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FeatureOctober 13, 2026

Out of the Shadows, the Memoir of the Man Who Ran the Pentagon's UFO Task Force

Jay Stratton led the government's task force on unidentified objects. His book, out today, says a hidden program has kept non-human life secret for 80 years. What he claims, and what the official record says.

A U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet of the Black Aces squadron, VFA-41, launches from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Pacific Ocean on August 8, 2007. The squadron and the carrier are the ones in the 2004 encounter known as the Tic Tac; this photograph was taken three years later. U.S. Navy photograph.

By SpaceDew · Photo: U.S. Navy, Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Eduardo Zaragoza

Published October 13, 2026. Facts as of that day. Some details may have changed since.

On August 4, 2020, the Deputy Secretary of Defense approved a new Pentagon task force with an unusual job: find out what the unidentified objects reported in military airspace were, and where they came from. It was called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Jay Stratton led it.

Today, October 13, 2026, his memoir goes on sale. It is called Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, and it is published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The subtitle says where Stratton has landed. The government's published record says something different. Here are both, side by side.

SpaceDew has not read the book, which comes out today. This story is drawn from the publisher's description of it, Stratton's own public statements, and what the government has put on the record.

Who he is

According to his publisher, Stratton served for more than 32 years, on the battlefield and as a senior member of the intelligence community, and specialized in new and disruptive aerospace technology, including the most classified American systems.

NewsNation, reporting on the book deal in 2024, said his career included eight deployments and that he held the civilian equivalent of a two-star general's rank. That, it noted, would make him the most senior former official to come forward about UFOs and non-human intelligence. It also reported that his investigations included the "Tic Tac" encounter of 2004, when Navy fighter pilots from the USS Nimitz strike group met an object they could not identify while training.

What the record says the task force was

The Pentagon announced the task force on August 14, 2020. The Department of the Navy ran it, under the office of the Pentagon's under secretary for intelligence and security. Its stated mission was to detect, analyze and catalog unidentified aerial phenomena (the government's term for what most people call UFOs) that could threaten national security. The announcement was about safety and security: unknown aircraft entering military training ranges and restricted airspace. It did not name who would lead the task force.

On June 25, 2021, the Director of National Intelligence sent Congress a preliminary assessment of the phenomena and of the progress the intelligence community and the task force had made. It covered 144 reports from government sources, mostly of incidents between November 2004 and March 2021. It could explain one of them with high confidence: a large, deflating balloon. For the rest, it said, there was not enough information to say what they were.

The same day, the Pentagon ordered a plan to make the task force's work permanent under a new office. That successor is today's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO.

What Stratton says

The publisher's description of the book makes these claims, each of them Stratton's:

  • His investigation began with a video of an advanced flying craft over a sensitive nuclear weapons site.
  • He co-founded the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, which the publisher calls the first official government program to investigate unidentified objects since the Air Force closed Project Blue Book.
  • He learned of a deeply hidden program that recovers crashed craft and works out how they were built, and that, he says, has kept the existence of non-human intelligent life secret for 80 years, from the public, from Congress and even from presidents.
  • He kept Congress informed of what he found, despite obstacles and threats, and went on to set up the task force.
  • The work brought close encounters of his own and took a heavy toll on his family.

He has said some of this before, on camera. In The Age of Disclosure, a documentary by Dan Farah released on November 21, 2025 and available on Amazon Prime Video, with Stratton as one of its executive producers, he said: "I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings." In the same film he said that the clearest videos and the best evidence remain classified.

When he announced the book on June 3, 2026, Stratton said it reveals everything he is legally allowed to say about his investigations.

What the government has said

On March 8, 2024, AARO published the first volume of a review Congress had ordered: the U.S. government's dealings with unidentified objects since 1945. The report is 63 pages. AARO's team interviewed about 30 people, among them current and former government employees who said they had been involved in such programs, or had heard about them.

Its findings run against the central claim of the book. AARO's acting director, Tim Phillips, told reporters: "AARO has found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology."

He said the hidden programs people describe either do not exist or were real national security programs, mistaken for something they were not and unrelated to alien technology. He said the claims come mostly from a small group of people repeating inaccurate stories they had heard from others over several decades. He also said most of them were sincere, not trying to mislead anyone. And he said AARO had been given access to the country's most sensitive programs, and that no one told it no.

How to read it

The two accounts do not meet. Stratton says he saw the evidence with his own eyes. The office that took over his task force's job says it looked and found nothing it could verify. SpaceDew takes no side on which is right.

What would settle it is the same thing that settles any claim on the record: names, dates, places and documents that someone outside can check. Members of Congress can ask for them. The National Archives keeps a collection of government records on unidentified anomalous phenomena. A book is one person's account. Whether Out of the Shadows points to anything that can be checked is the question to watch as readers, and lawmakers, get through it.

There is more to come either way. In September 2026, it was announced that Terence Winter, a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos and the creator of Boardwalk Empire, is developing a television series from the memoir with Dan Farah. No network, cast or date has been announced.

SpaceDew's File Zero desk reports these records as they come out, and the UFO Files list what the government has released.

Sources

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