Tom DeLonge, Disclosure and an Analytical History of UFOs

It would seem that Tom DeLonge’s program has had some success and I wonder if his status as a member of Blink 182 didn’t provide him with access to some high-level people that the rest of us might not have enjoyed. At any rate, just recently, those he had been working with, and who talked about a sighting along with gun camera film made by Navy fighter pilots, was confirmed by the Pentagon. In fact, we were all told that there had been a secret study made of UFOs for several years, though that study was concluded in 2012.

New reports and various commentators told us that the Air Force had begun investigating UFOs in 1947 under the name of Project Blue Book. So, bear with me as we look at a brief history of UFO sightings and investigations. They didn’t begin in 1947 as has been suggested and it didn’t begin with Project Blue Book as claimed. It began during the Second World War with aircrew reports of strange things in the skies around them that became known as the Foo Fighters.

The Foo Fighters were thought to be some sort of weapon or aircraft developed by the Axis that could counter the air superiority enjoyed by the Allies. There were discussions at the highest levels of intelligence and Allied command about them.

Alleged photograph of the Foo Fighters.

One of those involved was an American intelligence officer, Colonel Howard McCoy, who would pop up later. Scientists who made the analysis, which ended with the end of the war, made no identification of the Foo Fighters. The priority ended with the war and it was discovered that the Foo Fighters were not an Axis development. These became unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). All this was covered in The Government UFO Files that was published a couple of years ago.

But sightings didn’t end. In 1946, first in Finland, then Sweden, and finally all of Scandinavia and Europe, people were seeing what they called the Ghost Rockets. These were described more as rockets, some resembling the V-weapons developed by the Nazis, than they were as spaceships. Sightings continued into the late summer until various Scandinavian governments imposed a news blackout and without new stories about the Ghost Rockets published, the sightings seemed to end.

A streak of light that was thought to be one of the Ghost Rockets.
Today it is believed to be a meteor.

The sightings, however, did interest American intelligence. The thinking was that it might be some sort of Soviet development that demonstrated a new technology taken from Germany. Decades later it was learned that the Soviets had made no such development, but that didn’t mean that interest wasn’t high in 1946. An American intelligence officer, Colonel Howard McCoy, was one of those given the task of identifying the Ghost Rockets.

In late 1946, according to research done by Wendy Connors and Michael Hall, McCoy was given orders to establish an unofficial study of these UAPs. He set up an office at Wright Field with locked doors, very limited access and began gathering new reports. One of the best came from the Richmond (Virginia) Weather Station beginning on April 1, 1947. This was a series of sightings that included, according to the tales told, disk-like objects made by several different witnesses. It is important because it demonstrates an interest in these UAPs at the highest level of the military command structure that preceded the Kenneth Arnold sighting of late June 1947.

When the Arnold sighting was reported by the national press, the unofficial investigation became official. Investigations of sightings began by military officers, scientists and even FBI agents. In September, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, commanding officer of the Air Materiel Command, issued a letter that suggested the phenomena, that is the UAPs, were something real and not illusionary or fictitious. He ordered the creation of a project to investigate these flying saucers. Contrary to popular opinion, or rather what the news media is reporting today, that was not the beginning of Project Blue Book but of Project Sign. It began official operation in 1948. The officer who wrote the draft of the letter and the recommendations was Colonel Howard McCoy, the man who had been involved with them for years. This demonstrates a link from the Foo Fighters of the Second World War and this new project begun in 1947.

In the beginning, the project name, Sign, was classified with the public being told it was Project Saucer. That point will become important later. Many if not most of those involved in Sign believed that there was alien visitation and created an “Estimate of the Situation,” to prove it. Using the best evidence available they assembled the Top Secret document that was sent up the chain of command to General Vandenberg. Vandenberg  didn’t believe that the evidence proved the case for flying saucers. The Estimate was ordered declassified and then destroyed. While it might seem backwards, that is to declassify the report and then destroy it, by doing it that way, no record of it was created. In other words, destruction of Top Secret material required documentation to prove the document had been properly destroyed but by declassifying it first, no such documentation was required. This is just another indication that everything about UFOs was not above the board and that there was secrecy involved.

