The US Army has joined forces with a UFO investigation group to study mysterious advanced technology.

To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science is led by Tom DeLonge, a founding member of Blink 182, and was set up to investigate UFOs.

In a move one observer described as a ‘bizarre twist’, TTSA has signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.

The two organisations will now work together to ‘leverage developments in material science, space-time metric engineering, quantum physics, beamed energy propulsion, and active camouflage’.


It’s not know how TTSA came to know about these technologies, which are more associated with science fiction than genuine academic research.



But it is rumoured to have obtained alien ‘metamaterials’ salvaged from UFOs.

A view of a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO recorded by US Navy pilots in 2004

The partnership comes after a series of astonishing revelations about a shadowy government research drive called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.

‘Our partnership with TTSA serves as an exciting, non-traditional source for novel materials and transformational technologies to enhance our military ground system capabilities,’ said Dr Joseph Cannon of U.S. Army Futures Command.

‘At the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center, we look forward to this partnership and the potential technical innovations forthcoming.’

The AATIP project investigated ‘exotic technologies’ including wormholes, antigravity, invisibility cloaking, warp drives and high energy laser weapons, as well as the health ‘consequences’ suffered by people who had close encounters with UFOs.

One of the most famous incidents revealed during the exposure of AATIP took place in 2004 when pilots on the USS Nimitz Carrier Group were outmanoeuvred by ‘Tic Tac’ crafts moving so quickly they did not appear to obey the laws of physics.

It was headed up by Luis Elizondo, who currently serves as director of global security and special programs at the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

A view of the oval-shaped UFO encountered by US Airforce pilots

Several videos of super-fast aircraft have been released since the existence of AATIP was revealed by the New York Times in 2017, while earlier this year TTSA claimed to have obtained ‘exotic’ metals believed to have come from ‘an advanced aerospace vehicle of unknown origin’.

At this stage, there is no way of knowing whether these materials were salvaged from a crashed alien spaceship or an experimental top-secret aircraft built here on Earth.

Steve Justice, TTSA’s chief operating officer and aerospace division director, added: ‘This cooperative research agreement brings additional, critically important expertise that is necessary to advance the state-of-the-art in both our near and long-term technology areas of study.

‘While the Army has specific military performance interests in the research, much of the work is expected to have dual-use application in support of TTSA’s path to commercialization and public benefit mission.’

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We spoke to Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator at the Ministry of Defence, and asked if he believed the US Army was now studying alien technology.

He said: ‘This is arguably the most bizarre twist yet in the ongoing saga of the Pentagon’s UFO program. For some time now there have been rumours that one of the most tangible elements of AATIP related to strange materials – so-called “metamaterials” – associated with UFOs.



‘One allegation was that money had been spent on modifying buildings at Bigelow Aerospace’s Nevada facility, to store these materials. Bigelow Aerospace won the AATIP contract and did much of the work.

‘Opinion is divided about these metamaterials.

‘Believers think this could be wreckage from the UFO they say crashed at Roswell in 1947. Sceptics suggest the materials might be nothing more remarkable than odd bits of metal found by the public over the years and associated with UFOs, more by wishful thinking than by virtue of any tangible evidence.’

This drawing of a strange experimental aircraft was released in a patent document filed by the US Navy

MORE: The US Navy secretly designed a super-fast futuristic aircraft resembling a UFO, documents reveal

In a recent interview with US news host Tucker Carlson, Luis Elizondo confirmed that some of these materials TTSA had collected were obtained from ‘governmental sources’.

‘If any of this was genuinely extraterrestrial in origin, scientific testing techniques such as isotopic ratio analysis and x-ray diffraction should be able to put the matter beyond dispute,’ Pope added.

‘Considering the metamaterials in the context of these new revelations about US Army interest, the important point is that if all of this was just nonsense, the government and the military would steer clear.

‘To engage in this way, the US Army must either know or suspect that there’s a genuine technological advantage to be gained here, that collaboration with TTSA might deliver – and TTSA can legitimately be regarded as an offshoot of the US government’s AATIP program, on the basis that many of the same people are involved.

Nick Pope greets fans and supporters at an AlienCon event

‘The potential damage to the US Army’s reputation if TTSA can’t deliver anything is significant, so they must be very, very sure that there’s something to all this. Therefore, the significance of this research and development agreement cannot be overstated.’


The UFO community has spent decades claiming that alien technology obtained from UFO crashes was being secretly ‘back-engineered’ at Area 51 and then quietly introduced into the military.

But these claims have never been taken seriously.

Pope added: ‘It was suggested that innovations such as stealth technology, night vision goggles and Kevlar body armour were all derivations from extraterrestrial technologies.

‘These theories were widely dismissed as nonsense, but these new revelations about the US Army’s interest and involvement will only reignite such speculation, with many believing that the conspiracy theorists might have been right about this one all along.’

So are we on the verge of discovering the truth about whether aliens have been visiting Earth?

‘Whatever the truth of the matter, we’ve come a long way since the end of 2017 – before when the official line from the US government was that UFOs were of no interest and that no investigations were being undertaken,’ Pope added.

‘US Congress has been looking into AATIP and the spate of recent US Navy encounters with UFOs, and classified briefings on all this have been taking place.

‘Congress will doubtless demand to know what the US Army is doing partnering with TTSA, what they know about these bizarre metamaterials and their origin, and what technologies or capabilities they hope to derive from all this.’