operation. The release obliged the institution to ratify a public fact whose framing had already been established outside it.
The TTSA-Army CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement No. 19-15), signed October 2019 between TTSA and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, formalized the feedback loop in a different domain. The unfunded agreement — in which the Army contributed approximately $750,000 in laboratory resources and expertise against TTSA’s material samples — provided for the joint analysis of what TTSA described as exotic materials in its possession, potentially including UAP-recovered samples, under the framework of its ADAM (Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials) Research Project. The CRADA’s listed research areas included inertial mass reduction, electromagnetic metamaterial waveguides, quantum communications, beamed energy propulsion, and spacetime metric engineering — the same portfolio of frontier physics topics that Puthoff’s EarthTech had been addressing under AAWSAP contract a decade earlier. The specific material subjected to the most extensive analysis was a layered magnesium-bismuth composite with alternating micron-scale strata whose provenance TTSA declined to specify. Analysis by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and AARO concluded the material did not exhibit definitively non-human properties; TTSA contested the finality of those findings.
The CRADA instantiated what the video operation had initiated: a formal two-way channel between a private civilian entity and the defense establishment through which material and information could move in both directions. The channel was real. The tested magnesium-bismuth sample did not establish non-human manufacture, and no acknowledged legacy-program custodian used the agreement to transfer a decisive object.
The Personnel Continuity
The network’s continuity across institutional changes is more significant than the organizations through which it has operated. Elizondo departed TTSA in late 2020, publicly citing the organization’s drift toward entertainment over advocacy. His subsequent activity — congressional testimony, media appearances, the 2024 memoir Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, and a formal Inspector General complaint alleging coordinated Pentagon efforts to discredit him — reflects an operational posture shift from vehicle-builder to public pressure agent. Mellon similarly departed to operate as an independent disclosure advocate, maintaining media relationships and congressional access that required no institutional affiliation. Puthoff has remained at EarthTech while continuing to engage the disclosure network on scientific questions. Semivan has become an increasingly prominent public voice, describing personal anomalous experiencer events that he and his wife had in the 1990s as the original source of his engagement with the phenomenon — a biographical detail that places his entry into TTSA in the register of personal conviction rather than pure operational assignment, though those categories are not mutually exclusive.
DeLonge receded from the central role after the initial launch phase. TTSA the corporation pivoted toward its entertainment division — the Sekret Machines book and television development project, and a History Channel docuseries, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, which ran for two seasons in 2019–2020. The entertainment pivot was built into the original structure: TTSA was always going to become a media company, because the intelligence-adjacent personnel were never going to staff a long-running civilian science institution, and the Sekret Machines property — a fictionalized account of the UAP phenomenon developed with input from the same intelligence-community consultants — continues the operational pattern of using entertainment as an interface between classified knowledge and public narrative. The vehicle dissolved; the network persisted through individual nodes.
The Pressure Vehicle
TTSA organized the 2017 disclosure arc from outside the alleged center. Its roster joined the consciousness-research lineage (Puthoff, Stargate → AAWSAP → TTSA), clandestine services (Semivan, CIA), classified aerospace development (Justice, Skunk Works), and political-military intelligence oversight (Mellon, DASD Intelligence). Those biographies supplied access, vocabulary, sources, and public authority. The vehicle’s behavior reveals the limit of that access: leaked or ambiguously cleared videos, a public-benefit corporation, retail crowdfunding, press pressure, an Army research agreement, memoirs, and congressional advocacy. Custodians transfer objects. Search networks construct routes by which an object might arrive.
TTSA selected the timing and frame of material it could reach. It transformed authentic military ambiguity into public permission to discuss the Phenomenon, then used the resulting attention to press for deeper access. Coordination of media, witnesses, scientific aspiration, and institutional prestige supplied the management function while possession remained elsewhere or nowhere.
The missing object is decisive. TTSA confirmed institutional interest and helped establish genuine military encounters as a legitimate public subject. It never produced a craft, body, propulsion system, or material with demonstrated non-human provenance. The network may have carried testimony from real custodians; it may have circulated stories that acquired authority through repetition; it may have encountered fragments no single office could assemble. Its public record cannot choose among those branches.
The reality-production circuit continued regardless. Intelligence credentials authenticated the story. The story recruited press, money, witnesses, legislation, and new offices. Those institutions became further evidence that something deeper must exist. The Phenomenon remained real throughout the circuit because its strongest cases do not depend on TTSA owning a machine. TTSA gave the encounter a public body while the promised aerospace body remained absent.
References
DeLonge, Tom, et al. To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science launch event, October 11, 2017. Video. https://tothestars.media
To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science Inc. Regulation A Offering Circular, 2018. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420418023727/tv492460_partii.htm
Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” New York Times, December 16, 2017.
Mellon, Christopher. Remarks in The Phenomenon, directed by James Fox, 2020.
Vice. “Ex-Intel Official Says He Was the Source of the Pentagon’s UFO Videos.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-guy-says-he-was-the-source-of-the-pentagons-ufo-videos/
Department of Defense. “Statement on Release of Historical Navy Videos.” April 27, 2020. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2165713/
U.S. Army DEVCOM. Cooperative Research and Development Agreement No. 19-15 with To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, October 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000110465920089220/tm2023098d2_ex6-28.htm
Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.
EarthTech International. “About.” https://earthtech.org/about/
The Guardian. “Blink-182 singer contacted Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief to talk UFOs.” October 11, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/11/blink-182-hillary-clintons-campaign-chief-ufos-tom-delonge-john-podesta