Former Pentagon UAP Chief Jay Stratton Says the U.S. Holds Non-Human Craft. He Has Offered No Documents.

A man his publisher calls the most senior U.S. official ever to investigate unidentified anomalous phenomena has now told his story in public, in a book and on national television.

Jay Stratton's book, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, was published on October 13, 2026, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The publisher lists the hardcover at 336 pages. In it, and in a round of interviews around its release, Stratton says that humanity is not alone, that the United States government and private defense contractors hold craft that were not made by people, and that a secret program has spent decades trying to reverse engineer them.

He also says he saw some of this himself. On Fox News, he put it in one sentence: "I have seen nonhuman beings and nonhuman craft with my own eyes."

What he has not done is show any of it. In the interviews reviewed for this story, Stratton did not release a document, a photograph, a video, a date, or a location that would let an outside party test what he says. The Pentagon office that now handles these cases concluded in 2024 that it had found no verifiable evidence that the government or industry has ever had extraterrestrial technology. And several people Stratton names or describes in the book have already pushed back.

§ 1What Stratton told Fox News

Stratton sat down with Bret Baier on Fox News Channel's Special Report for a segment that runs a little over eleven minutes. Fox News lists the video under October 13, 2026. A transcript-based account of the broadcast notes that Baier described the book as coming out the next day, which suggests the interview first aired the evening before publication, on Monday, October 12. Fox News Radio posted the conversation as an audio episode, listed as part of The Bret Baier Podcast, on October 13, describing Stratton's 16-year career, his encounters near nuclear facilities, and what Fox called the ongoing race to reverse engineer non-human technology.

On Special Report, Stratton opened with the claim at the center of the book. "Humanity is not the only intelligent life in the universe," he said. "Nor do we know the intent of the nonhuman intelligent life that's here."

He went further when Baier asked what the government actually has. Stratton said that "both the defense contractor community and the government have craft of non-human origin." He continued: "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."

Stratton also described an account he says came to him from senior officers. Two admirals and a commander, he said, watched a UAP "phase in" above a training building. When they came to the Pentagon to report it, he said, they were intercepted by a senior officer he linked to what he called a "hidden hand" and a "legacy program." He did not name the officers, the building, or the date on air.

He described a video of a triangular object over nuclear missile silos, and he said that the President is still being kept from the full picture. He offered no specifics about which President, or who is doing the shielding.

Baier pressed him on the obvious problem. He noted that the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO, had looked for exactly this kind of program and found nothing. Stratton's answer was short. "Somebody's wrong," he said.

Baier also asked why Stratton was putting this in a book rather than taking it to Congress. Stratton said he has been briefing members of Congress for years, going back to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

§ 2The submarine operation

The most specific operational claim in the interviews involves a nuclear submarine and a Navy patrol plane.

On Special Report, Baier read a passage 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." A slightly longer excerpt published by Popular Mechanics on October 20 gives the reasoning. In that version, Stratton writes that the strategy "was built on our educated opinion that UAP were drawn to nuclear energy," and that the submarine's "reactor running hot would create a huge nuclear signature" in "a pre-selected area within US waters known for past UAP activity."

Stratton told Baier how he says it actually played out. "I had access to a nuclear submarine that I could put out, uh, off the East Coast," he said, "and I had, uh, a P-3," which he described as a Navy submarine-hunting aircraft carrying "a lot of different equipment." Then he said: "And it worked." On "their very first mission," he said, "a UAP appeared," and "data was collected on that mission."

That is the whole public account. Stratton did not say when the operation took place, which submarine was used, which squadron flew the P-3, where off the East Coast it happened, or what the collected data showed. None of that data has been released. The Navy has not publicly confirmed that any such operation took place, and no Navy or Pentagon statement on the claim was found for this story.

There is an earlier, related account on the record. In his 2024 memoir Imminent, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo described a proposal, which he attributed to Stratton, code-named "Interloper." According to a summary of the book published by Unknown Country in September 2024, that plan would have gathered a carrier strike group and other nuclear-powered vessels in one area to lure UAP, and Elizondo wrote that it was never approved. Stratton's new account describes a smaller operation built around one submarine and one aircraft, and he says it was carried out. It is not clear from the public record whether the two accounts describe the same effort at different stages or two separate efforts.

Some headlines have described Stratton as seeing craft "aboard" a submarine. That is not what he said in the Fox interview. He described a submarine used as bait and an aircraft collecting data.

§ 3What the book claims

Out of the Shadows goes well beyond the submarine. The publisher's own description says it reveals an 80-year coverup, a crash retrieval and reverse engineering program kept from the public, from Congress and from Presidents, and video of an advanced craft over a nuclear weapons site.

