"The New Republic" Runs Lengthy Piece Puzzling Over "To the Stars"

Yesterday, The New Republic ran a lengthy, if somewhat vacuous, piece on Tom DeLonge and To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. The article rehearsed the myth of To the Stars and its cadre of former government workers and contractors who now work tirelessly to leverage the prestige of the federal government as they crank out History Channel pseudo-documentary episodes to help promote their line of books, movies, and t-shirts. The New Republic piece offers nothing much about their activities that you don’t already know from the their multi-year track record of failing to deliver on their ever-shifting promises, which began with UFO “disclosure” and have gradually shifted to a strategic partnership with the U.S. government to serve as handmaiden to what they hint are psychological operations to prepare the way for social change.

Correspondent Matt Farwell couldn’t make heads or tails of Tom DeLonge’s double-talk, and he noted dryly that To the Stars happily let DeLonge blather incoherently to Farwell but wouldn’t let their supposed big guns, like Hal Puthoff and Christopher Mellon, face questions from someone who wasn’t a sycophantic supporter of the company’s obscure mission.
 
The most interesting part of the article, though, is the admission that To the Stars is the final, absurd outgrowth of a series of programs and initiatives that all began because an ex-Nazi working for the U.S. government at midcentury believed his grandmother had psychic powers.
 
Really, you can’t make this stuff up. The hyperlinks are from the original:

Russell Targ is a pioneering physicist whose early career advanced humanity’s understanding of lasers, but he’s best known for the decade he spent studying extrasensory perception, or ESP, and psychic abilities with Stanford-trained electrical engineer Harold “Hal” Puthoff—who co-founded To The Stars with Tom DeLonge and now sits on the group’s executive board. Living consciousnesses, you see, can be separated spatially by thousands of miles but may have no psychic distance between them, and “the most remarkable thing we were able to do is to get the CIA to let us study that for twenty years,” Targ said in a 2015 lecture about his and Puthoff’s research into “remote viewing.” Much of their work—performed at the Stanford Research Institute, the same place that made SIRI on your iPhone—focused on the psychic abilities of mentalists like spoon-bending Uri Geller. Geller was shown on multiple occasions to be a fraud yet still somehow managed to secure steady streams of funding from oil and mining companies to act as a psychic dowsing rod.
 
Nevertheless, Puthoff and Targ’s research into psychic abilities was well-funded, in no small part because of a former Nazi rocket scientist. “I got the program started by showing Werner Von Braun a mechanical ESP teaching machine at a conference on speculative technology,” Targ said. After World War II ended and Operation Paperclip began, Von Braun and several hundred of his Teutonic brothers gave up all their Nazi beliefs and shifted seamlessly into the simple existence of American rocket scientists living in Alabama. Von Braun, who reportedly had a clairvoyant grandmother as well as a cozy relationship with the U.S. intelligence community, “was prodigiously successful with my ESP game,” Targ explained. “He took me up to meet the administrator of NASA, and that was the first money we got to start a program.”

So, there you have it. Once again, decades of ridiculous boondoggles and pseudoscientific nonsense came about because one guy held an unscientific belief and had the power to act on it. It’s always the Nazis in the end, isn’t it?
 
Given that DeLonge has been making noise on Twitter again about UFOs not being alien but something more supernatural, it’s rather plain that To the Stars, under Hal Puthoff’s influence, continues down the path of hunting space poltergeists in the hope of finding an escape hatch from reality to reach an imaginary transcendence sanctified by the holy Government’s divine writ.