Neil McCasland

McCasland grew up in an Air Force family, the son of Lt William H. and Robin (née Chambless) McCasland. His father was killed in a tragic flying mishap when he was young, and his mother eventually remarried to another airman, Lt William R. Casey.[3]

McCasland went on to attended the United States Air Force Academy, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in astronautical engineering in 1979.[1] He went on to receive a full scholarship from the Hertz foundation, and attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a Master's degree in aeronautical engineering estimation and controls[4] in 1980.

He returned to MIT in 1985 to complete a Doctorate in astronautical engineering.[1] He defended his dissertation "Sensor and Actuator Selection for Fault-Tolerant Control of Flexible Structures" in August, 1988.[2] Dedicated to his late father, McCasland's thesis was supervised by Richard Battin, primary designer of the Apollo program guidance computer.[2] He later went on to attend the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, graduating in 1995, as well as the Advanced Program Manager's Course at the Defense Systems Management College on Fort Belvoir, Virginia.[1] In 2004 he participated in the United States-Russia Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[1]

McCasland is currently the Director of Technology at Applied Technology Associates, an Albuquerque, New Mexico based technical services contractor creating custom solutions in line of sight stabilization, inertial sensing, and real-time processing systems for government and commercial customers. McCasland lead technology identification and development, strategic vision, R&D, and risk assessment. The company was purchased by Arlington Capital Partners and is merging with AEgis Technologies and several other defense contractors to become Arlington, Virginia based BlueHalo, a defense contractor "purpose-built" to provide capabilities "in the domains of Space Superiority, Directed Energy, Missile Defense and C4ISR, and Cyber and Intelligence" to "lead the transformation of modern warfare".[10][11][12][13]

Since 2013 McCasland has been an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[14]

In June 2019, McCasland joined the Board of Trustees for Riverside Research, a not-for-profit "chartered to advance scientific research for the benefit of the United States government and in the public interest".[15][16]

McCasland is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).[4]

McCasland's involvement with the topic of Unidentified Flying Objects became public when WikiLeaks released an archive of Hillary Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta's email records in 2016.[17] The archive of documents was obtained from a data breach by Fancy Bear, a hacking group which the United States Government alleges is associated with military intelligence assets of the Russian Federation.[18][19][20][21] McCasland is the subject of an email[22] dated January 25, 2016 from Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge to Podesta in which DeLonge says of McCasland:

He mentioned he's a "skeptic", he's not. I've been working with him for four months. I just got done giving him a four hour presentation on the entire project a few weeks ago. Trust me, the advice is already been happening on how to do all this. He just has to say that out loud, but he is very, very aware- as he was in charge of all of the stuff. When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago. He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man.

McCasland is also the recipient of another email,[23] this time directly from Podesta, inviting McCasland to a Google Hangouts meeting with DeLonge and Podesta. Also CC’ed on the invitation are Rob Weiss, Chief of Lockheed's Skunkworks Division[24] and Air Force Major General Michael Carey.[23]

Podesta's involvement in UFO disclosure initiatives is well documented throughout his service in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and DeLonge runs To The Stars... Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA), a nonprofit associated with the UFO disclosure movement.[17] McCasland's involvement with To The Stars marks yet another surprisingly credible asset to DeLonge's unusual group which already employs a conspicuous number[25] of former senior members[26] of the intelligence, military, space, academic, and commercial defense communities. Others involved bring similar credentials to McCasland, including CIA and NSA officers and scientists, Special Access Program defense contractors, NASA propulsion and directed energy researchers, presidential advisors, a former Undersecretary of Defense, and the former program manager for the Department of Defense's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) UFO investigation operation during the Obama Administration.[17][25][26] McCasland's expertise at Air Force Research Laboratory and post retirement at ATA is notably similar to one of TTSA's current projects outlined in a 2019 CRADA contract with the U.S. Army Futures Command involving materials exploitation of purported metamaterials the group claims to have secured.[27]

The combination of highly qualified people working on seemingly fringe science supported by government procurement agreements has led some to theorize online[28] regarding DeLonge and his advisors’ true knowledge or intentions, and others to speculate that DeLonge is being manipulated by government officials like McCasland into developing a UFO cover story for new classified American defense technology of a more terrestrial origin.[29] Many drew conclusions from McCaslands previous role as head of oversight for all of the Department of Defense's most classified programs and his post retirement activities with UFO phenomena in support of both conclusions.[30] Other questions and speculation focused on a relationship McCasland was known to have with the late Dr. Michael Duggin, an Australian-American scientist with the Air Force Research Lab division at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico who spent years of his Air Force career in research on UFO phenomena.[30] Duggin also once worked for J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who led the Air Force's infamous Project Blue Book, one of the first investigations of reported encounters with UFO's by the United States Government.[30]

Early in his Air Force career McCasland married San Diego native Susan Wilkerson.[31]

• Air Force Biography