Tom DeLonge Appears on Joe Rogan's Podcast to Talk UFO Truth, But Instead Admits His "Secret" Knowledge Comes from Old Paperback UFO Books

​Last Thursday musician and UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience in order to promote To the Stars, Inc., his for-profit technology and entertainment company currently soliciting investment from the public to pay back the company’s massive financial obligations to DeLonge and to fund its explorations into science fiction and fringe science. Basically, it amounted to DeLonge telling Rogan that he knows all sorts of cool stuff but won’t tell anyone until he gets paid.

​To understand why Tom DeLonge’s story isn’t trustworthy, even if he is telling only true statements, I think it would be helpful for me to tell a true story that is 100% factually accurate while being totally misleading:
 
Some time ago, I traveled to Washington, D.C., where I met with a man who served in a top-level position in the Administration and who had the highest security clearance. On a rainy afternoon, we met in the Russell Senate Office Building, where a friend of mine worked as a top-level Senate staffer. After an exclusive private briefing about government matters, I asked him about the UFO phenomenon, and he provided me with U.S. government information about extraterrestrial spacecraft that I, like DeLonge, am of course unwilling to share with the general public.
 
But the power of words can create a mystery where there is none. Let me pull back the curtain:
 
In 1998, I went on a high school field trip to Washington. A classmate of mine, who would, as an adult, serve as a Senate staffer, had an uncle who was a longtime aid to Joe Biden and served in a high ranking position under Biden in the Obama Administration. He volunteered to give the class a tour of the Senate and share “inside” information about how government works. I did indeed ask him about UFOs because it was 1998 and The X-Files was huge. As for the “information”… Well, it was just that Congress didn’t have any since it wasn’t a subject they worked on. He jokingly said not to tell anyone.
 
I like the first version better, and clearly DeLonge is a fan of spinning mysteries out of half-truths, selective information, and implication.
 
The interview began with DeLonge telling Rogan that the U.S. government has time travel technology that uses time bubbles and the Doppler effect’s “red shift” to allow viewers to review frozen moments in time. He claims that he is working on an electromagnetic vehicle that will move through time. Rogan pressed DeLonge to explain more, and DeLonge said that he would not go into it for reasons he also declined to provide. He made frequent reference to minor U.S. government agents and officials, and implied—but never actually said—that the government had asked him to keep quiet for the good of society. Basically, it’s high-gloss bullshit. During the podcast he admitted that he has never been “read in” on classified information.
 
Indeed, listen to how Tom DeLonge describes his particular brand of “secret” knowledge of UFOs and fringe phenomena: “I also knew that I knew shit that most people don’t know because I’ve studied it for so long and I happened to put some pieces together that most people don’t put together.” DeLonge repeatedly declined to explain what connections he had made that others do not share, but he claims that his novel Sekret Machines prompted the government to kidnap him and interrogate him at a hotel for two days because of his supposed knowledge of international governments cooperating to track UFOs. DeLonge said that the U.S. government believed he had illegal access to classified information because his novel came too close to the truth. Even Rogan found this hard to swallow, particularly when DeLonge said that he has been told never again to speak about the material already published in his book which is currently for sale for cash money. What a crock. Basically he is saying: Buy my book because the government won’​t let me read it out loud! Pay me! Pay me! Pay me!
 
Rogan asked where this secret information really came from, and DeLonge confessed that it came from twentieth century UFO books. DeLonge said that he had spent a decade reading books about UFOs before he had this revelation, and here you can see the problem: He has simply absorbed crappy UFO books, the same ones that I and most of you have also read, and mistook the shared fictional world of ufology for a representation of reality. Just because these paperback fantasies tell variations on the same story doesn’t make them true. We have seen in these pages time and again that the books are packed with lies. Oh, and just for kicks, DeLonge attributes the secrecy to international bankers, or in his sloppy phrasing “world bankers,” which has been code for “evil Jews” for more than a century. He seems a little dim to know that, but then again, he also announced his belief (clearly born of uncritical reading of shitty paperback books) that the Nazis had sophisticated alien technology that they secreted away in Argentina and used to create the craft that crashed at Roswell. Specifically, the Argentinian Nazi UFO claim comes from Mattern Friedrich’s bonkers 1970s book UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons. DeLonge, who praised the Nazis for being “100 years ahead of us,” has merely substituted Roswell for Friedrich’s claim that the Nazi UFOs arrived in Washington as the famous 1952 U.S. Capitol sighting. Roswell wasn’t famous in the 1970s because its myth had not yet been invented practically from whole cloth.
 
DeLonge also claims that there is a group of “dudes in suits” who manage culture in order to hide the truth about aliens from humanity, mostly by creating “memes” that distract the public from essential questions. You will recognize this claim. It’s from Jacques Vallée’s 1979 book Messengers of Deception.
 
The more DeLonge talks, the easier it becomes to see how his reading of 1970s-1990s paperback fringe books underlies the UFO fantasy he has woven together. We already know that DeLonge’s views on ancient astronauts draw heavily on Zecharia Sitchin, with a few minor tweaks. (See my Sekret Machines: God, Man and War review, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) He also made the absurd claim that the Roswell wreckage had an inscription written in ancient Greek that said “freedom.” This claim has been banging about the internet since the 1990s, but it’s based on a fake image generated from drawings made decades after the fact. The supposed characters later transmuted in myth into “glyphs” originate in the tape used to hold together the spy balloon that actually crashed in Roswell. The tape was from a toy factory and had a pattern of kid-friendly shapes such as hearts, clouds, etc., according to Kendrick Frazier, writing in the current Skeptical Inquirer.
 
