On January 19, 2024, Christopher Mellon — former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and one of the most prominent voices in the UAP disclosure movement — sent an email to the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. He was asking a specific question: he wanted confirmation that a text-message screenshot he intended to publish was not classified. The screenshot, which Mellon would release publicly in April 2024, referenced the 1953 Kingman, Arizona UFO crash and alluded to a still-active, highly classified memorandum issued by a Secretary of the Air Force in the 1950s, reportedly still in effect to maintain the cover of UAPs. The story of how that email got scrutinized — and what it turned out to contain — is the story of how the disclosure movement's credibility problem keeps compounding itself.
The Mellon email did not originate with Mellon. He told DOPSR, according to documents obtained and published by John Greenewald of The Black Vault, that the message had been sent to him "some years ago" by a former Department of Defense employee who claimed to have been read into a program involving the exploitation of recovered off-world technology. Mellon described the sender as "a senior government official" with "plausible access" — plausible enough, he said, that the allegations merited serious attention. He redacted the sender's name. The DOPSR approved the redacted version for publication on March 1, 2024.
There is a detail buried in Greenewald's reporting that deserves to sit in plain light. Mellon, according to The Black Vault's account of the FOIA file, also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft. The source, in other words, was vouching for a program the source had never actually entered. And the case that email cited — Kingman — rests on a foundation that, by the most careful public accounting available, is a fiction.
The Only Witness Who Said He Embellished
The Kingman crash story entered the public record in 1976, when Ray Fowler published an account in Official UFO magazine based on his 1973 interview with Arthur Stansel. Before Fowler, two teenagers named Jeff Young and Paul Chetham had spoken with Stansel — at a gathering where, by the account later relayed through Kevin Randle's research, Stansel had consumed four martinis. Randle, a retired Army intelligence officer and prolific UFO researcher whose blog posts on both the Kingman and Del Rio cases form the primary public record of this investigation, has written that Stansel himself told Fowler he tended to embellish his stories when he drank.
That is the evidentiary foundation: one man, drinking, feeding a story to teenagers, later acknowledging he stretched things when he drank.
Randle's November 2025 post on the Kingman case details what happened when he and researcher David Rudiak tried to follow up on what had appeared to be a corroborating witness thread — the story told by a woman named Judie Woolcott. Woolcott claimed her late husband, an Army officer killed in Vietnam in 1965, had written to her about personally witnessing the Kingman crash while stationed at an air control tower in northwestern Arizona. Randle received a phone call and email from Kathryn Baez, who identified herself as Woolcott's daughter. Baez wrote that her mother's husband, William Woolcott, had served in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam and was, as of June 2010, very much alive and living in Wausau. Judie Woolcott, Baez also noted, had not known William Woolcott until 1980 — seventeen years after the supposed letter from Vietnam.
A second candidate for the letter's author, an Army captain possibly named Charles Alan Roberts who was killed in Vietnam in 1965, could not be placed anywhere near Kingman. His military record, which Randle found online, showed he had been discharged from the Army in December 1952 and spent the years 1953 to 1955 attending what was then New Mexico A&M. Woolcott never produced the letter. Baez suggested her mother had been in school as a teenager in 1953 — which would make a romantic correspondence with a recently discharged Army veteran, leading to her possessing a classified letter about a crash retrieval, implausible on its face.
Randle is careful, as he usually is, to note that absence of evidence is not proof of fabrication. But the corroboration that was supposed to give Kingman a second pillar simply does not exist under examination.
The Davis Problem
If the Kingman case were an isolated embarrassment, it might be dismissed as one bad entry in a large and complicated field. The trouble is that a parallel structure appears with Del Rio — and both cases now implicate some of the same senior voices.
