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.
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