Mike Wets

🛸 The UFO Controversy Jay Stratton Didn't Mention in His Book 🛸 (This isn't a sensationalist post about an alleged dog-killing alien being shot and put in a freezer, but I think it's important.) Real-Deal UAP or a Misidentification? "I brought him up to speed on everything, and he dove in. He knew the significance of the UAP topic. He told me plainly, 'This will be one of my key focuses for the year.'" ~Stratton (And yes, I still recommend Stratton's book and acknowledge that we wouldn't be where we are right now with disclosure if it wasn't for his hard work and...the work of lots of other people. And yes, I know we still have a long way to go. In his 2026 book, "Out of the Shadows," @jaystratton spoke highly of his former boss, Scott Bray, who was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence from 2020-2023.) Regarding the 2022 HPSCI (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) UAP hearing (which I'll get to), Stratton wrote this: Out of the Shadows: "One of the witnesses was my old boss from Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray. In the hearing, he mentioned the UAPTF as if it were still in existence. That’s because it was still operating at the time. "...it made me very happy that DDNI Bray continued to work the issue despite bureaucratic roadblocks created by OUSD(I&S) and the Legacy Program." Stratton did express, "a moment of hesitation" when Bray was first announced as his new boss at ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) in January of 2020. They had worked and collaborated together, professionally, over the years, and yet... Out of the Shadows: "In an ecosystem warped for decades by the Legacy Program, where misinformation, compartmentalization, and hidden agendas were baked into the walls, you didn’t simply trust the person stepping into the chair above you. How could you? Whoever replaced my old boss would immediately become a target for influence, pressure, and manipulation by the very forces working against transparency. So while I believed Scott was a solid choice, I also understood he was inheriting a battlefield he didn’t choose, with enemies he couldn’t yet see. And I was handing him the map. "When he joined, I brought him up to speed on everything, and he dove in. He knew the significance of the UAP topic. He told me plainly, 'This will be one of my key focuses for the year.'" (Key focuses is a good thing. But how did it all play out? Is there any reason to believe Bray was influenced, pressured, or manipulated, "by the very forces working against transparency"? Keep reading. Stratton also wrote that it was Bray who directed him to create the UAP Security Classification Guide (SCG), which establishes what UAP-related information should be classified, at what level, and what information can be publicly released. The controversy I'll cover in this post is related to the 2019 West Coast incidents and the analysis of certain videos. UAP? Or drones? Here are a few excerpts on what Stratton wrote about that.) Out of the Shadows: "Each of the ships in the CSG (Carrier Strike Group ~Joe) were tracking ten to fifteen unique UAP. These were a variety of shapes including spheres and triangles, usually at or around 20,000 feet, typically moving 135–200 miles per hour. "This footage eventually ended up with the media. I was surprised it took as long as it did. The two UAP caught on camera that garnered media attention were a triangle- or pyramid-shaped UAP and a spherical UAP that appeared to drop seamlessly into the water." (Those were the videos put out by Knapp and Corbell in 2021.) Out of the Shadows: "The triangles or pyramids were captured by the SNOOPIE team aboard USS Russell. "As soon as I got the videos, I made my normal rounds to all the security managers to rule out the idea of these UAP being classified programs. "After looking at every explanation imaginable, we concluded that everything caught on radar and on camera was in fact real-deal UAP." ~~~Triangular UAP or Prosaic Drones?~~~ (Now let's go back to the May 17th, 2022 HPSCI UAP hearing featuring Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Ronald Moultrie (retired in 2024), and Stratton's former boss, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray (retired in 2023). Bray spoke about the objects over the USS Russell.) Bray: "In this video, U.S. Navy personnel recorded what appears to be triangles, some flashing, recorded several years ago, off the coast of the United States. This was recorded while the U.S. Navy ship observed a number of small, unmanned aerial systems in the area. And importantly, the video was taken through night-vision goggles with a single-lens reflex camera. These remained unresolved for several years. "Several years later, and off a different coast, U.S. Navy personnel, again, in a swarm of unmanned-aerial systems, and again, through night-vision goggles and an SLR camera, recorded this image. But this time, other U.S. Navy assets also observed unmanned aerial systems nearby. "And we're now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to Unmanned Aerial Systems in the area. The triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night-vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera." (In other words, he's saying