On Tom DeLonge’s list of priorities, saving the earth from alien hardware is a lot higher than playing pop punk anthems.

The 40-year-old quit the band last year and has since launched Sekret Machines, a multimedia project involving fiction and non-fiction books, music and documentaries on ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.

Asked by Mic whether it was this project that led him to quit Blink, DeLonge replied: "Well it's not so much about Blink. It's about what I'm doing with my life now.

“When you're an individual like me, dealing with something that's a national security issue, and you're being gifted with the opportunity to communicate something you've been passionate about your whole life - something that has the opportunity to change the world over time - being a small part of that is enormously important for my life path.

“But I can't do everything. I can't tour nine months out of the year with enough time to do the enormity of what I'm setting out to do.”

Though he is hesitant to use terms like ‘aliens’ and ‘UFOs’ (“we don't really call it ‘aliens’…it’s much more complex than that”), the guitarist does think we have made contact of some sort.

“I think that contact is kind of a vague description of a lot of things,” he added. “I think there has been [alien] hardware, and whether by design or by accident, it's fallen in multiple countries.”