Transcript by Joe Murgia – @ufojoe11 on Twitter.
Tom DeLonge was the guest on The Kevin and Bean show on KROQ on July 17th. The following is an edited transcript of that interview.
Tom DeLonge: What happened was is about 12 years ago, I started “Angels & Airwaves,” when Blink first broke up, to be an art project where it was a mix of trans-media. I was like, “Okay, let’s do films and music together and let’s just do something totally different.” So I then I was like, “Okay, well, I need to create a company to make these feature films.” And then I was like, “Okay, it’s going to be easier to finance these movies if they were books. We can publish {inaudible].” Next thing you know, it’s like, this company is like this little science fiction, Disney kind of thing. And it was really a lot of work. And one of the stories was about UFOs. And then I just got super involved with the U.S. government and all this stuff. And it really took me out of having any time to play music. So the past, yeah, I haven’t done [Angels] for like seven years.
And now it just really mapped up to where I saw an opportunity to bring Angels back and go on the road just for a little bit because Blink’s really monopolizing. Like, if I was going to do Blink, I was like, okay, I can’t do anything else cause it’s just a machine that goes all the time. So Angels, [I was like] okay, I’ll just go out for these like four weeks. This is cool. And then the tour sold out in like, 11 minutes. Not the whole thing, but a big chunk of it. And I sat back… “I was like, Oh my god, like.” So we were. “Okay, well, let’s put the album on a label. Let’s do this. Let’s do this.” And next thing, you know it’s like full time.
(How did he get members of the government to speak with him when most everybody else had struck out? Was it due to his tenacity?)
DeLonge: It really kind of was. I basically…the very beginning of it, I was playing a lot of very important people off each other. It was really kind of funny. I was just making things up. I was like. “Hey, I’m talking to so and so.” And I go to that guy and say, “Hey, I’m talking to so and so.”
Kevin Ryder: And you weren’t talking to anybody?
DeLonge: Oh I kind of was but it was more like handshakes and hellos. You know?
Ryder: So they believed you were talking to somebody else? So they thought, “Oh, it’s safe. It’s legit.”
DeLonge: Kinda but basically, really what happened was, is I didn’t take no for an answer. And I was of service. Like you can’t go into the topic of UFOs, knock on doors and think they’re going to read you into anything and tell you. It’s national security. But I spent 20 some years studying this so I knew what was going on. And I had a couple different angles that you will never see on the internet. You’ll never see people talking about it in the UFOlogy kind of websites. And so I went in saying, “Look, this is what’s going on. And I understand it. And I understand the national security implications of it. But I have something I can do for ya. And this is my plan of how to communicate to young people and start bringing this out for the first time.”
Ryder: You can’t tell us, I assume, who the biggest official is you talked to you, in the early days? Somebody who made you feel like, “Oh wow, this is really going to be something.”
DeLonge: Oh, well, yeah, I got connected…I went through some – I gotta be careful of how I say certain things – Department of Defense officials. And then I went through NASA. And I eventually got connected to the general who holds the keys to all this stuff. Like a multi-star. But it was hard to get to him. And I had to really really plead my case as to why this was good for the country, whether it was good for young people, whether it was good for the world, and how I can help. And then they finally said, “Okay, we’re gonna introduce you to somebody. And when that happened, it was like, oh my God. Because that conversation was life changing. That was me in the back of a booth, with this guy that sat down at the table, in a vacant restaurant. And that hour conversation like…
Ryder: Were you nervous as hell sitting across from…
DeLonge: Yeah, super nervous. Because this topic’s really scary. It’s like, you know, UFOs….”Oh, wow, there’s these things in the sky!” Well, it’s much bigger than that. It’s much, much, much, much, much, bigger.
Bean: Why is there a stigma? Even the topic of UFOlogy, even though there is science involved. You’re not dealing with this from a fantasy perspective. You’re dealing from a facts perspective. Yet, still people hear Tom DeLonge and UFO or anybody and UFO, and they think tin foil hats. Why?
