The Wolfman of Skinwalker: Jay Stratton’s Claimed Encounter After the Ranch
By Crime Vault Staff
Jay Stratton spent years inside the U.S. government’s most secretive UAP programs. As a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official and later director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, he helped oversee the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) and worked with Robert Bigelow’s team studying Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.
What he and his family claim happened after one of those visits has become one of the more disturbing personal accounts tied to the ranch.
In 2009, Stratton traveled to Skinwalker Ranch. After he returned to the family’s home in the Washington, D.C. area, his wife Michele reported seeing a large, wolf-like creature standing upright on two legs outside their house. According to the account, the animal was leaning against a tree, looked directly at her, and then moved into the woods and disappeared. Days later, their teenage sons also reported seeing the same or a similar creature in the yard.
Stratton has said claw marks were left on the tree. Those marks have never been publicly shown. In his 2026 memoir Out of the Shadows, an additional detail appears: Michele described a light forming in the woods behind the creature. The light grew larger, appeared to contain swirling fog, and the upright wolf stepped into it before both the light and the animal vanished. Some have interpreted the event as a portal-like disappearance.
Stratton and others connected to the AAWSAP effort attributed the sightings to a so-called “hitchhiker” effect — the idea that anomalous phenomena from the ranch followed him home. The account is detailed in James Lacatski’s earlier book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon and expanded in Stratton’s own memoir.
This home incident is separate from the better-known wolf claims that originated on Skinwalker Ranch itself. In the mid-1990s, previous owners Terry and Gwen Sherman reported an extremely large wolf that approached the family, was shot multiple times at close range with little apparent effect, and whose tracks later disappeared. Those ranch stories have been tied for years to local Navajo skinwalker folklore and appear in Hunt for the Skinwalker. Stratton’s claimed upright wolf sighting occurred hundreds of miles away, at his family’s residence, after his visit.
No photographs, video, or independent physical evidence of the Stratton family’s creature have been released. The claims rest entirely on the family’s testimony. Critics have pointed to the complete lack of corroborating evidence. Supporters note that Stratton was a career intelligence official who has publicly described other anomalous experiences connected to his government work, including orbs and shadowy figures at the same home.
Stratton’s memoir, released in October 2026, frames these events as part of a larger pattern he says he encountered while investigating non-human intelligence and UAP. The book also discusses an alleged multi-decade government cover-up and personal toll on his family. Whether the upright wolf was a genuine anomaly, a misidentification, or something else remains unproven. What is clear is that one of the highest-ranking officials ever to run a U.S. government UAP program has publicly linked a bipedal wolf-like creature to his time connected with Skinwalker Ranch.
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