WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp - Jay Stratton - The Most Important Government UFO Investigator, Ever : WEAPONIZED FLASHBACK

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Jeremy and George are working to bring something special to you. In the meantime, we recommend revisiting one of our first and most significant interviews. Jay Stratton has been a pivotal figure in the creation and direction of three government UFO programs: AAWSAP, AATIP, and the UAP Task Force. Stratton personally conducted the first investigation of the 'TIC TAC' UFO incident, and he led the effort to rebrand UFO cases as UAP. Jay Stratton's very first on-camera interview regarding his UAP work was with WEAPONIZED. GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ••• Watch Corbell's six-part UFO docuseries titled UFO REVOLUTION on TUBI here : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tubitv.com/series/300002259/tmz-presents-ufo-revolution/season-2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Watch Knapp’s six-part UFO docuseries titled INVESTIGATION ALIEN on NETFLIX here : ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://netflix.com/title/81674441⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ••• For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium

and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. college PC. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people

with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Secrets, cover-ups, and strange phenomena. UFOs and ideas that challenge reality itself. All these mysteries, all this time. Are we ever going to get to the bottom of these?

My name is George Knapp. I dig into news stories that others can't or won't. I'm Jeremy Corbell, and for some reason people tell me things they probably shouldn't. And this is Weaponize. This is a flashback of Episode 3 of Weaponized, an exclusive interview with Jay Stratton that's worth repeating, pay attention. Weaponized. We're back. What's on your mind?

Oh my gosh. So much, man. Well, I guess we should start with a number of weeks ago. The new anticipated UFO report, official UFO report, came out from the government. And, you know, there's been a lot of reactions from, you know, dismissals in opinion articles in the New York Times to other. people that got it right but this was anticipated was supposed to come out on Halloween right 2022 here we are in 2023 now and finally it's out but so they call it the 2022 annual report on UAP unidentified aerial phenomenon is actually the 2023 report since it did not come out in 22 and looking at it you know the first impression you get is nobody's gonna wrench their back picking this thing up it's

only a couple of pages they got a title page and a table of contents page and a couple of index pages at the back and terminology, not much report here. I'm reminded of, remember when light beer first came out? The slogan was taste great, less filling. That's what comes to mind for this. Yeah, in defense of the depth of the report, it is a report of a classified report. It's a report that they did a classified report. But there's some really sneaky things that you brought to my attention that were kind of done in this. And I'd like kind of people to know about this from a news standpoint. Well, you know, I think there is a difference between this report and the one that came out in 2021, the UAP task force report to Congress.

It had 144 cases. It said 143 were unidentified. This one has a lot more cases. They added it's a 510 cases. So there's the good news is that the reporting system that has been implemented is working. They even got reports from the U.S. Air Force, it says, in here, and the U.S. Navy primarily. We don't know where these incidents happened. There's almost no detail whatsoever.

We don't know if they were in space, whether they were under sea, whether they're over U.S. airspace or the military encountered them somewhere around the world. Don't know what the size or shape or capabilities of these are. We know that there's an indication that at least some of these cases are advanced technology that had capabilities that were really intriguing. But really no details at all. I think the UFO public was prepared to be underwhelmed. Maybe not quite this underwhelmed.

But I mean, overall, there's some good stuff. The fact that they reported it at all, that they're getting better at identifying what's truly unidentified and anomalous on what isn't is pretty good. But we know, we know that this is all domain. We know that these cases span from space air to sea. Now, that's not something obviously that's put out to the public, but that's why it's called, you know, all domain. That's why it's called transmedium. So I think people got this title, you know, based on their bias, like, wrong. I think the title's right in the report.

There's a top of it, I think page five, can we read that? I want people to hear what they said. You know, continued reporting and robust analysis are providing better fidelity on UAP events. But many cases remain unresolved. That's right in the report. That's the headline. That is the important part. And then people try to cherry pick and say all this stuff that we know is false and they put it through major publications.

You know, the mass media needs to look at and read everything to be informed. It doesn't always happen. It seems like there was a concerted effort to water it down. I mean, this is the most exciting topic in the world. It's the biggest question in human existence in the history of civilization. Are we alone? It would change the world once we get a confirmation that there's another intelligence somewhere,

or they're out there or living among us here. It's huge. And they do their best to add this bureaucratic jingo-type language that junk it up and to dilute how interesting it really is, to make it as least interesting as possible, it seem like, in the terms that they use. And also you think about, like, you know, who are they that are doing this?

If you just look at who, who writes certain types of articles, you get a sense that this is not reporting. These are people that are inserting certain types of topographical, you know, premises that they come up with, biases they come up with. So if we just report the news, the line I just read, that's the news. That's what's important. So look, I don't know what UFOs are. I don't, but I know that it's unexplained and that there's a lot.

mechanical aspect to it. Well, they made a point of adding in a bunch of cases that I think were taken out of the original report. They said that in this- You think or you know. Well, it says that they added in a hundred and some cases that had been left out. So adding these back in increased the total, but it allowed them to say, oh, gosh, a heck a lot of these are balloons. A heck of a lot of these are drones.

A lot of it is trash, which is, you remember the New York Times had this pre-bunking piece, where they predicted. That's what this report is going to show. It's a bunch of drones. It's a bunch of balloons. Yes, drones exist. Balloons exist. We're aware of that.

We're aware that birds fly in the sky. That's not anything new. I mean, UFO's 101. You learn that 90 to 95% of all UFO cases are explainable. If you get enough information, they're explainable. They are drones, their balloons, their planets, their clouds, things that sort. That is the starting point for this conversation.

We're aware that cases can be explained. We're also aware that while 90% are explainable, nine out of 10 are not reported at all. Hold on. Just back up. Fucking record scratch. Okay. They excluded a bunch of cases because they were explainable. So let's now work on the ones that are not.

What you're saying is they brought those cases back in to be able to give these statistics. Yeah, it says it. The ODNI preliminary assessment discussed 144 UAP reports and had an in. information cutoff date of 5 March 2021. Since then, Arrow has received 247 new UAP reports, but an additional 119 UAP reports on events that occurred before March 5th, 2021, but were not included in that assessment, have been discovered or reported. So they took them that have been discarded and put them back in and allows them to sort of dilute the overall impact of this by saying, oh gosh, these are explainable.

And we know who discarded them. We know the people that discarded them so that they could focus on the true UAP mystery. And this was a sleight of hand. Is that what you're saying? Well, it's a little deceptive, I think. You know, by adding those back in that they already know are explainable.

The reason they were kicked out is because they're explainable. Is it fair to say that there's a minimization process that's occurring to the public? They're trying to minimize some of the gravity of this to the public. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Well, they brought back in cases that

explainable, they dumbed down the language, made it as clunky as possible, and as least interesting as possible, trying to make it less dramatic, almost as if, hey, there's really nothing to see here, folks. We did our duty, we got this report, we now have processes in place that were, it makes it easier to report this stuff, but we're explaining it, don't you worry your pretty little heads kind of thing. And one of the reasons we know about that process for the first report is because you and I were able to talk to the chiefs, the chiefs and scientist for the UAP Task Force. That's right. That's right. He's a guy who is well known to our listeners to viewers from television. Dr. Travis Taylor has been on

ancient aliens a number of times. He's been on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch at the past couple of years, well known as a scientist who is interested in the UFO and related mysteries. What most people don't know is that he was serving as the chief scientist for the UAP Task Force. We learned that and were floored by it on a trip we made to Alabama last fall, last summer. I learned about it before, but you reported on it first. You told people about that, and it kind of threw people for a loop because they know him from TV, they know him from this, but look, this guy's a serious scientist, and he's done a lot

of work, and he was specifically brought in and tasked because he had certain skill sets that would be good for this job, and we know who brought him in. And it's so interesting, man, I want to get to something. We had this crazy trip. You want to start talking about that? Sure, yeah. All right. For anybody that doesn't know mine and George's friendship and working together, once in a while,

I get some call from George, and it's like, pack your bags, we've got to go film something. We're doing an interview. And, you know, just immediately I know, oh, gosh, so this is the thing now. So my perspective, I've actually never told you this, but my perspective was, okay, George has, hopefully, a really important interview to hear from somebody that could shed light to the American public who's never gone on camera. And this is kind of the background you kind of gave me, you know, this could happen. But there's also an event going on. Before we get to that, I'm just like, okay, let me adjust my life to like leave in a few days. I needed a second camera. I don't even

know how to do aperture right, you know, professional filmmaker. I don't even know how to do this stuff Right. I knew this was important. I was like, I need somebody. I called up my buddy Niles Harrison. He's laying on the beach in Mexico, right, where he just bought a house. And I'm like, I need you on a plane right now. Just I need to get you to Vegas. And he's like, well, I got all my stuff and we have to put it in storage. This dude, Niles Harrison, dude, you are my idol, man. He packed everything up. And in two days, he landed in Vegas to meet us to be the D.P.E. or the backup force, the only guy I could trust, you know. And I still don't know what the mission is, so I can't tell him the mission, you know. So it's just like this fun kind of experience where I'm like, we get to Vegas, I'm like, what's going on? You know, and we hop right on a flight. So just so you know, I mean, it was crazy, man.

