Get out your wallet! Get ready to invest! In the biggest, most important company in the history of Earth and stuff! That will use alien technology to build a time-traveling space vehicle!
Blink-182's former frontman, Tom DeLonge, has held in his hands a piece of metal from an alien starship (he says). All he needs is your cash, and he'll replicate the substance and construct a spaceship that'll travel through time and space and get us … To the Stars!
To the Stars Academy is the name of his universe-shattering company, recently garnering plenty of coverage in the mainstream press.
It already has 1,500 investors who've bought into at least part of DeLonge's story. They've sunk a collective $1.8 million into this. That's about $1,200 each.
That's a lot of dough to bet on the idea that the singer of "What's My Name Again?" is going to leave NASA, SpaceX and Orion in the dust and blast us off to the Vega system.
We tried repeatedly to talk to DeLonge, to hear how a rock star came into the extraordinary position of touching a thing that E.T. touched.
To the Stars repeatedly declined our requests. They also denied requests to speak with a scientist involved in the project. There have their own scientists on the team. Although they're not very highly credentialed.
So we called a physics professor at the University of Colorado: Michael Dubson, who researches planetary science. The CU physics department, note, has won three Nobel Prizes, including one for creating a new form of matter. We wanted to hear how possible the dreams of To the Stars really are.
Dubson reviewed the website for us. The claims that they can figure out "engineering the space-time metric" and do "advanced Electrogravitic Propulsion," Dubson says, are nonsense.
"This is anti-scientific," says Dubson. "There's zero content."
What's more, when DeLonge talks about aliens and time-traveling spaceships, Dubson says, "that raises of all sorts of red flags."
"You might as well say, let's study witches, let's study Harry Potter," Dubson adds. "Scientists don't know everything, but we do know a lot. And everything we do know is completely inconsistent" with the plans and ideas of To the Stars.
If you're still interested in investing in To the Stars, listen to DeLonge himself, in his podcast with Joe Rogan, posted here.
DeLonge speaks rapidly, jumping from topic to topic. He has trouble getting to the point. He talks more about government conspiracies to cover up the existence of aliens than he does about the project itself. He makes grandiose claims about his own knowledge of aliens and off-world technology, and his contacts with high-level government officials who might know.
Rogan — who used to believe in Bigfoot — doesn't buy it, and stops just short of calling bullshit. Rogan also spent plenty of time asking Neil deGrasse Tyson whether the moon landing was faked.
So you have to ask yourself: what's more likely? That a rock star touched an alien spaceship and discovered secret technology no one else has? Or that he's a deeply confused person who's in over his head?
"There's all sorts of nonsense on the Internet," Dubson says. "The Internet, unfortunately, is the source of as much disinformation as information."
One thing DeLonge's website does not have information on is how these 1,500 investors can go about getting their money back.
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