Punk-rocker Turned UFO Researcher
He’s not just a musician, and Angels & Airwaves is not just a band—Tom DeLonge creates and educates through ‘psychic warfare’
Like any other punk rock kid hanging out in a garage and making music about broken homes with buddies who also came from broken homes, Tom DeLonge couldn’t care less what people thought of him. For photo shoots, he sported only boxer briefs and sometimes not even those. He ran around vandalizing whatever he pleased and pining after girls.
Though DeLonge’s obviously matured over the years, when he walked into a dimly lit Chicago hotel lobby for an interview with Luckbox before his Lollapalooza set, he was wearing a wrinkled navy blue tee, jeans and a red trucker hat. He had an iced tea in hand, and it was evident he was not the same person he was back then. He looked like a dad—a regular guy—which is exactly who he is and wants to be.
When DeLonge left Blink-182 in 2005, none of his fans quite understood why. Here was a punk rocker known for making sex jokes onstage and running around naked in music videos suddenly starting a new band with a mantra of Love.
“I knew back then everyone was going to think this was the stupidest thing—they didn’t understand,” DeLonge said before taking the stage with his band Angels & Airwaves. “It wasn’t normal for a punk rock kind of thing to have that, but that’s why I wanted to do it.”
Back in 2005, DeLonge finally had a vision for what his new band project was meant to be but said it took up until two years ago for it to really click with people. On the band’s most recent tour in 2019, the fanbase seemed to grow significantly, and now DeLonge and the other members of the band are able to present themselves in a way they always wanted to.
“It’s cool to be a good person, to have love in your heart and treat people with respect,” he said. “It’s an energy thing. It’s a conscious thing. It’s a physics thing. So my goal with Angels is to get people to understand that being self-aware and improving the lives of others around you, literally is a physics-level fundamental expression of us as human beings.”
“ People will not fucking believe what went down. I mean, they just can’t even grasp it. It’s gonna scare a lot of people … a lot is coming, and it’s going to change the world.”
DeLonge describes what he is doing as his own version of psychic warfare to make being a genuinely good person not so taboo, which includes managing his company, To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA), a research development and media center for science and technology.
Through the company and its subsidiary, To The Stars Inc., DeLonge and his team have published books, produced documentaries, started a podcast
and most notably have confronted government officials, pushing them to release the results of their
UFO research.
Even before the Adventure of Angels & Airwaves, DeLonge was screaming at Blink-182 fans that Aliens Exist and obviously was not taken seriously. His personal research down the UFO rabbit hole started with simple curiosity and grew significantly as he found out more. Soon, it became impossible to resist.
But it wasn’t until 2017 that his work was highly recognized. That’s when he received the UFO Researcher of the Year Award. Then in 2019 some of his findings were substantiated: The Navy confirmed that videos released by TTSA did indeed capture likenesses of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
That same year, a New York Times article titled “Glowing Auras And ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” prompted skeptics to take another look at what DeLonge was shouting into the void for years.
More reports are surfacing because of DeLonge’s efforts to inform people. Earlier this year, the Pentagon released the Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Report, which DeLonge traces to his team’s effort to set up briefings in Congress and at intelligence agencies.
The report represents the most direct U.S. government account of what officials call UAPs ever made public. It lists five possible explanations for UAPs but still states that researchers don’t know what the UAPs were.
Not speaking for his team or company, DeLonge said he personally believes the government knows a lot more than the most recent UAP report suggests. It states that one possible explanation for UAPs is they’re technologies deployed by “China, Russia, another nation or a non-governmental entity.”
He knows a lot that most people don’t, and he focuses on telling stories in a digestible way through To The Stars books and films.
But much of what he knows is
classified and what he can “expose” is limited.
“People will not fucking believe what went down,” DeLonge said. “I mean, they just
can’t even grasp it. It’s going to scare a lot of people, and so we just have to go step-by-step. It’s going to change
the world.”
How much? “These are giant games that are dealing with consciousness and the social engineering of mankind,” he insisted.
It’s difficult not to question how someone who came of age as a punk rocker and skateboarder would go on to research UFOs, but DeLonge has a sense of wonder that leads him down many paths.
The point of Angels & Airwaves was to produce work through multimedia platforms, and he has been doing just that. After incubating for three years, the band’s sixth album, LIFEFORMS, was released in September.
The album returns to DeLonge’s garage punk origins with heavy guitars and speedy interludes. It diverges from his later synth-focused space rock to get faster and more angsty.
DeLonge writes music for himself, not for the radio or to fit a streaming algorithm. With LIFEFORMS he uses what he’s learned over the years to take a hard look at humankind and how lives intersect.
“I go through life now knowing—not wondering—that my mindset and my vibration will affect every single thing around me, from my health to the people around me that I love, to the art that I create,” DeLonge said.
More DeLonge: Tom’s latest from Lifeforms
Kendall Polidori is an associate editor at Luckbox magazine and is the publication’s music guru.
