Talk:Christopher Mellon/Archive 1#Notability and References analysis

Hi @BuySomeApples,

Here are the actions I have taken to clean up this article according to the specifications of your first review:

I moved the sentence “Since 2017, Mellon has been the public spotlight for his work on increasing governmental transparency about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).” to the second paragraph of the article. I have now cited this sentence with three significant sources of coverage that are reliable and independent of Mellon. They are articles from Newsweek, Space.com, and Vanity Fair. None of these are direct interviews of Mellon. I believe these three establish his notability as a UAP transparency advocate.

I removed the citation of Mellon’s website in the first paragraph, in addition to its other appearances as a citation in the article. It still remains in the infobox.

I deleted all citations of Mellon’s LinkedIn.

I relied more on websites of organizations that employ Mellon and congressional records to serve as sources of information about his governmental, academic, and private equity career.

Most of the original draft’s significant, reliable, but non-independent citations covering Mellon's UAP-related testimony still remain in the article, but these citations only justify that he has consistently appeared as a UAP transparency advocate in high-profile outlets. It appears that these are appropriately used according to WP:NIS.

Though there is a great deal of reliable and significant coverage of Mellon’s testimony, much of it is being discounted due to Wikipedia’s requirement of it being “independent.” This makes finding good citations difficult, given that he is a governmental insider testifying about the need for UAP disclosure. In any case, I believe the three citations in the second sentence of the article satisfy the WP:SIGCOV and WP:GNG guidelines. Based on this, do you think I should give resubmission a shot?

Thanks,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 05:21, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Ben.Gowar: I totally get you. I edit a lot of fandom related pages and one of the problems there is that you have topics that are really well known with large communities following them, but they haven't yet been widely covered in the sources considered reliable by Wikipedia. The first step is to get the page into shape for being published, and that means sorting out the sources. You did a good job removing some sources and I'm gonna help remove others that would be 100% rejected in a deletion discussion. If we cut out all the definite "NO" sources, we can focus on separating the "YESes" from the "MAYBEs". I feel like this page will be able to be published, it just might take a little work. BuySomeApples (talk) 07:00, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If I may interject, there are tons of references here. Because the issue with deletion was WP:REFBOMBing, therefore, and it failed WP:BEFORE involving five different editors less than two weeks ago, I'm random sampling the available references.

- According to the Cite Unseen script, 11 of the 39 sources are unreliable. A few of these are false positives in which the script is misidentifying official YouTube channels (e.g. CNN, CNBC) as user-generated content. To vet these, therefore, I randomly sample two: in this one [1], the subject appears as part of a 7-minute panel discussion on CNN talking about UFOs; in this one, the subject speaks for 22 seconds in a 60 minutes report about UFOs. These fail our standards of WP:SIGCOV. CNN and 60 Minutes are not reporting on Mellon or providing biographical information about him. WP:N requires the person or thing be the subject of widespread reporting in WP:RS

- One source is Newsweek. Per WP:NEWSWEEK, it is generally unreliable, meaning it should not be used for sourcing of subjects that intersect the extraordinary, of which UFOs definitely fits the bill.

- Three sources are FOX News. Per WP:FOXNEWSPOLITICS, the community has determined we cannot source FOX News for science-related information.

- Several sources are transcripts of congressional testimony and are WP:PRIMARY. They may be fine for filling out information, but don't contribute SIGCOV.

- A few sources are something called "uapdisclosurefund.org" which is a nonprofit corporation established in California in 2024. The subject of this article is listed on its board of directors. Therefore, the source is not WP:INDEPENDENT. It might be fine for WP:ABOUTSELF but doesn't contribute to SIGCOV.

- Two sources are show listings in TV Guide in which the subject appears in a list of cast or crew. This is also not SIGCOV.

- An article from space.com contains two perfunctory sentences of biographical information on Mellon; this seems to be the closest we're getting to SIGCOV and it's not cutting it. Again, though, the article is not about Mellon in any meaningful way, as with the other articles, he just happens to appear in it briefly. Chetsford (talk) 06:37, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Howdy @Chetsford,

There sure are a lot of references about Christopher Mellon's UAP disclosure efforts, aren't there? Wow! With your continued help, I'm sure we'll get this article in great shape in no time!

As a mild digression, here's some information I'd like to share: I've never actually seen a UAP myself, but there are some interesting accounts out there. For instance, Senior Chief Kevin Day described tracking a UAP that traversed 28,000 feet in .78 seconds. A 2019 paper by Kevin Knuth and others calculates the mean acceleration of this maneuver to be 5950 g. Based rates of acceleration like this, the paper states: "The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel, i.e., if these observed accelerations were sustainable in space, then these craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a matter of days to weeks, proper time."

Isn't that astounding?! My, the things this generation will live to see!

Thanks,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 22:09, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Keep up the good work! I don't even understand the value of these editors who go around ripping down others people's hard work, actively destroying informational content. Clearly just a form of internet troll, chronically online and with no other source of dopamine in their life. Christopher Mellon is quite obviously notable, but it seems it's possible to lawyer him out of Wikipedia by missing the forest for the trees and classifying his endless MSM interviews, articles, op eds in the Washington Post, and other Google results as somehow "not good enough." Why would CNN etc. reach out to the guy again and again if he weren't notable? How would he even get on Rogan in the first place? Just ridiculous. 2409:250:2C0:3800:5543:3BE6:CFDA:5CC0 (talk) 15:47, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm creating a subsection so that we put together a list of sources that can be used for the page. Some of these sources only mention Mellon in passing but a lot of them are sigcov imo. Also, if he has had major roles in notable documentary films, he might qualify under WP:NENT.

• Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan.

• UFO by Garrett Graff.

• We Are Not Alone by Marc Hartzman.

• Wiley's Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy.

• Hollywood Reporter article on The Program.

• History.com article on Mellon.

• CNBC article has quotes and is more like an interview but still useful.

• HuffPost article. Unfortunately it's a contributor article so it isn't considered completely reliable.

• Gizmodo.

This is just a start but it's something that we can work with. BuySomeApples (talk) 07:18, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ben.Gowar: Feel free to add your own sources below. BuySomeApples (talk) 07:19, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@BuySomeApples: Thanks so much for all your effort and consideration! I really do appreciate it. I'm a novice when it comes to writing Wikipedia articles, so your input is very valuable. I will be parsing these sources and the relevant Wiki guidelines. I will try to make the case for Mellon's standalone article ironclad. I will also be on the lookout for more sources and unobjectionable ways of using sources to justify statements about Mellon. Thanks again for all your help.

Ben.Gowar (talk) 20:38, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note that we consider The History Channel generally unreliable per WP:RSPHISTORY due to "its tendency to broadcast programs that promote conspiracy theories". The relevant RfCs specifically cited Ancient Aliens and its related UFO-themed programming as necessitating the evisceration of The History Channel. The Hartzman book is published by Quirk Books, which is neither an academic publisher nor an established publishing house; it specializes in peddling joke books, novelty volumes, and juvenile readers and would doubtfully survive an RSN RfC. As noted by BSA, most of the rest appear to be incidental mentions. Chetsford (talk) 08:52, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good eye @Chetsford: thanks! I struck History Channel and the Hartzman book. I think some of the other sources might approach sigcov. Even if I do find enough for notability, the page will likely be a bit stubby since we'll have to keep an eye on WP:FRINGE. BuySomeApples (talk) 20:08, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @BuySomeApples,

I have been digging through The Hill's articles and Mellon is listed as an "Opinion Contributor" in at least five cases:

How government over-classification may hide UFO videos and harm our security

The questions Congress should — but didn’t — ask about UFOs

The problem is not Russia or China, it is Putin and Xi

The ocean science community must put science before stigma with anomalous phenomena

The Navy acknowledges UFOs — so why aren’t they on Washington’s radar?

I recognize that these are not independent sources, but could they be used to justify that the claim that he has served as a Contributor for The Hill?

For instance: "From 2019 to 2023, Mellon served as a Contributor to The Hill. During this time, he penned several articles on national security and UAPs, including "The problem is not Russia or China, it is Putin and Xi" and "The Navy acknowledges UFOs — so why aren’t they on Washington’s radar?"

Do you think this increased emphasis on Mellon as a contributor to a reliable media outlet could justify his notability?

Thanks again for all your help,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 23:18, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ben.Gowar: The fact that he was a contributor to the Hill won't count towards notability. Per WP:JOURNALIST articles themselves would have to be considered significant (like if they won awards or were widely discussed by independent sources), otherwise they don't confer notability. Most contributing writers aren't notable, only the most well known journalists are. However, we can still add that he has written articles for The Hill as a contributor, since it's verifiably true. BuySomeApples (talk) 00:40, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@BuySomeApples: Thank you! Alright, I found this article from Wired that seems to have more than a trivial mention of Mellon (meaning it's significant). It is reliable, secondary, and independent. I also think it estalbishes his notability. Here is what it says:

"Christopher Mellon, a research affiliate with Harvard University’s Galileo Project, has spent the past few years helping Congress and the public discover the truth about UAP. In an op-ed for Politico, he admits that “UAP were routinely violating restricted U.S. airspace.” He adds, “It wasn’t clear if these bizarre craft were Russian, Chinese, extraterrestrial or some combination of the above, but it seemed unacceptable and outrageous that no effort was being made by the intelligence community to alert policymakers or undertake an investigation.” Over his time investigating these phenomena the credibility of claims concerning US government possession of “off world craft” has only grown. In part, Mellon’s effort convinced Congress to demand an official report on UAP from the intelligence community.

The resulting report arrived in 2021 and identified a growing number of UAP encounters, many of which remain unexplained. One such incident was the now famous ‘Tic Tac’ video filmed by David Farvor, former navy commander and another witness at the UFO hearing. Journalist Byron Tau, who was watching the hearing, tweeted, “To me, the “Tic Tac” incident is the hardest to explain away. US Navy vessels saw it on sensors, four highly trained aviators had visual contact, and planes had sensor data. And it behaved in ways that defy known material science and physics.”"

