I
must be doing something wrong.
For
months I have been hearing about Tom DeLonge, he formerly of Blink-182, who has
entered the UFO arena with, allegedly, some highly-place contacts who will
assist him in bringing the truth about alien visitation to the public. This
began around 2015.
According
to Rolling Stone:
DeLonge
contacted [John] Podesta [Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager] again this
January [2016], sending an email with the subject,
"General McCasland," apparently a reference to a former
Air Force official with (according to DeLonge) information relating to the
infamous Roswell crash. In the email, DeLonge insisted that McCasland was not a
skeptic — despite the General's own previous insistence — and added, "When
Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air
Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a
couple years ago. He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped
assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man."
Of
course, I suppose, we could look at this as so much hyperbole. It does sound
impressive to say that he was in communication with an Air Force general who
was
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| Tom DeLonge |
in charge of the exact laboratory where the Roswell material was sent. The
problem is that William McCasland didn’t take over the post until 2011,
according to his official Air Force biography and the laboratory was created in
October 1997. It was, however, a combination of four other labs, but there is
no way of knowing if any of them were the ones to which Roswell material would
have been sent in 1947 or if material had been sent there it would have
remained until 2011.
Anyway,
that just sort of shows that DeLonge had been talking about UFOs and mentioning
Roswell for a number of years. He did have, and does have, the ear of some
people with impressive sounding credentials, which, of course, doesn’t mean
they have anything of interest to say about UFOs or Roswell, only that they
have been around the government for a very long time and moved in some of the
rarified atmosphere in Washington, D.C.
However,
it does seem that DeLonge’s messages have been heard by the UFO community. In
February, 2017, at the International UFO Congress, he was named UFO Researcher
of the Year. This seemed a tad bit odd since he hadn’t done much in the way of original
research or published much in the way of what he had learned that hadn’t been
said before. He did say that in a couple of months that he would make an
announcement about some “serious sh*t” he was into and that he was making some
serious progress.
During
the next several months, there had been hints about this announcement, some of
them centering around Disclosure and some of them hinting about new information
or new evidence concerning the Roswell crash. The speculation was that he had
some incredible inside information that came about through his association with
his former band. Somehow that had resulted in the contacts that provided the
information.
After
months of waiting, the announcement came on October 11. No, there wasn’t
anything about new UFO evidence, it had nothing to do with Disclosure or
government secrecy but everything to do with making money. Let’s look at that.
According
to a story in the Huffington Post, by
Leslie Kean, there had been “something extraordinary revealed today [October
11].” It told of high-level officials and scientists who had not been seen by
many but who, apparently “have long-standing connections to government agencies
which may have programs investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP/UFOs).
You can read the whole article here:
What
strikes me in that very first paragraph is that we have been provided with a
number of conditions. They have connections to agencies that may have been
investigating UFOs… but then, may not. We eventually find out who these people
are, but they are those in middle management or maybe in second tier
bureaucrats but not the top people.
Then
we learn that this is not about Disclosure, or about providing some stunning
evidence of alien visitation, but about the “official launch of To The Stars
Academy of Arts and Science,” or as they abbreviate it, TTS/AAS which they
describe as a public benefit corporation. This organization will have three
components, which are science, aerospace and entertainment. That last concerns
me. Entertainment is not necessarily restricted to fact and we learn in other
places that DeLonge has been planning the entertainment aspect since he left
Blink-182. According to Rolling Stone:
But since DeLonge parted ways with Blink-182 in
2015, his interest in extraterrestrials has become more than a hobby. "The
more I got into it, the more I realized it was all real," he tells Rolling
Stone. "Then I was like, 'OK, what am I going to do about it?'" So
he started spreading the word. He began creating a multi-part, multi-platform
rollout of an entirely new philosophy, one based on the theory that aliens have
been visiting Earth for most of our species' existence – and the only way for
us to have a prosperous future on the planet is if we take that into account,
and soon.
The newest addition to this project is the book Sekret
Machines: Gods, the first in a non-fiction trilogy he's co-writing with
occult historian Peter Levanda.
Already
we see some promotion for the books that DeLonge is writing which would be
incorporated under the umbrella of TTS/AAS and get a hint about the financial
aspects of all of this. In fact, Jason Colavito, on his website, looked deeper
into the financial arrangements of the organization. You can read his entire
analysis here:
Colavito
lays out, in detail, how money will be raised by selling stock in the company
and how much DeLonge is guaranteed for his part in all this. Colavito wrote:
DeLonge is soliciting investment by registering TTS AAS as a
public benefit corporation—notably not a nonprofit—and he is
framing his sale of $5 per share stock in the company as a chance to
democratize investment. Under the 2012 JOBS Act, companies may sell stock
directly to the public through a crowd funding website without needing to file
an IPO with the SEC. DeLonge is taking advantage of this to sell $200 stock
packages. The 2015 Title IV Regulation A+ allows companies to raise up to $50
million without a formal IPO…
It's interesting to see the difference between TTS AAS’s public
face and what they confess in their financial filings. Publicly, TTS AAS is an
educational enterprise divided into a number of units focused on cutting-edge
fringe research. The science division is pursuing consciousness research and
psychic phenomena. The aerospace division is looking for exotic propulsion
technologies. The entertainment division is producing the Sekret
Machines books, and a dystopian young adult franchise. Note carefully
that space aliens and “disclosure” don’t occur as a research subject or a
purpose for the company. And yet, the public protestations about using the
company to promote human knowledge are belied by what we see in the financial
documents. That’s not to say that there won’t be “educational” material, only
that the company’s primary purpose isn’t science and education, as it pretends…
DeLonge, though, is certainly a beneficiary. Documents laying out what he gets paid make pretty clear that this is intended to be
a very lucrative investment for him. DeLonge has a
constellation of corporate entities that control the intellectual property he
creates as a musician and now filmmaker. TSA, which the company abbreviates as
TTS AAS, is legally obligated to pay all of DeLonge’s expenses in using his
existing intellectual property to develop new TTS AAS multimedia products.
