Mellon, Scheussler, NIDS and the US DoD

2019

I only recently caught up with an article dated 2 November 2019, titled "The Navy acknowledges UFOs - so why aren't they on Washington's radar?" It was written by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) advisor, Christopher Mellon. In the article, Mellon poses a series of questions, of which perhaps the most important, is:

"Why are we not analyzing the vast quantities of data already collected by America's vast sensor network, already bought and paid for, to see what light that data might shed on the issue?"

On 12 November 2019, this point was taken up in a post on the TTSA website in another piece by Mellon, titled "Potential Sources of Information Regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon."

Mellon identified a number of US military and intelligence collection systems, including:

1. The Global Infra sound Acoustic Monitoring Network.

2. The US Space Surveillance Network.

* DARPA Space Surveillance Telescope,

* GEODSS Space Surveillance System,

* The space-based geosynchronous space-based Situational Awareness Program,

* The US Navy's sea-based X-band radar system.

3. The space-based Infrared System.

4. Active Electronically Scanned Army Radar.

5. US Navy Aegis radar.

6. The FAA/NORAD Joint Surveillance System.

Mellon goes on to list a number of known databases, including:

1. NORAD - "Unknown Track Reporting Database" and/or "Unknown track Reporting System."

2. Air Traffic Controllers - "Tracks of interest."

3. OPREP-3 reports - reporting "urgent" and "ongoing" events.

My comments:

For more on OPREP-3 reports, and further information on NORAD's systems, I recommend reading the relevant posts on Melbourne based researcher, Paul Dean's blog.

2002

As I was musing on the material written by Mellon, I was continuing to look through the items on the former website of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS.) I was intrigued to note an article, on the NIDS website,  written by US researcher John Scheussler, titled "Unconventional Flying Objects (UFOs): Why the Mystery Isn't Solved," dated 2002, 17 years prior to the Mellon items.

Scheussler, who at one stage was on the NIDS Science Advisory Board (SAB,) started off the article by writing "I believe that a big part of the problem lies in the fact that UFO investigators are always backward looking."

He provided a list of known data points about the phenomenon, such as where they are seen; their characteristics and behaviours. Looking ahead, he noted:

"All the while, various government agencies were using all sorts of advanced technologies for intelligence gathering purposes..."

His list of such technologies, mirrors that provided by Mellon, and included thermal infrared imaging; acoustic detectors; USAF Space Command SPACETRACK system; ground-based electro-optical deep space surveillance system, and NORAD's uncorrelated targets. The entire article, linked above (PDF copy) is well worth a read in the light of Mellon's two later, 2019, articles.

Return to 2019

Ryan Graves, one of the US Navy pilots with knowledge of the 2014/2015 East coast of the USA, incidents, appeared on the Kevin Rose show on 3 December 2019. During the course of the interview Rose asked Graves "What can we do to study these objects? Part of Graves' response was that the DoD needs to work on it. Also, he said that it needs someone high enough in the DoD to reach into places like NORAD, the FAA, and the US Navy to secure data.