In late 2015, months after he announced his departure from Blink-182, Tom DeLonge began reaching out to people in politics who might be able to help him find the truth and share it with the world. Maybe no one would have known he was doing it if he hadn’t been emailing with Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. When her campaign email server leaked in March 2016, though, there was a bundle of emails from Tom DeLonge: sending links, asking Podesta questions about alien life, and trying to set up a meeting between Podesta and an Air Force general to discuss what really happened at Roswell.

He was also dabbling in alien fiction. Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows, a novel, came out in April 2016. He has a young adult series called Poet Anderson, a children’s book, and both an alien-inspired album and short film slated to come out later this year. Each of these projects is meant to be grounded in the knowledge DeLonge has acquired through his years of research, like a bite-sized introduction to what he believes is the whole truth. In a YouTube interview with Joe Rogan in October 2017, he said, “The only way to get people to understand what the fuck is going on is to first present them the story [...] and then follow up with the science, and then show them that the [technology] you are seeing can be engineered and created.”

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So next comes the science. In October 2017, with over $75,000 cash and more than a million dollars in assets, according to SEC filings, DeLonge launched the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, comprising a group of 10 scientists, aerospace engineers, and creatives. Their aim is to explore the “outer edges of science,” bringing to light ideas unpresented by mainstream discourse, and to try to discover proof of what DeLonge already believes. They’ll also create cultural products like novels and movies to make those ideas more accessible. The plan is something like: film Star Wars, release a documentary explaining hyperdrives and lightsabers, then raise the money to somehow actually build them.