This is how it works with you and me is sometimes I call you, sometimes you call me, and it's time to go. Well, the premise for this, there were multiple reasons to make this trip. Huntsville, Alabama is a defense hub. A lot of interesting defense contractors have grown up around there. Of course, it's Rocket City. It's where the birthplace of the U.S. space program really was. Werner von Braun and his team were all down there. I didn't even know where we were going.

So now you're saying it. So you tell me, okay, we're going to Huntsville. I'm like, Huntsville. I'm like, why? Well, in a sense, you know, I hate to admit this, but Huntsville has become sort of the de facto UFO research capital of America. For a long time, for the past 30 years, it's been Las Vegas because of Robert Bigelow, his NIDs organization that became Bass, that was headquarters for the

OSAP program, which that's a lot of acronyms, but that program was the largest UFO investigation ever funded by the U.S. government that we know of. And so because of Bigelow and Collum Kelleher and their colleagues in Las Vegas, Las Vegas was a hub for this research. I think Huntsville might now have that title because of all the people who are concentrated there. The defense contractors that have grown up around the U.S. rocket program, the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal is there. In addition to the defense contractors and the rocket programs

and a lot of government agencies, there is also an UFO organization, SCU, the scientific coalition for UAP studies. Headed by a guy named Rich Hoffman. He's put together a team of scientists. They've done some great analyses on key cases, the Puerto Rico UFO that was, looked like a transmedium for one thing, and they did a tick-tac paper.

They're doing some great work, but they have an annual conference. I've been invited to go to each one of them, and finally I wanted to go because they not only had a really great lineup of speakers, but I had a feeling that the audience might be more interesting than the people who are up there on the dais, given the speeches. Okay, so to back up, so there are these UFO study groups, but this is one that really focuses on the science and technology. and it gets great speakers and members, and we know people just come in to quietly, silently listen,

that they might be interesting people because it's in Rocket City. But, I mean, you had an idea that we were going to get a specific interview, but at this point you're telling me, we're going to this conference. It's a UFO conference. I'm like, come on, George. And you're like, no, no, it's a cool one.

It's like science. And I'm like, all right, I texted Ryan Graves, you know, the fighter pilot that everybody knows now. And I just wanted to get a beer with them because we had talked so much. So that was, I was like, okay, I'm coming. I'll meet with Ryan. We're going to have a beer.

And that didn't end up happening. We ended up missing each other, two ships in the night. But we met a number of really interesting people and were able to get some first ever interviews with people that were going to come forward and also recorded with and talked with individuals who people don't know yet, but are also critical and essential to the UFO puzzle and what's going on within government and Congress and different intelligence agencies looking at this? I mean, just straight up, it was fascinating.

We had fun and we're driving in a car. You think I'm going to kill us. You know, we're making jokes about green pyramids. Our primary concern is getting there alive, which is not a given. In light of the fact that Jeremy is the person driving. And the navigator. And the navigator, yeah.

Hopefully we arrive in one piece. Oh, fuck. Like, it was the little worker guy with the goddamn pyramid. Oh, is that a pyramid or triangle? Or is that just a drone? That's construction work. So that's not a pyramid that you see right there. Well, it's a guy building a pyramid.

Oh. So is it like the government building a pyramid? Would that be accurate to say? You could infer that, perhaps. Okay, I'm going to. And off record, I fucking drive the curve. That we had a lot of fun, but what happens next, George? I mean, this is a really neat moment for us.

So I had hoped that we'd be able to land this really important interview with someone who has never spoken on camera before, has never interacted with the media in a way where he could be quoted. Someone I have known for a long time. You protected his name. I could never mention his name. You know, I've known about him, and then I got to know him. I happen to know that he loves Linda Michouacan, this Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas, and has been known to hang out there.

He's worked with the Nids guys with Bigelow and Kelleher and some of those folks. We'll go into more detail on that in a moment. But there he is. We now know that he had relocated to Huntsville. One of my favorite stories of last year that we produced for KLAS and Mystery Wire was about this company, this defense contractor in Huntsville, Alabama. that put out an amazing, seemingly innocuous release about two men they had hired. Actually, there were two releases.

The one was an announcement that they had hired a guy named Jay Stratton, who had been a lifelong intelligence officer, had worked at the Pentagon in very high-level positions for a number of years. And I was astonished to see his name released in the public because it's been forbidden that I could ever mention it. So that's the guy. That's the guy. Jay Stratton.

Jay Stratton. So the world doesn't really know Jay Stratton. People figured it out. There's been little things now that have come out. But at that time, you had kind of held back. So the big question is, who's Jay Stratton? Jay Stratton. So if anyone who's read the book Skin Walkers of the Pentagon written with Dr. James

Lachatky and Colin Kelleher, there are references to this guy in there. They don't use the name J. Stratton, use a different name, but references to a high-level guy, a really credible intelligence officer who was involved in key positions in these UFO programs. Ossap, ATIP, the UAP task force, and Arrow. He is the only person who is involved in all of those, who is sort of the common link from the start of Ossap through the creation of Arrow and continues, I think, to advise the folks who are involved with that. There's only one guy that's been there for that whole trip who has worked with Ossap and then Lou Al-A-Lazondo with A-Tip and created, in essence, the UAP Task Force,

who got the government to ship from using the term UFO to UAP, whose work, we'll talk about some examples of it. Well, back up. You just said Jay Stratton, did you just say Jay Stratton created the UAP Task Force? Yeah. Okay, so that would explain to me why numerous military, active military individuals were so stoked to see Jay Stratton's name come out. And I said, why?

And they're like, because this is the one individual who is credible military intelligence, who's worked DIA, who's worked in tons of programs, and ONI, all these different intelligence agencies that has pushed not only to be honest and true to the American public, but to create an interface so that we could honestly bring forward to the American public,

American public what we know and don't know about the UFO or what he helped systematized UAP process. And the reason he said he did that was to destigmatize reporting of UFOs. So this guy is trying to destigmatize reporting of UFOs, trying to systematize it so that reporting becomes better as a learning process, as bumpy as it is. People would put reports in from, let's say, the Nimitz or any of these encounters, they wouldn't hear back, they thought it got lost in the ether, they didn't want to to get mental checks, but he made it cool to report and learned along the way.

I respect that. So a lot of military people are like, that is so amazing to get him to talk because he's talking for us. We don't have voices. He's got a voice for us. So I just want to tell you that's what I've gotten a lot of. So that's who we're talking about. We're talking about a very serious, credible individual who's worked in intelligence capacity,

who's done the right thing. And he's done the right thing in a way to help destigmatize and communicate with the American public so we don't have the same problems as Project Blue Book, the cover, what in his own words, what Roswell did to the situation, the lies from our government. So I think it's, so now I know we might be interviewing this guy. And that's really cool. First interview. I learned that he was going to be there, that he and his colleague, Travis Taylor, were going to be at this event, this SCU conference. They're going to be in the audience. It was sort of the coming out party in the sense. both had been hired to work by Radiance Technologies,

and the releases, when each of them was hired, Jay was hired first, and then he convinced Radiance that, hey, Travis Taylor is a really qualified guy. He's the guy I'd like to work with here, and they hired him as well. And the releases for both of those guys were astonishing in that, unlike most defense contractors, they don't want to talk about UFOs. They don't want to mention it. They don't want to give it any credence.

even some of them who probably have a deeper roots with the topic than they care to admit, they don't highlight it. But these radiance technology, those releases both bragged about, in essence, they highlighted the fact that both these guys had worked on UFO programs with the U.S. government. It was as if they were saying, this is no longer a forbidden topic. We want to be involved in it at every level. In fact, if you've got some UFO contracts to give out to private industry, we're ready to go. I think I can get away with saying this.

I think it's fine. So we filmed at Radiance. That's okay. You did a news report. You know, how cool to be shown what we were able to be, you know, shown. We couldn't film what they're doing there. To some degree, we were able. I mean, obviously they have offices at Wright Patterson for their technology company.

But with what they could show us, we had to get the special badges, which we couldn't even photograph, you know, all that stuff. Do you remember when I was pushing them? I was like, that's a skiff? Let me see inside the skip. I don't believe you. Let me see inside the skip. And everybody's like, don't do that.

Everybody's not going to show you. And then they're finally like, okay, you can peek inside the door. But they don't say a word. You know, there's something going on in there. But it's okay. It's okay. I think I could. Yeah.

And I didn't believe him. Open that door. Holy cow. I mean, there was some cool stuff going on. Bam, close the door. It was nice of them to let me peek in just to verify, you know, what. It's a cool company. It's a lot of ways.

