Politico is reporting that the United States government set up a program (AATIP) in 2007 to investigate UFO’s, a story that former Blink-182 singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge has been pushing for a long time. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the story. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) first secured the appropriation to begin the program in 2009 with the support of the late Senators Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Republican Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
One reason they were able to get funds was the possibility that the UFO’s were not aliens, but new technology developed by China or Russia that could threaten the United States. The AATIP program ended in 2012, and Tom DeLonge is now working with people who were involved with it to search for answers.
The Pentagon, at the direction of Congress, a decade ago quietly set up a multi-million dollar program to investigate what are popularly known as unidentified flying objects—UFOs.
The “unidentified aerial phenomena” claimed to have been seen by pilots and other military personnel appeared vastly more advanced than those in American or foreign arsenals. In some cases they maneuvered so unusually and so fast that they seemed to defy the laws of physics, according to multiple sources directly involved in or briefed on the effort.
The article later states:
It has recently attracted attention because of the resignation in early October of Luis Elizondo, the career intelligence officer who ran the initiative. In his resignation letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Elizondo said the efforts of his program were not being taken sufficiently seriously. The Pentagon official could not confirm Mattis had actually seen the letter.
Shortly after his resignation, Elizondo was listed as one of the key players in a for-profit company called To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-founded by Tom DeLonge, an entertainment mogul and former guitarist and vocalist for the rock band Blink-182. An April 2016 profile of DeLonge in “Rolling Stone” magazine described his fascination with theories about extraterrestrial space travel as an “obsession.”
In a video advertising the company, DeLonge describes To The Stars as a “public benefit corporation” that has “mobilized a team of the most experienced, connected and passionately curious minds from the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, Department of Defense, who have been operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades.”
The founders say they believe “there is sufficient credible evidence of UAP [unidentified aerial phenomenon] that proves exotic technologies exist that could revolutionize the human experience.”
The article later details why the program was abandoned, as government officials and intelligence community officials did not think the program had made substantial findings that showed national security threats to the U.S.
“I still remember coming back from that meeting and thinking of the implications of what Reid said,” the former senior official said. “I remember being concerned about this. I wanted to make sure it was supervised and we were using the appropriation to do actual research on real threats to the United States.
He said he was assured that the research being done was valid. “It was not a rogue individual out of control.”
The former staffer said that eventually, however, even Reid agreed it was not worth continuing.
“After a while the consensus was we really couldn’t find anything of substance,” he recalled. “They produced reams of paperwork. After all of that there was really nothing there that we could find. It all pretty much dissolved from that reason alone—and the interest level was losing steam. We only did it a couple years.”
“There was really nothing there that we could justify using taxpayer money,” he added. “We let it die a slow death. It was well spent money in the beginning.”
Luis Elizondo, @TTSAcademy’s Director of Global Security & Special Programs and former manager of the USG Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, is featured on the front page of NYT. Doesn't get bigger than that. https://t.co/spcsUjtmqH
— Tom DeLonge (@tomdelonge) December 16, 2017
