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Is Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy a Deep State Operation?

Former Blink 182 rockstar, Tom DeLonge, is having great difficulty in convincing many UFO researchers that his To the Stars Academy is not a Deep State operation. Many believe that DeLonge has been coopted by savvy Deep State operatives who gave him access to the rarefied world of highly classified Special Access Programs in order to manipulate him.

Despite the success of the To The Stars Academy in getting mainstream media attention to study UFO files released by the U.S. military intelligence community, a number of UFO researchers have become very vocal in their criticism of DeLonge, basically claiming that he is in over his head and is being played by the Deep State.

The concern has become so great that Peter Levenda, one of DeLonge’s co-authors in his book series, Sekret Machines, attended the Contact in the Desert Conference in June to dispel such concerns. I recently was able to view the video of his presentation given on June 3, 2018 which was aptly titled: “Conspiracy Theories & UFOlogy: Tom Delonge & the Deep State Scenario”.

In the abstract he wrote:

This will be a discussion of the current theories in Ufological circles that Tom DeLonge and the To The Stars Academy are agents of a “deep state” that wishes to manipulate Ufology, or expectations concerning UFOs, for the benefit of a secret cabal of government insiders. .

In his nearly two hour presentation, Levenda offered a strident defense of DeLonge, the To the Stars Academy, and his own involvement in the book series. However, Levenda’s defense was so unconvincing that he inadvertently raised doubts with viewers, such as myself, over whether DeLonge may indeed be in over his head and has been coopted into a Deep State operation.

Levenda began by describing his own background and research that has made him a successful book author, who has travelled widely and interviewed many infamous individuals. His first book, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (1995) has become a classic and was among the first that examined the cult beliefs that dominated Nazi Germany’s ruling elite.

I read the book and have it on my bookshelf as a reliable source on Nazi occult beliefs. Levenda’s scholarship won him many fans, including myself.

What did raise my eyebrows during his Contact in the Desert presentation was Levenda’s account of how in 1968, as a 17 year old, he was involved in establishing a cult church in New York city where he and his buddy were self-appointed bishops.

Levenda described how he and his buddy gate-crashed the Robert Kennedy funeral impersonating high level church dignitaries who were transported in a limousine. Was this all simply an elaborate lark by two precocious 17 year olds as Levenda contends, or was something more sinister at play?

What we do know for certain is that Levenda and his buddy became targets for recruitment by rival strange churches, which were fronts for the CIA and other intelligence agencies as Levenda has publicly acknowledged. He says that he declined such offers, and his subsequent worldwide travel and research, was prompted by intellectual curiosity into the bizarre and unusual.

Perhaps, but the legitimate question can be raised about whether his subsequent writing career was established as a suitable cover for recruitment as a CIA agent and/or operative. After all, as a precocious 17 year old, he had displayed a clear talent for deception and establishing fake identities. This surely would have made him an ideal recruit for the shadowy world of CIA covert operations.

It is what Levenda had to say about critics of the To The Stars Academy that really raised my suspicions during his presentation. He called out Dr. Steven Greer as one of the more prominent critics, and set out to contrast Greer and DeLonge’s approaches to gathering UFO evidence.

Whereas Greer was depicted as touting up to 1000 unnamed whistleblowers/insiders spilling the beans on the UFO/extraterrestrial cover up, DeLonge was credited with getting former high level government and corporate officials to come forward and risk their reputations by joining his To The Stars Academy.

The audience was told that Greer was touting speculation by unknown sources, whereas DeLonge was promoting scientific research by having hard facts and evidence discussed by experts who had verifiable credentials in the military industrial complex.

There was a major flaw in Levenda’s critique of Greer. It is simply not true to say that Greer has touted unknown whistleblowers as sources on the UFO coverup. In his May 2001, Disclosure Project Press Conference, he got 21 former military, government and corporate figures to go public. In the subsequent book, Disclosure: Military and Government Witnesses Reveal the Greatest Secrets in Modern History, there were over 60 individuals who by a vast majority went on the record in terms of their identities and credentials.

While it is true that the bulk of Greer’s hundreds of Disclosure Project witnesses (currently estimated up to a 1000 according to Levenda) have not been named, a significant number have been publicly identified and their testimonies are available for research and analysis. Distorting the record of a prominent critic certainly did not help Levenda’s main goal of rebutting Greer’s criticism of DeLonge as out of his depth when it came to dealing with the Deep State.

Levenda went to great effort to stress that DeLonge had been researching the UFO field for decades, and was sufficiently familiar with the issues and main figures in the field to make good judgement calls on who’s authentic or not.

Essentially, Levenda was saying we can trust DeLonge and not see him as an inexperienced dupe, who has been taken in by the Deep State as Greer and other critics were contending.

My own knowledge in this regard is limited to an incident where Tom DeLonge got to hear the views of William Tompkins and Dr. Bob Wood regarding a secret space program, Solar Warden, established by the U.S. Navy with the aid of corporations such as Douglas Aircraft/McDonnell Douglas. Both Tompkins and Dr Wood have decades of experience with Douglas Aircraft and the aerospace industry.

