Christopher Mellon

American former DoD official and UAP disclosure advocate

Christopher Karl Mellon is an American former US intelligence official who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and Bush administrations and as minority staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a member of the Mellon family who has become a leading public advocate for government transparency on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). His 1985-to-2017 career on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon focused on defense and intelligence oversight, during which he helped draft the legislation establishing the United States Special Operations Command and later served on a committee with oversight of Defense Department special access programs. In 2017 he facilitated the delivery of three Navy targeting-pod videos — later identified as FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast — to The New York Times and The Washington Post, an act widely credited with triggering the modern UAP disclosure effort.

Early life and education

His parents, Karl Negley Mellon and Ann, met as teenagers and later eloped. Karl, a trucker and fishing boat crewman, divorced Ann and was estranged from Christopher. Mellon was raised in inner city Chicago in circumstances described as "difficult". He was declined enlistment in the United States Army owing to his response to an application question that asked about recent marijuana use, according to Mellon family biographer David E. Koskoff. Mellon has a sister, Andrea, and a brother, Matthew, who died in 2018.

Mellon graduated from Loomis Chaffee and enrolled at Colby College, where he was initiated into Kappa Delta Rho, worked part-time coaching youth soccer, and considered dropping out of college. He received a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Colby and a master's degree in international relations from Yale University, with a concentration in finance and management. Koskoff described Mellon in his youth as popular, and "a 1960s college boy at a 1950s college" in regard to his time at Colby and Waterville.

Family

Mellon is a member of the Mellon family and a descendant of both Thomas Mellon and William Larimer Mellon Sr. He is the grandson of Matthew T. Mellon and Gertrud (née Altegoer) Mellon. The Mellon family began fracturing into largely disconnected branches in the 1930s. Koskoff wrote that the extended Mellon family is "a large, amorphous group" with little contact among branches and "virtually no sense of 'Mellonhood'". Mellon is a member of a Pennsylvanian branch of the family; in 2024, Vanity Fair quoted a member of the Virginia–D.C. family line descended from Andrew W. Mellon that the Pennsylvanians and Virginians rarely meet. During his college years at Colby, Koskoff reported that Mellon had not read any of the family writings other than Matthew's books and his uncle James Ross Mellon's African Hunter. He maintained little contact with his wider Mellon kin, but met other family members when James took him hunting at the Rolling Rock Club. In adulthood, Mellon redeveloped a relationship with his father, Karl, prior to the elder Mellon's death by suicide in 1983.

Government career

Beginning in 1985, Mellon served in various United States Senate staff positions on Capitol Hill, including a decade as a professional staffer of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), before joining the Department of Defense in 1997. In his own later telling, he "spent about 20 years working for Uncle Sam," beginning on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff under Senator William Cohen and doing related Armed Services Committee work.

United States Special Operations Command

Main article:

United States Special Operations Command

As a legislative assistant to Cohen, Mellon participated in drafting the bill that led to the creation of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM) in the National Defense Authorization Act for 1987 (NDAA). Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence William G. Boykin reported that Mellon encouraged Cohen to take a leading role in the effort. By 1985, Cohen and Mellon were interested in reforming United States Special Operations Forces (SOF). Cohen was approached by "former special operations people" seeking his help in "helping to rebuild SOF."

In 1985, House of Representatives staffer Ted Lunger approached Mellon to win Senate backing for Dan Daniel's special operations reform bill. Cohen and Mellon's interest in SOF reform intensified after the October 1985 Senate Committee on Armed Services report Defense Reorganization: The Need for Change. At a preliminary conference committee meeting, Mellon and his staff team argued the Daniel bill conflicted with the Goldwater–Nichols Act, whereas the Senate's Cohen–Nunn approach still let the Department of Defense craft its own long-term solution. The 1986 reform bill from Cohen's office, largely written by Mellon, relied on ideas from Senate Armed Services Committee staff member Jim Locher. While drafting the bill that would lead to the creation of USSOCOM, Mellon was unaware of an earlier Strategic Services (STRATSERCOM) proposal on the SOF topic. Boykin noted in The Origins of the United States Special Operations Command that Mellon contributed many of the ideas in the reform bill related to low-intensity conflicts. In a 1988 interview Mellon recalled that the SOF problem had been unknown to him when he first began drafting the legislation in early 1986. Mellon credited both Locher and Andrew Krepinevich's work in The Army and Vietnam.

