A former head of the Pentagon’s UFO task force says some beings recovered at Roswell were alive when found. Jay Stratton makes the claim in his new memoir, Out of the Shadows, and it has been making the rounds this week.
What Stratton Says
Stratton was chief of air and space warfare for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. In the book, he says an unnamed source told him that in 1947 a spacecraft broke in two near Roswell, New Mexico, and that military forces later retrieved the wreckage and non-human bodies. By the source’s account, several occupants were still alive. Some were dead on arrival, and others, allegedly, lived for a time but died after refusing food and contact. He writes that communication was limited and often futile.
He goes further. Stratton says military contractors hold at least a dozen crashed craft and non-human remains, and that encounters with this material led some people involved to resign, suffer breakdowns, or take their own lives. In an interview with People, he said we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and that the world has a right to know about UAP activity over sensitive military and nuclear sites.
The Official Story
The Air Force has long said the Roswell debris came from military balloon research. In 1994 it tied the material to Project Mogul, a classified balloon program meant to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and it later attributed reports of alien bodies to anthropomorphic test dummies and military incidents that happened well after 1947. Retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel said in 1978 that the balloon explanation was a cover and the debris was extraterrestrial. In 2022, AARO sent a sample of the alleged crashed craft to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. AARO’s assessment was that it was likely a test object, a manufacturing product or byproduct, or a component used in aerospace studies of magnesium alloys.
He Is Not Alone
Stratton’s account sits alongside several others from former officials. Lue Elizondo, who spent a decade running the Pentagon’s AATIP program, said in his 2024 book Imminent that officials recovered technology and biological material after Roswell. David Grusch, a former intelligence official, said in 2023 that the government holds non-human craft. Astrophysicist Eric Davis said in 2026 that he has personally seen classified images and documents suggesting life was found in crashed craft. Researcher Hal Puthoff has said four types of alien species have been recovered, and also alluded to a CIA meeting about spreading disinformation.
The Catch
My head says 60 percent open. It is hard to ignore a chorus of former insiders saying similar things, and Stratton’s role is not a small one. But the chorus has a weakness. Most of these accounts trace back to people who say they were told, not to documents or physical evidence anyone can examine. Stratton’s own source is unnamed, and the memoir does not offer a way to check the claim. Anecdotes passed through several people tend to get tidier with each retelling.
The part that would change my mind is simple: something the public can inspect. Until then, this is one more entry in a long and fascinating line of Roswell claims. It does remind me why UFO disclosure fights keep coming back to the same question, which is whether any of these people will ever be allowed to show us anything.
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