He Used a Nuclear Submarine to Lure an Alien Spacecraft—and Found Something That Defied Physics

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Jay Stratton never intended to spend a large part of his career making sense of alien encounters, but that changed when he was asked to investigate suspicious video footage.
• For the next sixteen years, Stratton dealt with both his own experiences and others’ accounts of phenomena that seemed not of this planet, including aircraft that defied the laws of physics.
• While he still faces backlash from critics, Stratton insists that he was not an alien fanatic, just a military official tasked with finding out what was behind bizarre and unexplained events.

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.”

The encounters themselves baffle even skeptics. One pilot was on patrol when he caught sight of a floating sphere, roughly six feet in diameter, drifting through the darkness at 20,000 feet as if the violent winds hitting it simply weren’t there. The crew turned their radar on the object, and it fled so abruptly it might as well have been a hallucination. Roswell raises the same questions on a far larger scale. The city that inspired a paranormal TV series in the late ‘90s and still trades on aliens and flying saucers as unofficial mascots was the site of a 1947 crash that many dismiss as a failed military experiment. The debris made sensational headlines before officials wrote it off as a fallen weather balloon. Stratton says the balloon was just a cover story.

What the recovery team hauled out of the desert, Stratton writes, went well beyond crumpled metal. It included bodies that were not human. An unidentified source told him that some of these beings died on impact while others survived the crash but not much longer, refusing food and refusing to communicate. The aftermath never reached the public. Witnesses inside the intelligence services were traumatized enough that many resigned, several suffered breakdowns, and a few, haunted by what they had seen, took their own lives. The wreckage itself is long gone, beyond the reach of any modern analysis—but Stratton points to more recent events that unsettle him just as much. In one case, top gun instructors—pilots selected for their composure under pressure—recorded four encounters in a single week. They came away shaken.

The incidents recounted in Out of the Shadows drew backlash from several directions. Stratton had just returned from an investigation in Nevada when a colleague pulled him aside and warned him that entangling himself in such things carried dire consequences. Then came the hard questions. If aliens had really touched down on Earth, where are the images to corroborate the alleged video evidence? Why did no one run lab tests on the bodies recovered at Roswell? Why does every account offer everything but a scientific explanation? The pressure was not all professional. Glowing balls of light hovered outside the family’s windows after dark, and Stratton lived with the sense that someone was always a step behind him. Only retirement brought any relief.

“Anytime I’ve ever done anything related to UAP or UFO, that’s been my job,” Stratton told 8 News Now Las Vegas in an interview. “And what I mean by that [is] I didn’t really have a passion growing up, I didn’t have all the books, I didn’t watch all the TV shows. I stepped into a job for the Defense Intelligence Agency where some things came across the desk…[for] all the stories you hear, there’s probably an office that deals with this.”