Tom DeLonge is a Scam Artist
I grew up listening to Blink 182. They were my first concert. I have a tattoo of the “moshing rabbit” they used as a mascot during their early days. I defended them when my punk-rock-loving friends in high school demeaned them and said they “weren’t real punk.”
But none of that mattered. I loved the music.
Then Tom DeLonge, the guitarist and nasally co-frontman for the band got weird. His counterparts, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker, started a new band called +44, DeLonge started Angels and Airwaves, and I preferred the former.
DeLonge started making promises on indie music sites, like Chorus.fm (formerly absolutepunk.net), about very ambitious projects. Then he underdelivered. Got back together with Blink for another album, then had no interest in doing more. All the while, continuing to emphasize (even recently) that he was still in the band. Completely ignoring he had been replaced by Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio.
One project seems to have dominated the majority of his endeavors, that being To the Stars Academy. An alleged “school” with a group of “specialists” that claim to have loads of secrets on UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
Were DeLonge to have a group of competent individuals to work in this field, I might feel differently than I do. Sadly the qualifications of the individuals working on this project, while impressive, are nothing close to experts to speak on extraterrestrial life.
On the staff page of the site, a number of people who sound proficient, with impressive credentials, pops up. Jim Semivan, a former CIA “spy” (his words) with a BA in English Literature and Secondary Education, and an MA in English Lit, has firsthand knowledge of UFOs. Including a video (which we’ll get to later). While those are great accomplishments, it doesn’t seem up to par with expertise in astrobiology or physics.
Also on the list are individuals like Luis Elizondo who worked for the Department of Defense. He appeared on CNN giving answers to journalists questions about an odd thing caught on camera. He ultimately felt, emphasizing it was his personal opinion and not reflective of his former department’s analysis or conclusions, that “we may be not alone.”
DeLonge’s team also includes geneticist Dr. Gary Nolan, Brain Function and Consciousness Consultant (???) Dr. Paul Rapp (who has published works on TBI and human central nervous systems, among other neurological issues), Dr. Norm Kahn who is an oceanographer, and Dr. Colm Kelleher, who is a biochemist.
Kelleher wrote a book about a ranch in Utah and paranormal activity which…was proven to be bunk (thanks James Randi).
Harold Puthoff is on staff; an electrical engineer who started a division of the CIA that studied paranormal activity. Among others, he was well known for alleging to have “proven” that Uri Geller had legitimate psychic abilities. After refusing to provide transcripts to others who wanted to do testing to confirm his findings, and then being unable to replicate the findings with the limited transcripts he offered, it was shown Geller was doing slight of hand tricks that required zero super powers.
What’s missing from this team are astronomers. Astrophysicists. Astrobiologists. People who could study, demonstrate, and confirm, extraterrestrial life. The team consists of people who have engineering capabilities, certainly. However, without physicists standing by to study, plot, and affirm or deny claims and evidence, this team just seems unnecessary.
It took Neil deGrasse Tyson viewing the video to say there was nothing there to see, claiming it was paltry evidence for an alien life. Tyson said the “UFO” designation is a vague descriptor to say describe what it is: unidentified objects that happen to be flying. To conclude “we don’t know what it is, therefore aliens” is a leap. He commented that he would believe it once DeLonge and his crew were having tea with the actual lifeforms they claim are visiting.
Late last year, DeLonge appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss his company, To the Stars, and the evidence for alien life. It’s painful, to say the least. What it ultimately does is show why evidence is important.
It also demonstrates why, if you’re going to be the face of a science-based organization, it’s important to know the lingo.
Here are a few quotes from that interview.
(When asked about, really, anything) I don’t wanna get into that.
I haven’t seen anything physically…
(When asked about people who communicated with him) I can’t say who they were…I can’t tell you who it’s from.
I don’t know what spectrum of infrared [the satellites he’s incredibly vague about] function off of.
Rogan looks increasingly more frustrated and distrusting of DeLonge as the interview continues. At one point, DeLonge is discussing how they are able to put a gravitational bubble around an object and how it changes the spacetime continuum around it. He claims that they are able to demonstrate this by “shooting a single electron” over the object.
Rogan (in bold) asks an obvious question:
How do you shoot a single electron?
Fuck if I know. I’m not a physicist.
How would they do that?
They’re doing crazier shit at CERN.
