For those who have been closely following the litany of major developments in the unidentified aerial phenomena research community, particularly during the To the Stars era, the comments from a former Director of National Intelligence making headlines this week will come as no surprise.
During a recent interview that unfortunately occurred on Fox News, John Ratcliffe—who quite controversially served as Intelligence Director under Trump from 2020 to 2021—addressed the excitement surrounding an impending report from multiple federal agencies regarding UFOs, which are now more commonly referred to as UAPs by those pushing for more attention and greater research on the issue.
“We have lots of reports about what we call unidentified aerial phenomena and this is actually a program that’s been in place for a few years in terms of a task force that’s been there under the National Defense Authorization Act … There’s now a report that will be issued by the Pentagon, by the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “I actually wanted to get this information out and declassified before I left office but we weren’t able to get it down into an unclassified format that we could talk about quickly enough.”
From there, Ratcliffe—whose comments were recently spotlighted on Twitter by To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science co-founder Tom DeLonge—appeared to reference the UAP footage that was first made public back in 2017 by TTSA in collaboration with the New York Times. He also suggested there was much more on the horizon showing similarly baffling technologies on display.
“Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” Ratcliffe said. “Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for and traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom. In short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain and so there’s actually quite a few of those. And I think that that information is being gathered and will be put out in a way that the American people can see.”
And while Ratcliffe noted that “plausible explanations” for such events are always sought first, many of these examples defy any such thing.
“There are instances where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things that we’ve seen and when that information becomes declassified, I’ll be able to talk a little more about that,” he said.
The report in question, thanks to a 180-day countdown put in motion by the enactment of a new Intelligence Authorization Act, is believed to be arriving in June.
In June of last year, DeLonge’s TTSA announced its support of the inclusion in the Intelligence Authorization Act of a new UAP Task Force.
“This is a great step forward for both government transparency and national security,” Chris Mellon, then-TTSA Advisor and Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said at the time.
More recently, Mellon—as well as key figures Lue Elizondo and Steve Justice—were said to be leaving TTSA. No official public statement on this has been made by TTSA. Those names, however, do not currently appear on the official TTSA site’s advisory board section. TTSA leadership is currently listed to include DeLonge as co-founder, chairman of the board, and interim CEO. Dr. Hal Puthoff, Jim Semivan, and J. Christopher Mizer are also listed as leading board members.
