Tom DeLonge first rose to fame as the frontman for pop-punk trio Blink-182. After leaving the band, DeLonge had enough free time to pursue his true passion: UFOs.
If you weren’t a teen or tween in the late 90s/early 00s, then you might be asking yourself who Tom DeLonge is. The short answer is that he was in a very famous band whose songs you have heard on TV at some point in your life, even if you didn’t realize it. They broke up in 2005, got back together in 2009, and DeLonge left the band for good in 2015.
DeLonge’s Wikipedia page describes him as “[p]ossessing a distinctive nasal singing voice,” which is something of a backhanded compliment. He is also the favorite musician and personal hero of Dave, a contestant on The Great British Bake Off, who recently created a cake sculpture of DeLonge. It looked like this:
But DeLonge made headlines recently for something unrelated to music or nightmarish cake sculptures. It turns out that he’s the founder of the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a group dedicated to researching UFOs and uncovering the truth about aliens.
Remember those declassified Pentagon videos that seem to show UFOs flying alongside Navy planes? Those videos were initially released by the New York Times and To the Stars. DeLonge is very, very serious about finding proof of alien visitors to Earth. As he told the Times in an interview last year:
I saw some really anomalous stuff one night out in the desert, zipping across the stars, horizon to horizon, zig zagging. That really blew my mind because no satellites move that way. But, I can’t tell you what it was. I think like most people, the stuff that I’ve seen is a lot of stuff on the internet where I bet some of it really is true, but you really don’t know which pieces.
That’s a long walk to today’s news, which is that Tom DeLonge will make his directorial debut with Monsters of California. It’s described in the official press release as a “coming of age adventure with a science fiction twist,” which mirrors DeLonge’s own childhood interest in sci-fi. He will serve as director, co-producer, and co-screenwriter. Oh, and he’s doing the soundtrack, too.
DeLonge posted on social media that the movie is full of “blink-era dick jokes, skateboarding culture, UFOs and a few sekrets [sic] thrown in.”
I don’t really know how to unpack that statement, to be honest. What “sekrets” does DeLonge know? So far, what we do know is that the film stars Richard Kind, Casper Van Dien, and Arianne Zucker. No offense, but those aren’t exactly blockbuster names. Monsters of California is likely to be a low-budget sci-fi flick that inexplicably shows up for rent at Red Box one day.
But honestly, with movie theaters in danger of extinction–and with them, mega-budget movies that need to make a billion dollars at the box office–smaller movies might be the way of the future. In the meantime, DeLonge is also producing Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation for the History Channel.
