UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDPERSONNEL FILE
Christopher Mellon
Former Deputy Asst. Sec. of Defense for Intelligence
Christopher Mellon spent much of his career in national security. Beginning in 1985 he worked on Senate staff, including about a decade on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and in 2003 returned to the Senate as minority staff director of the Intelligence Committee.
In 2017 Mellon joined To The Stars Academy, the company founded by musician Tom DeLonge, as an adviser on national security affairs. Working with Luis Elizondo, he helped bring three Navy videos of unidentified objects to the press. He told CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ that, as a private citizen, he obtained the videos and gave them to the New York Times, which published them with its December 16, 2017, story on the Pentagon’s UAP program.
Mellon said he acted because he was concerned nothing was being done. ‘It’s bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that,’ he told ‘60 Minutes’ in 2021. He and Elizondo took their case to newspapers, the History Channel and members of Congress, and he wrote opinion pieces urging the Pentagon to take the encounters seriously. He left To The Stars at the end of 2020.
The release of the videos remains contested. In 2019 the Navy confirmed they were authentic but said their release had never been authorized. When the Pentagon officially released them on April 27, 2020, it referred to ‘unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017,’ while To The Stars maintained the clips had already been declassified.
Mellon has continued to press for disclosure and has criticized AARO. As chair of the Disclosure Foundation’s board, he responded to President Trump’s February 2026 directive to identify and release government UAP files by saying ‘the impact will depend on the follow-through,’ and noted that AARO had not yet released the second volume of its historical report or its 2025 annual report.
Christopher Mellon, 2021. Photo: Max Moszkowicz (cropped) · CC BY 3.0 · source
