Metamaterial, Art Bell and the To The Stars Academy

For those of you keeping score at home, I am coming to this table a tad bit late. I just couldn’t get fired up about the TTSA’s acquisition of alien metallic debris they call metamaterials. I have heard so many stories about bits of debris circulating throughout the UFO community and beyond that I just don’t buy into it anymore. For nearly thirty years I have chased metallic debris, claims of photographs, diaries and letters. In all that time, not one of them has panned out* so I have become somewhat cynical.

In the last few weeks I have learned that the TTSA has acquired some debris and that the US Army is interested in it because it might help develop materials to

The late Art Bell.

protect our soldiers on the battlefield. Well, having been a soldier on a battlefield or two, I’m all for protecting the soldiers but I doubt that anything the TTSA has acquired will help in that mission.

So, let’s talk about the material that the TTSA acquired that I’m told they paid something like 35 grand for. Just what is that material and where did it come from (so many sentences ending in prepositions)?

It has been reliably reported that what we have here is something that was originally known as Art’s Parts because they were originally sent to late night talk show host Art Bell. He received them in a letter on April 10, 1996. That tells us that these parts have been around for a while. According to the letter that arrived anonymously with them:

Dear Mr. Bell,

I’ve followed your broadcasts over the last year or so, and have been considering whether or not to share with you and your listeners, some of the information related to the Roswell UFO crash.

My grandfather was a member of the Retrieval Team, sent to the crash site, just after the incident was reported. He died in 1974, but not before he had sat down with some of us, and talked about the incident.

I am currently serving in the military, and hold a Security Clearance, and do NOT wish to “go public”, and risk losing my career and commission.

Nonetheless, I would like to briefly tell you what my own grandfather told me about Roswell. In fact, I enclose for your safekeeping “samples” that were in the possession of my grandfather until he died, and which I have had since his own estate was settled. As I understand it, they came from the UFO debris, and were among a large batch subsequently sent to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio from New Mexico.

My grandfather was able to “appropriate” them, and stated that the metallic samples are “pure extract aluminum”. You will note that they appear old & tempered, and they have been placed in tissue-paper, and in baggies for posterity.

I have had them since 1974, and after considerable thought and reflection, give them to you. Feel free to share them with any of your friends in the UFO Research Community.

I have listened to many people over the years discuss Roswell and the crash events, as reported by many who were either there or who heard about it from eyewitnesses.

The recent Roswell movie, was similar to my grandfather’s own account, but a critical element was left out, and it is that element which I would like to share.

As my granddad stated, the Team arrived at the crash site just after the AAF/USAF reported the ground zero location. They found two dead occupants, hurled free of the Disc.

A lone surviving occupant, was found within the Disc, and it was apparant [sic] it’s left leg was broken. There was a minimal radiation contamination, and it was quickly dispersed with a water/solvent wash, and soon the occupant was dispatched for medical assistance and isolation. The bodies were sent to the Wright-Patterson AFB, for dispersal. The debris was loaded onto three trucks which finished the on-load just before the sunset.

Granddad was part of the Team that went with the surviving occupant. The occupant communicated via telepathic means. It spoke perfect english [sic], and communicated the following:

The Disc was a “probeship” dispatched from a “launchship” that was stationed at the dimensional gateway to the Terran Solar System, 32 light years from Terra. They had been conducting operations on Terra for over 100 years.

Another group were exploring Mars, and Io [which I assume is a moon of Jupiter… funny how the aliens knew the names we gave to various astronomical bodies but keep referring to Earth as Terra… but I digress].

Each “probeship” carried a crew of three. A “launchship” had a crew of (100) one-hundred.

The Disc that crashed, had collided with a meteor in orbit of Terra, and was attempting to compensate it’s flight vector, but because of the collision, the inter-atmospheric propulsion system malfunctioned, and the occupants sent out a distress signal to their companions on Mars. The “launchship” commander made the decision to authorize an attempted soft-landing on the New Mexican desert. At the same time, the inter-atmospheric propulsion system had a massive electrical burn-out, and the Disc was soon virtually helpless.

There was another option available to the occupants, but it involved activating the Dimensional powerplant for deep space travel. However, it opens an energy vortex around the Disc for 1,500 miles in all directions. Activating the Dimensional powerplant, would have resulted in the annihilation of the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California and portions of Mexico. Possibly even further states would have been affected.

