In the fall of 2025, Kevin Randle — a retired Army intelligence officer who has investigated UFO crash claims for more than three decades — published a series of posts on his blog laying out something that should have landed harder than it did. The two crash cases most prominently championed by America's leading UAP insiders, the 1953 Kingman, Arizona incident and the Del Rio, Texas retrieval, cannot be verified by a single reliable witness. Not one.
Randle isn't a debunker. He's written extensively about Roswell, argued that something crashed in New Mexico in 1947, and spent years on what he calls crash/retrieval research. When he says a case is a hoax, he's spent time trying to prove it isn't first.
The Del Rio story begins with Robert Willingham, who appeared in Skylook — the original MUFON publication — in 1968, identified as a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. Over the years, Willingham's account shifted. The date of the alleged crash changed three times. When Randle interviewed him directly, Willingham said he wasn't sure whether it had happened in 1954 or 1955. He eventually claimed to have been present at six separate crash retrievals. And critically, as Randle established by checking military records, Willingham had never served in the Air Force. He was never a fighter pilot, never a colonel. He was a Civil Air Patrol member who wore ribbons he hadn't earned and claimed Korean War wounds his service record doesn't support. His military record shows thirteen months of service, from December 1945 to January 1947. Full stop.
When Randle interviewed him directly, Willingham said he wasn't sure whether it had happened in 1954 or 1955.
Randle has stated plainly, in a December 2025 post, that in more than two decades of research into the Del Rio case, he has not found a single other witness to the alleged retrieval. The case rests entirely on Willingham. And Willingham, by Randle's documented account, fabricated his credentials.
The insider endorsement problem
This is where the story gets uncomfortable for the disclosure community.
On Coast-to-Coast AM, physicist Eric Davis — a figure with genuine connections to government-adjacent UAP research and a regular presence in briefings attended by congressional staff — stated that the UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas, was real. Randle heard it, noted it, and tried to follow up. He got no response from Davis directly.
What he eventually got, according to his December 2025 post, came through a third party. André Skondras had contacted Davis on Randle's behalf, and Davis's response, as relayed by Skondras, was that Randle's conclusions about crash-retrieval history are incorrect and based on flawed research — and that Davis, David Grusch, and other cleared personnel were briefed on classified evidence firsthand, information that remains inaccessible to the public due to long-standing national-security restrictions.
Randle's reply to that framing is pointed. He served as an intelligence officer in both the Air Force and the Army. He understands classification. His argument isn't that classified programs don't exist — it's more specific and harder to dismiss: if Davis had genuine inside access to crash-retrieval evidence, he would have encountered information establishing that Del Rio was Willingham's invention. The absence of that correction, Randle suggests, tells you something about the quality or nature of the briefings Davis received.
Davis's claim, as relayed through Skondras, remains unverified. No primary documents support it. No other named witness to the Del Rio event has ever surfaced. The contradiction between Davis's insider confidence and Randle's documented field research sits unresolved.
The Kingman case has a parallel architecture, and Christopher Mellon is at its center.
The 1953 Kingman crash story traces to Arthur Stansel, who in 1973 told two teenagers — Jeff Young and Paul Chetham — that he'd witnessed a crashed craft retrieval in Arizona. Ray Fowler later interviewed Stansel and wrote about the case for Official UFO's April 1976 issue. That article gave Kingman its public life. The problem Randle keeps returning to: Stansel himself told Fowler that when he drank, he tended to embellish his stories. The night he first told Young and Chetham, he'd had four martinis.
For decades, the Kingman case attracted additional claimed corroboration. One thread involved a woman named Judie Woolcott, who said her late husband — an Army officer killed in Vietnam in 1965 — had written to her from the war, describing his involvement in the Kingman retrieval. He had reportedly been in a control tower in northwestern Arizona when the object hit the ground.
Randle's investigation of that claim, detailed in a November 2025 post, produced something more useful than a rebuttal: a paper trail. Woolcott's daughter, Kathryn Baez, contacted Randle and told him, in an email dated June 1, 2010, that Woolcott's actual husband, William Woolcott, had served in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam — and was, at the time of the email, very much alive and living in Wausau. He was never considered a Vietnam Veteran by the relevant designation standards. Kathryn Baez also wrote that her mother hadn't known William Woolcott until 1980, ruling him out as the source of any 1965 letter.