Those left at Sign, after a house cleaning that saw those who had written the report removed from the project, eventually issued a final report suggesting that there was nothing to the flying saucers that couldn’t be explained in the mundane. There was nothing more to be done and the impression left was that the Air Force had concluded its study which was something that was announced. In fact, the code name was changed to Project Grudge, and the investigations continued. Eventually, Grudge produced a long final report which again suggested that UFOs were explainable even though there was a large body of reported sightings that were not identified. The project was then nearly abandoned with little being done thought it still, technically, existed.

Grudge then evolved into Project Blue Book with renewed interest after a series of radar sightings. For about 18 months, through the summer of 1952, the effort was in gathering solid information and investigating the sightings in an unbiased manner. But old habits die hard and Blue Book became nothing more than a public relations project with the goal of explaining sightings. Air Force regulations, particularly AFR 80-17 provided for releasing UFO information if the sighting had a plausible explanation but requiring the information to be classified if no explanation had been found. Questions about these unexplained sightings were directed to a higher authority.

In October 1957, according to documentation found in the Blue Book files, another project was created known as Moon Dust. The mission of Moon Dust was to recover falling space debris of foreign manufacture or of unknown origin. Moon Dust did have a responsibility for investigating UFOs which fell under the unknown origin banner. We know this because of documents released under FOIA from the Department of State as well as information in the Blue Book files. I have found four cases from September 1960 in the Blue Book files marked Moon Dust. Granted, they are probably explainable by meteors or other natural phenomena, but they are found in the files of the Air Force UFO investigation and they are marked “Moon Dust.”

During the 1960s, it is clear from the documentation in the Blue Book administrative files, there was an effort to end the investigation, though it could be suggested it was an effort to end the public face of UFO investigation by the Air Force. The University of Colorado and Dr. Edward U. Condon, accepted a grant to investigate UFOs. While it was suggested that it was an unbiased investigation, documentation exists proving that it was anything but that. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler provided instructions to Condon that suggested that they find there was no threat to national security, there was nothing to the reports of scientific interest, and the Air Force had done a good job investigating sightings. Condon himself, at a speaking engagement in Corning, New York, told the audience that he was ready to find those things but he wasn’t supposed to do that for another 18 months. In December, 1969, Project Blue Book was closed and there were no UFO investigations sanctioned by the US government, at least according to public knowledge.

In the long report released at the time, Condon wrote, “We have no evidence of secrecy concerning UFO reports.” This is a strange statement given that one of the Committee’s scientists, who was investigating sightings at Maelstrom Air Force Base was told by the UFO officer there that he couldn’t discuss the sightings because of national security. There were other files, now declassified that were clearly marked as “Secret.”

But what about Moon Dust, you might ask? Did it end in 1969 when Blue Book was closed? The answer is, “No,” and the documentation found through FOIA proved that. Even though many documents about it were in the hands of UFO researchers, in 1985, the Air Force told US Senator Jeff Bingaman that such a project had never existed. Presented with documents from the Department of State, the Air Force amended their response, suggesting that the project had never been used. Based on other documentation, that proved to be untrue as well. It must be noted that the deployment of Moon Dust personnel in a number of cases did not seem to recover anything proving alien visitation but the real point is the project did exist, it did deploy and when asked, the Air Force denied these things.

In 1985, Robert Todd, a UFO skeptic, filed a FOIA request asking about the follow-on project to Moon Dust. He was told that the new code name was properly classified and could not be released. In other words, he wasn’t told no such project existed, only that it was classified under a new name.

I haven’t mentioned the Robertson Panel of January 1953, which was a CIA project that had its conclusions and probably the final report written before the panel sessions ended. Their recommendation was that there was nothing to the UFO reports and that a program of debunking should be started. For those who wish more detail, I have outlined all this in The Government UFO Files.