It's owned by the employees. The employees own. Oh, really? Everybody benefits from when they do well. They have offices in 17 states. Nearly all of them are attached to or within U.S. Air Force bases. So they're at Wright-Patterson. They're at Nellis.

Two bases that we know have a long history of involvement with the subject that is near and dear to our heart. And so they do serious work. You can see hints of it on their website, the kind of things they do. But essentially, that company does reverse engineering work, which in the UFO world, that term, that term is laden with hidden meaning. It suggests taking things apart to figure out how they work, things that we did not build.

But they do that, and Jay Stratton, who went to work for them, specialized in reverse engineering, and not just technology, not just systems, machinery, but in situations. When he worked for the DIA, he would reverse engineer potential threats, figure out who might be flying what, what their capabilities were, and what kind of systems we might need, need to counter that. I mean, he was a top expert in that kind of work. And we'll allow him to maybe explain some of the jobs that he held at the Pentagon. Definitely. And additionally, I also want to

be clear, we weren't shown anything we weren't supposed to see. But it was just neat that we got that tour and be able to see in certain rooms. Obviously, they keep a real kind of lock and key. But it was, I just got to think it was such a cool experience for a company like that to be so open for the first time with journalists coming in there and even the president sat down and did an interview and you did a report on it. You know, it really shows that like their interest in the reverse engineering of things. I'm sure they would love to have some of the goodies and they would be a great company. Well, we asked them, I said it, you know, all right, you hired Jay Stratton, you hired

Dr. Travis Taylor. It sounds like maybe you guys are taking a part of flying saucer or building one and they kind of joked about it, well, yeah, we'd kind of like to do that if we got a chance to. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's so compartmentalized with a company like that. The president even told us it's like he has tons of projects going on that he has not read into because that's, you know, that's how it's stovepiped. So, so with this company out there and you and I going out there and getting people were approaching us that were told to approach us. And that was really interesting to me because it was happening so much at that thing that there were people in the audience, the people still don't know who they are. And they trusted. us with numerous things which will be coming public at some point. Yeah, well, we went there with some goals in mind, specific goals, and talking to Jay Stratton and to Travis Taylor would have been, if that was all we got, that would be awesome. We didn't know for sure if that was going to happen, but that's what we went there to do.

And then we ended up meeting a bunch of other people who introduced themselves and began a dialogue with us that I think will bear fruit throughout this whole year. You know, and I was like, okay, you know, we're going to film this. my buddy all the way from, you know, he flew in from Mexico and here we go. And then I was like, oh, no, man, we're not recording in a hotel room. I was like so upset about that, you know, visually. But we had to do it kind of private and we needed to make sure that it was, the information was well documented.

You know, another thing that, so when we started the interview, something that Jay said kind of right away that was so interesting to me was that Ossap, from the very onset was technological. It was technology. It was about discovery of disruptive technologies. And you look at all the duds and the reports and obviously they're thinking, forward-looking 30, 50 years from now, what could be a disruptive technology, no matter where it's from, what could be a disruptive technology? And then he said, but look, where the evidence led is that there were other things that we learned. There was a disruptive technology aim, but that there were a lot of other things they learned

when they were studying things like The Ranch. So that really threw me for a loop that, you know, something like Ossap came in with the idea of identifying future threats and then realized, wow, there's a lot more going on. He talked about that in his interview with us. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. So, Emily's phone is off.

That's just as much ringer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's off. And alarms are off. The cameras are all in this stymund's little AB common marker. Okay. Jay, have you done a on-camera interview before? Have you done interviews before?

So it's the first. I mean, your world is the black world. classified stuff. Right. Can you give me broad strokes of your career, the highlights, and a kind of secure program to your work on? Sure. You know, I started military.

I was a full-time reservist with the Air Force, and then I moved up to Maryland to work at Pax River to do weapons integration with the F-18 flight test out of Nav Air. And from there, I went to the Office of Naval Intelligence, where I was recruited to be an airspace engineer working with them. to look at, you know, really apply the blue knowledge, as we call it, and apply it to the red and potential adversaries and write up reports on what I think foreign capabilities can do or not do. In a sense, reverse engineering. Absolutely.

And you take that into DIA, went over to Defense Intelligence Agency to work in the Defense Warning Office, where I was applying the same knowledge but at a higher level and more kind of orchestrating the intel community at that point. There's a term we use validation, whereas if you're building an F-22 or you're building a joint strike fighter, you know, you're really kind of designing that to counter a potential threat, and that potential threat needs to be a validated threat because what we can't have happen is a Lockheed Martin or a Boeing, you know, spending tons of money against a threat that they say exists, where the government needs to say it exists. So it's kind of a contractual thing of you're building to the validated threat, and that's what I did at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Along with also having a science and technical intelligence hat with the Defense Warning Office to look across the spectrum at technology, specifically air and space that are leading edge, things that could be disruptive and challenge us in the future. We're looking 10, 20, and sometimes 50 years out, depending on the topic and trying to provide the Department of Defense. and across the Intel community a better understanding of some of those potential disruptive threat so that we could get ahead of the game and counter them. And when you're at DIA, I'm ignorant of this stuff, but you're a Navy guy who then goes to work for DIA. Does that mean you're a Navy guy within DIA or you're always a Navy guy? So when I transitioned to Office of Naval Intelligence, I became civil service. So I'm a Navy employee with the National Intel community.

So your service centers, Office Naval Intelligence, Nasik, National Air and Space Intel Center, the Missile and Space Intel Center is a subcomponent of the DIA that's here in Huntsville. And then you have the MCIA, which is the Marine Corps intelligence activity, and then finally the National Ground Intel Center at Charlottesville. Those are the four of what we call service centers, and now you're going to have one for the Space Force, co-located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Those are service centers that support the analysis that supports the Navy or supports the Marine Corps, the Army, but in reality they are all funded by the director of National Intelligence

now, the OD&I as National Intel-funded billets that are able to support. So, you know, people refer to O&I, the Office of the Air Force of Intelligence is the Navy's Intel Center. The reality is it's the National Maritime Intel Center, where we are of the threat at the maritime. And when you think of Navy too, right, you gotta remember that Navy is the Navy, but the Navy also has an Air Force and the Navy has an Army and the Navy's Army has an Air Force right so it's a big service so with that when I has a big big footprint and a big concern but in all

of that the key and bringing up that the ODNI funds the four service centers is very important because back to the threat that justifies the building of new systems and such right the Air Force really wants a program they might go to an Azik and say we need a threat to drive that program. And we are funded by the national side of the house so we can say, well, we don't take orders from the Air Force in that regard. We don't take orders from the Navy.

So we can, you know, this is the assessment, right? That's driven out of tradecraft, and that's the answer. It's going to independent, you know. It's very independent. And a lot of people don't realize that. You know, they look at those service intel centers as kind of parts of the Air Force, parts of the Army. They are on paper, but in reality, you know,

the majority of their budget comes from the national. So you have high security clearances. You see sensitive stuff, as sensitive as it gets. All through my career. So from there, you know, DIA went back to O&I to be the head of air warfare. Really, I was the deputy initially. Then the fleeted up, as we say, to be the director of air warfare for O&I. When I first went back, I had everything that touches air in the Navy.

So science and technical side as well as the operational and tactics side, we call it. Spear is kind of the nickname. for the name that that organization uses. We've got a history all the way back to Desert Storm. If you watch Top Gun originally, Charlie that's briefing the Migs, she was based on a spear analyst. So the group that I led has that kind of pedigree of talking about how capabilities operate. So your national intel centers at Nasik, for example, right, can talk about a Russian fighter.

I'll just throw an example when everybody knows we look at Russia. a Russian fighter and talk about how fast it flies, how high it can fly, based on it in their assessments, right? What Speer does is we get into the head of the pilots and we try to talk about how they're going to fly that aircraft. You know, one of the analogies I've used for years is hockey players, right? Every hockey player asks them how to skate. Some of them are better than the others, but it's really about the game, right? It's about everything else but skating. Skating comes second.

