When Jay Stratton joined the military barely out of high school, he saw himself as an infantryman. Nothing in those early days pointed anywhere but toward a rifle and a rucksack. Stratton could never have predicted that someday, beyond camo and combat boots, he would end up on the front lines of something far more bizarre and unearthly than any battlefield.
It began with a video. After he had risen in the ranks of the Defense Intelligence Agency to become chief of air and space warfare, Stratton found himself in his office in Washington, D.C., when a colleague appeared at his door and asked him to make sense of classified footage. He was suddenly watching what could have easily been a scene from a science fiction movie. Hovering near a nuclear missile silo was an unidentified flying object that appeared vaguely menacing. How it had managed to enter one of the most restricted regions of U.S. airspace is still unknown. Its eerie yellowish glow left a visible trail, carving turns through the air that no engine or airframe should allow. The craft traversed the skies in complete silence, then accelerated faster than Han Solo could ever dream of pushing the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars—and vanished.
This would be the start of a UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) hunting mission that spanned nearly two decades. Stratton went on to co-found the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapons Application Program (AAWSAP) and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), then rose to director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), where he led the first UAP investigation to reach across the entire federal government. For the final sixteen years of his military career, he chased occurrences that no earthly explanation could cover: silent craft, impossible accelerations, objects that moved through air and water with equal ease. The infamous undersea “tic tac” craft was only the most famous. Nothing in the human catalog of engineering, Stratton concluded, could account for what he was seeing.
“The plan was bold as it was straightforward,” Stratton says of luring UAPs in his new memoir, Out of the Shadows. “It was an efficient expedition and our strategy was built on our educated opinion that UAP were drawn to nuclear energy. Our bait could be a nuclear submarine. Its reactor running hot would create a huge nuclear signature, and it would suffice as a pre-selected area within US waters known for past UAP activity. The goal, exploit a decades-old pattern. Draw a UAP close enough to monitor, track, or if possible, capture or recover.”
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