Department of Defense tenure

When Cohen became United States Secretary of Defense (SecDef) in 1997, Mellon accompanied him to the Pentagon as part of Cohen's transition team. Mellon later recalled that "when he was asked to become Secretary of Defense, he asked me if I would like to go with him to the Pentagon to be part of his team. And I was honored and gladly accepted," serving four years in the Defense Department in various intelligence- and security-related positions. After the transition, he was appointed Coordinator for Advanced Concepts and Program Integration in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, focusing on encryption and information assurance issues. From November 1997 to June 1998, Mellon served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Policy, providing advice on intelligence matters, and from June 1998 through November 1999 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations.

In November 1999, Mellon took a noncareer (political) appointment in the Senior Executive Service as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence within what was then the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (OASD(C3I)). Over the course of his Pentagon tenure, he served under Presidents Clinton and Bush, and under SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. According to Mellon's own account, while in that role he was responsible for reviewing counterintelligence security for the Secretary of Defense and for overseeing black programs, and found that many hundreds of classified programs operated without the Director of Central Intelligence or senior National Security Council advisors being cleared for them.

Return to Capitol Hill

In February 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller hired Mellon as minority staff director of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). In his own telling, he "went back to the Senate Intelligence Committee as the minority staff director shortly before the 2nd Iraq War." According to Gizmodo, during his government service he served on a Defense Department committee with oversight of special access programs (SAPs). In Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, author and journalist Fred Kaplan wrote of Mellon's involvement during his Senate career with the National Security Agency and J. Michael "Mike" McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and Mellon's research into the NSA's budget. In Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA, Rowan Scarborough wrote that, at the White House's behest, Mellon and his Republican counterpart, William D. Duhnke III, were excluded from briefings on the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Journalist Keith Kloor wrote that Mellon "oversaw the Pentagon's most sensitive and closely held 'black' programs."

Following the 2003 leak of a Democratic staff memorandum drafted for Senate Select Committee on Intelligence vice-chair Rockefeller that proposed leveraging cooperation, issuing a dissent, or pursuing a Democrats-only investigation to highlight potential administration misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence, Republican committee members said the document aimed to discredit the panel's pending report and demanded Democratic repudiation of its partisan implications. In a November 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial column attacking the leaked memo, the editorial identified Mellon as an aide whose dismissal would be necessary to restore bipartisan credibility. In a January 2004 Insight on the News piece, writer J. Michael Waller, citing unnamed Senate and Defense sources, claimed that Mellon had set up an "autonomous Democratic staff apparatus" on the committee that pursued probes of senior Pentagon and State Department officials. In a November 14, 2003 Wall Street Journal letter, Senator Richard J. Durbin wrote that Rockefeller appointed Mellon, a registered Republican, as minority staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Durbin further noted that Mellon had earlier served the committee as deputy minority staff director for Republican senators Cohen, John Chafee, and John Warner, which he cited as evidence of a bipartisan record.

Mellon subsequently left government service. Ed Henry of Roll Call called Mellon's credentials "distinguished," and Military.com called Mellon a "top expert" in matters of national security.

UAP advocacy and the 2017 disclosure

According to Mellon, a long personal interest in UAP was concealed during his government career owing to the social stigma attached to the subject; he "confided to a few trustworthy friends" when he found "a fellow traveler" but otherwise "absolutely wanted to conceal that and not reveal that." After leaving government, he learned through Luis Elizondo and Navy pilots that UAP encounters had been occurring regularly off the US East Coast from 2015 onward — including the USS Nimitz incidents — and that these reports were not reaching senior Pentagon officials or Congress. Popular Mechanics reported that Mellon, while outside of government, had been invited to an AATIP meeting by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acquaintance, and that after being unsuccessful in contacting then-SecDef James Mattis about UAP-related topics, Mellon afterward focused on raising awareness about UFO- and UAP-related issues. In his own account, Mellon introduced Elizondo to two direct reports to Mattis, but those officials declined to brief Mattis, fearing it would damage his reputation.

