A former Pentagon official who once ran the government's UFO investigations unit says he personally witnessed non-human beings and non-human craft, and that defense contractors and the U.S. government are sitting on vehicles not built by humans. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who studies unidentified anomalous phenomena for a living, says there's a problem: no one outside Jay Stratton's own testimony has been able to verify any of it.
Stratton, who led the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and became its first director before retiring in 2022, laid out his claims in a new memoir and in subsequent interviews, according to People. He told Loeb that “both the defense contractor, community, and the government have a craft of non-human origin,” and went further, saying, “I have seen non-human beings and non-human craft in my own eyes,” according to Loeb's own account, published on Medium. Loeb, a Harvard professor who chairs a scientific effort to analyze UAP data, didn't dismiss Stratton outright, but he was blunt about the evidentiary gap: “the claims Jay makes are not corroborated by publicly verifiable data,” he wrote.
A Memoir Built on Decades in the Shadows
Stratton's book, titled Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, hit shelves on October 13, as reported by Cybernews. In it, he says he spent nearly 33 years in the U.S. military and intelligence community, including more than 16 years investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena, work he traces back to viewing a 2005 video of a purported craft near a nuclear missile silo, per People's reporting. He also says the manuscript was vetted by 21 agencies and departments before it was cleared for release.
The claims inside are striking. Stratton writes that military contractors hold at least a dozen recovered craft in secure facilities scattered around the country, and that the effort to collect them involved sending covert special operations teams to recover and transport crashed UAP and non-human bodies, according to People. He also attributes to an unnamed source the claim that a 1947 crash in Roswell, New Mexico, did happen and did involve non-human bodies.
A Submarine Encounter Off the East Coast
Beyond the book's broader claims, Stratton has described a specific personal encounter: he says he saw an unexplained object during an operation involving a U.S. nuclear submarine off the East Coast, with a Navy P-3 aircraft collecting sensor data during the event, according to IBTimes UK. The outlet noted that Stratton also claimed the U.S. government possesses craft of non-human origin, but that the interview did not independently establish that assertion. Cybernews reported a similar account, with Stratton saying he helped organize the collection of UAP sensor data from the submarine working alongside the P-3 aircraft.
Stratton has also claimed that a senior Pentagon figure discouraged two admirals and a commander from filing an official report after they witnessed a UAP, warning that their reputations would be at stake, per Cybernews. He's suggested even U.S. presidents may not be given the full picture, framing any eventual public disclosure as a watershed moment: “The president that's going to the microphone to tell the world we're not alone, that's a monumental moment,” he said, according to the same report.
Loeb's Pushback: Show the Data
Loeb's response centers on a consistent theme from his UAP research: testimony isn't proof. He said his PURSUE team, which has released six tranches of military UAP data, has not found evidence that links UAP to non-human technologies, and that the vast majority of military encounters in that dataset can be attributed to conventional objects such as drones, weather balloons, foreign spy aircraft or airborne clutter, per his Medium post. He also noted that official intelligence conclusions from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stop short of confirming non-human intelligence.
Loeb said he met Stratton at PhenomeCon 2026 and invited him to speak with the UAP Science Advisory Council, but that Stratton did not respond to the invitation. The gap between vivid personal testimony and verifiable material evidence is, for Loeb, the entire crux of the matter — he wants data, not just stories, however compelling the storyteller.
Echoes of Earlier Congressional Claims
Stratton's account lands in territory already shaped by David Grusch, the former intelligence official who told Congress in 2023 that the U.S. government had operated a secret, multi-decade program to reverse-engineer recovered vessels and had recovered non-human biologics from crash sites, according to NPR. Unlike Stratton, Grusch said he had not personally seen alien vehicles or bodies himself, basing his claims instead on accounts from more than 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years.
That same 2023 hearing featured other dramatic accounts: former Navy pilot Ryan Graves described encountering a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere roughly five to 15 feet in diameter, while retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor testified that a white Tic Tac-shaped object rapidly accelerated and disappeared in front of his aircraft during a 2004 encounter, NPR reported. None of those accounts, like Stratton's, have been independently verified with physical evidence.
The debate over Stratton's book was also the subject of a recent segment from FOX 32 Chicago, which examined how Loeb, the Harvard professor, is scrutinizing the former Pentagon official's claims. For now, the story remains one of dueling certainties: a career intelligence veteran insisting he's seen the unexplainable, and a scientist insisting the universe owes us better proof than memory alone.