What do ya think? Ben.Gowar (talk) 04:17, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I will weigh-in on the WIRED article. The WIRED article is 871 words long and the word "Mellon" is mentioned twice. It's eight paragraphs long and all mentions of Mellon are contained in one of those paragraphs. By my count 38% of the paragraph is a direct quote from Mellon. This is synonymous with the example given in WP:SIGCOV of Bill Clinton.
Generally, subjects who are notable won't require contorting ourselves into a pretzel to try to scrape together a 2 or 3 sentence mention and then herald it as "significant coverage". It should be readily and easily apparent they're notable. Here are a couple examples of SIGCOV just from the article on Philip Low (neuroscientist): a 1200 word article [2] in the San Diego Union Tribune about Low winning an award - it includes data on his childhood, quotes from people who know him, a profile of his career; a three-page article in The Scientist delving into Low's background from birth to present [3]; three paragraphs in MIT Technology Review about Low and his achievements (not merely quoting Low talking about current events) [4].
A person can also meet subject-specific notability guidelines. For instance, if Mellon received the Medal of Honor or Nobel Prize for defending Earth against the flying saucers, he does not have to meet the WP:GNG. Under WP:POLOUTCOMES we also give the presumption of notability, even in the absence of SIGCOV, to sub-cabinet officers. The term "sub-cabinet officer" has never been explicitly defined but, in the U.S., those at the rank of Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary generally pass; Assistant Secretary is marginal; I have never seen a Deputy Assistant Secretary pass. This is the lowest rank on the Executive Schedule. At any one time there are ~60 Deputy Assistant Secretaries just in the DOD. There are hundreds across the U.S. Government. Tens of thousands of people have probably held this grade of office. Chetsford (talk) 05:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chetsford: Well golly, you sure look to be thorough! However, I noticed that though the word "Mellon" was mentioned twice, 216 words out of 888 are dedicated to Chris Mellon and the consequences of his work. This would mean 24.324324324% of this article is indicative of his notability. Five sentences are specifically about Mellon and another five are about the consequences and significance of his work. Goodness me, I also recall that according to WP:GNG, "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." This does not seem to be a trivial mention. I do not know of any recommended length of a reliable source. Do you?

In any case, it seems that in citing Wired, Vanity Fair, and Space.com we are putting together some reliable, secondary, and independent sources! I also think these establish his notability, especially when taken together cumulatively. We are working well together @Chetsford!

To your point about pretzels, some contortion can be good for the body, ha ha! Ever try Yoga? Supposedly if you practice enough you can acquire some siddhis, but maybe that topic is more appropriate for the Stargate Project article. It seems Mellon would know about that one!

Anyway, thanks for all of your good will!

Ben.Gowar (talk) 06:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"especially when taken together cumulatively" Three incidental mentions don't equal one piece of significant coverage. That's not how this works. Moreover, because all three of these sources were in the original article and the community chose to delete it based on an absence of SIGCOV, recreating it with no substantial change in sourcing will probably make it eligible for speedy deletion (deletion sans discussion) under WP:G4 criteria. To prevent this namespace from being WP:SALTed, it might be best to wait until someone writes a profile of Mellon, or something else of substance beyond just the endless quote parade. Chetsford (talk) 06:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chetsford and Ben.Gowar: I appreciate both of your arguments and help assessing these sources. An encyclopedic page will not parrot Mellon's beliefs about UAP's (see WP:FRINGE). At the same time, a few people known for fringe theories end up warranting inclusion in the encyclopedia through GNG or one of the SNGs. As there is no deadline, there's no rush to publish the page or flat-out reject it today. There also doesn't seem to be any reason for this page to be SALTed in the near future. There hasn't been any attempts to repeatedly recreate the page in mainspace, and trying to improve the page through AfC shows good faith. AfC is the best place for Ben.Gowar to work on something like this, it's what draftspace is for.

I suggest tabling the personal discussion for now and working on improving the draft until it's in a much better state. After that, it will be up to the next AfC reviewer to review the submission. If it's accepted and any editors disagree with the reviewer, the page can be nominated for deletion in the future. If the reviewer(s) exercise good judgement, than an AfD hopefully won't be necessary. BuySomeApples (talk) 09:20, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chetsford: You say they are "incidental," yet I assert they are significant and not trivial. There seems to be a lack of quantitative criteria for differentiating between a source that is significant vs one that is trivial. Nevertheless, you tried to provide some quantiative metric. I pointed out that your measurement was incorrect, and now you simply call it incidential because you claim cumulative mentions aren't "how this works." Yet, WP:SIGCOV implies Mellon "does not need to be the main topic of the source material" and that "multiple sources are generally expected."

So, it seems that the cumulative number of sources is relevant to the expectation that "multiple sources are generally expected." It also seems that Mellon not being the "main topic of the source material" is irrelevant.

In addition, you stated that "all three of these sources were in the original article." This is false. Neither the Space.com nor the Wired article were ever in the original article. I know it can sometimes be difficult to review an article's sources after it has been deleted, so here is an archived version for you. It seems archives are difficult to scrub. These are not the only new sources that we have added to this article, but they are new ones that meet the criteria of being reliable, secondary, and independent. So, I'd hope that even if we submitted this article today, no one would make the argument that it should be eligible for speedy deletion due to "no substantial change in sourcing." That would just be an argument based on false premises.

Anyway, thanks @BuySomeApples. I will table personal discussions and keep doing what I can! You've been very generous with your time. I appreciate it. Ben.Gowar (talk) 16:12, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Howdy @BuySomeApples,

I think I found a source that even @Chetsford would have to admit is reliable, significant, secondary, and independent. It's an article from the ABC News that focuses almost entirely on Mellon and his testimony: "UFO sightings ignored by Pentagon, former insider says"

I suppose my question is: What statement in the draft should we cite with the ABC News, Wired, Space.com, and Vanity Fair articles? Do you think it's overkill? It seems odd to me to take out the Vanity Fair article simply because it was used in the deleted version of the article. After all, it is a reliable source. In any case, do you think there's a way to lead with these articles so that reviewers can clearly see that there is reliable, significant, secondary, and independent coverage of Mellon and his work?

Thanks so much,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 05:14, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ben.Gowar: That article might be useful, good find! I think you should remove every primary source and unreliable source (like The Hill contributor articles) so that only the best sources are there. This will make it easier for the reviewers since they won't have to go through a bunch of cruft. There's no need to ping Chetsford every time you add a comment btw. They are welcome to participate in their own time, but otherwise it might be nice to give their notifications a break. BuySomeApples (talk) 06:01, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Again, this doesn't contain coverage about Christopher Mellon. It covers something else entirely, Mellon is merely quoted commenting on it. SIGCOV doesn't require a certain length of article, but neither does it presume a long article is significant. SIGCOV could occur in a 200-word article and non-SIGCOV could be the case in a 2,000 word article. It addresses "the topic directly and in detail" (see WP:SIGCOV. This does not directly address the biography and life and Christopher Mellon. It addresses UFOs and Mellon merely appears as a quotable figure in it; no detail is provided about him. This is also addressed by our well-regarded essay WP:IV: "Anything interviewees say about themselves or their own work is both primary and non-independent, and therefore does not support a claim for notability." The only thing here said about Mellon in ABC's own voice is superficial (a former job title). Did you have a chance to read the examples of SIGCOV from Philip Low I provided above? Just find a couple things like those and you'll be set. Chetsford (talk) 12:49, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Now you've got me thinking. Since there is reliable, significant, secondary, and independent coverage of Mellon's UAP disclosure work (rather than his life), maybe it's more appropriate to create a Wikipedia page about that. Can you think of a precedent for this type of article? The one that comes to my mind is "David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims." Do you know of others like this?

Thanks,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 17:18, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pentagon UFO videos? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:55, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:26, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Howdy @Very Polite Person,

No, I don't mind at all. The biggest hurdle being presented is finding sources of Mellon's actual biography rather than mere descriptions of his work (though I don't think the two can be disentangled). I have found four reliable, significant, secondary, and independent descriptions of Mellon and his work. These sources are: ABC News, Wired, Space.com, and Vanity Fair. These are meeting with objection that they don't "contain coverage about Christopher Mellon," which is of course not true, yet the objection still arises. Two of these articles were also faced with the objection that they had appeared in the deleted version of Mellon's article, but that was also untrue. If these articles don't meet with those objections, then they are still described as having too little coverage about Mellon, despite there being no specific Wikipedia guidelines about length or proportionality.

Anyway, that's where we are!

Thanks,

Ben.Gowar (talk) 21:12, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look:

• Draft:Christopher Mellon#Draft 2

Unless someone can find more stuff, that's about all of it for the moment. There may be some valid cross-referencing of sources still to be done, if some of the ones listed can be utilized as further support for other citations. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 22:52, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I only found two -- what are the other sources? I found:

Mellon was heavily decorated through his government career, having earned the National Reconnaissance Office Gold Medal and the Defense Intelligence Agency Director's Medal.

But we list in the infobox:

• The Secretary of Defense Meritorious Public Service Award,
• The Secretary of Defense Outstanding Public Service Award,
• The National Reconnaissance Office Gold Medal,
• The Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s Medal,
• The National Imagery and Mapping Agency Medallion for Excellence

What sources cover the others? Bold we have a source for. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 23:12, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Very Polite Person: It's definitely on his LinkedIn, but you'll probably have a better shot defending UFOData:

"Awards he has received include the National Reconnaissance Office Gold Medal, the Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s medal; the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Public Service Award, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Medallion for Excellence and the Secretary of Defense Outstanding Public Service Award."

Anyway, thanks a lot for all the work you put into your resubmission of this article. I really appreciate it. Ben.Gowar (talk) 23:59, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome! Fixing up stuff and preservation of data is kinda my interest here beyond certain subject matters (check my user page for my other stuff, I like to take tiny articles on obscure things and expand them--I have a dozen I'm noodling on off-wiki when I have time. Sometimes I just drop them into article space nearly done.

I don't that particular UFO site will fly nor linked in, but we've got cites locked down for the two more notable awards. I was just joking with someone the other day that I always wonder why orgs and groups don't just keep a stockpile of all media coverage linked somewhere on their site, just for stuff like this, or for journalists that want to look them up. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 00:07, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In genereral, any award etc mentioned should have a decent secondary source. If the award, or at least the org behind it, has a WP-article, a primary source (the awarding org) might be enough. Subject's (or anyone's) linkedin fails bigtime. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:38, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm finding a huge array of mentions of him, including some write-ups, in stuff that is on the Perennial RS list as no, and mentions of him in what seems like another half-dozen books, mostly around defense, and all pre-2017. The guy had a notable career before the UFO stuff even began. Unless someone wants to dip into newspapers.com or Lexus, this is it for at least today. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 00:55, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Very Polite Person: I saw you asking for a restore of the old version of the article. I don't know if you saw it from above, but here is a decent version: https://archive.ph/mwthk

Ben.Gowar (talk) 06:15, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Noting that the 2 HuffPost sources in the draft are WP:HUFFPOCON. "HuffPost contributor articles should never be used for third-party claims about living persons." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:33, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Bonadea,

I see that you recently declined the submitted draft for Christopher Mellon "Per Chetsford's source evaluation (supported by my own source checks) and the recent AfD outcome."

