Chris Mellon is a member of Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy and claims
he got the videos "in the Pentagon parking lot."
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.
Lt. Col. Robert Friend was in charge of Project Blue Book, the military’s
famous UFO study.
A retired Air Force official in charge of one of its
most famous UFO research efforts said before his death last year that
the effort may have been scuttled not because it was fruitless, but just
the opposite.
By Ed Mazza The Huffington Post
10-15-20
In a clip from the new documentary “The Phenomenon,” Lt. Col. Robert Friend
pointed to the sudden closure of Project Blue Book in 1969.
Tucker Carlson: It’s ‘Outrageous’ the Government Is Still Hiding Evidence of UFOs
As he often does, Tucker Carlson took a break from talking politics for a few minutes at the very end of his Fox News show on Friday night — to talk about aliens and UFOs.
By Phil Owen The Wrap 10-9-20
The last time Tucker talked about aliens on his show was mid-September, when we got the the news that there is very likely some form of life on Venus. This time, the topic was prompted by the release of an obscure new documentary called “The Phenomenon” — which claims to be, according to the product description on Vudu, “the most credible examination of the global mystery and cover-up involving UFOs.”
Former U.S.
Senator Harry Reid
repeated claims in a new documentary that UFOs interfered in U.S nuclear
weapons facilities – even prohibiting the weapons’ launch altogether.
In the documentary “The Phenomenon” that released Tuesday,
By Laura Widener americanmilitarynews.com
10-6-20
Reid said, repeating claims told to him, “If they had been called upon by the
president to launch [the nukes] they couldn’t have done it.”
'It’s not a question of belief': the film examining government UFO records
The Phenomenon studies the history of UFO claims from the 1940s to this
summer’s revelation of a Department of Defense investigation into military
sightings
The question of unexplained phenomena and
Unidentified Flying Objects have long fascinated the public, as the
subject of feverish American news coverage in the years post-second
world war and too many films and investigative documentaries
By Adrian Horton The Guardian 10-7-20
to count, all landing on speculation without certainty. But the frenetic,
oxygen-sucking rollercoaster of headlines in the Trump administration has
overshadowed a cascade of strange evidence released by the government in
recent years: in 2017, the New York Times revealed the existence of a shadowy,
partly classified government program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFO reports from deep
within the Pentagon.
This is the grounding fact presented in The Phenomenon, a documentary from
longtime UFO enthusiast James Fox which updates longstanding extraterrestrial
theories with recent government regulations....
“The day the sun didn’t come up was so surreal. I
mean, it was literally apocalyptic. There was this orange glow in the
sky all day, the sky was orange and dark and everybody was walking
around like they were in some matrix. It was eerie and spooky and
unsettling, and it was like, let’s get the hell out of here, man, we
can’t even breathe fresh air.”
James Fox is doing the
phoner from somewhere in Arizona, where the choking ashes from
multiple conflagrations near his home in
By Billy Cox De Void
10-6-20
northern California aren’t filtering through the seams and powdering the
pillows. He and his family left the state a couple of weeks ago; with any
luck, the weather will have taken a more rational turn when they return home
in November.
This is a huge moment for the director of “The
Phenomenon,” which is premiering online today following 7½ years of
soul-searching and turmoil during its bumpy production schedule. The
documentary – Fox’s fourth on UFOs – is drawing
rave endorsements
from some of its featured subjects, including the likes of Bill Richardson,
John Podesta, Chris Mellon, Jacques Vallee (“the most credible documentary
ever made about UFOs”) and
Luis Elizondo. But, after being plagued by budget shortfalls, transient partnerships, the
collapse of a major distribution agreement that might’ve translated the film
into 50 languages and opened in nearly 200 countries, and (of course)
COVID-19, Fox sounds exhausted by the ordeal.
“I’m not trying to
sound melodramatic, but that film nearly killed me. In every way,” he says.
