If To The Stars Academy contributes nothing more to the debate, if its sole legacy is getting the mainstream media to approach the UFO puzzle as legitimate news, it will have accomplished what no one else has been able to do since the cessation of Project Blue Book nearly 50 years ago. Right now, the signs are encouraging. Just look at everyone who’s suddenly paying attention to The War Zone blogger Tyler Rogoway.

A military hardware aficionado who has harbored a longstanding but closeted interest in UFOs, Rogoway cultivates sources by keeping tabs not on The Great Taboo, but the latest developments in war technology, at home and abroad. Journalistically, and with good reason, he has kept a healthy distance from the UFO quagmire. Until recently, that is, when he followed a lead on incidents that played out over California-Oregon in October, and Arizona-New Mexico in February.

Avoid the alien spaceship references, work the FOIA angles, stick to hard data, decline to interpret — could this be the formula for grabbing and sustaining mainstream media interest in The Great Taboo?/CREDIT: thecepblog.com

Swiftly working those sources for Federal Aviation Administration data, Rogoway augmented his detailed analyses on both of those episodes by posting voice recordings among pilots, air traffic controllers, and FAA officials. He steered clear of interpretation, an area where so many people screw up, and let the presentation speak for itself. What was also remarkable, as Rogoway told Alejandro Rojas this week in the Open Minds podcast, was the amount of cooperation he got from the FAA.

The results have been astonishing. Rogoway’s revelations have been circulated by all the corporate heavy hitters – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The NY Times, WaPo, Fox, Time, etc. etc. And that publicity windfall comes on the heels of an equally viral shot across the bow from former Department of Defense administrator Christopher Mellon. In a March 9 Washington Post op-ed, accompanied by F-18 video footage of an object its pilot struggled to lock onto, Mellon excoriated the Pentagon for its failure to rigorously investigate this potential flight safety hazard.

Mellon’s credentials pinged the media radar last December when, as an adviser to TTSA, he figured into the NY Times scoop on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which included two F-18 videos tracking UFO activity. So it’s a fair question to ask if the MSM would’ve been as receptive to Rogoway’s reporting without the TTSA having breached the restraining walls four months ago. Lately – or to be safe, let’s just say for now – it appears as if the Fourth Estate might actually be rousing from its slumber.

But at a moment when this issue appears to be gaining traction, we’re not hearing a peep from TTSA, which should be shaping coverage, not evaporating. Unlike Rogoway, who documented every step of his investigation into the civilian UFO events, TTSA has little to show in the way of establishing under whose authority, specifically, an investigation of those recorded incidents occurred, especially the one associated with the USS Nimitz carrier task force off California in 2004. Unable to produce chain-of-custody records, TTSA has evidently walked away from that obligation.

To get a feel for how bad this looks, check out John Greenewald’s updates at his Black Vault website. In an effort to verify statements made by retired intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who oversaw the AATIP before retiring in frustration last October, Greenewald has pursued every lead for substantiation. And at every turn, his FOIAs have been answered with no-records-found snubs. Although it’s still a little early to go all X-Files on these denials, it doesn’t look like TTSA much cares about following up, either.

Robert Powell, the researcher who co-authored the ground-breaking, radar-based evaluation of the 2008 Stephenville Incident, and anchored the investigation into the equally intriguing 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, encounter, offers another disappointing twist. Following his appearance on one of Rojas’ podcasts, Powell was contacted by a radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, the flagship for the Nimitz group during the 2004 encounter.

“He’s retired now, and he said nobody had ever contacted him about what happened,” recalls Powell. “And he wanted to talk.”

The radar guy told Powell the UFO(s) that mystified the carrier pilots were tracked by five separate military systems, which included two destroyers and an airborne E-2 Hawkeye. Powell says the Navy veteran commented for the record, and his credentials passed the smell test. Given the military’s inability to produce radar data for his FOIAs, Powell says his source’s perspectives are invaluable.

“You can’t really conclude anything from video, and that’s why radar returns are so important because they’re primary sources,” says Powell who, like Greenewald, is having little luck on the FOIA front. “They say they don’t have any radar records, but why would our government keep the video and throw away everything else? That doesn’t make sense. They could easily release the video and put this to bed without revealing any national security secrets.”

Like the Aguadilla footage, the Navy F-18s followed the UFO(s) using the same sort of infrared optics employed by Border Patrol agents in the skies above coastal Puerto Rico five years ago. Unlike the Navy incident, radar records from Aguadilla helped Powell’s team — called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology – render a more accurate accounting of a smallish object that not only buzzed a city at treetop level, it dipped into the Caribbean and split in two when it re-emerged.

Among Powell’s SCU team members is Morgan Beall, who played a lead role in the Aguadilla study and is now collaborating on reconstructing the Nimitz encounter. Once the Florida director for MUFON, Beall like Powell is severing his ties to the increasingly sensationalist and marginalized national volunteer organization. (“MUFON,” says Beall, “is promoting an agenda and placing more value in entertainment and celebrity than research”.)

Beall says SCU hopes to have a white paper on the Nimitz incident completed within a few months, and that it will be more thorough than anything TTSA has published.

“I think what they’ve (TTSA) done has been good in terms of, there’s a little bit more ease of public discussion (about UFOs), and the giggle factor isn’t quite what it was,” says Beall. “But they’ve been no help to us at all, and the stuff they’ve put out there isn’t going to get into Nature magazine or Scientific American. There’s no executable data.”

If, as De Void hopes, journalists like Tyler Rogoway continue to file solid work on The Great Taboo, and big media continues to handle it with sobriety, then TTSA will have contributed mightily to our cultural evolution. But unless TTSA gets a bit more fastidious about documenting what else, if anything, it has up its sleeve, its best moment may already be receding in the rear-view.

The $50 million crowd-funding goal it set to develop shareholder-financed innovations like “beamed energy” and “advanced electrogravitic” propulsion systems remains stuck at $2.5 mil, and hasn’t budged in months. In fact, at last glance, TTSA isn’t even bothering to post the latest numbers anymore. When it comes to headline-grabbing UFO material, the TTSA, Powell suspects, is out of gas.

“I think they’ve already shot their wad,” he says, “and that’s probably the end of it.”