For more than three decades inside the United States intelligence community, Jay Stratton worked the kind of problems that rarely reach public view. He is best known for a single, high-stakes portfolio that did.
Stratton created, organized, and directed the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and, before that, helped carry the torch from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s AAWSAP effort into what became AATIP and then UAPTF.
Since retiring as a Defense Intelligence Senior Executive from the Office of Naval Intelligence in 2021 and stepping into industry, he has begun to speak publicly about what he did and why he thinks the subject matters.
Those on-the-record appearances, paired with reliable trade press and official documents, give enough to assemble a careful portrait of a government program builder who insists that the UAP problem is real, consequential, and urgent. (Apple Podcasts)
Early career and the path to UAP
Public biographies are sparse by design for senior intelligence officials, but there is a clear outline. Stratton spent more than 32 years in progressively responsible roles across the national intelligence community, culminating as a Defense Intelligence Senior Executive at the Office of Naval Intelligence.
In May 2022, Radiance Technologies announced it had hired him after his retirement to serve on the chief executive’s strategy team as a subject matter expert for intelligence strategy. The company highlighted his career-long experience across the Department of Defense and intelligence community. (PR Newswire)
What makes Stratton distinctive inside the UAP timeline is his continuity across the post-2000 government efforts. In his first extended public interview, he explained that he cut his teeth on the early “Tic Tac” case work and then stayed with the mission as it migrated through AAWSAP, into the AATIP lane, and finally into the UAP Task Force that he organized and directed.
The show notes for that interview fix the sequence in plain language and note that after leaving government he joined Radiance. (Apple Podcasts)
Building programs rather than chasing lights
From AAWSAP to AATIP to UAPTF
Stratton’s self-description is not of a lone investigator but of a manager who builds teams and processes.
According to the public summary of his 2023 interview, after the DIA’s AAWSAP effort wound down he worked with colleagues associated with AATIP on a narrower, military encounter focused line of effort.
When Congress and the Navy formalized UAPTF in 2020, he moved the center of gravity from ad hoc briefings to a chartered task force.
During this period he oversaw creation of a large, classified briefing deck that was delivered to senior Pentagon officials, across intelligence agencies, and to members of Congress. The deck was designed to standardize what was known, what was not, and what required action. (Apple Podcasts)
The strategic thrust of that work became visible in 2024 when the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published its Historical Record Report. The AARO history acknowledged successive government efforts since 1945 while concluding that, on the official record, there is no verified evidence that the U.S. government possesses nonhuman technology.
That conclusion sits in tension with the picture painted by Stratton’s task-force era briefings and later public remarks, a contrast discussed below. (AARO)
Rebranding the problem and normalizing the conversation
One of Stratton’s quieter contributions was linguistic.
The Weaponized team’s episode summary credits him with leading the shift from the older term to the now standard “UAP” label across the Department of Defense. That terminology change preceded legislation, altered reporting culture inside the services, and made it easier for aviators to file incident reports without stigma. It is a small-sounding change that multiplied downstream effects. (Apple Podcasts)
Publications and public-facing work
Stratton’s professional life was classified for most of his career, so he does not have a conventional publications list.
His “publications” in the historical sense are the programs he assembled, the briefings he delivered, and now a mix of long-form interviews and an announced memoir.
- Memoir under contract. In September 2024 The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline reported that Stratton had sold a memoir to HarperCollins’ William Morrow, with Farah Films acquiring screen rights. The coverage framed the book as an insider account of the modern government UAP inquiry. (The Hollywood Reporter)
- Film appearance. In March 2025 Dan Farah’s documentary The Age of Disclosure premiered at SXSW. Reporting by the Washington Post and Guardian describes Stratton as a central voice in the film, quoting him on both the stakes of the technology race and his own personal observations. The Post quotes him stating, “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” and frames his argument that a Manhattan Project style race is underway to understand the underlying physics. Whether one accepts the film’s claims or not, Stratton’s presence is a primary source that clarifies his views. (The Washington Post)
- Podcast interviews. Stratton’s first on-camera conversation on the topic was recorded February 7, 2023 on WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp.
The episode was later resurfaced in 2025 as a “flashback.” Across the original and the reprise, the hosts emphasize that he investigated the Navy’s 2004 Tic Tac incident, worked across AAWSAP, AATIP, and UAPTF, and built a large internal briefing used to educate senior leaders and lawmakers. (Apple Podcasts)
The claims Stratton has put on the record
UAP are real, strategically important, and potentially transformative
At SXSW he argues that the national security stakes are analogous to the earliest nuclear era. “The first country that cracks this technology will be the leader for years to come,” he says in the film, underscoring why a government task force was necessary and why interagency awareness matters. He frames the issue as an engineering challenge with geopolitical consequences rather than a curiosity. (The Washington Post)
Personal observation claims
In the same film Stratton is quoted saying he has personally seen nonhuman craft and beings. That is an extraordinary claim stated plainly by a named former official. The statement has polarized observers, which the Washington Post and Guardian both note, but it anchors his later interviews and appearances to a clear personal position rather than secondhand accounts. (The Washington Post)
Whole-of-government destigmatization and capacity building
In late 2024 Stratton publicized that the UAP Task Force had received a National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation presented under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence, crediting the task force with building coalitions, raising awareness, and applying analytic rigor.
