Blink-182

In 2015, Blink-182's guitarist and singer left the band to devote himself to UFOs. Put like that it sounds like a joke, and for years it was told as one. Four years later, the Pentagon declassified three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena. They were the same three videos that this guitarist's company had released, and the US Navy had already confirmed they were genuine.

Of everything that was said about Tom DeLonge in 2015, the only thing that aged badly was the laughter. It's worth explaining why, because this is a vindication story of the good kind.

The split wasn't about Martians

First, the truth about his exit, because that gets told badly too. The documented cause wasn't aliens. It was a row about diaries and contracts: Hoppus and Barker said DeLonge kept postponing studio dates without explanation; DeLonge replied that he'd been handed a contract demanding an album in six months and blocking commitments he had already signed up for. His own line sums it up better than anyone else could: that he never thought about quitting, but that committing to anything is desperately hard for him. A scheduling breakdown. The UFOs were the context. But what a context.

The man everyone laughed at

In 2017, DeLonge founded a company with a former CIA officer and a researcher into paranormal phenomena, and set out to raise fifty million dollars. As a business it went badly: by the end of 2018 it had barely gathered a million and was carrying an enormous deficit. A financial failure, on paper.

And yet. In September 2019, the US Navy confirmed that the three videos that company had released were genuine and showed unidentified aerial phenomena. In April 2020, the Pentagon declassified them officially. With the help of a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, briefings were arranged in Congress with the pilots who had filmed them.

It's worth measuring carefully what that means: nobody confirmed anything about aliens, and there's no sense in inflating it. But there's no sense in playing it down either. The bloke everybody laughed at got the United States Department of Defense to acknowledge and publish material that had been classified for years. Very few people with a doctorate manage that. He did it on his way out of a pop-punk band.

The irony that had been there since 1999

The best part is that the clue had been in plain sight for two decades. On "Enema of the State", the 1999 album that made them famous all over the world, there's a song called "Aliens Exist". Aliens exist. It was right there in the title. Barker has also said that on the tour buses DeLonge would spend his nights staring out of the window looking for UFOs, and that he organised expeditions to hunt for Bigfoot. It wasn't a midlife crisis: it was what he had always been. One day he simply decided to take it seriously.

What really brought them back together

And here the story changes tone completely, because there's a tragedy at the centre of this band.

On 19 September 2008, a private jet ran off the runway on take-off in South Carolina. Six people were on board; four died. Travis Barker survived with severe burns: sixteen operations, and there was talk of amputating a foot. The other survivor, the DJ travelling with him, died eleven months later; a friend summed it up by saying the crash killed him, it just took a year.

At that point, Hoppus and DeLonge hadn't spoken in three years. DeLonge later put it bluntly: he thought Barker was going to die, and in that moment he knew he wanted to play with him again. The reunion was announced five months later. It took almost losing one brother to get another one back. And Barker didn't set foot on a plane again until 2021: thirteen years of touring by bus and by boat, crossing the country overland rather than fly. The band carried on existing because he was capable of that.

The number, while we're here

182 isn't how many times a swear word is said in "Scarface", nor anybody's weight, nor the tail number of a plane. They were called Blink, another band objected to the name, and to avoid a fight they added a number to it. By their own account, Hoppus came up with it while skateboarding around his neighbourhood, and when he was asked why 182, he said he didn't know, it just seemed like a nice number. Sometimes legends are built on nothing at all, and it's fine that they are.

What to remember

Mark Hoppus beat a stage four lymphoma that became public by accident, when he uploaded a photo of himself in chemotherapy without meaning to. He has been cancer-free for years and has published his memoir. The band is still alive, all three of them, after a crash that nearly killed one and an illness that nearly killed another. And the guitarist who left over UFOs ended up being the civilian who pushed hardest to make the Pentagon publish what it didn't want to publish.

Remember it like this: Blink-182 survived a burning plane, a cancer and three years of silence between two friends. And of all the strange things Tom DeLonge did, the only one that turned out to be a mistake was everyone else's mockery.

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This piece mentions a fatal crash and a death by overdose. If you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol or drug use, in Chile SENDA's Drugs and Alcohol helpline answers free of charge 24 hours a day on 1412.

Sources

Blink-182, an American band formed in Poway, California, in August 1992, made up of Mark Hoppus (bass and vocals), Tom DeLonge (guitar and vocals) and Travis Barker (drums, from 1998, replacing Scott Raynor); all four are alive. The name comes from the original "Blink", modified with a number after an objection from an Irish band of the same name; according to the band themselves, the figure 182 was an arbitrary choice by Hoppus. On 26 January 2015, Hoppus and Barker announced DeLonge's departure in a statement claiming that he was indefinitely postponing his involvement; DeLonge replied publicly, citing the existence of a contract that demanded an album in six months and prevented him from honouring prior commitments. In 2017 he founded To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences with Harold E. Puthoff and Jim Semivan, with a public offering of fifty million dollars; according to filings submitted to the SEC, by October 2018 it had raised around one million and had accumulated a deficit of 37.4 million. The three videos released by that company were confirmed as genuine by the US Navy in September 2019 and declassified by the Pentagon in April 2020. The album "Enema of the State" (1 June 1999) includes the track "Aliens Exist" and is certified five times platinum by the RIAA. On 19 September 2008, a Learjet 60 ran off the runway on take-off from Columbia airport, South Carolina; of the six people on board, four died —the pilots Sarah Lemmon and James Bland, the assistant Chris Baker and the bodyguard Charles Still— while Travis Barker and the DJ Adam Goldstein survived, the latter dying on 28 August 2009 of acute intoxication. The NTSB attributed the crash to tyre blowouts and to the late decision to abort take-off. The band's reunion was announced on 8 February 2009; Barker did not fly again until 2021. Mark Hoppus revealed on 23 June 2021 that he had stage four diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, announced that he was cancer-free on 29 September that year and published his memoir on 8 April 2025. A Rebobinados rewrite of previously verified research; interpretations are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Billboard, the NTSB, CBS News, NME, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter and other coverage.