Thus, the occupants, chose to ride the ship down, and hope of the best. They literally sacrificed their lives, rather then destroy the populations within their proximity.

The Dimensional powerplant was self-destructed, and the inter-atmospheric propulsion system was also deactivated, to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Terrans. This was done in accordance with their standing orders in regards to any compromise with contact experiences.

Granddad spent a total of 26 weeks in the Team that examined and debriefed the lone survivor of the Roswell crash. Granddad’s affiliation with the “project” ended, when the occupant was to be transported to a long-term facility. He was placed on-broad a USAF Transport aircraft, that was to be sent to Washington, D.C.

The aircraft and all aboard disappeared under mysterious and disturbing circumstances, enroute to Washington, D.C.

It may interest you that three Fighter aircraft, dispatched to investigate a distress call from the Transport experienced many electrical malfunctioning systems failures, as the entered the airspace of the transports [sic] last reported location. No crash or debris of the Transport was ever found. The Team was disbanded.

Well, I realize I have likely shocked you with this bizzare [sic] and incredible account, and seeking to remain “unknown” likely doesn’t do anything for my credibility… eh? And the metal “sample” only will likely add to the controversy.

But, I know you will take this with a “grain of salt”, and I don’t blame you, Mr. Bell.

I just hope that you can understand, my reasons and my own desire to maintain my career and commission.

I am passing through South Carolina with an Operational Readiness Mobility Exercise, and will mail this just prior to this Exercise, possibly from the Charleston area.

I will listen to your broadcast, to receive any acknowledging or confirmation, that you have received this package.

This letter and the contents of the package are given to you, with the hope that it helps contribute to the discussion of the subject of UFO Phenomena.

I agree with Neil Armstrong, a good friend of mine, who dared to say, at the WHITE HOUSE no less, that there are things “out there”, which boggle the mind and are far beyond our ability to comprehend.

Sign me,

A Friend

Well, there is a lot more nonsense to follow up with this, including some preliminary reports on the composition of the material. Almost all of the analyses suggested that the material is of Terran manufacture (being an old science fiction fan, I couldn’t resist using the science fiction name for Earth… Terra. BTW, I find the use of the name, Terra troubling and indicative of hoax since it is a science fiction term that wouldn’t have been known by many outside of science fiction fans in 1947… though, at one point I told Stan Friedman that I preferred the term Terran to Earthling, but I digress) You can read more of it here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010815220312/http://www.artbell.com/rosreprt.html

If you wish for more confirmation that the TTSA material is the “Art’s Parts,” you can read about it here:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/whitley-streiber-confirms-to-the-stars-alien-metal-is-just-1990s-era-arts-parts

For those who might need a little help with this, what we have is here is nonsense. It is an anonymous letter containing a few scraps of metal. There is no provenance for the metal other than a cockamamie story of some unknown guy who somehow managed to escape with some bits of metal that he said came from Roswell but offered no proof of that. We can’t check the name to see if the guy was ever really in Roswell because we have no name. We have various analyses of the metal which mostly suggest it is from Earth. It’s been around for a couple of decades until Linda Moulton Howe sold it to TTSA (way to go Linda) and now it is about to go another round of analysis that will prove nothing because THERE IS NO PROVENANCE for it. We trace it to Art Bell and no farther… and Bell is dead so that really is the end of the line.

But somehow, the TTSA academy convinced the Army to study the material because it might lead to a way to make military equipment that is more resistant to the strains of combat. Why the Army would agree to that is almost as big a mystery as who this anonymous letter writer with the anonymous grandfather is.

The original letter should be the giveaway. A base on Mars. Aliens sacrificing themselves to save New Mexico and a bunch of other places. A convenient plane crash (or disappearance) so that the people who knew the most about this are gone along with the surviving alien crew member (maybe that launchship snatched the airplane to save the lone survivor).

Anyway, the anonymous nature of the letter, the lack of real provenance for the metamaterial, the stupid story told in the letter, are all reasons I failed to tackle this before now. I just couldn’t get around to it… but here are some of the facts. You have to decide if the Army is really dumb enough to think that little bits of metamaterial sent to a late late talk show host are enough to waste the limited resources of that one Army unit’s research budget. I simply can’t believe that they fell for it. The anonymous letter writer has to be laughing his ass off.

