Tom DeLonge @ KROQ Interview 7/17/19

Here is a link to the full interview: https://youtu.be/CfjwOXTDWVc

I have taken the liberty of condensing/transcribing the information within the interview that deals with the UFO Phenomenon and To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science below.

— — — — —

Tom DeLonge: “About 12 years ago I started Angels & Airwaves…to be an art project where it was a mix of transmedia, it was like, ‘okay, let’s do films and music together, let’s just do something totally different’. So then I was like ‘Okay, well, I need to create a company to make these feature films’…one of the stories is about UFOs and I just got super involved with the US Government and all this stuff, and it really took me out of having any time to play music….and now, it like just really mapped up to where I saw an opportunity to bring Angels back and go on the road just for a little bit…”

Kevin Ryder: “Can I go back, can I just go back about halfway through that answer and say ‘so then, I started dealing with the US Government’. How, how did that start? How did you get anyone to take your call? What was the first time?…”

TD: “Yeah — the crank calls at first? [chuckles] You just call up and say you’re a General and they’ll talk to you [more chuckles from both sides] Um, no, I, uh-”

KR: “Because I mean they hear from a lot of citizens who have questions but usually they just don’t talk to them — they just ignore them. Somehow you were able to not only get people on the phone but get people on the record and start really getting stuff out to the public that had never been available before. And that’s — Is that just due to your sheer tenacity?”

TD: “It really kind of was. I basically, the very beginning of it, I was playing a lot of very important people off each other, it was really kind of funny. I was making things up, was like ‘hey, I’m talking to so-and-so’ and I’d go to that guy I’m all ‘hey, I’m talking to so-and-so”.

KR: “And you weren’t talking to anybody?”

TD: “Oh, I kinda was, but it was more like handshakes and ‘hellos’, ya know?”

KR: “So they believed you were talking to somebody else so they thought ‘oh it’s safe’.”

TD: “Kinda. But basically really what happened was, is I, I didn’t take no for an answer and I was of service. You can’t go into the topic of UFOs, knocking on doors and think they’re gonna read you into anything and tell you it’s National Security. But I spent 20-some years studying this so I knew what was going on, and I had a couple different angles that you will never see on the internet, you’ll never see people talking about it in the Ufology kind of websites. So I went in saying ‘Look — this is what’s going on and I understand it and I understand the National Security implications of it, but I have something I can do for ya, and this is my plan of how to communicate to young people and start bringing this out for the first time.”

KR: “Who — you can’t tell us, I assume, who the biggest official is you talked to, ya know, in the early days? Somebody who made you feel like ‘oh — wow, this is really gonna be something’?”

TD: “Oh, well, yeah — I got connected, um, I went through some — I gotta be careful how I say certain things — I went through some Department of Defense officials and then I went through NASA, and I eventually got connected to the General, who holds the keys to all this stuff, a multi-star. It was hard to get to him — “

KR: “It should be!”

TD: “Yeah, well, ya know, I had to really really plead my case as to why this was good for the country, why it was good for young people, was good for the world, and how I can help. And then they finally said, ‘okay — we’re gonna introduce you to somebody’. When that happened it was like ‘oh my god’, because that conversation was life changing. That was me in the back of a booth with this guy, um, that sat down at the table in a vacant restaurant and that hour conversation — “

KR: “Were you nervous as hell sitting across from — “

TD: “Yeah, super nervous, because this topic’s really scary. It’s like ya know, UFOs ‘oh wow there’s these things in the sky’ — well, it’s much bigger than that. It’s much much much much much bigger than that.”

KR: “Tom, why is there stigma on even the topic of Ufology, even though there’s science involved…you’re not dealing with this from a fantasy perspective, you’re dealing from a facts perspective, yet still people hear ‘Tom DeLonge and UFO’ or anybody and UFO and they think tinfoil hats — why?”

TD: “Because what happened was, when we found out what was going on after World War II, kind of during WWII, it scared the hell out of everybody involved. So what they did was, they said ‘we gotta figure out what this subject — what this topic is, we gotta figure out what it is, who it is, what they’re doing, all that kind of stuff, and we need to do it in crazy secrecy because this is really really really advanced stuff.”

KR: “What was the really really advanced stuff?”

TD: “Well, the machinery, ya know? The crafts itself— “

KR: “Aircrafts?”

TD: “Well, they’re not even really air — they’re transmedium — you have this sphere — “

KR: “Okay, now I’m just gonna say it’s this point right here where everybody says ‘Tom is crazy’…”

TD: “Yeah, well, yeah…let me explain why it’s the tinfoil hat thing. So what they did was the government slipped operatives, ya know, over decades into these UFO groups and into the news and just made everyone think it was dumb. But it was for good reason. Because they didn’t want people to understand it was real, they didn’t want people freaking out, they didn’t want Congress freaking out, and eventually what that would’ve done is expose what they were trying to do, which was really a crash course on understanding what this was. So just keep everyone thinking it’s stupid that way it doesn’t boil up before they’re ready to talk about it.”

KR: “Do we have an alien ship of some type?”

TD: “Oh, ya know, no comment on that.”