DeLonge claims that a U.S. government official met with him in public at an airport restaurant, and informed DeLonge—again, in public!—that the U.S. government found an alien lifeform during the Cold War. Naturally, DeLonge offered no proof and no details, and in fact he concedes that he never asked the official where the lifeform was found or what it is. You would think someone who claims to be obsessed with aliens would be interested in such niceties as what the goddamn aliens look like, or how they know them to be from another world. When Rogan asked him if he considered that the man might be a liar, DeLonge said it was not possible. (Ha!) Instead, he turned the conversation back to himself and explained that the Pentagon wanted DeLonge because “I have a service” that provides the Pentagon with entertainment and social media communication services to provide minor disclosures to “young people.” DeLonge claims that Pentagon officials cannot share the information themselves because … and I cannot believe I am writing this … he said they do not have a way to communicate through entertainment without him. “This shit is monumentally big,” he said. I couldn’t agree more. This is a massive pile of shit.
 
The Pentagon, you will recall, pays for military propaganda to be inserted into sporting events (they invented the decade-old “tradition” of NFL players lining up for the national anthem) and into entertainment programs and Hollywood movies, which give the government veto power over scripts. Given the government’s high-level connections with the biggest sports leagues and Hollywood studios, I cannot imagine why they would need a third-rate former rock star for their messaging, especially one that DeLonge himself admits feels no need to share “everything” but only select disclosures that he feels the public would be able to handle.
 
Does that mean that we must modify his claim to say that he is asking to be paid to decide for us what we can handle? Presumably this will include the fake facts that DeLonge endorsed, such as “nuclear” bombs on Mars (as seen on Ancient Aliens) and the imaginary pyramids of Mars. It will not, however, include questions about whether human beings are alien hybrids or whether aliens are masquerading as celebrities since DeLonge considers such questions “disturbing” and said that the public doesn’t “need to know that shit.” Would you trust DeLonge to decide what you can and cannot handle?
 
The only interesting thing I found in the podcast is DeLonge’s claim that a lump of metal supposedly from a UFO was “3D printed” from various metals of exceptional purity, formed in zero-gravity with physical properties not of this Earth. He alleges that when exposed to electron beams the metal loses mass and will float. DeLonge claims he will soon show the metal, but what is interesting to me is that the claim is quite similar to Jacques Vallée’s recent claim that he, too, was investigating lumps of metal from UFOs and also found unearthly physical properties. Is this a coincidence? It seems strange to find two ufologists making quite similar claims within weeks of one another. Unlike Vallée, however, DeLonge claims that his piece of metal, when used in airplane-like vehicles, will distort space-time to make transportation faster. That said, the claim that metals can be 3D-printed to allow “consciousness” to “move through” their molecules will require much more proof than a fading rock star’s say-so.
 
DeLonge said he met with an unnamed director of both the CIA and NSA, and that he had asked DeLonge to connect UFOs to Greek mythology, a pet subject of his. Even though Michael Hayden is the only person I am aware of who has served in both positions, DeLonge claims it is not him. Whoever the man is supposed to be, DeLonge said that he directed DeLonge to a specific, and again unnamed, Sumerian king as a key figure in the UFO enigma. (I assume he is misremembering either the Gilgamesh epic or the “mystery” of why the Sumerian King List closely resembles the list of antediluvian Jewish patriarchs, both popular subjects in fringe literature.) DeLonge added that Zecharia Sitchin is the only person to have come close to the truth when he determined that angels and gods were actually evil space aliens, excepting of course DeLonge himself, who knows the “real” truth.
 
Rogan and DeLonge repeat many silly Sitchin claims about Sumerians, which are actually referring to Babylonians, and they allege that the ancients had a map of the solar system, including the dwarf planet Pluto. The image in question is not a “map,” is not to scale, and does not depict the solar system. It shows some circles surrounding a six-pointed star. Unless your solar system contains a bunch of planets about to crash into each other, it is not a map of anything. Here is a lengthier analysis from Michael Heiser with extensive detail on the image in question. 
 
DeLonge also said he believed that humans lived alongside dinosaurs and that there were antediluvian lost civilizations. He claimed that the U.S. government invaded Iraq to gain access to the records of these lost civilizations, which is an internet conspiracy that sprang up in the wake of the Iraq War in a failed attempt to justify George W. Bush’s war of choice in cosmic terms.
 
I went into the interview thinking DeLonge was merely an opportunist looking to cash in. But then his frequent reference to young adults twenty years his junior and his harking back to his own adolescent years two decades ago strongly suggested that alongside whatever financial motives he has, DeLonge is also a case of arrested development, trying to eternally relive his youth through a fantasy life based on the interests of his own young adult years. However, near the end of the podcast, money reared its head again. Even Rogan found himself baffled by DeLonge’s conspiratorial sales pitch that the public should buy the “small amount” of shares in his company (5 million out of around 100 million, according to SEC filings) so that the public will have a vested interest when the government tries to shut down the company for exposing too much truth, the same government that DeLonge claimed to be working with hand-in-glove. He can’t really get his story straight because the fringe conspiracies are coloring atop an entertainment company. It’s just another story.
 
“What we’re doing happens to be extremely lucrative,” DeLonge said, honestly, before backtracking and telling another story about how he will create a trillion-dollar super-spaceship, presumably the same one that will be traveling through time. Cool story, bro.
 
Joe Rogan asked if UFO disclosure is DeLonge’s end goal. “My end goal is to build a company that changes the world by doing a traditional IPO in the next five to seven years,” DeLonge said. Were there ever more inspiring words, or a greater rallying cry in tireless pursuit of truth? It’s almost endearing how DeLonge keeps blurting out the truth no matter how hard he tries to obfuscate and dissemble.