DISGRACELAND - Blink-182: Tom Was Right. Aliens Exist.

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Everyone thought Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge was a joke, until he proved them all wrong. This is the story of government control, aliens, an arrest, a plane crash, a cancer diagnosis, redemption, and (o...f course) anti-authority punk rock. Do you believe in Non-Human Intelligence? Have you had an experience with UFOs? Let Jake know and tell your story at 617-906-6638, disgracelandpod@gmail.com, or on socials @disgracelandpod. This episode was originally published on January 28, 2025. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:01 This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about Blink 182, which means it's also a story about dick jokes, about running through the streets of Los Angeles naked and about simple, infectious, juvenile pop punk. It's also a story about the truth,
Starting point is 00:00:41 about what the government does and does not want us to talk about, or even to think about. It's about a plane crash, a cancer diagnosis, and about a snot-nosed punk from Southern California, who was expelled from high school but would eventually find himself taking meetings with White House personnel. A snot-nose punk who, in his band, Blink 182, made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show,
Starting point is 00:01:12 that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my Melotron, called Husker Do's Books About UFOs, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to blinding lights by the weekend. And why would I play you that specific slice of 80s time machine cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America
Starting point is 00:01:40 on April 27, 2020. And that was the day that the Department of Defense did something it had never done before. Disclosed information to the public regarding the likely existence of life from beyond this planet and or this dimension. On this episode, dick jokes, government lies,
Starting point is 00:02:03 aliens exist, and blink 182. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. Exist. But don't take my word for it, or anybody's word for it, for that matter. Look at the evidence.
Starting point is 00:02:53 The federal government's actions, to be exact. Look at the front page of the New York Times, where it was reported in 2020, that U.S. intelligence agencies had established a program called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, to quote, standardized collection and reporting of sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, unquote. On the Times website and across the Internet, You can find videos of these so-called, unexplained aerial vehicles captured by naval pilots. Videos of aircraft moving in unearthly ways that defy physics.
Starting point is 00:03:33 Video footage, the Times calls, mystifying. If you dig an inch deeper, you'll quickly learn about the legitimacy of these videos. You'll find countless military personnel from the last 75 years, many highly decorated, many who put their credibility, on the line. Credibility they spent their entire careers building, detailing the very real experiences with similar logic-defying aircraft that will lead you to only one possible explanation. Aliens exist. They're real. You know what else is real? What the government does and does not want us to think. Up until about seven years ago, it was very evident that the government did not want us to think that aliens did indeed exist or that they were real.
Starting point is 00:04:25 No, that type of thinking was wrong. It was wrong, think. Very, very bad. That thinking was for crackpots who spent a little too much time believing the headlines they read in the supermarket checkout line. And there was a time back in the 20th century when the government didn't want us thinking or speaking about much more than God, country, and family. And this is all changed, of course. The government doesn't care too much these days about God, country, and family.
Starting point is 00:04:49 but back in 1966, if you use the wrong type of language, language that, of course, encouraged subversive thinking, if you demonstrated wrong think by using the wrong language in public, you'd go to jail. Ask comedian Lenny Bruce, who was arrested for saying nine specific words. Ass, balls, cock sucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss shit, and tits. Then, six years later in 1972, comedian George Carlin had this to say about it.
