Former Blink 182 frontman and current UFOlogist Tom DeLonge says that his UFO research organization has acquired “potentially exotic materials featuring properties not from any known existing military or commercial application.” It has not yet provided any proof to back up this claim.

For 70 years, the UFO community has been engaged in active debate regarding physical debris from unidentified flying objects, but the general public got a true taste of that in 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program. The article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, whose interest in UFOs is no secret, modified buildings to house “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”

These "alien alloys" quickly became the topic of great intrigue. DeLonge's To the Stars Academy, a UFO research outfit that may or may not be broke, said that it has recently acquired some metamaterials, though it's not clear whether they are the same ones referenced in the NY Times article.

“The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application,” Steve Justice, To The Stars Academy's COO and former head of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works said in a statement. “They've been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials' properties and attributes. In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available."

Justice said that the organization wants to reverse engineer the metals with hopes of manufacturing more of them.

The press release related to these metals is incredibly vague—little information is given regarding the physical characteristics of the materials nor does it provide any data which even suggests the materials are truly “ground-breaking.”

In the press release, Justice said that the materials have “been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials' properties and attributes.”

According to the press release, some of these materials were in the possession of investigative journalist and UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe, who, in 2004, gave a presentation at the Xcon Conference regarding these materials. In her lecture, a video of which has been on the internet for years, she suggests that the material could become a “lifting body” with the right amount of electromagnetic static and certain RF frequency. These are undoubtedly the same materials mentioned by DeLonge on his Joe Rogan interview where he stated, “if you hit it with enough terahertz, it’ll float.”

In an interview with Motherboard, Dr. Chris Cogswell, who hosts the Mad Scientist Podcast and who holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering, explained that we need to be incredibly cautious before jumping to conclusions. He expressed that layered magnesium and bismuth alloys are pretty common and are certainly easily explainable by science.

“Micrometer thick layers are made by mistake in metallurgy facilities all the time. The purification of lead by removing bismuth using magnesium is a perfectly reasonable explanation,” he said.

He explained that if these materials are truly exotic, then initial results should come relatively quickly: "The facilities to analyze these solids are readily available. If they have materials, we should be seeing progress because these tests would take all of a month to run and analyze to see if there is something worth pursuing."

Any claims of actual evidence related to UFOs should be taken skeptically, of course, but To the Stars has in the past been the first to publish video of military pilots seeing UFOs, so its claims cannot be dismissed immediately out of hand. It's also worth noting that there are, of course, many materials scientists working on new alloys and composites all the time.