While this was not announced on a .gov site, outlets reproduced the text of the certificate and noted Stratton’s own post about the award; an ODNI FOIA production log also references requests related to that citation.
The episode helps explain why Stratton speaks often about stigma reduction and process. (WHITLEY STRIEBER’S UNKNOWN COUNTRY)
Core contributions
Architect of the modern UAP program landscape. Few individuals were present at all three pivot points of the modern era.
Stratton appears at the intersection of AAWSAP’s broad data gathering, the AATIP period’s operational focus, and the UAPTF’s formal charter. This continuous line allowed him to move institutional memory and lessons learned from one framework to the next. (Apple Podcasts)
Standardizing the brief. His team’s classified briefing deck, described in his 2023 interview, was important not just as content but as a governance tool. It taught non-specialists what to look for, how to interpret sensor artifacts, and what the unresolved set looked like. That, in turn, enabled the later legislative mandate to stand up a permanent office. (Apple Podcasts)
Public normalization without sensationalism. Stratton’s choice to do a single, comprehensive interview in 2023, then appear in a mainstream documentary and a major scientific coalition event, suggests a strategy of limited but high-value engagement.
The WEAPONIZED interview, combined with conference appearances, functions as a public set of “program manager’s notes” for a topic long trapped in rumor. (Apple Podcasts)
Controversies and points of dispute
The official counter narrative. AARO’s Historical Record Report argues that across the historical data there is no verified evidence of nonhuman technology in U.S. government possession, and it expresses skepticism about long-running crash retrieval stories. That directly conflicts with the spirit of the Age of Disclosure film and with the program-builder’s emphasis on unresolved high-performance observables.
The existence of this sharp contrast matters for readers trying to weigh claims. It is not just a culture clash; it is a disagreement about what the data and access actually show. (AARO)
Leadership culture and belief. When Science profiled the Pentagon’s UAP study in 2022 it emphasized that some of the key figures had a track record of interest in what critics call the supernatural, and it framed this as problematic.
Part of the criticism has been that the modern programs were too open to high strangeness and that this contaminated analysis of aerospace events. Stratton’s answer, when pressed elsewhere, has been to bring more data and more discipline, not to narrow the aperture. (Science)
Optics after the “pyramids” bokeh case. In 2021 video of apparent triangular lights recorded through night-vision devices circulated widely. A UAPTF brief had flagged the clip, which some took to imply an endorsement of extraordinary performance.
AARO’s subsequent analysis placed similar cases into mundane categories such as birds and balloons, or optical artifacts.
Stratton’s view is that the hard problem survives such debunking. The contrast illustrates how messaging swings when case resolution updates arrive, and why standardized briefings were needed in the first place. (AARO)
The “Axelrod” question and hitchhiker lore. Multiple commentators and reporters have linked Stratton to the pseudonymous “Jonathan Axelrod” in the 2021 book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, which describes a “hitchhiker” effect following government personnel home after fieldwork.
Some outlets have stated this identification as a matter of public record, and it is often repeated in coverage of Stratton’s career. While Stratton has not centered that narrative in his on-camera interviews, the linkage has become part of the debate over whether high strangeness belongs in official UAP study. Readers should note what is clearly on the record and what is inferred. (Washington Spectator)
A review of recent public speaking and podcast appearances
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp, Episode 3: “The Pentagon’s Top UAP Hunter,” February 7, 2023
This is Stratton’s foundational public statement and remains the best single source on his program-management perspective. Key takeaways:
- Continuity across programs. He delineates his role across AAWSAP, the AATIP lane, and UAPTF, and explains why the latter needed a broad charter that nested within the Navy while coordinating widely. The episode summary confirms that he oversaw the first in-depth look at the Tic Tac case and built an expansive classified briefing for senior audiences. (Apple Podcasts)
- Normalization of UAP reporting. He emphasizes destigmatizing reporting and creating repeatable processes. This theme recurs in later appearances and helps explain the 2024 recognition of the task force’s community-building work. (Apple Podcasts)
Assessment: The episode is program history rather than anecdote-driven storytelling. Its value lies in institutional detail and in the unambiguous record that a named senior official designed and led the task force the press had described only in fragments.
AlienCon Pasadena, March 4–5, 2023 (panels with Travis Taylor; moderated sessions with George Knapp)
AlienCon was a public-facing conference, but it yielded one of Stratton’s first stage appearances with colleagues from both television and government.