Given that this is the case, I would like to draw your attention to several falsehoods that @Chetsford wrote in his source evaluation. But before I do that, I'd also like to draw your attention to Chetsford again writing falsehoods about sources as I was attempting to garner new ones for this article. In this first case, he made the claim that two new sources (from Space.com and Wired) were in the original Christopher Mellon article that was deleted. When I pointed out that this was outright false, he had nothing to say. I would have anticipated he would have known the citations in the original article better, given that he initiated the AfD, but apparently not. In any case, you'll see that these articles did make their way into the draft you declined.

Regardling "Chetsford's source evaluation" of the recently submitted draft, here are the falsehoods that he wrote in bold, with my refutations in plain text:

"7. Article is about flying saucers; Mellon is briefly quoted in it speaking about flying saucers - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV This article never once mentions "flying saucers," nor is Mellon "briefly quoted in it speaking about flying saucers." The article details Mellon's past positions in presidential administrations, and how Mellon gave declassified Navy UFO videos to the New York Times, resulting in their "blockbuster story" about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It also describes his "60 Minutes" interview and includes his assertion that UAPs are a national security issue. This is significant, reliable, independent coverage of a high-profile individual in the UAP disclosure movement.

9. 12 page article on a piece of legislation mentions Mellon once ("Christopher Mellon, Cohen’s staffer, later said: [quote]") - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV This is demonstrably false. Mellon is mentioned three times, but even if that weren't the case, one mention would still evidence the claim that: "In interviews with Joint Forces Quarterly, Mellon in 2002 discussed his time and memories working in the United States Senate." Regardless, here are THREE mentions that show Chetsford's outright telling of falsehoods:

On page 44: "Christopher Mellon, Cohen’s staffer, later said: “One thing about Senator Warner that I always admired . . . is that he maintained an open mind. He was willing to change his point of view based on new evidence and information. Senator Warner might go into something with a great deal of conviction on one side and argue furiously, and yet as new information would come to light, he always listened.”

On page 45: "Looking back at the committee’s work, Mellon said: “It was an example of good government. It is the memory I would like to have of the Senate. There weren’t parochial motives that I was able to discern. Members were motivated by national security considerations. People were dedicated; everybody was engaged; they were working with a great deal of vigor, energy, and commitment. Issues were decided on the merits and substance. It was the kind of experience that makes you want to go into government and be involved and participate.”

On page 46: This process strengthened the bill and achieved consensus. Mellon compared it to forging a sword: “Warner and the Navy were the hammer, and Goldwater, Nunn, and the staff were the anvil. Warner kept firing in these amendments and concerns and objections to provisions. In a way, they helped to strengthen, sharpen, and harden some of the provisions and forged the bill in a hotter fire.”

10. Mellon is briefly mentioned in two short sentences in this 360 page book. False. Mellon is mentioned in THREE sentences that do justify the claim "In Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, author and journalist Fred Kaplan wrote of Mellon's involvement during his Senate career with the National Security Agency and J. Michael "Mike" McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence, and Mellon's research into the NSA's budget." Nevertheless, the important part is that Mellon cracked the NSA's books and revealed their meager budget "for programs to penetrate communications on the internet." This led to McConnell assuring "the Senate commitee that he would beef up the programs as a top priority." This content can be read on page 36 of the book:

"McConnell feared that the NSA would lose its unique luster—its ability to tap into communications affecting national security. He was also coming to realize that the agency was ill equipped to seize the coming changes. A young man named Christopher Mellon, on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff, kept coming around, asking questions. Mellon had heard the briefings on Fort Meade’s adaptations to the new digital world; but when he came to headquarters and examined the books, he discovered that, of the agency’s $4 billion budget, just $2 million was earmarked for programs to penetrate communications on the Internet. Mellon asked to see the personnel assigned to this program; he was taken to a remote corner of the main floor, where a couple dozen techies—out of a workforce numbered in the tens of thousands—were fiddling with computers. McConnell hadn’t known just how skimpy these efforts were, and he assured the Senate committee that he would beef up the programs as a top priority."

12. Mellon is mentioned in one paragraph of this article on a congressional hearing; a large portion of that paragraph is a direct quote from him - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV Again, a falsehood. Mellon is mentioned in FIVE paragraphs, and perhaps more important than Mellon's direct quotations are the implications of his work: Were it not for Mellon, Kean would not have been able to break her New York Times story and the UAP-related provisions in the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act would not have been added. Additionally, the article highlights that Mellon has confirmed that the"government possesses stark visual documentation" of UAPs. Nevertheless, here are the five distinct paragraphs where Mellon is mentioned:

On October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher K. Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie Kean was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of an upscale hotel near the Pentagon. She was greeted by Hal Puthoff, the longtime paranormal investigator, and Jim Semivan, a retired C.I.A. officer, who introduced her to a sturdy, thick-necked, tattooed man with a clipped goatee named Luis Elizondo. The previous day had been his last day of work at the Pentagon. Over the next three hours, Kean was taken through documents that proved the existence of what was, as far as anyone knew, the first government inquiry into U.F.O.s since the close of Project Blue Book, in 1970. The program that Kean had spent years lobbying for had existed the whole time.

After Elizondo resigned, he and other key AATIP participants—including Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan—almost immediately joined To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, an operation dedicated to U.F.O.-related education, entertainment, and research, and organized by Tom DeLonge, a former front man of the pop-punk outfit Blink-182. Later that month, DeLonge invited Elizondo onstage at a launch event. Elizondo announced that they were “planning to provide never-before-released footage from real U.S. government systems—not blurry amateur photos but real data and real videos.”

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, their story—“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”—appeared online; it was printed on the front page the next day. Accompanying the piece were two videos, including “FLIR1.” Senator Reid was quoted as saying, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this going.” The Pentagon confirmed that the program had existed, but said that it had been closed down in 2012, in favor of other funding priorities. Elizondo claimed that the program had continued in the absence of dedicated funding. The article dwelled not on the reality of the U.F.O. phenomenon—the only actual case discussed at any length was the Nimitz encounter—but on the existence of the covert initiative. The Times article drew millions of readers. Kean noticed a change almost immediately. When people asked her at dinner parties what she did for a living, they no longer giggled at her response but fell rapt. Kean gave all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward, but she told me, “I never would have ever imagined I could have ended up writing for the Times. It’s the pinnacle of everything I’ve ever wanted to do—just this miracle that it happened on this great road, great journey.”

The point of using the term “unidentified,” he said, was “to help remove the stigma.” He told me, “At some point, we needed to just admit that there are things in the sky we can’t identify.” Despite the fact that most adults carry around exceptionally good camera technology in their pockets, most U.F.O. photos and videos remain maddeningly indistinct, but the former Pentagon official implied that the government possesses stark visual documentation; Elizondo and Mellon have said the same thing. According to Tim McMillan, in the past two years, the Pentagon’s U.A.P. investigators have distributed two classified intelligence papers, on secure networks, that allegedly contain images and videos of bizarre spectacles, including a cube-shaped object and a large equilateral triangle emerging from the ocean. One report brooked the subject of “alien” or “non-human” technology, but also provided a litany of prosaic possibilities. The former Pentagon official cautioned, “ ‘Unidentified’ doesn’t mean little green men—it just means there’s something there.” He continued, “If it turns out that everything we’ve seen is weather balloons, or a quadcopter designed to look like something else, nobody is going to lose sleep over it.”

In June of 2020, Senator Marco Rubio added text into the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act requesting—though not requiring—that the director of National Intelligence, along with the Secretary of Defense, produce “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting.” This language, which allowed them a hundred and eighty days to produce the report, drew heavily from proposals by Mellon, and it was clear that this concerted effort, at least in theory, was a more productive and more cost-effective iteration of the original vision for AATIP. Mellon told me, “This creates an opening and an opportunity, and now the name of the game is to make sure we don’t miss that open window.”

In addition to all these falsehoods, @Chetsford frequently implies that coverage about a topic not "significant or in detail" based on what percent of a source it constitutes or how long the source is. This is fallacious. Coverage can be significant and in detail even if it is a small portion of larger work or even if the source is subjectively short. All of Chetsford's arguments to discredit a source based upon proportionality and length should be discounted, especially given that Wikipedia does not have specific guidelines for SIGCOV on the basis of proportionality and length. Arguments based on proportionality and length are a mere attempt to misconstrue the relevant facts of the matter—Those being the ones cited in a given source, regardless of the source length or what proportion of the source is relevant. Attempts to discredit the significance of a source based upon proportionality or length are strawman arguments that draw editors into a quagmire. Chetsford makes arguments of this kind in the following cases:

7. Article is about flying saucers; Mellon is briefly quoted in it speaking about flying saucers - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV

9. 12 page article on a piece of legislation mentions Mellon once ("Christopher Mellon, Cohen’s staffer, later said: [quote]") - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV

10. Mellon is briefly mentioned in two short sentences in this 360 page book

12. Mellon is mentioned in one paragraph of this article on a congressional hearing; a large portion of that paragraph is a direct quote from him - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV

15. Mellon is mentioned in one paragraph of this 28 paragraph article commenting on proposed legislation - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV

