The Pentagon's First UFO Chief Says He Saw Non-Human Beings. Here's the Full Case File.

He didn't say it on a podcast, and he didn't say it anonymously. He said it on Fox News, to Bret Baier, under his own name.

Jay Stratton, the man the Pentagon once put in charge of its UFO task force, told Special Report that he has seen non-human beings and non-human craft. Baier asked him to confirm the beings part. He did.

The next day, October 13, 2026, his memoir hit shelves. Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life is published by William Morrow, a HarperCollins imprint. And it says things the official record has spent years denying.

So somebody is wrong. Let's open the file.

Who Jay Stratton is

Stratton is not a guy with a ring light. According to NewsNation, he served in government for more than 32 years, including eight deployments and time in intelligence, reaching the civilian equivalent of a two-star general. Fox News has described him as a former Defense Intelligence Agency official. IBTimes reports he retired in 2022.

His biggest credential is the job. Reporting by IBTimes and Fox News identifies him as the first director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

That task force is a matter of public record. The Defense Department announced it on August 14, 2020, saying Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist had approved it on August 4. Its mission, in the Pentagon's words: "to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security."

It was the forerunner of today's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO. In other words, when the government finally decided it needed someone to look at this seriously, it picked him.

And this isn't the first time he's said it. In the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure, Stratton told the camera, "I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings," according to Entertainment Weekly. Twice, a year apart, on the record.

"I have seen non-human beings and non-human craft with my own eyes."

The video that started it

Everything in the next three sections is Stratton's account. None of it has been independently verified. That's exactly why it deserves a hard look.

In autumn 2005, Stratton says, a colleague showed him footage reportedly recorded near a U.S. nuclear missile silo, according to IBTimes. He describes a triangular object with colored lights that accelerated rapidly and disappeared.

The publisher's own description of the book says a video of an advanced aircraft over a nuclear weapons site is what pulled him into a national security investigation. IBTimes notes that neither the footage nor his reading of it has been independently assessed.

Nuclear sites keep turning up in this story. Remember that.

The submarine and the P-3

Then there's the submarine.

Stratton told Baier he personally saw an unexplained object during an operation involving a U.S. nuclear submarine off the East Coast, IBTimes reported. He said it appeared on the operation's first mission, and that a Navy P-3 patrol aircraft collected sensor data on it.

The book lays out the logic. "Our bait could be a nuclear submarine," Stratton writes, in an excerpt reported by Popular Mechanics and picked up by IBTimes. The idea, as IBTimes describes it, was that a reactor's nuclear signature might draw something in close enough to observe.

What's missing matters just as much. IBTimes says the date, precise location and mission name aren't established in the material it reviewed. It also notes that a proposed strategy doesn't prove an operation was carried out, and that no independently accessible record or instrument data backs up the outcome.

No date. No location. No sensor data released. Just his word, and his former rank.

Roswell, through an unnamed insider

The memoir goes furthest on Roswell.

Stratton relays an account from an insider he doesn't name about what was recovered in New Mexico in 1947. According to IBTimes, that source says a spacecraft broke in two and the military recovered wreckage and non-human bodies. The book quotes the source:

"Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact."

IBTimes reports that Stratton says he didn't witness the recovery himself, and the insider hasn't been identified. That's secondhand testimony from an anonymous source, retold in a book. Hold on to that.

"Even presidents"

His widest claim is about who's been kept out.

The book's publisher says Stratton fought gatekeepers who hid the truth from the public, Congress and even presidents, Cybernews reported. On Fox, according to Cybernews, he said he believes the sitting president is still being shielded from the truth. On Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox News summarized him as saying a classified UFO program is so secretive it has been concealed from presidents.

He even puts a number on the secret. "The people who have had this 80-year monopoly on the topic believe that the secret is so intense that the American people cannot handle it," Stratton said, according to IBTimes.

The 21 agencies

Here's a detail his supporters lean on. Stratton's representative says 21 agencies and departments reviewed the book before it was published, IBTimes reported.

That sounds like a seal of approval. It isn't. Prepublication review checks a manuscript for classified information. It doesn't certify that what's left is true, and IBTimes says plainly that a security review is not government endorsement of the book's factual claims.

What it does tell you: two dozen corners of the government read their former UFO investigator's account of non-human beings and let it go to print.

The official record

The Pentagon's answer hasn't moved.

In March 2024, AARO published Volume I of its historical record report. "AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology," it said. We broke that report down, and what its critics say it missed, in our AARO historical report analysis.

