Former Pentagon UFO investigator Jay Stratton claims aliens were recovered alive from the infamous Roswell, New Mexico, crash in 1947, but later died after refusing food and human contact.
Stratton was the chief of air and space warfare for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Now, he is coming forward with some of the shocking information he learned during his time in government.
Jay Stratton has written a new book about his experiences
In Stratton’s new memoir, Out of the Shadows, an unnamed source told him that in 1947, a spaceship broke in two near Roswell. The wreckage and non-human bodies were later purportedly retrieved by military forces. The informant said several occupants were still alive.
“Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact. Communication was limited and often futile,” he writes.
Official government reports said the debris found at the Roswell site was nothing more than the result of military balloon research. The Air Force reiterated the claim in 1994, saying that its investigation linked the debris to Project Mogul, a classified balloon program intended to identify Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force later attributed reports of alien bodies found in the area to anthropomorphic test dummies and other military incidents that occurred well after 1947.
In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel claimed that the weather balloon story had been a cover-up and that the crash debris the Army found was actually extraterrestrial in nature. In 2022, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) sent a sample of the alleged crashed UFO to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“Considering all available evidence, AARO assesses that this specimen is likely a test object, a manufacturing product or byproduct, or a material component of aerospace performance studies to evaluate the properties of [magnesium] alloys,” the report claimed.
Stratton claims several alien spacecrafts have been recovered
Jay Stratton disputes those claims. He says military contractors possess at least a dozen crashed spacecraft and have recovered non-human remains. In his book, he claims that encounters with non-human intelligence and their technology caused some of those involved “to resign, suffer mental breakdowns, and in some cases take their own lives. The truth was just too difficult for them to process.”
Speaking to People, Stratton said, “We’re not the only intelligent life in the universe.”
He added, “We don’t know the intentions of the non-human intelligent life that’s here. We have ongoing UAP activity over sensitive military and nuclear sites. We have flight safety concerns for military and civilian aviation [due to UAP]. The world has the right to know about this.” (UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena. This is what the government now calls UFOs.)
Jay Stratton’s story echoes that of other former government officials
For 10 years, Luis “Lue” Elizondo was the director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was tasked with investigating reports of UFOs. He too recounted a similar story about Roswell in 2024.
In his book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, he claims government officials retrieved “technology and biological objects” after the Roswell crash.
“Our primitive EMP (electromagnetic pulse) device must have somehow disrupted their propulsion bubble, rendering them vulnerable,” he wrote, adding it was “like a 757 losing all power on its jet engines. Four deceased nonhuman bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash.”
A former government intelligence official made similar claims
David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former official with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), said in 2023 that the U.S. government also has alien bodies in its possession.
“These [programs] are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” he said.
Former advisors to Pentagon UFO programs also made these claims
Then, in 2026, Dr. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who worked with the Pentagon’s UFO program for years, asserts that he has personally seen classified images and documents from the U.S. government that purportedly attest to alien life having been discovered in crashed UFOs. In 2020, Davis said he examined materials that “we couldn’t make ourselves” and “off-world vehicles” that humans did not make.
Earlier in 2026, Dr. Hal Puthoff, a former CIA-funded researcher and advisor to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, also claimed that the United States has recovered “four separate types” of alien species from crashed UFOs.
Puthoff said there was a “CIA meeting where people got together and said, ‘Okay, in order to not have people be pursuing this area, let’s go out of our way to spread what we would call now disinformation.’”