By now you probably have heard all about rocker Tom DeLonge, formerly of Blink 182, and his long-promised "UFO announcement" on October 11 that turned out to be nothing more than a fund-raising scheme to provide income for him and his colleagues, with whatever money that might be left "invested" in wacky pseudo-scientific research, like a faster-than light spaceship.
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| Tom DeLonge (from Wikimedia Commons) |
Now that a few weeks have passed since that famous announcement, we are getting a clearer picture of DeLonge, and his venture (which has now raised almost $2 million from "investors", who are perhaps better called "suckers.") For one thing, he is a Serial Deleter on social media. Meaning, that he carelessly posts stupid stuff, that he soon has to delete after the embarrassment of having it quickly shot down.
The first such deletion I became aware of was a supposed photo of Bigfoot that DeLonge posted on Instagram in August of 2016, with the comment "taken yesterday by a friend of a friend" (making this a FOAF story, probably the least-credible category of urban folklore). It was quickly pointed out that this was in fact an old picture that had been kicked around on Reddit about a year earlier. DeLonge deleted the supposed Bigfoot photo. Apparently somebody told him this FOAF story, and he did not question it at all.
Then on October 30, almost three weeks after the Grand Announcement, DeLonge posted this illustration to his Facebook page, with the comment "Looks like we may be adding a notable Aerospace Revolutionary to our leadership team at ToTheStars... Stay tuned, and check out"
Here Tom DeLonge is clearly suggesting that Robert Bigelow may be joining his organization. Bigelow is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company making valuable progress in an effort to create inexpensive inflatable space modules. Bigelow is also well-known as a staunch believer in extraterrestrial UFOs. The app Tin Eye quickly confirmed that this illustration does indeed depict a module from Bigelow Aerospace. In less than a day, Delonge deleted the posting. I suspect that Bigelow called up DeLonge and said something like, "You fool, I didn't say that!"
Most recently, DeLonge posted to Facebook several very fake-looking photos depicting supposed triangle-shaped UFOs (triangle UFOs have been very trendy of late). I especially liked the one that showed a triangle UFO behind a jet aircraft and its contrails. Very quickly the Italian skeptic Scott Brando pointed out that several of these photos were stills from a hoax video posted to YouTube by the hoax-promoting site Secure Team 10. All but one of the "triangle UFO" images were quickly deleted from DeLonge's Facebook page. But when I checked this morning, there was still this one remaining. Perhaps he overlooked it when deleting the others?
DeLonge also posted this on November 4, but for some reason quickly deleted it. Fortunately Curt Collins saved a screen capture. (From now on, if you see something weird posted by DeLonge, get a screen capture right away, before he has a chance to delete it).
What all this shows is that Tom DeLonge is a very careless guy, who believes practically every crazy UFO story he hears. He impulsively posts flaky photos to Facebook or Instagram, then soon removes them once someone points out that they are known to be hoaxes. Yet he has raised almost $2 million from "investors" in less than a month. I'll bet even Steven Greer hasn't raised that much in the past few years.......
Finally, in this video DeLonge promises that his company To The Stars will construct a spaceship that will generate more energy than it consumes, thereby violating conservation of energy. Before anyone can take DeLonge's claims seriously, he needs to explain exactly how he is planning to do this.