Chase Brandon

Career in Intelligence

Chase Brandon spent 35 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, with 25 of those years serving as an undercover, covert operations officer in the Clandestine Service. He operated in black operations assignments and participated in training and liaison roles across the intelligence community. In 1996, he transitioned to a more public-facing role, becoming the CIA's first official Entertainment Liaison Officer—a position he held until his retirement in 2007. In this capacity, he provided technical consultation to major Hollywood productions including Mission: Impossible III, The Bourne Identity, Alias, and 24, as well as documentary programming on the Discovery, Learning, and Military Channels. After his official retirement, Brandon remained active as a consultant to multiple intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, and federal and state law enforcement organizations.

The Roswell Disclosure

On June 23, 2012, Brandon appeared on the radio program Coast to Coast AM with extraordinary claims about the 1947 Roswell incident. He stated that while working at CIA headquarters in the mid-1990s, he had personally accessed materials in the Agency's Historical Intelligence Collection—a classified research library—and specifically opened a box labeled "Roswell." According to Brandon, the contents (photographs and documents, though he declined to describe specifics) confirmed to him that "there was a craft from beyond this world that crashed at Roswell, that the military picked up remains of not just the wreckage, but cadavers."

Brandon's disclosure was significant because of his security clearance level, his direct access to classified CIA materials, and his willingness to break a lifetime of operational silence. His statement aligned with earlier testimony from other former government insiders but stood apart for coming from someone whose role placed him in proximity to the highest levels of CIA archives.

The Cryptos Conundrum

In 2012, the same year as his Coast to Coast AM appearance, Brandon published a novel titled The Cryptos Conundrum. The work is framed as a techno-thriller centered on a coded sculpture—the actual Kryptos monument located in the CIA courtyard—and follows a protagonist tasked with containing "the greatest secret the government has ever kept."

Brandon explained that he published the novel as fiction because he remains unable to publish non-fiction materials addressing his classified knowledge. He believed the novel format allowed him to encode references to classified CIA documentation involving UFOs, extraterrestrial contact, and what the intelligence community knows about non-human activity on Earth. His claims gained traction when John Ramirez, a fellow CIA veteran who also went public about UAP programs, corroborated that Brandon's novel contained genuine information about government UFO knowledge.

The notion of a high-level CIA official disguising true classified information within a published work raised questions about how far whistleblowers might go to circumvent classification restrictions and communicate with the public.

Credibility and Controversy

Brandon's disclosures occupy a contested space. His three-decade career, security clearances, and direct access to classified materials lend weight to his claims. The specificity of his Roswell statement—identifying an actual box, describing its location, and naming the archive—suggests either genuine knowledge or a crafted false narrative.

However, his refusal to detail the contents of the "Roswell" box, and the absence of independent verification of his specific allegations, means his claims cannot be confirmed through public documentation. Skeptics note that his Roswell statement could be interpreted as confirming what many researchers already believed rather than providing new, independently verifiable evidence.

His novel, while intriguing to UFO researchers, remains ambiguous: is it an encoded transmission of classified truth, or a speculative thriller that cleverly mirrors well-known UFO narratives? Brandon never definitively answered that question, likely constrained by his continuing non-disclosure agreements.