Limited Disclosure: The New Church Of UAPs Will Reveal The Truth When We Are Ready
Harmonialism among the 'deep state' professional class and their friends
This is a follow-up to the previous installment in my series on the history of the belief in extraterrestrials. I have identified flying saucers as a ‘way of knowing’ among moderns, a gnostic icon of Harmonialist religion, an old time American spiritual tradition. I anticipate two more premium subscriber essays this year before the book project is completed. The previous essay is unlocked for one week:
In the previous installment, I explained how the “Invisible College” behind the most recent UFO ‘flap’ on Capitol Hill consists of the same people who sold the US government on paranormal investigations decades ago. Having refreshed the spiritual menu of Harmonialist belief in extraterrestrial aliens like all similar movements before them, the Invisible College are now developing a new orthodoxy of rational ‘scientific’ UFO belief for the 21st century. They are following a distinct and consistent pattern observed throughout this essay series.
The rock star
Tom DeLonge endorsed John Kerry in 2004, touring with the Democratic presidential candidate, finding the sense of mission that lay behind his second band, Angels & Airwaves. In September 2005, after months of silence following the breakup of his first band, Blink-182, DeLonge “released a rather grandiose, cryptic and curiously punctuated statement on his whereabouts” that called his new band’s forthcoming album “the greatest rock and roll revolution for this generation”, as reported by James Montgomery for MTV. In a 2007 interview with Montgomery, DeLonge explained that he had “literally stayed awake for three weeks straight” after Blink-182 split up “trying to reorganize the next chapter of my life”.
“I didn’t want to come out and just be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play some more music,’ because I’m not just creating another band, I’m trying to create the world’s greatest rock band”, DeLonge said. “Everyone I talk to says stuff like ‘Music sucks today,’ and I’m going to try and change all that.” Angels & Airwaves produced three albums. All of them were outperformed by every metric when DeLonge reunited with Blink-182 to produce the 2011 album Neighborhoods. Still seeking a wider outlet for his ideas, DeLonge’s involvement with the Church of the UAP began with his 27 March 2016 appearance on Coast to Coast AM with weekend host George Knapp, media grandfather of the Skinwalker Ranch group.
DeLonge was there to discuss his novel, Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, which he co-authored with A.J. Hartley and self-published under the business name “To The Stars…” the following month. It is currently ranked #140,400 in the Amazon Kindle store at the time of this writing. A sequel, Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, was published in 2018. Together, they are longer than the Urantia Book. The plot is a fictionalized version of the “core story”, or genesis myth, of the UAP believers. “I knew, and know, there has to be an answer”, DeLonge writes in his forward. “And it will be a simple answer once we hear it. But right now, that answer evades our understanding. It is like trying to understand the description of a color we have never seen.” DeLonge writes that he sent then-CIA official Jim Semivan the prologue to a nonfiction book series, “a thesis on certain elements within this project”, which “seemed to have made quite an impression” on the recipient.
During the interview with Knapp, DeLonge mentioned that in formulating the novel, he had spoken to “advisors” from within the intelligence community that he did not name. He was alluding to the Skinwalker Ranch group at the Pentagon, of course. In a 2021 podcast appearance on Into the Impossible, hosted by cosmologist Brian Keating, Semivan has also recounted how the Skinwalker Ranch group — which he likewise not name — urged him to read DeLonge’s book and listen to his interview with Knapp, insisting that national security leaks were potentially involved. No such leaks emerged, of course, because the book is fiction, but Semivan, a career spook, exhibited the intended fear response.
After meeting DeLonge in person later that August, Semivan began the collaboration that led to his co-founding To The Stars Academy with DeLonge and Hal Puthoff, a psychic remote viewing expert with decades of experience selling his services to the deep state that we met in the previous essay. In Washington, DC, DeLonge says he “pitched a massive entertainment franchise that involved novels, feature films, nonfiction books, documentaries, and everything else that goes along with a story that’s been told over decades and teaches people the truth about something that is almost too big to handle.”
I knew more than most that this phenomenon was scary, and everything that we did over the past sixty years was based on the enormity of the unbelievable task at hand. We had to rethink religion, history, national security, secrecy, physics, defense, space exploration, cosmology, humanity. But the generations of civilians who followed this matter felt left out, lied to, and disrespected.
The government has failed to explain the inexplicable and DeLonge would have us treat this as a hate crime against the believers in the unexplained. A sense of elite entitlement becomes evident throughout the discourse of the Disclosure community. Decades of frustrated expectationalism pervade their conversations. Everyone is top notch, an expert in their field displaying expertise outside their field, and all of them want their expectations fulfilled. Almost everyone involved is a former agent of the ‘deep state’, or else a dilettante with money to burn. They are united in their demand for disclosure, but only by the demand for disclosure. Among the believers, the key debate is what degree of immanent disclosure humanity is prepared to receive.
The primary mode of discourse in the Disclosure community is the podcast format. Both TTSA and the Sol Foundation, as well as independent YouTubers, have provided electronic pulpits for testimony. Within this discourse, there is an argument for limited disclosure, or what we might call managerial disclosure. Even the existence of the articles of faith, the relic spaceships in hidden hangars, becomes questionable when the respected voices with lifelong intelligence community careers argue for being very, very careful with the mysterious technologies in the spaceships. The new church of the UAP will have orthodoxy, it seems, but only after a rigorous, years-long scientific analysis at taxpayer expense, when this new class of experts have finally decided what they can reveal without breaking society.
In the meantime, we have the pseudoscriptures of Tom DeLonge to inspire our imaginations and lead us towards harmony with the cosmos. Claude Lévi-Strauss would recognize the bricolage of Harmonialism being refreshed once again by a new bricoleur. As with all the bricoleurs of Harmonialism going back to Emanuel Swedenborg in the 19th century, Tom DeLonge presents the latest, and he would hope greatest, version of an old story. He would like it to be the greatest Harmonialist story every told.
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