In New SEC Filing, To the Stars Academy Reveals a Portrait of a UFO Infotainment Business

​Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science submitted its latest required filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission a couple of weeks ago, and there are some interesting items in the report. Most of it is about what you would expect, but it was interesting to see how small the company is compared to the media footprint it has tried to create. For example, TTS AAS or TTS Academy (as they style themselves) reports having a total of ten employees, of whom eight are working on entertainment projects. Given that the company lists ten executives and consultants on its homepage, this is a rather surprising executive to employee ratio.

​On the financial front, we learned that DeLonge loaned the company tends of thousands of dollars last year to keep it operational, and it has not paid DeLonge $300,000 in royalties that it currently owes him for licensing his name, image, and music. He forgave some of the loans he made to the company at startup, indicating again that the finances are not as good as he expected. We also learned that 95% of the company’s revenues come from online merchandise sales, particularly books and DeLonge’s music. According to the filing, the company intends to devote much of its work this year to promoting DeLonge’s Angels & Airwaves band, which they expect will “bring high brand visibility and increased product sales.” TTS AAS stated that Angels & Airwaves was “history-making” for the company, presumably by bringing in cash. DeLonge’s music accounted for 55% of revenue. An additional 45% came from TTS AAS’s books such as Sekret Machines and swag. Essentially, in practical terms, TTS AAS is a DeLonge merchandising company that uses its UFO studies as a publicity-generating tool to push music, book, and swag sales.
 
Nevertheless, the relative lack of new product in 2018 cost the company money: 

Our net revenues for the year ended December 31, 2018 were $902,048 as compared to $1,376,215 in 2017, a 34% decrease. The 2018 decrease in net revenues was primarily attributable to lower direct to consumer sales on the company’s own e-commerce platform, due to fewer new and/or limited-edition product releases during the 2018 year as compared to 2017. The company’s e-commerce platform includes a full assortment of the company’s branded digital products and physical merchandise.

​The company also claims to actively be pursuing “government contracts,” though for what they did not say.
 
But what interested me was the slow shift in the organization’s fringe science studies. Originally, the company billed itself as pursuing UFO disclosure, and then later as working with the U.S. government to adapt UFO technologies. But now the mission has experienced mission creep yet again. Its “Science Division” has fully transformed into an extension of TTS AAS executive and co-founder Hal Puthoff’s longstanding interest in interdimensional poltergeists and ESP, which he has pursued as part of various government programs since the 1970s: “The company’s Science Division is a theoretical and experimental laboratory, challenging conventional thinking by discovering a new world of physics and consciousness-related possibilities and exploring how to use them to affect the world positively.” That got me. “Consciousness-related possibilities”! That’s certainly code for ESP, remote viewing, telekinesis, and other remnants of New Age fantasy.
 
TTS AAS says that it had to “evolve” to account for its “experiences” and praised its own “flexibility” in adapting to what seems to be their repeated failure to find proof of space aliens. I noted that the alien “metamaterials” that formed such a prominent part of TTS AAS’s messaging last year have been reduced down to “possibly exotic” materials in the current report. Translation: They’re not. But that doesn’t mean that TTS AAS is giving up on them. They are still the key to the company’s claims to be pursuing advanced aerospace technologies, at least insofar as it means that Hal Puthoff of To the Stars gets to funnel cash to Hal Puthoff’s own Earth Tech International (ETI) to conduct the research:

In a joint effort with the Science Division to perform research and analysis on materials to support this foundational work, the Aerospace Division will benefit from the results of the Statement of Work for the SOW-MSSA with ETI for the analysis and experiments for the Materials Analysis – Set A. Under the SOW-MSSA, ETI will be responsible for planning, execution analysis, and experimentation to establish the properties of specific materials. They will advise on the collection and scientific evaluation of materials samples the company obtains through reliable reports of advanced aerospace vehicles of unknown origin.

​In short, TTS AAS is paying one of its own executives to outsource analysis of supposed alien metals to his own company and then “advise” whether it was worth doing so. Since Hal Puthoff could have done this on his own at ETI (and did try in 2012 with Robert Bigelow), what exactly does TTS AAS get out of this for its cash, other than publicity?