DeLonge: Because what happened was, is when we found out what was going on after World War II – kind of during World War II – it scared the hell out of everybody involved. And so what they did was, they said, “We gotta figure out what this subject is…what this topic is. We gotta figure out what it is, who it is, what they’re doing…all that kind of stuff. And we need to do it in crazy secrecy because this is really, really really advanced stuff.”
Ryder: And what was the really really advanced stuff?
DeLonge: Well, the machinery, you know. The crafts itself.
Ryder: Aircraft.
DeLonge: Well, they’re not even really air. They’re trans-medium, you know. So you have this sphere.
Ryder: Okay, now, I’m just gonna say it’s this point right here where everybody goes, “Tom’s crazy.” You know what I mean? Like, not me. I’m just saying it feels like…
DeLonge: Well, let me let me explain why it’s the tinfoil hat thing. So what they did was is the government slipped operatives, you know, over decades into these UFO groups, and into the news and just made everyone think it was dumb. But it was for good reason. Because they didn’t want people to understand it was real. They didn’t want people freaking out. They didn’t want Congress freaking out. And eventually what that would have done is exposed what they were trying to do, which was really a crash course on understanding what this was. So just keep everyone thinking it’s stupid, that way it doesn’t boil up before they’re ready to talk…
Ryder: Do we have an alien ship of some type?
DeLonge: Oh, I…you know. I have no comment on that. There’s a lot of…
Allie Mac Kay: Have you ever you encountered an alien?
DeLonge: Uh, no. But I’ve had some really interesting experiences, yeah.
Allie Mac Kay: Do you believe, as I do, there could be an alien in this room right now?
DeLonge: You know, there might be. But I will tell you this: I have met very, very, very high-ranking intelligence officials that have had encounters. Direct…
Ryder: Is that right?!
Allie Mac Kay: Experiences? Direct encounters?
DeLonge: Yeah, there’s actually some really unnerving aspects as far…you know, there’s one thing…there’s one program where there’s hundreds of operatives that have been having contact and they’re trying to figure out what that’s all about. It’s wild.
Bean: We had in one of your boys, [to talk about “Unidentified” on the History Channel] by the way, Tom?
DeLonge: Yep, Lue. I heard. He was in charge of the UFO program for
the United States up until…
Bean: He didn’t want to tell us anything, man. I’ll tell you that.
DeLonge: It’s very…I can talk cause I don’t have what’s called a TS SCI Clearance like him. He gets polygraphed every few months. So…
Bean: Tom, you are the co-founder and president of the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. And I think people have a vague understanding of what it is you’ve been doing over the past few years. But, talk for a moment…brag for a moment about how you really kind of have changed this conversation. I mean, the work that you have been doing, much of which has been unheralded, has really revealed things that were unknown to the public before and you should be very proud of that.
DeLonge: Yeah, you know, I am. I brought out the first three declassified videos of UFOs ever that were given to me. To The Stars Academy brought them out. I assembled a team of very, very high ranking government officials from the CIA, Department of Defense, other three-letter agencies and so on. One of the heads of the Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin. Skunk Works built Area 51, you know, for the U2 spy plane back in the day. So these are very, very, you know, kind of an elite team of individuals that all have experience with this subject. They all came together because I created a vehicle that has three divisions: entertainment, science, and aerospace. And the whole goal of this is to create a vehicle for the disclosure of the UFO phenomenon and various other things.
Ryder: So your goal is to eventually get this information out there.
DeLonge: Well, we’ve already been doing it. So, for the past 24 months, we’ve been heavily involved briefing the Senate and multiple committees in Congress. We’re the ones that set up the mechanism that you’ve been reading about where it says, you know, a formal reporting process of UFOs within the Navy. And the Navy came out and admitted that UFOs are real. That’s all us. So we’ve been bringing the people from the various departments in the Pentagon over to Congress for the first time in seventy years. There are a few senators that knew about this. If you watched our show on the History Channel, the last episode, Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate, ran the program that Lue was the program director, who now works for me. But Lue was on your show. Harry Reid was on the show and he was talking about it. But there’s only a couple Senators that knew.