*We did discover a diary kept by Ruth Barnett for 1947, but there is nothing in it to suggest that Barney Barnett had seen a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. For the true believers, this was worse than finding no diary at all.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Jan Harzan MUFON

MUFON’s Executive Director, Jan Harzan was the guest on this edition of A Different Perspective. We began by talking about the trends in UFO reporting, if there are more sightings, fewer, or has it remained steady. I wondered if, in the world today, they were solving more of the cases than they had in the past. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/20014666

We talked about the To The Stars Academy, and if they communicated with one

Jan Harzan

another. Seems that there is interaction between the two, but there is a difference in the missions of the two organizations with MUFON more engaged in UFO research and TTSA following a somewhat different business model.

One of the things we talked about was the increase in the number of military witnesses coming forward. I wondered about the vetting of these witnesses because, in my experience, there were far too many who claimed military service or high military rank who either hadn’t served or were inflating their credentials. We did talk about the difficulty of vetting these witnesses given some of the roadblocks in getting the most accurate information.

There was one aspect of this that did bother me. I wondered if Jan had heard the skeptical argument that what the Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz had seen was a top- secret Army drone project. Jan suggested that Luis Elizondo had been in a position at the Pentagon, or in his job where he had an opportunity to review all the black projects. Had such a project existed, he would have known about it. I simply do not buy this sort of an argument.

I cite the situation in 1945, as the US raced to complete and test an atomic bomb, that Harry Truman, as vice president had not heard about it. He didn’t learn about it until President Roosevelt had died. At that point Truman became president and was briefed on it. Truman was the vice president at the time… not some fellow toiling away in the Department of Defense (and yes, I know that there was no Department of Defense in 1945… it was the Department of War and the Department of the Navy). The point is, that when you reach into the stratosphere of classified information, there really is no one who has access to everything. Sure, the president can get at it, if he knows what questions to ask, but seriously, would Elizondo be privy to everything?

At the end of the program, I mentioned Don Burleson’s article that appeared in a recent issue of The MUFON Journal. When Don appeared on this program, I asked him about some of this and while I don’t mean to pick on Don, I was concerned about the “speculation” in the article that could be read as established fact. For those who missed that interview, you can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/19428012

Next week, I’ll be talking with Charles Halt about the Rendlesham Forest encounter. The following week is Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. If you have questions, put them in the comments section here and I’ll get them asked on the program.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Stephen Bassett and Unidentified

I had been watching Unidentified on History. I wasn’t a big fan of the show, though it seemed to be presenting UFO research and government investigation into the phenomenon in a positive light. My pals Rich Reynolds and Stephen Bassett had a higher opinion of the show than did I. After the season finale, both seemed more

Stephen Bassett. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

than a little annoyed. Both were critical of that episode and what it suggested or what it had implied. Bassett published a highly critical review of that show which is reprinted at the end of this post. This inspired me to invite Bassett back on my radio show to explain his thinking on this. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18575335

I will note that my last week’s show, with Robert Sheaffer, a well-known skeptic, provided additional detail about that particular episode of Unidentified. It was surprising to me that both men, Sheaffer and Bassett, seem to have reached similar conclusions about the evidence presented in this last Unidentified episode. In other words, both thought the investigation trip to Italy and the details of the helicopter incident and burned areas had nothing to do with UFOs. The helicopter had been forced down by birds through the rotors and the burned areas were shown to be arson.

During our discussion on all this and the relation of it to the To the Stars Academy, Bassett raised some disturbing points about Tom DeLong, his involvement with UFOs and a few things that he had said in the past. You can take a look at some of that here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJdBo0DnKaqCCr7wenAZt7cGH6jjgTa0UPapFw1aylY/edit#

https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/c4o51n/ttsa_disclosure_plan_revealed_trough_tom_delonge/

https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2019/07/ttsa-new-filing-with-us-securities-and.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR1FeotAN8eTITCW9ycFoz4L5hlBnmSU-G7rV0-Ksdt-8D9ZfCpJp5jXl_0

Our discussion did provide some history about the last couple of years, the creation of the To the Stars Academy, and how this might be pushing us closer to Disclosure. Bassett did suggest a few things that were somewhat disturbing about various alien groups who have visited Earth, and proxy wars fought using humans. DeLong suggested that the major wars had been instigated by these various alien races. The links above note some of this.

This was something of a wild program, given some of the information provided and gives us a glimpse into some of the factors that have dogged UFO research for decades. You’ll have do decide just how much of that information is important for your own research and how much you wish to reject. If nothing else, it is interesting.