Tom DeLonge

What all this have to do with Tom DeLonge and the most recent revelation about a secret military study of UFOs you might ask? Well, it shows a long list of deceit at the hands of the military and other governmental agencies. It demonstrates some of the cracks in that secrecy that have long been ignored by the mainstream media because of their distaste for stories of alien visitation. It shows that the government has actually lied about the situation time and again and that while they might have claimed that there were no secret UFO studies or files (just look at what the Condon Committee had to say about that even when access to a specific UFO case was requested, they were told it was classified) that turned out not to be true.

What we have learned over the last several days is that much of the 22 million in funding for this new UFO project, landed with Las Vegas based businessman Robert Bigelow. He has been developing a space technology and it seems that he wanted the UFO reports as a way of deducing the propulsion systems being used by the UFOs. That much of the study focused on reports from the military, especially military pilots, indicates that they were looking for something more than just reports of lights in the night sky or strange blobs seen in the daylight. If something could be learned about the dynamics of UFO flight, then progress might be made in developing a system that would duplicate it. It is sort of a back-engineering task (and I use that term advisedly) because it would seem that if they learned something about the exhaust or the maneuvering of the UFO, they might also be able to learn something about the propulsion.

But none of that is as important as the implications of all this which is why I spent time explaining the history of UFO research as conducted by the US government and military for about three-quarters of a century. We have seen how the government kept the general public in the dark about those investigations, often saying one thing and doing another. They announced the close of the investigations on several occasions but kept right on working. They said there was nothing to the reports, yet kept gathering and classifying those that couldn’t be explained while announcing solutions to the others. The denied the classified studies and as we have seen, there were those studies made. And, they engaged in a program of ridiculing those who claimed to see UFOs, often suggesting they were uneducated people who might have had a drinking problem when the truth was that the higher the education, the less likely it was for the sighting to be a misidentification of a mundane object.

Now we learn, through Tom DeLonge’s organization and some of those supporting him who were, at one time, highly-placed individuals, that another, multi-million-dollar study was undertaken, the funding hidden in the black budget. But what seems to have been missed in all this was that if all the research conducted in the past proved there was no alien visitation, as we have been told, and if there was nothing hidden by various government agencies or in their files who had studied UFOs for decades, then why did we waste 22 million dollars on an investigation that was sure to fail? If the evidence was really as poor as we have been told, and if there was nothing to suggest otherwise, was this money a gift to Bigelow and his corporation and others who were involved? If there was nothing to find, then what was the real purpose of all this?

Steve Bassett

I had one other thought that probably thrills Steve Bassett and the Disclosure crowd, which I don’t think that anyone has mentioned. This is actually the first time that the government admitted there was something to this idea of alien visitation and had spent so much money so quickly on an attempt to learn more. It was the first time that they actually, almost, endorsed a sighting report of an attempted intercept by American military aircraft without providing some ridiculous explanation such as those offered for a variety of credible reports. It might suggest the first cracks in the stone wall of denial that we have been subjected to since many of us became interested in UFOs.

What this latest revelation suggests is a subtle change in attitude. There was no denial by the military or the government and the main stream media seemed to take the announcement as somewhat important. Rather than treat the news with the disdain they normally show for UFO related stories, they seemed to be interested in it. That they don’t know much about the whole of UFOs, and can’t seemed to be bothered to even look it up at Wikipedia, they did treat it seriously.

So, does this indicate a relaxation of the curtain of ridicule? Does it suggest that more information about UFOs might be coming? Are we being told that something of a scientific value might be learned by studying UFO reports, even if that doesn’t lead us to alien visitation? Those are the questions that need to be answered.

There is one other thing that I should note here. Those at the highest levels were looking at this as a way of learning something about the propulsion used by the UFOs. That indicates that they know more about it than they are letting on because if that wasn’t the case, then it was nearly a crime to spend 22 million dollars on a study they had to know what fail. The only way this makes any sense is if they believed that such a study would produce results and the only way they could believe that was if they suspected that some UFO sightings might be of advanced technical craft. The only way any of this makes sense is if they know something about UFOs that they haven’t told us. And that is the real revelation.