Chris Mellon's Incoherent UFO Analysis Reveals a Millennialist Salvation Fantasy

​In a new piece for the Debrief published yesterday, Chris Mellon offered an incoherent set of thoughts on UFO disclosure that accidentally revealed more than he probably meant to about the campaign behind the scenes to pressure government to embrace space aliens and also repeated the utopian fantasy that undergirds the UFO mythos.

​The majority of Mellon’s piece is putatively devoted to exploring the question of whether the government should disclose the existence of space aliens, a question Mellon answers in the negative in an attempt to manage expectations following the lack of world-changing “disclosure” in the wake of David Grusch’s congressional testimony. Mellon argues (now, anyway) that disclosure would be a catastrophic crisis because of the fear it would send through the population, so he counsels using a (very) slow and gradual approach to prepare the public.
 
In real life, a YouGov survey last year found that a majority of Americans, 57%, are certain aliens exist and a full 34% already believe UFOs are alien spaceships. A 2021 YouGov survey found that nearly half of all Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believed demons were currently operating on Earth. It wouldn’t seem that “disclosure” would be quite the “ontological shock”--that term again—that Mellon asserts it would be. If you already think evil demons are attacking America, would a visit from space demons be that much more horrific?
 
Mellon, however, has an ulterior motive for playing up the threat and panic angles. First, he wants lawmakers and Pentagon officials to feel urgency to adopt his preferred policy solutions—naming his favored candidates to top UFO jobs, awarding contracts to his colleagues, etc.—and he also wants to reset the narrative to help minimize upset that the promised “disclosure” that was to have come this summer or this fall never happened. The more that ufologists can frame UFOs as an existential threat, the more they can justify not delivering on their promises by, ironically, endorsing the old Pentagon line that secrecy is essential for national security. Nevertheless, at the end of the article, Mellon concedes that Americans would, rather than panic, in all likelihood simply go on with their lives—and doesn’t acknowledge the contradiction.
 
Mellon also appears to imply that some nefarious force will threaten lawmakers if they pursue alien claims: “For example, Senator Gillibrand has young children, and it is conceivable that if sufficiently alarming information emerges, she might reconsider her admirable desire to share as much information as possible with the public.” That’s one way to shift blame when you don’t deliver anything but yet another round of cable TV documentaries and lecture circuit appearances.
 
Along the way, though, Mellon makes some admissions that are worth highlighting: He says explicitly that he planned to influence Congress to carry out his agenda—though, of course, you should never accuse him of “lobbying” Congress! Mellon “confesses” that he arranged for Eric Davis to meet with Congress to make claims about space aliens and UFOs. He also admits that he was the secret facilitator who paved the way for Grusch to go public. He even admits that he purposely lied about his space alien beliefs in order to use a (supposedly) false narrative about foreign threats to publicize the UFO issue: “At the time, the ET issue was present but remained unspoken for good reason; if we had approached Congress with an explicit focus on aliens, we would have quickly been shown to the exit. Many legislators were privately curious about UAP, but we needed to focus on the national security angle to provide a politically viable justification for engaging on the UAP issue.”
 
Nothing like admitting that you are deceptive and purposely hide the truth for political gain—while criticizing the Pentagon for supposedly doing the same thing!
 
Mellon makes the unfortunately claim that we cannot “limit” ourselves to “pristine science” and must therefore embrace stories and hearsay and act on the UFO “threat” based on what pilots believe rather than what evidence indicates. That’s a great way to navigate around the problem that not a single UFO case has ever yielded undisputed scientific evidence of aliens or interdimensional beings, and, indeed, every solved case has had mundane origins. By dismissing the need for science, Mellon wants to redefine the standard of evidence to a question of trust, banking that testimony from pilots about what they perceived themselves as seeing can substitute for evidence that their perceptions correlate with reality. We know from seven decades of study that they do not.
 
His piece finishes with a utopian fantasy that UFOs will heal the planet and elevate humanity closer to perfection, one he hopes will overcome partisan division and prevent the U.S. from descending into civil war: “I believe the inevitable ontological shock would eventually prove highly beneficial, stimulating immense creativity, investment, and research. Moreover, and most importantly, it could have a profound, positive, and desperately needed impact on mankind and international relations.” Mellon asserted earlier in the piece that the aliens are not “angelic,” which would imply that they are not beneficent. But that renders his conclusion nonsensical, unless, like Ozymandias in Watchmen or Ronald Reagan, he imagines a new Cold War with Earth finding a common enemy to unite us. But if the aliens are technologically superior to us and could, in theory, wipe us from existence, what, precisely, is the future world Mellon envisions?
 
For his concluding fantasy to be true, his preceding warnings must be false. Mellon seems to give the game away. He doesn’t take the real ramifications of contact with a vastly more powerful alien civilization seriously because he isn’t interested in the aliens, not really. He is Ozymandias, imagining he can rewrite history and fix human nature, if only the cosmos would cooperate. Or the UFOs are the Second Coming, heralding the Millennium. Either way, it's not science.