So we set up the situation to where they can all get briefed and it’s been happening like wildfire. So what’s happening slowly is the stigma is going off, people are starting to realize, “Oh, my God, this is real.” And it’s not just people in urban areas that see this stuff. It is pilots and generals and astronauts and everything else. And and it’s not just twenty incidents. It’s thousands and thousands of incidents.
Bean: Why aren’t there better pictures, Tom?
DeLonge: There are? But a lot of them are classified for various reasons, too. It’s funny. The UFO in a video isn’t classified but where they caught the photo might be, you know, On what system, it might be. So that’s the problem. It’s like, okay, we weren’t supposed to be over Russia or something, you know. It’s like…or the camera’s like so crazy good that we don’t want anyone to know we can take pictures like that. So it’s the things like that that make it difficult.
Allie Mac Kay: So would you say one of the main reasons that the government wanted it to, you know…there to be a stigma so long ago and for just little, itty bitty things to be leaking out now, is because it would terrify people? And is it a matter of just sovereignty?
DeLonge: Yeah, it’s…it would terrify people.
Ryder: What would terrify?
DeLonge: I think it’s the the idea that, you know, there’s, there’s something here.
Allie Mac Kay: Humans aren’t the elite beings.
DeLonge: There’s something here that’s potentially millions of years more advanced than us and it can do things that we can barely even fathom. And what that means is that humans may not be alone or in charge,
Allie Mac Kay: And we’re not that important, which freaks people out.
Tom DeLonge: Yeah. But that also is like one of my big pitches to the generals I first started meeting with. I was just like, you know, you guys are all fighting all these wars based on belief systems. But if you really attacked the core issue, we might start coming together as a planet. And that’s kind of what my hope is, with all this stuff.
Bean: Thats what “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was about.
DeLonge: Yeah, well, exactly. And a lot of…even “Independence Day’ was like about that kind of stuff. But the reality is, is that once we realize that the Universe is teeming with life, that there’s billions of galaxies for a reason, you know. And it’s so weird, to like, I remember, I watched this documentary where they put a seatbelt in a Ford car. And they’re like, “Well, that was a good idea.” You know, it’s kind of like, well, you know, we see billions of galaxies, but yet, we’re still not really computing that there’s life everywhere and there is.
Bean: Will there be a time in our lifetime, Tom, where it will be publicly accepted and acknowledged that they are here?
DeLonge: It’s coming. So, that’s what we’ve been doing. So at To The Stars, we have been specifically involved in three things, which is…getting ready to bring out the stories, studying it with the public and really big AI database algorithms and all this different stuff and then the third thing is building the technology. So we’re active in all three of those.
Ryder: So you’re saying it’s coming. So, 5-10 years? 15-20 years? 20-30 years?
DeLonge: I think within the next three to five years, you’re going to start hearing rumblings of hearings.
Ryder: Okay, but something more substantial than rumblings of hearings.
DeLonge: No, no, no…because this is a big deal.
Bean: You’re gonna hear whispers of rumors. Come on, we’re almost there. (all the hosts laugh).
DeLonge: I think you’ll start to hear the pressure building to have congressional hearings. And then once that happens, things get a little scary. Because then, on a public level, they have to act on this. Now what does that mean? What are they gonna do? Now, you know, I know a lot of things of what we’ve done but the idea of those things happening on a public, you know, forum, it’s just it’s terrifying.
Allie Mac Kay: It could be chaos.
DeLonge: It could be chaos. What are you gonna do like have a landing or something? Maybe. Maybe, you know, like, who knows, you know, I don’t know.
Bean: You brought up Area 51. And I think you knew I had to ask your reaction to, what started out as a joke, but then kind of exploded on the internet about that.
DeLonge: I know, I saw that.
Bean: Yeah, let’s let’s storm Area 51. Let’s see them aliens, as it said,
DeLonge: Let’s see dem aliens?
Bean: You would be against that and you would…my guess is advise people that the Air Force would take that seriously, if people try to get on the base.