So if you think about that and apply it to a fighter aircraft, it's how they're deploying that, right? And guys with my background can watch somebody flying an airplane and go, well he's probably Russian or whoever right there might that's probably an American so you know you really kind of can recognize some of the the techniques and the way they do things you know a mutual friend of ours was trying to describe how high up you went and he compared you to a two-star admiral that wasn't accurate exactly you weren't comfortable with that but how how would I explain to our audience how far up the rung you went well sure it's it's right in and and I didn't want to really push any buttons with that. So from O&I, you know, I went to the

Pentagon and I worked in N2 and 6, which is the headquarters level for Naval Intelligence. The director of naval intelligence is dual-hatted is what we call the N2 and 6 which just to the you know the OpNAV office code. At that point I was still at 15 and then I went off to be the J2, the Director of Intelligence for the Joint Warfare Analysis Center at Dalgrin. And then from there I was promoted initially to what we call Tier 1, defense, intelligence senior level tier one which is a as a senior executive position and then was within eight months or so I was bumped up to a tier two which is where the two-star

comes in you know it's an equivalency throughout my career it's been you know are you really equal right we always throw like GS-15s or kernels or there's an equivalency but you don't go busting around the Pentagon saying oh I I'll rank you or you know so I'm in a Right, yeah. But you do have the gravitas if that's a good word to use, that's not a good word to use, the kind of the peer level, right? So, you know, if I'd go into a meeting with a two star or one star, you know, kind of have a peer level. So I'm not putting in the corner, you know, and typically in my meetings, you know, I was there representing someone higher than me as well. Sometimes I'm representing myself, but sometimes I'm there representing someone higher than me. So then I inherit their authority. I'm sitting at their seat with their name on it. And I'm. I'm sitting at their seat with their name on it. And I'm. And I'm just on. And I'm. I'm not. I'm representing someone higher than myself. And I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm So I'm speaking for that person. I wouldn't have been sent to that meeting if I couldn't speak for that person. And a lot of that in the Pentagon is resource sponsoring. So, you know, I sat in many tables where I was representing the resource sponsor,

and that gets attention because acquisition programs at your Nav Air, your NAVC, your Air Force Material Command, those are all built on requirements back to the threat, right? And those requirements are paid for by resource sponsors. So the resource sponsor says we need a new jammer. and from that resource sponsor, requirements are driven, and then capabilities are built, and they go to whoever can build that capability, whether that's Nav Air or that's Nav, you know, and whoever that might be, right? So in those circles, you know, you get to know a lot of people, and that helped me later to really kind of know who I need to reach out to.

Can you describe for me at what point UFOs, they were called then, UAPs now, at what point that kind of got on your radar screen? Was it something you had at least a casual interest in growing up or it came a point in your professional career that it landed on your desk. Yeah, every time I've done anything related to UAP or UFO has been my job. And what I mean by that, 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 at the Defense Intelligence Agency where some things came across the desk, again thinking technologies and other things where I needed to really kind of dig in and understand

potentials and those potentials you know I kept an open mind a skeptic mind whatever you want to call it and I'm looking for something that could answer this and all the means that I had to chase that but there were definitely some times where we really couldn't close the loop and with that we realized that something needed to be done about it. We should maybe just fill in our listeners about how J. Stratton ended up studying UFOs and related mysteries because he made it clear to us in our conversation with him. He's not a UFO guy.

He's not sitting at home watching UFO videos on YouTube. He'd watch guitar playing videos on YouTube, but not UFOs. He didn't have a whole bunch of books. He didn't have an abiding interest in it. But he ended up moving from Office of Naval Intelligence over to DIA. and became an acquaintance and colleague of Dr. Jim Lakatsky, who was the creator of, eventually became the creator of the OSAP program, what became OSAP. And Lakatsky had an interest in Skinwalker Ranch in the book that Column and I,

Column and I wrote. And we'll let Jay Stratton explain how that process went. I can remember telling our mutual friend Dr. Lakatsky, right, that some of this stuff, I don't, and I hate saying the word now because I have so much more. background but the word believe right the belief isn't there necessarily and I'm seeing when I think or you know was being reported right so that evolution between 2006 and then to 2008 at that time I had to go to Iraq just a normal deployment and because we did deploy civilians a lot of people don't realize that civilians are just on the hope just like military and to

2006 and seven time frame as we were trying to think about this problem set, Jim Lackatsky says, hey, you know, basically I made the comments on the effect of I'd love to see one with my own eyes. And what I meant by one is a nuts and bolts craft, right? Because in my mind, that's what I'm a technology aerospace guy. I'm thinking the craft that I can go touch and put my hands on, right? Or I'd like to see one of these things in person. And I was getting ready to go. And Jim, was obviously he was tracking the ranch and he kind of made a joke or I don't need to say it's a joke about a comment of hey you know there's one place in the world we might see one of these things as this place and he hands me your book

and I throw the book in my backpack and literally took it to a rack with me so I read that book in the green zone and in my downtime and you know before I even got back we're you know talking and and things are proceeding along but So I come back and at that time we were at initially the Defense Warning Office and the DIA was at the Diak we call the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bowling Air Force Base. Now granted, I was flight test back in the day as Pax River Naval Air Station, which is in St. Mary's County, Maryland. So I still live there and I never sold my house throughout this whole process because I liked where I lived. But I was making really terrible commutes. So I agreed to work at the Defense Intelligence Agency and made that commute.

and in the process they transferred us 14 miles through the city to another place. And I can remember the quote to this day. It's only 14 miles, Jay, but it's 14 miles of D.C. hell, right, going through the commute there. So anyway, we end up in this place that's called Clarendon, and it was really killing me physically, you know, just the drive every day and the stress of that. I love the job, but the stress of getting there at home. And in 2008, O. and I offered me the position to come back and be the Deputy Director of Warfare,

which was a lot better commute, and I loved O&I. You know, I kind of grew up there in the Intel community, so I took that job and left. You know, Dr. Ocaskey stayed in touch, but that contract, you know, it was already in the beginnings. And then 2009, if I remember my timeline, right, he put it on FedBISOps to be bid, and they had two bidders that I remember,

one being Bob Bigelow Airspace and the other being a company that I don't remember the name of, but it was a company that did a lot of business with DIA and kind of in that contract world. You know, you have your favorite customers and your favorite, but there were more than one bed. And no funny business that you can see. It wasn't.

None at all. And I know all of the leadership, right, I worked there, worked for them. They're the most straightforward honest people, as you can imagine. And I could not, I could never in a million years imagine them taking any kind of, you know, favoritism in their account, I guarantee you they went over everything very detailed and made a decision based on the best response to the proposal that they had. They fire up this program, Bigelow's organizations, Frings in Action, they create these 38 papers. You know, we've heard it described as junk science.

Do you recall how those papers were received when they came out? So what I remember, so Lackatsky, Dr. Lackatsky, you know, that was driving that. And our colleague, Dr. Howe Putoff, kind of led the charge there, supporting Bigelow Aerospace. And the idea of them, in my mind, was awesome, right? I all have this reference document that I can always go back to on all these different technologies. They did come back being really, I'll see, academic, right? Very high-level academic. whereas we're dealing with the Defense Intelligence Agency that predominance is a liberal arts degree

and, you know, their war on terrorism was hot and heavy, right? We're hiring people who were experts in that culture and, you know, hiring some people just because they speak Arabic, you know, and all these things. It wasn't, we weren't hiring the best and brightest engineers at the time because it just wasn't the need of the DIA. So if you take all of that into context and you realize your average DIA analyst is going to look at that with their you know, polysci or history background and go, what is this, right? Whereas other folks out, you know, out AFRL and folks, you know, people with the educational background will look at it and go, oh, this is, this is interesting.

But they may say some of it is junk science because it is bleeding edge and that's what we wanted. We wanted to know what they thought as the leading expert on a potential technology, what would be pushing the edge of that envelope. Because I needed something to point back to if I saw something in any kind of reporting, I could say, look, based on Dr. X, Y, Z that wrote this report, that's significant. You've seen what else was produced by OSAP over the 27 months. I mean, it's a lot of stuff. But a lot of it is, some of it is pretty weird. I mean, you know, the Skinwalker angle. I've heard it said now people who want to denigrate the program that it was nonsense.

It got off on all this weird paranormal stuff that was never what it was supposed to be. And it was a waste of money. And that's why it was canceled because it got into these weird topics that are just too far out. In general, can you address the work that was done by OSAP, the reports that you've read that haven't made public when there was worthwhile on it? So I think, so I'm back at O&I at this point, right? So my day-to-day interaction with the contract and with Bass was not there. You know, I didn't have that day-to-day. However, Dr. Lekatsky and I, again, he wants to pick my brain on things that are being seen.

And I'm still in a role where I'm concerned about threats to aviation and those types of things, right? So it's good to keep me and the team that I had and my larger Rolodex of experts across the Intel community. So it was good to keep me up to speed. The heart and soul of OSAP was those technology areas, and the heart and soul of those technologies areas is preventing a disruptive technology. The other stuff that came out of that was collateral. If you go to the ranch to see a nuts and bolts craft that you might be able to put your hands on and you see other things that you can't explain, no one to this day can explain. Is it a Is it something to do with the technology?

Is it something, you know, is it an effect on the body? Is it something that's driving you to see things that aren't really there? You know, all those things needed to be studied. And again, throughout this whole process, I'm learning. All of this comes into the forefront later with the bigger task force and knowing what I needed and knowing the kinds of expertise that I needed. And that true diversity may not mean, you know, whether you're from a certain country or your ethnic background or anything else.

