Now that he no longer has Blink-182 to keep him occupied, it’s no secret that Tom DeLonge has been putting most of his spare time into research on aliens, to the point that he was even crowned UFO Researcher of the Year a few months back.
And while some of his projects, like a film about skateboarding alien investigators, seem pretty normal in the grand scheme of things, his new goal is stratospheric in comparison.
As Stereogum reports, DeLonge has just announced that he’s created a new organisation named the To The Stars Academy Of Arts & Sciences, but that’s not all – he’s also crowd-funding his own spaceship.
“Hello, my name is Tom DeLonge from the Blink-182,” he announced in a Facebook post. “I have brought together an elite team from CIA, DOD and the FMR Director of Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin’s SkunkWorks.”
“We are aiming to build this ElectroMagnetic Vehicle to Travel instantaneously through Space, Air and Water by engineering the fabric of Space-Time.”
The company, then, is as much a travel company like SpaceX as it is an alien research centre, as the President and CEO DeLonge explained further.
“The public interest in the outer edges of science and the understanding of phenomena has always been suffocated by mainstream ideology and bureaucratic constraint,” he says.
“We believe there are discoveries within our reach that will revolutionize the human experience, but they can only be accomplished through the unrestricted support of breakthrough research and innovation.”
He’s already had plenty of support from his fanbase and the alien-loving community, with almost $400,000 US raised at the time of writing – although we hear spaceships are pretty expensive to build, so he’s probably got a long way to go yet.
No word on whether this’ll get in the way of his plans to release that new Angels & Airwaves album he was teasing, or carry out those plans to reform Boxcar Racer with Travis Barker.
If it doesn’t work out though, he’s said that he still “owns” Blink-182 and could be back in the band “in a matter of days” if it suited him, so it’s good to know he’s got his bases covered if the spaceship doesn’t get off the ground.
If you’d like to invest, check out his pitch below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gr-A4ebLeE
