Tom DeLonge

Thomas Matthew DeLonge (born December 13, 1975, in Poway, California) is an American musician, entrepreneur, filmmaker, and UFO disclosure advocate. He is a co-founder, lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the pop punk band Blink-182 (1992–2005, 2009–2015, 2022–present); the founder and frontman of the rock-multimedia project Angels & Airwaves (2005–present); and the founder of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), the organization credited with releasing the first officially confirmed UAP videos to the public. He is also co-author, with Peter Levenda, of the three-volume non-fiction Sekret Machines series examining the UFO phenomenon through the lens of science, consciousness, and national security.

Early life

DeLonge was born in Poway, California, the son of mortgage broker Constance (née Lovell) and oil-company executive Thomas Lyon DeLonge, and is of German and Mexican descent. He has a brother, Shon, and a sister, Kari. He received his first instrument — a trumpet — at age eleven, took up the guitar after borrowing one at a church camp, and as a pre-teen was given a battered thirty-dollar acoustic by sixth-grade friends. Skateboarding consumed his youth, and he originally planned to become a firefighter, participating in the San Diego Cadet Program. He was expelled from Poway High School for attending a basketball game while intoxicated and finished his diploma at a different school.

DeLonge developed an interest in the UFO phenomenon in junior high school after encountering books on unexplained events in his school library. He has described his motivation as rooted in childhood circumstances — growing up in a broken home after his parents' separation, getting expelled from high school, and searching for something that gave the world coherence.

Music career

Blink-182 (1992–2005, 2009–2015, 2022–present)

DeLonge co-founded Blink-182 in 1992 in Poway with Mark Hoppus and Scott Raynor, the band later shifting to its best-known lineup with drummer Travis Barker. The pop punk group released its debut Cheshire Cat (1995) on Cargo Records, broke through commercially with Enema of the State (1999) — which sold over 15 million copies worldwide — and saw Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001) debut at number one on the Billboard 200. DeLonge also formed the post-hardcore side project Box Car Racer with Barker in 2002 and released a self-titled album that year.

DeLonge left Blink-182 in early 2005 amid creative and interpersonal tensions and his desire to prioritize family. Blink-182 reunited in 2009 following Barker's near-fatal plane crash — an event DeLonge has described as the trigger for his return. He again departed the band in 2015 over contractual disputes regarding his other projects, before rejoining the reunited lineup officially in October 2022; the band released One More Time... in October 2023.

Angels & Airwaves (2005–present)

After leaving Blink-182, DeLonge founded Angels & Airwaves, framed as a broader "art project" encompassing music, film, and other media, and released its debut We Don't Need to Whisper (2006), followed by I-Empire (2007), Love (2010), Love: Part Two (2011), The Dream Walker (2014), and Lifeforms (2021).

Vocal style

DeLonge's distinctive nasal singing style — which contorts words like "things" into "theeeengs" — became iconic of the late-1990s pop-punk era and was studied by Stanford University linguistics professor Penelope Eckert, who attributed it to a combination of California English vowel shifts and punk vocal techniques.

Business ventures

DeLonge founded the holding company Really Likable People (RLP) in 1998. In 2001 he co-founded the clothing brand Atticus Clothing with Mark Hoppus and Dylan Anderson, selling the brand in 2005; in 2002 he co-founded the rock-inspired footwear brand Macbeth Footwear; and in 2007 he launched Modlife, a direct-to-fan monetization technology platform for musicians. In 2015 he established the entertainment company To The Stars, Inc., which in 2017 was expanded into To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science.

Film and writing

DeLonge directed a music video for Taking Back Sunday (2004), co-directed the animated short Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker (2014), produced the science-fiction film Love (2011), and made his feature directorial debut with Monsters of California (2023).

DeLonge has also published children's books and novels, including The Lonely Astronaut on Christmas Eve (2013), the Poet Anderson series with Suzanne Young, the Sekret Machines books with A. J. Hartley and Peter Levenda, and the Strange Times graphic novels and companion books.

Intelligence community contacts

DeLonge has described pitching his science-fiction franchise concept to figures in the United States intelligence community, receiving an email directing him to meet near the Pentagon, where a series of escalating introductions allegedly followed — including a two-hour meeting at NASA Ames Research Center and a later airport meeting at which a senior official reportedly told him: "It was the Cold War and we found a life form." He identified the value he offered these contacts as a communication platform: the ability to reach young civilian audiences through music, books, films, and documentaries in ways the government could not.

His advisors purportedly included Hal Puthoff, Steve Justice (former Lockheed Martin Skunk Works), Jim Semivan (former CIA), Kit Green, Eric Davis, Garry Nolan, and Chris Mellon.

The extent of DeLonge's government contacts became widely known in October 2016 when WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails, which included DeLonge's video conferences and correspondence with John Podesta. He also described being subjected to a two-day interrogation-style debriefing after publishing the first Sekret Machines book, with agents allegedly concerned he had obtained classified information through a leak.

To the Stars Academy

Main article:

To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences

DeLonge launched To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) in October 2017. The founding team included Luis Elizondo, Steve Justice, Hal Puthoff, Chris Mellon, and Jim Semivan. In December 2017, TTSA served as the vehicle through which three declassified U.S. Department of Defense UAP videos — the Nimitz, Gimbal, and Go Fast footage — were released to the public, in coordination with The New York Times. In 2019 TTSA produced the History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation, examining the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident, with DeLonge as an on-camera executive producer. In April 2020 the Pentagon formally declassified the three videos TTSA had released in 2017. Steven Greer has alleged that DeLonge's involvement with TTSA represented a loss of his earlier independent trajectory, stating that Luis Elizondo "intercepted him, gaslit him, used him, and spit him out" — pulling DeLonge into a disinformation narrative centered on alien-threat framing that Greer characterizes as a controlled psyop.

Sekret Machines series

Main article:

Sekret Machines

DeLonge co-authored the Sekret Machines non-fiction trilogy with Peter Levenda: Gods (2016), Man (2017), and War (2019), covering cultural, scientific, and national-security dimensions of the UFO phenomenon respectively. A companion fiction trilogy was published in parallel.

Art-science philosophy

DeLonge has articulated a philosophy he calls the merging of art and science — symbolised by a custom challenge coin depicting the Vitruvian Man motif, representing art and science unified — his argument being that empirical science and art as streams of consciousness must converge before humanity can understand consciousness and the UAP phenomenon.

Acclimation thesis

DeLonge has articulated a position of gradual, culturally mediated public preparation for the reality of non-human intelligent beings, occupying a middle road between forced disclosure and blanket denial. He describes the concealment of UFO-related programs not as malicious deception but as what he characterizes as a rational response to an extraordinary security situation. This framing has been criticized within the UFO community as potentially functioning as a managed limited hangout. As an example of the hidden history he argues is being gradually revealed, DeLonge has said that scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory found radioactive signatures on Mars that could only have come from an artificial nuclear weapon detonation.

Personal life

DeLonge married Jennifer Jenkins in 2001; the couple had two children and divorced in 2019. He married Rose-Marie Berryman in May 2021.

See also

• UAP disclosure movement

References

External links

• #1029 - Tom DeLonge. youtube.com. 2017-10-26. Retrieved 2026-03-15. ＋