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Jay Stratton

Also known as Stratton

Jay Stratton is a retired U.S. intelligence official who spent more than 16 years investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena for the government. He joined the Army in 1989 and served almost 33 years across the military and the national intelligence community, rising to the Senior Executive Service. At the Defense Intelligence Agency he was chief of air and space warfare, responsible for emerging and disruptive aerospace technologies. He describes himself as an aerospace engineer, and spent much of his career with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

He was at the centre of every modern Pentagon UAP effort. In 2009, on loan to DIA, he worked on the Reid-funded AAWSAP and, by his account, helped found it. He contacted Commander David Fravor that year to investigate the 2004 Nimitz "Tic Tac" encounter. He then worked on AATIP, the informal successor, alongside Luis Elizondo, and says the Navy's Gimbal and GoFast videos reached his desk first. After the 2017 New York Times revelations he briefed Congress and became the first director of the Navy-led UAP Task Force (2020–2021). Its work fed the Director of National Intelligence's 2021 preliminary assessment, and David Grusch served as the NRO's liaison to it. AARO credits the task force with standardising and destigmatising UAP reporting. The same AARO report says AATIP was never an official program, with no staff or budget of its own.

Stratton gave his first on-camera interview in 2022 and appeared in The Age of Disclosure (2025). His memoir Out of the Shadows (October 2026) debuted at No. 3 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list. In it, and on television, he says a "legacy program" has hidden recovered non-human craft for 80 years. He also says he has personally seen non-human craft and beings, the latter at his family home. AARO's founding director, Sean Kirkpatrick, calls the program "fictitious" and accuses Stratton of national-security violations. Knapp and Corbell report that the book confirms he is "Axelrod", the intelligence official in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon whose family experienced phenomena at home.

Sources: Out of the Shadows (publisher's biography) · Fox News Special Report, 13 Oct 2026 · WEAPONIZED (2022 interview) · Gallaudet and Fravor testimony (2024, 2023) · AARO historical report (2024) · Elizondo, Newsweek (2024)

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