In 2015, Tom DeLonge walked away from Blink-182, the band that made him famous, to chase something almost nobody took seriously: the idea that the US government was sitting on real footage of unidentified aircraft. Five years later, the Pentagon proved him right.

The Rocker Who Quit for UFOs

DeLonge had spent years talking publicly about his fascination with UFOs, often to bemused interviewers who treated it as a punchline.

In 2017, he formalized that obsession by co-founding To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a company built around aerospace research and the study of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.

Critics were blunt about it. Headlines called him the "UFO-obsessed rocker." Fans wondered if the guy behind "All The Small Things" had lost the plot.

Three Videos Nobody Could Explain

DeLonge's organization didn't just talk about UFOs. It obtained and published real cockpit footage from US Navy pilots.

In December 2017, The New York Times ran two of the clips, known as "FLIR1" and "GIMBAL," showing Navy pilots reacting with disbelief as an object outmaneuvered their jet. A third video, "GoFast," followed soon after.

All three showed unexplained objects recorded during real training missions, first in 2004 and again in 2015.

In September 2019, a Navy spokesman confirmed the footage was genuine and said the objects were officially classified as "unidentified aerial phenomena" spotted entering restricted military training ranges.

A US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet in flight against a blue sky, the same type of aircraft flown by the pilots who recorded the GIMBAL and GoFast footage — Navy pilots recorded the footage from F/A-18 fighter jets during training missions.

The Pentagon Makes It Official

Confirming the videos were real was one thing. Officially releasing them was another.

On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense declassified and formally published the exact same three videos DeLonge's group had put out years earlier.

The department said it was releasing the footage "to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real."

It confirmed the objects in all three clips remain officially unidentified. No explanation was offered for what they actually were.

Not So Wacky After All

The reaction was immediate. News outlets that had once treated DeLonge's UFO chase as a punchline now had to reckon with the fact that he had been ahead of the government's own paperwork.

DeLonge celebrated the moment publicly, thanking the shareholders who had backed his company through years of ridicule.

One entertainment outlet summed up the reversal simply: the wacky outer space guy from Blink-182 wasn't so wacky after all.

He never confirmed there were aliens. He didn't have to. He just had to be right that something was there, years before the Pentagon was ready to say so.

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