Starting point is 00:05:22 In poor taste, unseemly, street talk, gutter talk, locker room language. Boddy, naughty, saucy, raunchy, rude, crude, lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off-color. Risky, suggestive. Cursing, cussing, swearing, and all I could think of was shit-piss, fuck, cuck, a motherfucker, That bit from Carlin's 1972 album Class Clown was played on WBAI Radio in New York in 1973. A complaint was filed against the radio station and the federal communications commission, the FCC,
Starting point is 00:06:07 issued a declaration backing the complaint, holding the radio station accountable. The complaint was filed in court and it went all the way to the Supreme Court where it was found that, yes, under no circumstance, Does the government want you to say the words, ass, balls, cock, sucker, cunt fuck motherfucker piss shit and tits on its airwaves? Count the snotty Southern California pop punk band Blink 182
Starting point is 00:06:32 among the innumerable counterculture subversives who didn't get the Supreme Court's memo. That's Blink 182's live staple family reunion, which is essentially George Carlin's seven words you can never say on television, and routine set to music. The Boys in Blink added fart, turd, and twat for good measure. And that song was released as a promotional single in 1999. Now, there's no telling whether or not those lyrics were swimming through Blink 182
Starting point is 00:07:16 guitarist and co-singer songwriter Tom DeLong's head back in 1995, while he sat handcuffed in the back of a Jacksonville, Florida police cruiser, busted for wandering the streets of Jacksonville drunk and carrying an open container while, while on the group's first real tour, Tom was in for a long night in jail, a night where Tom's imagination would see him through. It was always Tom's ability to dream that delivered him through the tough times. Through the monotony of a bored suburban teenage existence, through the bleakness of a grown-up prescribed adult future in a cubicle or on a construction site, through his parents splitting up, through getting expelled from high school. They could tell him
Starting point is 00:08:02 there was no future, but they couldn't make him believe it. The local library back in Pauley, California, gave his dreams wings, books about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination. Punk rock gave him the audacity he needed to question authority. Chin, have you seen him? Charlie don't serve? California Uber Alas. All of the subversiveness that was at the core of the West Coast punk ethos that Tom
Starting point is 00:08:31 DeLong raised himself. on, made it very easy for him to call bullshit on the official government narratives aimed at explaining away the topics he obsessed over in his local library. The U.S. Air Force's Roswell report on the 1947 New Mexico UFO crash and the report from the trumped-up warrant commission on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Please, you had to be a mindless automaton to accept these explanations as anything more than what they obviously were. Lies from a government hell-bent on bending the public's perception of the truth to its will. On that first Blink 182 tour back in 1995, Tom's bandmates, bassist, and fellow
Starting point is 00:09:18 singer-songwriter Mark Hoppiss, and original drummer Scott Rayner, no doubt had no idea what to think as they drove through Dallas's Dealey Plaza, the site of President Kennedy's assassination 32 years earlier, and listened to their bandmate Tom go on and on over his theory that Kennedy was shot because he had learned the truth about aliens, and that JFK was going to disclose to the American public evidence proving aliens exist. In 1995, this type of thinking seemed hysterical, but Tombed along, this type of thinking was essential. After bouncing from that Jacksonville jail with a slap on the wrist, after taking in a rocket, launch in nearby Cape Canaveral.
Starting point is 00:10:03 After rapping a successful first tour in 1995, after breaking through on the 1996 Warp Tour and capitalizing on a major label bidding war, after signing with MCA records and releasing an album that went gold, after parting ways with their original drummer and replacing him with the percussive juggernaut that is Travis Barker, after casting Alyssa Frickin Milano in their music video and downgrading America's collective maturity level
Starting point is 00:10:29 a couple notches with songs about shitting your pants and getting laid, this type of thinking, this hysterical wrong think, was absolutely driving Tom DeLong to write the lyrics for Blink 182's song, Aliens Exist. A song that nearly everyone laughed off as just another example of Blink 182's staggering level of immaturity. A song with a sentiment that would one day compel the United States government to take Tom DeLong as nothing less than dead serious.
Starting point is 00:11:03 The United States government lets you get away with a lot of things. For instance, you can wake up one morning and walk into your recording studio and rant into the microphone about what a bunch of deplicitous controlling autocrats the government is made up of, and depending on the size of your microphone, you can pretty much get away with it as I am right now. What you can't get away with is not forking over to the government, it's peace. its take. And if you don't pay the government the taxes it demands, a massive percentage of which is exorbitant and unnecessary, the government will apply a Vig to the principal amount you owe,
Starting point is 00:12:03 which will, in turn, make your debt nearly impossible to pay off. Does this sound familiar to you? It sounds to me like the mafia. It's the same tactic gangsters have used for years in their Shylock businesses. Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction once said, quote, in the government are no different. And he wasn't wrong, not in principle. The federal government is, of course, more evolved and more sophisticated than the mafia. If, say, you're a porn star and you owe, oh, I don't know, $300,000 in back taxes, now you know full well, as we all do, that you should have paid those taxes.
