ex-Blink 182 Frontman Now UFO Researcher

How Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge Became a U.F.O. Researcher
Two years after Mr. DeLonge left the band, he found a new life trying to make sense of outer space.

“We’ve been waiting around as scholars and researchers on the subject for many decades and hoping to God that one day the government would come out and acknowledge what this is.”CreditCreditDaniel Brenner for The New York Times

By Derrick Bryson Taylor
Sept. 26, 2019
Updated 3:34 p.m. ET


For decades, the discussion of whether or not U.F.O.s exist has been debated in American pop culture and within science communities.

That all reached a fever pitch last week when the United States Navy confirmed that three widely shared videos captured by naval aviators in 2004 and 2015 were indeed real and showed what it called “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The “unidentified” part of that statement sparked excitement among U.F.O. enthusiasts.

The three videos show mysterious objects in the sky and contain audio of pilots trying to make sense of what they were seeing. They had gained notoriety since being published in 2017 and 2018 by The New York Times and a company called To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences. Founded in 2017, it is run by a team of 12, including several former government employees, who try to advance society’s understanding of scientific phenomena through the lenses of entertainment, science and aerospace.

As news of the Navy’s statement spread, many people took note of the academy, and more specifically one of its founders: Tom DeLonge, who was from 1993 until 2015 a guitarist and singer for the band Blink-182. How, many wondered, did the guy from Blink-182 become involved in U.F.O. research?


A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.CreditCreditU.S. Department of Defense
It might be hard for those not steeped in U.F.O.-ology to see the significance in all this. Susan Gough, the Pentagon spokeswoman who made the statement last week said that the Navy had “confirmed that the three videos that are in wide circulation are indeed recordings made by naval aviators, recorded during their training evolutions.”

She also said that the Navy “has always considered the phenomena observed in those videos as unidentified.” Not only that, but the sightings had been “part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years,” she said.

And that brings us to Blink-182.

We talked with Mr. DeLonge, who is on tour with another band, Angels & Airwaves, and Luis Elizondo, the director of global security and special programs for the academy, about the company and what the Navy’s response to the three videos actually means.

The following is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.

I just wanted to say to Tom and Luis, thank you again for giving me a little bit of your time. I know you guys have busy, busy days.



Mr. DeLonge: Sure! Absolutely man.

How did you get into U.F.O.s and space research?

Mr. DeLonge: Well, ever since I was in junior high I was really kind of a troubled, rebellious kid. I got into a lot of trouble. My parents were working all day and I was a skateboarder and I was heavily into punk rock music, which is rebellious by nature. I would just do things, honestly, to try to get security guards and police officers to chase us to get some adrenaline. I remember being so bored during the summer and kind of going, “Wow, there’s got to be more to all this.”

I started becoming very fascinated in the idea of what else is there besides working a 9-to-5 job and coming from a broken family. For some reason I just thought science fiction was just fascinating. My brother and I were so into the whole “Star Wars” thing, obviously, in the early ’80s. It just kind of led to me thinking a little bit broader.

There have been a lot of headlines about the Navy confirming and saying objects seen in three declassified military clips, one from 2004 and two from 2015, are “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Why is the Navy’s response so important to the larger conversation on U.F.O.s?

Mr. DeLonge: Everyone still looks up to the United States government as having the resources, the intellect and the duty to deal with subjects like this. We’ve been waiting around as scholars and researchers on the subject for many decades and hoping to God that one day the government would come out and acknowledge what this is. This whole thing could be answered by the government. We’re just waiting for them to come and help us with some of this research. This situation that just happened is literally something I and many other people have been waiting for for not years, but decades. This is what we’ve been hoping it would do so it can really just ignite more smart people and intellectuals to get into this race and help us figure out more about it.
...
The Rest @ NY Times

PETER DOCKRILL18 SEP 2019
The US Navy has for the first time confirmed that a set of eerie, grainy videos that appear to show UFOs flying through the sky are indeed real – and contain phenomena the military still cannot identify.

The sensational footage in question – which began appearing in media outlets including The New York Times from December 2017 onward – was captured by US Navy pilots, and sourced by a private research group, To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), founded by rock musician Tom DeLonge.

While this footage was at the time reportedly declassified, that appears to now not be the case, at least according to intelligence website The Black Vault.

A spokesperson for the US Navy has allegedly told the site that the videos are authentic – the first official confirmation by the military that the footage depicts flying phenomena that can't be identified, although the abbreviation UFO (unidentified flying object) is no longer in official use.

"The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena," Joseph Gradisher, the official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, reportedly told John Greenewald at The Black Vault.

"The 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' terminology is used because it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings / observations of unauthorised / unidentified aircraft / objects that have been observed entering / operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges."

To be clear, this doesn't mean the videos show aliens, or that the US Navy is suggesting that's what they are. It only means the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) are objects that cannot be identified.



The US Navy has previously used another descriptor for these strange objects: Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs), and leaked Pentagon documentation shows the US military has studied the mysterious phenomena for several years, although they don't exactly broadcast it.

"The Navy has not released the videos to the general public," Gradisher said, suggesting the torrent of media coverage surrounding the eerie videos was never part of the Pentagon's plan.
https://youtu.be/tf1uLwUTDA0
We're still no closer to knowing what these things really are, but even the change in military terminology – and the public confirmation of the unidentified phenomena – has surprised some.
https://youtu.be/wxVRg7LLaQA
"That the Navy is using the term 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' shows that they have broadened what is expected to be reported by US fighter pilots to investigate anything unknown in their airspace that in the past has been connected with a stigma," UFO expert and researcher Roger Glassel told Motherboard.

"If these investigations are due to an interest in finding the cause of the UFO phenomenon - in a ufology sense - or due to reducing flight hazards or to counter unidentified intrusions by known adversaries, and readiness for technological surprise, remains to be seen."

https://www.sciencealert.com/us-navy...eant-to-see-it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKPmx1MNytA&feature=share

Maybe Sammy was on board getting anal probed.

The funny thing about the UFO bullshit is that over the last decade or so we have gone from a very very small number of people carrying a video camera to the majority of the population of the world.

Google says 5 billion people now have cell phones so that's basically most people with a video camera on them at all times yet fucking no drop the mic UFO videos. In fact if anything they have gone down in number.

The funny thing is that the Petagon doesn't want you to know that they don't think it's funny...

Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program


A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.CreditCreditU.S. Department of Defense
By Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean
Dec. 16, 2017

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WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

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On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

A video shows a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.CreditCreditU.S Department of Defense
James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.


https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017...y=90&auto=webp
Pentagon officials say the program ended in 2012, five years after it was created, but the official who led it said that only the government funding had ended then.CreditCharles Dharapak/Associated Press
Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.

Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate U.F.O.s until October. He resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program.
Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate U.F.O.s until October. He resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program.CreditJustin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”

He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.

Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.

The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.

“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”

NY Times 2017

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nitro Express

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKPmx1MNytA&feature=share

Maybe Sammy was on board getting anal probed.

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He still sends the Grays Christmas cards!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nickdfresh

He still sends the Grays Christmas cards!

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Yeah. Sam would be hitting on the greys. Normal dudes would be trying to get laid by one of those tall Nordic blonde pleadian chicks.

Maybe Sammy is the one person who actually had an encounter with aliens and that's why they never came back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seshmeister

Maybe Sammy is the one person who actually had an encounter with aliens and that's why they never came back.

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Yup. They were looking for intelligent life forms and after meeting Sam they decided there were none here and went to the next planet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nitro Express

Yup. They were looking for intelligent life forms and after meeting Sam they decided there were none here and went to the next planet.

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Or decent taste in music...