Jay Stratton

Jay Stratton is a former US government intelligence officer who spent approximately sixteen years investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena on behalf of the American national security community.²¹ According to Luis Elizondo, Stratton was instrumental in establishing the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), which was the precursor to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).¹ In early 2009, Stratton and a colleague identified by Elizondo as Rosemary Caine visited Elizondo’s office unexpectedly to recruit him to support an intelligence programme at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), requiring a senior intelligence officer to establish counterintelligence and security functions.² Stratton is credited by Elizondo with coining the term “unidentified aerial phenomena” as a replacement for “UFO”, a change he introduced to facilitate more serious institutional engagement with the subject.^8,9

Stratton conducted one of the earliest official investigations into the 2004 Tic Tac encounter, doing so before Elizondo joined the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) team.³ He produced a detailed AAWSAP/AATIP report on the incident,⁴ and it was not until 2009 that he contacted David Fravor to formally gather testimony about what Fravor’s crew had observed.⁶ Fravor subsequently described Stratton as part of the programme led by Luis Elizondo out of the Department of Defense (DoD), and referred to Stratton’s investigation report as the “Unofficial Official Report”.⁵ Elizondo characterised Stratton as a shrewd investigator with a talent for eliciting testimony from fellow Navy members about UAP incidents. Together, Stratton and Elizondo moved the remnants of AATIP from the DIA into Elizondo’s portfolio within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,¹⁰ and Stratton drafted the programme’s appropriations language under an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) framing to obscure its UAP focus.¹¹ He also secured an additional USD 10 million in funding for AATIP from Senator Harry Reid.¹²

In 2015, Stratton received a string of emails from senior leaders at the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detailing UAP incursions involving the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.¹³ In response, he spent weeks developing an operation plan — OPLAN Interloper — designed as a “honey pot” operation intended to be irresistible to the UAP by deploying nuclear-powered assets in a concentrated area of the Atlantic.¹⁴ The plan incorporated dates, times, locations, call signs, and radar data from all twenty-two recorded UAP encounters with the Roosevelt carrier strike group. Stratton and Elizondo submitted OPLAN Interloper to the Joint Chiefs of Staff via an Alternate Compensatory Control Measures (ACCM) process, bypassing the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)), which they regarded as compromised.¹⁵ Before the end of 2016, the Joint Chiefs rejected the ACCM designation for the plan.¹⁶

Following the rejection of OPLAN Interloper, Stratton and Elizondo formulated a broader disclosure strategy. They concluded, along with Christopher K. Mellon, that Congressional pressure was necessary to alter the Pentagon’s handling of UAP, and that engaging the press was the mechanism to achieve it. The two devised a plan whereby Elizondo would resign from government and go public, while Stratton would remain in post to leverage the resulting public momentum to brief officials and lead whatever successor programme to AATIP emerged.¹⁷ When the Pentagon’s public affairs office subsequently moved to tell the press that Elizondo had never been involved with AATIP, Stratton objected directly, stating that such a claim would be wrong and untrue; the Pentagon nonetheless proceeded with that narrative.¹⁸ Stratton was later tasked by Navy intelligence leadership to construct a whole-of-government interagency UAP Task Force, drawing representatives from the FBI, National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), NASA, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).¹⁹ The Secretary of Defense subsequently announced the UAP Task Force publicly and named Stratton as its first director.²⁰

Beyond his institutional roles, Stratton conducted fieldwork at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, an experience he later discussed publicly at a UAP conference in March 2023.²² He described seeing a hovering delta-shaped UAP directly above him on his first day at the ranch,²⁴ and separately reported observing a translucent entity near his trailer — an account independently corroborated, according to Stratton, by his colleague Dr Travis Taylor.²³ Stratton’s family members reported a range of anomalous experiences for more than twelve years following his July 2009 visit to the ranch, including orbs, an entity described as a “dogman” in the family backyard, and unexplained footsteps in the home.²⁵ Stratton coined the term “Jay Stratton Hitchhiker Effect” to describe the phenomenon of anomalous experiences apparently following witnesses home from Skinwalker Ranch. He is identified pseudonymously as “Axelrod” in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s 2021 book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon Book.²⁶ Stratton retired from government after sixteen years of UAP investigation, which Elizondo noted was the longest such tenure of anyone he was aware of.²¹