Bearing in mind all of this mendacity, I do not believe deferring to "Chetsford's source evaluation" is sufficient grounds for rejection. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ben.Gowar (talk • contribs) 23:40, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Per Chetsford's source evaluation (supported by my own source checks) and the recent AfD outcome. bonadea contributions talk 18:07, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: This article was recently deleted at AfD by community consensus. The community determined there was insufficient WP:SIGCOV. The AfD nomination also noted that the article was elegantly WP:REFBOMBed with otherwise RS that merely contain quotes or one-sentence mentions of the subject to create the appearance of robust sourcing.
  Per WP:AFCPURPOSE "Articles that will probably not survive [AfD] should be declined.". This article has already once died at AfD due to SIGCOV problems. Since acceptance of this article through AfC, therefore, will turn on overcoming the community's determination there was insufficient SIGCOV, below is an evaluation of the 9 sources that appear in this draft that did not appear in the deleted version (organized by footnote number as of this timestamp):
  1. Panelist bio at speaking event; not WP:INDEPENDENT
  6. Unreliable source per WP:RSPHISTORY
  7. Article is about flying saucers; Mellon is briefly quoted in it speaking about flying saucers - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV
  9. 12 page article on a piece of legislation mentions Mellon once ("Christopher Mellon, Cohen’s staffer, later said: [quote]") - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV
  10. Mellon is briefly mentioned in two short sentences in this 360 page book
  11. Source offline -- given the history of this article it might be problematic to AGF that this is different from the rest
  12. Mellon is mentioned in one paragraph of this article on a congressional hearing; a large portion of that paragraph is a direct quote from him - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV
  15. Mellon is mentioned in one paragraph of this 28 paragraph article commenting on proposed legislation - WP:SIGCOV "addresses the topic [Mellon] directly and in detail" - fails SIGCOV
  18. Mellon is extensively mentioned as one of the eponymous "fools" in this article "Spaceship of Fools"; this might pass SIGCOV based on a generous understanding of SIGCOV Chetsford (talk) 08:33, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I think this subject might be notable but the sources definitely need to be improved, especially since it looks like the page was deleted recently. Can you find any articles that meet WP:SIGCOV? WP:GNG is probably going to be easier to meet than any of the special notability guidelines. Non-independent sources like YouTube, social media, and the person's own website should be avoided. BuySomeApples (talk) 07:03, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Scarborough book's specific passage is visible on Google Books if you're curious. Thank you as well for confirming by pointing out the Ship of Fools article had more mentions! That, with ALL the rest, and you for some reason didn't address a number of my sources which means you seem to have NO criticism of them... that Mellon trivially passes Wikipedia:Notability (people) for simply the top half of his article! From before the UFO stub. We have plenty of stubs on government people. I guess my "UFO-less" draft here (please look, click here) wasn't so pointless after all.

@Chetsford has elegantly if I suppose unintentionally settled this that Christopher Mellon is notable per Wikipedia:Notability (people) which requires simply:

"If the depth of coverage in any given source is not substantial, then multiple independent sources may be combined to demonstrate notability; trivial coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not usually sufficient to establish notability."

I guess we're done here and Christopher Mellon now trivially is notable. Thank you, Chetsford, for resolving this. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 16:48, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Very Polite Person, why not work on the existing draft? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:39, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Btw, I'm not sure where your original text in the new draft came from, I'm guessing a version of this draft, but you may need to consider WP:COPYWITHIN. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:35, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, it was a complete from scratch rewrite by myself beginning here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft%3AChristopher_Mellon&diff=1288452136&oldid=1288440008

Once I got it "up" a little more I was going to come back to here with it. The current draft here is 68 edits behind. You can use the talk there, it's wide open. I wanted to do it there for now so I can use the raw space as I wanted including my references analysis section in the same flat page as I worked (I didn't know if was against the rules here). It was inspired by @Chetsford: large source-review table on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Sol Foundation. I figured I had zero desire to argue and wanted to just have things as immutable and non-arguable as possible when it came back here. That references analysis will then come to this Talk page and later will become the first section in the live article talk page for posterity and to help deal with any potential later questions by other parties, like AfD. Why have to argue on the fly if you can pre-do it? -- Very Polite Person (talk) 13:01, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem with working on stuff in userspace! I was slightly worried you intended to move the new draft to mainspace, something that would have been slightly questioned, I'm fairly sure. My advice, worth it's weight in diamonds, is to submit this draft for review when you think it's ready, not move to mainspace directly. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:05, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly! I know this has to go through the AfC rodeo now after AfD. Usually when I make a page, I will source it out as thoroughly as possible before it goes to main space, as I prefer/enjoy doing the research myself as a solo exercise (like I did here--it's a challenge, a nice mix of professional and personal skills). I have never pushed any of mine through AfC. Usually I will drop my "new" stuff with just enough notability to clear any concerns but the sources at hand, then go back into each source to carefully build out the article. I went slightly overboard here in data review because I hate doing things more than once. I won't hit the submit button again for days yet at least--I want to dig around more. We may have an easy few more SIGCOV/GNG, but it looks like we're already very much there. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:09, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Examining how much there is here that meets WP:SIGCOV: at least 2-3 are needed with three green checkboxes. These are the most used sources. We seem to have... up to 14?

          

• Click here to discuss if this is notable enough to pass AfC.

          

Link to detailed source review section	WP:SIGCOV	WP:RS	non-Primary
Harvard Colloquium on International Affairs
Air Force Special Operations Command (see below re SIGCOV)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Military.com
Roll Call
Washington Spectator
The New Yorker
Huffington Post (deprecated)
Vice
Gizmodo
Vox
Susan Marquis
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Popular Mechanics
space.com
Totals:	14 or 15	14	14

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

          

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20041114004031/http:/www.law.harvard.edu/academics/graduate/hcia/panelist_bio_65.php

• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

"Founded in 2001, the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History sponsors visiting lectures, workshops, and conferences on diverse themes of interest to scholars in history, philosophy, political theory, literature, and the human sciences."

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. Christopher Mellon has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence since November of 1999.
2. From June 1998 through November 1999, Mr. Mellon served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations.
3. In that capacity he was responsible for policy and programmatic oversight of information assurance, critical infrastructure protection, security, counterintelligence, and information operations strategy and integration.
4. Mr. Mellon went to the Pentagon as a member of Secretary Cohen's transition team on January 2, 1997.
5. Following the transition, Mr. Mellon was appointed as the Coordinator for Advanced Concepts and Program Integration, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, concentrating on encryption and information assurance issues.
6. From November 1997 to June 1998, he served as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Policy, providing advice on a range of intelligence issues.
7. Before joining the Department of Defense, Mr. Mellon served for 12 years in a variety of positions on Capitol Hill including nearly 10 years as a professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
8. Mr. Mellon received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics at Colby College.
9. He earned his Masters Degree from Yale University in International Relations, with a concentration in finance and management.

Analysis:

• Primary source arguably, but 100% fine for rote basic biographical data, as we use it.
• Not fine for establishing notability.
• Otherwise perfectly fine for WP:RS as it is used and will continue to be.

Commentary by others:

This appears to be Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. As a "panelist_bio", I consider it WP:ABOUTSELF/an advert and so it doesn't help with WP:N. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:36, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, no bearing on WP:N, but per WP:ABOUTSELF perfectly fine as used for the basic biographical data/source buttressing. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 16:21, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20161117181056/https://www.afsoc.af.mil/Portals/86/documents/history/AFD-051228-009.pdf

• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. Page 5: According to one of his aides, Chris Mellon, Senator Cohen was approached by a number of credible former special operations people with requests for his assistance in helping to rebuild SOF.
2. Page 8: Chris Mellon summarized the situation by saying "Repeatedly,...the Congress had funded programs, received assurances that they would be implemented, only to have the money be re-allocated by the Services in direct contradiction to the commitments made to the Congress by the OSD officials."
3. Page 10: Sometime in 1985, Ted Lunger also approached Chris Mellon at Senator Cohen's office to solicit Senate support for SOF legislation.
4. Page 10: Already interested in the subject, neither Mellon nor Senator Cohen needed much encouragement.
5. Page 14: The conference finally began in mid-September 1986. Attendees included Ted Lunger, Jim Locher, Chris Mellon, Ken Johnson, and a new face, Bill Cowan, from Senator Warren Rudman's office.
6. Page 19: Chris Mellon helped his boss gain support for the bill and provided many of the ideas for the low-intensity conflict elements of the law.

Analysis:

• Definitely WP:RS.
• Definitely not primary.
• Definitely in the proximity of WP:SIGCOV but I'm not positive.

Commentary by others:

Paper by William G. Boykin. At best partial GNG-point per your quotes, ctrl-f doesn't work for me here. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:46, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ctrl-f doesn't work for me here

Yeah, it's a straight image scan of the document made to PDF, I couldn't get it to text with lazier/easier OCR methods. I figured it was easier to just cite pages here and hand type out the relevant bits. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 16:18, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20250502211530/https://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2007/06/30/Mellon-family-s-legacy-lives-on/stories/200706300127

• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. Chris Mellon, a 49-year-old descendant of Gulf Oil co-founder William Larimer Mellon, returned to southwestern Pennsylvania last year after two decades of defense intelligence work in Washington, D.C.
2. "I'm delighted to be getting more and more involved in the area," said Mr. Mellon, who now lives in Ligonier, longtime home to dozens of Mellon kin.
3. His involvements include serving on the board of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, opening business advisory firm Mellon Strategic Consulting LLC, and aiding a Ligonier startup venture, Powercast, which he and other Mellons backed with family money.
4. Powercast's technology uses radio waves to transmit electricity through the air, and Mr. Mellon sees the budding business as part of a long tradition of energy entrepreneurship in Western Pennsylvania, from the discovery of oil by Edwin Drake to the development of nuclear power by Westinghouse Electric.
5. The case of Powercast also is a reminder that the Mellon family is still a potent force in southwestern Pennsylvania, even as the family's namesake institution shifts its headquarters out of Pittsburgh after 138 years.
6. Among family members from this branch, "there seems to be an appreciation for the area," said Chris Mellon, the great-grandson of William Larimer Mellon.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	1577	100 %
Four paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	140	≈ 8.9 %
Same four plus the transitional “Powercast also is a reminder…” paragraph (which still centres on his activity)	175	≈ 11.1 %

Depth: The article provides more than a passing mention: it gives his age, family line, return from Washington, residence, board seat at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the founding of Mellon Strategic Consulting LLC, and his role in financing Powercast. That is genuine narrative detail, not a name‑check.

Length relative to the whole: 140–175 words is several solid prose paragraphs. By the examples in *WP\:SIGCOV* this qualifies as “significant coverage” because the reader can understand *who he is and what he has done* without needing outside material.

Independence and reliability: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is an established, independent daily newspaper with professional editorial control. That satisfies the “reliable, secondary, independent” requirement.

Notability test:

• One source with significant coverage is not sufficient by itself for the General Notability Guideline; at least one additional independent source of comparable depth is still required.
• This article would count as one qualifying SIGCOV source toward meeting GNG, but you would still need a second (or more) comparable, independent piece to pass notability.