But,
those of us interested in all aspects of UFOs and not the inner workings of a
corporation created to make some money and produce multi-media products wanted
to hear something about UFO sightings. Eventually we treated to one UFO report
provided by “TTS Academy member Chris Mellon” who was, at one time, Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for two administrations. “He
gave a synopsis of an event from 2004 that involved the battleship [sic] USS Nimitz.” I’ll give Mellon the
benefit of the doubt here by saying that in his position he should have known
that the Nimitz was an aircraft
carrier and not a battleship. I suspect the reporter got it wrong. According to
the story:
“Two F-18s
approach, the four aviators see that the object has no wings or exhaust — it is
white, oblong, some 40 ft long and perhaps 12 ft thick”, he [Mellon] said. “One
pilot pursues the craft while his wingman stays high. The pilots are astonished
to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F-18. In a
series of discrete tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics,
the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F-18.”
The lengthy
event occurred in broad daylight off the California coast, and gun camera
footage was taken. At one point the object went from hovering at 80,000 feet to
dropping at supersonic speeds, and came to a complete stop at 50 feet above the
ocean. “More F-18’s are dispatched but with similar results,” Mellon stated.
“The secret machine easily evades the F-18s. Dozens of military personnel
aboard the various planes and ships involved are privy to these interactions.”
Okay.
Not an overly spectacular sighting but it does suggest some evidence in the form
of gun camera footage. It mirrors other sightings that have been reported over
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| USS Nimitz complete with aircraft. |
the years that include radar images, photographs of the radarscopes and many
witnesses on the ships involved. Investigation into them have yet to provide
the evidence to prove that there is alien visitation.
There
was one other aspect of all this that bothered me as well. One of those now
part of this was identified as Luis Elizondo. The Huffington Post reported:
Lue had
resigned his position at the DOD literally the day before we met. I was able to
verify who he was and what his tasks were at the Pentagon. He received the
highest commendatons [sic] from his superiors. I was told that important unclassified [emphasis added] data and
documentation are expected to be released through the Academy’s on-line
Community of Interest (COI) in collaboration with the US government, which will
be set up soon.
Unclassified
data? The Internet is awash in unclassified data. The vast majority of the
Project Blue Book files can be found at Fold3. John Greenewald’s Black Vault is
loaded with all sorts of unclassified documents relating to UFOs. Even the
FBI’s website provides information about UFOs. And now we are to be treated to
another source that will provide us with unclassified documents. Wow.
In fact, this was underscored when Rolling Stone reported, “Subsequent books in the Sekret Machines trilogy
will move away from ancient texts to focus on claims of interactions with
aliens documented by government agencies since the 1940s, many of which are available
by Freedom of Information Act requests and a recently digitized cache of
CIA documents.” More unclassified documents that can be obtained by anyone who
cares to do so.
Which, of course,
moves us away from any meaningful research and puts us back in the
entertainment camp. There are too many shows today that rely not on solid
research but on the entertainment value of the show. Tell us a story, no matter
how ridiculous and we’ll climb onboard even if it is so incredible that it
can’t be true. Entertain us first and worry about the reality later. Ironically
DeLonge and his co-author had something to say about that. According to Rolling Stone, “…they’re not claiming that
everything you've seen on shows like Ancient Aliens is real. ‘Humans
are responsible for building the pyramids, for instance,’ says [Peter] Levanda. ‘I think we can agree on
that. But what was the impetus behind it? What we're saying is the initial
contact is what prompted all this. Not that there were aliens out there telling
us how to build pyramids. I think that just devalues the entire conversation,
and we're trying to get beyond that.’"
That, of course, is
something that many of us have said for years. I didn’t single out Ancient Aliens in the past but have
pointed a finger at Hangar 1 and Unsealed: Alien Files which seemed to be
based more on speculation and wild stories than on cases that added some real
value to UFO research.
There is one other
point that has been mentioned in the past that should be bothersome to all
those interested in UFO research. According to Rolling Stone, “DeLonge's plan is bigger
than just a few books. In addition to the nonfiction series, he is writing a
historical-fiction trilogy with novelist A.J. Hartley, the first book of which
was released last spring, as well as a documentary and a scripted film, all of
which discuss the theory that we're not alone.”
And the
additional irony here is that I point this out. Almost since I published my
first book on UFOs, one of the criticisms is that I also write science fiction
as well. I have kept the science fiction away from my UFO writings and I’m not
the only one who has investigated UFOs and who has written science fiction.
Bruce Maccabee, Whitley Strieber, Don Ecker and Nick Pope have all written
fiction. The difference here, subtle though it might be, is that we have not put
the science fiction under the same umbrella as our UFO research. And, of
course, DeLong’s plan might not affect the rest of the organization’s goals,
but it is just one more worrisome aspect of all this.
We learn, at the end of the
news conference, that TTS/AAS “… intends to release game-changing information of the type
interested people have been seeking for a long time.”
But the problem here
is that this is the same claim that has been made for months about DeLonge’s
research and activities and no matter who he has pulled in, he has yet to make
any stunning revelations, other than he is forming a corporation to exploit the
UFO field. This announcement ended, not so much with a bang, but with a
whimper. We have learned nothing that we didn’t already know and it seems that
we were promised much the same thing that has been promised by so many others
over the last half century. The real point doesn’t seem to be research but
entertainment, which, of course, is not always a bad thing… it’s just there has
been too much entertainment in the UFO field and not enough research.