Allie Mac Kay: “What do you know Tom?”

[cutting out some back and forth chatter/chuckles — feel free to listen via the link above]

TD: “…I will tell you this, umm, I have, uh, met very very very high-ranking intelligence officials, um, that have had encounters…direct…yeah, there’s actually some really unnerving aspects…there’s one program where there’s hundreds of operatives that have been having contact and they’re trying to figure out what that’s all about.”

[again, leaving out some chatter/chuckles here as well]

KR: “…we had in one of your boys for that, by the way, Tom…”

TD: “Yep, Lue, I heard…he was in charge of the UFO program for the United States up until — “

KR: “He didn’t wanna tell us anything, man, I’ll tell ya that.”

TD: “…I can talk cuz I don’t have what’s called a TS/SCI Clearance like him, he gets polygraphed every few months, so — “

KR: “Gotcha.”

[breaks for commercial, but the interview starts right back up]

KR: “Tom, you are the co-founder and President of To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science and I think people have a vague understanding of what it is you’ve been doing over the past few years. But talk for a moment, brag for a moment, about how you really kind of have changed this conversation. I mean, the work that you have been doing, much of which has been unheralded, has really revealed things that were unknown to the public before, and you should be very proud of that.”

TD: “Yeah, you know — I am. I brought out the first three declassified videos of UFOs ever, they were given to me, To The Stars Academy brought ’em out, I assembled a team of very very high-ranking government officials from the CIA, Department of Defense, other three-letter agencies, and so on, one of the heads of the Skunkworks at Lockheed Martin…Skunkworks built Area 51, ya know, for the U2 spy plane back in the day, so these are very very, kind of an elite team of individuals that all have experience with this subject. They all came together cuz I created a vehicle that has three divisions: Entertainment, Science and Aerospace. And the whole goal of this is to create a vehicle for the disclosure of the UFO Phenomenon, and various other things…”

KR: “So your goal is to, eventually, get this information out there?”

TD: “Well, we’ve already been doing it. So for the past 24 months we’ve been heavily involved briefing the Senate and multiple committees in Congress. Um, we’re the ones who set up, uh, the mechanism that you’ve been reading about where it says you know a formal reporting process of UFOs within the Navy and the Navy came out and admitted that UFOs are real — that’s all us. So we’ve been bringing the people from the various departments in the Pentagon over to Congress for the first time in 70 years. There are a few senators who knew about this — if you watched our show on the History channel, the last episode, Harry Reid, Majority Leader of the Senate, um, ran the program that Lue was the Program Director, who now works for me, but Lue was on your show, Harry Reid was on the show and he was talking about it, but there’s only a couple Senators who knew. So we set up the situation to where they can all get briefed and it’s been happening like wildfire. So, what’s happening slowly is the stigma’s going off, people are starting to realize ‘oh my god, this is real and it’s not just people in urban areas that see this stuff, it is pilots and generals and astronauts and everything else and it’s not just like 20 incidents, it’s thousands and thousands of incidents’.”

KR: “Now, why aren’t there better pictures, Tom?”

TD: “There are. There are. But a lot of them are classified, for various reasons, too. It’s funny, the UFO in a video isn’t classified, but where they caught the photo might be, ya know? On what system, it might be…so that’s the problem. It’s like ‘okay, we weren’t supposed to be over Russia’ or something, ya know?…or the camera is so crazy good we don’t want anyone to know we can take pictures like that. So it’s things like that that make it difficult.”

AMK: “So, would you say one of the main reasons the government wanted…there to be a stigma so long ago, and just for itty bitty things to be leaking out now, is because it would terrify people and is it a matter of just sovereignty?”

TD: “Yeah…it would terrify people — “

KR: “What would terrify people?”

TD: “Um, I think it’s the idea that, you know, there’s something here — “

AMK: “Yeah — humans aren’t the elite beings.”

TD: “ — there’s something here that’s potentially millions of years more advanced than us. And it can do things we can barely even fathom….and what that means is that humans may not be alone or in charge — “

AMK: “And we’re not that important.”

TD: “ — we’re not.”

AMK: “ — which freaks people out.”

TD: “Yeah, but that also was one of my big pitches to the generals I first started meeting with, I was just like ‘ya know — you guys are all fighting all these wars based on belief systems but if you really attack the core issue, we might start coming together as a planet, and that’s kinda what my hope is with all this stuff over a few decades — “

KR: “That’s what The Day The Earth Stood Still was about.”

TD: “Exactly….even Independence Day was about that kinda stuff. But the reality is that once we realize that the Universe is teeming with life, that there’s billions of galaxies for a reason, ya know? It’s so weird, I remember I watched this documentary where they put a seat belt in a Ford car and they’re like ‘wow, that was a good idea’, ya know? [chuckles] It’s kinda like, ‘well, we see billions of galaxies but yet we’re still not really computing that there’s life everywhere’. And there is. So — “

KR: “Will there be a time in our lifetime, Tom, where it will be publicly accepted and acknowledged that they are here?”

