The Vehicle
To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA) gave the disclosure network a civilian body. A California public benefit corporation, it launched through a live-streamed event on October 11, 2017. Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 served as president, CEO, and public face. Music and entertainment gave the organization an audience outside the defense establishment. Military footage and insider claims could reach that audience through a company that spoke in the language of popular culture.
The founding roster supplied the institutional authority. Jim Semivan had spent twenty-five years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. He retired at Senior Intelligence Service rank, the clandestine service’s counterpart to general-officer rank.
Harold “Hal” Puthoff had directed remote-viewing research at SRI International for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1970s. That work established a foundation for the program lineage later known as Stargate. His EarthTech International in Austin continued advanced-physics research. EarthTech also worked under the DIA’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) through the principal contractor, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. Its defense reference papers addressed metric engineering, wormhole traversability, and anti-gravity. The papers defined research possibilities; they did not announce working machines.
Luis Elizondo brought Army and Department of Defense counterintelligence experience in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Latin America. He describes his later role as management of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) from 2009 until his October 2017 resignation. Christopher Mellon had served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under the Clinton and Bush administrations. His role supplied senior civilian oversight experience within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Steve Justice had been Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. That organization had developed the U-2, SR-71, and F-117 through classified aerospace programs.
The five joined clandestine operations, consciousness research, counterintelligence, political oversight, and advanced aircraft development. TTSA gave them three public lines of work: science research, aerospace technology development, and entertainment. Their careers already provided routes to congressional briefings, formal release requests, and staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Those routes could bring a question inside government. They could not compel the transfer of the object the network sought.
TTSA supplied another route. It joined bounded military material, insider testimony, speculative physics, and entertainment in a public campaign. It gave the network a place from which to build pressure on a system that had not supplied an answer. The roster looked like an inner circle. The operation revealed people searching for access beyond their own.
The Prelude: DeLonge’s Intelligence Network
The network preceded the October 2017 launch by at least two years. Emails published by WikiLeaks in October 2016 showed DeLonge corresponding with John Podesta about meetings with senior defense and intelligence officials. Podesta chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He had also served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and had long advocated UFO disclosure. DeLonge was approaching officials who knew the institutions that controlled the requested records.
One exchange named Major General William McCasland, a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. McCasland had commanded the laboratory from 2011 to 2013. Wright-Patterson holds a lasting place in UFO lore as an alleged repository of recovered Roswell material. DeLonge described McCasland as “very, very aware” of the phenomenon.
By 2015–16, DeLonge was cultivating Air Force contacts at two- and three-star level while corresponding with Podesta. Senior political and military contacts were entering a network directed toward public disclosure. A civilian entertainment figure provided its outward interface. TTSA gave that existing network an organization, a public roster, and a means to act together.
The December 2017 Operation
The October launch prepared the public channel. Approximately sixty days later, on December 16, 2017, the New York Times published “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean wrote the story. The launch and publication formed a coordinated disclosure campaign. A civilian organization supplied voices and footage; a major newspaper carried them into public discussion.
The three Navy gun-camera recordings were FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast. Their route to publication differed from an authorized Pentagon release. Mellon has described meeting an unnamed Pentagon official in a parking lot and receiving a package of videos. In his account, Elizondo had already processed the recordings for release review, but they remained formally unreleased. Mellon delivered them to Kean and Blumenthal. He has presented his intervention as bending the rules for a larger good.
The account describes a private handoff followed by publication through a newspaper with broad public authority. A former senior defense official moved military footage into that channel while TTSA supplied the civilian framework. Review processing, permission to distribute, and classification status are separate conditions. Mellon’s account of prior processing does not make the handoff an authorized public release.
The Times carried FLIR1 and Gimbal with the initial story. TTSA released GoFast through its own channels in early 2018. It also opened a Regulation A offering registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The offering raised approximately five million dollars from retail investors. Public investment gave the disclosure project a commercial purpose and a record of civilian ownership. The campaign now had footage, a press audience, and shareholders invested in its promised future.
The Laundering Architecture
Public circulation changed the institution’s problem. The videos were unclassified, but the Pentagon had not authorized the releases through which the public first encountered them. Their publication made military footage a widely discussed public fact. Officials faced pressure to say whether the recordings were authentic. An acknowledgment would ratify the footage. A denial would create a credibility conflict with the people who knew its source.
The Navy acknowledged the recordings in September 2019. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense authorized public release of all three. Its statement described the videos as unclassified and said the release would “clear up any misconceptions” about their authenticity and completeness. It also retained their unidentified status.
The interval from the December 2017 story was roughly two and a half years. Authentication established that the recordings were Navy footage. Authorization established that the public could receive them through an official channel. Neither act identified the objects or changed unclassified footage into newly declassified material.
Military footage moved through private publication into public pressure, then official acknowledgment and release. The sequence gave TTSA its management function. It established a public frame before the institution supplied its formal response. The later authorization does not retroactively supply permission for the earlier handoff. The institution nevertheless had to address a fact already circulating outside its control.