Or true diversity may be just purely the way you think. based on your own background that is kind of an asymmetric approach to the technology area, right? For example, hiring biologists to look at the terrorist network and the thread of radical Islam and how it spreads like a virus, right? You take that same mindset to other things and the various phenomenon that we're seeing. It's important to bring in that kind of diversity. It's just purely the way they think. And I always like to bring in folks with that kind of background that didn't have a

military background because now they don't they're not in this box in this in this in this in this viewpoint that they're always trying to mold things into they're coming at you with well have you thought about this right and that is where the true the power of those and those papers come from too because then you've got to be something to point back to you to say hey hey take a look at this what do you think right you know to another academic or and and how can you how could you see that applied. So Jay Stratton is not a UFO guy. He's a I don't know if you say a career intelligence officer, but O&I to DIA. The UFO thing hits at him and he realizes there's a void there. We need to do this right. There are potential threats. We don't know where they're coming from.

So I'm going to create the UAP task force and we're going to look at this in a badass way. And we're going to be clear with the American public. He also made sure to put that in We're going to be clear with the American public. He did that for a while, and then he had a break, right, from the, it wasn't his job. And during the time he was doing intelligence in another field, are we up to that point in the story? So the public, the UFO public, is aware of the programs that Jay Stratton was involved in. We've mentioned the names of those. What they don't know is they're already familiar with some of his work.

For example, in 2018, I released through KLA Awesome Mystery Wire, a 13-page report about the Tick-Tac incident. Tick-Tac occurred in 2004. Your friend, Commander Dave Fravor, is the aviator for the Navy that had the direct encounter with this strange object. Five years later,

when AOSAP is born, the first case they start looking at is TIC-TAC. And the person they came to rely on to write the first report, an investigative report, on Tick-Tac was J. Stratton. I released that report in 2018. It had no information.

insignia on it. It wasn't signed. It doesn't say who wrote it. But we can say now he's the guy wrote it. And it was great work. He talked to all these aviators and different people who are involved in it. It is one report that then became a much bigger report that has not been made public, but eventually will be someday. So that's one bit of work that he did. A second thing that the public would know about is the dirds. There are 38 of these dirds. Defense Intelligence Reference documents is that that's the acronym what it means. And 38 of those reports, were prepared for the OSAP program. And as Jay explained to us when we met with them, you know, it was meant to be a baseline to establish what our baseline is for science and

technology in specific kinds of categories and to project what it might be 50 years from now. And, you know, I remember when I made some of those, when you and I released some of those reports, people were griping and moaning, oh, this is sci-fi, it's nonsense, it's garbage science. Well, it's not. That's not how it was received by the defense. industry, they loved those reports because it was a really good work. And they needed a baseline from which they could compare when they had UFO cases to analyze, is this ours? Could it be ours? Could we duplicate that 50 years from now? And many times the answer was no. Right. And Jay actually talked about this in this interview that we did. It's like he was saying,

look, we were trying to find the disruptive technologies in 50 years from now, the things that we were seeing, the things that were going on, we didn't have good explanations for, so we have to theorize and get out there, like, what could it be? How could it be happening? It's so interesting to me the way he also said he was so dismissive in a calm, cool, collected way because he really empathizes with people to have less information than him. And I get that. So certain things that are classified within our Department of Defense, He can't just go out on Twitter and say even if he gets on Twitter, you know what I mean? But he was very clear that if something was identifiable, if something was ours, if something was a traditional object or a known for a nation, or even a question that could be a foreign nation, known, despite the capabilities, that those would not be included in his reporting, in his analysis.

And he really specifically said, you know, I get it that people think it's just one piece of evidence, like just a video. But you and I are hyper personally aware that there's other corroborative evidence that is not for public consumption. Jay says it himself, though, we had more information. And so when you say, oh, it's, you know, birds, balloons, optical illusions, reflections, pilot air, he's like, bullshit. It's not. We would never have included it. And it's nice to hear him say that because it carries a lot more. weight than just, you know, it actually supports the pilots and people that know because they were there.

Exactly. I mean, you know, the armchair experts, the debunkers on social media, just throw anything out, throw it out and see what sticks against the wall. It's birds, it's flares, it's, you know, it's exhaust from a jet. It's ridiculous is what it is. And, you know, for that explanation to work, any of those, you have to assume the U.S. military are idiots, that the pilots are idiots, that the people manning the sensors are idiots, that the analysis done by intelligence officials afterward, that they're all idiots, that they don't recognize a bird from an unknown object traveling at a high rate of speed. So Jay did share with us that there is so much information that cannot be shared with the public for national security reasons that went into their

analyses of these key cases, gimbal, tick-tac, go fast, and a lot of others that you and I got into. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamaba's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay.

So he worked with Ossap, with Bigelow and Colum and Lakatsky, and he developed relationships in other parts of the Pentagon and the intelligence community that served him well years later. 27 months after Ossap starts, it ended. And then Lou Elizondo comes along, picks up the pieces, creates what came to be known as ATIP, and Jay was directly involved with that. Well, and also Jay developed, it was so cool hearing him talk about this. He developed what he said was like asymmetrical approaches. So he would get people in different fields because they had different ways to solve problems.

And he would get them with their specialties like a biologist that would look at the spread of information a little bit differently. So I really appreciated the way that he would take an intelligence approach to problems that haven't been solved in traditional means. So my point is he actually developed, you know, staff and teams. And this was a big deal. I think that that what he did in developing, and for people that don't know, so Ossap, we keep saying that, I'll just, it's bare to repeat, Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program, that was the largest, best-funded, government, DIA, UFO program in history that is publicly known. And then as that transitioned, it turned into ATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme, program. So those are the acronyms that we keep talking about. But I think it's important to show

that there's individuals in intelligence agencies that are taking this seriously and building infrastructure for better reporting and want to be transparent with the American public, to the degree that is safe with, you know, with problems with foreign problems. That's so encouraging. I love that there are a multitude of agencies now that are developing. helping beyond an interest, but a process to help bring this information to where it needs to go. It will make you and me obsolete maybe as journalists, but it's great, it's happening. OSAP, the DIA program lasted 27 months, and then, you know, because of its, it got into

some pretty controversial areas and became a hot potato within the Pentagon intelligence community, Lou Alessando steps forward and was able to keep something going, a form of of the program. It's not as big. It's not as high profile. But he kept it going and was upset eventually that it just didn't get enough attention. It didn't get enough resources to be able to do the work they really needed. Jay, who was working with Lou, their good friends, a lot of mutual respect between the two of them, moved on to another job. He was aware, as he told us, he was aware that Lou Alizanda was going to leave and the reasons why he was going to leave and was upset. He was not aware that the New York Times story was going to come and then boom it happens one day so so that's a

funny yeah thing so so Lou I mean really that's I I people just don't get this but Lou is a champion I mean he took something and he kept it going and he made it strong and you know I think and I think Jay really appreciates that you could tell from the conversations so so we get to the point where Jay is now out of the UFO topic that's not his task with his intelligence job, so he's doing something else. And the way he said it to us was so cool, is on December 17th or whatever it was,

2017, when the New York Times thing, somebody put a paper bang right on his desk and says, you know, Merry Christmas or happy birthday, whatever he said, we'll let him tell that story. Yes. I knew Lou was leaving. So again, at that point in the 2017 to early 18 timeframe, I was in a job

that UFOs were not my job. in any form or fashion. So I did not do that job. Very conscious throughout my career of sticking to what I'm paid to do, right? However, again, Lou and I are friends and the folks that kind of took it over when I left, I knew them all.

And I got a face-to-face, it's called a Tamberg and secure kind of FaceTime with Lou in his office. And this was about, I think, three or so days before he dropped his letter and he's holding his letter. he's holding his letter, you know, something that effected. And he's like, here's what I'm doing. And I said, you know, good luck. And then, you know, lo and behold, he's on stage with Hal and Steve Justice and the team

there. And I'm watching. And still at this point, I had no idea I would be back in this topic at all, right? I'm watching as an outsider just like everybody, but I could actually text if I wanted, right? So I had some insider about. But I'm watching and interested. Are you sympathetic to his stated reasons for leaving in that? He was frustrated that I can't get through to the Secretary of Defense and tell him about this,

and it needs to be a higher priority. I am. What we needed was a program of record, as we call it, right? We needed something that had the oomph behind it, the power behind it, the authority behind it, to do a lot of things in order to get the answers that needed to be, the answers we needed. And, you know, I was building towards that later, and I'm sure we'll talk about the task force, but, you know, I had a five-year plan of how we're going to get all of these

things that we needed. But if you're just a working group, you know, and trying to do your job and in my hat, you know, Navy at the headquarters, I had a certain amount of wiggle room for trying to get things done in authorities, right? But you needed something above all that. You needed something at that SEC DEF level, at that ODNI level, that could reach into everything and had the authority to get the answers it needed. And Lou and I knew we needed that.

