The Pentagon’s Highest Ranking UFO Hunter Steps Out Of The Shadows To Highlight His Work On The UFO Topic
Written by Christopher Sharp - 7 February 2023
The creator and former Director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), Jay Stratton, has given his first-ever public interview with journalists George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, featured in episode three of the WEAPONIZED podcast.
Stratton is the only person from the U.S. federal government to have worked on all of the modern Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) programs and is the most senior figure directly involved to have spoken out, having held a rank comparable to a two-star Admiral.
Speaking to Knapp on his approach to the UAPTF, Stratton spoke about the importance of trust:
“We’re already 70 years behind the power curve for trust, right? Because everybody says the government's lying to us and that the whole Blue Book thing and the whole Roswell thing killed trust.”
Regarding his investigation approach, Stratton later added:
“I kept an open mind, a skeptic mind, whatever you want to call it, looking for something that can answer this in all the means that I had to chase that.
“But there were definitely some times where we really couldn't close the loop. And we realized that something needed to be done about it.”
Stratton’s story, which led to the eventual formation of the UAPTF, started in 2017.
Following his involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), Stratton told Knapp that he had no intention of returning to the UAP topic again.
That was until the New York Times broke its story about the Pentagon’s secretive UAP investigation following Lue Elizondo's resignation from the DoD.
After the New York Times broke the story which included accounts from the USS Nimitz TicTac UAP incident from 2004, Congress’s interest was sparked and Stratton was asked by his boss at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) to tackle the topic and lead engagement efforts with Congressional committees.
An entity which would later become the UAPTF was subsequently formed by Stratton in 2018 - two years before the Department of Defense (DoD) formally established it in August 2020.
Jay Stratton was seen as the best person to work on the topic by ONI due to his previous experiences with other UAP programs and his background in identifying the capabilities of other nations’ military systems and validating potential threats.
In January 2021, when that year’s U.S. National Defense Authorization Act became law, the UAPTF was given the daunting task of creating a report for Congress in six months.
With a monumental effort needed with few resources available, the Task Force became further handicapped when Stratton was reassigned to other duties. That left the job of creating the report to two other members of the UAPTF, despite them both having other full-time jobs.
Some have speculated that Stratton’s reassignment was an attempt to sabotage the work and pending report. However, the two remaining members were committed to transparency with the American public on the UAP topic. They pulled together a massive briefing presentation Stratton had created and used it as the basis for the report eventually delivered to Congress.
Providing some context on Stratton’s importance to the UAP topic up to this day, George Knapp told Liberation Times:
"Jay Stratton was the U.S. government's top UFO hunter.
“He conducted the first in-depth investigation of the Tic Tac case, and is the only person in the entire government to work on all of the major UFO probes, including the DIA's ambitious program (AAWSAP), its successor (AATIP), and then the UAP Task Force which he created, organized, and directed before it was formally authorized by Congress.
“The classified briefing he wrote, narrated, and presented to key audiences is a primary reason why the newest program AARO was created.
“And unlike many of his former colleagues at DoD, Stratton believes the public has a right to know what's going on rather than the obfuscation, stonewalling, misleading statements, and strategic leaks to debunkers, all of which continue to muddy the UAP waters."
Journalist, George Knapp
Liberation Times has confirmed with Jeremy Corbell that some of his photographic and video releases were also contained within the audio and visual report generated by Stratton and UAPTF, including the ‘Mosul Orb’. However, Corbell was keen to stress that none of the materials or information ever provided to him originated from Stratton or UAPTF in any way.
Jeremy Corbell, commenting to Liberation Times spoke about the significance of Stratton’s first public outing following the formation of the new UAP office, known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO:
“The importance of somebody like Jay Stratton coming forward for the first time - in both name and face - is that it’s a key milestone for the UAP topic and our U.S. Government earning back the trust of the American people who have been lied to for generations about the nature of the UFO reality. Stratton’s decision to come forward will assuredly inspire and motivate, not only our service members but our government representatives who have been lied to and intentionally misled by factions within our own intelligence agencies and government.
“Those who are currently apprehensive due to the destructive stigma surrounding the UAP reality - who hold valid fear of illegal reprisal and coercion from authority - will be emboldened to come forward with the information that they have on the UFO coverup.
“Most importantly, Jay Stratton coming forward should directly inspire and motivate action by DoD’s AARO to follow in the footprints formed by the steps and in the direction created and envisioned by Jay Stratton.
“Full and total transparency on the UAP topic by the United States government to the American people - who they are elected to represent. Nothing less will be accepted by the American public.”
Journalist, Jeremy Corbell
Later in his interview with Knapp, Stratton commented on the need to effectively and accurately communicate efforts led by the UAPTF:
“[We] wanted the task force to have its own spokesperson so that we're briefing as much as we can of what we're dealing with. But you get this whole machine.
“And no matter how hard you try, email is not the best communication method, right? And hardly anybody picks up the phone these days. So what would happen to me is I would see a response from the DoD spokesperson, and I would say, oh my gosh, like why did we say that, right?
“And you come back and you try to clean up but there's no cleaning up at that point. So it was all that circular, and then you had agendas. Right? You still had, I think you're probably aware of Lue [Elizondo’s] previous [situation], you know, you had that happening.”
Previously, the Pentagon’s public affairs office has commented that former AATIP Director Lue Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities with the program.
Liberation Times has previously asked the Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office whether Lue Elizondo had any assigned or unassigned responsibilities with AATIP - a question that no spokesperson has publicly answered to date.
Other revelations from Stratton included one event where an unnamed official told him not to get involved in the UAP topic due to religious concerns:
“There's absolutely some concern there. And I did see it in writing one time in my career, where someone was asking me to push back because [of] their religious concerns, and ‘you should wave-off of this topic’ is literally what they're telling me. You know, [telling me] you shouldn't be involved in this.”
The interview, which was presented by Corbell and Knapp throughout the show forms only one small part of a larger in-depth filmed interview that they did with Stratton, with further clips expected to be released in the coming weeks and months.
Stratton currently works with Radiance Technologies, where he is leading, directing, assisting, and developing efforts in existing contracts and the creation of new areas of business related to Scientific and Technical Intelligence with a focus on reverse engineering.