Tom DeLonge Quit Blink-182 to Become One of the World’s Leading UFO Experts
by Kelsey McKinney February 27, 2018 (thefader.com)
• In the 1990’s and 2000’s, Tom DeLonge was a young guitarist, singer and songwriter for the successful rock band, Blink-182. Being a UFO enthusiast and having read hundreds of books on the subject, he occasionally made references to ETs in his songs, and even spoke with CNN’s Larry King about UFOs in 2012. In 2015, while camping in the Nevada desert near Area 51, Tom and some friends say they had a close encounter with a herd of unseen aliens that swarmed past the men huddled inside their buttoned-up tents.
• DeLonge’s public revelations about the existence of ETs and UFOs apparently caught the attention of some political and military officials. He was emailed an invitation to attend a meeting at the Pentagon in 2015. In 2016, leaked Hillary Clinton campaign emails revealed that DeLonge had been in correspondence with campaign manager John Podesta discussing the UFO phenomenon. DeLonge also published his own book on UFOs called Sekret Machines and plans to release a short film on UFOs later this year.
• In an October 2017 interview on Joe Rogan’s YouTube podcast, DeLonge stated: “The only way to get people to understand what the f*ck is going on is to first present them the story… and then follow up with the science, and then show them that the [technology] you are seeing can be engineered and created.” This appears to be what DeLong is planning to do.
• While his book is officially “fiction” and his close encounters are vague, they do reveal what DeLonge believes to be true: the Nazis were involved in the Roswell crash; the Cold War was part of a massive world-wide ET cover-up; the U.S. government is currently in possession of ET technology and actual alien beings; and intelligent ETs have been visiting the Earth for decades – even genetically tampering with the human species.
• By 2017, DeLonge had assembled $75,000 cash and an esteemed group of scientists, aerospace engineers, and former government and military officials, forming a public-benefit corporation called To The Stars Academy to explore the outer edges of science and bring to light ideas unrepresented in mainstream discourse. In addition to continuing to create books and documentaries, and encouraging further government disclosures and whistle blowers, the Academy will presumably engineer some of this advanced technology itself.
• One of the Academy’s highest profile members is Luis Elizondo, the CIA/DOD insider who ran the Pentagon’s secret UFO investigation program, as scooped by the New York Times last December. Elizondo resigned from his Pentegon position to join the Academy in October 2016 in order to give this information a better chance of becoming public. Other Academy members include esteemed physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff; Steve Justice (Lockheed Martin); Jim Semivan (CIA); and Chris Mellon (DIA).
• A 2017 survey by 20th Century Fox found that 47% of Americans believe in aliens, and 39% believe that aliens have visited earth. Since their public debut in October 2017, To The Stars Academy has raised almost $2.4 million toward their stated goal of $200M. Perhaps DeLonge’s timing is just right to create a groundswell of public interest resulting in high-level government full disclosure of UFOs and ET beings. Or perhaps not. There are those in the UFO community who believe that DeLonge is merely being used as part of a soft disclosure of limited information to the public.
In no particular order, here is a list of things Tom DeLonge has consistently claimed to believe: UFOs are real, aliens are real and they visit us episodically, the U.S. government has known about alien life for decades, the U.S. government has been actively experimenting with alien technologies, the Nazis were involved in Roswell, the Cold War was actually an international cover-up about extraterrestrial life, there was more to the moon landing than we were told, the mass of nuclear weapons the U.S. has is being held for a war with aliens, human evolution was tampered with by someone or something, and the U.S. government has a real live alien species locked up somewhere.
He used to sound crazy. Here was a dude in a beanie, his left arm inked from wrist to somewhere beneath his graphic tee, best known as the former co-frontman of the rock band Blink-182. In interviews, the words coming out of his mouth made less sense than the 40 “na”s strung together in the chorus of “All the Small Things.” This would have been fine — a creative mind susceptible to wild ideas is hardly unique. Except Tom DeLonge didn’t just have a passing interest or affinity; he was planning a crusade.
In late 2015, months after he announced his departure from Blink-182, Tom DeLonge began reaching out to people in politics who might be able to help him find the truth and share it with the world. Maybe no one would have known he was doing it if he hadn’t been emailing with Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. When her campaign email server leaked in March 2016, though, there was a bundle of emails from Tom DeLonge: sending links, asking Podesta questions about alien life, and trying to set up a meeting between Podesta and an Air Force general to discuss what really happened at Roswell.