And every time we would try to knock on a door and say, hey, we need that. Here's what we know, right? Here's what we've seen. A little bit of history on ASAP and other things. Yeah, you get the door kind of shut in your face because it's back to that careerism. I don't know. I don't know. I'm afraid of the Washington Post. Was there any involvement? I've heard these stories from people we know about

fundamentalist religious people, high ups, who were concerned about its demons or were messing with forces of biblical proportions? 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 they're religious concerns. and you should wave off of this topic is literally what they were telling me. You know, you shouldn't be involved in this. I know it exists. I think what my professional opinion is after, again, years now of being involved, is that seems to have died off. I think, one, now, you know, I'm elevated into that senior level,

and a lot of my colleagues that were all at the same, you know, level that had grown up with me throughout the process, we don't really think that way, right? So I think kind of the old guard was moving out, the new guard was moving in, and it never once after that early DIA stuff, you know, did it ever, ever stop or getting the way. It was just early on when kind of that old guard's there and protecting their own, you know, what they believe. December 2017, it blows up. New York Times story. I don't know if you knew that was coming, But I know, you know, Lou has been through the rigor since then.

I also know that Senator Reid, who, you know, he'd let me know it was coming. He starts getting phone calls immediately from his former colleagues in the Senate. And they're asking, hey, what's the deal? Is this program real? How do I find out about it? Is that when you get sort of pulled back in and you start doing briefings? So I was sitting in my office at the other non, you know, UFO-related job. and I get an email from my old boss

that was a link to the New York Times story and she said Merry Christmas because I had no idea that was coming at all and it was literally holy crap when you're reading that and you have some inside baseball knowledge and but I didn't have any security concerns you know just like yeah if I had security concerns

I would have addressed it with the security concern I had the you know I can't believe we're saying all this in the New York Times there because of everything that was involved, right? But I didn't know it was coming. It took me by surprise. I had zero intent at that point of working the topic again. And there...

Just when I'm out, they pulled me back. Exactly what happened. The godfather. Exactly what happened. So my old boss that sent me the email sometime after that sent me a position and said I should consider it. And I did. And I applied and I got that. And it was that promotion.

I was actually stepping back into office and naval intelligence to do a different job. But at that point, you know, your pilots have been taken to Congress. The Senate's Armed Service Committee and all these folks had interest in the topic. And my boss realizing, you know, she knew all along, hey, I got one guy that's got some history in this and the trust to tackle it appropriately and keep it professional and do all the things that need to be done. So she reached out and said, hey, I want you to take this over. And she really wanted a joint program is the word she used, but, you know, a joint effort built to tackle this problem and get out ahead of it because of the Alex Dietrichs of the world, right? The people that we want to take care of.

And I'll only say her name because she's come out herself. And with that, I took it. I had the authority, we call it Durloss, direct liaison authority. I had directly liaison authority across the entire government. She empowered me with her, you know, her power to do that, to say, just go for it. And I wouldn't let anything stop me unless they, you know, threw me out, right? So I started going through my own education and saying, here's what I need. And that came from the years of looking at this, and I knew I needed, I needed things like the FBI,

and the Coast Guard and others for their Title 18 authorities. I needed folks of the right Title 50 authorities, the folks of the right Title 10 authorities, and to do this right and to get that level of respect and get to those true answers, you gotta have the right people involved, right? So I went out like building the business and started knocking on doors.

And now, thanks to my new rank, I pretty much got doors opened, right? And previously, they would have, might have opened the doors, But now, hey, let's see what this guy has to say. At that point, you know, we had the gimbal and other things, right, that people know about, but we had more, obviously. I'm going through what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and everywhere I went,

because, again, of that education of how to present the data, how to present the information, they went, holy crap, how can we help, right? And I ended up with somebody in each organization that was kind of my belly button and say, hey, this is your guy, he'll help you. And I just started building out that business and that framework and getting the things that we needed to be successful. I would call it at that point a partnership, not a task force, because really, you know, task force is a legal thing in the DOD circles.

But we were this partnership with the right people, across the services, everybody approaching it from the right perspective. Did that name at that point? No, I started looking at that point. No, I started loosely calling it a task force, but that was very loose. It was really, and the way I would brief it as partnership, you know, as I kind of show who's helping out. But at that point, I am briefing Congress, you know, from that day forward, right?

I went in and briefed a couple of the committees on my plan. I had what I call a one-pager. Again, I'm, you know, from a marketing perspective, everything on one page, and here's what I'm going to do, and here's how I'm going to do it. And they loved it, and they got behind it. and you saw some language coming out of the authorization for that? I heard it became a hot ticket that, you know, whereas before it was not nothing that ever popped up in Congress and suddenly, hey, let's have a hearing, show us the videos.

Absolutely. And again, it's how you present the data, right? And there were plenty. There were still a few of the old guard kind of hanging out that could prevent me from being successful. And some of them did not want to hear from me, right? They don't want to get the briefing. But every time I finally got to brief them, they were supportive. Every congressman I ever briefed except for one I won't say who and it gets back to the belief word

You know everybody understood where I was coming from and and the problem said and and that You know at the end of the day the business I built Was working and it was and it was what we finally needed right It sort of reminds you of Michael Corleone just when I'm out that I thought I was out they pulled me back in. It's a kind of thing So yeah he again he was not a UFO guy. Yeah, He was doing his job. Each of the times he was asked to do this, he was doing his job. And, you know, something else he said that really impacted me was, you know, he was a really high rank.

And I don't want to get into exactly like how that works. But, you know, we'd say an equivalent of, let's just say a really high rank. So a lot of people could have pressured him because of their rank to try to diminish the work he was doing. But he resisted that all along the way and did the right thing. And I just, I thought that was a really. cool thing to hear from somebody and to know it to be true. You know, the public knows a lot about the role of Lou Elizondo, both in blowing the story wide open and trying to get a bigger program and in bringing some of the aviators and other

witnesses, escorting them to Congress. He and Chris Mellon work on pushing that ball down the field. Jay Stratton is the unsung hero, who is working in obscurity, but doing the really the important stuff. And this was, he didn't have a program. It wasn't called the UAP task force. It was after that New York Times story and Congress starts asking questions that he was putting in charge of an inquiry, you know, to try to pull all the different strings together, to start pulling information together in cases and and getting a structure of an organization that became the UAP task force later on. Jay Strz started the UAP Task Force, and that was huge for transparency on the subject.

I do want to say you're like, he's the unsung hero. I'm going to say, though, Lou gets a lot of grief that is not, it's not valid grief. He's really endured a lot of slings and arrows, as you say. So it's like, you know, being a hero in this ain't what it cracked up to be maybe. I mean, it's, you know, he is to me absolutely a hero to this topic. And I think it's important what he's done. I think Jay coming forward with us on camera, I think I hope he is treated differently because, man, he's done great things and now the public's going to learn about them.

Well, you remember, at end of 2020, Congress says we want a program. In fact, we want a report. Here's the legislation. We want that report. You got six months to write it. So January, Jay's organization starts working on it. The UAP task force, we're going to put this report together. And it's precisely that moment, he gets yanked out of it.

And it looked really suspicious. I remember I reported on it exactly the time when you need him most, when the most experienced guy in the U.S. government on the UFO mystery is taken out of it and given another job. But he actually was supposed to be doing that job all along. This was a temporary duty. So he has taken out the people who he had left there. They didn't have a full-time position.

They didn't have any full-time positions. didn't have a budget. Here, put this report together for Congress, and I think they did a remarkable job in six months to get it together. That's right. And he had two people that were putting this report together, and I do agree. It was a phenomenal job. He even talked about why, in the interviews with us, he even talked about why he started in 2004 rather than going back all the way through UFO history. Everybody's like, why did he just start in 2004?

And he explains that really well, and there's a clip of it. So you get a lot of, you know, I said on numerous occasions, right, trust is important. You can't, and, you know, I think it was Colin Powell said you can't surge trust. The minute you're, I mean, we're already 70 years behind the power curve for trust, right? Because everybody says the government's lying to us, right? And that the whole Blue Book thing and the whole Roswell thing killed, killed trust, right? But very good reason why not to even go there, right? And in this whole discussion, the task force and everything else, we kind of started 2004,

right, as Mr. Bray said in the congressional hearings. You got to start somewhere. And in my recommendation when I created is that that 2004 start date is important because that was the first case in recent history where I had pilot reporting and data, right? Back to the data. But you take all of that, that trust, and then you get this. bureaucratic machine that is the Department of Defense and the Intel community and then you know this is an interagency whole of government so now you're talking about Congress and you're talking about all the other

departments your DHSs and your transportation right with FAA and everybody else like you got to have a singular message and that's why I 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 so 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 that and i would say oh my gosh like why did we say that right you come back and you try to clean up but there's no cleaning up at that point so it's it was all that circular and then you had agendas right you still had uh i think you're probably aware of lose previous and you know and you know you had that you know you had

that happening and that was also manipulating and driving because again DOD is very rank conscious ranked structured organization right so if someone senior is telling you to do something it's not illegal they're probably don't want to risk things and go with it so I think you had some of that going on now I'll tell you even as the head of the task force I didn't I didn't get into those politics on purpose in fact I went back to my old days of defense intelligence agency when I was saying you were nationally funded and I need to make an assessment that isn't manipulated by politics, which is actually the law now following 9-11, I stuck to my guns that I am here to, you know, working on behalf of the intel community to give the American people

an answer. And on numerous occasions, anytime someone tried to play the rank game, I would just stick to my guns. Essentially the idea that he would choose a date where they have a great amount of systems data and move forward from there, it makes total sense. And I think that was a very smart move. I'm sure there is historic data that we can look at now, but I think that was a great starting point.

