Last week Kenny and I spent a night in a haunted barbershop in Estes Park. When you pack up the gear and drive home after something like that, there’s a question ghost hunters half-joke about: did anything follow you?

The man who ran the Pentagon’s UFO task force says something followed him.

That’s the story I told in this week’s Campfire Story, and I want to go further with it here. The timing is good, because on Friday the Pentagon released a new batch of UFO files, and one of them is a report on the same patch of Utah ground where his story starts.

Who Jay Stratton is

This isn’t a guy with a podcast and a night-vision camera. According to a review of his new book in The Black Crow, Stratton joined the Office of Naval Intelligence in 2001 and later the Defense Intelligence Agency. There he created AAWSAP, the program that led to AATIP. He became the first director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force and reached the Senior Executive Service in 2018.

His memoir, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life, came out October 13. The Goodreads listing describes AAWSAP as the first official U.S. government UAP investigation since Project Blue Book. It also says the book covers “the toll the work took on him and his family.”

That last part is where this gets strange.

The hitchhiker effect

Before the task force, Stratton was part of the government-funded investigation of Skinwalker Ranch in northeastern Utah. That property has a decades-long reputation for lights in the sky, strange animals, and stranger stories.

Researchers have a name for what some visitors report afterward: the “hitchhiker effect,” the idea that whatever is happening at the ranch can follow people home. According to the Black Crow review, that’s what Stratton describes at his family’s house in Southern Maryland. He reports footsteps with no source, knocking at night, and a front door found open after it had been locked. He also describes a thermostat that changed on its own and the dog’s name tag disappearing and reappearing.

Dick Russell’s review puts it more bluntly. He writes that after Stratton’s early Skinwalker work, his home was “basically invaded by alien beings and orbs,” frightening his wife, two sons, and the family dog.

The wolf at the tree line

The account I built the short around is in Chapter 20, as summarized in The Black Crow. One night, with Jay away, his wife Michele looked out toward the tree line behind the house. She saw an upright, black-furred, wolf-like figure, about seven feet tall, with golden eyes and clawed paws. It scraped a tree and stepped into a small, glowing orb. Days later, the couple’s sons reported seeing a similar creature.

The first time this story was told

This isn’t the first time the wolf story has been in print. In 2021, three people from inside the program published Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: James Lacatski, the DIA analyst who managed it; Colm Kelleher, the biochemist who ran day-to-day operations for the contractor; and journalist George Knapp. According to Unidentified Phenomena, the Defense Department reviewed the book and cleared it for release on May 11, 2021.

One official in that book appears only under a pseudonym, “Jonathan Axelrod.” The book describes him as “a senior aerospace engineer in Naval Intelligence” and “the lead investigator of the now infamous ‘Tic Tac’ case” who visited the ranch in July 2009. Those quotes are from researcher Bill Chalker’s 2021 write-up.

The book calls Axelrod and his family “the ‘poster children’ for the eruption of anomalies in the home.” It says his wife and then-teenage children were “subjected to nightmarish ‘dogmen’ appearing in their backyard.” It also describes colored orbs floating through the house and yard, “black shadow people standing over their beds when they awoke,” and footsteps on the stairs. “Axelrod and his family were certain that the trigger for this transformation was his first trip to Skinwalker Ranch.”

For five years, people guessed who Axelrod was. Now the Black Crow review identifies Stratton as the source, and his memoir tells the same story under his own name.

I’ve read Skinwalkers at the Pentagon myself. On the core of it, the two accounts line up: a wife who sees an upright, wolf-like creature at the edge of the yard, and children who see it in the days after.

Some details differ, and I’d rather show you that than smooth it over. The 2021 book places the house in “suburban Virginia,” while the review of the new memoir puts it in Southern Maryland. A pseudonym exists to keep someone from being identified, so a blurred detail in a Pentagon-cleared book isn’t shocking. But it’s a difference worth knowing about.

None of this makes the creature real. It does mean the story wasn’t invented to sell a memoir. It was on the record, in a government-cleared book, five years before Stratton put his name to it.

What we know, and what we don’t

Here’s where I put my reporter hat back on.

What’s documented: Stratton held the jobs he says he held, the government funded a study of that ranch, and he has now put his family’s experiences in a book under his own name.

What’s not documented: anything about the creature. These are his family’s accounts, and I’ve only read them secondhand, through reviews. Coverage at SFL Media notes that the personal accounts are unverified and that no broadly accepted scientific evidence supports them. That’s fair.

I’ll also say this. A senior intelligence official with a career on the line doesn’t usually volunteer that a seven-foot wolf-thing visited his kitchen door. The Black Crow’s reviewer, Ambrose Andreano, has real criticisms of the book. Still, he calls Stratton “a genuine and good man who is trying to do the right thing.” People can be sincere and still be wrong about what they saw. Both things can be true, and you can make up your own mind.

The Pentagon’s own ranch file

Now the timing. On October 23, the Pentagon published its seventh batch of UFO records. EarthSky counts 28 PDFs, and the program behind them, PURSUE, started releasing material on May 8, per Above the Norm News.