“Mentally, physically, psychologically, like I was in the ring with a monster
and I was literally just trying to survive to the next round.”
There’s a load to unpack in this 101-minute treatment of The Great Taboo, and
enough material in storage for an additional five-part mini-series. But maybe
the greatest source of Fox’s anxiety was the ending, which culminates with a
textbook Close Encounter of the Third Kind incident involving African
schoolkids in 1994. If UFO hardware, videos and radar tracks get clogged in
the windpipes of the American mainstream, purported interactions with the
voyagers themselves are the subculture’s gaudy emetics. When he first heard
about the faceoff, Fox’s instinct was to run the other way.
“If you’ve seen any of my work, you know I don’t do CE-3 stories, I cover CE-1
and CE-2,” he recalls. “And knowing full well that most of the high-profile
officials I interviewed for the film wanted to see the whole documentary
before they signed off on it, I knew that going there would be a slippery
slope, and incredibly challenging.”
Fox learned about the Zimbabwe playground incident in the 1990s, when he was
“naïve enough” to think he could cop an interview with Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg’s intermediary, a mutual friend, got back to Fox and told him Mr.
Hollywood wasn’t interested in chatting. However, she added, “he does want you
to know there’s an incredibly compelling landing case in Africa and you should
look into it.
“And I thought, there’s no way a UFO could land in broad daylight at a school,
where the occupants could get out and interact with children, without the
entire world knowing about it. And I thought, if I was gonna dismiss it that
quickly, the general public was gonna dismiss it even quicker.”
But after taking a look at the footage recorded in the immediate aftermath,
with the young eyewitnesses struggling to make sense of what they saw, Fox was
a fish on a hook, and with a major dilemma: How to get the most credible
authorities in his documentary to consent to participate in a film that ends
with a CE-3 kicker? “To have to cut any of them out because of this,” he says,
“would’ve been devastating.”
None bailed. In fact, off-the-record accounts of high-strangeness imparted to
Fox by some of those same folks suggested that maybe what happened in Zimbabwe
was more palatable than he initially believed: “What I learned from meetings
with some of these high-level people shocked me, in terms of the evidence
they’ve seen, and the evidence that’s not been released. I think about this
almost every day. And as (retired Senator) Harry Reid says in the movie, what
ended up on the front page of the New York Times (12/16/17) is just the tip of
the iceberg.”
Among the angles in Fox’s odyssey that will likely never see the light of day
is how he managed to nail down the Zimbabwe story. He promised never to air
that part of the journey, but the way it happened reinforces Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s famous truism, “There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it
doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” Because with one stroke of generosity
that will not appear in the credits, “The Phenomenon” was allowed to become
something more than just another UFO tale.
“Now that I’m a dad,” says Fox, who has a 6-year-old son, “I look at children
differently. I care about their future. There’s a very powerful environmental
message in this film. I didn’t create it, I just highlighted it.
“We need congressional hearings. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, this is
something that’s realistically possible, based on some of the meetings I’ve
been in. And the only way we’re gonna get any traction with elected officials
is to rattle their cages. They need their constituents to rattle their cages.
That’s it.”
Released on Tuesday, James Fox's new documentary The
Phenomenon, offers a historical inquiry into UFOs. Or what the U.S.
Military refers to as "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."
[...]
By Tom Rogan www.washingtonexaminer.com 10-5-20
Centering on more credible witnesses, such as military observers, Fox documents
how UFOs are not something new. He examines the so-called "Foo Fighter" wave of
UFOs that were seen by American pilots over Europe and the Asia-Pacific during
World War II. Fox also studies the heavy occurrence of UFOs in and around
nuclear sites. The correlation of UFO reports and the development of the atomic
bomb is seen by some analysts as a critical point of note. Again, Fox breaks
news here, getting former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the record as
saying that UFOs have, on occasion, even interfered with U.S. nuclear weapons
systems (note that the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered). This
nuclear interference has been previously — and extensively — reported by Robert
Hastings. However, to have Reid, who was instrumental in the forming of the
Pentagon's 2009-2017 UFO program, corroborate that reporting is important for
its political salience. On that point, we should note that Sen. Marco Rubio,
current Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now demanding a new
Pentagon report on UFOs.
