Jay Stratton

Biography

A career intelligence officer who led the UAP Task Force, the Pentagon's official group (August 2020 to November 2021) that produced the basis for the 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment. He is cited by David Grusch as a credible insider on the handling of the topic, and per several accounts was involved in lines of inquiry into materials and retrievals. After leaving government he moved to the private sector. He provides the formal institutional link between the Navy cases and the whistleblower cycle. In October 2026 he published his memoir, Out of the Shadows (William Morrow, October 13), reviewed by 21 agencies before release. According to the publisher's description, his inquiry began when he was shown video of an advanced aerospace vehicle over a sensitive nuclear weapon site, and what he learned at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) about UAP incursions over nuclear weapon sites led him to co-found AAWSAP, and that there he uncovered a deeply hidden UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program that has been covering up the existence of non-human intelligent life for eighty years. We have found no published copy or independent analysis of that video. AARO's historical report (Volume I, 2024) describes AAWSAP as a program DIA set up in 2009, with funding pushed by Senator Harry Reid, to assess foreign aerospace threats and future aerospace technologies; investigating UFOs was not in the contract's statement of work, although the contractor did so with the support of the DIA program manager, and AARO found no evidence of reverse-engineering programs. In the memoir he relates that a source assured him wreckage and non-human bodies were recovered at Roswell (1947), and in the Fox News interview with Bret Baier that accompanied the book he took a step Grusch never took: he claimed to be a direct witness ('I have seen non-human beings and non-human craft with my own eyes'). He also said that both defense contractors and the government hold craft of non-human origin, and described a nuclear submarine parked to collect data on a UAP and a triangular object over a nuclear missile silo. He gave no date or place for what he saw, produced no documents or images to support it, and no one in government confirmed or denied it.