Jay Stratton steps out of the shadows with craft, bodies and a ‘hidden hand’
The first director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force launched his memoir Out of the Shadows this week on Fox News, in People and on CNN. Twelve craft at Lockheed, a nuclear submarine used as bait, Roswell survivors who refused food, and a gray being at his son’s window: the claims, in his own words, and what stands behind them.
Published
‘Yes, it does’
Jay Stratton’s memoir, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, went on sale on October 13, 2026, and the retired Defense Intelligence Senior Executive who ran the Pentagon’s first UAP Task Force has been giving interviews about it, to Bret Baier on Fox News’ Special Report, to People and to Jake Tapper on CNN. Baier asked the simple question first. Are we alone? “No, Bret, we’re not. Humanity is not the only intelligent life in the universe, nor do we know the intent of the non-human intelligent life that’s here. It’s very concerning.” Does the United States government have non-human craft in its possession? “Yes, it does.” Had he seen one with his own eyes? “I have seen non-human beings and non-human craft with my own eyes.” Non-human beings too? “Yes, sir.” Where is the hardware? “Both the defense contractor community and the government have craft of non-human origin,” Stratton said. “There is an ongoing program to capture and reverse engineer this technology, and really, we’re in a secret Cold War race to do that.” China and Russia, he added, are both working on reverse engineering craft of non-human origin. The people who have held “this 80-year monopoly on the topic” believe “the secret is so intense that the American people cannot handle it.”
Sources: Special Report at 1:10Special Report at 3:36Special Report at 5:27Special Report at 5:57Special Report at 6:28Special Report at 10:16Pentagon’s UFO Hunter Reveals Himself and What He Learned, Including the Video He Can’t ForgetThe Lead with Jake Tapper, October 14, 2026: Jay Stratton on Out of the ShadowsOut of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life
The triangle over the silo
Every version of the story starts in the autumn of 2005, when Stratton was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s chief of air and space warfare and a colleague asked him to make sense of a video on a classified system. Security forces had recorded it looking up at restricted airspace near a nuclear missile silo. In People’s telling, it showed a black triangular craft with orange, white and yellow lights glowing at each corner, moving silently before accelerating faster than the eye could follow. Baier read the book’s own description: “A black triangle aircraft, no wings, no tail, no exhaust, no visible propulsion of any kind, as if the fundamental laws of physics simply didn’t apply.” “I can literally still see that video in my head,” Stratton told People. “That was the moment that changed my world.” He called it a threat: “We don’t understand it. We don’t know the intent and we don’t know where it’s from.” The video has not been released, and Jason Colavito, reviewing the book, notes that Stratton concedes the frame held nothing to show the object’s size.
Sources: Special Report at 3:50Special Report at 4:32Special Report at 5:16Pentagon’s UFO Hunter Reveals Himself and What He Learned, Including the Video He Can’t ForgetReview of ‘Out of the Shadows’ by Jay Stratton
A nuclear submarine as bait
The claim Fox put in its on-screen banner came from an operation Stratton calls Interloper. Baier read it from the book: “Our bait would be a nuclear submarine. Draw a UAP in close enough to monitor, track, and if possible capture or recover.” Stratton said he had “worked on several efforts to do this,” and that it culminated when he had access to a submarine he could put out off the East Coast, with a Navy P-3 submarine-hunting aircraft loaded with sensors overhead. “It worked,” he said. “On the very first mission a UAP appeared, and the P-3 worked to collect, and data was collected on that mission.” The book, in the Substack writer RM McLaren’s summary, is more modest: the original proposal stalled at the Joint Staff, a follow-on he calls Interloper 2.0 secured about sixteen flight hours for a P-3 with the call sign WARLOCK, and on its first sortie the pilot reported a sphere roughly six feet across at 20,000 feet, which slipped out of view while the equipment was being set up. Nothing was recovered, no date or mission designation is given, and nothing from the Navy confirms any of it. The theory behind the lure is the one Stratton has pressed longest: that the phenomenon is drawn to nuclear weapons, which, he says in The Age of Disclosure, it has “both deactivated and activated” in the United States and Russia.
Sources: Special Report at 6:46Special Report at 7:02Special Report at 7:23Special Report at 9:11Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft—and a CIA Official Blocked His Team From Getting One
Twelve craft at Lockheed and a ‘hidden hand’
The book’s most sensational passage comes secondhand. In 2009 Hal Puthoff and the physicist Eric Davis introduced Stratton to Jim Ryder, an executive at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, who, in Stratton’s telling, said Lockheed alone held twelve craft of non-human origin, some recovered with occupants, and told him, “We don’t need more money. We need more minds.” When Ryder offered to transfer a craft to the scientists of AAWSAP, the DIA program Stratton had helped build, an unnamed CIA official he calls the top gatekeeper refused: “The answer was no—flat, immediate, and final.” Stratton does not describe inspecting the craft himself; Ryder died in 2018. The structure Ryder laid out is what the book calls the Legacy Program, which Stratton spelled out on CNN as “this deeply hidden and buried program that was called the Legacy Program that has been for many years recovering and reverse engineering these craft of non-human origin”: elements of the CIA controlling it, the Air Force retrieving the hardware, contractors receiving it. On Fox he described its hand at work. Two admirals and a commander serving as their intelligence officer telephoned him, he said, after “four UAP encounters in the past week,” one an object that “phased in” over a training compound associated with Top Gun. “Jay, we’ve seen it with our own eyes.” He brought them to the Pentagon to be debriefed, “and a senior officer, someone senior to them, someone who I believe is involved in this legacy program, this historic cover-up, the hidden hand, as I call it in the book, intercepted them and convinced them that their reputations were on the line if they make this report. And they didn’t make the report.” Baier read a friend’s warning from the book: “These people don’t play games, Jay. They have done worse than threaten people to keep their secrets.” What did worse mean? “Throughout history, Bret, the secrets sometimes are so impactful to our national security that steps have been taken to remove the problem.” “And the people?” “And the people.”
