Sekret Machines: Gods, Man & War

TL;DR

This is the argument the novels only gestured at, stated plainly. Tom DeLonge partners with esoteric historian Peter Levenda for the nonfiction spine of the Sekret Machines project, making the case that the phenomenon is not a modern curiosity but a thread running through myth, religion, and the history of power. Levenda supplies the erudition and the sources; DeLonge supplies the mission. It is more substantial than the fiction and more frustrating, because it mixes genuine historical survey with large interpretive leaps and asks you to accept the connective tissue on trust.

What it claims

The book argues that accounts of gods, angels, and celestial visitors across cultures may describe encounters with the same non-human phenomenon now called UFOs, and that recognizing this reframes both religion and geopolitics. It contends that the phenomenon has shaped human events and that governments have long understood more than they admit. Levenda ranges across comparative religion, folklore, and Cold War history to build the pattern, while being careful, at times, to flag where he is speculating rather than asserting.

Why it matters

It gave the DeLonge campaign an intellectual backbone. Where the novels reached fans, Gods, Man & War reached readers who wanted an argument, and it lent the To The Stars project a veneer of scholarship through Levenda’s involvement. It also revived, for a mass audience, the old Vallée-adjacent thesis that the phenomenon is woven into human religious history rather than being a recent visitation. As a cultural document of the 2017 disclosure moment, it is the serious end of the Sekret Machines shelf.

Does it hold up?

Unevenly. The historical raw material is real and often interesting, but the load-bearing move, that scattered myths point to one physical phenomenon, is interpretation, not evidence, and the book leans on it hard. Levenda is a more careful writer than the project’s marketing suggests, yet the connective claims cannot be tested and the geopolitical assertions rest on assertion. It lands as contested: worth reading for the pattern it proposes, not to be mistaken for the pattern being proven. The comparative-religion angle is handled with more rigor and less strain by Jacques Vallée.

Read this if

You want the actual thesis behind the Sekret Machines project, or you are drawn to the idea that the phenomenon and the sacred share a history. Read it against Vallée’s Passport to Magonia for the same argument made with tighter discipline.