Key Takeaways
- Ex-Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon says unidentified objects violated airspace over Langley Air Force Base for 17 straight days, forcing the relocation of an F-22 squadron
- Mellon estimates hundreds of baffling incursions happen every year over US bases at home and abroad — NORAD has logged more than 600 since 2022
- He says unknown craft have flown right up to the bridges of US Navy ships and shone lights inside, in what looked like deliberate provocation
- None of the objects has crashed or been brought down by anti-drone systems, and Mellon says some behave in ways drones simply can't
- Congress is pushing for immunity so whistleblowers can testify about the incursions without losing their careers
📑 Table of Contents
- UFOs Over Military Bases: What Christopher Mellon Revealed
- Langley Air Force Base Incursions: 17 Days, Then the F-22s Moved
- UFOs Harassing Navy Ships: 'We Are in Your Face'
- Drones Over Military Bases — or Something Else?
- UFO Whistleblowers and Immunity: What Congress Is Doing
- What This Means for UFO Disclosure in 2026
UFOs Over Military Bases: What Christopher Mellon Revealed
The man who used to oversee intelligence for the Pentagon says the US military cannot explain what keeps flying over its own bases. And he thinks the public should be far more bothered about it than they are.
Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, told NewsNation's "Elizabeth Vargas Reports" this week that unidentified craft are routinely violating restricted airspace over American military installations, at home and overseas. Not once or twice. He estimates hundreds of incidents a year that leave commanders baffled.
"These kind of incursions have been happening at bases all over the United States and overseas," Mellon said. "It isn't as widely known as it ought to be."
He is not a fringe voice. Mellon served under both Clinton and George W. Bush, and his old job gave him oversight of some of the most sensitive intelligence programmes in the US government. When he says the military doesn't know what's in its own skies, that carries weight. And the numbers back him up: NORAD has logged more than 600 incursions over US military installations since 2022.
Langley Air Force Base Incursions: 17 Days, Then the F-22s Moved
The case Mellon keeps coming back to is Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, home of the US Air Combat Command. For 17 consecutive nights, unidentified objects flew through the base's restricted airspace. Reports from the time describe up to two dozen craft on a given night, some estimated at 20 feet long and moving at over 100 mph.
The Air Force could not stop them. It couldn't even work out where they were coming from. So it did something remarkable: it moved a squadron of F-22 Raptors, the most advanced stealth fighters in the world, to another base. The jets got out of the way of the intruders, not the other way round.
Mellon's point is blunt. "If the air combat command at Langley can't control its own airspace, then you wonder how effectively they could protect Washington," he said.
Langley is not an isolated case. Similar incursions have been reported over Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval port, over the Nevada site used for nuclear weapons experiments, and over the Virginia base that houses SEAL Team Six. An investigation involving the Pentagon, the FBI and the military's UAP office has still not produced an answer.
UFOs Harassing Navy Ships: 'We Are in Your Face'
If the base incursions sound like surveillance, some of what Mellon describes at sea sounds closer to taunting.
Speaking at the recent Disclosure Forum in Washington, he said some objects appeared to be deliberately provoking American forces. In one series of encounters, unknown craft approached US Navy ships so closely that they came right up to the bridge and shone lights inside.
"Like, just in case you didn't know that we're flying around your ship," Mellon said. "You know, we are in your face, and you can't do anything about it."
Whatever these objects are, they are not falling out of the sky. Mellon describes activity going on "night after night", involving "scores and scores" of objects. None has crashed. None has been brought down by the anti-drone systems designed to jam or disable small unmanned aircraft.
"So it's a very capable system, whatever it is," he said. "And whoever is flying it."
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Drones Over Military Bases — or Something Else?
The official line has long been that most of these objects are probably foreign drones, or ordinary clutter that looks odd on sensors. Mellon doesn't dismiss that. "In some cases, it probably is drones," he says, especially near sites that foreign intelligence services would obviously want a look at.
But he won't go further than the evidence, and the evidence bothers him. Asked directly whether some of the objects might be something else entirely, he answered: "We don't know. That's part of the problem, it's a mystery. In some cases, it probably is drones. In other cases, it seems to be something more advanced."
He described smaller objects being seen entering a larger craft, which then "instantaneously accelerated directly away from the target area at extreme velocities, the kind of speeds that are not attainable with drones." And he noted the pattern is old. Strange objects have been reported around military sites since the Second World War, he says, "but not as aggressively, not as much in our faces as we've been experiencing lately."
The Pentagon's own UAP office has said much the same, in quieter language. Its director has admitted the government is stumped by several "true anomalies" and said solving them will need "the help of academia and the public." For an organisation that spent decades waving the subject away, that is quite an admission.
Worth pausing on Mellon's most sobering point, though. Even if every single one of these objects turns out to be human-made, built by an adversary or hidden in some black programme, the story is still alarming. It would mean someone has been flying rings around the most defended airspace in the United States for years, and the Pentagon can't stop them.
UFO Whistleblowers and Immunity: What Congress Is Doing
Mellon's interview lands in the middle of a growing fight in Washington over who gets to talk about all this.
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna says there are "credible whistleblowers" who want to speak openly about recovered non-human craft and biological material, but who fear losing their security clearances or worse. She is drawing up a list of people she believes should be granted immunity so they can testify to Congress without destroying their careers. Senator Mike Rounds, meanwhile, has pledged to revive the UAP Disclosure Act, which would build whistleblower protections into law.
We covered the wider push at the Disclosure Forum in Washington, where Mellon made his Navy ship comments. The forum made one thing plain: the argument is no longer about whether the incursions are happening. Officials confirm they are. The argument is about what the government knows, and when the rest of us get told.
What This Means for UFO Disclosure in 2026
For UK readers, this one is less remote than it sounds. In November 2024, unidentified drones spent nights over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall and RAF Feltwell in East Anglia, all bases used by the US Air Force. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the sightings. The source was never publicly identified. Whatever is probing American bases has shown up over British ones too.
Mellon's message is not that aliens are buzzing the flight line. He is careful, sometimes frustratingly so, about what the objects might be. His message is simpler: the incursions are real, they are frequent, and the most powerful military on Earth cannot explain them. After a year of file releases, governance boards and congressional pressure, the mystery hasn't shrunk. It has moved closer to the runway.
Keep looking up. Just know that the people paid to guard the sky are doing the same, and they don't know what they're looking at either.
Sources:
- Pentagon stumped by reported UFO sightings over military bases: Ex-defense official — The Hill
- US military stumped by UFO sightings over bases, ex-defense official says — NewsNation
- 'In Your Face': Unstoppable UFOs Force F-22 Jets to Relocate as Pentagon Admits Airspace Control Failure — IBTimes UK
- Drones swarmed a military base for days. The Pentagon still doesn't know why. — Task & Purpose
- Here's What NORAD's Commander Just Told Us About The Langley AFB Drone Incursions — The War Zone
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