Tom DeLonge Says That His "Strong Sense of Business" Will Help Him Dole Out UFO Revelations Little by Little for "Years" to Come

​I must admit to being a bit surprised that it seems that no professional reviewers, or even UFO enthusiasts, have reviewed Peter Levenda’s new book, Sekret Machines: Gods. I had expected to see at least some reviews outside of Amazon.com customer reviews, especially since this wasn’t just a self-published vanity project but had secured distribution through Simon & Schuster’s network. As best I can tell, however, credited author Tom DeLonge’s company, To the Stars, Inc., did only puff-piece publicity for the book, which he tied in with the near simultaneous paperback release of his novel Chasing Shadows from last year. This pulled the focus from the new release to DeLonge’s personality and business instead. While I didn’t expect him to send me a review copy, I didn’t hear from anyone working in media that they had received one, either. No wonder it landed with such a resounding thud. As of this writing, a Google search for the book plus the word “review” brings up just my review and sales pages. No wonder Levenda was upset with me.

​But it did make me wonder a bit, so I looked into some of the publicity interviews DeLonge did over the past few weeks, and I found one from the San Diego Union-Tribune that was particularly revealing. Take a look at what he said. The ellipses and parentheses are in the original:

“So, in order to have a conversation about how this one subject matter — UFOs — has affected all the branches of the truth, we have to start with the ideas of ancient gods and the mythologies they represent that maybe weren’t mythologies. And then we have to look at how man has been dealing with this, since at least World War II. … I want people to have facts. Doing fiction and non-fiction books is the best of both worlds…
 
“This isn’t about landings, or abductions, or seeing something in the sky — there are thousands of books that do that. This is about how we come to grips with it and where we’re going in the future, and understanding it and pushing back, for the first time in human history. That doesn’t make too much sense here (and now), but it would, if we go a few years down the road and see the feature film and the documentary.”

​As regular readers know, I don’t accept the assumption that UFOs represent a single phenomenon, or that they affect “all the branches of the truth.” That’s an assumption, and one that needs to be proved rather than assumed. But I am interested in DeLonge’s second paragraph, where he all but admits that his book and video series is intended to dribble out the so-called “truth” little by little to keep customers buying without actually providing the revelations initially promised. Remember when Sekret Machines was going to blow the lid off UFOs? Somehow the goal posts have moved, and now it’s a thought experiment about how humanity should deal with aliens. What a letdown!
 
In his interview with the Union-Tribune, DeLonge teased an upcoming “announcement” that would change everything … unless it won’t. DeLonge said the announcement wouldn’t say anything specific, but that we would need to “read between the lines.” In other words, it’s more smoke and mirrors. But it’s just what we would expect from a man who describes himself as having “a strong sense of business.” Those are his own words. He added that “I don’t want to talk about it” when asked to elaborate, but he did promise “years” of slow-drip publicity stunts teasing a revelation that will never come.
 
All of this has caught the attention of ufologists, even if they haven’t been quick to review his book, and there have been rather large number of ufologists alleging that DeLonge (who once mistook a scene from a Spielberg TV miniseries for leaked government UFO footage) is a dupe under the spell of a government-run disinformation campaign, or is even an active disinformation agent himself. The High Strangeness Show, for example, said this week of DeLonge and Levenda that “Their military-industrial and intelligence community sources are attempting to sell the national security state to a new generation and control the UFO narrative to the masses.”
 
Here’s where I think I differ from some of the ufologists who are upset with DeLonge. I don’t think that the U.S. government purposely developed a UFO phenomenon as part of a vast campaign of deception. I’ve read the same government documents as the ufologists, and they seem to support a less purposeful reading. The available documentation suggests that the UFO “phenomenon” emerged as a result of science fiction readers and writers, notably Ray Palmer, imposing a narrative on a series of disparate events that only gradually solidified into the “UFO” phenomenon. The first “UFOs” after all were tiny little things before they became giant ships. (The description of the Roswell weather balloon as a flying “disc” was just one of many tiny flying discs reported in the 1940s.) The government seems to have taken advantage of the developing story rather than having created it, using it as cover for covert spying operations and aircraft testing. The government seems more an accidental participant than the prime mover, and perhaps that is the “secret” that nobody has an interest in letting us know.