Christopher K. Mellon is a former US intelligence official who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.1 Over nearly twenty years in the US Intelligence Community,2 he held the Pentagon’s third-highest intelligence position, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and Information Operations.3 He is part of the Mellon family associated with Carnegie Mellon University.4 At the age of seven, Mellon was shown a home movie, filmed by a friend, of a golden disc-shaped object moving across clear skies and through cumulus clouds in a manner that would be very hard to fake.5 He went on to read widely about UFOs and completed a college research project on the subject for a physics professor.6
Mellon began his career as a legislative assistant to US Senator William Cohen,7 becoming Cohen’s closest adviser on Capitol Hill.8 When Cohen became Secretary of Defense in 1997, Mellon followed him into the Pentagon as part of the new secretary’s transition team.9 Earlier, as a staffer for the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,10 Mellon’s role required him to review top-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information projects inside Special Access Programs (SAP),11 including monitoring Area 51, a secure United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test Range.12 He was also ordered by then-Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Robert Byrd to investigate claims that the United States was secretly developing a classified aerospace project known as Aurora.13 In the early 1990s he led Senate inquiries into the mass sightings of triangular craft during the 1989-1990 Belgian Wave,14 conducting what he described as exhaustive investigations with the Pentagon and US intelligence services.15 He said he concluded there was no secret US triangular-craft programme matching what was reported,16 and that the craft observed was “definitely not something the United States had on the books."17 Mellon separately visited Area 51 with full access to review every classified project onsite,18 and said he never saw anything there that matched the technology later demonstrated by observed UAP, and certainly no captured alien spacecraft.19 He has also said that current and former Lockheed Martin colleagues told him privately that if a TR3B craft exists, it is not made by Lockheed Martin,20 that he never saw an enormous spending line or other evidence of such a craft during his visits to Area 51 and adjacent ranges,21 and that he was aware of one data point suggesting a US connection to the TR3B, which he described as tangential, far from definitive, and not in the public realm.22
Mellon first met Luis Elizondo at a closed-door Pentagon meeting in early 2017.23 At the time Mellon already knew that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) existed under that name despite the programme’s secrecy,24 and he asked Elizondo how he could be read onto it.25 Although he had spent years with oversight of all of the United States Department of Defense (DoD)’s Special Access Programs, Mellon admitted he had had zero prior visibility into the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) topic.26 He obtained the required security clearances within a week,27 after which Elizondo briefed him for three hours inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), sharing reports, photographs, data and intelligence on legacy UAP efforts.28 Mellon subsequently pledged his support to AATIP and became a trusted member of the effort.29 In August 2018, the journalist Ross Coulthart said he found PowerPoint slides prepared for a briefing of senior DoD officials while examining Mellon’s personal website.30 One such slide, the ‘Department of Defense (DoD) Threat Scenario’ briefing slide, asserted - according to the same account - that the science exists for an adversary of the United States to manipulate both physical and cognitive environments to penetrate US facilities, influence decision-makers and compromise national security.31
In 2017, Mellon, Jim Semivan and Harold E. Puthoff met with Elizondo and journalist Leslie Kean in a hotel lobby near the Pentagon,32 a meeting that lasted four hours,33 and urged Elizondo to connect with the media in order to reach the American public on the UAP issue.34 That December, Mellon joined Elizondo, Puthoff, Semivan and Steve Justice in founding To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA),35 a venture that aimed to raise money for research into UFOs.36 Mellon was present at the venture’s launch event in October 2017,37 where, in his launch speech, he pointed out that the date marked precisely sixty years since the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik.38 He went on to chair TTSA’s National Security Policy and Scientific Advisory Board,39 and, according to the company’s website, served as its national security affairs adviser.40 By 2020, speculation had mounted for months that Mellon, Elizondo and Justice were leaving TTSA;41 it took Tom DeLonge several months to formally confirm their departure to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.42
Mellon went on to work with Elizondo on bringing the UAP issue before Congress. His reporting for the Washington Post revealed that the Go-Fast video, part of the 2014-2015 US East Coast UAP encounters, had been filmed off the east coast of the United States in late 2014 or early 2015.43 According to Elizondo, Mellon used his contacts at the Pentagon to obtain copies of three unclassified UAP videos,44 drawing on long service in the intelligence community that meant he knew where the footage had been kept and how to extract it.45 With Jay Stratton, Mellon and Elizondo concluded that the only way to change how the Pentagon handled UAP was to get the United States Congress to force change,46 and Mellon gave Elizondo permission to share his name with senior officials who could help reach Defense Secretary James Mattis.47 Elizondo and Mellon tried to raise AATIP with Mattis directly but could not get past his gatekeepers.48 During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mellon and Elizondo drafted the legislative language for what became the government’s UAP reporting requirement,49 and Mellon assisted a bipartisan group of senators and representatives in crafting UAP language for the National Defense Authorization Act.50 Information provided to Congress acknowledges 11 near mid-air collisions between military aircraft and UAP since 2004.51 Mellon has also been instrumental in arranging classified briefings for members of Congress on UAP, including references to exotic retrieved materials;52 the first such briefing he facilitated, according to the same reporting, was provided to staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee on 2019-10-21, and to staff of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence two days later.53 Mellon has said that once members of Congress gain fuller awareness of the information provided to committee staff, they will be able to quickly determine the truth if they have the will to do so.54 “This is an unprecedented oversight challenge for the committees,” he said, “but I believe we have leaders in Congress who are up to the task."55
Mellon has said he believes, with high confidence based on the positions he held within the Department of Defense, that the unidentified objects reported by pilots are not US technology,56 noting that the United States Navy (USN) and Department of Defense first checked to make sure the objects were not their own.57 He has said Russian or Chinese technology is a possible explanation, while noting that the performance of the vehicles is so extraordinary that it is difficult to imagine terrestrial rivals mastering it,58 and that it is necessary to entertain the possibility that the UAP filmed by US fighter pilots are of alien origin, given they appear not to be American, Russian or Chinese.59 He has said that the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the NSA appeared to hold important UAP data that they were not sharing with each other.60 Asked in a May 2020 interview whether the United States held physical materials recovered from UAP, Mellon said some of the materials he was aware of had genuinely extraordinary properties,61 with isotopic ratios differing from terrestrial metals.62 He has also said that a number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with him about an alleged non-human craft recovery programme, including its history, governing documents, and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered.63 According to the podcast Science vs. Secrecy, Mellon and Eric Davis have said that programme ceased in 1989 due to a lack of progress.64 Regarding the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter, Mellon has said the object involved was not an experimental US aircraft,65 has met with one of the pilots involved and confirmed the account,66 and has said the events can be verified by the US government itself.67 Coverage of his claims has drawn scrutiny: a 2019 profile noted that a Fox & Friends segment did not mention Mellon’s employment by TTSA, nor that a companion documentary was produced by the company that employed both him and Elizondo.68 The journalist Bryan Bender described Elizondo and Mellon as part of an unmatched team of former high-level officials to come forward on the UFO issue, noting they retained security clearances and networks in Washington, D.C.69