The event program and multiple media previews list Stratton among featured contributors, with a History Channel block that included The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch personnel. Contemporary reporting notes a two-person panel with Taylor that provided an “inside baseball” perspective on UAPTF investigations and processes. (Pasadena Now)
Assessment: For students of the policy process, AlienCon shows the beginning of Stratton’s bridge from classified program management to public education. It also previews his later willingness to sit with diverse audiences and explain, within the limits of nondisclosure and classification, what the government actually did.
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies Conference, Huntsville, June 6–8, 2025 (keynote)
By 2025, Stratton’s role as a public explainer extended to scientific and technical audiences.
The SCU conference site and associated announcements name him as keynote speaker, emphasizing his experience as UAPTF’s architect and director. Social and professional posts from the event add detail about his focus on supporting people directly affected by UAP encounters and on building humane processes for witness engagement. (The SCU)
Assessment: The SCU keynote marks a shift from introductory interview to domain leadership talk. It is the venue where program design, analytic tradecraft, and human effects policy intersect in front of a mixed audience of scientists, engineers, and former officials.
The Age of Disclosure, SXSW world premiere, March 9, 2025
The Washington Post and the Guardian both covered the film’s premiere and the post-screening Q&A. They highlight Stratton’s blunt framing of the stakes and quote his most controversial assertion about direct observation of nonhuman craft and beings.
Supporters call the documentary historic for the sheer number of named officials who went on the record. Critics complain that the film does not present hard proof and argue that the claims are inherently untestable in public.
Both reactions matter for understanding Stratton’s current posture. He is no longer just the program-builder. He is now one of the handful of senior, named former officials who has put a very strong personal claim on the record. (The Washington Post)
How Stratton’s record sits alongside the official 2024 AARO history
AARO’s Historical Record Report volume one is careful, archival, and skeptical.
It concludes that many cases can be explained with better data and that there is no verified evidence for legacy crash retrieval programs hidden from oversight.
Stratton’s program narrative and later film appearance, by contrast, imply that the unresolved set includes performance and provenance questions profound enough to justify a standing interagency effort.
AARO has also begun publishing case resolutions and imagery that place many incidents into conventional categories such as balloons and birds, showing how rigorous analysis winnows the list.
The two views can be seen as complementary if one believes a stubborn remainder persists. They are irreconcilable if one believes all cases will succumb to ordinary explanations. That is the analytic line Stratton has drawn by continuing to speak. (AARO)
Present affiliations and advocacy
After leaving government, Stratton joined Radiance Technologies in Huntsville, which has recruited other UAP-literate scientists and former officials.
The hire announcement is plain about his seniority and the company’s interest in advanced sensing and aerospace problem sets.
He has also used podium time to endorse stigma-free support for witnesses and to connect the scientific community with government needs, themes evident in SCU conference materials and post-event summaries. (PR Newswire)
What this biography can and cannot assert
The public record is unusually strong on certain elements of Stratton’s career.
His roles across AAWSAP, the AATIP lane, and UAPTF are now in multiple mainstream summaries. His Radiance role is documented by a corporate release. His presence and statements in a major 2025 documentary are well covered by national press. His keynote at SCU is announced in conference materials. These are stable facts.
There are also contested areas that readers should treat with analytic distance.
The identification of Stratton with the pseudonym “Jonathan Axelrod” in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon is reported by several outlets and widely repeated in commentary, yet he has not made that narrative central in his own interviews.
The 2024 AARO report stands as the official counterpoint to the film’s strongest claims. Those who follow this subject should read both, note what is demonstrably documented and what rests on access to classified material, and then make their own assessment about where the weight of evidence lies. (Washington Spectator)
Selected timeline
- Pre-2020: Senior roles across the intelligence community that positioned Stratton to work the UAP issue in the DIA’s AAWSAP era, then within the AATIP lane. According to his 2023 interview summary, he investigated the 2004 Tic Tac encounter and developed early analytic frameworks. (Apple Podcasts)
- 2020–2021: Creates, organizes, and directs the UAP Task Force under Navy sponsorship while building a comprehensive classified briefing for senior leaders and lawmakers. (Apple Podcasts)
- 2021: Leaves government service. (Apple Podcasts)
- May 2022: Hired by Radiance Technologies as an intelligence strategy subject matter expert after retiring as a Defense Intelligence Senior Executive at ONI. (PR Newswire)
- February–March 2023: First on-camera interview on WEAPONIZED; public stage appearances at AlienCon in Pasadena with Travis Taylor, moderated by George Knapp. (Apple Podcasts)
- September 2024: Memoir deal announced by Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. (The Hollywood Reporter)
- December 2024: Publicizes the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation presented to the UAPTF, emphasizing coalition building and stigma reduction. Third-party coverage reproduces the citation text; ODNI FOIA logs reflect public interest in the award. (WHITLEY STRIEBER’S UNKNOWN COUNTRY)
- March 2025: Featured voice in The Age of Disclosure at SXSW; national outlets quote his strongest personal claims. (The Washington Post)
- June 2025: Keynote speaker, Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies annual conference, Huntsville. (The SCU)
Why Stratton matters to the UAP record
Jay Stratton matters because he is the connective tissue. He carried the lessons of a wide-aperture DIA initiative into an operationally focused Pentagon lane, then engineered the transition to a formal task force that briefed Congress.
