You heard that right. Frontman of Blink 182 talks alien abduction, secret space programs, and government phone taps in a recent interview.

“I’ve done a lot of weird stuff in this industry” Tom DeLong admitted in a recent interview with Papermag. “People wouldn’t believe me if I told them.” The guitarist for Blink 182 provide a detailed explanation of some wild extraterrestrial theories, personal alien encounters, and his belief that the government is keeping an eye on him. In the interview, he states that he’s been a dedicated believer for two decades and that he’s become quite well-read on the subject since he initially took interest.

People will be like “Oh, you believe in UFOs”, 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.

On being asked if he’d had his phone tapped by the government, he said this:

Yeah, yeah I did. For quite some time.Years ago, there was somebody who was gathering 150 hours of top secret testimony specifically for Congressional hearings on government projects and the US secret space program. People from NASA, Rome, the Vatican, you name it, they’re all on there. The top 36 hours that summarized the best parts of all of that footage, I had it hidden in my house for a period of time, and during that time I was flying this person out along with somebody that was Wernher von Braun’s right-hand assistant. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi scientist that we brought over to build our Apollo rockets that got us to the moon, and on his deathbed he told this person a bunch of stuff, and I was flying them out to Los Angeles and we were taking certain meetings. At that time a lot of weird stuff started happening.

He went on to provide a full story of an alien encounter while camping near Area 51 in Nevada:

We had two nights. We did one outside of a secret base called China Lake. And that was on the flight path to Area 51, which is known as Groom Lake. We camped out at the northern end of that, about 200 miles from the nearest staff location. We were above an area called Tonopah, which is where they test-fly a lot of different things. So if you remember, I was talking about a person that was gathering all that footage for the congressional hearing. That person was telling me that the big belief, which I had corroborated by a university professor that was in the know, by the way, that the communication of this particular phenomenon is the frequency of thought. So part of communicating and making contact is shutting your mind down and being able to project your thoughts. And this guy was telling me about it, and this whole protocol for how it works. When we went out there the first night, we decided to run through this protocol where you project your thoughts. So we decided to do it, and we were up mad late, but nothing happened. I kept telling the guys: if anything was going to happen, it would happen at three in morning, because that’s the time when things like this happen. Don’t ask me why. We put about four logs on the fire, and everything is illuminated by the fire, and we fall asleep around one or two. I woke up right around three a.m. My whole body felt like it had static electricity, and I open my eyes and the fire is still going, and there’s a conversation going on outside the tent. It sounded like there were about 20 people there, talking. And instantly my mind goes, OK, they’re at our campsite, they’re not here to hurt us, they’re talking about shit, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. But they’re working on something. Then I close my eyes and wake up, and the fire is out and I have about three hours of lost time.

Aside from this, DeLonge has been spending a lot of additional time in the spotlight recently. This interview follows heated allegations of him dropping out of Blink 182. Recent reports have also shed light on increasing tensions between him and his longtime friends and bandmates Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker.