Jay Stratton is a former US intelligence officer who spent 32 years across various branches of the US military, reaching the Senior Executive Service and working with the Office of Naval Intelligence, for which he was highly decorated.1 He retired from government service after sixteen years investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) for the US government.2 In early 2009, Stratton and a colleague identified as Rosemary Caine visited Luis Elizondo at his office to recruit him.3 The pair recruited Elizondo for his counterintelligence and security experience, for a highly classified programme run out of their office at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).4 Harold E. Puthoff had earlier suggested to Stratton that they meet with Jim Semivan at the Pentagon.5 Semivan and Stratton subsequently invited Elizondo to a dinner for the programme team held in a hotel meeting room in Roslyn, Virginia.6 Stratton helped create the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), which later became the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).7 The programme was led within the Pentagon by Elizondo.8 Stratton and Elizondo personally handpicked everyone involved in it,9 and Stratton proved skilled at getting United States Navy (USN) personnel to talk about their UAP encounters.10 While working with the AATIP team at Skinwalker Ranch, Stratton changed the official acronym describing the phenomenon from Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) to UAP, having concluded that “UFO” did not cover the phenomena he had witnessed there.1112
In 2009, Stratton contacted David Fravor to investigate the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter,13 having already investigated the incident before Elizondo joined the AAWSAP/AATIP team.14 He went on to write a detailed AAWSAP/AATIP report on the encounter.15 Elizondo said that as Stratton interviewed witnesses to the encounter, some did not want to talk, including people who had since retired into civilian life, and that even those who did speak asked him not to reveal their identities.16 Stratton also secured $10 million in new funding for AATIP from Harry Reid.17 Elizondo said Stratton later shared with him a video, filmed on a cockpit camera, showing a wedge-shaped craft flying within approximately fifteen metres of a naval aviator’s cockpit during a routine mission.18
According to Elizondo, in 2015 Stratton received a series of emails from senior leaders at Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detailing UAP incursions involving the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt.19 A senior intelligence officer at Fleet Forces Command subsequently reached out to Stratton, who worked in naval intelligence on the Navy staff at the Pentagon, to open a larger investigation into the incidents.20 Based on twenty-two UAP incidents involving the USS Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, Stratton created an operation plan codenamed OPLAN Interloper,21 a document that included dates, times, locations, call signs and ship names, together with radar data substantiating pilot and aircrew eyewitness testimony.22 Stratton and Elizondo submitted the plan through an Alternative Compensatory Control Measure (Alternative Compensatory Control Measures (ACCM)) process directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bypassing the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,23 though before the end of 2016 the Joint Staff rejected assigning it an ACCM designation.24 The two men spent considerable time coordinating the plan.25
He and Elizondo made plans at work to bring about disclosure of UAP,26 with Stratton intending to remain in government and use the momentum generated by Elizondo’s later public disclosures to advance the effort from within.27 Together with Christopher K. Mellon, the two concluded that the only way to change how the Pentagon handled UAP was to get the United States Congress to force change,28 and developed a multiyear strategy to educate Congress on the subject,29 focusing their message on risks to flight safety and the historic lack of transparency from the executive branch dating back to the 1940s.30 Once Elizondo’s public disclosures drew congressional attention, Stratton began receiving briefing requests from members of Congress who had previously been unaware of the facts about UAP because of stigma and bureaucracy,31 and the three men funnelled credible military and intelligence figures with knowledge of UAP to Congress.32 Stratton also received requests for briefings from members of the White House National Security Council, who went on to brief President Donald Trump at some level on UAP.33 Before he retired, Stratton and Elizondo worked with Congress to propose legislation creating a permanent UAP programme funded directly by Congress, so that its funding could not be blocked or misused,34 and the three called their advocacy effort the Five Pillars of Engagement.35 Stratton and Elizondo also drew on a network of contacts across the US military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Energy.36
Leadership in Navy intelligence tasked Stratton with quietly building a whole-of-government interagency UAP task force with greater authority than AATIP had ever had,37 and he handpicked its members and representatives from across the intelligence community and civilian agencies, including the FBI.38 The task force he built went on to become the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).39 At the time, the United States Space Force (USSF) did not yet have its own UAP programme;40 Elizondo began working as a contractor for the USSF to help build its UAP effort and support Stratton’s task force.41 After Stratton had spent a couple of years quietly building it, the United States Secretary of Defense announced the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force and named Stratton as its first director.42 From the moment the task force became official, the Legacy Program began quietly pushing back on Stratton and the task force, creating bureaucratic hurdles.43 Puthoff later said that Stratton, while leading the task force, encountered gatekeepers who controlled access to the Legacy Program,44 and that Stratton involved around sixteen different defence contractors and intelligence units in an effort to move UAP investigation forward beyond it, though the effort was not successful.45
In March 2023, by then described as the former head of the Pentagon’s UAP investigations team, Stratton spoke at a UAP conference about his experiences at Skinwalker Ranch.46 He had first visited the ranch in July 2009.47 He has described witnessing a translucent, humanoid entity evocative of the creature in the film Predator near his trailer at the ranch, with a rectangular shape on its chest.48 According to In Plain Sight (2021), the sighting was independently corroborated by his colleague Travis Taylor.49 Stratton has also described seeing a hovering, delta-shaped UAP directly above him on his first day at the ranch.50 He coined the term the “hitchhiker effect” to describe anomalous activity at the ranch that followed people home and harassed their loved ones after they left the property.51 According to In Plain Sight (2021), which cites Kelleher and Knapp’s Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, disturbing incidents consistent with the hitchhiker effect occurred at Stratton’s family home in Virginia.52 His son reportedly woke on one occasion with multiple red contusions on his stomach and chest, as if he had been repeatedly and forcibly struck,53 and described being assaulted by blue and red orbs in his bedroom and seeing black, shadowy humanoid figures that screamed telepathically inside his head.54 The same account states that for more than twelve years following Stratton’s 2009 visit, his wife and teenage children all witnessed orbs and a shadowlike “dogman” entity in the family’s garden, as well as unexplained footsteps on the stairs of their home.55 Stratton has since signed a deal to publish a book.56