Blink 182’s Tom Delonge on leaving the group to prove that UFOs are real ( TORONTO STAR )

 

Let’s get this out of the way: there are a lot of people that owe Tom Delonge an apology. Of course, it’s no surprise that when a pop culture figure vacates his empirical post to chase an unlikely cause, there will be detractors. But perhaps no case has been so public — and more importantly, publicly wrong — than those who doubted Delonge when he left Blink 182, one of the most popular bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s, to ostensibly prove UFOs are real. Yet here we are six years later, and the man who once waggishly sang about his desire to copulate with a canine is being credited for confirming the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (That’s govspeak for UFOs).

Which is why it would be understandable if Delonge spent his current promotional tour in support of “Lifeforms,” his group Angels & Airwaves’ upcoming sixth album, castigating his critics. But instead, as he sits in his car looking out at the Pacific Ocean not far from his home in San Diego, the 45-year-old offers grace to his detractors.

“I knew that it would be like that for a minute,” he said. “When I started saying that stuff people obviously thought I was crazy, that I’d lost the plot and was wearing a tinfoil hat. But that didn’t matter to me because I was in important briefings — I’d been brought into discussions that, frankly, no other civilian had. And now you see (the results): I mean, literally, the announcement that UFOs are real from the Navy and the Department of Defense had my name attached to it and now Congress is calling for an agency (in the style of) Homeland Security. That’s a big deal!”

Delonge’s path to becoming the face of viable UFO research predates his time in Blink 182. When he was in junior high school, he came across a book about the paranormal. Sparking his interest, he “put a pin in it” until he began touring with the group in the early 90s. As he set to travel across the United States in a van with nothing to do (“this was before smartphones”), he grabbed the paranormal book and went down the rabbit hole. With each successively larger tour, Delonge’s library grew to include more titles documenting UFO encounters with the military.

“I realized it’s a super rich vein of knowledge,” he said. “You’re reading about physics, quantum mechanics and national security, and you’re reading about more esoteric stuff like consciousness and so on.”

Despite Blink’s swelling success, as his interest in the world of investigations ballooned, Delonge said he became more estranged from the group’s juvenile outlook. “When we got into Blink, it was all about being as funny and as fast and energetic as we could be to rebel against our broken families; it was a very specific way of always laughing and having fun and feeling free,” he explains. “But as I got older and became more self aware, I kind of felt like it was time to go a little bit more inward.”

He soon quit the band for the first time and formed the “ultra serious” Angels and Airwaves to artistically explore this existential side of himself, a move he now admits came from insecurity born.

By 2014, Delonge had reluctantly reunited with Blink but said he was mentally ready to quit releasing “eternal youth” music in favour of exploring ”an art project that was communicating larger themes across multiple platforms, like film, music and books.” To facilitate this, he launched the production company To The Stars.

As he recalls, it was while chasing down one of these stories that he “stumbled upon a clearer picture of what was going on.”

“Over 20 years, I just kind of put a lot of pieces together and felt like I found the missing glue to how humanity got to this point,” he recalls.

In fear of being accused of releasing state secrets “like Ed Snowden,” he decided he needed to “socialize” his ideas with the people in power. He began seeking out officials associated with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a hiding in plain sight division of the Pentagon which investigates reports of unidentified flying objects. And, in 2017, launched To the Stars... Academy of Arts & Sciences, which included the AATIP’s former director, Luis Elizondo, alongside other prominent former intelligence and government officials.

When the New York Times ran its front page expose on the government’s UFO agency, To The Stars was credited for its work in making the program known to the public. The story set off a series of events which, this past June, culminated in an unclassified report by the secretary of defence and director of national intelligence on everything the government knows about UFOs.

“That was the first step,” Delonge said. Now, with the government “moving into the task force accountability, oversight, budget requirements and national security legislation,” he’s finally able to focus on “what I should be focusing on, like communicating the stuff through major motion picture television, series, nonfiction, documentaries.” And, naturally, his work in Angels and Airwaves. “My goal is, if the band ever demands that kind of a crowd or experience, that all these things will come to life in the performance and around the venue for people to interact with. Like a travelling ComicCon of sorts that is more real than science fiction.”

Which brings up an interesting side note to the revelations brought on by To The Stars research. While they have proved that the government had been keeping track of UFOs, they didn’t exactly make the point that they were extraterrestrial. A realization not lost on the author of Blink 182’s 1999 anthem, “Aliens Exist.” “The evidence does not seem to suggest that they’re coming from planets,” he concedes. Rather, “it seems to suggest that they are materializing and displacing rather than travelling in a linear fashion — that the physical reality, as we see it, is all taking place in the past, present and future all at one moment. That time is not linear, it’s parallel. So if that’s the case then you have sufficiently advanced societies that can traverse time through frequency and displacement of space time.”

“It gets a little tricky,” he adds.

If that concept makes you roll your eyes, consider the track record of the man saying it. Asked why he thinks he’s been able to succeed where so many truth seekers have failed, Delonge pauses.

“Having Blink become really big taught me anything’s possible,” he explains. “Once you feel success and realize that you’re capable of it, it just gives you the balls to go do anything you want.”

Jonathan Dekel

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