POLITICO on the To The Stars Academy and UFOs

From Bryan Bender's 5-28-21 POLITICO article entitled "How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream":

The quarter-century saga stretching from [Senator] Harry Reid’s first attendance at one of [Robert] Bigelow’s NIDS [National Institute for Discovery Science] meetings to the forthcoming release of once-secret documents offers a modern case study in how marginalized ideas can make their way into the mainstream. Last summer, after a series of classified briefings for Congress, including Navy pilots giving direct testimony, the Pentagon announced it was creating the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.” In a recent public forum, the Navy’s top officer said the military now has a “well-established process in place ... to collect that data and to get it to a separate repository for analysis.” The Pentagon’s internal watchdog announced this month that it is launching its own evaluation “to determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).”  

Other public and private entities are embracing a subject that once would have been fatal to their institutional credibility. “What if invisible aliens exist among us, already here but unseen by human eyes?” asks a recent blog post from Northrop Grumman, one of the Pentagon's largest contractors and a bastion of corporate orthodoxy. “Do aliens exist?” asks another entry. “Scientists wonder if extraterrestrial life has visited Earth.” It can sound like a cheesy trailer for a History Channel documentary, except the scientists they’re referring to are working at some of the nation’s most elite schools [...]. 

The mindset shift inside Congress, in many ways, is the most consequential because of its ability to back up its public discussion with legal mandates and taxpayer dollars. One needn’t believe UFOs are real to recognize that the money that might flow from the Hill very much is [...].

[T]here is no disputing the role [Tom] DeLonge played in moving UFOs into the realm of more serious discussion. When DeLonge was setting up To the Stars Academy five years ago, he began to assemble a team of consultants not unlike the group Bigelow had brought together some two decades before, who had connections in the shadowy recesses of the national security agencies needed to unearth new information to help prove his theories. In some cases, they were the exact same people. 

“From day one, I figured I needed knights of the round table,” DeLonge told me. “I needed a whole Camelot of scholars and each of them had a different piece that really helped me. It was the military, it was intelligence, it was engineering. It was executive branch.”

One of the first people DeLonge recruited as the academy’s vice president for science and technology was [Hal] Puthoff, the former Stanford engineer who had carried out experiments in the ’70s for the CIA. After NIDS shut down in 2004, Puthoff became one of the top consultants for Bigelow Aerospace, which, in time, became the primary contractor of Reid’s secret Pentagon program [...].

Another of DeLonge’s recruits was Jim Semivan, who retired in 2007 after 25 years in the CIA’s clandestine service, where he helped spy on adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Semivan met DeLonge through [John] Alexander, the Army officer who helped found NIDS with Bigelow. Semivan says he had no official role in studying UFOs for the government, “but I ran into a lot of things that were very strange.” He also told me he had a UFO encounter with his wife that he has never discussed publicly [...]. 

DeLonge also enlisted Steve Justice, an aerospace engineer who had spent decades overseeing classified development programs at Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works [...]. 

 

Another veteran of NIDS whom DeLonge brought on board to advise the effort was Jacques Vallee, a French-born astronomer and computer scientist. Vallee was the inspiration for the scientist in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about alien abductions by a seemingly benevolent species that communicated with humans subconsciously. In more recent years, Vallee helped run a venture capital firm that partnered with NASA in 2006 to help the space agency explore emerging technologies.

To read Bender's entire article, click HERE.