Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows

TL;DR

The opening novel of Tom DeLonge’s fiction arm of the Sekret Machines project, co-written with novelist A.J. Hartley. It is a globe-trotting thriller about aviation mysteries and a shadow contest over advanced technology, and DeLonge has always framed it as truth wrapped in story: fiction as a delivery system for things he says he learned from insiders but cannot document. Judge it as a novel and it is a competent airport thriller. Judge it as evidence and there is nothing here to check, which is exactly what the format was designed to allow.

What it claims

As a novel it claims nothing literally, and that is the point. The narrative follows characters pulled into secrecy around unexplained aerial technology, and the marketing insists the scaffolding rests on real briefings DeLonge received while building To The Stars. The implied claim, made in interviews rather than on the page, is that a decades-long human effort to understand and reverse-engineer a phenomenon is being kept from the public, and that a novel is the safest way to gesture at it.

Why it matters

Its importance is cultural, not evidentiary. This book was the public-facing edge of the DeLonge campaign that produced To The Stars Academy, drew in former intelligence and defense figures, and formed part of the noisy run-up to the 2017 shift in how mainstream media treated UAP. Whatever you think of DeLonge, Chasing Shadows marks the moment a mass-market entertainer tried to move disclosure through pop culture rather than ufology, and reached an audience the old field never could.

Does it hold up?

As a thriller, it holds up fine and does what thrillers do. As a vehicle for hidden truth, it cannot hold up by construction: fiction that insists it is secretly factual gives the reader no way to separate the two, and DeLonge’s later, better-documented ventures never confirmed the specifics implied here. That is why it lands as thin. There is no claim on the page rigid enough to test, and the interesting real-world developments that followed came from the nonfiction and institutional side of the project, not the novels.

Read this if

You want to understand the DeLonge disclosure phenomenon as a cultural event, or you just want a UFO-flavored thriller. For the arguments meant to be taken literally, skip to the nonfiction companion, Sekret Machines: Gods, Man & War.