Twenty-four minutes into the
long-awaited documentary
“The Phenomenon,” director James Fox foreshadows its final act with a
look back at what happened outside Australia’s Westall School in 1966.
That’s when several hundred students came swarming out of their
classrooms upon hearing about a disc-shaped UFO stunting in broad
daylight over the power lines near the athletic field. They watched it
descend below the treeline, rise again, turn on its broad side, and zip
away at a crazy velocity.
By Billy Cox De Void
9-29-20
Fifty years later, a handful of those eyewitnesses reconvene to share not only
their sighting experience, but how they watched local and federal authorities
cordon off the landing area to conduct an investigation. They were also warned
by the administration during a subsequent school assembly that they hadn’t seen
what they said they saw. Even today, a faculty member who watched that event
unfold agreed to go on camera only after being assured of anonymity. For anyone
who’s followed the mystery for any length of time, stories like these are
generically familiar. Indeed, much of the setup follows a conventional arc with
names (from Gen. Roger Ramey to John Podesta), places (Roswell, Bentwaters,
Malmstrom AFB) and events (from Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” sighting in
1947 to the 2004 Tic Tac incident off California) that are staples of the UFO
timeline. But Fox is targeting a much larger audience, and establishing baseline
frames of reference for the uninitiated is absolutely critical for the emotional
wallop “The Phenomenon” packs at the end.
With American democracy on
the ropes and institutional norms degenerating into banana-republic spittle,
convincing audiences to divert their attention, if only momentarily, to what has
long been libeled as freak-show culture is a big ask.
It’s always been
a big ask. However, the fringe is also deteriorating, and things are happening
quickly now. Whether it’s the formation of the Pentagon UAP Task Force or the
anticipated release of the military intelligence report on UFOs to the Senate,
the landscape on the other side of the election is already evolving into
something for which we are unprepared. And “The Phenomenon” forces us to go even
deeper, to maybe even reassess the longstanding status quo on UFOs, as maybe a
crime against nature – human nature.
To be sure, Fox delivers twists that may take some cognoscenti by surprise.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, for
instance, recalls how Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper broached the UFO subject
with President Clinton during a Cabinet meeting. Dispatched by SecDef William
Cohen to learn more, Mellon remembers hitting the wall when a USAF colonel told
him the pertinent records had been “cleaned up or thrown out to save space.”
Mellon goes on to recount how “somebody bent the rules” to get the
celebrated F-18 UFO chase videos to him in the parking lot of the Pentagon. He also professes how
“extraordinarily disappointed” he was in the NY Times groundbreaking story of
12/16/17, which showcased the videos and exposed the existence of the $22
million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Instead of focusing on AATIP, Mellon says, “the real story, in my mind at least,
should’ve been, these things are real, they’re here, this is happening now.”
“The Phenomenon” also takes us behind the scenes and gives us tantalizingly
brief glimpses into the research underway right now on purported UFO debris
collected “as far back as 1947.” French physicist/computer scientist/pioneer
UFOlogist Jacques Vallee says colleagues are investigating material that is
manufactured, not natural, by employing technology that allows researchers to
peer into atomic structure so deeply it is “impossible to fake.” Stanford Med
School microbiology professor Garry Nolan displays the “multiparameter ion beam
imager,” and discusses how it determined that the samples’ isotopic compositions
are unique to any metals known on Earth.
“If you’re talking about an advanced material from an advanced civilization,
you’re talking about something that I’ll just call an ultramaterial, right,”
Nolan tells Fox. “It’s something which has properties where somebody is putting
it together at the atomic scale. So we’re building our world with 80 elements,
somebody else is building the world with 253 different isotopes.”
