To the Stars Comes Crashing to Earth
By now, you may be wondering: is Dream’s End just that powerful, or only psychic? You flatter me, reader. I am just a noticer of things obvious.
In this case, only two posts into a multipart exploration of To the Stars Academy and the seemingly historic disclosure of unexplained advance technology flying around in our skies, and I gave this warning to Tom DeLonge:
Whether by design, or by developments that cause the government to need to pull the plug on this project, DeLonge could easily find himself discredited and discarded. The disinfoteers who play these games don’t much care who gets hurt in the process, and DeLonge, with his rock and roll background and rudimentary science knowledge, could end up the latest victim.
Just days after writing this, we have a very strong rumor (still unverified) that three major figures are departing TTSA, arguably the three who gave the organization what credibility it has, and its apparent entree into government and military circles.
Luis Elizondo, Chris Mellon and Steve Justice apparently have parted ways with the organization, though no formal statement has yet been made.
These three, especially Mellon and Justice, were the heavy hitters, with resumes so impressive that it is, to me at least, rather perplexing that they aligned themselves with DeLonge in the first place.
Chris Mellon has served in government at very high levels for many years. Here is his description from the “cast list” of the History Channel’s “Unidentified”.
A descendant of the founder of the Mellon Bank, Chris Mellon served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. For over a dozen years, Chris worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill, including many years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he ultimately served as the Minority Staff Director. Chris is the team’s government liaison, using his access and relationships with high-level officials to prompt the government to take action on what he believes is a serious threat to national security.
Mellon is as establishment as you get, and given his family name, I doubt money was the motivation. He comes across as genuinely interested in the phenomenon but he also comes across as someone who would not see TTSA as a viable commercial or scientific enterprise. But I also note that he left government in 2004 and then his LinkedIn profile is rather barren until 2016. Looks like he spent some time dabbling in private equity investing. Remind me in my next life to be born into a family of oligarchs.
It is also worth noting that his service in government was always connected to Intelligence in various ways. He ended his government service working for Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller as the Minority Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Speaking of the intelligence sphere, Luis Elizondo has been the public face of TTSA as the lead investigator since the beginning. From the same website:
Luis “Lue” Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP), the secretive Pentagon unit that studied UFOs. As a senior counterintelligence officer for the Department of Defense, he operated throughout Afghanistan, the Middle East and Latin America. He’s a trained Special Agent who has led countless tactical and strategic missions both during wartime and times of peace. He also conducted sensitive source operations against some of America’s toughest adversaries. Lue is the team’s lead field investigator, continuing in the civilian world the work he did inside the Pentagon’s AATIP program.
I have not ever understood why the head of AATIP was a counterintelligence specialist. I would think maybe a scientist or something, but what do I know. We will look a bit more closely at Elizondo in a future post.
Someone who does know about things that fly and how to build them is Steve Justice.
Steve Justice is one of the most respected aviation experts in the U.S. As the former director of Advanced Systems Development at Lockheed Martin’s mysterious Skunk Works division, he led research and development of classified programs for the U.S. military. Most of his career accomplishments are still unacknowledged. He leads the team’s effort to understand the advanced technology that is powering the unidentified aircraft.
Justice, of course, would be perfect for an organization like TTSA and his presence there was one of the reasons, despite DeLonge, that I thought maybe the organization was legit. And, as we saw, it was a party at Lockheed’s Skunkworks that got DeLonge into all this in the first place.
It seemed unlikely to me that any of these men would have attached themselves to the rather vague project and vaguer scientific knowledge of Tom DeLonge. Their motives are what interest me. Why have they put their reputations on the line for this project? Why DeLonge and not some reputable scientific organization? What was Justice told that made him think, “Wow, I guess they do have enough material to back engineer these alien craft?” Why did Mellon, who as noted above, spent over a decade in “private equity trading” think TTSA looked like a sound investment?
It’s possible that they are all sincere and thought hooking up with DeLonge was the best way forward given his fame. In that case, perhaps they finally got fed up with his Tweeting out hyperbole and known hoaxes. Perhaps they figured out that the materials that were allegedly from downed alien craft were just a drawer full of industrial slag that got mailed into the Art Bell show. But I simply can’t think that these three looked at DeLonge and his business plan that mixed entertainment and “research” right from the start and thought, “This is the best way to advance the cause of UFO disclosure.”
Instead, what it seems like to me, is that, once again, “disclosure” has been channeled into an organization that has built-in discrediting features. The fact that the “Unidentified” series which features TTSA’s work, runs on the History Channel, which is basically thought of as the National Enquirer of cable networks is the first clue.
DeLonge argues that getting these ideas into public awareness is the goal. But by propagating these stories in various media projects like the History Channel series, it allows them to be categorized right in there with “Ancient Aliens” in credibility.
So why else would these serious men lend their names and reputations to this work?
As I have said before, I write all of this completely aware that my deep bias is to believe that there really are alien craft zipping around our skies and Mellon and the others think we ought to know about it. I think there is some high quality evidence out there, and also, I just want reality to be that interesting.
But I doubt it is that simple. Because it is never that simple. And the intel community has spent so much time and effort sowing disinformation into the UFO community over the last 60 years that there is just no reason to trust them now.