“This story takes place around a seminal UFO event that I believe happened”: Blink-182's Tom DeLonge has written a novel titled Trinity about a “pivotal moment in American culture”

Tom De Longe, Trinity
(Image credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Coachella | To The Stars)

Blink-182 vocalist/guitarist Tom LeLonge has written a novel which is set for publication this summer.

Trinity, a novel co-written with DeLonge's regular collaborative partner AJ Hartley, who also worked with the Californian pop-punk star on the Sekret Machine series, pivots around a UFO event which may or may not have occurred - DeLonge thinks it did, fyi - on an US nuclear test site in the 1960s.

The book will be published on June 11 via DeLonge's own To the Stars Media company and distributed by Simon & Schuster, who describe it as, “A thrilling new novel by the creators of Sekret Machines who, with the help of a team of government insiders, exposed the secret pentagon UFO program that captured America’s attention and led to the first public congressional hearings about unidentified flying objects.”

A synopsis of the book's narrative plot 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.”

Offering further insight into the story, the UFO-obsessed DeLonge says, “This story takes place around a seminal UFO event that I believe happened. 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 adds. “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.”

The book is available for pre-order now

Paul Brannigan
Contributing Editor, Louder

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.