Joe Rogan Experience #1645 - Christopher Mellon

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) All right. Well, thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

Pleasure. Absolute pleasure.

Tell everybody who you are, and what your background is.

Okay. Uh, my name is Chris Mellon, and, uh, I spent about 20 years working for Uncle Sam, worked in the, uh, 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, um, 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 (clears throat) I then served for four years in the Defense Department with Senator Cohen, Secretary Cohen at that point, um, in various positions, all intelligence related, and, uh, and security related. And then, um, I was asked to stay on after, uh, Clinton departed, and so I worked for Senat-... for, uh, Secretary Rumsfeld.

Pull up just a little bit closer there. There you go.

And, uh, (clears throat) then went back to the Senate Intelligence Committee as the minority staff director shortly before the, uh, the second Iraq War.

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, uh, boarding school, and the principal of the school, a friend of his had photographed a video, an old reel-to-reel Kodak movie camera had taken a movie h- a home movie of a video of a, uh, UFO flying in beautiful blue skies, cumulus clouds, huge golden disc that, that comes into the picture, it 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, 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, and myself and all the other kids ran outside that night and were looking at the stars. And it just, uh, uh, 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?

Yeah. Sure did.

Before you were like, "Hey, what do you guys know?"

Yeah. Uh, (clears throat) well, uh, for a long time I waited. Um, very rarely, I looked for openings, I looked for opportunities.

(laughs)

So, uh, for example, you know, the stigma is, is so great that you're reluctant, obviously, to, uh, to raise that issue. A couple times there were some natural opportunities. So, uh, one of my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee was going to Hawaii for some oversight, uh, trips, meetings, and he went to the Maui, uh, Space Optical Tracking Facility. And I said to him, "While you're 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, uh, Pete called me up and said, "Hey, you wouldn't believe this. I've got this videotape here, and it's, shows these weird things." And so, uh, I talked to the Air Force people, they sent the tape to us. Turns out it was totally unclassified. Um, I showed it to Senator Cohen, uh, and some others, and it ended up on, uh, on national TV, um, actually, but it didn't generate, uh, uh, in- any further response. Everybody just kind of threw their, their hands up in the air and said, "Well, you know, that's interesting, but, uh, we don't know what to do with it." It was, uh, 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 'cause they're burning, they're interacting with something. Uh, you know, there's plasma coming off 'em, uh, 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. Um, occasionally something like that would happen, but by and large the issue almost never arose.