Since when does a mediocre musician become an exotic materials guru who warrants receiving a no bid secret contract with the US military?
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US Army Refuses to Release Records About Tom DeLonge's UFO Organization
The Army says details about its agreement with To the Stars Academy to research 'novel materials' are exempt from FOIA.
By MJ Banias
Mar 13 2020, 5:46am
The U.S. Army refused to release any records about its deal with Tom DeLonge’s UFO-hunting group To the Stars Academy (TTSA).
In October of 2019, the former Blink-182 frontman’s UFO organization joined forces with the US Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, a research and development body. According to the contract, the government is interested in studying some pretty exotic science such as active camouflage, inertial mass reduction, and quantum communication. In particular, the government is interested in the group’s ADAM Project, which Doug Halleaux, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center described as “a global dragnet for the collection and evaluation of novel materials.” In 2018, TTSA put out a call for individuals and organizations to submit materials from alleged exotic sources as part of the project.
John Greenewald of The Black Vault, a website dedicated to collecting declassified government documents, explained in a recent blog post that the research and reports related to the deal are exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests as per Army Regulation 70-57.
Knowing this, Greenewald instead filed a FOIA Request regarding a copy of all records and emails related to Dr. Joseph Cannon of U.S. Army Futures Command (who is working on the agreement) containing keywords such as "TTSA" and "To The Stars."
The Army got back to Greenewald telling him that 29 documents were found relating to his request, and each page was exempt from his request. The Army stated that it was not going to release any records. Motherboard reached out to Halleaux, the Army’s CCDC spokesperson, who said that any documents related to DeLonge’s organization would be classified as “trade secrets and commercial or financial information [that are] privileged or confidential.”
In other words, the public can’t know what the Army and TTSA is working on because of corporate and commercial secrets, namely intellectual property and finances. This includes related email communications. Halleaux told Motherboard that he personally had no idea what the Army and TTSA were up to, and if he did, he couldn’t talk about it.
TTSA now has roughly four-and-a-half years left on its five-year contract with the Army to research and develop future military technology. Halleaux told Motherboard in 2019 that the government believes the “key technologies or capabilities that [the Army] is investigating with TTSA are certainly on the leading edge of the realm of the possible” and comes at a low cost for the government. Regardless, mounting a complex exploration of the various projects outlined in the CRADA such as “adaptive camouflage,” “beamed energy propulsion,” and “quantum communication” will definitely take some serious collaboration, laboratory set-up, equipment gathering, research and time. It is highly unlikely that any actual technology development has occurred in the last six months.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzm7e/us-army-refuses-to-release-records-about-tom-delonges-ufo-organization