DeLonge expressed his disbelief that such a thing could have happened. I know that DeLonge is not alone in disbelieving that the U.S. Navy could have secretly developed kilometers long space carriers out of its classified facilities as Tompkins contends. There is testimonial evidence that U.S. Air Force officials, have investigated Tompkins and Corey Goode’s claims in this regard as well, as I have written about here.

My book, the US Navy’s Secret Space Program and Nordic Extraterrestrial Alliance, lays out all the evidence that Solar Warden was real, and that it continues to operate in Deep Space. Perhaps DeLonge is merely reflecting the worldview of his insider sources, largely drawn from the US Air Force, who disbelieve that they would have been out of the loop on such an advanced technology program.

What the above incident does show, however, is that DeLonge has an inability to reconcile information that is contrary to what he is being told by his insiders. That’s a red flag and doesn’t help build confidence that he is not being duped by the military industrial community.

It is what Levenda had to say about the John Podesta – DeLonge link that finally shifted me from being an agnostic on the “DeLonge is an agent of the Deep State” perspective. Levenda described the Pizzagate controversy raised by Wikileaks release of thousands of Podesta emails by dismissing it as yet another example of the fear and paranoia that is so prevalent in the UFO community.

Levenda assured the audience that there’s nothing to Pizzagate and that Podesta isn’t the pedophile child sacrificing deviant that many now believe due to the Wikileaks release. In the past, I’ve written admiringly of Podesta, and also of Hillary Clinton, in their respective roles in promoting UFO disclosure dating back from the 1990’s during the Clinton Administration, right up to the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Like many in the UFO/exopolitics communities I saw them as heroes fighting the good disclosure fight, and supported them above other politicians/public figures who remained silent on the UFO issue.

All that changed with the October-November 2016 Wikileaks releases of the Podesta emails that showed coded language using pizza related words being used by Podesta, Clinton, and their associates. Investigative reporter Ben Swann and other investigators showed that this was an elaborate code used by known pedophile networks that indulged in child trafficking, and even ritual human sacrifice. The fact that many of the symbols and codes were known to law enforcement agencies merited close examination of such claims despite debunking efforts by the mainstream media such as the New York Times and Snopes.

I had earlier been made aware of the connection between child trafficking and the Washington D.C. political establishment (Deep State) through the pioneering research of John DeCamp in The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska and Cathy Obrien’s seminal book, Trance: Formation of America. Both of these books showed how an elaborate sex-trade in children was used to compromise young upcoming politicians, and ultimately make them agents of the Deep State as they were rapidly promoted into senior positions.

I understand that this is all very controversial, and why UFO researchers would want to steer clear of all of this. However, with the Wikileaks release of Podesta’s emails, we have someone long viewed as among the few public officials supporting UFO disclosure being directly implicated in an alleged network of child traffickers that practice many kinds of abusive rituals.

I would have understood it if Levenda had simply skirted around all this controversy and merely pointed out that DeLonge’s association with Podesta pre-dated the Wikileaks email release (they began meeting in mid-2015). This would have meant that DeLonge, along with Levenda, were simply unaware of what Podesta may have been involved in, and merely wanted to elicit his support for a UFO disclosure initiative that they were pursuing.

Tom DeLonge, Peter Levenda, and John Podesta pictured from left during a 2015 interview

However, what Levenda did instead was to offer a full-throated rebuttal of the entire Pizzagate controversy. Levenda said it was all another example of the systemic fear and paranoia that is part of the UFO community, and there was nothing of substance in the Pizzagate controversy. He even made a crude pizza joke about it all, to the stunned silence of his audience.

That is not the position an objective researcher would take when looking at all the data and evidence. The Podesta emails are a part of the public record, and in many of them he and other Clinton affiliated figures appear to be using pizza related code words and symbols recognized by law enforcement bodies as common among pedophile rings.

Levenda was not interested in seriously examining the Wikileaks email release in terms of what the use of a coded pizza words meant for Podesta and Clinton.

That’s when it finally hit me. Levenda was a Deep State agent/operative after all. His history and recruitment by the Deep State was hidden in plain sight with his account of his exploits as a precocious 17 year old which brought him into contact with CIA/Deep State operatives in an “innocent lark” involving the creation of a fake church cult.

Furthermore, who would be unscrupulous enough to use deception and a fake identity to gate crash the funeral of Bobby Kennedy who had just been assassinated after clinching the Democratic nomination for the 1968 Presidential campaign? Certainly not any normal person, but instead a future CIA agent/operative with a talent for using deception in public interactions.

Ironically, Levenda’s attempt to prove he was not a Deep State operative only succeeded in converting me from being an agnostic on the whole “DeLonge is an agent of the Deep State”  narrative, to now accepting it.

DeLonge may still be a well-meaning researcher wanting to promote UFO disclosure, but he has been coopted by Deep State operatives, including Levenda, and that is not a good foundation for any kind of genuine disclosure of the truth behind UFOs and extraterrestrial life.

© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice

Further Reading

Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Peter Levenda, Tom DeLonge