Matthew James Sullivan was an American Air Force intelligence officer known by the call sign “Quake.” A Clemson University graduate, he served with organizations including the 17th Training Wing, the 1st Fighter Wing’s 27th Fighter Squadron, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, the National Security Agency, and the Air Force Intelligence Agency. His deployments included U.S. Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command, and he received a Bronze Star for service during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Colleagues remembered Sullivan as an unusually energetic analyst, mentor, reader, and strategist. His career placed him near technical intelligence and foreign-aerospace assessment, but the publicly available obituary does not identify a UAP assignment. Claims that he worked with a private corporation and an intelligence agency on an exotic vehicle emerged later through reporting and statements by people seeking congressional testimony.

Sullivan passed away at his Falls Church, Virginia, home on May 12, 2024, at age 39. Representative Eric Burlison later said Sullivan had been preparing to speak with Congress about alleged legacy programs and called the timing suspicious. No public evidence has established homicide, and the underlying information Sullivan reportedly intended to provide remains unavailable.

His posthumous relevance to whistleblower testimony rests on attributed accounts from Burlison, David Grusch, journalists, and associates. Those accounts justify scrutiny of whether a potential witness was lost before an interview, but they do not establish what Sullivan knew about crash retrieval. A careful biography preserves both parts of the record: an accomplished intelligence career and an unresolved, secondhand UAP narrative that grew after his passing.