Tom DeLonge will no longer be singing about heartache and penis jokes with Blink-182, but at least he’ll always have his other job to fall back on. That would be his position as longtime alien enthusiast and conspiracy theorist.

The guitarist’s belief in the extraterrestrial has been well-documented over the years (hello, Enema of the State’s “Aliens Exist”), however, a new interview seems to offer up evidence that DeLonge is in fact completely out of touch with reality.



In the lengthy Q&A, the punk rocker touches on some zany topics, including his so-called encounter with an actual alien at Area 51, how “knowing too much” has put him in danger, and how the government has been tapping his phone calls. Check out some choice excerpts below and/or head here for the full interview.

On the beginning of his UFO-loving days and how he has “government sources”:

What’s funny, two decades ago when I got into this, it was such a “the world is flat” scenario, and here’s Tom running around about UFOs and they’d just laugh it off. But now, NASA is holding symposiums on the inevitability of finding life in the universe. The Vatican is talking about, yes, there’s life out there, and how it interferes or doesn’t interfere with the church’s view of existence. You have to understand, I’ve been involved in this for a long time. I have sources from the government. I’ve had my phone taped. I’ve done a lot of weird stuff in this industry — people wouldn’t believe me if I told them. But this is what happens when you start getting on an email chains with hundreds of scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and different universities around the country, and you start outing seniors scientists from Lockheed Martin talking about the reality of this stuff, guys that hold 30 patents, guys that work underground out in the Nevada test sites in Area 51. It goes far beyond just saying, “Hey, that little light in the sky, that’s a little green man.” That doesn’t lend the right gravity to the topic.

On how his extensive research has taken him way beyond simply believing in “little green men”:

People will be like “Oh, you believe in UFOs” [laughs], but I’m reading books on physics, I’m reading books on the secret space program, I’m talking to people that work underground for six months at a time, that are confiding in me about the national security initiatives. I’ve literally read 200 books on the subject, and I don’t spend my time looking at UFO reports or talking to little green men. I’m way past that. If anybody tells you there’s no life in universe, you should be turned off. That’s just such a dumb thing to say. It’s totally, universally accepted amongst the country’s elite scientific establishments that there’s life everywhere. The question is what kind, where, how’d they get here, what are they doing when they get here, and how do we communicate with them? That’s when you start reading books about the mind and consciousness, and telepathy and ESP. It’s a whole different program.

On that time he believed he made contact with an alien while camping at Area 51:

We had two nights. We did one outside of a secret base called China Lake. And that was on the flight path to Area 51, which is known as Groom Lake. We camped out at the northern end of that, about 200 miles from the nearest staff location. We were above an area called Tonopah, which is where they test-fly a lot of different things. So if you remember, I was talking about a person that was gathering all that footage for the congressional hearing. That person was telling me that the big belief, which I had corroborated by a university professor that was in the know, by the way, that the communication of this particular phenomenon is the frequency of thought. So part of communicating and making contact is shutting your mind down and being able to project your thoughts. And this guy was telling me about it, and this whole protocol for how it works. When we went out there the first night, we decided to run through this protocol where you project your thoughts. So we decided to do it, and we were up mad late, but nothing happened. I kept telling the guys: if anything was going to happen, it would happen at three in morning, because that’s the time when things like this happen. Don’t ask me why. We put about four logs on the fire, and everything is illuminated by the fire, and we fall asleep around one or two. I woke up right around three a.m. My whole body felt like it had static electricity, and I open my eyes and the fire is still going, and there’s a conversation going on outside the tent. It sounded like there were about 20 people there, talking. And instantly my mind goes, OK, they’re at our campsite, they’re not here to hurt us, they’re talking about shit, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. But they’re working on something. Then I close my eyes and wake up, and the fire is out and I have about three hours of lost time. I get everyone up first thing in the morning and go, “Did anybody hear all the chatter last night? I couldn’t move my body, I was stuck there. I couldn’t hear anything.” And one of the guys I was with goes, “Yes! They were all around our tent, they were talking. I told you!” And the other guy slept right through it. He had no idea what we were talking about. [laughs] It sounded like English, but you couldn’t make out any words. You knew you weren’t threatened, you couldn’t move your body, but you were very aware of the conversation going on for a period of time. But this is the scary part. If you look up and study abductions of people, people that have had contact, and a lot of the stuff you can read from John Mack; he was [a member of] Harvard’s psychiatry department. He almost lost his job because he started writing books about UFOs and people getting abducted. Harvard tried to kick him out of the medical group, but they lost. He got hit by a car in mysterious circumstances. Pretty odd, right? But when you read his books and study what he was doing, a lot of people who have these contacts talk a lot about chatter, like you’re in the middle of people working. How fucking crazy is that? Nothing else. No footprints, no weird like marks or anything like that.

On whether he’s had his phone tapped by the government:

Yeah, yeah I did. For quite some time. Years ago, there was somebody who was gathering 150 hours of top secret testimony specifically for Congressional hearings on government projects and the US secret space program. People from NASA, Rome, the Vatican, you name it, they’re all on there. The top 36 hours that summarized the best parts of all of that footage, I had it hidden in my house for a period of time, and during that time I was flying this person out along with somebody that was Wernher von Braun‘s right-hand assistant. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi scientist that we brought over to build our Apollo rockets that got us to the moon, and on his deathbed he told this person a bunch of stuff, and I was flying them out to Los Angeles and we were taking certain meetings. At that time a lot of weird stuff started happening.

On a specific instance in which his knowledge of aliens almost got him in real trouble:

To give you an example, one time I remember bringing up a very specific craft that I believe we’re building, in secret, to emulate the phenomenon that our government has been observing for decades. So I started talking about the craft, and its magnetic slide system and how it displaces over 89% of the mass of the ship, how it ionizes the engine, how it glows — I went through the whole thing, and this engineer looks at me, this guy is 70 years old, and he goes, “You better be real fucking careful about what you’re talking about.” And I go, “Okay, so I’m close.” And he goes, “I’m not fucking kidding with you. You better be really fucking careful.” And he calls me up the next day and he goes, “I’ve had calls about you. If someone comes and asks you to get in their car, don’t fucking get in the car.” [laughs] And that’s the shit I’m dealing with.