Bad Data Dump: "To the Stars" Takes Italy, and Brien Foerster Releases Elongated Skull DNA Results

​I have some work to do today on my book, so I will leave you in the capable hands of Robert Shaeffer and his analysis of Tom DeLonge’s recent trip to Italy to present alongside Luis Elizondo (mis)information about To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science to a private Italian UFO group. The four-hour presentation was uploaded to YouTube and then transcribed on UFO Joe, and Shaeffer reviewed it. have neither the time nor the interest for so much talk, no, not even when one of the Italians shared a racist cartoon and said he hoped it wouldn’t offend anyone. At this point, was that even surprising? I skimmed the transcript, but it was so… rote. I didn’t have the energy to go through it line by line.

​Anyway, DeLonge said he’s working on movies, TV shows, space lasers, and anti-gravity devices, and he repeated the spiel that you can read on any of his many platforms, pretty much verbatim. I’ll just point out the DeLonge’s professed ultimate goal is, well, bonkers: “Through these efforts, we hope to unify the nations of the world and bring an ability to understand who we really are and where we are going as a civilization.” Yes, movies and lasers will create world peace.
 
Shaeffer provides an annotated list of errors that the To the Stars team made, and he offered a pretty succinct summary of what is wrong with DeLonge and Elizondo as ufologists: “Neither of them has any real understanding of the difference between credible and non-credible sources of information concerning UFOs. Neither of them seems to have any ‘filter’ for baseless UFO claims, and neither seems to understand the prevalence of misinformation in UFOology.”

Meanwhile, George Knapp illustrated exactly the ethical problems I have criticized him for in an article published yesterday on the website of the Las Vegas TV station where he works. The article offered little new information about metamaterials but instead summarized information made public by To the Stars over the past five months. The only news is that Robert Bigelow has tried to get government funding to study the suspected industrial waste that he and Hal Puthoff had come to believe was UFO debris. Bur in the article Knapp failed to disclose his close personal relationship with Bigelow, and readers have no way of judging, because again he did not disclose, whether the secret information provided by Bigelow in confidence was relevant to his article and whether he is leaving out essential details or even passing on false claims from To the Stars that this secret information might have challenged. It is a clear example of the ethical quandaries that agreeing to hide information can create.
 
And before I close today, let me also recommend to you this week’s update from Carl Feagans. Please be sure to read his recent post on Brien Foerster’s publication of DNA test results from the elongated Paracas skulls. Foerster claims that the results indicate that the skulls are primarily of European origin, but Feagans makes a compelling case that the results are faulty, the result of contamination and poor collection methods.