A warning sign outside the Nevada Test and Training Range, a U.S. Air Force base that hosts the highly classified military installation known as Area 51, believed to be a U.S. experimental weapons test site and a common point of fixation for pop culture and UFO enthusiasts.

To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), the UFO research organization founded by former Blink 182 star Tom DeLonge, entered into a contract with the U.S. Army earlier this year to have the military vet exotic technologies supposedly in its possession—including “samples of of mechanical and EM sensitive metamaterial.” Those are the much-ballyhooed “alien alloys” that keep getting brought up in connection to TTSA, though officials connected with the institution have insisted the word “alloy” is inaccurate and their alleged special properties have never been confirmed.




Rather than finding them in the shattered remains of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, TTSA reportedly acquired the “metamaterials” from UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe for $35,000 for the purposes of further study. Motherboard scored an interview with Moulton Howe published Thursday; she says that she, in turn, acquired them from late conspiracy theorist and Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell along with documents purportedly written by a U.S. army sergeant stating they were found by the sergeant’s grandfather.

According to Motherboard, Moulton Howe said that the metamaterials will float if they are hit with a strong enough electromagnetic wave, as DeLonge has previously claimed. “They had a piece and they explored whether magnetic fields would cause it to turn into a lifting body. Different frequencies,” she said. Moulton Howe added that she had taken a bismuth magnesium alloy sample for analysis to Carnegie Science’s Department of Technical Magnetism in 1996—which, she told Motherboard, was not able to demonstrate they came from off-planet—as well as Institute of Advanced Studies at Austin researcher Hal Puthoff. That researcher is known for his work on debunked remote viewing experiments for the U.S. military and involvement with the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the source of several disquieting videos of U.S. naval aviators seemingly encountering bizarre flying objects (and a number of junk or fringe scientific studies).


Motherboard obtained a copy of a 2012 letter from Puthoff to Moulton Howe in which he stated he shared her disappointment his tests “did not yield an interesting/anomalous outcome in the tests involving the application of various fields.” However, Puthoff said that he believed that additional tests using specialized equipment might yield more interesting results, which is apparently where the Army comes in.

Screenshot : Motherboard

TTSA reached out in July 2018, when she was still attempting to have the material analyzed, Moulton Howe told Motherboard.

“They call me up and say, ‘we’d like to be able to do an agreement where you could come to San Diego and deliver the piece to us,’” Moulton Howe said. “We’ve got a lab that we’re pretty sure they’re going to be able to do the terahertz test.”


However, TTSA ran into similar equipment limitations. Moulton Howe said that former Lockheed Martin Skunk Works exec Steve Justice, TTSA’s aerospace director and chief operating officer, then called her and said the Army was interested in looking into it.

“I don’t want to stop the science. And I don’t want to stop what may be the only way they’re going to be able to test this,” Moulton Howe told Motherboard, though she also said she believed that price was “so low they couldn’t believe it” and that she had sunk up to $2,000 a year simply trying to have it analyzed.


U.S. Army spokesperson Jerry Aliotta issued a statement to Motherboard confirming that it has advanced materials science and electromagnetic research capabilities, and that if it confirms the samples possess any special properties, it will immediately research its potential use in “ground vehicle applications.”

Prior reporting has emphasized that the materials in TTSA’s possession could be nothing more than industrial slag, with Mad Scientist Podcast host and chemical engineering Ph.D Chris Cogswell telling Vice, “it has been suggested this may be from the Betterton-Kroll process,” a method of separating bismuth from lead first patented in 1922.


As for the other technology the Army contract with TTSA states may be studied, such as “inertial mass reduction, ...electromagnetic metamaterial wave guides, quantum physics, quantum communications, and beamed energy propulsion,” no further word on that or whether they’re connected to a series of weird U.S. Navy patents ranging from high-energy magnetic fields to compact fusion reactors. Some physicists have expressed immense skepticism about the Navy patents, reported the Drive, which appear to refer to similar technologies as the Army contract but could be their own separate military rabbit hole.

[Motherboard]