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.
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