Neil McCasland

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

McCasland went on to attend 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 director of technology at Applied Technology Associates, an Albuquerque, New Mexico based subsidiary of Arlington, Virginia based BlueHalo, a defense conglomerate operating in the areas of space warfare, directed energy, missile defense, cyber and C4ISR.[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]

Podesta's involvement in UFO disclosure initiatives is well documented throughout his service in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, while DeLonge lead To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit associated with the UFO disclosure movement.[17] The pair's collaboration on seemingly fringe science led some to speculate that DeLonge was being manipulated by public officials like McCasland into developing a UFO cover story for new classified American defense technology of a terrestrial origin.[22][23][24] Other speculation focused on a relationship between McCasland and Michael Duggin, an Australian-American scientist with AFRL at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico who spent years of his Air Force career in research on UFO phenomena.[24] Duggin was an assistant to 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.[24]

Early in his Air Force career McCasland married San Diego native Susan Wilkerson.[25] He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• Air Force Biography