they're "reasonably confident" they were drones, and the triangular appearance (on both coasts and in both incidents) was due to the equipment the video was shot on/through.) Bray: "I don't mean to suggest that everything that we observe is identifiable, but this is a great example of how it takes considerable effort to understand what we're seeing in the examples that we are able to collect." (Is he saying that the UAPTF with Stratton, Taylor, Grusch, and others, didn't make enough of an effort to determine what those objects were?) Bray: "As a lifelong intelligence professional, I'm impatient. I want immediate explanations for this as much as anyone else. However, understanding can take significant time and effort. It's why we've endeavored to concentrate on this data-driven process to drive fact-based results." (Again, is he suggesting that the UAPTF (which wasn't official yet) didn't spend enough time or exert enough effort on investigating this case? Did they not concentrate on data and facts? How did Stratton not write about what Bray said at the hearing regarding the triangles? If he does more interviews, it needs to be brought up. ) ~From the same HPSCI Hearing~ @SenAdamSchiff: "With respect to the second two videos showing the small triangles, the hypothesis is that those are commercial drones that, because of the use of night-vision goggles, appear like triangles. Is that the operating assessment?" Bray: "Some type of drone, some type of unmanned aerial system. And it is simply that that light source resolves itself through the night-vision goggles onto the SLR camera as a triangle." Schiff: "And, have we - in order to prove that hypothesis - flown a drone and observed it with that same technology to see whether we can reproduce the effect?" Bray: "UAP Task Force is aware of studies that have done that." (Are Stratton, Taylor and Grusch aware of that? Let's see those studies. In the book, Stratton details how they went to great extremes to capture as much data as they could and analyze it thoroughly.) Out of the Shadows: "The analytical process at Dahlgren spanned several months, during which our ONI analytics team stepped in to enhance capabilities, notably developing an innovative data processing technique that enabled the visualization of radar tracks from an overhead perspective, akin to a bird’s-eye view. "We had numerous UAP tracked by multiple independent radar systems operating in different frequency bands. In this case, the corroboration was rock-solid." (And with all of that, they were fooled by drones, mistook them for triangles/pyramids, and labelled them UAP? That's, basically, what Bray was saying. ~ Several weeks later, in early June of 2022, @g_knapp and @JeremyCorbell interviewed Stratton and asked about the 2019 West Coast incidents and the objects videotaped by Navy personnel.) Stratton: "They're unidentified." (And the objects over the USS Russell?) Corbell: "You've seen [that footage]. They played it in Congress. Is the shape (pyramid/triangle) that you see in the green footage...is that an artifact of the iris?" Stratton: "To my knowledge, based on three PhDs...the shape in that video is the shape that you're seeing - and that is a pyramid - and that it's self-illuminating. The illumination is coming from the object itself. That's my understanding based on what I had from the [UAP] Task Force. I got three PhD people to look at it." ("That's my understanding" doesn't exude confidence to me. As in: That's my understanding but it could be wrong.) Corbell: "Were they like, optical physicists?" Stratton: "Yes. Because there might be an easy explanation. And get it to the right people." (As you'll see, Travis Taylor was one of those optical physicists who did the analysis.) Stratton: "And, when it came down to sensor performance, right? And somebody saying, 'Oh, the gimbal on the FLIR changes in this regime of flight.' Cool, but the guys that made it (Raytheon) told me a different answer, right?" (He's referring to the Gimbal UAP video and whether or not the craft was rotating or the rotation was caused by the inner optics of the ATFLIR, which was made by Raytheon.) Stratton: "So I'd always try to go to the best expert I could get on anything, to give me their answer. Because then it's not Jay answering it, it's that person answering that question." (Did the, "analytical process at Dahlgren," [which] "spanned several months," also analyze at the green-pyramid video, or was it just the three optical physicists who looked at that?) ~ Finally, here's what Stratton said in 2023 at AlienCon (AC). Stratton at AC: "And, it really, really did upset both Travis and I when we were watching that [HPSCI] hearing [with Bray and Moultrie]." (And yet, Stratton expressing that emotion is nowhere to be found in the book.) Stratton at AC: "And I can also promise you that if I were back clinching (Not sure if he said, “clinching” ~Joe) that hearing or front-seating that hearing, I could have told them about the Malmstrom incident. I could have told them just about any incident. They just weren’t briefed and prepared to the level that I would have prepped them. And that was a little bit, probably, by design." (By design? Did the Legacy-Program folks make sure Bray and Moultrie weren't briefed or