On Roswell, the Air Force concluded in 1994 that the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified balloon program designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Its 1997 follow-up, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, tied the accounts of bodies to anthropomorphic test dummies carried on high-altitude balloons and to unrelated military accidents years after 1947.

AARO's 2024 review, according to IBTimes, found no records showing the government recovered aliens or extraterrestrial material at Roswell.

So the man who ran the task force says he saw it. The office that replaced it says there's nothing to see.

Why it sounds familiar

If Stratton's story feels like a pattern, that's because it fits one.

On April 27, 2020, the Pentagon officially released three Navy videos, FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST, and called the objects in them unidentified. In June 2021, the government's first UAP assessment reviewed 144 reports and could explain exactly one, a deflating balloon.

In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch told Congress under oath that he'd been informed of a multi-decade crash-retrieval program. The Pentagon said it had found no verifiable information to back that up.

And in The Age of Disclosure, the same film that features Stratton, Marco Rubio spoke about nuclear facilities. "We've had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it's not ours," he said, according to Fox News.

Nuclear sites. Navy encounters. Insiders who say there's more. Which is exactly why Stratton's claims have to be checked, not just believed.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• Stratton was the first director of the Pentagon's UAP Task Force, which the Defense Department established in August 2020.
• On Fox News and in his October 13, 2026 memoir, he says he has seen non-human craft and beings, and describes a 2005 nuclear-site video, a submarine operation and a Roswell insider account.
• AARO said in 2024 that it found no evidence of reverse-engineering programs, and the Air Force has attributed Roswell to Project Mogul since 1994.

What we don't

• What the P-3 recorded, and whether that sensor data still exists.
• Who recorded the 2005 video, and who the Roswell insider is.
• What the 21 reviewing agencies cut from the manuscript, if anything.

Three possibilities, and what would settle it

Strip it down and there are three options.

One: he's lying. That means putting a 32-year career, and a former two-star-equivalent reputation, behind a story he knows is false.

Two: he's mistaken. He believes what he saw and what he was told, and he's wrong about what it means. Secondhand sources and unidentified objects leave plenty of room for that.

Three: he's telling the truth, and the record we've been handed is incomplete.

Here's what would separate them: the P-3 sensor data, the 2005 nuclear-site video, a named Roswell source. Anything that can be tested.

Congress has already built a home for it. The FY2024 defense bill, signed in December 2023, created a UAP records collection at the National Archives and ordered agencies to search their files. If the evidence exists, that's where it belongs. Out of the shadows, for real.

Seen something yourself? Log it on Sighted, the live community map of UAP sightings. A dated, located report is the kind of data this debate keeps running short on.

The first man the Pentagon trusted with this question now says the answer is yes. So which is it: lying, mistaken, or telling the truth? Pick one in the comments and tell us why.

Sources

• Former Pentagon UFO Chief Claims Roswell Included 'Non-Human Bodies' That Were 'Refusing Food or Contact' — IBTimes UK, 2026
• Ex-UAP Chief Claims He Saw 'Non-Human Craft With My Own Eyes' Aboard a US Nuclear Submarine — IBTimes UK, 2026
• Jay Stratton Claims Roswell's Balloon Story Was a Cover-up and UFOs Are Drawn to Nuclear Energy — IBTimes UK, 2026
• He Used a Nuclear Submarine to Lure an Alien Spacecraft—and Found Something That Defied Physics — Popular Mechanics via Yahoo News, 2026
• UFO coverup claims: ex-UAP chief says presidents kept in dark — Cybernews, 2026
• Top UFO investigator tells all on secret government projects, alien sightings — Fox News, 2026
• Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life (catalog listing) — Blackstone Library / HarperCollins, 2026
• High-ranking Pentagon insider to release UFO memoir — NewsNation, 2024
• Explosive new documentary probes '80-year global coverup' of UFO secrets — Fox News, 2025
• Marco Rubio reveals UFOs are flying over 'restricted nuclear facilities' in trailer for shocking new doc — Entertainment Weekly via AOL, 2025
• Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force — U.S. Navy / Department of Defense, 2020
• Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos — U.S. Department of Defense, 2020
• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2021
• Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency (hearing transcript) — U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2023
• Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing UFO program that Pentagon has denied — Associated Press via Anchorage Daily News, 2023
• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, 2024
• The Roswell Report — U.S. Air Force, 1994–1997
• Public Law 118-31, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 — U.S. Congress, 2023
• Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection (Record Group 615) — National Archives, 2024