To recap (DeLonge’s stunning lack of knowledge around something he is purporting to be objective fact and represents as something his organization is active in demonstrating and proving as factual), DeLonge isn’t a physicist. He doesn’t know how to explain something he is hoping people take at his word, and then says “other people are doing harder stuff, so it’s not unreasonable that this could be true, according to him.
Rogan points out the enormous size of CERN, but DeLonge deflects and changes the subject.
DeLonge also throws out terms without knowing what they mean. He mentions “artificial gravity bubbles.” While artificial gravity is possible, having it in a bubble is nothing short of science fiction. If he’d like us to believe this is possible, he needs to bring a physicist on board who can evaluate the claim, witness the experiment, do the math, and then give DeLonge the information in a way he is capable of communicating to the public.
DeLonge also mentions that the bubble “red shifts,” and people inside the bubble freeze and you can move cans of Coke from one person’s hand to the next. While maybe the interpretation of what time travel might look like from someone on the outside seems plausible, we lack the capabilities of having that happen in the same place at the same time as people being capable of interacting with them and remaining unaffected. Mostly because, according to General Relativity, time dilation doesn’t occur in the same place and time due to gravity. Unless they’re creating a blackhole (in which case, there would be circumstances DeLonge wouldn’t be around to tell, let alone others to report the time travel).
As for red shift…unless the object was moving away from the observer, DeLonge is completely wrong about what he was talking about. Red shift occurs when a light-emitting object moves further away from an observer, causing the wavelengths to grow longer and shifting the light towards the red end of the spectrum.
DeLonge mentioned satellites that function off of infrared wavelengths, but not knowing the wavelength they function off of. Were these satellites fiber optic? Are they satellites that guide missiles? Telecommunications? Thermal-imaging? It seems like an important thing to know, especially with former military specialists on board. Are aliens firing missiles at us or messing with our cell phones? Am I blaming Verizon or Venutians for my dropped calls?
This just shows the claim he made in the interview about “studying physics” is malarkey.
The next big claim is a material that was “atomically aligned” and had “eighty layers within a few microns.” I’m not sure how DeLonge was able to discover something that was “atomically aligned” without a team of chemists on board. And for the second claim, he mentions layers of…what? A few microns is an incredibly minute measurement (one micron = 10^-6 meters). So knowing what these layers are is pretty important. The closest he comes is mentioning metals “of purity not in our solar system…made in an area where there’s no gravity.”
To start, it must have been pretty difficult for those metals to have been “made” with no gravity as…there’s fucking gravity everywhere. When astronauts are out in space, they are not experiencing zero gravity. They are in free fall around the Earth, or the Sun. If there was zero gravity outside of Earth’s atmosphere, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and every planet after ours would be missing. Gravity isn’t necessarily the strongest force, but it’s one of the farthest reaching. Even outside of our solar system, there is a level of gravity that keeps our solar system, as well as the billions of others, tied to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
As for the metal “purity,” DeLonge is talking about? It’s pure nonsense. It was something concocted by a research group with a deep-seeded confirmation bias that alien life forms have visited our planet. In fact, there was nothing to confirm much of what they reported, save for the fact they found some alloys. Something a grad student could easily analyze and find conclusive information on, including where in the universe it had likely come from.
Anyone heard of a terahertz? DeLonge mentions using “terahertz [radiation]” against the alloy he claims they’ve found, being able to lower the object’s mass, and then make it levitate. Sadly, he would not be able to demonstrate this because they “lack the power” to do so. It sounds like a nifty theoretical physics prediction, except it’s bullshit. Scientists have actually discovered, as early as 2009, that terahertz radiation can be produced simply by peeling tape.
Beyond all this, DeLonge talks about his interactions with people involved like the kid you went to middle school with who claims to have a girlfriend at another school in Canada. He references meetings with “Generals…multi-star Generals” and “Admirals” like those titles, without military division they’re from, names, or how they’re involved in such goings-ons, means anything.
DeLonge hides everything that might lend credence to his claims with calls to secrecy, except if he’s already talked about it in one of his books, interviews, or other projects that require you to pay. In fact, it almost becomes transparent that this is all a ploy to sell more of his science fiction work now that Blink 182 has given him the boot.
No names, no scientifically verifiable, or physically possible, concepts, and everything he either doesn’t want to talk about or claims he can’t. DeLonge is the walking example of why a bibliography is necessary.
Stay in school kids. And don’t do drugs.
