About six months ago, our board at UFODATA was privileged to welcome Christopher Mellon as the newest member of our team. Chris spent nearly 20 years in the federal government serving in various national security positions. For the first time, he has agreed to speak publicly about his experiences within government as they relate to UFOs.
Photo courtesy Chris Mellon
It is unusual for a man of Chris’s stature to speak openly about UFOs, which gives his statements great weight. His positions during the Clinton and Bush administrations involved high clearances; in fact, there are few people who have enjoyed such deep and wide-ranging access to compartmented programs in both the Defense Department (DoD) and the intelligence community. Chris is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Reconnaissance Office Gold Medal and the Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s Medal.
At DoD, Chris
served on a small committee that provided oversight of all DoD special
access programs, in order to eliminate potential waste and duplication.
The oversight included visits to Area 51 and other sensitive facilities.
He also spent over a decade on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
involved in oversight of NRO, CIA, NSA and other intelligence
organizations. He became the first Congressional official to review all
of the NSA’s compartmented programs.
I wanted to
know what Chris had to say about Hillary Clinton’s implications that the
government may be withholding classified UFO documents. Backed by John Podesta, chairman of her campaign, Clinton
has been speaking about the need to “get to the bottom of the
UFO mystery.” Her comments are unprecedented within a presidential
campaign.
Here is my recent conversation with Chris Mellon, mainly conducted via email, edited only for clarity.
Q: When did you first become interested in UFOs?
A: I
was about seven years old when I saw an old-fashioned amateur movie
taken by a friend of our school principal. It showed a huge, golden
disc-shaped object serenely moving through sunny, blue skies, passing
through cumulous clouds in a manner that would be very hard to fake. I
have no idea what became of the movie, but it filled me with wonder and
awe. I read everything I could get my hands on afterwards and eventually
did a research project on UFOs in college for a physics professor. I
remain deeply intrigued.
Q: Did your colleagues in government know you were interested in UFOs? Were you afraid of being ridiculed?
A:
It was something I didn’t reveal to colleagues unless I got to know
them well and we became personal friends. Even then of course I wasn’t a
nut about it and I certainly was not obsessed; it was simply a subject
of great curiosity. It did not come up often. I was focused like a laser
on my duties 99.9 percent of the time.
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