In an interview with Mic, Tom DeLonge claimed that he quit Blink 182 so he could take time out to investigate UFOs. Here are highlights:

On when he first became interested in aliens and UFOs: “First of all, we don’t really call it “aliens.” In pop culture, that’s a term people throw out there, and rightfully so because the government spends a lot of time and a lot of money throwing that term out there. But it’s much more complex than that. I first got into it in junior high. I don’t know why. I just had some free time on my hands and I found myself at the school library looking for books on the subject matter. [In] the beginnings of my career with [Blink-182], you have a lot of free time in the van, traveling across the country for 12 months, so I found myself getting a lot of really interesting books that challenged the way I thought about stuff.”

On leaving Blink to study aliens: “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.”

On Blink’s song ‘Aliens Exist’: “Yeah, isn’t that the weirdest thing? It’s weird that people remember that song. It’s, like, an eighth album track from, like, 20 years ago [1999’s Enema of the State]. The very last line of that song references this urban legend in UFO folklore called Majestic 12, these documents that got leaked in the ’80s that described an entire organization of top-level scientists, military people and intelligence officials that manage the information of this phenomenon. I put the name in that song, and the irony now is that I’m dealing with people from the modern version of whatever that group is called. It’s a big deal.”