For those interested in what inspired the invitation to Stephen Bassett, here is the analysis he published:

From its launch on October 11, 2017 Paradigm Research Group has aggressively supported the core mission of the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science in lectures and media interviews, on Facebook and Twitter, and to the PRG international email list. Hundreds of links to TTS/AAS related articles and media interviews are earmarked on PRG's website.

PRG fully expected this initiative to be heavily scrutinized and criticized, and has tried to impress upon the public the complexity and degree of difficulty in putting together this unprecedented effort from within the military/intelligence complex (MIC). Seven decades of government imposed embargo on confirming the extraterrestrial presence created considerable distrust and frustration particularly with those researcher/activists quite familiar with the evidentiary basis underpinning the reality of the phenomena. Many other actions by political leadership in concert with the MIC over the same period have added to this distrust. 

PRG's support of the TTS/AAS mission continues, but not without nontrivial concern regarding a narrative thread running through the Identified series. That narrative is about the UAP "threat."

The research program impelled upon the Pentagon by Senator Harry Reid was eventually named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). This was appropriate to ensure a basic acceptance within the DOD and avoid push back, as well as receiving high level media coverage such as the New York Times.

The Unidentified series would bring with detail the mission of the TTS/AAS to a large audience over a six episode season that ended on Friday, July 5. PRG watched the series with keen interest in how the TTS/AAS would address the threat meme.

There is a distinctive difference between "threat" and "potential threat." PRG noted "potential threat" was never used, or was used perhaps once or twice. On the other hand direct and indirect references to the threat posed by the UAPs escalated as the series progressed culminating in he final episode - The Revelation.

The sixth episode of Unidentified was flawed to the point of being grotesque. Every aspect of the production was designed to be dark including the cinematography, editing, and content, which was drenched in "threat" projection.

The TTS/AAS decided to go to Italy to address an incident involving a helicopter allegedly damaged and forced to land by a UAP. Meetings were held with Italian officials and researchers. Within the context of these meetings there was reference to a series of mysterious fires that occurred in the Italian village of Canetto di Caronia in 2004, 2005 and 2014. It was suggested these fires were caused by rays beaming out the sea where a UAP underwater base was located. Really?

It seemed clear to PRG the TTS/AAS had gone to some length to find a case that involved an "attack" by a UAP on a military vehicle. PRG was surprised at the TTS/AAS's lack of credulity regarding these assertions by the Italians.

The fires. In March of 2015 Giuseppe Pezzino and his father Antonio Pezzino were arrested and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit fraud, and sounding a false alarms pertaining to the events in Canetto di Caronia. Insurance fraud was the likely motivation. The Italian military police had installed hidden cameras in the streets after the fires started again in July 2014. Video captured about 40 incidents implicating Giuseppe and Antonio. There was also phone tap evidence. They were found guilty.

The TTS/ASS could have found this information on the Internet in 10 minutes.

The helicopter. Helicopter rotors hit birds. Also, it was not a "military" helicopter. It was the equivalent to a "police" helicopter.

How intense was the treat meme in Episode 6? Researcher Vern Lovic transcribed threat related statements from the Episode. Many of these takes are shown below this statement. That said, only by watching the full episode can one truly appreciate how drenched in threat was this program.

The TTS/AAS has been meeting with members of Congress - including committee chairs - for over a year. The potential threat aspect of UAPs would be helpful in bringing those members to the table and in convincing committees to hold the needed hearings. The concern is whether or not this is a strategic maneuver to get the appropriate attention (if so, then use "potential threat") or is it a core mission of the TTS/AAS to drive fear into the politicians and the American people leading to massive funding of a "space force."

If the latter, the TTS/AAS should not underestimate the knowledge base of the citizen ET researcher/activist community, its collective power or the ability of that community to marshal the media to push back.

If the TTS/AAS team has clear, compelling evidence UAPs and their creators are not just a potential threat, but a real and present danger, they should produce that evidence sooner not later.

Stephen Bassett

San Pedro, CA

July 9, 2019

His website is: https://paradigmresearchgroup.org/

Next week, as promised earlier, I’ll be talking with Don Schmitt about the Festival in Roswell in the beginning of July.

Tom DeLonge and UFOs

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

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:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fmr-manager-of-dod-aerospace-threat-program-ufos_us_59de2f4be4b0b992a8214874.

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:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/not-quite-a-ufo-ipo-tom-delonge-is-seeking-your-investment-in-to-the-stars-to-give-himself-a-700000-or-more-payday

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

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.