He turned scattered, often stigmatized incident reporting into a standing national-security problem set that engineers, analysts, pilots, and program managers could discuss in the same room.
He also chose to place his personal assessment on record.
Agree with him or not, the architecture he helped build is what allows the United States to talk about UAP in public with more rigor than at any time since the Cold War. (Apple Podcasts)
References
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. (2024, March). Report on the historical record of U.S. government involvement with UAP, Volume 1 [Unclassified PDF]. Department of Defense. https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/AARO_Historical_Record_Report_Vol_1_2024.pdf (AARO)
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. (n.d.). Official UAP imagery and UAP case resolution reports [Web pages]. https://www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/Official-UAP-Imagery/; https://www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/UAP-Case-Resolution-Reports/ (AARO)
Deadline. (2024, September 10). Jay Stratton UAP memoir: William Morrow & Farah Films acquire rights. https://deadline.com/2024/09/jay-stratton-uap-memoir-william-morrow-farah-films-acquire-rights-1236083182/ (Deadline)
Hollywood Reporter. (2024, September 10). Another UFO boss to break silence in major book deal. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jay-stratton-ufo-memoir-1235996607/ (The Hollywood Reporter)
Hollywood Reporter. (2025, March). ‘Age of Disclosure’ trailer and SXSW coverage [Article with images]. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/age-of-disclosure-ufo-documentary-trailer-sxsw-1236114831/
Radiance Technologies. (2022, May 12). John F. Stratton Jr. joins Radiance Technologies as SME for intel strategy [Press release]. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/john-f-stratton-jr-joins-radiance-technologies-as-sme-for-intel-strategy-301546258.html (PR Newswire)
Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. (2025). SCU Conference 2025: Program overview [Conference page and announcements]. https://www.explorescu.org/scu-conference-2025; https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scientific-coalitionfor-uap-studies-scu_2025-scu-conference-activity-7317348568132968448-OR8B; https://x.com/ExploreSCU/status/1929547402618220755 (The SCU)
The Guardian. (2025, March 12). Horton, A. ‘80 years of lies and deception’: Is this film proof of alien life on Earth? https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/12/age-of-disclosure-ufo-documentary (The Guardian)
The Hollywood Times. (2023, March 6). Milano, V. Welcome to the mothership: AlienCon Pasadena recap [Event report]. https://hollywoodtimes.net/welcome-mothership/ (Hollywood Times)
Unknown Country. (2024, December 15). The UAPTF awarded a National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Commendation from the DNI [Report quoting Stratton’s post]. https://unknowncountry.com/headline-news/the-uaptf-awarded-a-meritorious-unit-commendation-from-the-director-of-national-intelligence/ (WHITLEY STRIEBER’S UNKNOWN COUNTRY)
U.S. ODNI. (2024, November 8). FOIA production workload statistics report with case listing [PDF noting requests about a UAPTF meritorious citation]. https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/FOIA/2024/November_2024.pdf (Director of National Intelligence)
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp. (2023, February 7). The Pentagon’s top UAP hunter — Guest: John “Jay” Stratton [Podcast episode]. Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pentagons-top-ufo-hunter-guest-john-jay-stratton/id1664299388?i=1000598416511 (Apple Podcasts)
WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp. (2025, May 28). Jay Stratton — The most important government UAP investigator, ever: Flashback [Podcast episode]. Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jay-stratton-the-most-important-government-ufo/id1664299388?i=1000710219626 (Apple Podcasts)
Washington Post. (2025, March 11). Yuan, J. Aliens are real and there’s a cover-up, new documentary aims to prove. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/03/11/ufos-aliens-age-of-disclosure/ (The Washington Post)
Pasadena Now. (2023, February 21). Aliens among us: AlienCon returns to Pasadena [Preview listing Stratton among featured guests]. https://www.pasadenanow.com/weekendr/aliens-among-us-aliencon-returns-to-pasadena/ (Pasadena Now)
AARO. (2024, February). History and origin of Kona Blue [Information paper]. https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/UAP_Records_Research/AARO_DHS_Kona_Blue.pdf (AARO)
(Note: A 2022 Science magazine profile provides additional context on how critics perceived the leadership culture of Pentagon UAP work. Access to the full text may require a subscription.) (Science)
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