Starting point is 00:12:43 Making tax payments is not a new concept, but it's easy to see how entertainers, athletes, and those in the workforce who aren't accustomed to coming into massive cash windfalls fail to make payments. You get paid $600 grand for a couple of skinflicks, and all of a sudden you have to fork over 50% to the feds. Now, for a porn star, that's hard to swallow. Sorry, I couldn't resist. This is, after all, still a Blink 182 episode,
Starting point is 00:13:10 even though I'm talking about tax rates at the moment, but I promise this is going somewhere relevant. So, anyway, you're a porn star who owes $300,000 in taxes. The government isn't going to act like the mafia and blow up your place of business with a pipe bomb, but it is going to send agents to your house and those fancy windbreakers at an ungodly early morning hour, raid your place, take you away in handcuffs, and throw you in a federal prison. And that's what happened to Janine Lendemolder in 2009. And despite the fact that she'd starred in a Blink 182 video 10 years earlier,
Starting point is 00:13:44 there was nothing she could do about it. Janine was going to jail. Because, as Tom DeLong would soon find out, the federal government does not fuck around. But back in 1999, Janine had no way at knowing that. She had other things on her mind, like the three skinny naked punk rock dudes ogling her on a Los Angeles street corner while the cameras rolled. This was a different camera crew than Janine was used to. This wasn't a Valley production.
Starting point is 00:14:15 This was more Hollywood. The boys in the band were nice enough and fun. despite being wickedly horny. Janine saw real quick that the boys in Blink were about to learn the hard truth about a skin flick production, and that's that being naked in front of scores of people in broad daylight, it might be funny or sexy when the finished edit hits screens, but while you're making the thing, being naked on set sucks. Sure, you look all daring and cool running through the streets of Hollywood,
Starting point is 00:14:45 filming your new video for your incredibly catchy song, What's My Age Again? But then once they call cut, you're just a schmuck and a skin-colored speedo and nothing else on, standing on the side of West Third in L.A. while dudes and Jeep Cherokees drive by and give you the finger and launch homophobic slurs at you. Janine, of course, thought it was hysterical. So did the rest of America. The video, that is, not the homophobic cutdowns. What's My Age Again was a massive hit, both as a video and a single, propelling Blink 182's newest album at the time, Enema of the State, to sell 15 million copies, probably more by now. Enema of the state also featured the song, Aliens Exist. With the lyrics, Hey Mom, there's something in the back room.
Starting point is 00:15:35 Hope it's not the creature from above. You used to read me stories as if my dreams were boring. We all know conspiracies are dumb. And what if people knew that these were real? I'd leave my closet door open all night. I know what the CIA would say, what you hear is all hearsay. I wish someone would tell me what was right.
Starting point is 00:15:57 Tom DeLong, who wrote those lyrics, though, was wrong about the CIA. Someone was, in fact, about to tell him what exactly was right. Enema of the state turned Blink 182 into a household name. Their next album, featuring another trademark juvenile blink title, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, was also a hit. They followed that up with a self-titled full-length in 2003.
Starting point is 00:16:24 After that effort, the band entered a phase that is treacherous ground for any group of self-respecting rock stars. Adulthood. Life changed for Tom DeLong, Mark Hoppice, and Travis Barker. In 2005, Tom quit the band to be with his family. In 2008, Travis Barker was in a private plane crash in which six people died. He was severely injured,
Starting point is 00:16:48 along with his friend, a musical collaborator in his group, Travis D.J. AM, Adam Goldstein, aka DJAM, who was driven back into addiction after the crash and the trauma of it all. He overdosed and died in 2009. And the extremely traumatic event nearly drove Travis to suicide, but ultimately he recovered both physically and mentally from the horrible experience. In 2009, Tom DeLong rejoined Blink 182, and the group embarked on another chapter, touring and releasing the full-length album Neighborhoods. The album was well-received critically. It was a progression from their more youthful efforts, but was that necessarily a good thing? In the end, the album failed to set the world on fire.