Randle and researcher David Rudiak separately pursued another candidate: an Army captain named Charles Alan Roberts, who research suggested might have been a close friend of Woolcott's rather than her husband, and who was killed in Vietnam in 1965. But military records Randle located show Roberts was discharged from the Army in December 1952 and spent 1953 to 1955 attending New Mexico A&M. He wasn't near a control tower in Kingman. He wasn't in Arizona at all. The letter Woolcott claimed to have received was never produced. Her daughter's June 2010 email noted that Judie herself was a teenager in 1953 and in school — making even the framing of the relationship implausible.
Every line of corroboration for Kingman, when traced to a source, evaporates.
The Mellon email and what DOPSR found
Enter Christopher Mellon. Earlier in 2025, Mellon published a heavily redacted screenshot of an email that mentioned the Kingman crash, framing it as suggestive of a real program. Randle noted this, and John Greenewald of The Black Vault pursued it through FOIA.
What Greenewald's FOIA request returned, as reported on The Black Vault and cited by Randle in a November 30, 2025 post, is illuminating. Mellon had submitted the email screenshot to DOPSR — the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review — on January 19, 2024, asking for confirmation that it was not classified. The approval stamp came back March 1, 2024. Mellon published the material in April 2024.
The DOPSR file revealed additional context that Mellon had not disclosed publicly. Mellon explained in his submission that the message had been sent to him some years ago by a former DoD employee alleging they were being read into a program involving the exploitation of recovered off-world technology. Mellon said he had redacted the name of the alleged gatekeeper and was protecting the source's identity. He described the sender as a senior government official with plausible access.
But the DOPSR file also contained this: Mellon acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.
That sentence does a lot of damage to the email's evidentiary value. The source never saw anything. The name of the program is unknown. The date the email was sent is unclear — Mellon described it only as some years ago, with a possible suggestion of 2020, after the term UAP entered common use. The email mentions a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the USAF in the 1950s, but no such document has been produced or identified.
Mellon's first DOPSR submission was actually returned to him after an employee flagged his three-page mailed package as a security threat — a detail Mellon did not mention in his public article. Randle speculates that the employee may have recognized a reference to a classified program. That's possible. It's also possible the flag was precautionary and routine. Without further disclosure, there's no way to know.
What Randle is doing in these posts, taken together, is building a specific argument: that two men with claimed access to genuine classified UAP programs — Davis and Mellon — have both publicly endorsed crash cases that dissolve under documented research. Randle is careful to leave the door open. He acknowledges that Davis may have been briefed on other crash retrievals he hasn't encountered. He acknowledges that witnesses to Kingman might exist that he hasn't found. He is not saying the entire edifice of UAP secrecy is fabricated.
He is saying something narrower and in some ways more troubling: that if Davis and Mellon know what they claim to know, they would not be pointing toward Del Rio and Kingman. Those cases are contaminated at the source. An insider would know that.
The documentary Age of Disclosure, directed by Dan Farah and reviewed critically by Randle in a November 26, 2025 post, features Davis, Mellon, Hal Puthoff, and former Pentagon official Jay Stratton making sweeping claims — Stratton going so far as to say he has seen with his own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings. Randle's complaint isn't that these men lack sincerity. His complaint is that sincerity without evidence, after decades of promised disclosure, is no longer sufficient. Puthoff tells viewers that the classified data they accessed when they joined the program was indisputable. Davis says there is 80 years of data the public isn't even aware of. Stratton says the best evidence remains classified.
None of it is shown. None of it is documented. And two of the men vouching for it have, in adjacent contexts, endorsed crash cases that a decades-long documented investigation has found to be inventions.
The specific document worth watching for now is whatever DOPSR holds beyond what FOIA has already returned — particularly any internal assessment of the highly classified USAF memo referenced in the Mellon email. If that memo exists and can be identified, it would change the evidentiary picture considerably. If it can't be located, the email's anchor to a real program disappears entirely, and the question of why Mellon published it without that caveat becomes considerably more pressing.