Ufology Update: In-Q-Tel, Tic Tacs, and the CIA’s Side Hustle
by Rich Scheck
Rancho Mirage, CA
November 4, 2025
The closer one looks at America’s UFO infrastructure, the more it resembles a high-risk startup: covert investors, aerospace gatekeepers, and a few visionary insiders leveraging secrets for speculative gain.
The In-Q-Tel Connection
In a recent conversation, researcher Richard Dolan and analyst Alan Lavigne explored how the now-legendary Tic Tac craft evolved from military curiosity to commercial asset. Their discussion points toward In-Q-Tel (IQT) — the CIA’s venture arm — as a quiet broker ensuring that any breakthrough propulsion or sensor technology discovered within the Tic Tac program remains under intelligence-community influence. Dolan calls it “the CIA side hustle”: classified science repackaged as private equity.
By blocking Robert Bigelow’s access to Lockheed’s findings (reportedly through CIA veteran Glenn Gaffney) IQT and its Silicon Valley allies preserved both secrecy and profit, keeping the most exotic data streams in-house.
Trump, Tech Titans, and Project Preserve Destiny
Missing from that dialogue is the potential role of President Trump. According to Patterns Tell Stories and podcaster Jessie Michaels, Trump may have inherited portions of the Pentagon’s UFO archive and redistributed them to close allies — Thiel, Musk, and Ellison — under the rubric of Project Preserve Destiny. If true, it extends a familiar American pattern: political capital converted into technological privilege, disclosure monetized by the very billionaires shaping the AI-aerospace frontier.
The Meta-PsyOp
Across administrations, UFO disclosure has functioned as a perpetual psy-op — a self-renewing cycle of leaks, denials, and partial truths that keep the public engaged yet uninformed. The constant churn exhausts inquiry while insiders consolidate patents and proprietary data. As I’ve written before, the phenomenon may reveal less about aliens than about the architecture of secrecy itself.
Entanglements and Familiar Names
Dolan’s sources hint at deeper intersections:
1. The NY Times Tic Tac story likely contained crafted distortions.
2. James Comey, ex-Lockheed Martin counsel, may overlap with the Wilson–Davis documents and early “cloaking” programs reportedly halted by Robert Mueller.
3. Jeffrey Epstein’s reach into advanced-tech research networks positioned him near classified innovation pipelines.
4. Tim Mellon’s $100-million donation to Trump’s campaign, with nephew Chris Mellon central to AATIP, underscores the feedback loop between wealth, access, and narrative control.
Meanwhile, Palantir now operationalizes the same AI-driven surveillance frameworks that could trace their lineage to those “non-inertial” craft telemetry datasets — turning other-worldly physics into everyday targeting algorithms.
The Pattern Persists
The “side hustle” may be the defining signature of modern ufology: revelation as revenue stream. Whether the origin of these craft is alien, interdimensional, or strictly terrestrial, the result is identical — a public kept mesmerized while a private few consolidate the spoils.
Until genuine, verifiable data escapes the intelligence-finance feedback loop, Disclosure remains a fake brand, not a real breakthrough.