Starting point is 00:17:36 And throughout the early odds, and after reuniting with Blink 182, Tom DeLong recorded and toured with the side project known as Angels and Airwaves. And then, in 2014, Tom DeLong took a trip out to the desert. Area 51, Death Valley. Tom awoke in his tent. The voices outside in the desert were too many to count, too many to comprehend. They woke them up. They weren't human.
Starting point is 00:18:10 His fellow campers, one of whom was a prominent ephologist, slept sound. in their tents. These sounds were unearthly but still strangely familiar, murmuring, whispering. Tom could hardly understand them. He could scarcely hold on to his awareness of them over the sound of his steadily beating heart, which was now pounding. Those voices, whatever they were, wherever they came from, were there, right there, the edge of perception. But the words themselves were impossible to comprehend, and whatever message was meant to be translated fell short. Tom couldn't grasp it.
Starting point is 00:18:54 It floated away. He was awake now, but he wasn't conscious, so he couldn't possibly understand. The beings, whether they were extraterrestrials from worlds far away or ultra-terrestrials from uncharted dimensions here in this world, whether they were angels or demons or whatever they were, Tom was told they communicate through consciousness. They speak to us through high consciousness.
Starting point is 00:19:21 They compel us. In those moments when our minds disassociate from this world, when we unplug, when we simply are, when we dream, when we pray, perhaps when we ingest psychedelics, however we get there, it's that point when all of our thoughts, actions, and emotions are objectifiable.
Starting point is 00:19:42 when we separate from the subjective and become conscious. That's when their whispers, their murmurs, manifest into messages that permeate our own thoughts. Perhaps even their messages present to us as our own thoughts. Perhaps our ideas are on some quantum level, not ideas at all, but rather the aliens themselves being born out of our own consciousness, pulling us into a higher strangeness and moving us closer toward a greater universal understanding. Awake and afraid in a tent in the middle of the desert, consciousness is unattainable, and therefore so is extra or ultra-terrestrial communication. So Tom was out, but Tom was also in.
Starting point is 00:20:36 Whatever he did or did not understand out in the desert on that night in 2014 was enough to compel him to dedicate his life to learning more and demanding that the powers that Bs share with the American public what they did or did not know. And Tom DeLong knew enough to know that the U.S. government knew a lot more about beings from other worlds and or other dimensions than they were letting on. In short order, in 2015, Tom DeLong would quit Blink 182, one of the planet's biggest rock and roll bands to go chase UFOs. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.
Starting point is 00:21:18 Link 182's Tom DeLong describes alien encounter, says authorities tapped his phone. Tom DeLong just proved he's gone completely insane during Alien Ramp. I'm not going to say Tom DeLong is bad shit crazy, but Tom DeLong wants you to stop calling him crazy for researching aliens. That's a smattering of what the media had to say about Tom DeLong's efforts to investigate the legitimate. of alien existence after departing Blink 182. The rock and roll press was predictably the most snarky and also the most disingenuous. Consequence of sound elaborated on their claims that Tom had gone crazy, adding this to their cheap hip piece on him.
Starting point is 00:22:06 Quote, former Blink 182 member implies he met with Bill Clinton to discuss the threat of UFOs, unquote, when in fact Tom did not imply he was meeting with Bill Clinton. That was a presumption the same thing. so-called journalists from consequence cooked up entirely on his own to make Tom look crazy based on a photo of a meeting Tom posted to Instagram and then deleted. So is now a good time to mention the fact that the CIA has had journalists planted in the media since the 1960s as part of their secret Operation Mockingbird to help shape various narratives to fit the government's view of what it wants the public to think?