Robert Willingham first told his story of witnessing a UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas in 1968, when he was identified in Skylook — MUFON's original publication — as a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. He would subsequently present himself as an Air Force colonel and combat veteran. Randle, who describes himself as the first researcher to actually vet Willingham's military record, found that Willingham had never served in the Air Force, had not been a fighter pilot, had not served in Korea, and had worn decorations he had not earned. His military record showed thirteen months of service, from December 1945 to January 1947. Willingham was a Civil Air Patrol officer — a civilian auxiliary organization — who dressed the part of something else. He also, over the years, claimed to have witnessed six additional crash retrievals.
In over two decades of research, Randle writes, he has not found a single additional witness to the Del Rio event. The date of the crash changed three times. When Randle interviewed Willingham directly, Willingham told him he wasn't sure if it was 1954 or 1955.
Dr. Eric Davis, a physicist who has been prominent in classified UAP research and who appeared in Dan Farah's documentary Age of Disclosure, made what Randle describes as a throwaway remark on Coast-to-Coast AM stating that the Del Rio crash was real. Randle attempted for some time to reach Davis directly. He never received a response. The reply he eventually obtained came through a third party — researcher André Skondras, who had separately contacted Davis. According to Skondras, Davis responded that Randle's conclusions about crash-retrieval history were incorrect and based on flawed research, and that Davis, David Grusch, and other cleared personnel had been briefed on classified evidence firsthand — information that remains inaccessible to the public due to long-standing national-security restrictions.
This is a significant claim, relayed second-hand, from a researcher who declined to engage with Randle's documented findings directly. Randle's response is worth noting: he is himself a former Air Force and Army intelligence officer. He says he understands secrecy protocols. His point is not that classified programs don't exist. His point is that Davis is using the existence of those protocols to insulate a claim about a specific case — Del Rio — that the public evidence does not support, and whose foundational witness was a serial fabricator.
In Age of Disclosure, Hal Puthoff told viewers that "the classified data that we had access to when we joined the program was indisputable." Jay Stratton said that he had "seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings" — the clearest videos, he said, remain classified. These are extraordinary assertions from men with serious credentials. Randle, reviewing the documentary on his blog in November 2025, notes with visible frustration that none of those assertions came with anything viewers could examine. No documents. No photographs. Thomas Gonzales, a sergeant with the 509th Bomb Wing at Roswell, at least carved figurines of what he said he saw. Stratton offered a personal testimony and nothing more.
"the classified data that we had access to when we joined the program was indisputable."
Randle does not accuse Davis, Mellon, or Stratton of bad faith. He raises a question he cannot answer and is honest about that. But he states it plainly: if these men have genuine access to classified crash-retrieval evidence, they should have known that Del Rio was invented by Robert Willingham. They should have known that Kingman rests on a man who drank martinis and admitted he embellished. Their continued promotion of those cases — or, in Mellon's instance, their failure to scrutinize an email that cited Kingman as evidence of a real program — suggests either that their access is narrower than presented, or that something else is happening.
The tension the data cannot resolve is this: Davis and others assert, with apparent conviction, that they were briefed on firsthand classified evidence of non-human craft. Randle's documented, public research — sourced to primary records, military files, and interviews with the witnesses themselves — shows that at least two of the cases these insiders have endorsed are not real. Both things appear to be true simultaneously, and reconciling them requires information that is not publicly available.
What Would Change the Picture
One specific document could begin to resolve this: the release, or even the official acknowledgment, of the highly classified 1950s Air Force Secretary memorandum referenced in the Mellon email. If it exists, its scope and language would tell us whether Mellon's anonymous source understood what they were describing, or whether they were repeating something half-remembered from the same folklore loop that produced Del Rio and Kingman. The DOPSR review flagged Mellon's first submission as a security threat before approving the redacted version — which suggests someone in that chain saw language that warranted scrutiny. What they saw, and why the redacted version ultimately cleared, has not been explained.
Until that explanation surfaces, or until Davis or Mellon addresses Randle's documented findings about Willingham and Stansel on the record, the insider-access argument remains circular: classified evidence proves the crashes were real, and the crashes being real proves the classified evidence exists.