So that was very cool when he did that. And the two people that he tasked with doing that report, again, did a remarkable job. There's something else he did that you and I have referenced in various reports without attributing it to him in any way because I couldn't use his name. But there was a briefing presentation and was put together. And it was an accumulation of all these cases that Jay and his colleagues had been investigating. And a lot of them had included video and photos and things of that sort. And he put this together as a briefing presentation for higher ups in the Pentagon, for members of Congress,

for defense contractors, and for the intelligence community. And he made the case, hey, this is real. This is a genuine unknown. This is a national security matter. We need to take a look at it. I understand it's a very persuasive piece of information. But some of the images that were in that briefing document, it's classified, but some of the images that came from that are not classified. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in a crowd. But too often, life gets busy, or the price holds you back. Price Line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Price Line.

Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. It said everything happens for a reason, but maybe everything happens for a Rises. Take noise-canceling headphones. Do they block hearing to heighten taste? Hmm. That sound seems to show. Everything happens for a Rises.

The green footage from the USS Russell, which you know that George and I have pained and released, so you know somebody's going to screen and shouldn't have done that, but that's not me as journalists, there's shieldball, obtained and release, but you've seen it. They played it in Congress. Yep. Okay.

The question about that is, was that, to do the best of your knowledge, is that a camera artifact of the iris? The shape that you see in the green footage, we'll call green. Is that an artifact of the iris? To my knowledge, based on three PhDs, It is the shape in that video is the shape that you're seeing and that it is a pyramid and that it is self-illuminating.

It's a what? That illumination is coming from the object itself. That's my understanding based on, you know, what I had. You said three PhDs? You got three PhDs? You got three PhD people to look at it. I got three PhD people to look at it. Were they like optical physicists?

Yes. But why go so far to show one video instead of three other video? that are out in the public that are corroborated visual evidence of one event and then say there's drones in quite i know who named them drones so why did they do that i don't know fair to say if it was a known u.s technology i would have admitted that right right i i i said it it was unknown have you personally seen the 23 minute video that people talk about yes okay with your own eyes well the 23 hold on yeah yeah i should i ask which 23 minute video. Have you simply seen the... My video was 23 minutes just so you know, roughly.

Right, right. So the suit, that's so funny. I can't confirm. Because I was trying to keep, I only even know the time because I was trying to keep it below 20 minutes as best I could. But I know your video is 20 minutes, take this out. But that you're talking about a 23 minute tick-tack video? No. Okay. No. There is no longer tick-tech. That's absolutely correct. Right. And I will absolutely. People, Dave Braver's told him 100 fucking times. So, yep. Right.

I mean, we'll be clear because we've been clear all along the way, is as journalists, obtaining and releasing unclassified information is absolutely fine. No designation, nothing like that. Sure, something can be contained within something classified. I don't know. What I know for sure is that, and it was confirmed by the Pentagon, that stuff that we ended up releasing, especially regarding the 2019 events on the West Coast. which is something we've covered on an episode at length, one of our last episodes.

And I think that the key thing here that I think people should know is that you've got this audio-visual presentation that is being shared within multiple intelligence agencies. Why? The reason why appears to be to destigmatize, to acclimate people to the possibility of how do you report this, and to encourage reporting going right back up the chain of command where it should go, which is a smooth and cool process. Problem was they didn't respond a lot to people when they would report it up and they realized that was an error and that they should give feedback so people know these reports are going somewhere. were taking them seriously. He also needed to find a way to get beyond NDAs, right? Because sometimes you just overclassify stuff

and people have to do an NDA because something was seen or picked up and they have to go through the process of getting past NDAs, which I don't know he ever got, but I think that's important moving forward for Arrow if it's going to do some great work. Yeah, a lot of those cases that were part of his briefing presentation ended up as part of the UAP task course report to Congress. They didn't spell it out in any instances,

but we know that that is the case, and that Congress did respond and did take it seriously. Jay Stratton left government in 2021 and entered the private sector. He was happy to move to Huntsville, Alabama, to work for radiance. He was happy to bring Travis Taylor along. And as we know, you know, we've been able to share at least a couple of excerpts,

this interview that we did. There's a lot more coming from Jay Stratton, I think. Oh, I know. Yeah, we know. I mean, he is making it a point to communicate as clearly as possible with the American public about his roles, what he did, what he hopes for the future with this, what's currently going on. I think it's great that people will be seeing a lot of him, that he'll be coming and talking

about his roles and experiences. I think when you can put a face, you know what I mean, to these people that were really before the Unsung Heroes. I mean, the Intel community, people are deep inside. They don't want to be in front of a camera. But now that people come forward a little bit and give other people the encouragement and the permission, I think that that's very powerful for witnesses that have been part of UFO exploitation and reverse engineering programs and legacy programs or current programs to come forward

through the new legislation that has been passed into law that protects whistleblowers. And in fact, it's not just a right to come forward. In fact, it's a duty. If there have been programs that have been hidden from congressional oversight, proper congressional oversight, you have a legal duty to come forward. So I really hope people are encouraged by this in these programs that we do know exist, that they do come forward and that they share with our Senate Intelligence Committee or whatever the process is at this point to get this information forward, then hopefully out to American

public. This technology is important, man. I totally agree. I want to say this also about Jay Stratton, although I've been allowed to know of him and then to know him. He is not a source. He did not leak any of these images to us. This is a guy who plays by the rules. It drove me crazy to know a guy like that who could answer these questions and who could,

has access to all kinds of materials that I have not seen, that you haven't seen, that the public hasn't seen. But he played by the rules. He is a stickler about that. Now that he's in the private sector and he is a public citizen, a private citizen, he has a lot more flexibility to pursue these subjects. He's definitely hooked on it now. If he wasn't before, he is now. And we're going to hear a lot more from him in 2023, but I just want to make it clear he's not a leaker. He didn't leak any stuff to us.

You know, it's so funny, man. People are going to try to, you know, I would too try to guess like how this was. Everybody's been wrong. Everybody's been wrong about how information gets to journalists. You know, we don't need to, you know, constantly tell you, we would never have a source on. But the thing is, is like, what does it mean to be a source? Sometimes you and I have received stuff that we don't know exactly who or where it came from. So our job for years sometimes, which is what's now a lot of that's coming out, but like for years

is to figure out the validity of information rather than the source of information. That's interesting, isn't that? That's something unexpected to me. You know, the people who are real heroes in this saga, this ongoing saga, Dr. James Lackatsky, who almost single-handedly, with the help of Harry Reid and Robert Bigelah,

got the OSAP program created, and then Lou Elizondo, who rescued the remnants of it and got A-Tip and kept it going. And then Jay Stratton, who was part of all of this, all those programs and beyond into the current era, you know, he might be the most important UFO, government UFO investigator ever of all of them. And it's so great to be able to talk to him. We have so much more that we haven't been able to share yet, but we will over the next course of the year. And hopefully he'll be here live sometime.

Yeah. And look, this program or whatever, this audio and visual program, it's because we know we can now. Now we're going to have people here. It's every time we're able to use this to get stuff out that you and I wouldn't normally be able to get out in any traditional means. So I am excited. It would be great. Right here, if there was somebody who worked in one of the government UFO programs that could sit right here next to us, wouldn't that be great? Well, look at the wheels that are turning.

because of the work of the guys I just mentioned. You know, Lakatsky, Colum Kelleher, Lou Elizondo, Jay Stratton, the work that they did, toiling in obscurity for so many years, is really paying dividends. I mean, this is not a terrific report. But the fact that it exists at all is amazing. The fact that they have now have a streamlined process

and have taken away some of the stigma attached to reporting UFOs is amazing progress in a short period of time. And Congress maintaining it, an ongoing interest in this. They're demanding more information. We don't know what's in the classified version of this, but it's exciting. It's awesome. And, you know, the legislation that offers protection to whistleblowers is also very exciting that we're going to be exploring over the next nine, ten months. Is this George Knapp being optimistic about the UO topic?