Starting point is 00:22:44 Perhaps. But perhaps that's a digression that'll derail this story. And maybe you guys can go ahead and look that one up for yourself, though. Operation Mockingbird. Back to Tondalong. Remember earlier when I said the government doesn't fuck around? Here's what I meant. The stakes for the meeting couldn't have been higher.
Starting point is 00:23:06 Tom used a mix of his celebrity and astute politicking to set it up, himself and a federal government aerospace contractor. It is unconfirmed, but it is widely believed that the contractor was Lockheed Martin and their special division, Skunkworks. The meeting was heavily secured, four layers of security, armed guards and white noise pumping through speakers to scramble any listening devices inside the dark windowless room. Tom was prepared.
Starting point is 00:23:37 He had the audience he had been building toward for some time now. He had a message to deliver. He had a reaction to elicit. This was, in some really strange way, no different than being on stage. This was a performance like any other. Tom explained that the work done by the government, the military, and their contractors on UFO phenomena,
Starting point is 00:23:59 was worthy of disclosure, and that the proper way to disclose this information to the youth was through culture, through books, through comics, through records, through films. Tom wanted to combine a celebrity and authentic connection to the youth with the vast knowledge of the UFO phenomena he had attained over the years.
Starting point is 00:24:19 One of the contractors scoffed, essentially told Tom he was a conspiracy theorist wasting his time, and he abruptly left the room. The other contractors followed him, all but one, all but the lead contractor, who sat back and listened to more of Tom's pitch. The government and its contractors were doing great work in this area.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Why did it all have to be so secret? There was so much evidence that it was obvious what the truth was. Eventually, that truth was going to come out. And then what? What kind of effect would the shocking truth about alien existence here on Earth have on the American public? Could anything be more disruptive to humanity, more life-altering than the realization that we are not alone in the universe? What would this knowledge do to humanity? It would no doubt have a life-altering influence on our core beliefs as a species, on our thoughts about our place. and point in this world about God, about the devil, about good and evil.
Starting point is 00:25:22 It was knowledge, secret knowledge, that had to be handled and disclosed very cautiously. When Tom finished, the government contractor, to Tom's amazement, agreed that slowed disclosure of the UFO phenomena via culture, rather than exclusively through traditional media, could responsibly bring the public around to the mind-bending notion that, yes, aliens exist. This is the part of the story where you call bullshit and I don't blame you. Why would a federal defense contractor or anyone connected with the federal government
Starting point is 00:25:57 entrust a foul-mouth punk rocker from a band with a nonsensical name like Blink 182 with disclosing humanity-altering information to the public? Well, because this is what the government has always done. Used cutouts from culture. individuals from the world of arts and entertainment, actors, musicians, artists. The government has relied on these individuals of influence for the better part of a century to get its message to the American people. In 1954, the CIA secretly funded the film adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm
Starting point is 00:26:34 and its efforts to win hearts and minds during the Cold War against Communist Russia. To further its winning efforts in the Cold War, the CIA secretly bolstered the careers of abstract expression painters Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. These artists were unaware of the strings the CIA pulled on their behalf to promote them, but the government's message was sent, and it was this. In America, our artists thrive. In the Soviet Union, artists are thrown in prison.
Starting point is 00:27:04 As recently as 2013, the CIA demanded and received script approval for the television series, The Americans. You know all that long-winded expositional dialogue, lathering on and on about UN regulations in the movie Iron Man? Guess who had a production agreement in their dirty hands all over the script for that film? The CIA. So, the federal contractor agreed to help Tom and connected him with an unnamed general, who confirmed Tom's belief in UFO phenomena and agreed that the time was now for disclosure.