DeLonge: Oh my God, they would take it seriously. This is, you know, I totally advise people against it for a variety of reasons. Number one, it’s not going to change anything. Number two, people can get hurt. You know, and number three, there’s really good reasons for things being secret. And I used to think that it was because we couldn’t handle it. Or I used to think because you know, these guys want power. And it’s about oil money. It’s all these stupid conspirator…It’s none of those things. It’s scary, you know. And you have a bunch of guys that do not sleep at night that are dealing with this stuff so we can go to soccer games and all that. The real way to get change is dealing with a corporate issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue. The way things are kept secret are mechanisms that are there since World War II for a really good reason. So what we need to do is change the law. And the law would pry the mechanism loose of how it secret.
Because right now, I mean, there’s things, they have these things called SCIFFs that are like compartmented rooms of the way they’re built. They’re certified so no one can eavesdrop. It’s for top-secret communication. You know, a conference room table where no one can listen, right? Anything that’s said in that room is owned by the room. So if you go into that room, and you say something about this subject, that little moment can never leave that room or you’ll go to prison. That has nothing to do with UFOs or ISIS. It’s just the way security law works. So if they found a bunch of stuff out, talked about it in that room, unless there’s a law, we can’t pry that conversation out of that room. That’s just the way…it’s like, that’s kind of an example.
Ryder: A law that was made that had really nothing to do with what you’re talking about.
DeLonge: Exactly.
Bean: But you also agree, though, that the government has the right to protect state secrets. As the public, we don’t…we’re not owed explanations on things that we shouldn’t know.
DeLonge: Oh my God, yeah. Not at all. We’re just ignorant to how it works and why it works that way. And now that I, you know, I’m playing in these waters, I’m like, I’m consistently wowed by what they have to deal with and what the stakes are. That’s a big deal. Like I, I remember when I was doing this early on, and I was just so gung ho about getting this stuff out. I gotta be a little careful with some of this. But I got brought into something. And they sat me down, and they said, you know, first it was like, we need to know who the eff you are. We need to know who the eff you’re talking to. It was crazy. It was like two days of hardcore questioning.
Bean: You’re lucky you didn’t end up in Guantanamo.
DeLonge: I was pretty scared to be honest. And I remember, I talked my way out of this. And they said, “Well, let me just give you an idea of the stakes of what you’re playing with.” And something was said to me and I didn’t sleep for for like three nights. I was like, “Oh my God.” You just don’t have any idea as a civilian. the enormity of these things. And so we make up these stories.
Ryder: That sounds very threatening. Like something could happen if aliens who are here, wanted something to happen, it could. And it would be bad for all of us?
DeLonge: You know, whatever these things are, you know, they’re moving…I mean, we have a Top Gun. Top Gun graduates, pilots and they graduate radar operators. On our show on History Channel, one of the guys was talking on graduate, he controlled the entire airspace around the USS Nimitz, when one of these videos that we brought out. And he was watching over a four-day period. 100 of these craft came in from space…over a four-day period. 100. And they went from 80,000 feet to sea level in ,78 seconds. Boom! So what kind of tech? I mean, you’re dealing with technologies that are so advanced. I mean, it was captured on the Aegis Spy-1 radar, which is the most advanced radars we have. The Princeton was an entire radar ship. You know, this is the most elite sophisticated…
Bean: People are behind you on this journey. I know that we all we all laughed when you left Blink and went off to explore the stars. But something is coming out of it, man. And it’s very cool. And I hope you continue to push.
DeLonge: Well thank you, sir.
Ryder: I do have one more question. Is it possible you’re crazy? Like and then you’re meeting with people who go, “Yeah, you’re gonna be a four-star general. Just put that on and you’ll…”
DeLonge: Yeah, you know, you would think but it’s not. I knew when I jumped into this…I couldn’t even tell the guys in Blink. So I remember they got really upset with me because I couldn’t do all the things they wanted to do. But I was already being brought in to all this stuff. Now it’s coming out and people are going, “Oh my gosh, he’s not really crazy. This is scary.” And this is not science fiction. The UFO subject is very, very, very real. I know this with direct experience with the people I work with, what I work on at my company. And it’s starting to come out. Give it a few years and I think it’s it’s gonna be even a much bigger deal than it is. But I appreciate you guys letting me talk about it.
Bean: Of course, man! We’ve been looking forward to it.
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