#1645 - Christopher Mellon

**Christopher Mellon** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:09)
Alright, well thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

**Christopher Mellon** (0:17)
Pleasure, absolutely pleasure.

**Joe Rogan** (0:18)
Tell everybody who you are and what your background is.

**Christopher Mellon** (0:21)
Okay, my name is Chris Mellon, and I spent about 20 years working for Uncle Sam, worked in the Senate for the Intelligence Committee, and for Senator Cohen also did some Armed Services Committee work. When he was asked to become Secretary of Defense, he asked me if I would like to go with him to the Pentagon, be part of his team, and I was honored and gladly accepted.
So then served for four years in the Defense Department with Senator Cohen, Secretary Cohen at that point, in various positions, all intelligence-related and security-related. And then I was asked to stay on after Clinton departed, and so I worked for Secretary Brumsfield.

**Joe Rogan** (1:06)
Pull it a little bit closer.

**Christopher Mellon** (1:08)
And then went back to the Senate Intelligence Committee as the Minority Staff Director shortly before the Second Iraq War.

**Joe Rogan** (1:16)
So when did you get interested in the subject of UFOs?

**Christopher Mellon** (1:22)
That happened at a surprisingly early age. I was seven years old at a boarding school, and the principal of the school, a friend of his, had photographed a video, an old reel-to-reel Kodak movie camera, taken a movie, home movie of a video of a UFO flying in beautiful blue skies, cumulus clouds, huge golden disk that comes into the picture and banks, goes into a cloud, and it disappears into this sort of wispy cloud in a way that would be very, very hard, I think, to fake somehow, particularly in those days with no computer-generated imagery. And it comes out the other side and then sort of goes off over the horizon.
And I was, you know, stunned and flabbergasted myself and all the other kids ran outside that night and were looking at the stars, and it just sparked my curiosity, a lifelong curiosity.

**Joe Rogan** (2:21)
So once you got into government, and once you were, I mean, you were there, you were basically there, you had to start asking questions like, did you wait a while? Like, how long did you ask for? What do you guys know?

**Christopher Mellon** (2:35)
Yeah, well, for a long time I waited.
Very rarely, I looked for openings, I looked for opportunities.
So, for example, you know, the stigma is so great that you're reluctant, obviously, to raise that issue. A couple times there were some natural opportunities. So one of my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee was going to Hawaii for some oversight trips, meetings, and he went to the Maui Space Optical Tracking Facility. And I said to him, why are you there? Why don't you just check and see? Do they ever see anything weird they can't explain and so forth? So he did, and Pete called me up and said, hey, you wouldn't believe this. I've got this videotape here. And it shows these weird things. And so I talked to the Air Force people. They sent the tape to us. Turns out it was totally unclassified.
I showed it to Senator Cohen.
And some others. And it ended up on national TV, actually. But it didn't generate any further response. Everybody just kind of threw their hands up in the air and said, well, you know, that's interesting, but we don't know what to do with it. It was Ted Koppel's Nightline show that this tape was played on. It showed sort of five objects moving parallel to the ground, possibly in formation. They're in the atmosphere because they're burning, they're interacting with something. You know, there's plasma coming off them, which wouldn't presumably be happening in space, but they seem to be too slow to be meteorites. So it was mystifying and difficult to explain. Never did get an answer. Occasionally, something like that would happen. By and large, the issue almost never arose.

**Joe Rogan** (4:23)
The issue is a weird issue because if you bring it up in the wrong company or at the wrong time, you could be dismissed as a loon. Did you feel that when you were there? Like, as a person who had a budding interest in unidentified flying objects and what have you, did you feel like this is a politically risky thing to discuss, especially to discuss, like, in serious terms? Like, do you believe in these things? Like, what are they? What do we know?
Was that an issue?

**Christopher Mellon** (4:56)
Absolutely. I concealed my interest in the topic for years and very carefully and confided to a few trustworthy friends, had a few heart-to-heart talks with a couple individuals when I found a fellow traveler who was interested in this topic, but by and large, absolutely wanted to conceal that and not reveal that.