Therefore, the article supplies significant coverage under WP:SIGCOV for Christopher Mellon, contributing approximately 9‑11% of the article’s content, but on its own it is only a single qualifying source toward establishing a standalone biography.

Commentary by others:

Good source as in ordinary newspaper, but only slightly more than passing mention on the article-subject. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:29, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

• Click here to go back up to the table.

          

• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220309050739/https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/03/07/how-believers-paranormal-birthed-pentagons-new-hunt-ufos.html

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. The three videos were leaked to Chris Mellon, a former deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, in the Pentagon parking lot.
2. The New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon had a UFO program in December 2017, with Elizondo and Mellon as key sources.
3. At the same time, both men joined the To the Stars company, which jointly published the Nimitz and Roosevelt Navy videos with the newspaper -- causing a global sensation that hasn't abated.
4. Elizondo and Mellon were original members, along with Hal Puthoff, a physicist who worked on the DIA and CIA psychic remote viewing programs of the 1970s and 1980s.
5. Both Elizondo and Mellon, along with other members of the To the Stars company, starred in a History Channel series called "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation."
6. Mellon, the former Pentagon official who helped make the 2017 Nimitz videos public, brushed off questions about the earlier DIA research in an interview with Military.com.
7. A descendant of the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh, he said his family name has led many to assume he grew up wealthy, but that he was actually raised in inner-city Chicago under difficult circumstances.
8. "They think I grew up in a nice home in the countryside with a limo or something, and that was anything but the case," Mellon said.
9. He served in the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and worked on Capitol Hill for more than a decade, eventually rising to minority staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
10. His knowledge of the national security apparatus and facility with the language of the Pentagon, Congress and Washington, D.C., quickly elevated him as a top expert, who was loudly blowing a national security klaxon.
11. He compares the overall Pentagon response to UFO reports to missing radar indications of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
12. "I found out that this had been going on not just for months, but for years in dozens and dozens of incidents off the coast, including a near midair collision," Mellon said. "And the secretary doesn't know. Congress doesn't know, senior officials don't know. I mean are you kidding me? This is such a grotesque failure of imagination, of curiosity and of the system."
13. In 2017, Mellon began his effort to convince members of Congress to act, though he said he avoided any mention to lawmakers of the earlier research by Lacatski and Kelleher, or the beliefs of the founding members of To the Stars. "You had to provide some political cover for these people, some legitimate basis on national security grounds for them to engage and say, 'OK, I'm willing to take a brief or I'm willing to look at this,'" Mellon said. "You don't go in there and say, 'Oh, we've got little green men or people coming out of interplanetary portals; or, you know, woo-woo kind of stuff. You wouldn't get to first base."

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	2350	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	240	≈ 10.2 %

Depth & substance: These details let a reader understand who he is, what he did, and why it mattered, surpassing a trivial mention.

Reliability & independence: Military.com is a long‑running, professionally edited defence‑news outlet unaffiliated with Mellon; therefore the piece is a reliable, secondary, independent source under WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: This counts as one significant‑coverage source for Christopher Mellon. Combined with at least one other independent SIGCOV source of similar depth, it would satisfy the General Notability Guideline for a standalone Wikipedia biography.

Commentary by others:

Not familiar with this one, but it doesn't look like a WP:BLOG. More than a passing mention, an amount of "he says", partial GNG-point. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:28, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's a notable and very widely used source about American military topics. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:33, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200811130333/https://rollcall.com/2003/02/12/unholy-alliance/

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. Attention all conspiracy theorists who despair about “one-world” government: It’s starting to look like the Rockefellers and Mellons are taking over the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. (part of Senate Mellon hired to)
2. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the panel’s new vice chairman, has hired Christopher Mellon (yes, of that Mellon family) as minority staff director
3. The 45-year-old staffer, whose great-grandfather started the Gulf Oil Co., is a descendant of Judge Thomas Mellon. The Senator, of course, is John Davison Rockefeller IV, great-grandson of the man who founded Standard Oil.
4. Both families are great fodder for people who run Web sites devoted to following the “Illuminati,” or secret society of rich people who are allegedly plotting to take over the world.
5. In all seriousness, Mellon brings distinguished credentials to the committee post, having spent a decade working on intelligence issues for then-Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine.).
6. When Cohen became Defense secretary, Mellon followed him over to the Pentagon and until recently was serving under current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
7. In other words, the liberal Rockefeller has hired — gasp — a Republican. In keeping with the bipartisan nature of the committee, it will probably work out just fine.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	310	100 %
Three paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	103	≈ 33.2 %
Same three plus two transitional/context paragraphs that still centre on his activity	143	≈ 46.1 %

Depth: The identified 103–143 words supply substantial detail: his family lineage, age, Senate Intelligence Committee role, decade of service with Sen. William Cohen, and Pentagon positions under Defense Secretaries Cohen and Rumsfeld.

Independence and reliability: Roll Call is an established, professionally edited Capitol‑Hill newspaper, independent of Mellon.

Notability test: This article therefore counts as one significant‑coverage, reliable, secondary source toward General Notability. A separate, comparably detailed independent source would still be required before a standalone biography meets GNG.

Commentary by others:

Seems like a good source, more than passing mention though not that much about him, partial GNG-point. Shows coverage over time. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:15, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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• for WP:SIGCOV
• for WP:RS
• for non-primary source

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230721001904/https://washingtonspectator.org/spaceship-of-fools/

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. We’ve been here before. Two former Defense Department officials, Luis “Lue” Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, came forward a few years ago to expose what they deemed a government cover-up of UFOs.
2. Prominent among the proponents of such far-fetched claims were those former influential DOD officials, Elizondo and Mellon, both of whom had joined DeLonge’s company.
3. These same individuals laid the groundwork for the UFO media firestorm that began at the end of 2017, new defense legislation that was passed in December 2021, and Senate hearings held this past April.
4. Elizondo had obtained these videos while still at the Pentagon; Mellon later claimed that he leaked them to the Times, presumably through freelancer Leslie Kean.
5. Astonishingly, the concerted publicity and lobbying blitz by Mellon and Elizondo culminated in President Biden attaching his signature last December to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a provision to investigate a possible government cover-up of crashed alien vehicles and bodies.
6. With respect to the TTSA complaint, lawyers on behalf of DeLonge, the company and Elizondo deny any wrongdoing, as has Mellon, while other leading figures at TTSA haven’t commented on the allegations.
7. Even so, prominent UFO advocates, such as the former Defense Department officials Mellon and Elizondo, highlighted the importance of the new UAP report and the sweeping defense law they helped pass. “I’ve spoken with several credible people who claim the U.S. has evidence of alien technology in its possession,” Mellon proclaimed after the report’s release. He and other proponents claimed these revelations were coming soon, thanks to new whistleblower protections in the defense act.
8. Elizondo and Mellon initially joined TTSA in 2017 but left the firm at the end of 2020, in large part, they claim, because the “scientific” mission was losing out to entertainment.
9. Mellon replied by email: “I am not and never was an officer or employee of TTSA. I was not on the board, not on a salary and not responsible for any decisions taken by the company. I have no reason to believe I am under investigation by the SEC or anyone else.”
10. He’s technically correct in terms of his TTSA positions, but Mellon was described by the company as its “National Security Affairs Advisor.”
11. As a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence during the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, Mellon lent credibility by his association.
12. All three videos were first obtained by TTSA through Elizondo and Mellon.
13. According to The New Yorker, in October 2017, Kean met with Mellon, the former Pentagon official, as well as Puthoff and Elizondo, in the bar of an upscale hotel near the Pentagon, for a confidential briefing on the government’s UFO program.
14. They were then leaked by Christopher Mellon to TTSA as they both joined the company—and ultimately to The New York Times.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	4100	100 %
Eight paragraphs focused chiefly on Christopher Mellon	395	≈ 9.6 %
Same eight plus two shorter mention‑only paragraphs that still centre on his actions (total 10)	470	≈ 11.5 %

Depth: The article devotes ~400–470 words—roughly one‑tenth of its length—to Mellon. That is well above a trivial name‑check and gives readers a clear understanding of who he is, what positions he held, and why he is relevant.

Independence and reliability: Washington Spectator is an independent, professionally edited periodical; it therefore satisfies the “reliable secondary source” requirement.

SIGCOV: Taken together, this piece does count as one WP:SIGCOV‑grade source for Christopher Mellon.

Commentary by others:

I'm not familiar with this publication, but on the face of it, looks alright-ish. GNG-point or close. Fwiw, calls Mellon "prominent UFO advocate". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk • contribs) 10:08, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The source is used without concern on a "critical" source on other BLPs, without concern, so it's certainly fine here on that precedent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LinkSearch?target=https://washingtonspectator.org/spaceship-of-fools

It should be more than fine. UFO conspiracy theories uses it three times and Luis Elizondo uses it five times as of today. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:06, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Beware WP:OTHERCONTENT. But it doesn't prove the opposite, either. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:09, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210706204449/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. On October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher K. Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie Kean was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of an upscale hotel near the Pentagon.
2. After Elizondo resigned, he and other key AATIP participants—including Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan—almost immediately joined To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, an operation dedicated to U.F.O.-related education, entertainment, and research, and organized by Tom DeLonge, a former front man of the pop-punk outfit Blink-182.
3. When people asked her at dinner parties what she did for a living, they no longer giggled at her response but fell rapt. Kean gave all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward, but she told me, “I never would have ever imagined I could have ended up writing for the Times.
4. Despite the fact that most adults carry around exceptionally good camera technology in their pockets, most U.F.O. photos and videos remain maddeningly indistinct, but the former Pentagon official implied that the government possesses stark visual documentation; Elizondo and Mellon have said the same thing.
5. In June of 2020, Senator Marco Rubio added text into the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act requesting—though not requiring—that the director of National Intelligence, along with the Secretary of Defense, produce “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting.” This language, which allowed them a hundred and eighty days to produce the report, drew heavily from proposals by Mellon, and it was clear that this concerted effort, at least in theory, was a more productive and more cost-effective iteration of the original vision for AATIP. Mellon told me, “This creates an opening and an opportunity, and now the name of the game is to make sure we don’t miss that open window.”

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	9600	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	205	≈ 2.1 %
Same passages plus one brief reference paragraph that still centres on his activity	240	≈ 2.5 %

Depth: Although Mellon receives several detailed sentences (his former Pentagon title, role in arranging the 2017 Times leak, later work with To the Stars, and claims about classified U.A.P. evidence), the coverage is dispersed in a long, theme‑driven feature. Still, the passages give readers clear information on who he is and what he did—qualifying as significant coverage, not a trivial mention.