He was also dabbling in alien fiction. Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows, a novel, came out in April 2016. He has a young adult series called Poet Anderson, a children’s book, and both an alien-inspired album and short film slated to come out later this year. Each of these projects is meant to be grounded in the knowledge DeLonge has acquired through his years of research, like a bite-sized introduction to what he believes is the whole truth. In a YouTube interview with Joe Rogan in October 2017, he said, “The only way to get people to understand what the fuck is going on is to first present them the story […] and then follow up with the science, and then show them that the [technology] you are seeing can be engineered and created.”
So next comes the science. In October 2017, with over $75,000 cash and more than a million dollars in assets, according to SEC filings, DeLonge launched the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, comprising a group of 10 scientists, aerospace engineers, and creatives. Their aim is to explore the “outer edges of science,” bringing to light ideas unpresented by mainstream discourse, and to try to discover proof of what DeLonge already believes. They’ll also create cultural products like novels and movies to make those ideas more accessible. The plan is something like: film Star Wars, release a documentary explaining hyperdrives and lightsabers, then raise the money to somehow actually build them.
And… maybe you can? In December, two months after the launch of the To The Stars Academy, The New York Times published an article revealing a decade-long, taxpayer-funded Pentagon program that investigated UFOs without the knowledge of the American people. (The Defense Department says it closed in 2012, though some skeptics say that it’s still in existence.) Their big scoop was based off research straight from DeLonge’s foundation. Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon employee who ran the department and became the story’s main source, was one of the first employees of To The Stars.
Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who greenlit the secret Pentagon program for investigating UFOs, supports DeLonge’s cause. “I think what DeLonge helped start is really wonderful,” Reid told The FADER. “I think it’s remarkable that he’s gotten this team together. They’re all scientists with deep experience.”
Suddenly, DeLonge didn’t sound like a man possessed. He sounded like a man who knew something. “I know that it’s fun to make snarky comments, but this isn’t the kind of thing to joke about,” he told the New York Daily News in December. “This is going to really affect a lot of people and a lot of people’s belief systems.” Tom DeLonge might sound crazy to you, but he’s already had one of his claims verified. And there’s no telling what else he believes that isn’t just conspiratorial rambling, but truth.
This is the story of how Tom DeLonge got very, very serious about aliens.
On the 1999 Blink-182 album Enema of the State, DeLonge co-wrote the song titled “Aliens Exist.” The next year, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said that the track was “about aliens that come to earth and fly up your butt […] and it’s true,” hence the “enema” in the album’s title. “I’m one of those freaks that really believes that stuff exists,” he wrote in a program for the accompanying tour. “I think if anybody out there does a little bit of research they will find that they side with me.”
In 2000, his Blink-182 bandmate Mark Hoppus told Rolling Stone that Tom “believes anything he reads. You could say, ‘I read in a magazine that an alien landed in Australia. A doctor found him and did an autopsy – there’s footage on the Internet.’ And Tom wouldn’t even question it. He would take it as gospel and go around telling everybody.”
The band gave DeLonge the platform to talk about what he believed and, because he was already famous, a built-in audience. In 2011, the same year Blink released their sixth studio album, he launched his own (now-defunct) website for conspiracy theories called StrangeTimes. In 2012, he went on Larry King to discuss UFOs: “Everyone wants evidence, but no one will take testimony,” a flustered DeLonge told to a UFO skeptic. Of course he was flustered, because at that point, testimony was all he had — that is, until he met his first alien in 2015. Well, maybe heard is a better word for it.
DeLonge was traveling in the desert around Area 51 with some fellow believers filming a documentary about UFOs and government cover-ups. His tired crew drove off-road to find a good place to build a fire, set up a tent, and, hell, maybe try to reach some aliens. That night, when DeLonge awoke to “a chorus of voices — hundreds of people talking around the tent,” he already knew that aliens don’t speak like we do. “They speak on the level of consciousness,” he told George Noory on the late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM, which focuses on the paranormal. When he woke up the next morning, his experience was confirmed: a traveling companion had heard the same thing. (DeLonge denied multiple requests to comment for this piece.)
The experience in the desert affirmed his years of questioning. Years where he had read, by his own count, more than 200 books on the subject. Finally with proof, he quit Blink-182 to focus full-time on UFOs. “I can’t tour nine months out of the year with enough time to do the enormity of what I’m setting out to do,” he told Mic. He sought out Podesta and members of the intelligence community until, by his telling of it, DeLonge was inducted into a metaphorical tent of secrets by the United States government.
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Blink 182, John Podesta, Luis Elizondo, To the Stars Academy, Tom Delonge