Starting point is 00:27:40 Perhaps the general's thoughts around timing had something to do with the hundreds of unidentified aerial phenomena being captured on video by the U.S. military personnel at that exact point in time. The news was coming out. UFOs were no longer relegated to the tabloids lining your supermarket checkout. They were being discussed and shown on the front page of the New York Times and on the nightly news. The dam was breaking. The general agreed to connect Tom with experts from the intelligence community, from airos, space, and even an expert from the White House, all to advise Tom DeLong from Blink-Frickin 182 on how to take the information he had gathered on his own thus far and disclose the
Starting point is 00:28:26 fact that aliens exist. With these new contacts, Tom then pulled together a formal group of advisors, heavy hitters, ex-CIA operators, NASA, and DOD advisors, White House staff, and private sector AI contractors and gathered them into a new company he called to the stars. Its mission, to create culture to help disclose the truth about UFOs. Predictably, the press pounced, doubling down its ire on Tom for quitting a beloved punk rock band to waste time trying to validate quote-unquote conspiracy theories. The media was particularly incensed with Tom's intimation that he was working with government operatives connected to the White House.
Starting point is 00:29:11 This seemed to be the height of delusion. Tom was scorched across the internet, doubted, defamed, disgraced by everyone from faceless, cowardly internet trolls to the likes of Vice magazine, which issued a factually incorrect expose on Tom's company's financial stability, which, coming from the bankrupt vice, is, as we now know, the height of irony. And then, something remarkable has. So what exactly was in that WikiLeaks dump of DNC emails, besides proof that the Democratic Party attempted to subvert the campaign of one of its candidates, Bernie Sanders, and coronate the party's chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton? There were numerous emails between Tom DeLong and John Podesta,
Starting point is 00:30:00 official counselor to the president of the United States, Barack Obama, and the presidential campaign manager at the time to the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and one-time deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. The emails detailed Tom's disclosure plan with Podesta, who became a public advocate for UFO disclosure upon leaving the White House. And the emails also detailed in a... in-person meeting between Tom and Podesta and other high-level government and military operatives. All of a sudden, the Dick Joe-cracking UFO chasing guitar player from Blink 182 didn't look so crazy.
Starting point is 00:30:39 And Tom doubled down. In 2017, one of his official to the stars' advisors, Lou Elizondo, who previously ran the Pentagon's secret government program formed to study UFO phenomena, leech three. videos captured by military pilots showing unidentified aerial phenomena flying off of the east coast of the United States. Let me say all that again. Tom DeLong, the Blink 182 guy, hired away the Pentagon official who ran the government's secret program to study UFOs.
Starting point is 00:31:13 A program the government once adamantly denied the existence of but reversed course on and admitted that yes, the program did exist and that millions of dollars were secretly funneled to this program to study alien and aerial. phenomena. And that guy helped Tom leak the video showing that aerial phenomenon. And that then, and this is the point, the government itself officially declassified that video in 2020. In effect, confirming that the video Tom DeLong leaked back in 2017 was real and also in the process effectively emitting the existence of aliens. As reported in the New York Times in 2021, the government admitted that it had no explanation for the aerial objects
Starting point is 00:31:57 and stopped just short of ruling out aliens. Again, the government stopped short of ruling out aliens. Tom DeLong, the guitarist from Blink 182, did that. This guy. What would you guys do? This happened to me. What would you do if you were like sleeping and you feel like a slight tapping on your body?
Starting point is 00:32:18 And you wake up and you're like, what? And you look down and your brother is going, Mr. Inky do-do-do and walks up your legs. He's like walking up your legs, and he goes and zips down your zipper. He grabs the dick and goes on Mr. Enki. What did you do? It happened to me three times last night.
