Intelligence chief Chris Mellon reveals HE provided New York Times with three infamous UFO videos
Daily Mail
October 20, 2020
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon, has revealed that he was the source who provided the New York Times with the three UFO videos it famously published in 2017.
Mellon, who served in the senior intelligence role under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, made the bombshell admission in a recently released documentary, The Phenomenon, which is directed by James Fox.
The 63-year-old told Fox that he met with an unnamed individual in the parking lot of the Pentagon months earlier and was handed a package containing three videos of ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ captured by Navy pilots between 2004 and 2015.
‘I received the videos, the now famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot from a Defense Department official. I still have the packaging,’ Mellon is heard telling the filmmakers. ‘This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good and we’re absolutely all better off because of it.’
The three videos went on to form what would become the basis of one of the most significant and revealing articles about UFOs in recent years.
One of journalists who worked on the story, Leslie Kean, also appears in the documentary.
Kean said she 'knew this was breaking news for the front page of the New York Times,' as soon as Mellon informed her about the clips' existence.
In its bombshell December 2017 article, the Times unveiled a classified Pentagon UFO program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), overseen by the likes of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Though at the time the government said the program, secretly commissioned in 2007, was shuttered due to a lack of funding in 2012, the Times later confirmed it continued its existence under a new name, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, within the Office of Naval Intelligence.
For more than a decade, the Pentagon had been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials.
The briefings were centered on sightings, video footage, and radar logs by military pilots of ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ which seemed to transcend existing flight technology - such as an aircraft with no visible engine at 30,000ft, traveling at hypersonic speed.
The Times also released three clips captured by Navy pilots across an 11 year period.
The first of which, known as the 'Tic Tac' incident, was captured by F-18 pilot Chad Underwood off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004.
The Tic Tac UFO - so-called because of its rounded shape and white color - was spotted by Underwood flying erratically over the Pacific Ocean.
'It was going from like 50,000 feet to 100 feet in like seconds, which is not possible,' Underwood said back in December 2019, breaking his 15-year silence over the encounter.
To this day, officials still have no idea what the recorded object was, with weather phenomenon, man-made craft and birds having all since been ruled out.
Two other videos recorded on January 21st, 2015, were also released.
The first video showed another anomalous aerial vehicle rotating rapidly while in flight. The second featured an object quickly flying over the water below, with a Navy pilot heard remarking ‘what the f**k is that thing?’ as it passes underneath him.
Months earlier before the article was published, the former head of AATIP, Luis Elizondo, worked with the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review to have the three videos declassified in late August of 2017, according to VICE.
Kean then met with Elizondo on October 4 where she was informed about the secret UFO program. Mellon, who was also reportedly present, then showed Kean the videos on his laptop.
The Department of Defense officially released the videos in April this year, nearly two-and-half years after the Times report.
Officials said they finally decided to disclose the footage 'in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos'.
'The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified,'' the department said.
The disclosure of these clips serves as the grounding theme of The Phenomenon.
The 100 minute-long film, in part, analyzes the history of UFO sightings in the US from the 1940s all the way up the footage released by the DOD this spring.
In addition to Mellon, Fox also speaks to a number of other high-ranking government officials, such as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Reid claims in the film that the US government has been hiding key details about UFO encounters from the public for years.
‘Why the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything, stopped it, I think it’s very, very bad for our country,’ Reid tells Fox in the film.
When asked if he’s saying there’s still some evidence that hasn’t yet been publicly disclosed, Reid replies: ‘I’m saying most of it hasn’t seen the light of day.’
Since leaving office in 2017, Reid has become increasingly outspoken about UFOs. He has, however, stopped short of confirming evidence of other-worldly activity, tweeting in August that he wants the issue studied and that ‘we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men.’
Reid stands firm on that point of view in The Phenomenon, telling Fox: ‘Nobody has to agree why it’s there. But should we at least be spending some money to study all these phenomenon? The answer is yes.’
The film traces the relatively recent history of UFO fixation, which began around eight decades ago.
The US Military began repeatedly investigating UFOs in the late 1940s, as sightings of unidentified discs and other strange incidents began frequently cropping up in the mainstream news reports.
From 1947 until 1969, the air force investigated more than 12,000 UFO claims. However, a study code-named Project Blue Book later concluded that most of the sightings could be explained by stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes. 701 of the sightings, though, remained unexplained.
One such incident was a 1967 report in which an object appeared over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana at the same time as 10 ICMB missiles suddenly become inoperative.
Robert Jamison, a retired USAF nuclear missile targeting officer, told of several occasions having to go out and ‘re-start’ missiles that had been deactivated, after UFOs - mysterious glowing red objects in the sky - were sighted nearby.
‘If they had been called upon by the president to launch, they couldn’t have done it,’ Reid says in The Phenomenon.
Similar sightings were also reported at nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union and again in Great Britain in 1980.
The documentary also goes on to cover the incidents at nuclear weapons facilities in Russia, with Russian military officials giving testimony about UFO incursions at one of their bases and taking control of their weapons.
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