educated enough on the UAP subject? Doubtful. I'm not sure how they could even do that. And seeing the, "hidden hand of The Legacy Program" suggested as the possible culprit for so many things, like Stratton does in his book, is a bit much, IMO. And, remember, Stratton says that he brought Bray up to speed on UAP and he (Bray) was going to make UAP one of his key focuses for 2020. So what happened? I'd love to hear Stratton's thoughts on that.) Taylor: "It felt like it was by design. When Jay and I were sitting at Radiance (Technologies, where they both worked) in the conference room and watching the HPSCI meeting as it was taking place... And when they start talking about the Russell (alleged pyramid/triangle) incident, I was like, 'That’s not what…we did not brief them that way. That is not what we told them.'" (So, again: What happened? Did The Legacy Program influence Bray to say what he did in the hearing regarding the West Coast incidents? That sounds ridiculous to me. Why debunk videos that aren't that impressive in the first place and then admit that other UAP events are truly unidentified, like Bray did during the same hearing? That makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm missing something? Stratton? Bueller? Maybe the analysis done by the UAP Task Force experts was wrong and those specific UAP were actually drones? What does Bray think about the 2019 events in their entirety? All drones? And again, why didn't Stratton talk about this in the book? Here's an excerpt from my blog about Knapp, Stratton, Taylor and AlienCon 2023, which features some technical analysis from Taylor and a look at the debunker argument related to the USS Russell video. I'll include a few excerpts, and if you want to see the images and read the entire blog, I'll provide a link in the replies. When it's me writing, I'll just put: "Murgia." ~ Taylor: "Well, so the idea (a theory some folks have put forth on ufo twitter. ~Joe) is that the night-vision goggles that were used, the NVG, the second generation, that was used on the Russell, that SNOOPIE guy had a triangular aperture in it and he had bokeh. Well, maybe you can get one of those and tear it apart, if you want to, but they’re expensive and I don’t wanna tear ’em apart. "They are likely, you know, triangular or trapezoidal, or something along that nature. But you can do that with any type of out-of-focus error. My first PhD, by the way, was in optical science and engineering, and I took so many Fourier transforms of optical images and learned that, to get that PhD, that I was pretty danged good at it. "So the thing up close, does have some sort of triangular shape to it. I don’t know that it’s a pyramid shape, because it’s two dimensional, right? The TV screen is two dimensional. And also, when you do heat analysis on it, you see it had bright spots on each corner. I don’t know what that is, I’m just saying it had bright spots on each corner. Should I tell…can I tell the rest of it (looking at Stratton)?" (I believe Stratton gave a look to Taylor, as if to say. “It’s up to you.” ~Joe) Stratton: "My company did an in-depth analysis on this." (We've never seen this analysis. ~Joe 2026) Knapp: "Aw, come on." Stratton: "We got a lot of answers." Taylor: "Well…so, we…" (The crowd urged them to share details) Taylor: "Here’s the problem. And you guys got to understand the sticky situation we’re in. So Jay and I, and a few others, we wrote the security-classification guide when we were on the UAP Task Force, and none of this was classified. None of it was. But then, when we left, the new group (AARO) is going in and trying to backdate and change the classifications of some of the stuff, and it could catch us in a trap. And so, we have to be very careful about where we go with some of it, and it’s just been weird, it’s been really weird." Knapp: "Is it fair to say that you had access to a great deal of information that has not been made public, that can’t be, as a matter of national security?" Stratton: "Absolutely. We had a much bigger picture, obviously, you know, when we were briefing all of the seniors, the briefing was very detailed and very…highly footnoted, I guess you could say, right? And Travis knows this. I went over, every time, with Congress or anyone else, with my ducks in a row, right? I would not have gone and briefed Congress that I believe these triangular-shaped objects to be – at least one real and some stars – without my ducks in a row, and be able to answer every question that’s thrown at me." ~ Murgia: "I don’t know what the object over the USS Russell was, or if it was triangular in shape, but the most important point is that it was flying in restricted/sensitive airspace and it should not be there. Stratton and Taylor have said they had access to other data, which, unfortunately, none of us have seen. Also remember, this was one incident on one ship." (There's a lot more. ~Joe 2026) Murgia: "For a more extensive look at the July 2019 West Coast events, I’ll once again urge you to read or listen to the interview Corbell and Knapp did with active-duty Navy commander, John 'Guts' Gutierrez, which included segments of interviews with sailors on board the USS Paul Hamilton. When judging 2019, I’d make sure to give proper weight to what was said