The Washington Post in 2017 identified Mellon as having worked for AATIP, the 2007–2012 Pentagon program that investigated UAP, which was also disclosed by a New York Times article in the same year. In 2017, Mellon became a member of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA), an organization founded to research UAP-related topics, and worked as a paid adviser. TTSA described Mellon as its "National Security Affairs Advisor", and Art Levine wrote in The Washington Spectator that Mellon "lent credibility by his association." Mellon stated he was personally recruited by Tom DeLonge, TTSA's founder, after the musician read an article Mellon had written. At TTSA's first press conference, Mellon unveiled "photographic evidence of a UFO" that turned out to be a party balloon; Levine noted ironically that Mellon's "prestige has not been dimmed" despite this.

In 2017, Mellon brought three Navy targeting-pod videos — publicly identified as FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast — to editors at The New York Times and The Washington Post, facilitating the December 2017 articles that triggered a major shift in public and congressional attention to UAP. According to Mellon, the videos had gone through an official declassification review and carried documentation marked "approved for public release," though the Defense Department's public affairs office had not been notified, and the Air Force subsequently confirmed that the footage was "truly unclassified" following an investigation into the release. Mellon and TTSA played a role in the publication of the New York Times report "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program", with freelance journalist and UFO proponent Leslie Kean telling The New Yorker's Gideon Lewis-Kraus that Mellon and Elizondo were responsible for the creation of the article. Mellon, along with other TTSA members, met Kean on October 4, 2017, at an arranged meeting in a hotel near the Pentagon. According to Space.com, Mellon helped provide to the New York Times what became known as the Pentagon UFO videos. Mellon and Elizondo were credited for bringing the videos made by pilots from the United States Navy aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt to TTSA. In the 2020 documentary film The Phenomenon, Mellon again confirmed he was the source of the videos. Mellon departed TTSA at the end of 2020.

Mellon subsequently contacted former congressional colleagues and encouraged them to request classified UAP briefings from the Navy, which, by his account, led to Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committee staff meeting with pilots. He contends that this committee interest ultimately compelled the Navy to publicly acknowledge the videos as authentic, since it could no longer privately confirm the footage while publicly denying it.

Further UFO affairs

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Issues in Science and Technology highlighted a 2018 column by Mellon in the Washington Post, discussing lack of interest in UAP investigations by the Pentagon, despite repeated military encounters with them. Writing for the National Academies, Keith Kloor credited Mellon's piece in the Washington Post for moving UFOs, "a topic long confined to the tabloids", to being a "serious news story". Kloor also noted that Mellon was "influential" for leading the Senate and House Committees on Armed Services to seek information in regard to AATIP and Pentagon UFO investigations, and to interview military pilots who reported UFOs. In 2020, then-Senator Marco Rubio included language in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 which directed the DNI and SecDef to create "a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting", which "drew heavily" from proposals by Mellon to the Congress. Writing for Politico, Bryan Bender credited Mellon as having "effectively drafted" the legislation calling for the report. After then-DNI John Ratcliffe disclosed on Fox News that some UFOs lacked "good explanations", the Washington Post reported Mellon supported the disclosures.

According to a 2021 interview with Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, Mellon began his advocacy due to his views on investigations of UFOs by the government and surrounding secrecy matters. Vox reported that Mellon attributed his UFO-related beliefs to his security clearances. Mellon also authored pieces for Politico. The History Channel documentary series Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation listed Mellon as a featured contributor. In 2021, The Galileo Project at Harvard University named Mellon a research affiliate, joining founder Avi Loeb's effort to search for extraterrestrial intelligence or technologies on and near Earth and to identify the nature of UFOs. In 2023, Art Levine reported in the Washington Spectator that Mellon had lobbied in support of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which included provisions to investigate UFO-related topics and created the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Mellon has been associated with the UFO disclosure movement, and appears in The Age of Disclosure, a 2025 American documentary film.