One of those files, DOW-UAP-D174, is an April 2010 report from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. BAASS was the contractor behind AAWSAP, the program Stratton helped create. EarthSky reports that its 2008 contract was initially worth $10 million. Above the Norm describes the report as roughly 60 pages on a property in the Fort Duchesne area. UNX News identifies it as Skinwalker Ranch.

According to Above the Norm, investigators did interviews, mapping, and photography, and set up seven wildlife cameras. In one account, an animal chased by dogs left hair on a barbed-wire fence, and the samples were submitted for DNA analysis. Above the Norm also notes the report “does not establish that the material originated from an unknown species.”

That’s the honest shape of it. The file proves the government paid people to go out there, listen, and collect. It doesn’t prove what they were listening to.

Read the files with me Tuesday

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 27, at 7 PM Mountain, I’m going live to read the Release 07 documents on screen. That includes the Utah ranch report and an AARO memo about two federal agents who watched a silent, matte-black triangle over a Western ridge. EarthSky quotes the file: “Absolute acoustic silence persisted throughout the high-velocity phase.” Bring your questions, and your own Colorado triangle sightings.

And since it’s Halloween week, we’ll end the night in the spirit of the season. My co-host, Estes Park Bigfoot researcher Kenny Collins, will join me to trade the scariest local stories we’ve ever heard. Pull up a chair.

Coming up: a trip south

One more heads-up. I’m heading to the Caribbean soon, and the camera is coming with me. Every island has its own stories, and I’ll be bringing back some special reports on the strange things people there talk about. More when I’m back home.

If you want more of this, subscribe to The Colorado Switchblade so every companion piece lands in your inbox. On YouTube, please like, subscribe, and share The Colorado X-Files. It’s the biggest thing that helps an independent show grow.

The Colorado X-Files shop has tees, hoodies, mugs, hats, and slate coasters I engrave myself here in Estes Park. Every purchase funds the investigations.

Got a strange Colorado story? The tip line is coloradoxfiles@gmail.com.

On October 13, Kenny Collins and I walked into a barbershop in downtown Estes Park with an EMF meter, a spirit box, a thermal camera and a laser grid. It was cold, misty and raining. It was also my first real ghost hunt.

Kenny has done more of these than he can count. He’s investigated the Elkhorn Lodge and the old movie theater here, and there’s a whole…

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If you’ve watched our second Campfire Story, you already know the legend. A prospector high above Fall River cracks open crystals deep inside his mine and lets something out. On cloudy nights a glowing blue mist drifts down through the trees. In the morning there are three-toed claw marks on the spruce and dead animals around the cabin. In the end, the …

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When I wrote here last, The Colorado X-Files was one episode old. I promised a longform companion piece after every episode, and then the show ran faster than my typing could keep up with. So consider this me catching you up, all at once, and making good on that promise going forward.

Here’s the short version. In about a month, we’ve put out three more full-length pieces, a run of breaking-news shorts, a brand-new illustrated series of Colorado campfire stories, a field report from a Colorado MUFON meeting, and our first-ever merch shop. Some of it was planned. Some of it happened because a good story walked up and we couldn’t help ourselves.

The full-length episodes

Chuck Zukowski, uncut. Our conversation with Chuck for episode one ran long, and most of it never made the final cut. So we released the whole interview on its own: What Are They Doing With ALL the Blood and Organs? Chuck Zukowski on Cattle Mutilation. If you read my last piece and wanted more of the engineer who got let go as a reserve deputy for disagreeing with his own department about a dead horse, this is an hour of him, in his own words.

Can a $500 backyard radar catch a UFO? For episode 1.5, I sat down with David Dominguez Hooper, a UC Berkeley–trained engineer who worked on autonomous drones and LiDAR before founding ELDÆON. His company builds passive radar sensors, and his plan is a citizen detection network: ordinary people watching their own skies, instead of waiting for the government to tell us what’s up there. It’s the most hopeful idea I’ve run into in this whole field, and it’s the kind of thing I want this show to keep looking for. Can This $500 Device Detect UFOs?

Where Kenny saw Bigfoot. This is the one I’d been waiting to film. Kenny started hunting Sasquatch as a 14-year-old in Nebraska after seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek. On January 7, 2013, on a snowy morning in the hills above the Big Thompson River, about five miles outside Estes Park, he says he found himself staring at one behind a rock. He also says he felt it telling him to go away, and he went. We walked the site together, and he tells the whole story, including why he left. I also told a couple of my own stories on camera for the first time: two silent black triangles I saw as an EMT in Montana, and a night of lights over my family’s home near Glacier. Bigfoot Kenny Takes Us to Where He First Saw Sasquatch

Breaking news, in under a minute

When the government releases UAP files now, it does it in batches, and Colorado keeps turning up in them. So we started a run of short videos that get the Colorado angle to you fast. The first covered Colorado’s appearance in the sixth UAP document drop.

