John Greenewald, Christopher Mellon and Kingman

As those of you who visit here regularly know, I believe the tale of a UFO crash near Kingman, Arizona in 1953, is a fake. It boiled down to a single identified eyewitness, who said that he embellished his stories when he had been drinking. It seems to be a tale that an adult fed to two teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. I would guess that he thought the story would go no farther than the two young men. The trouble is that Arthur Stansel’s story spread into the public arena and Ray Fowler got involved. He wrote an article for Official UFO’s April 1976 issue. Kingman entered the big time.

I’m not going to recap all that now. I’ve written extensively about it and included a long chapter about it in my upcoming book on UFOs. In the book, there are details that suggest a hoax. But then, Christopher Mellon released screen shots of an email in which Kingman is mentioned. I have thought that Mellon was one of the correspondents but it turns out that he had received a copy of the email from someone else, a person he refused to identify.

My point has always been that if Mellon was on the inside, as he had suggested in the past, he should have known the truth about Kingman. He would have known about the newspaper articles from the 1950s found by David Rudiak that mention all sorts of strange things going on in that Arizona but all of which seem to be more fantasy than fact. My thought has been that anyone who had access to government files would know the truth. This was developing into another MJ-12 fiasco.

David Rudiak at the Roswell Festival.
Photo by Kevin Randle

By that I mean the release of the MJ-12 documents sparked a government and Air Force investigation of the MJ-12 documents. Their conclusion was that the documents were bogus. I had thought them authentic when first published, but my investigation, based in part on my experience as an Air Force Intelligence Officer, suggested a hoax. I detailed all that in the updated version of my book, Case MJ-12.

I mention all this because John Greenewald just published on his The Black Vault website, the results of his FOIA requests for more information about this.

You can access the whole article at:

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/inside-the-pentagons-review-of-christopher-mellons-alleged-ufo-crash-retrieval-text/

 What I learn from that is that Mellon was able to publish the redacted email because it wasn’t classified. John wrote:

The FOIA file begins with Mellon’s January 19, 2024, email to DOPSR, in which he submitted the text message screenshot he later published publicly. Mellon wrote that he was seeking confirmation “to confirm it is not classified,” and noted that a submission mailed earlier had been returned “because some employee deemed it a security threat.”

The email does suggest there might be a classified portion because the email said, “We also know that a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the USAF in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover of UAPs.”

John Greenewald in Denver.
Photo by Kevin Randle

I will note here, that I am bothered by the use of the term UAP. That is fairly new term and Mellon, in his attempt to learn if there was anything classified in the email, wrote:

In that letter, Mellon explained that the message was sent to him “some years ago” by a former DoD employee alleging they were “being read into a program involving the exploitation of recovered off-world technology”. Mellon also indicated he had “redacted the name of the alleged ‘gatekeeper’” and emphasized that he respected the confidentiality of the source.

Of course, without knowing when the email was sent and the only date on the document was when it was cleared for publication, we might be dealing with an anachronism. We just don’t know what “some years ago” means in terms of when Mellon received it. There is a suggestion that the email was from 2020, which is after the term UAP was invented, but that is just a guess.

In his posting to his website, John provided additional detail that I believe weakens this alleged “leak.” He wrote:

The approval stamp, dated March 1, 2024, appears on the version later published by Mellon in April 2024, when Mellon published the message and an accompanying explanation. In it, he emphasized that he received the text years earlier from “a senior government official” who he said “had plausible access and was high-ranking,” and whose claim of access to a crash retrieval program was why he believed at least some allegations merited attention.

He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.

So, what do we have here? We have an email from an unidentified source referencing a case that is a hoax but suggests it is real. We learn there is a highly classified program, but we don’t have the name of that program. And we have the suggestion that the writer was denied access to the program and saw nothing himself. We have no way to vet the information in the email, which makes it virtually useless.

As for the idea that there might be something to the email, John quoted “The records also reveal that Mellon’s first attempt to submit the material was returned to him after a DOPSR employee deemed his three-page mailed package a ‘security threat’ a detail he did not disclose in his public article.” I would suggest that whoever initially received the request noted the reference to that highly-classified program. That would have been enough for him or her to flag it for further review.

I believe the most telling of the sentences in the letter is one that bears repeating. It said, “He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.”

In the end, this becomes another rabbit hole that leads us to a dead end. Unless we are given some way to vet the information in that email it is just rumor. I say that someone used the Kingman case because he or she thought it was a real event. In the end, you might say that was the poison pill.

I do applaud John for providing us with additional information about this aspect of the Kingman case. It just doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been before.

 

For those who wish to follow up on all this and who might not be completely aware of all the data available, I suggest the following:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Kingman#google_vignette