People magazine, which interviewed Stratton for a profile published October 13, reported that the book says defense contractors hold at least a dozen crashed craft. People also reported that the book retells the 1947 Roswell incident through an unnamed source. In the book's words, as quoted by People: "The crash broke into two pieces, and everything was recovered—the crash and non-human bodies." And: "Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact." The source is not identified, and the word "allegedly" is in the book's own text.

Stratton has said the book names three sources for what it calls the Legacy Program, the secret effort he says has held this material for decades. According to reporting by Ben Schreckinger at PARADIGM on October 15, the three are Harry Reid, who Stratton says was briefed on the program by mistake; an unnamed senior member of the special operations community; and Jim Ryder, a former head of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, who died in 2018. The book says Ryder told Stratton that Lockheed, working with the CIA, held about a dozen craft. Reid died in 2021. Neither man can be asked about it now.

The book is also personal. People reported that, starting around 2010, Stratton's family saw orbs and what he called "shadowy figures" at their home in the Washington, D.C., area, and that those experiences stopped after he retired in 2022. None of these events has been documented by anyone outside the family.

Stratton told People he shared "as much [in the book] as I legally could." His representative told the magazine that 21 government agencies and departments vetted the manuscript.

That review deserves a careful reading. Former officials who held clearances must submit books for prepublication security review. That process checks whether a manuscript reveals classified information. It does not check whether the manuscript is true. Several outlets, including UAP Times, have made the same point. Clearing the book means the government did not object to its publication. It does not mean the government agreed with it.

§ 4Who Jay Stratton is

Stratton is not a fringe figure, and that is why his claims are getting attention.

According to his publisher and to People, he is 54, grew up in an oil town in East Texas, and enlisted in the Army at 17. His HarperCollins author biography says he spent more than 32 years in national security, with eight deployments, and served in Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence before becoming the Defense Intelligence Agency's Chief of Air and Space Warfare. Deadline, reporting on his book deal in September 2024, added roles at the Defense Warning Office, the State Department, the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations and U.S. Strategic Command, and said he held a civilian rank equivalent to a two-star officer. People reported that he was working in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

His UAP work began, by his account, in the fall of 2005. People reported that a colleague showed him a classified video of a black triangle with lights near a nuclear missile silo. He spent the next 16 years on the subject.

His publisher says he co-founded the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, known as AAWSAP, and created its successor, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. AAWSAP was the program, championed by Harry Reid, that funded contractor research beginning in 2008, including studies at a Utah property now widely known as Skinwalker Ranch. Profiles of Stratton say he has described visiting the ranch and experiencing unexplained events there, including a humanoid figure and what he called a "hitchhiker effect," in which strange activity seemed to follow visitors home. Those accounts come from Stratton himself and have not been independently verified.

The best documented part of his career is the UAP Task Force. The Department of Defense announced on August 14, 2020, that Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist had approved its creation, with the Navy in the lead under the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Its mission was to detect, analyze and catalog UAP that could pose a threat to U.S. national security. The Pentagon's announcement did not name a director. His publisher, the Hollywood Reporter, People and other outlets identify Stratton as its director.

The task force fed the intelligence community's first public assessment on UAP, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021. That report looked at 144 reports from military sources and was able to explain only one, which it identified as a large, deflating balloon.

In October 2024, according to the Hollywood Reporter, the task force and Stratton were honored with the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation. The Hollywood Reporter also reported that Stratton received the DIA Director's Award. Stratton retired from government in 2022.

His name surfaced, without being spoken, at the House Oversight subcommittee hearing on UAP on July 26, 2023. The best known witness that day, former intelligence officer David Grusch, wrote in his statement to the subcommittee: "I was a member of the UAPTF from 2019-2021." He added: "In 2019, the UAPTF director tasked me to identify all Special Access Programs" related to the task force's mission. Grusch testified that he had been told of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access." Grusch's statement did not name the director. Stratton's book now makes much the same allegation in his own name.

Stratton's first big public step came in the documentary The Age of Disclosure, directed by Dan Farah, which premiered at SXSW in 2025 and was released on Prime Video on November 21, 2025. Stratton is an executive producer. In the film he says: "The things that I've seen, the clearest videos, the best evidence we have that these are non-human intelligence, remains classified. I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings." He also says UAP "have both activated and deactivated nuclear weapons in both the U.S. and Russia."

Farah Films holds the film and television rights to the book. In September 2026, the Hollywood Reporter reported that Terence Winter, a writer on The Sopranos, will adapt it as a series.

§ 5What the government has said

There is no public statement from the Pentagon or AARO responding to the book itself. No such statement was found for this story.

