Chase Brandon is a retired officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who served as the agency's first official liaison to the entertainment industry. In 2012 he said that during the 1990s he had found a box labeled "Roswell" in a restricted collection at CIA headquarters, a claim that drew wide coverage because of his long CIA career.

By his own account Brandon spent 35 years with the CIA, including 25 as a covert operations officer in the Clandestine Service working on terrorism, counterinsurgency, narcotics and weapons smuggling, followed by a decade on the director's staff. The Guardian described him in 2001 as a veteran operative whose career had been spent largely in South America before he became the agency's public relations liaison with Hollywood, a role that began in 1996. He worked with productions including the CBS series The Agency, the series Alias, the comedy Bad Company and the film The Sum of All Fears, and he withheld the agency's endorsement from Spy Game and 24. "We've always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian," he told the newspaper.

In July 2012, around the 65th anniversary of the Roswell incident, Brandon told HuffPost and Coast to Coast AM that in the mid-1990s he had been browsing the Historical Intelligence Collection at Langley when he found a box marked only with the word Roswell. He said it held "some written material and some photographs," that the object recovered in 1947 "was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet," and that he would not describe the contents further because of his secrecy obligations. At the time he was promoting The Cryptos Conundrum, his 2012 novel about a CIA cover-up of the Roswell crash.

The CIA answered with a statement that "our historians have found nothing in the Agency's holdings to corroborate Mr. Brandon's specific claims," as the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. In February 2013 the former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates told the paper that in 46 years in government he had never seen "one shred of evidence" of a UFO, remains or cadavers, while saying he had "a lot of respect" for Brandon and would not question him. Air Force reports in the 1990s attributed the Roswell debris to a balloon from the classified Project Mogul. Brandon did not retract his account.

His story resurfaced in 2026. Brandon came up in episodes of Jesse Michels's American Alchemy on Hollywood, Steven Spielberg and the CIA, and in October a long essay on r/UFOs read The Cryptos Conundrum alongside the box claim, arguing that the novel turns Roswell into a cosmology. Brandon's place in UFO history rests on the pairing of a well-documented career shaping the CIA's image in Hollywood with a Roswell account that the agency says its own historians could not confirm.