Christopher Mellon Calls on Trump Declassification Task Force to Release Withheld Unclassified UAP Videos

Christopher Mellon, who served nearly 20 years in the U.S. Intelligence Community including as Minority Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, published an op-ed in The Debrief on April 5, 2025, titled "Will the Declassification Task Force or President Trump Compel the DoD to Release its Trove of Unclassified UAP Videos?" The piece is addressed to Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who leads a new Congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and to the Trump administration, which Mellon notes has already taken action to declassify documents relating to the JFK and MLK assassinations and the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Mellon traces the origins of the current classification problem to 2017, when he obtained three Navy UAP videos approved for public release by the DoD's Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR). Two of the videos were shared with The New York Times and appeared in a December 16, 2017 front-page story. A third appeared in The Washington Post on March 9, 2018. An Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) inquiry subsequently confirmed the videos were unclassified and their publication did not damage national security. In the aftermath, however, the DoD's UAP Task Force created a new classification guide that Mellon argues made virtually all UAP-related material — including footage of the same type already published — a national secret.

Mellon states that he raised the classification guide problem with AARO's first director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who acknowledged it was problematic and said he had initiated a revision process. Despite this, Mellon reports that as of early 2025, no new Navy, DoD, or Intelligence Community UAP video has been declassified and publicly released — with the exception of one unresolved UAP video of a metallic sphere filmed over Iraq by an MQ-9 Reaper drone and several resolved cases on the AARO website. He further states that in conversations with government officials in March 2025, he was specifically told that no one in the government has been designated to seek or feels any obligation to release unclassified UAP information.

Mellon invokes Executive Order 13526, which governs federal classification policy and requires that information only be classified if it "reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security" and that "if there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified." He argues the current DoD approach is nearly the inverse of what the order requires, particularly for imagery captured by commercially available targeting pods or consumer devices. He points to Customs and Border Protection's public release of ten UAP videos and Northrop Grumman's public technical descriptions of the F-18 targeting pod as evidence that such disclosures do not compromise national security.

On a positive note, Mellon reports that AARO, now under the leadership of Dr. Jon Kosloski, has agreed to locate a specific F-18 UAP video Mellon recalled and submit it to DOPSR for declassification review. Mellon credits Kosloski with transforming AARO's posture, including no longer dismissing the credibility of military UAP witnesses or claiming that no reported cases are genuinely anomalous. He closes by urging Luna's task force and the administration to revise UAP classification guides, designate an official responsible for reviewing and releasing unclassified UAP imagery, and use this issue as an early test case of their commitment to government transparency.