It’s been over 20 years since Tom DeLonge sang “Aliens Exist” on Blink-182’s Enema of the State, the multiplatinum 1999 album. Nobody knew back then how serious DeLonge was.
The guitarist, who stopped playing with Blink in 2014, has become one of the most prominent UFO researcher’s in the country. He co-founded To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company dedicated to UFO research, which received credibility first in 2017 when the New York Times reported on its work exposing the Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program, and then again in September, when the U.S. Navy called declassified videos published by To the Stars, along with the New York Times, “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Researchers saw it as a breakthrough moment, the government acknowledging the existence of the objects in the videos — and that they don’t know what they are. “We have kind of have been pressing hard to have something like this happen,” DeLonge told Rolling Stone after that announcement. “We’re a young startup, but this is the year I feel that things are really igniting. I’m super excited for our team, and I’m excited for the world.”
As we wrap 2019, here’s the full interview with DeLonge, conducted this past fall, looking back on his wild ride so far.
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How has the Angels and Airwaves tour been going?
It’s been amazing. It completely caught me off guard. Getting out here and doing this was not really part of my plan a year ago, but I was like, “OK, let’s test the waters. We’ll book a tour.” The next thing I know, it’s kind of the big return that I didn’t plan. But this is just the beginning. This is the beginning of what will probably be the best record I’ve ever made in my life.
What was your reaction to the Navy’s statement acknowledging “unidentified aerial phenomena”?
Well, my reaction is kind of two-par because, on one hand, I’m over the moon, but on the other hand, I knew all along that they just weren’t saying it. It’s a surprise to me that it actually happened. And we’re all really excited, because as American citizens, we need to hold our government accountable. We need to inform them that they work for us, not the other way around, and on something as important as this, it’s not a good thing to be wondering if they’ve had information like this for a long time. It really kind of cedes the trust in government, which I don’t really want to have happen. Because I work with a lot of government people and they’re the most trustful people I know. So I think this is one of those things that can really build bridges between the U.S. citizens and their government.
What was most significant about their statement?
I think the most signifiant thing was when the government said that the video contains “unidentified aerial phenomena.” That is because they have ruled out all the other things that they know how to find. These systems find real planes and jets. They have high fidelity and they are the most advanced systems on earth. The pilots have been trained for many years with millions and millions of dollars to make them specifically trained observers using those systems. Everyone says, “Well that’s just a drone or something,” I don’t think people understand that the systems and the pilots are created and educated in such a way to where they’re not guessing, you know?
Which video affected you the most?
For me, the Gimbal video, because I was at the time talking to Dr. Harold Puthoff, and he’s the co-founder of To The Stars Academy, and he is a physicist. He talked to me a little about how these crafts could be flying and what the observations of them show, and the Gimbal video seemed to show a lot of that, which would be stuff like blurry edges around the bubble … we call it “gimballing” around, where it’s shifting its weight in a counter-clockwise motion, which shouldn’t happen when it’s moving the way it’s moving. So there are all these little attributes that I was learning from the point of view of a physicist that works for the Department of Defense. When I saw that video, I thought, “Oh my God, all these themes are contained in this one video.” You could see the wings, you see the jet exhaust coming out the back … that video really did kind of blow me away.
Tom, when you tweeted about Salon’s story [“U.S. Navy Reports Tom Delonge of Blink-182 was Right About UFO’s”] you wrote: “We have been very serious about this and its ramifications since day one.” What are those ramifications?
For me, the ramifications are so vast. It’s who we think we are, and where we’re going. Are we the only life in the universe? What are these technologies? The technologies can defy the laws of gravity and physics as we know them. What if this is an adversarial state? Or what if these technologies can clean up our world’s oceans and get clean running water to people and places that need it? So it’s so vast, what this does for us. And also as national security, just protecting our borders, what if someone was able to put a nuclear weapon directly in New York City within 30 seconds because they have this technology? That’s the kind of stuff I’ve learned they have to worry about in the government. It’s not stuff that everyday Americans normally think about, but it raises the hair on the back of your neck.
In your research, have you ever seen what might be inside of these crafts?
Oh no, not at all. I’ve always had a lot of fun with my fans back in the day before To the Stars, just putting out things to laugh with them to make them wonder, but now that I’m running a company that has a real science division, and doing all the things that we are doing, there’s no real room to play those types of games with the audience. The only things I am able to prove are the things that To the Stars are doing, specifically the scientific endeavors we’re involved with. And we are in the process of all that now. We did analysis on the videos when they came out, and now we‘re doing all the analysis on the materials that we have, and we hope to be talking more about that soon.
I saw a quote from an astronomer who said there’s a lot of unexplained natural phenomena on the earth and in the atmosphere that require further investigation, but jumping to saying what you’re seeing can be some sort of advanced technologically alien spacecraft is really a big leap to make.
What people are forgetting is Raytheon, who build the system that was captured on, all they do is build systems like this and they have to rule out meteorological and astrological data so our pilots or men or women in uniform can use their systems to find threats. The second thing that happened was Steve Justice – he was the top two or three people at Skunk Works, who built the most elite and advanced stealth fighter jets for the US government — did the analysis on the video. He knew exactly what the attributes any kind of known craft would have, and why this doesn’t fit the module. And then you have then you also have Dr. Harold Puthoff, who was the lead physicist for the actual UFO program that Luis Elizondo ran, and he was a co-founder of TTSA. So the people that are involved in this are so much more qualified than anybody else that’s kind of throwing things from an armchair. This isn’t something that just got put out there and nobody looked at it. These are guys who are the best of the best doing it their entire careers in the places that deal with this stuff. I think people forget that sometimes.
There was a lot of coverage of To the Stars’ financial issues last year. Does the Navy acknowledging your work give you a boost?
When we started, we knew that we probably had a year or two of really just working with the public doing things like the show on the History Channel, Unidentified, or doing things within government by coordinating briefings … we knew that we needed to do some work to destigmatize the subject, and we did that. And when we launched, we were very aware that it was going to be difficult and an uphill battle, and it was just about more work. The the second step that we needed to do was really get the corporate structure fixed, get the people in to start building the company now that the spark was ignited, we needed to start putting fuel on the fire. We needed to create an environment where the company can scale. And that’s what we did, then out of nowhere the Navy admits it, it could not be a better time. Literally the company is ready to do everything we set out to do, and this is just like, wow, the forces up there, the spiritual forces … the stars are aligning.