Independence and reliability: The New Yorker is fully independent of Mellon and has rigorous editorial fact‑checking; it meets the “reliable secondary source” test.

SIGCOV: Taken together, this piece does count as one WP:SIGCOV‑grade source for Christopher Mellon.

Commentary by others:

At least partial GNG-point, there's not that much on Mellon in it, but certainly more than a passing mention. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:07, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Updated WP:RS to red on below feedback. All cites here can be covered by other sources I've found.

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190828055720/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-there-a-ufo-coverup-a_b_9865184

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. His positions during the Clinton and Bush administrations involved high clearances; in fact, there are few people who have enjoyed such deep and wide-ranging access to compartmented programs in both the Defense Department (DoD) and the intelligence community.
2. Chris is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Reconnaissance Office Gold Medal and the Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s Medal.
3. At DoD, Chris served on a small committee that provided oversight of all DoD special access programs, in order to eliminate potential waste and duplication.
4. The oversight included visits to Area 51 and other sensitive facilities.
5. He also spent over a decade on the Senate Intelligence Committee, involved in oversight of NRO, CIA, NSA and other intelligence organizations.
6. He became the first Congressional official to review all of the NSA’s compartmented programs.
7. Chris drafted the bill for Cohen that established the US Special Operations Command.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	1510	100 %
Seven key sentences listed above	144	≈ 9.5 %

Depth & specificity: The seven sentences supply concrete factual data: senior‑clearance roles in two Presidential administrations; oversight duties spanning DoD SAPs, Area 51 inspections and the Senate Intelligence Committee; first‑ever full review of NSA SAPs; authorship of the SOCOM enabling bill; and two high‑level intelligence awards. Individually and together they do more than “name‑check” him—they describe his career, responsibilities and distinctions in detail.

Independence & reliability: HuffPost (at the time a professionally edited news outlet) is editorially independent from Mellon; the interview format still qualifies as a secondary, reliable source under Wikipedia policy.

Commentary by others:

I'll put my comment here, if that's not what's expected feel free to move. This fails WP:HUFFPOCON, quote: Editors show consensus for treating HuffPost contributor articles as self-published sources, unless the article was written by a subject-matter expert. HuffPost contributor articles should never be used for third-party claims about living persons. In 2018, HuffPost discontinued its contributor platform, but old contributor articles are still online. Check the byline to determine whether an article is written by a staff member or a "Contributor"

It wouldn't matter if the author was Neil deGrasse Tyson, it would fail as a source for living people anyway, like non-primary SPS do on WP. So, it also fails as an argument for WP:N. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:01, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To double check, does the date the article was published play a factor? Either way, I can edit the green to red and update. Either way, it's a draft, and I'm pretty sure I can peg every Kean citation here to another source anyway. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:05, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Per link, contributors disappeared from Huff in 2018, so in a sense. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:21, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'll keep plinking off the Kean and updating with other sources. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:24, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Source deprecated; kept here for posterity and tracking/reference. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 19:21, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20240831223758/https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-guy-says-he-was-the-source-of-the-pentagons-ufo-videos/

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. In the recently released UFO documentary The Phenomenon, Chris Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, stated that he was the source who provided the New York Times with the three infamous UFO videos it published in 2017.
2. Mellon, who is currently a member of Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, told filmmaker James Fox in an on-camera interview that he met with an unnamed individual in the parking lot of the Pentagon and was handed a package containing the three videos that formed the basis of the most important UFO article in many years.
3. “I received the videos, the now famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot from a Defense Department official. I still have the packaging,” Mellon said.
4. “This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good and we’re absolutely all better off because of it.”
5. Motherboard has been unable to independently verify that Mellon was the source of the videos, but his story tracks with everything we know about them.
6. We know that To the Stars Academy ultimately published the videos, and Mellon was one of the earliest members of that group.
7. On October 4th, Kean met with Elizondo as well as other individuals where she was told about the secret UFO program.
8. Elizondo told Motherboard that Chris Mellon was in the room as well, and showed Kean videos on a laptop.
9. Only days later, Elizondo along with Mellon would appear on stage with former Blink 182 punk rocker Tom DeLonge and announce a new UFO research organization named “To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science.”
10. Mellon was also unable to comment at this time and declined an interview.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	1270	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	520	≈ 40.9 %

Depth & substance: Roughly forty per cent of the piece is explicit description of Mellon.

Reliability & independence: VICE’s Motherboard desk is an established, professionally edited tech‑science unit; the article is reported independently of Mellon. That satisfies the “reliable, secondary, independent” requirement in WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: The piece therefore counts as one significant‑coverage source for Christopher Mellon. Along with at least one other independent source of comparable depth, it would meet the Wikipedia:Notability#General notability guideline for a standalone biography. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 17:34, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Commentary by others:

Not the best for a BLP per WP:VICE, but possibly acceptable as a GNG-point. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:04, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20250215052544/https://gizmodo.com/another-ufo-report-is-a-bust-so-why-do-so-many-people-1851331674

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. As it stands today, so much of the UFO story revolves around the premise of information—good information and bad information, credible information and incredible information. One influential figure who, at many times, has played a prominent role in helping deliver information about the UFO subject to the broader public is Christopher Mellon.
2. A former highly placed U.S. intelligence official, Mellon very much gives off the impression that he knows where the government’s bodies are buried.
3. Born to a wealthy family, Mellon was educated at Yale and worked for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee for decades before transitioning into the intelligence community.
4. Eventually, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
5. As part of his work in government, Mellon was part of a committee that was given oversight over all of the Defense Department’s special access programs, or SAPS, the government’s highly compartmentalized initiatives that are shrouded in secrecy. As such, you’d think that Mellon would be the perfect person.
6. For the better part of the last decade, Mellon has used his government bona fides to advocate for transparency surrounding the UFO issue.
7. When I spoke with Mellon by phone, he explained that he had been drawn to the UFO subject matter after repeatedly hearing stories about F-16 pilots encountering strange sightings that were taking place—and that he had been confounded by the fact that nobody was doing anything about them.
8. “These things were hanging around in restricted airspace and these guys were seeing these things on a regular basis. And we didn’t know if they were Russian or Chinese but because they were unidentified and because of the stigma, nobody wanted to do anything,” Mellon said.
9. When I spoke with Mellon, he portrayed himself as a kind of bureaucratic truth-seeker, a government insider who nevertheless has been flummoxed by the government’s inaction on the issue of UFOs.
10. As such, Mellon says he’s played an influential role in bringing the issue to the media and Congress and, as a result, into the wider public consciousness.
11. Mellon says that after learning of the extent of UFO sightings by U.S. pilots, he wanted to spread the word about the issue. “I came up with a simple plan to do that, which involved going to the press and going to Congress,” said Mellon.
12. He then relays to me a familiar tale that has made its way into numerous news reports, which is the origin story of how a famous UFO video—the 2004 Nimitz episode—was leaked. According to Mellon, a person met him in the parking lot of the Pentagon and handed him an envelope containing a USB drive. Inside the USB drive were three videos taken by F-18 pilots that showed “real UAP,” as Mellon puts it. Mellon says he then decided to share the videos with the press.
13. The way Mellon explains it, the pivotal New York Times story that is largely credited with helping legitimize UFOs within the broader culture never would have happened without his direct involvement. “This was not investigative journalism,” Mellon tells me. “I handed them the evidence, introduced them to Lue Elizondo, gave them a stack of documents, arranged for them to meet and interview Harry Reid, and made a deal with them. They ran the story, which appeared on December 16 of 2017 on the front page.”
14. Mellon says this was part of a broader plan on his part to spread the word about UFOs and to get Congress to take some sort of action on the matter.
15. The situation might be best encapsulated by a comment made by Christopher Mellon during my interview with him. Mellon said that secretive government work has a way of changing the way you look at the world. “If you get deep in that world, you do see things differently afterward,” he said. “And, if you get really deep into it—and you learn how certain things work—you read the newspapers differently…You realize how different actors are pulling different strings.” He pauses. “There’s some truth to that,” he says.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	2100	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	550	≈ 26 %

Depth & substance: The ~550 words (≈ one‑quarter of the feature) detail his Yale background, Senate Intelligence Committee tenure, dual‑administration DASD‑Intelligence post, SAP‑oversight role, decade‑long advocacy for UAP transparency, first‑hand account of leaking the Nimitz videos to The New York Times, and his stated strategy for moving Congress and the press. That easily exceeds a token mention.

Reliability & independence: Gizmodo is a professionally edited tech‑science outlet unaffiliated with Mellon, fulfilling the “reliable, secondary, independent” requirement.

Notability contribution: Counts as one valid significant‑coverage (SIGCOV) source toward a standalone Christopher Mellon biography under the General Notability Guideline.

