There was a flurry of UFO sightings in the 1950s and early 1960s. Books about them landed on the “paranormal” shelf. People interested in them were deemed cranks. Then sightings stopped for a long time. Or at least they stopped making news. In the last few years they are back. “60 Minutes” ran a story Sunday night. The military now calls them unidentified aerial phenomena — UAP.
These comment struck me as familiar from a similar investigation:
Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and had access to top secret government programs.
Chris Mellon: So it’s not us, that’s one thing we know.
Bill Whitaker: We know that?
Chris Mellon: I can say that with a very high degree of confidence in part because of the positions I held in the department, and I know the process.
Mellon says he grew concerned nothing was being done about UAPs, so he decided to do something. In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired the three Navy videos Elizondo had declassified and leaked them to the New York Times.
Chris Mellon: It’s bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda.
He joined forces with now civilian Lue Elizondo and they started to tell their story to anybody who would listen: to newspapers, the History Channel, to members of Congress.
Chris Mellon: We knew and understood that you had to go to the public, get the public interested to get Congress interested, to then circle back to the Defense Department and get them to start taking a look at it.
My friend Barry Summers has been pursuing something similar for years. He has tried to alert the public that the military in conjunction with military contractors such as General Atomics has been working since at least 2012 to comingle large, remotely piloted military drones with civilian aircraft in U.S. air space. Drone integration programs (in the six states with them) are run by former military officers, Summers notes.
These are not hobby quadracopters. They are Reapers (rebranded the SkyGuardian for the commercial market) and Global Hawks designed for persistent surveillance. The latter have wingspans greater than a 737. They have less-than-stellar safety records. One or more were used for surveillance over Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests there last year.
A Reaper crashed on takeoff last year in Syracuse, N.Y. Another quarter mile and it might have gone through the front door of a Circle K convenience store. The Air Force told no one. It was not the first drone crash in that area. Another crashed into Lake Ontario in 2014. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection drone lost contact with its ground controller and crashed into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in 2014. Another crashed in the desert north of Las Vegas in 2016.
The City of San Diego last year “kicked around the possibility of using the SkyGuardian drone for vehicle enforcement on the freeway — but asked General Atomics not to discuss that information publicly.” A scheduled test flight of a military-grade drone over San Diego last year was cancelled.
But it has been as frustrating as drawing attention to the UAP issue to get anyone to take drone integration seriously. Not until one crashes into a school.