A second channel opened through the Army. In October 2019, TTSA entered Cooperative Research and Development Agreement No. 19-15, or CRADA, with the Army. The Army partner was its Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center. Each party bore its own costs, and the agreement supplied no federal cash payment to TTSA. It estimated the government’s contribution of personnel, services, facilities, equipment, and related resources at approximately $750,000. That was an estimate of planned resources, not a record of money paid or work already completed.
TTSA supplied material and claims for testing. Its ADAM Research Project — Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials — presented samples as exotic and potentially recovered from UAP. The agreement listed interests in inertial mass reduction, mechanical and structural metamaterials, electromagnetic metamaterial waveguides, quantum physics, quantum communications, and beamed energy propulsion. These topics overlapped the frontier research associated with Puthoff’s EarthTech. Spacetime metric engineering belonged to that wider research portfolio. The agreement’s list set targets for assessment; it did not certify that TTSA possessed those capabilities.
The principal disputed sample was described as a magnesium-bismuth composite with alternating layers on the micron scale. Its specific provenance remained unresolved. Subsequent analysis by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) did not establish non-human manufacture. TTSA disputed the finality of the reports and sought further discussion of the material’s origin, purpose, and apparent anomalies.
The agreement created an actual channel for samples, expertise, test results, and reports to move between TTSA and the defense establishment. The channel did not deliver the promised decisive object. No acknowledged custodian of a legacy recovery program used it to transfer a craft or other object of demonstrated non-human origin.
The Personnel Continuity
The people carried the disclosure campaign beyond the organization. Elizondo left TTSA in late 2020, citing its movement toward entertainment over advocacy. Congressional testimony, media appearances, and his 2024 memoir, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, continued the pressure. He also filed an Inspector General complaint alleging coordinated Pentagon efforts to discredit him. His public role shifted from building a corporate vehicle to pressing institutions directly.
Mellon also left and continued as an independent disclosure advocate. His press relationships and congressional access did not require TTSA membership. Puthoff remained at EarthTech and continued scientific work within the disclosure network. The organization could lose personnel while the relationships that gave it authority remained active elsewhere.
Semivan’s route also carried a personal encounter. He describes anomalous experiences that he and his wife had in the 1990s as the source of his involvement with the phenomenon. His intelligence career supplied institutional knowledge; the encounter supplied personal conviction. Those sources of commitment can coexist with an operational assignment. Contact enters the network through the experiencer as well as through an office or research contract.
DeLonge receded from the central disclosure role, and the corporation moved toward entertainment. Sekret Machines supplied books and television development. The History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation ran for two seasons in 2019–2020. Entertainment had been one of TTSA’s three founding lines of work, so the pivot used an existing part of the structure.
Sekret Machines developed a fictionalized account of the UAP phenomenon with input from intelligence-community consultants. The consultants brought insider narratives into the fiction and gave those narratives a public audience. Entertainment continued to carry the material into public imagination. The original advocacy cohort dispersed while the company continued its entertainment work. The network persisted through its individual members.
The Pressure Vehicle
TTSA organized disclosure from outside the alleged center of custody. Puthoff carried a consciousness-research lineage from Stargate through AAWSAP into TTSA. Semivan brought the clandestine service. Justice brought classified aerospace development. Mellon brought political and military intelligence oversight.
Their biographies supplied access, vocabulary, sources, and public authority, but possession of a decisive object required something further. The operation used videos, a public benefit corporation, retail investment, press coverage, an Army research agreement, memoirs, and congressional advocacy. Each method opened a route or increased pressure. A custodian can transfer an object already held. A search network builds routes through which that object might arrive. TTSA’s conduct placed it in the second role.
It selected the timing and public frame of material it could reach. Authentic military footage opened permission to discuss the Phenomenon. The resulting attention pressed for access to a deeper archive. Media, witnesses, scientific ambitions, and institutional prestige worked together. The network managed the public campaign while decisive custody remained unestablished.
TTSA helped make genuine military encounters a legitimate public subject. It did not produce a craft, body, propulsion system, or material of demonstrated non-human origin. Three testimony paths remain open in its public record.
It could have carried accounts from real custodians. It could have carried stories whose authority grew through repetition. It could have encountered fragments that no single office could assemble. The available record does not choose among those paths.
The reality-production circuit continued through all three. Intelligence credentials gave the story authority. The story recruited press, money, witnesses, legislation, and new offices. The existence of those offices then strengthened the demand for a deeper disclosure. Public belief acquired institutional forms, and those forms fed belief back into the next round of inquiry.
The Phenomenon remains real throughout this circuit. Its strongest encounters do not depend on TTSA owning a machine. TTSA gave the encounter a public body: witnesses, images, organizations, and a shared demand. The promised aerospace body remained absent. The distance between those two bodies explains both the campaign’s power and its continued dependence on the next disclosure.
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