Sources: Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft—and a CIA Official Blocked His Team From Getting OneReview of ‘Out of the Shadows’ by Jay StrattonThe Lead with Jake Tapper, October 14, 2026: Jay Stratton on Out of the ShadowsSpecial Report at 7:30Special Report at 8:18Special Report at 8:40Special Report at 8:55
Roswell survivors and a gray at the window
People drew out the claims that filled the aggregators for the rest of the week. The book says military contractors hold at least a dozen crashed craft in secure facilities, and, citing another insider, that the 1947 Roswell crash was real: “The crash broke into two pieces, and everything was recovered—the crash and non-human bodies. Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact. Communication was limited and often futile.” The encounters were so disturbing, the source told him, that people involved resigned, broke down or took their own lives. The claims Stratton makes in his own name are stranger and closer to home. Tapper opened by reading the book’s first scene: in 2014 Stratton goes to his son’s room and sees outside the window “what is unmistakably a non-human being staring at my son. It’s gray and has a large head with small black eyes, no noticeable nose, and a small mouth. Startled, it turns to face me. A few seconds of standoff. The light goes dark and it’s gone.” Nobody else saw it; “That’s correct,” Stratton said when Tapper asked. The intelligence he was investigating, he said, “seemed to be investigating me,” and “that followed me home.” To People he described visitations beginning in 2010 at the family’s home near Washington, glowing multicolored orbs and “shadowy figures … darker than dark” that seemed to watch his wife Michele and sons Chris and Jonny. “Once I retired, it pretty much stopped,” he said, “which is very telling.” By reviewers’ accounts the book adds a silent triangle seen in daylight at Skinwalker Ranch, a towering shimmering figure there that reminded him of the Predator, and the “hitchhikers” he says followed him home from the Utah ranch in 2009 and still bother him. “I don’t have data to back it up,” he writes, “but I know what I saw.”
Sources: Pentagon’s UFO Hunter Reveals Himself and What He Learned, Including the Video He Can’t ForgetThe Lead with Jake Tapper, October 14, 2026: Jay Stratton on Out of the ShadowsJay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft—and a CIA Official Blocked His Team From Getting OneFormer Pentagon UAP Task Force leader Jay Stratton releasing book in October
What can be checked
Baier noted that Stratton has been advising the White House since the president ordered the files released, and asked whether Trump had seen the real evidence. “No, Bret, I don’t think he’s seen it,” Stratton said. “I think he’s still being shielded from the truth.” Then the Pentagon’s findings: “The UFO office says they found no evidence of extraterrestrials. You say they are here. Somebody is wrong.” “Somebody’s wrong,” Stratton agreed. “And I think that America’s gonna pay the price if the truth doesn’t win in this situation.” And why a book rather than Capitol Hill? “I’ve briefed Congress numerous times,” he said. “I was one of the first to brief Congress on this topic in the modern era in 2007 when I briefed Senator Harry Reid.” The record is thin on his side of the argument. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s March 2024 report found no empirical evidence that the government or private companies had been reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology, described the “as many as 12 extraterrestrial spacecraft” story as a narrative circulating among AAWSAP’s alumni, and recorded that the former CIA official accused of blocking the transfer denied it in a signed memorandum; its July 2026 annual report repeated the finding. Marco Rubio, whom the book portrays as worried about a cover-up, said in August that there is none. The prepublication review that a representative says involved twenty-one agencies screens manuscripts for classified information; it does not vouch for them. Everything in the book that can be checked, from his career to the task force he ran, holds. Everything that would matter cannot be.
Sources: Special Report at 9:48Special Report at 10:02Special Report at 10:32Special Report at 10:46Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume IFiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena‘They’re Not Ours’: Marco Rubio Admits Alien Tech or Foreign Spies Could Explain Unexplained UAP SightingsPentagon’s UFO Hunter Reveals Himself and What He Learned, Including the Video He Can’t Forget
Sources & documents
WE ARE NOT ALONE? Ex-intelligence official says he’s CERTAIN alien life existsFox News · YouTube · Aired October 12, 2026 · Stratton’s own unverified claimsPentagon’s UFO Hunter Reveals Himself and What He Learned, Including the Video He Can’t ForgetJohnny Dodd · People · October 13, 2026The Lead with Jake Tapper, October 14, 2026: Jay Stratton on Out of the ShadowsCNN · Transcript of the 6 p.m. hour · The segment begins at 18:47Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent LifeJay Stratton · William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins · October 13, 2026 · Product pageJay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft—and a CIA Official Blocked His Team From Getting OneRM McLaren · Substack · October 14, 2026 · A chapter-by-chapter reading of the bookReview of ‘Out of the Shadows’ by Jay StrattonJason Colavito · October 14, 2026Former Pentagon UAP Task Force leader Jay Stratton releasing book in OctoberGeorge Knapp and John Forest · KLAS 8 News Now · September 3, 2026Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume IAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · Released March 8, 2024 · PDFFiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous PhenomenaAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · Released July 2026 · PDF‘They’re Not Ours’: Marco Rubio Admits Alien Tech or Foreign Spies Could Explain Unexplained UAP SightingsIBTimes UK · August 12, 2026 · On Rubio’s remarks to The Katie Miller PodcastSpotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
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