Classification and transparency positions

Mellon has argued that a large volume of UAP material is being inappropriately classified in violation of the president's executive order on classification, which directs that ambiguous cases be resolved in favor of release. He has noted that, two years after the 2017 release, the Defense Department produced a classification guide suggesting that the same categories of videos now constituted a national security threat — a position he described as incoherent. In Mellon's assessment, a systemic institutional failure exists in that, with no individual within the system designated as an advocate for releasing UAP material, officials with the authority to declassify footage have simply not done so despite public commitments before Congress.

Among his stated priorities for congressional action: revision of the UAP classification guide; a mandated oral history program that would put on record the accounts of former secretaries of defense, directors of national intelligence, and former presidents with direct UAP knowledge; and legislative requirements that NORAD and major air and space surveillance systems report UAP observations systematically.

Assessment of UAP phenomena

Mellon has stated that no definitive evidence exists that any specific UAP event involves extraterrestrial vehicles, citing a lack of definitive evidence and the government's failure to establish threshold criteria that would allow such a determination. He has argued that Chinese or Russian origin is implausible for the most anomalous cases, noting that the US intelligence community spends approximately $70 billion per year monitoring those nations and has found no evidence they possess technology performing at those levels.

On the Nimitz encounter of 2004, Mellon has said the event was verified across multiple independent sensor systems — including the USS Princeton's Aegis radar, forward-looking infrared, and crews from multiple aircraft — in broad daylight, and that all available data confirms the craft performed maneuvers previously considered physically impossible. He has also pointed to a pattern of UAP activity near nuclear facilities and ICBM launch sites, noting that retired Air Force officers have testified under oath to incidents at installations such as Malmstrom Air Force Base and that FOIA documents support their accounts, yet Congress has never formally required the Air Force to acknowledge or investigate these events.

According to Mellon, the shift in official US government terminology from "UFO" to "UAP" reflected advocacy for neutral language covering anomalies in any domain — air, space, or undersea. He has noted that the Air Force initially tried to use the word "aerial" to exclude space-based observations from reporting requirements, which contributed to the eventual adoption of "unidentified anomalous phenomenon" as the standard term.

Third-party assessments

Steven Greer has characterized the Mellon family as "the first family of intelligence" and argued that Mellon's public posture of uncertainty about the nature of UAP is a form of "studied agnosticism" — allegedly withholding knowledge he possesses in order to maintain access to mainstream media outlets that would bar him if he were to state unequivocally what UAP are.

Daniel Sheehan, the attorney who represented Luis Elizondo in his dealings with the Defense Department, described Mellon as a central figure in the 2017 disclosure: "Chris Mellon being the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for the entire United States government under both President Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush, came forward along with Luis Elizondo" to deliver the three gun-camera videos to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Sheehan further noted that the Pentagon's Office of Pre-Publication Review and Security had cleared the videos for public release — a point that "99 percent of the people" still do not understand about the 2017 disclosure.

Elizondo himself credited Mellon as having "worked tirelessly for years behind the scenes getting Congress to encourage them and motivate them to write some of this historic and landmark legislation."

Post-government career

Mellon returned to his family's Pittsburgh home in 2006 after decades in the Washington, D.C., area and settled in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, home to many of his extended family. Mellon served on the board of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He has been involved with startup companies, including in the wireless power transfer field.

Personal life

As of 2020, Mellon is married. He is a fan of Jimi Hendrix.

See also

• Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
• Clipper chip
• David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims
• ECHELON
• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
• Room 641A

References

Template:US government sources

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External links

• Official website
• https://substack.com/@chriskmellon
• Template:IMDb name
• Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs): A National Security Threat, 2021 Stars and Stripes podcast with Mellon
• UFO Expert Chris Mellon: Based On What We Know About UAPs, Aliens Are The BEST Explanation, 2022 The Hill video