Former Intelligence Secretary Christopher Mellon's Fascination with UFO's

The J.Rogan experience. So when did you get interested in the subject of UFOs? 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 video, an old reel-to-reel Kodak movie camera, taken a movie, a home movie of a video of a UFO flying in beautiful blue skies, cumulus clouds, huge golden disk that comes into the picture in 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 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. So once you got into government and once you were, I mean, you were there, you're basically there, you had to start asking questions like, did you wait a while? Like how long did you ask for your okay? Sure did. What do you guys know? 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 a Ted Koppel's Nightline show that this tape was played on. And 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. 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? 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 in serious terms? Do you believe in these things? What are they? What do we know? Was that an issue? 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. Did you know Clinton? No, no. No? He would be the guy that I would go to. I feel like he would probably tell you. There's a request that came to me once that I think was from President Clinton and it was one of the astronauts claimed to have seen a UFO out at Edwards Air Force Base and it was videotaped, he said, and he described this in his memoir and wanted the president to get hold of the tape, of the video. And Secretary Cohen came back to the Pentagon from a meeting and a message came down to me to go to try to find this tape. And unfortunately, there was, I got nowhere with that. The Air Force was adamant that there was no such tape, there was no such information, anything they had on UFOs had been destroyed. So I had one of these situations that's very common in this area, which is you have just two apparently credible sources, but utterly conflicting, irreconcilable information, which seems to happen often in this field. Now being as you were in government and very close to literally the machine that runs the world, what's the general perception when people are discussing these things in Washington? What's the general perception of what's going on with these things? I'm happy to say that it's changed, that perception has changed considerably in the last few years. People feel like they have permission to talk about it. When do you think this happened? This happened after the New York Times article and subsequent press beginning in 2017, December 2017. And that sort of gave people permission to talk about this. And I've actually had Pentagon friends who said, you know, this is kind of cool, we don't have to go in the closet to talk about this anymore. What do you think kept it in the closet before? When did the stigma start? And do you think this was intentionally sort of set up this way? It was. It was the Robertson Panel Commission, 1953. And they concluded during those Cold War days that this was a potential threat to national security because UFO reports might overwhelm our air defense and communication system. And that the Soviets might spook the public and somehow manipulate this issue. So they actually advocated in writing that this issue be debunked and discredited and the government, what it had and did so, extremely successfully, unfortunately. And this all started with the Project Blue Book, correct? Correct. It was during that era. So what was the gentleman's name that was running Project Blue Book again? Well there were different people. There was the guy who went on to- Is there an honor, Alan Heineck? Heineck. And Heineck went on to become a believer. So he started debunking and was told, essentially, the way he reported it was that he was told to kind of debunk every single case. Everything he could find, whether it was swamp gas or, you know, ball lightning, find some way to explain this away. But then once he left Project Blue Book, he started openly discussing these cases and he started discussing his own belief. That's correct. And he felt badly burned as well because he was trying to carry out his mandate that the Air Force had given him. As you may recall, in one instance he went to Michigan and famously declared that the people of Michigan were misconstruing swamp gas for flying objects. And so Gerald Ford, who was representing that district, got incensed, as did the local population and Congress took a fleeting interest in the topic. And Dr. Heineck was very embarrassed and understandably so. It was really quite insulting to these people who had very clear sightings of these objects. So he did eventually change his view publicly and was very critical of Project Blue Book. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. 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