On 16 December 2017, the New York Times published “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” on its front page. Written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, the article revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a Defense Intelligence Agency programme that ran from 2007 through at least 2012 with approximately $22 million in funding, most of which went to Robert Bigelow’s company Bigelow Aerospace. The programme was run by Luis Elizondo from the Pentagon’s C Ring. Accompanying the article was the release of the FLIR1 video, infrared footage from a 2004 encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an oval white object off the coast of San Diego during the USS Nimitz carrier strike group exercises.
The article and the video had been facilitated by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which had launched two months earlier on 11 October 2017 at a public event in Encinitas, California. Its founding team assembled credentials that no previous UAP organisation had matched: Tom DeLonge (musician and co-founder) as president; Elizondo as Director of Global Security and Special Programs, having resigned from the Pentagon on 4 October 2017; Dr Hal Puthoff (experimental physicist, former NSA and SRI International) as Vice President of Science and Technology; Jim Semivan (25 years in the CIA’s Clandestine Service) as Vice President of Operations; Steve Justice (31 years at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works) as Aerospace Division Director; and Christopher Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) as National Security Affairs Advisor.
Two additional videos followed: Gimbal and GoFast, both from 2015 encounters during USS Theodore Roosevelt operations off the Atlantic coast. All three videos were officially declassified by the Department of Defense in April 2020.
What Changed
The 2017 NYT story did not prove anything about what UAP are. What it proved was that the US government had studied them in secret, spent tens of millions of dollars doing so, and had never told the public. That institutional fact reshaped the conversation. Within five years of the article: the Navy established a formal UAP reporting process (2019); Congress created the UAP Task Force (2020); the Office of the Director of National Intelligence delivered its preliminary assessment to Congress (June 2021); NASA commissioned its independent study (2022); the House held its first UAP hearing in over fifty years (May 2022); and three witnesses testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee (July 2023). None of these institutional responses existed before the NYT story. All of them trace a direct line back to it.
What Happened After
The organisation that catalysed this sequence did not sustain the role. Elizondo, Mellon, Puthoff, Justice, and Semivan all departed. TTSA renamed itself from To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science to To The Stars Inc. in September 2021, reflecting a pivot away from its science and aerospace divisions toward entertainment and media production. Its current operations centre on films (including “Monsters of California,” directed by DeLonge, 2023), television production, music, books, and merchandise. The company employs approximately four to five people and is run by DeLonge and his sister Kari DeLonge as president and COO.
No peer-reviewed research was published from TTSA’s former Science Division. Claims about “metamaterials” in the organisation’s possession were referenced in SEC filings and media appearances but no analytical results were published in the scientific literature.
The archive documents To The Stars because the 2017 story it facilitated was the single most consequential event in the modern history of UAP disclosure. The organisation’s subsequent trajectory does not diminish that fact; it contextualises it.
Related: The Disclosure Foundation | Americans for Safe Aerospace | NASA UAP Research
