Chris Mellon: Aliens Have Landed and Contacted Witnesses

Chris Mellon attended a conference on UFOs in Barcelona, and while there he gave an interview to a Spanish newspaper in which he made some of his most explicit and revealing comments about his belief in space aliens to date. The former Defense Department official and onetime lobbyist has been one of the driving forces behind the effort to convince Congress to create a new UFO office. He recently began admitting that his lifelong interest in science fiction and space aliens led him to believe UFOs are alien ships, and now he rather absurdly asserts that not only are these aliens visiting Earth but that “hundreds” of people have seen them land and even communicated with the creatures.

When you go to the zoo, do you talk to the animals? Why would they want to talk to us? What would be of interest to them? They may be so far beyond us. But the other thing I would say is that we have many reports that indicate that there has been some contact and some communication. Don’t forget, we’ve had incidents where these objects were flying right over our capital, the capital of the United States, and this has happened in other countries. We’ve had situations where these things have landed and hundreds of people have seen them. There may have been some contact and interaction, one, and, two, it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t want to, uh, land on the White House lawn and talk to the government, you know?

​Mellon’s claims are transparently derived from old UFO lore. The claim of UFOs over Washington is most likely a reference to the famous 1952 D.C. UFO flap, which was caused by unfamiliarity with new radar systems and how they handled atmospheric ice, leading to misidentification of ice as flying saucers. The other claims also seem to reference “classic” UFO incidents from paperback UFO lore.
 
The astonishing thing is that Mellon’s belief rests on the same body of archaic lore that failed to convince three generations of scientists, and yet, when spoken of elliptically, shorn of details, and presented out of the mouth of an ex-official is made to sound serious anew. Similarly, Lue Elizondo claimed in an interview last year that during his “time” heading AATIP (by which he either meant his actual UFO job with AAWSAP or else the unofficial hobby he later pursued for which there is little documentary evidence) he received “anecdotal information” about a second crash at Roswell in 1947. “During my time with AATIP, there was some very interesting anecdotal information that suggests there wasn’t just one crash, there may have been actually two crashes, and that somehow it may have been related to some sort of testing that was being done at the time at White Sands, and that material was recovered,” he said. Of course, that “information” was fakelore from UFO paperbacks and the ufology conference circuit—not secret government evidence.
 
Anything can be an “incident” or a “report,” which carries no implication of quality—though propagandists use faux-official terminology to make it seem so.