Starting point is 00:32:37 I fuck your boss. Mark Hoppice of Blink 182 was sick, really sick. It was 2021, and there was no Blink 182 actually. So I should say that Mark Hoppice formerly of Blink 182 was sick. He didn't mean to post the photo of him receiving his first round of chemotherapy to his million-plus followers on Instagram. He had a witty caption for the photo of him sitting there in his L.A. Dodgers hat, thick black-framed glasses and comfy Birkenstock sandals over blue socks, and the caption read,
Starting point is 00:33:30 Yes, hello, one cancer treatment, please. Mark meant for the image to be shared only with his close friends on Instagram, but he messed up his settings and the image went wide for all of his followers. And there's no telling if Mark's ex-bandmate Tom DeLong was included in Mark's close friends setting on Instagram, or if he was part of Mark's wider set of impersonal account followers, but regardless, when Tom learned of Mark's diagnosis, he knew he was going to do something he thought he would never do again. Play music with Blink 182. Tom has since been quoted as saying,
Starting point is 00:34:09 When he told me he was sick, that was like the gnarliest. Nothing matters, really. DeLong continued. It wasn't about fame or money or how big blink was or anything. It was like, you're going to get through this shit and we're going to go dominate. You need a purpose in life. especially when you're sick and fighting for your life. Tom DeLong knew all about needing purpose.
Starting point is 00:34:35 He'd been purpose driven for the better part of the last decade. Unfortunately, that purpose, Tom's mission, to disclose the truth about aliens, often ran up against Tom's earlier passion, playing music with Blink 182. But that was all about to change. Blink 182 reunited and Mark Hoppice beat cancer. Tom, Mark, and Travis are back on stage, stadium stages. There are less dick jokes, but they're still there, and now there's another element of Blink's sets.
Starting point is 00:35:07 That moment when Mark leans into the mic and says, Tom was right, and the crowd freaks out because they know what's coming. Blink's 1999 banger from Enema of the state, aliens exist. The vindication is palpable, if not juvenile, but that's what it should be. This is still, after all, rock and roll, and even though the boys in Blink 182 are all either in or about to be in their 50s, rock and roll is still the province of youth. It's juvenile, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a weird sort of wisdom that only kids process.
Starting point is 00:35:44 They're wise enough to dream, to question authority unequivocally and without shame. Rock and roll, punk rock, whatever you want to call it, is a rebellion against growing up, against accepting adult mandates that stifle creativity, your imagination, and your ability to dream. Blink 182 and Tom DeLong knew this when they were young punks playing shows in Southern California, and they never lost sight of it. Tom DeLong never accepted the grown-up notion that dreams and big ideas and thinking outside of the prefabricated suburban box were the type of childish thoughts that adults need to put aside because, well, grown-ups suck.
Starting point is 00:36:25 And the federal government and the media are filled with grown-ups, the majority of whom lack imagination and the courage needed to make like those old punk rockers in question authority. Tom DeLong did something no other civilian has ever done, compelled the federal government to disclose previously unacknowledged truths about alien existence here on Earth. The question now isn't whether or not aliens exist, As Blink 182 sang about in 1999,
Starting point is 00:36:59 the question is why the government, or at least some part of the government, now wants us to know this truth. Why have they reached some sort of unofficial partnership with Tom DeLong? My theory is that there's more coming, much more. Advanced radar systems are what made it possible for those naval pilots back in the late aughts to capture that UAP footage.
Starting point is 00:37:23 What technology are we developing car, that will similarly unveil deeper truths about extra and ultra-terrestrials. Will the AI revolution irrefutably prove alien existence in a way that the automaton bureaucrats and the disinterested public won't be able to ignore? Does this coming onslaught of technological truth worry the government enough to compel it toward more disclosure? Perhaps. It's just a theory.
Starting point is 00:37:51 It's just me dreaming. just like Tom DeLong from Blink 182, whose mission is anything but a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. All right, thanks for checking out this episode. This week's question of the week is, do you believe in non-human intelligence? Do aliens exist and have you ever had an experience
Starting point is 00:38:28 with a UFO, a UAP, or something unexplainable or anomalous? Let me know, and we will discuss your, experiences in our next after-party bonus episode. Call me with your answers. 617-906-66-6-6-3-8. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text. DM me at Disgracelandpod. Email me at Disgracelandpod.
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