[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.

As a lieutenant, McCasland reportedly stood out among his peers, becoming one of just a handful of lower officers given large program leadership responsibilities for highly classified development units within what became the birth of Air Force satellite reconnaissance as it exists today.

[1] After Buckley, he returned to Los Angeles AFB, spending three years as the Chief Engineer of the Navstar GPS Joint Program Office, the controlling authority for the Global Positioning System for government, commercial, and consumer applications.

[1] At AFRL, he led billions of dollars in advanced materials sciences and future weapons research across one of the largest scientific centers in the Department of Defense.

[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.

[17] The pair's collaboration on seemingly fringe science led some to speculate that public officials like McCasland were manipulating DeLonge into developing a UFO cover story for new classified American defense technology of a terrestrial origin.

[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 UFOs by the United States Government.