Blink-182 Founder Tom DeLonge Is Born

Tom DeLonge co-founded Blink-182 and helped define the pop-punk sound of the late 1990s and early 2000s with albums that sold over fifty million copies worldwide. Born in Poway, California, in 1975, he formed Blink-182 with bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Scott Raynor in 1992, later replaced by Travis Barker. The band's third album, Enema of the State, released in 1999, produced the hits "All the Small Things" and "What's My Age Again?" and sold over fifteen million copies, establishing pop-punk as one of the dominant genres in mainstream rock. Their self-titled 2003 album marked a creative shift toward more experimental compositions that anticipated DeLonge's later work. He left Blink-182 in 2005, citing creative differences, and founded Angels and Airwaves, a band that reflected his growing interest in atmospheric, arena-scale rock and science fiction themes. Then his career took a turn that nobody predicted. In 2017, DeLonge founded To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a venture dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena. The organization obtained and published three declassified Pentagon videos of UAPs, footage that forced the U.S. Department of Defense to acknowledge that the videos were authentic and that the objects depicted remained unidentified. His advocacy played a direct role in pressuring the U.S. government to establish the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and to hold Congressional hearings on UAPs. He returned to Blink-182 in 2022 for a reunion tour and album. His career trajectory from pop-punk to UFO disclosure advocate is one of the most unexpected in modern entertainment.