Commentary by others:

WP:GIZMODO: "There is consensus that Gizmodo is generally reliable for technology, popular culture, and entertainment. There is no consensus on whether it is generally reliable for controversial statements." Where Ufology falls in this is not glaringly obvious. More than half is "Mellon says", so not independent (but a usable source for what Mellon says), the rest is more than a passing mention, so, if acceptable as a BLP-source, at least a partial GNG-point. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:46, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's used to buttress his Yale attendance; family affiliation; pre-UFO career info; more pre-UFO career info; more pre-UFO career info; Mellon reported to Gizmodo he arranged a NYT/Harry Reid interview; 3rd source for why he did all this stuff/supporting. Nothing controversial, perfectly fine as used and for GNG. -- Very Polite Person (talk) 18:50, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210628020847/https://www.vox.com/22463659/ufo-videos-navy-alien-drone

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. To that end, DeLonge began putting together To The Stars Academy, which in his vision would become a leading source of UFO-related expertise and of related media projects. In that role, he became an important convener of ex-government officials with an interest in UFOs — starting with Luis Elizondo, who left the DOD in 2017, and the man who would become his main partner in UFO evangelism, Christopher Mellon.
2. Mellon, a member of the prominent Mellon family of Pittsburgh who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, had a longstanding interest in UFOs, and began giving interviews arguing for increased disclosure around 2016.
3. “Tom [DeLonge] called me out of the blue one day,” Mellon recalls. “He saw an article I’d written. … He was starting this organization and was wondering if I would want to get involved.” DeLonge connected him with Elizondo, and both joined To The Stars as advisers.
4. Mellon had been outside of government for many years at this point, but still had sources in the Pentagon, which is how he and To The Stars got access to the three videos above.
5. “Somebody met me in the parking lot and passed [the videos] off. It had documentation stating it was approved for public release. It was unclassified,” Mellon told Lewis-Kraus. To the best of my knowledge, the person inside the Pentagon who leaked to Mellon is still unknown.
6. Kean, like Mellon a scion of a Northeast political dynasty (her uncle, Thomas Kean, served two terms as governor of New Jersey and chaired the 9/11 Commission), had been interested in aliens and UFOs for years.
7. In any case, Kean continued to maintain a steady interest in UFOs, serving with Mellon on the board of the nonprofit UFODATA, which supports scientific, agnostic investigations in UFOs. Per Lewis-Kraus, Mellon and To The Stars offered her the UFO videos and supporting documentation on the condition that Kean place the story in the New York Times.
8. So that’s number one, the naturalistic explanation. Elizondo, Mellon, Fravor, and other UFO disclosure advocates and ex-pilots do not just dispute this argument but are actively infuriated by it.
9. “I don’t know why people even take [Mick West] seriously,” Mellon told me. “He knows nothing about these sensor systems, he deliberately excludes 90 percent of the pertinent information and in the process maligns our military personnel. ‘Oh, Dave Fravor doesn’t know what he’s looking at. Oh, those guys don’t know how to operate those infrared systems.’ Who the hell does he think he is? These guys are the real deal. He’s a desk jockey sitting in front of a monitor.”
10. It also seems perfectly plausible that Elizondo and Mellon are right and there is private government data proving the skeptical explanations wrong — but it’s impossible to evaluate that without access to such data.
11. Mellon has said that he’s confident the vehicles aren’t ours, because he has a high enough security clearance that he would have heard about them in that case.
12. Maybe! But I imagine there were many people with high security clearances who, say, did not know that in the 1950s and ’60s the CIA was secretly dosing people with LSD to see if it could be used to coerce confessions. The US government is a vast, sprawling behemoth that’s doing any number of strange things at any given time, so Mellon’s point — while plausible — doesn’t strike me as dispositive. That said, the Times’s Cooper and Julian Barnes have reported that the UAP Task Force report will conclude that the UAPs in the videos were not US military aircraft, which would back up Mellon’s claim considerably.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	2100	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	495	≈ 23.6 %

Depth & substance: Nearly one‑quarter of the feature is devoted to Mellon. It details his pedigree (former DASD‑Intelligence, Senate Intelligence staff director), his pivotal rôle in obtaining and leaking the FLIR‑1, GIMBAL, and GOFAST videos, his collaboration with Luis Elizondo and Tom DeLonge, and his policy stance that the objects are neither U.S. tech nor necessarily extraterrestrial. The article also quotes him at length countering skeptic Mick West. All of this is well beyond a name‑check. Wayback Machine

Reliability & independence: Vox is a professionally edited news outlet unaffiliated with Mellon; the piece therefore meets the “reliable, secondary, independent” standard in WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: This article counts as one significant‑coverage source for Christopher Mellon. Together with at least one other independent source of comparable depth, it would satisfy the General Notability Guideline for a standalone Wikipedia biography.

Commentary by others

WP:RSPVOX, good source, more than passing mention, at least partial GNG-point. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:59, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

          

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Source: https://archive.org/details/unconventionalwa0000marq/page/124/mode/2up?q=mellon

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. In 1985 Ted Lunger had recognized that SOF reform would not be possible without support from the Senate, and he approached Chris Mellon, a member of Senator William S. Cohen’s staff, to gain support for legislation being considered by Representative Daniel. Senator Cohen and Chris Mellon already had some interest in SOF reform as a result of conversations with several former special operators.
2. Cohen’s and Mellon’s attention was captured further with the October 1985 release of the Senate Armed Services Committee staff report, “Defense Reorganization: The Need for Change.”
3. Cohen’s May 1986 bill was written largely by his legislative assistant, Chris Mellon, who relied heavily on the ideas of Jim Locher, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee staff.
4. The bill was unusual in several ways. It went into far more detail than was usual for defense legislation. Congress had never designated a unified command through law, and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization bill had deliberately shied away from having Congress specify assistant secretaries of defense. In a 1988 interview, Mellon said that in early 1986 the SOF issue was relatively unknown to him and other Senate staffers.
5. When he wrote the May bill, Mellon knew nothing of the earlier Stragtegic Services (STRATSERCOM) proposal and had never paid attention to Noel Koch. Mellon was, however, influenced by the history of special operations forces, particularly as described by Andrew Krepinevich in The Army and Vietnam and in Jim Locher’s 1985 Senate staff study that was the foundation for the Goldwater-Nichols defense organization act.
6. The primary participants at the staff level from the Defense Department were U.S. Navy Captain William DeBobes from the Joint Staff and Lynn Rylander from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with the addition of Larry Ropka, also from the OSD. The staffs of the Senate Armed Services and House Armed Services Committees included Locher, Mellon, Johnson, and Lunger.
7. The staff discussions were characterized by hostility and inflexibility on both sides. Captain DeBobes and his approach to the negotiations have often been cited as one of the reasons legislation was ultimately passed.96 Chris Mellon characterized DeBobes as “rigidly inflexible.” He would not budge from the JCS offer. At the same time, the congressional staff members became increasingly frustrated and hardened their own positions. There was great resistance to Daniel’s NSOA and, on the Defense Department side, to the new unified command proposal. Less was said about the proposed position for an assistant secretary since that position did not appear to have any impact on the services.
8. With the Cohen-Nunn bill and the Daniel bill, there was a clear division on Capitol Hill about what legislated reform and reorganization should look like. The frustration and fury of Daniel and Lunger were evident in their attempt to sever nearly all ties between special operations forces and the conventional military. The Senate side, particularly Senator Cohen, Jim Locher, and Chris Mellon, were just as determined to resolve the problem, but they were more moderate in their approach and still willing to let the Defense Department provide and implement the solution. They just had to be convinced that the Defense Department solution was for the long term and would meet the SASC requirement for a senior advocate in the resource arena and for truly joint command and control.
9. The preliminary conference committee meeting, including Locher, Lunger, Mellon, Ken Johnson, and Bill Cowan, was tense and somewhat acrimonious. Ted Lunger believed strongly in the cause he was championing and had written legislation that he felt offered the only solution to the lack of support and misuse of SOF. The Senate staffers were equally convinced that the Daniel bill ran counter to Goldwater-Nichols and would never be accepted by the senators who were working for the reorganization of special operations forces.

Scope	Words	Share of full book
Whole book (≈ 319 pp.)	96000 (est.)	100 %
Passages that centre on Christopher Mellon (8 paras.)	550 (est.)	≈ 0.6 %

Depth: The eight paragraphs give a coherent narrative of Mellon’s legislative influence: how he was recruited by Ted Lunger, crafted Senator Cohen’s May 1986 reform bill, negotiated with DoD counterparts, and shaped the creation of U.S. Special Operations Command. They include direct evaluation of his knowledge gap in early 1986, his use of Jim Locher’s staff study, and contemporaneous quotations describing his negotiating style.

Independence & reliability: The work is a peer-reviewed policy study from Brookings Institution Press, independent of Mellon. That fulfils the “reliable, secondary, independent” clause of WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: It is significant coverage in Wikipedia terms: readers can understand who he was, what he did, and why it mattered without consulting other sources. Thus this book counts as one qualifying SIGCOV source toward the General Notability Guideline for a standalone biography.

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404113127/https://issues.org/ufos-wont-go-away/

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. News of the Pentagon’s UFO program continued to generate headlines as more tidbits dribbled out via Elizondo and the new company he worked for. Other high-powered members of the To The Stars Academy also began airing their concerns about unknown, physics-defying aircraft showing up in US airspace. One of these voices was Chris Mellon, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (In this capacity, Mellon oversaw the Pentagon’s most sensitive and closely held “black” programs.) On March 9, 2018, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?” And so, in the span of a few months, a topic long confined to the tabloids and fringe media had become a “serious news story” as the Post asserted in its coverage last year, shortly after it published Mellon’s op-ed.
2. Still, the disclosure of the Pentagon’s UFO program, which officially existed between 2008 and 2012, has stirred interest on Capitol Hill. Members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have requested details on the program; the latter has quietly interviewed a number of the military pilots who claim to have witnessed UFOs while on training missions. Influential to this effort is Mellon, a Washington insider for decades, who left the Pentagon in the early 2000s, did a stint as Democratic staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and now works alongside Elizondo at the To The Stars Academy, which bills itself as an “initiative mobilizing the brightest minds from within the top-secret shadows of aerospace, science and the Department of Defense.” That placard is at the top of a company website page that sells branded T-shirts, hoodies, and other merchandise.
3. Several years ago, Mellon told one interviewer that there were “sufficiently well-documented” UFO cases that “warrant a scientific investigation of the phenomenon.” I have recently discussed with him the merits of this claim in phone and email conversations. In one such exchange in late 2018, I shared a comment I had received from a prominent astronomer who said he was “very skeptical about the alien interpretation of UFO reports” that had been circulating in the media.
4. Mellon was indignant. “I did not claim the objects were alien,” he shot back in an email. “Merely real, intelligently controlled and not ours—hence the need to investigate further.” Then he added: “Off to Govt mtgs in DC today with people who are on the front lines of this.” In a follow-up exchange later that day, he mentioned that the people he was working with felt “an urgency to engage Uncle Sam and the public from a national security standpoint.”
5. When I read this passage in Ruppelt’s book, I was struck by how much it resembled what Elizondo and Mellon have said publicly about supposed latter-day UFO incidents involving the military. Both have also emphasized in conversations with me the importance of advanced twenty-first century spy radar systems that they say have detected “anomalous” aircraft, aka UFOs. But getting the Pentagon to acknowledge this has been another matter, they assert. More concerning, they say, is the military’s apparent lack of interest in the matter. “We cannot afford to avert our eyes, given the risk of strategic surprise,” Mellon writes in his 2018 Washington Post op-ed. “It is time to set aside taboos regarding ‘UFOs’ and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators.”
6. Perhaps the unknown objects being spotted by military radar are nothing to worry about, Mellon and Elizondo say, rhetorically, or maybe they are—except there’s no way to know unless the Pentagon spends money and manpower to find out. “That’s the same argument Ruppelt made back in 1955 and 1956,” after he retired from the Air Force, says the Penn historian Dorsch, who is writing her doctoral thesis on the birth of UFO phenomenon.
7. Mellon and Elizondo have also said that they are frustrated by the institutional secrecy that prevents a more concerted government investigation into the “phenomena,” as they call it. This argument, too, is similar to what other media-savvy voices such as Keyhoe were saying in the 1950s, when he was president of a nonprofit organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). Its leadership included retired military and intelligence officials, such as a former chief of the Navy’s guided missile program. Another prominent member was Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who had served as the first director of the CIA, from 1947 to 1950.
8. There are other discrepancies that have put him on the hot seat. He and his company have facilitated the release of video footage that show military pilots engaging with supposed UFOs. Several of these, including a grainy 45-second video of the Nimitz incident, have gone viral online, due in part to the recent media coverage that he and Mellon have received. Elizondo has insisted that the videos were declassified and released by the Pentagon in 2017, which the Pentagon denies. Even odder, a video of the Nimitz incident—the same one the New York Times embedded in its 2017 article and claimed to have received from the Pentagon—was already bouncing around on the internet in 2007.
9. Whatever its provenance, it is this video and others like it that Elizondo and Chris Mellon cite as compelling evidence of aerial wizardry by UFOs that pose a threat to US national security. As one might expect, an online army of eyes with many years of aviation and aerospace experience have minutely examined the videos. The crowdsourcing consensus, helpfully compiled into a detailed rundown of the incident at a popular skeptic’s blog, is that the “anomalous phenomena” asserted by Elizondo and Mellon are more likely explained as sightings of some sort of classified missile or aircraft, perhaps a drone, being tested at the time.
10. That would make sense given the mysterious scrubbing of electronic data relating to the 2004 incident, as reported by various crew members on the Nimitz and Princeton. Perhaps the aerial phenomena around which Elizondo and Mellon seek to cast such a veil of mystery can instead be chalked up to a familiar cause of UFO sightings over the past seven decades—advanced military aircraft and weaponry that the Pentagon is trying to keep secret.
11. If Elizondo, Mellon, and the To The Stars Academy seem to be working in the great American tradition of P. T. Barnum, the irony remains that the Pentagon may well have its own good reason for keeping the UFO story alive. Not that they’d ever admit it.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	≈ 2200	100 %
Core paragraphs centred on Christopher Mellon (lines 16-18, 21-23, 41-44)	≈ 520	≈ 23.6 %

