Back around Christmas time, we looked at some of the initial videos of “unknown aircraft” released by the government after they revealed a secret program which had been monitoring unidentified aerial threats. (Let’s face it… they’re talking about UFOs, whether they’re something cooked up by one of our black ops projects or somebody from another planet.) After that news came out, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a brief period where people were talking about it, but then it just sort of went away.

Well, another video has been released. This one was taken off the east coast of the United States in 2015 by some F-18 Hornet pilots. And with its release, Christopher Mellon is asking some of the same questions I’ve had in an op-ed at the Washington Post. But unlike me, this guy has a bit firmer background in this area. He’s a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence in both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. These days he serves an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science which we’ve discussed here before and he’s working with a number of other government and military personnel who are looking for answers.

Before we get to Mellon’s thoughts on this, let’s look at the latest video. It sets up with some background information on what it is you’re seeing in this footage shot from the weapons control systems of an F-18. You hear the voices of several pilots who are, somewhat shockingly, laughing as they try to figure out what the heck it is they’re tracking. It allegedly dropped down from more than 60K feet at supersonic speed, stopped about fifty feet over the ocean and took off. Much like the video from last December, the Super Hornets were unable to catch it. Oh… and it doesn’t have wings.

Nobody is sure what these things are, but as I said above, Mellon has questions.

Is it possible that America has been technologically leap-frogged by Russia or China? Or, as many people wondered after the videos were first published by the New York Times in December, might they be evidence of some alien civilization?

Unfortunately, we have no idea, because we aren’t even seeking answers.

I served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and as staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I know from numerous discussions with Pentagon officials over the past two years that military departments and agencies treat such incidents as isolated events rather than as part of a pattern requiring serious attention and investigation. A colleague of mine at To the Stars Academy, Luis Elizondo, used to run a Pentagon intelligence program that examined evidence of “anomalous” aircraft, but he resigned last fall to protest government inattention to the growing body of empirical data.

Mellon is expressing the frustration of a lot of people in the military and the intelligence community. You don’t have to believe in anything crazy or have any sort of opinion at all. But the government has a pile of information and nobody is compiling it across agencies and departments to try to get a handle on it. Everything is being treated like a one-off incident and if our government has any answers, they’re not telling anyone.

Mellon has a theory as to why it’s not being pursued more vigorously. Nobody wants to be “the alien guy” in the national security bureaucracy. That’s traditionally been a great way to end your career quickly. But somebody needs to at least be asking the questions, don’t they? If you don’t want to think it’s extraterrestrials, that’s fine. I’m not even sure I believe that. But these aren’t pictures of swamp gas or weather balloons. If this is something that the Russians or the Chinese cooked up, we’ve probably got a very serious problem if we have nothing even remotely close to that sort of capability. I suppose the more comforting theory is that it’s actually one of ours but it’s so classified they can’t admit it. But if that’s the case, why release these videos?

Whether it’s ours, Putin’s or somebody from the Pleiades system, wouldn’t our government want to know? And if that technology is real and actually capable of doing anything close to what these videos seem to indicate, wouldn’t we want to get hold of it or figure out how to develop it ourselves?

Good questions. I’d love to hear some answers.