You wrote a book called The Lonely Astronaut on Christmas Eve. Your son is named Jonas Rocket. You’ve explored a lot of outer space themes with your band Angels & Airwaves. Why do you think this topic means so much to you? Why do you think it’s resonated throughout your life?
I think it’s the biggest story of mankind. You take Christianity: a guy named Jesus came and died on the cross for everybody’s sins. That’s not as big of a story as what types of intelligences are living across the universe. I mean, the deep space project by Hubble, which is taking our most exotic telescope that we’ve ever made at the time, and focusing on the blackest part of space for 11 days straight. Literally a grain of sand, if you held it out at arm’s length, is where the focus of this orbiting telescope is at. For 11 days. And it came back with a one-inch by one-inch colored slide with ten thousand galaxies in it. It’s like we have trillions of galaxies and in each galaxy there’s trillions of planets. It’s just unreal.
You’ve never been shy about your beliefs. You’ve had a song “Aliens Exist,” and I remember you talking about this in Rolling Stone, but at the time Blink-182 presented themselves as young, carefree guys. But when you started talking about aliens with Angels & Airwaves and then you launched Strange Times, people started to go, “Oh, he’s really serious about this stuff.”
People will be like “Oh, you believe in UFOs” [laughs], but I’m reading books on physics, I’m reading books on the secret space program, I’m talking to people that work underground for six months at a time, that are confiding in me about the national security initiatives. I’ve literally read 200 books on the subject, and I don’t spend my time looking at UFO reports or talking to little green men. I’m way past that. If anybody tells you there’s no life in universe, you should be turned off. That’s just such a dumb thing to say. It’s totally, universally accepted amongst the country’s elite scientific establishments that there’s life everywhere. The question is what kind, where, how’d they get here, what are they doing when they get here, and how do we communicate with them? That’s when you start reading books about the mind and consciousness, and telepathy and ESP. It’s a whole different program.
Was it tough in the beginning for people to believe that you’re serious and knowledgeable about the subject — you’re not just some rockstar with a hobby?
To give you an example, one time I remember bringing up a very specific craft that I believe we’re building, in secret, to emulate the phenomenon that our government has been observing for decades. So I started talking about the craft, and its magnetic slide system and how it displaces over 89% of the mass of the ship, how it ionizes the engine, how it glows — I went through the whole thing, and this engineer looks at me, this guy is 70 years old, and he goes, “You better be real fucking careful about what you’re talking about.” And I go, “Okay, so I’m close.” And he goes, “I’m not fucking kidding with you. You better be really fucking careful.” And he calls me up the next day and he goes, “I’ve had calls about you. If someone comes and asks you to get in their car, don’t fucking get in the car.” [laughs] And that’s the shit I’m dealing with.