TD: “It’s coming, so that’s what we’ve been doing. So at To The Stars, we have been specifically involved in three things, which is getting ready to bring out the stories, studying it with the public in really big AI database, algorithms and all this different stuff, and then the third thing is building the technology. So we’re active in all three of those — “

KR: “So you’re saying it’s coming. So, 5–10 years, 15–20 years, 20–30 years?”

TD: “I think within the next 3–5 years you’re gonna start hearing rumblings of Hearings.”

KR: “[Laugh]. Okay, but something more substantial than ‘rumblings of hearings’.”

TD: “No, no, no. Because this is a big deal…”

KR: “You’re gonna hear whisperings of rumors…[laughs]”

TD: “No, I think you’ll start to hear the pressure building to have Congressional Hearings on this.”

KR: “Oh, I see, okay.”

TD: “And then, once that happens things get a little scary, because then, on a public level, they have to act on this. Now what does that mean? What are they gonna do? Now, you know…I know a lot of things of what we’ve done, but the idea of those things happening on a public, ya know, forum is just terrifying — “

AMK: “It could be chaos.”

TD: “It could be chaos. What are you gonna do, like have a landing or something? Maybe. Maybe. Ya know, like, who knows? Ya know, I don’t know.”

[Area 51 raid gets brought up at this point]

KR: “You would be against that and you would, my guess is, advise people that the Air Force would take that seriously if people tried to get on the base?”

TD: “Oh my god they would take it seriously…I totally advise people against it for a variety of reasons. Number one, it’s not gonna change anything. Number two, people can get hurt, ya know? And number three — there’s really good reasons for things being secret. And I used to think that it was cuz ‘we couldn’t handle it’ or I used to think ‘cuz these guys want power’ and ‘it’s about oil money’. It’s all these stupid conspiratorial — it’s none of those things. It’s scary, ya know? And uh, you have a bunch of guys that do not sleep at night that are dealing with this stuff so we can go to soccer games and all that. The real way to get change is dealing with a corporate issue — it’s a bureaucratic issue. The way things are kept secret are mechanisms that are there since World War II for really good reason. So what we need to do is change the law, and the law would pry the mechanism loose of how it’s secret. Cuz right now, I mean, there’s things — they have these things called Skiffs, that are like compartment rooms, the way they’re built they’re certified so no one can eavesdrop, it’s for Top Secret communication, ya know? A conference room table where no one can listen, right? Anything that’s said in that room is owned by the room. So if you go into that room and you say something about this subject, that little moment can never leave that room or you’ll go to prison. That has nothing to do with UFOs or ISIS, it’s just the way Security Law works. So if they found a bunch of stuff out, talked about it in that room, unless there’s a law, we can’t pry that conversation out of that room…that’s kind of an example — “

KR: “A law that was made that had really nothing to do with what you’re talking about — “

TD: “Exactly — “

KR: “But you also agree, though, that the government has the right to protect State Secrets?”

TD: “Oh my god, yeah — “

KR: “As the public, we’re not owed explanations on things that we shouldn’t know?”

TD: “Not at all, yeah. We have — we’re just ignorant to how it works and why it works that way. And now that I, ya know, I’m playing in these waters, I’m like, I’m consistently wowed by what they have to deal with, and what the stakes are. That’s the big deal, like, I remember when I was doing this early on and I was just so gung-ho about getting this stuff out — whatever — and ya know, I got — I gotta be a little careful with this — I got brought in to something and they sat me down and they said, um — first, it was like ‘we need to know who the “f” you are, we need to know who the “f” you’re talking to — it was crazy, it was like two days of hardcore questioning — “

KR: “You’re lucky you didn’t end up in Guantanimo dude — “

TD: “I was pretty scared to be honest. And I remember — I talked my way outta this and they said ‘well, just let me give you an idea of the stakes of what you’re playing with’ ya know? And something was said to me and I didn’t sleep for like three nights. I was like ‘oh my god’. You just don’t have any idea as a civilian, the enormity of these things. And so we make up these stories — “

KR: “That sounds very threatening…like something could happen, if aliens who are here wanted something to happen it could and it would be bad for all of us?”

TD: “Whatever these things are…we have a Top Gun…Top Gun graduates pilots and they graduate radar operators. On our show on the History channel one of the guys was a Top Gun graduate, he controlled the entire airspace around the USS Nimitz when one of these videos that we brought out…And he was watching over a four day period one hundred of these craft came in from space over a four day period. One hundred. And they went from 80,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds…you’re dealing with technologies that are so advanced. I mean, it was captured on the Aegis Spy 1 Radar, which is the most advanced radars we have…The Princeton was an entire radar ship. This is the most elite, sophisticated — “

KR: “Can you get Allie and me abducted?…”

TD: “I can but it’s just not gonna be…I think it’s more of a sexual thing, it’s a human thing, there’s no aliens…”

[it’s very difficult at this point to tell if he’s just trying to joke along with the interviewers who are obviously trying to lighten the whole vibe — though to be fair, Tom doesn’t laugh at this quite like he did in the previous (more obvious) jokes…and I’ve also cut most of the rest of the interview out because it’s either stuff he’s already said elsewhere or not truly relating to this particular aspect I’m trying to capture]