in that interview and what Stratton and Taylor said in this AlienCon interview by Knapp. Also remember, 2019 wasn’t Stratton and Taylor looking for UFOs. According to Stratton, this all started when…" "I got a classified email from the carrier-strike-group commander saying, 'Jay, we’ve got some UAP.' And I said, 'Got it.' I had a guy on board his carrier within a day, in order to start educating, start collecting data, start getting the folks talking, going to each ship, via helicopter, and bringing everything back to DC., immediately." ~Jay Stratton ~ Stratton: So, I had access to that, I had other things, as Travis said, you know? The carrier strike group has a multitude of sensors, and, I mean, we have other ways to reach across the government." Travis Taylor: "Two other optical PhDs." Stratton: "Yeah, I had to be independent, so I was a lot about, you know, going in with the data and saying, 'Hey, I have two other optical PhDs in other organizations look at this, without even knowing the other’s looking at it.' And just keep it completely separate." ~ Taylor Tweet: "So when the [night-vision goggles] focus adjusted to the object very near it has subtense and appears to be in focus and thus the stars go out of focus. First second or so stars are IN FOCUS meaning Airy disk. Then the object is focused on making the stars blurry but not the moving object. So…???" Murgia Tweet: "Do you know the conclusion of the other two optical physicists on the triangular object?" Taylor Tweet: "Yes. We all came to same conclusions. The NVG appears to go into focus on the moving object suggesting a triangular shape but there is still enough focus error to be 100% confident in shape. The shape was NEVER greatly important to us. That’s the strawman obfuscation. "By enough I meant too much btw." (The shape is rather important if you're going to brief those objects as triangular or pyramid in shape and Bray is saying the shape was the product of the night-vision goggles and camera. ~Joe 2026) ~ Murgia: "In a blog published by 'Liberation Times,' on May 8th, 2023, Pentagon spokesperson, Susan Gough, added some comments about the 2019 events and the alleged triangle-shaped craft above the USS Russell:" Gough: “As noted by Scott Bray, Deputy Director for Naval Intelligence, during a congressional hearing in May 2022, the UAPTF was reasonably confident that the triangles correlated to UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems) in the area, given that the triangles appeared in videos from different occasions where U.S Navy assets observed a number of small UAS nearby." ("Reasonably confident"?) Gough: “As with all UAP cases it inherited, AARO is reviewing the associated data of past cases within its newly developed analytic framework. These triangles may be a combination of known sources, including UAS, and AARO is using its newly implemented analytic framework to definitively determine the sources and peer review the results before officially closing the case." (Not sure if we ever heard back from AARO on that. ~Joe 2026) Gough: “As Mr. Bray also noted during his testimony, we can confirm that the objects observed in this case appeared to the viewer as triangular shapes due to the angle of observation and optical system used. As part of the analytic framework, the source of the lights are currently being reviewed against the star/planet alignment at the time, air traffic and other likely UAS systems. As we have stated previously, there is not one solution for all UAP.” (Confirm? They can't confirm that. It's a hypothesis. ~Joe 2026) ~ Back to Knapp, Stratton and Taylor at AlienCon, as Taylor comments on how he felt after watching the HPSCI hearing with Moultrie and Bray… Taylor: "And it seems odd. It felt like we’ve been practicing all year and got to the playoffs and we lost like, you know, forty-two to nothing. I mean, that’s how it felt. It was real weird, a kick in the gut. And it’s one of those things that, it seems like…the question is: Why? You know, I’ve never been a believer in conspiracies, but also, I’m not a big believer in coincidences, right? "And the fact that, now suddenly, all of a sudden, there’s all these balloon things happening. And, 'Oh, we didn’t know how to track it, and the UAPTF didn’t know what they were doing. They’re a bunch of morons, and so, it was all balloons and it wasn’t UFOs.' Well, we told them that you couldn’t chase the balloons until you fixed the damn radars! And so, it really seems very timely, and almost directed, but I can’t bring myself to believe in a conspiracy." Stratton: "If I got everything on my wish list, we’d be in a much different place right now. Much different." ~~~ Final Thoughts... Stratton says he personally brought Scott Bray up to speed on UAP and praised his work in his new book. But in 2023, Stratton and Travis Taylor revealed how upset they were by Bray's 2022 congressional testimony, particularly his assessment of the USS Russell's alleged triangular UAP. Taylor even suggested the witnesses may have been inadequately briefed "by design." So what happened? Was the UAPTF's analysis wrong? If so, what else did they get wrong? Was Bray given different information? Was he told to debunk that video? And why did Stratton leave this controversy out of his book?