Thanks to Monday's Tom DeLonge-spurred official publishing of UAP footage by the Department of Defense, a planet still grappling with how to move forward in the COVID-19 era has taken to pondering how the news relates to the topic of extraterrestrial life.
While the DOD's move is indeed inarguably historic, and further bolsters the years-deep work of DeLonge's To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), the accompanying comments from government reps do not include any assertion that they themselves are treating the footage (some of which can be seen at the top of this page) as proof of our extraterrestrial brethren.
A DOD rep, however, did concede that the aerial phenomena seen in the videos—two circa November 2004 and one circa January 2015—remains categorized as "unidentified." Notably, Unidentified is also the name of the History Channel docuseries following the work of TTSA.
And as of Tuesday afternoon, those understandably stoked and/or concerned by this latest development in matters of UAP had united behind the #AliensExist hashtag to further explore the news through impassioned meme-based jokery and/or sobering ponderings on what it all really means.
"Aliens Exist," of course, is also the title of a potentially prophetic song taken from DeLonge's blink-182 years:
During a revival tour with his space-influenced Angels & Airwaves project last year, DeLonge brought back the 1999 blink-182 track for inclusion in the set's acoustic portion. In an interview released Monday amid the DOD news, DeLonge pinpointed the exact moment on the UAP timeline that inspired him to revisit the Enema of the State classic.
"The 'Aliens Exist' song was interesting because I don't think I was doing it in the beginning of the tour," DeLonge explained to Rock Sound's James Wilson-Taylor in a Zoom interview. "But during the tour, the US Navy came out and mentioned that UFOs were real and they mentioned my name. ... So basically, here I am on tour and the US Navy comes out and acknowledges that unidentified flying objects are very real. It's the first time in history and they're doing it with my name in the same sentence. So I kinda took that and the day that happened, I decided to throw in 'Aliens Exist.' And the rest is history."
While we wait for someone to drop a new quarantine-crafted song built on a timely "Aliens Exist" sample, celebrate the good news with a batch of those aforementioned tweets:
