(NewsNation) — A former top-ranking U.S. security official believes the federal government needs to be more transparent in its attempts to engage with detected unidentified anomalous phenomena rather than trying to hide its encounters from the general public.

Christopher Mellon, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, told NewsNation’s “Reality Check with Ross Coulthart” in an interview that he believes the government is making a mistake in classifying information about UAPs.

While information that is potentially damaging to national security must be classified, other materials, including videos of U.S. encounters with UAPs, should be released to the general public, Mellon believes.

“There is a real gap here and a problem in terms of transparency, and I think, unfortunately, many people in the intelligence community, it’s part of the culture to think that the less we share, the safer we are,” Mellon said in the November interview,

In 2017, Mellon provided The New York Times and Washington Post with videos of UAPs by U.S. Navy pilots between 2004 and 2015.

The release of the videos came in a bombshell New York Times report that unveiled a classified Pentagon UFO program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that was overseen by government officials.

Mellon told Coulhart that the videos he provided the two newspapers had previously been investigated by the U.S. Air Force and were confirmed as “unclassified” because they did not threaten national security. The videos enhanced national security by raising awareness of our vulnerability and the activity that needs to be addressed.

After that happened, the defense department created a classification system for UAPs that Mellon said seems to indicate that “anything and everything having to do with UAPs” is classified.

Mellon said the government has many more videos that fall into the same category and remain classified material.

“I don’t believe that, and I don’t think they could prosecute anyone successfully who leaked videos of that ilk,” Mellon told NewsNation.

Mellon, while working in counterintelligence, constantly reminded his staff that the U.S. didn’t defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War because the American government was better at keeping secrets. Rather, he said the U.S. surpassed the Soviets because officials were better at sharing information in the marketplace, with free markets, pricing and policymaking.

“We want to reserve classification for things that is really sensitive and needs to be protected, but otherwise, it’s in the country’s best interest to get that information out,” Mellon said.

“I think they’re making a mistake in this case.”