Let me take that back. Let me take it back. No, you can't take it back. I heard it loud and clear. It sounded like George Knapp is being optimistic about your overall transparency in some way. look man we're only going to get as far as we push it nobody wants to give up information you know if it's special to them there's no reason to but I think if the public demands it we ask nicely and shake the doors a little bit look there are great people within our the majority of our armed services our intelligence agencies you know they are just like us they're curious about this they're excited about it if it's not a matter of national security this is stuff that should be told to the American public.

So I am very optimistic by nature, but it was kind of cool to hear some optimism from you. You're not so optimistic sometimes when it comes to traveling because of your curse. And I want to finish this trip and remind you what happened. So we are, we do these great interviews, and we're just stoked, man. It was really fun.

We met really interesting folks that we ended up, you know, having friendships with along the way, who I'm sure you will hear from in the future, who are involved in this topic deeply. So we're like, okay, let's just get home. And of course, we're on some horrible airline. There's this photo I put up on social media. We look like gorillas, man.

We have our bags and we're just walking down this runway, just trying to get on this plane. We're all masked up because guess what? Turns out, Niles, if COVID didn't kill you, I was going to kill you. My buddy who we were with all week had really bad COVID. I made bleeding coughs. And I was like, oh, man, you and I, we have. We escaped it.

We thought we escaped. There we are in the plane. And then we get this lightning storm. I have never seen so much lightning in my life out of window. It was like, it just felt like doom because of your travel curse. But we got back and we still had to sit on this story for, we had to sit on the story up until now in a lot of ways. So it was, you know, it's funny, like as a journalist, you've probably dealt with this like tons, but you got to really respect that someone gives you their trust and they're allowing you to do this.

So you got to time everything right. You can't just throw something up on YouTube or throw something out on Twitter. You have to do it responsibly. Check everything before you do it. And God forbid you make a mistake, but if you do, you say it, right? So that was kind of a neat trip. We get back and, man, we were tired, but we got what we needed. Yeah.

You know, we got so much material from Dr. Taylor and from Jay Stratton and the folks at Radiance and then the people, other people we met at the SCU conference, and we were really excited to go ahead and share it with the public, but it takes time, you know. Yeah. We didn't have the okay to go ahead and spill all those beans. Yeah. We do now.

We have permission from Jay to use some parts of that interview, and I think we're probably going to be using more in the future, and hopefully we'll be hearing from him live, maybe on this stage and maybe on other stages. Okay, so what's the big picture now? Like, as we do these and we try to put these pieces together for public consumption, and here we are in 2023.

You know, what's the big picture, man? Where are we going with this? From reports to Arrow to other agencies we know that are interested in the UFO subject, like where are we going with this, man? Well, we know that because of that legislation, there are whistleblowers who are lined up, at least a few of them that we know of,

who are lined up prepared to tell what they know. The most interesting unanswered question is, where are the goodies? Is there metamaterials stashed in a warehouse? Are there intact craft, as Bob Lazar suggested, somewhere out in the desert? Are there bodies? You know, there are people who have told us that they know that those things are true, that there are materials, exotic materials from somewhere else.

The question is, are they going to be allowed to speak? Now, I did express a little bit of optimism a couple of minutes ago, but I think for them, it's still a dicey deal, you know, stepping forward to tell these incredibly sensitive secrets, comes with risk. And we know that there are at least some of them who are already facing potential consequences for agreeing to step forward. Hopefully, the stories will come out. The information will be conveyed to Congress. Whether or not that information gets to us, the public, that's another matter, but we'll be doing our best to get it out. The process

designed through the Whistboro Protection stuff, the idea of using something like the Inspector General to move forward with complaints of reprisal and this sort of thing. I think it is fair to say because we've said before that process, whether or not it has been formalized, there are people in this subject who are using the right mechanisms to get the information where it needs to go out of fear of reprisal. That is something current. That is happening. So I'm encouraged that that process is there to protect people.

ultimate goal, let's just say it like it is. There are UFO study programs in multiple agencies across every branch of our military, many of which we know about. The idea is can they go through a formal process to bring those illegal programs to where they should go? This shouldn't be a job of journalism. This should be a job of cleaning house. This should be something that they do on the inside.

Journalists do what they do. This should be clear and straightforward. If there are unknown illegal programs dealing with non-terrestrial technologies, yes, that's a huge issue for humanity. But this also needs to be fixed on the inside. Absolutely. And, you know, this report, for example, there's a line in there that I found pretty interesting. It says that we have no evidence of any direct human health consequences of exposure to UFOs. I can hope that sometime in the next 12 months that the arrow folks will go down the hall

and knock on the door at the DIA and ask to see the OSAP files because OSAP, as we have reported, has very definitive evidence about harmful consequences from people who got too close to UFOs. And there are some very dramatic and well-documented cases that the DIA program followed for a number of years. So having seen some of these reports, the thing you're saying is that Arrow, who's studying the UFO phenomenon, They should already have all this documentation of a huge program like OssF that clearly shows that there have been health issues that have been caused directly from close proximity to UAP. Right.

And they don't seem to have any knowledge of that. It was similar to the two guys who appeared before the congressional hearing, the first congressional hearing of 54 years, when they were asked about nuclear incidents, incidents are nuclear missile bases. They don't know anything about it. Well, there are some pretty dramatic cases that were studied also by ASAP, that were written up into reports. All they have to do is ask for it. Congress seemed to only know a little bits and pieces.

They were unaware, seemingly unaware, that OSAP ever existed. When the Navy guys were asked, is there anything between Project Blue Book and ATIP? Nope. Well, that's not true. I mean, you know, it was a lot of money. Millions of public dollars were spent on that. The stories have been all over the world. The book has been written.

The people who are involved in the program have come forward and talked about it. How can they not know? Yeah. Yeah, ma'am. So I guess, you know, kind of where we're at here is it would be really great to hear from somebody who actually worked in these programs. And I think we're going to get that pretty soon.

You know, thanks for kind of telling us about the report and getting to the point we're at. I guess where I'm at is I'm just excited to see kind of how this is all assimilated into to our processes, like so that I want the American public to know if this is true. I don't have the luxury of disbelief on certain things, but I want it to be stated and boldly stated. I don't know when that's gonna come

and what the truth is or what the full truth is, but I think we're getting closer. Well, the public also needs to understand as ASAP came to realize that this is way beyond just UFOs. You're never going to solve this mystery just by studying lights in the sky. or craft that appear on a sensor and you can't see with your own eyes. You have to look at the big picture.

And unfortunately, a lot of that gets really weird. So strange, maybe it's almost by design, that it's so strange that people are reluctant to dig into it. That's how many in the Pentagon seemingly reacted to the reports that came in from OSAP, from the Big Lowe organization. It gets really strange. The stuff at Skinwalker is really strange. It's easy to make fun of. It's easy to dismiss because it's so strange, but it happened. It really did happen.

And the reports that have not yet been made public lay it out in very specific detail. And we're going to be getting into that more in the course of the next few months on this program. Absolutely. And I just want to kind of testify here that, like, I think I'm nuts and bolts. You know, my family thinks I'm just fucking nuts. But the thing is, is that I have a resistance. I have a resistance to the high strangers, to the weirdness, to the things. things that seem to happen around the UFO phenomenon. I am cool with Bob Lazar's description of

craft as an example. That's what initially the science of that, how that would work. I am cool with the nuts and bolts. I get an allergy when it comes to the weirder stuff. And, you know, so even with everything I know have seen and been briefed on, I, but I have an allergy to it. So I can understand that the public, you know, kind of trying to be like, that's too weird to be true. We can accept flying saucers. We can accept UFOs. We can accept reverse engineering and governments hiding this. And there being a cover-up.

To some degree, we can accept that. But when it gets weirder, I empathize with the resistance to it. Now, I'm going to try. I'm going to try to look at straight and say, you know, look at it just like I would anything else. But I think hearing from people directly who have direct experience, experiences in these programs, that's going to be the key to understanding that. Well, Dr. James Lakatsky spent 20 years as a rocket scientist at the DIA. That's as nuts and bolts as you get.

Studying rockets, our rockets, other nations rockets, potential threats. Jay Stratton, his friend and colleague, also at the DIA, nuts and bolts guy, reverse engineering, how to figure out technology, figuring out the nature of threats of all sorts. nuts and bolts people who came to understand that this mystery goes way beyond nuts and bolts. Jay Stratton, we've heard from him today in pieces of the conversation that you and I had with him. What we haven't heard is some of his personal experiences and that goes way beyond just studying lights in the sky. And hopefully sometime in the course of 2023, he's going to open up about that. Yeah, well, look, man, I'm looking forward to it. As always, I'm willing to learn.

And, you know, the main thing is I think that having those direct conversations are going to help around the corners for a lot of people, including myself. So anyway, thanks, man. That was really fun. Yeah. All right. Never has so few. Had so much to tell, but could say so little.