"The Shadow Officer" · retired CIA
James Semivan is a retired CIA Senior Intelligence Officer who spent 25 years in the Agency's Directorate of Operations — the clandestine services arm responsible for human intelligence collection and covert action. He worked overseas in multiple undisclosed postings during his career. Following retirement, he co-founded To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA) with Tom DeLonge and Luis Elizondo, serving as a Vice President of Operations. He is one of the least publicly prominent members of that founding group but is widely regarded by colleagues as one of the most significant in terms of access and background.
Unlike his colleagues Elizondo and Puthoff, who speak relatively openly about UAP programme details, Semivan tends to speak in careful, elliptical language — characteristic of someone still operating under significant classification obligations. He has, however, made several remarkable public statements that suggest his private convictions are deeply informed by direct access to UAP-related programmes and personal experience.
Semivan has spoken in limited public forums about a dramatic personal encounter that he and his wife experienced — an intrusive, physically real visitation in their bedroom that he describes as genuinely terrifying and life-altering. He has declined to provide full details publicly, but the encounter appears to have been the personal catalyst for his engagement with the anomalous phenomena broadly and eventually his involvement with TTSA. His willingness to acknowledge a personal experience is unusual for someone with his professional background and suggests that his involvement in UAP-related work goes beyond the professional and institutional.
In podcast interviews and conference presentations, Semivan has repeatedly made statements pointing toward the most radical interpretations of UAP: that the phenomenon is not merely a technology problem but a "consciousness problem," that it is deeply intertwined with human awareness and cognition, and that the people in the U.S. government who are most informed about UAP are genuinely frightened. His framing aligns closely with the "Five Observables plus consciousness" model that Elizondo and others at TTSA advanced.
Semivan's significance lies partly in what he represents institutionally: a senior career CIA operations officer who chose to co-found a UAP disclosure organisation, associate publicly with the most serious whistleblowers in the field, and make carefully bounded statements pointing toward the reality and profundity of the phenomenon. A 25-year veteran of clandestine services does not make such moves lightly, and his participation in TTSA — at significant professional and social cost — is itself a data point of considerable weight in the UAP disclosure calculus.