Then came a two-parter on black triangles. Part one walks through FBI files on two black triangles reported over Colorado Springs. Part two is personal: I’ve seen one. I tell the story of the two silent black triangles with red lights I watched around 3:30 in the morning near Dickey Lake, Montana, while I was working as an EMT, with my EMS manager right beside me.

The shorts live on the channel’s Shorts tab, and they’re the fastest way to keep up between full episodes.

Campfire Stories: a new illustrated series

This is the project I’m proudest of this month. Campfire Stories is a series of short animated films in a field-sketchbook style, each one a strange true story told the way you’d tell it around a fire. I narrate and report every one; the illustration is built with AI tools, and every script is checked against the record the same way I’d check an article. And like everything else on the show, each one separates what’s documented from what’s just a good story.

#1: He Testified to Congress. Now He Says Reptilians. In 2023, decorated Air Force intelligence veteran David Grusch told Congress under oath that the U.S. has been hiding crashed non-human craft. On Joe Rogan’s show this fall, he relayed a colleague’s account of American troops meeting survivors of a crash. Grusch says he never saw it himself and has shown no evidence, and the Pentagon’s UAP office says it has found nothing. We tell you exactly that.

#2: The Blue Mist of Estes Park. In the early 1900s, a prospector named William “Miner Bill” Currence worked a claim high on Mount Chapin, in what’s now Rocky Mountain National Park, and swore he’d released a glowing blue mist from crystals deep in his mine. The legend says it left three-toed tracks and came for him. The paper trail tells a different story, and it’s sitting in the Park Service’s mining history and the Estes Park Museum’s records.

#3: The Airport Statue That Killed Its Creator. A 32-foot blue mustang with glowing red eyes rears over Peña Boulevard outside Denver International Airport. In 2006, a section of it broke loose and killed the sculptor who made it, Luis Jiménez. Travelers call it Blucifer.

More are coming all through October. If you’ve got a Colorado story that belongs around the fire, send it my way.

Joining Colorado MUFON, and a scientist with a big claim

I’ve joined Colorado MUFON, the state chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, which meets monthly in Centennial. On October 10, I went to hear Dr. Jim Segala, a physicist who spent years as chief scientist on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. His claim: close encounters with the phenomenon leave marks on the human body, and he says he has the data.

He presented his experiencer study, the skin and hearing effects people report, and a 2010 Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, released through FOIA, that describes burns and neurological effects he says match what his participants report. He also showed sensor data from contact sessions, including one in Bailey, Colorado.

The next evening I walked the Lake Estes path and recorded my honest take, as someone who’s had his own experiences. Some of it lined up with things I’ve felt myself. Some of it felt more like a pitch for his app and sensor boxes than a deep dive into the data. His work hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, and I say so. Skinwalker Ranch Scientist Says UFO Encounters Leave Marks on the Body

Thank you to Colorado MUFON for letting us use clips from their livestream of the talk.

The Colorado X-Files shop is open

We opened a shop, and I’ll be honest about why. Making this show costs real money, and I’d rather it be paid for by people who love these stories than by anyone with an agenda. Every purchase goes straight back into the investigations.

The designs come straight out of the stories. The Blue Mist of Estes Park, with the miner’s cabin from our Campfire Story. Blucifer, Denver’s demon horse. A Sasquatch Research Unit design for Kenny’s corner of the Big Thompson. They’re on tees, heavyweight hoodies, mugs, tumblers, bottles, hats and a CX beanie, all done in a vintage park-service look, because that’s what Colorado feels like to me.

And then there are the coasters. I engrave every slate coaster myself, by laser, in my basement workshop here in Estes Park. There’s a UFO design and a Sasquatch design, both carrying the line that’s become our motto: I Believe. It’s the other side of the coin from “I Want to Believe,” and I think it says something about how far this community has come since The X-Files first aired.

Shop The Colorado X-Files

What’s next

This week Kenny and I go back out to film the second half of our Sugar Shack episode: the actual ghost hunt. The Sugar Shack is a historic building here in Estes Park, home to a candy shop and a barbershop called the Vortex. I think it’s one of the most haunted places in one of the most haunted mountain towns in America, and hardly anyone knows about it. After that comes our Halloween special.

And I’m recommitting to the promise I made in my last piece: a longform companion article here for every full episode, going deeper than the video can. You’ll get the next one without the month-long wait.

If you’ve seen something strange in Colorado, or you know a story we should be chasing, the tip line is open: coloradoxfiles@gmail.com.

If you’ve enjoyed any of this, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the channel, like what you watch, and share it with someone who’d love it. For a small independent show, that’s what keeps the lights on, and the flashlights off.

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The Colorado X-Files: Why I’m Done Writing About What Divides Us

In September of 1967, on a ranch outside Alamosa, a three-year-old Appaloosa was found dead in a field. She’d been stripped to the bone from the neck up — no blood on the ground, no tracks leading in or out. The papers called her Snippy. Her real name was Lady, and nearly sixty years later,…

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