But beyond isotopic ratios, a discussion of threats to the superpowers’ nuclear
arsenals, and the bureaucratic intrigues, “The Phenomenon” poses an even more
fundamental question: More than 70 years into the “modern” UFO era, where have
the morals or ethics of denial and obfuscation left us? In a more recent version
of what happened at the Westall School in Australia, Fox leads us to the Ariel
School in Zimbabwe, and into the life-altering mass encounter that went down in
1994.
Using a remarkable anthology of contemporaneous BBC video testimony from dozens
of schoolkids discussing what they saw 26 years ago, Fox reunites a handful of
those students for interviews as adults. All have had decades to contemplate
that moment, an experience which diverged sharply from your average
lights-in-the-sky fare. They reported seeing small beings outside the vehicle,
the apparent occupants, with large heads and huge, hypnotic black eyes. Many
received telepathic messages, largely dystopian, about the fate of the Earth and
technology’s role in its sickness.
Most poignant are the interviews conducted by the late Harvard psychiatrist John
Mack, whose onsite empathy and compassion in 1994 clearly moved some of those
kids to extraordinary reflection. To her credit, unlike in Australia, at least
one Ariel School official encouraged the children to “say exactly what you want
to say” as cameras assembled for interviews. Decades later, however, at least
one of the alums admitted to having misgivings about sharing her experience so
freely, “being so young and not even being allowed time to able to comprehend
what we had seen.” She added, “Our teacher certainly didn’t believe us, so that
was a big deal because we had to continue going to school there.”
By time Fox’s production team arrived in rural Ruwa, former Ariel teacher and
current headmistress Judy Bates had her own on-camera confession to make all
these years later: “I wanted to apologize, I should’ve taken more notice, but I
didn’t. I was more concerned about me and not them, and what was going on in my
own personal experience.” Her verdict: “Aliens visited us – and that’s about
it.”
Fox knows the Zimbabwe material is dynamite, and he’s smart
enough to back off and let the images breathe. It’s not so much what the kids
said back then as how they said it. They struggled to articulate what was going
on behind their eyes, and they expressed themselves with a halting uncertainty
that seemed to wobble between wonder and trauma. The adults failed them then,
just as they failed the Aussie kids in 1966, as well as countless others who’ve
been ostracized and doubting their sanity since whenever this all started.
Bottom line, “The Phenomenon” is a call to action. Fox puts an urgent human face
on the current momentum towards transparency, and he leaves us with a small
window into the price we pay for doing nothing. Someday, if and when the veil
parts, we may regret having peeked. But the consequences of being shielded from
the view are self-evident. And time is running out.
James Fox's feature exploring 70 years of history behind proving UFOs
exist will now have a digital release on Oct. 6.
UFO documentary The Phenomenon, which takes
an expansive look across 70 years' worth of history behind proving the
existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries, has a new trailer
and release date.
By Alex Ritman The Hollywood Reporter
9-15-20
The feature — from director James Fox — was originally slated for a wide North
American theatrical release via 1091 Pictures this fall, but due to the COVID-19
pandemic will now premiere worldwide on all digital platforms on Oct. 6.
If aliens exist, eventually we’ll know about it. How will we find out? What will they want? These are the kinds of questions that spark our imaginations every single day. Could the revelation possibly come in the form of a documentary? If the
By Germain Lussier
Gizmodo
2-2-20
language being used to promote The Phenomenon is right, maybe it will.
Directed by James Fox and narrated by Peter Coyote, The Phenomenon is a new documentary that covers over 70 years of UFO history.
The film includes interviews with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.
1091 Media has acquired North American and digital rights to the UFO documentary The Phenomenon, with a nationwide theatrical release set for June of next year, followed by a digital release in September.
By Mia Galuppo
www.hollywoodreporter.com
11-13-19
The film takes an expansive looks at 70 years' worth of history behind proving the existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries.
