Blink-182's Tom DeLonge Says He Had an Alien Encounter at Area 51: "My Whole Body Felt Like It Had Static Electricity"

He has studied extraterrestrial life for more than 20 years and has even made high-powered scientist friends

Tom DeLonge isn't just a rocker with a hobby.

The Blink-182 band member has been passionate about extraterrestrial life and UFOs for as long as he can remember, but it isn't just a casual interest. The musician has studied it, has sought out top scientists and has even conducted his own research all in the name of discovering aliens.

Talking to Paper magazine, DeLonge opens up about his not-so-casual pastime and how his own experiments with friends led him to have an alien encounter at Area 51. He and a group of friends traveled to the famed Air Force test site to see whether or not they could make contact with other forms of life.

The secret, according to a university professor and a close contact to DeLonge, is in letting all of your thoughts go to free your mind.

"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," he explains to the mag.

"So part of communicating and making contact is shutting your mind down and being able to project your thoughts."

However, when he and his friends decided to try out the "protocol," nothing happened! But the Angels and Airwaves founder wasn't going to give up on what he came to experience.

"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," he says. "We put about four logs on the fire, and everything is illuminated by the fire, and we fall asleep around one or two."

At 3 a.m. on the dot, DeLonge woke up and experienced a bizarre phenomenon. Explaining that his whole body "felt like it had static electricity," DeLonge reveals that he couldn't move but could hear people talking.

"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," he recounts. "And instantly my mind goes, 'OK, they're at our campsite, they're not here to hurt us, they're talking about s--t, but I can't make out what they're saying. But they're working on something.'"

He adds: "Then I close my eyes and wake up, and the fire is out and I have about three hours of lost time."

If anyone is skeptical, he clarified that he wasn't the only one in his group to experience the middle-of-the-night chatter. One of his pals confessed at the time, "'Yes! They were all around our tent, they were talking. I told you!'" The other guy in their group slept through the whole thing.

He isn't afraid to share his passion with other people, even if it means being thought of as the rocker with a strange hobby. He named his son Jonas Rocket, he wrote a book called The Lonely Astronaut on Christmas Eve and his band, Angels and Airwaves, incorporates a lot of space themes into its lyrics.

If most aren't on board with all of his thoughts and theories about space, that's OK, but he does believe most should assume other forms of life are out there.

"If anybody tells you there's no life in universe, you should be turned off. That's just such a dumb thing to say," he says. "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," he continues. "It's a whole different program."