Depth & substance:' The article devotes about one-quarter of its prose to Mellon. It details: his former Pentagon rôle (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), his Washington Post op-ed that helped mainstream the Navy-UFO story, his Senate Intelligence Committee tenure, his current position with To the Stars Academy, and direct 2018 email quotations clarifying his view that the objects are “real, intelligently controlled and not ours.” These passages clearly explain who he is, what he did, and why it matters, well beyond a fleeting mention.

Reliability & independence: Issues in Science and Technology is a peer-reviewed, professionally edited policy journal published by the National Academies and Arizona State University; it is editorially independent of Mellon. Thus the piece is a reliable, secondary, independent source under WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: This feature therefore counts as one qualified significant-coverage source for Christopher Mellon. When combined with at least one additional independent SIGCOV source of similar depth, it satisfies the General Notability Guideline for a standalone Wikipedia biography.

          

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Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230425062251/https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a43490964/lue-elizondo-ufo-truth/

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. In 2016, Elizondo met Chris Mellon, who had been invited to an AATIP meeting by a mutual CIA acquaintance. Mellon had 20 years of experience in the intelligence field; he’d served as deputy assistant defense secretary for intelligence and advised members of Congress from both parties. The meeting’s topic was reports of regular intrusions in restricted airspace by unidentified aircraft. “These had been going on for two years at that point,” Mellon says, “and I was absolutely flabbergasted—horrified—to discover that nobody was doing anything about it, except for Lue.”
2. As Elizondo and Mellon began sharing connections and intelligence, they became increasingly alarmed. Over the past 76 years, the military has documented UAPs encounters with alarming frequency around U.S. nuclear assets. In one notorious instance in 1967, a UFO seemed to shut down nuclear-armed missiles at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
3. AATIP was also documenting encounters at sensitive military installations, and with carrier strike groups training for deployment, in some cases as they crossed the Atlantic. “We’ve had military exercises canceled because there were unidentified aircraft on the training range, and they were afraid of midair collisions,” Mellon says. “These are aircraft that don’t have transponders, and haven’t filed flight plans, and nobody knows what they are.” The numbers of these encounters spiked in 2014 and 2015, to the point that former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said in a 2021 interview with 60 Minutes that sightings were a daily occurrence.
4. So it was with UAPs—only at the Pentagon, it wasn’t just bureaucratic churn; some people there didn’t want the information. Because of the little-green-men stigma, some bureaucratic substrata insulated their bosses from any involvement—including General Mattis, who by then had become Secretary of Defense, Mellon says. And several stymied AATIP efforts because the possibility of extraterrestrial life runs counter to their religious beliefs.
5. Mellon knew two direct reports to Mattis, and he too tried to work the chain of command. His impression was that aides surrounding the Secretary were worried that someone might use the issue to try to discredit him. “It finally became clear that nobody was going to do anything serious about this,” Mellon says. Elizondo couldn’t accept the idea of doing nothing. “I don’t think that we should keep this conversation quiet,” he says. “It hasn’t worked for [76] years. Let’s have a conversation.” As he saw it, his only remaining play was to “take it to the streets.”
6. He and Mellon had plotted his next steps by analyzing where they and others had failed before and how they might avoid similar mistakes. They pieced together a five-point approach: legislative outreach; executive branch-level engagement; international engagement; media appearances; and public engagement (which included Unidentified and social media). Mellon focused on matchmaking pilots and other military personnel who had UAP experiences with members of Congress.
7. Elizondo’s crowning achievement to date came on December 23, 2022. That day President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes numerous far-reaching UAP provisions. One requires the government to own up to whether it’s been concealing physical evidence of alien spacecraft. “That was stunning,” Mellon says. “There was bipartisan support, and the reason is because they received credible sourcing and credible testimony indicating that that may, in fact, be the case.”
8. There’s more: For the first time, the U.S. will use the intelligence community’s multibillion-dollar technical apparatuses, which include spy satellites, weather balloons, and the most powerful radars in the world, to track UAP activity in real time. “There’s nothing that compares to the assets the U.S. intelligence community has. That power is now being harnessed to help answer [UAP] questions,” says Mellon.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	≈ 2650	100 %
Core paragraphs centred on Christopher Mellon	≈ 350	≈ 13.2 %

Depth & substance: Roughly one-eighth of the feature profiles Mellon: his Pentagon and Senate careers, decision to leak the Navy videos through The New York Times, subsequent lobbying for UAP language in the 2021–22 NDAAs, and direct quotations on national-security stakes. That is plainly more than a passing mention.

Reliability & independence: Popular Mechanics is a century-old, professionally edited magazine unaffiliated with Mellon, meeting the “reliable, secondary, independent” standard in WP:SIGCOV.

Contribution to notability: This piece therefore counts as one significant-coverage source that can be cited for Mellon’s biography. Together with at least one additional independent SIGCOV source, it would satisfy the General Notability Guideline.

          

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https://web.archive.org/web/20210605112046/https://www.space.com/ufo-report-military-dod-to-congress-next-month

All mentions/sentences of Christopher Mellon:

1. You've probably seen footage of a few such encounters, thanks to Christopher Mellon, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.
2. In 2017, after he had left his position with the U.S. government, Mellon gave three recently declassified Navy UFO videos to the New York Times, the CBS news program "60 Minutes" reported on Sunday (May 17). The Times then published a blockbuster story about the videos and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon project tasked with investigating such sightings.
3. Mellon told "60 Minutes" that he took this step because he was concerned that not enough was being done to investigate UFOs, or UAPs ("unidentified aerial phenomena"), as they've been rebranded in U.S. military parlance.
4. "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," Mellon told "60 Minutes" reporter Bill Whitaker.
5. And it is indeed a national security issue, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told Whitaker. "Anything that enters an airspace that's not supposed to be there is a threat," Rubio said. After all, the reported UAPs might be some kind of advanced aircraft developed by an adversary nation such as Russia or China. (Mellon told Whitaker that the vehicles were definitely not developed by the Pentagon.)
6. People like Mellon, Rubio and former AATIP official Luis Elizondo, who declassified the three videos that Mellon passed to the Times, are eager to get to the bottom of the mystery. At the very least, they hope that finding an explanation will help determine if the UAPs could pose any threat to national security. And Rubio has taken some action on this front.

Scope	Words	Share of full article
Whole article	≈ 880	100 %
Core paragraphs devoted to Christopher Mellon	≈ 165	≈ 18.8 %

Depth & substance: The article gives a concise but substantial narrative of Mellon’s role: identifies him as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; recounts that he supplied the FLIR-1, GIMBAL and GOFAST Navy videos to The New York Times in 2017; quotes him on why he did so (“to get a national-security issue on the agenda”); notes his on-record statement that the craft seen were “definitely not developed by the Pentagon.” Together these points let a reader understand who he is, what he did, and why it matters—well beyond a trivial mention.

Reliability & independence: Space.com is a long-running, professionally edited science-news outlet independent of Mellon. The archived page is therefore a reliable, secondary, independent source.

Contribution to notability: This feature counts as one significant-coverage (SIGCOV) source for Christopher Mellon. Paired with at least one other independent SIGCOV source, it helps satisfy the General Notability Guideline for a standalone Wikipedia biography.

          

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• None of the independent sources are primarily about Mellon, except maybe Vice, at the time I write this, but GNG allows for "many streams make a river" when source content is more than a trivial mention. If this was an afd, I'd say keep based on these sources. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:08, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Very Polite Person@Sophisticatedevening, Fwiw, I have another one here, you need WP:LIBRARY access:^[1]

  IMO, it's a GNG-point. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:23, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You reminded me, Gråbergs! Thanks. Archive to it -- I'd actually introduced it last year to Luis Elizondo and completely forgot, added to table: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404113127/https://issues.org/ufos-wont-go-away Thanks! -- Very Polite Person (talk) 13:16, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• "The Truth Is Out There. So Is Lue Elizondo." By: Howard, David. Popular Mechanics. May/Jun2023, p44-56. is also pretty good. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:35, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]