But the Pentagon has addressed the core claim directly. In March 2024, AARO released the first volume of its congressionally mandated historical record report, covering U.S. government work on UAP from 1945 to October 2023. Speaking to reporters, then acting AARO director Tim Phillips said: "AARO has found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity." He said the office also found "no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology."

Phillips said hidden programs described by witnesses "either do not exist or were misidentified, authentic national security programs." He said much of what AARO heard was "circular reporting," the same stories passed from person to person until they sounded like independent confirmation. AARO said it interviewed about 30 people for the report. Phillips said that when the office asked to see programs, "Nobody said, 'No.'"

People noted the same finding in its profile of Stratton, writing that in 2024 the Pentagon publicly denied a multi-decade UAP cover-up. On Fox News, Stratton's reply to that finding was simply that someone is wrong.

§ 6The pushback

The sharpest response has come from the man who led AARO when it was created. Sean Kirkpatrick was AARO's first director, from 2022 to the end of 2023. According to PARADIGM, the book alleges that Kirkpatrick "was compromised and controlled by the Legacy Program."

Kirkpatrick rejected that flatly. "That's the most absurd thing I've heard today," he told PARADIGM. "I'm sure Jay offers no evidence of this allegation." He also said: "There is no legacy program." Kirkpatrick went on to suggest that Stratton may have violated national security law, without saying how. That is an accusation, and like Stratton's, it has not been backed with public evidence.

Stratton's account of Harry Reid has also met resistance from people who worked for Reid. Susan McCue, Reid's chief of staff from 1999 to 2006, told PARADIGM: "I've heard that a few times but am not able to confirm." Kirk McConnell, a former Senate staffer, told PARADIGM: "I do not recall Jay ever sharing this information with staff from the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees." An unnamed Senate investigator quoted by PARADIGM described the feuding among former UAP officials this way: "They all hate each other." The investigator added: "I have not seen any evidence."

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who runs the Galileo Project, responded on October 13, the day the book came out. Loeb wrote that he met Stratton at a conference in Utah earlier this year and invited him to join a UAP science advisory council. He said Stratton did not respond, even after retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet repeated the invitation. "While his resume is undeniable," Loeb wrote, "the claims Jay makes are not corroborated by publicly verifiable data." His essay's title made his request plain: digital data or material evidence, please.

Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, made the same argument about Stratton's statements in The Age of Disclosure in November 2025. Responding to Stratton's claim that he saw non-human craft and beings, Shermer asked whether he could see the evidence with his own eyes, answered no, and concluded, "Then I remain skeptical."

One critique attributed to a well-known skeptic should be set aside. Some coverage has claimed that Mick West, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2024, described Stratton as an "experiencer." The column in question cites a different person and does not name Stratton.

§ 7What is confirmed and what is not

Here is where things stand.

It is confirmed that Out of the Shadows was published on October 13, 2026, by William Morrow. It is confirmed that Stratton appeared on Fox News' Special Report and on Fox News Radio around the book's release, and that he said on air that he has seen non-human beings and craft, that the government and contractors hold non-human craft, and that a nuclear submarine was used as UAP bait with a Navy P-3 collecting data. It is confirmed that the Pentagon created the UAP Task Force in August 2020, and multiple outlets and his publisher identify Stratton as its director. It is confirmed that AARO reported in March 2024 that it found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology in government or industry hands. And it is confirmed that Sean Kirkpatrick, Avi Loeb and others have publicly rejected or questioned his claims.

It is not confirmed that the United States or any contractor holds non-human craft or bodies. It is not confirmed that the submarine operation took place as described, or that a UAP appeared, or what any collected data showed. The admirals' sighting, the officer Stratton calls a "hidden hand," the Legacy Program, the Roswell bodies, Jim Ryder's alleged statement about Lockheed, Harry Reid's alleged briefing, and the events at Stratton's home are all unconfirmed. Each rests on Stratton's word or on sources he does not name, and some of them rest on people who have since died.

The fact that 21 agencies cleared the book for publication does not confirm any of it. That review was about secrets, not accuracy.

§ 8What comes next

Stratton has kept talking. He appeared on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper on October 14, the day after publication, and has given several podcast and radio interviews since.

He also says he is still working on disclosure from the outside. The Hollywood Reporter reported in June that Stratton says he works with the White House, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of War on the issue. Those offices have not publicly described any such arrangement.

And he has issued a warning. Stratton told People that the country risks "a strategic surprise on the level of Pearl Harbor" if it does not take the subject seriously. "We're not the only intelligent life in the universe," he said.

For now, the question for Stratton is the one Baier asked, the one Kirkpatrick asked, and the one Loeb asked. If the evidence exists, where is it? Stratton says the best of it remains classified. Until some of it is released, by him, by Congress, or by the Pentagon, his account stands as the testimony of a senior former official, and nothing more than that.