Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge has long enjoyed a parallel career as an author, filmmaker and UFO researcher/activist, and his next endeavor away from the stage taps into those paranormal vibes. DeLonge has teamed with frequent collaborator AJ Hartley to co-write Trinity, a novel loosely based on a purported UFO event around a nuclear testing site.
“This story takes place around a seminal UFO event that I believe happened,” DeLonge says of the book, which will be released June 11 through his To the Stars Media company and distributed by Simon & Schuster. “Although the location may have been changed, the importance of what I believe transpired remains. AJ and I wanted to capture a sense of what it was like to be in this pivotal moment in American culture in 1962: the cars, the space race, the beginnings of social change, but also under the pressures of Vietnam, the Cold War and a new skepticism about government secrecy.”
“We wanted to see all this from the position of young people who are struggling to find a sense of themselves and are, for various reasons, misfits, even outcasts, battling for a sense of self and purpose,” he continues. “We took a whole lot of truth and encased it in a cool and rebellious story to help explain the enormity and complexity of the subject.”
A summary of the book provided by To the Stars Media reads: “It’s 1962, in Trinity, Nevada, a small town on the edge of the desert, home to a military base serving the nuclear testing grounds. Van Lopez and his brother Andy have enough to do keeping their truck running and the local criminal gang happy to be concerned about nuclear tests. Van has dreams, or—he’s not sure what to call them—that he cannot explain or forget, but when he sees mysterious lights in the sky, he struggles to make sense of what now feel like his earliest memories.
On the day of the atomic test, the nuclear blast brings down something over Trinity that wasn’t supposed to be there—something not of this world. Now Van is running for his life, pursued by a murderous Soviet agent and government forces bent on keeping all he has seen—and all he has remembered—from getting out. Romances and rivalries come to a head as he fights for the things he cares about most, and in that final battle he may have to make allies of his oldest enemies.”
DeLonge and Hartley have previously worked together on a number of books as part of the UFO-centered Sekret Machines franchise, which is being adapted for television by Legendary Entertainment. DeLonge also composed original music, directed and co-wrote the 2023 sci-fi adventure film Monsters of California.
As for Blink-182, which DeLonge rejoined in 2022 after a nearly 10-year absence, the band is touring internationally through early April and will begin a North American swing June 20 in Orlando, Fl.
