Former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge recently sat down for an interview with Mic, where he explained why he had to leave the band, and what he now spends his time doing. He is quoted as follows:
We got a press release that says you decided to not tour with Blink-182 in favor of working on this. What was the decision that went into that?
TD: "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."
OK I have to ask: How many people have made a joke about your "Aliens Exist" song in relation to this project?
TD: "[Laughs] 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."
How did you first get interested in this kind of thing — the possibility of aliens and UFOs?
Tom DeLonge: "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."
Scientists in places like the SETI institute are taking the possibility of alien life seriously. But they have a different way of talking about this stuff.
TD: "Yeah, they are, and they have their own way of doing things. I think there's been a policy to find microbial life far out somewhere else, then start the conversation about life in the universe and how it could form, how far it can advance itself and could they ever come here. Maybe they sent drones here. I'm starting with the idea there's been something else here all along.
There are two sides to looking for other forms of life. There's one that's looking at the interaction with humanity over a very long period of time. But there's also advancing the idea that there was life or forms of life on Mars, on Europa, and even farther out — on exoplanets that look very much like Earth."
Read the full interview at Mic.
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