Chris Mellon Releases Texts from Government Official Claiming a Crashed UFO

​A few days after John Greenewald’s FOIA request for Chris Mellon’s messages to Sean Kirkpatrick revealed David Grusch had misrepresented his efforts to avoid speaking to AARO about his crashed saucer claims, Chris Mellon coincidentally released messages he exchanged with an allegedly high-ranking government official about a crashed saucer in Kingman, Arizona—messages he sat on for more than three years. The new messages, sent through a government text-messaging service, sent a tizzy of excitement through a ufology community reeling from accusations that this week’s new whistleblower, Jason Sands, told inconsistent stories about working for the UFO Task Force that suggested he was making his story up.

​Mellon’s texting partner claimed in 2020 that he “now” knew things that would leave people “slack-jawed.” The anonymous official went on to say that “we”—presumably a group within the Pentagon—were investigating the “recovered UAP that landed in Kingman, AZ in the 50s.” His group, he said, collected documents about which groups recovered materials from the crash site and the Air Force directive governing secrecy, as well as the “SES-2” executive branch official now in charge.

Mellon's redacted messages with an unnamed official

​Ufologists like Ross Coulthart considered this a major revelation, but there is less here than meets the eye. Mellon’s source merely viewed documents, and as with other alleged crashes, it is more than likely that the official was interpreting prosaic events through a science fiction lens. The crash allegedly took place near a nuclear test site, and it is more than possible that the documents referred to the recovery of materials (what, I don’t know—intentional test objects, accidental foreign craft, etc.) from the test site.
 
In the case of Jacques Vallée’s Trinity hoax, memories of nuclear testing became distorted into evidence to support a seemingly intentional hoax. Here, there is also a known hoax at work.
 
While the modern myth of the Kingman UFO grew out of a 2016 book, building on a 1973 report from Raymond Fowler, the story echoes one told by Frank Scully, the entertainment reporter whom Silas Newton duped with a massive hoax. Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers (1950) reported on an Arizona crash suspiciously similar:

“Oh yes,” responded Dr. Gee, “we have had three and we saw a fourth. But that one got away,” he added with a laugh. “The second one landed near one of the proving grounds in Arizona, as opposed to the first which landed near a proving ground in New Mexico. When we got to the second one we found almost the same conditions of the first, except that the door was open and the sixteen dead people in it were not burned nor browned. In fact medical opinion was that they had not been dead more than two or three hours. Our conclusion was that they had died in our atmosphere when the double knob of the door was opened and our air rushed into their cabin which was probably vacuumed or pressurized for their atmosphere but not ours.”
 
Newton asked, “How do you determine the presence of these particular ships. Do you stumble on them or know the moment they come in our atmosphere?”
 
Dr. Gee replied, “In the laboratories and also at Alamogordo and Los Alamos and at different parts of the country we have tenescope observers who spend 24 hours a day watching for evidence of objects or ships flying in the sky. Everything that comes within the range of these tenescopes is noted. If it is unfamiliar and lands, the Air Force is aware of it almost immediately, and if it presents scientific problems we or other groups are consulted.”

​According to declassified government documents, both the Air Force and the FBI investigated Newton’s claims. This seems a possible source of the documents Mellon’s excitable friend has spun into a conspiracy.
 
The current version of the Kingman crash places it in 1953, but the story Fowler told about the dead aliens, the opening in the craft that killed them, the size and shape of the disc, etc. are all very similar to Scully’s version. The stories are close enough that one might reasonably suspect conflation of Newton’s 1950 hoax with memories of the very real nuclear tests done in 1953.