Jay Stratton’s First On-Camera Interview Resurfaces, Revealing Pentagon’s Inner Circle on UAP Investigations
Long before Jay Stratton became a recognizable name in UAP disclosure circles, before his book Out of the Shadows reached readers, and before his claims about recovered non-human craft and beings entered the national conversation, he sat down in Huntsville, Alabama, for what would become one of the most consequential unpublished interviews in modern UFO investigative history. Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and veteran investigative journalist George Knapp traveled to meet Stratton in 2022, capturing the former director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force in his very first on-camera interview — footage that has now been released publicly for the first time through Corbell’s Weaponized platform.
The significance of that timing cannot be overstated. In 2022, the broader public had little sense of who Jay Stratton was. Today, he is understood to be a central architect of the United States government’s modern UFO investigative infrastructure — a career intelligence officer whose fingerprints are on some of the most sensitive UAP programs the Pentagon has ever operated, including AAWSAP, AATIP, and the UAP Task Force itself. The release of this archival footage offers a rare window into the thinking of an insider at a moment before public pressure, congressional scrutiny, and disclosure momentum had fully reshaped the official conversation around unidentified aerial phenomena.
The Tic Tac, Gimbal, and GOFAST — From the Inside
In the newly released footage, Stratton speaks in detail about how the Pentagon investigated three of the most discussed UAP encounters in the public record: the Tic Tac incident involving Navy pilots off the coast of California in 2004, and the Gimbal and GOFAST encounters documented in 2015. These three cases became the cornerstone of public UAP discourse after the New York Times’ landmark 2017 investigation, but Stratton’s account offers something the public record has consistently lacked — an insider’s description of how those cases were actually handled within the intelligence community.
Perhaps most striking is Stratton’s confirmation that engineers at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division and Boeing’s Phantom Works — two of the most advanced aerospace research programs in the United States — were consulted during these investigations. The involvement of Skunk Works, historically responsible for some of America’s most classified aviation achievements including the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, suggests that Pentagon investigators were seeking to determine whether these objects could plausibly be attributed to any known human engineering. According to Stratton’s account, they could not.
AAWSAP’s Enduring Legacy
One of the more consequential disclosures in the interview concerns the AAWSAP database — the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, a $22 million Pentagon contract awarded in 2008 and administered in coordination with Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). Stratton confirms that the massive repository of UAP-related data compiled under AAWSAP did not simply disappear when the program was formally ended. Instead, it became a foundational resource for the government investigations that followed, including AATIP and ultimately the UAP Task Force that Stratton himself would lead.
This is not a trivial detail. Critics of the government’s UAP investigative record have long argued that institutional knowledge is routinely lost when programs are shuttered, defunded, or reorganized. Stratton’s confirmation that AAWSAP’s database survived and informed subsequent work suggests a degree of continuity in the government’s engagement with this subject that has rarely been acknowledged publicly. It also raises pointed questions about what exactly is in that database and who currently has access to it.
The “Axelrod” Identification and CIA Allegations
The interview also addresses one of the more intriguing mysteries to emerge from the publication of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the 2021 book co-authored by former Defense Intelligence Agency official James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher, and George Knapp. That book referenced a shadowy government figure known only as “Axelrod,” whose identity had been a subject of considerable speculation in UAP research communities. Stratton is now publicly identified as that individual — a disclosure that places him at the center of on-site investigations at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, a location that has itself become synonymous with anomalous phenomena claims.
Equally significant is the allegation, examined in the interview by Knapp and Corbell, that the Central Intelligence Agency intervened to prevent the transfer of UAP-related materials from Lockheed Martin to Robert Bigelow’s research program. If accurate, this would represent a documented instance of inter-agency friction over the handling of retrieved UAP-related evidence — and would raise serious questions about which government entities ultimately control access to physical materials related to non-human technology. Stratton’s willingness to address this allegation on camera, even in the measured tones of a career intelligence professional, marks it as a claim that warrants serious investigative attention.
A Disclosure Landscape Transformed
The release of this 2022 footage arrives at a moment when the UAP disclosure landscape has shifted dramatically. Congressional hearings featuring whistleblowers, the formation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and a growing body of legislation demanding government transparency have moved these questions from the margins toward the mainstream of national security policy. Against that backdrop, Stratton’s early interview reads as something close to a historical document — a record of what one of the most informed insiders was prepared to say, privately, before the dam began to break.
Stratton’s book Out of the Shadows has extended his public engagement with
