Jim Semivan
Jim Semivan is a retired CIA operations officer who served in the National Clandestine Service and subsequently became a co-founder and vice president of operations of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA). He has publicly described unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) as non-human technology that cannot be attributed to Russian, Chinese, or American programs.
Biography
CIA career
Semivan served in the CIA's senior service, at one point running what he described as "rather large programs" with legal counsel present for every decision. Following retirement, he was part of an informal group of intelligence community and Department of Defense personnel who had studied the UAP topic privately for years. When members of that group became aware of Tom DeLonge — through his book Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows — Semivan was designated as the operations officer to go assess him directly. After that meeting, joined by others including Hal Puthoff, Semivan and DeLonge sketched out the structure of To the Stars on a cocktail napkin and shook hands. He also met with Lou Elizondo during Elizondo's time heading AATIP and did informal consulting with him.
Disclosure and public activities
TTSA founding
Steven Greer characterized Semivan as "the former head of Covert Operations Domestic for the CIA" and described TTSA as "a thinly veiled front group for the Defense Intelligence Agency" staffed with intelligence operatives including Semivan. Greer has also accused Semivan of deliberately conflating extraterrestrial craft with interdimensional entities in order to "gaslight people in Congress" — part of what Greer describes as a coordinated campaign to foster a false alien threat narrative.
The rationale for TTSA as rooted in frustration with the government's inability to release UAP information. The highest levels of government were informed that colleagues would take UAP research private, and there were no objections.
Key claims
The UAP phenomenon has been observed since at least World War II and has never been discontinued as a government concern despite the appearance of official disengagement — including Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, and the Condon Report, which he called "a total whitewash." The phenomenon exhibits deliberate low observability and a "trickster element," and as "totally indifferent" to human beings. The real effect may be sociocultural — altering humanity's cultural and social norms rather than simply conducting surveillance.
On the question of alien bodies, the response was a refusal to comment, stating only: "I'm not going to comment on it." Skinwalker Ranch is described as "a pretty serious place" where "a lot of serious things happen," while acknowledging the phenomenon there resisted direct documentation.