Ryan Graves flew fighter jets for the Navy, but his toughest mission has been giving credence to UAP sightings
From Massachusetts to the Navy: Ryan Graves’ journey
As a child growing up in Baldwinville, Mass near Wachusett Mountain, Ryan Graves said he read a lot of science fiction, but didn’t believe in unidentified flying objects.
“It wasn’t really a topic I concerned myself with,” Graves said in a recent interview. “It wasn’t something I considered to be real.”
To him, UFOs were “make believe” and part of a “cultural phenomenon.” That is, until he grew up to become an F-18 fighter pilot in the US Navy and his squadron, the Red Rippers, began encountering strange objects in their airspace while training near Virginia Beach in 2014.
In one particular incident, two members of the Red Rippers reported having to take evasive action after witnessing a “dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere.” According to congressional testimony
Graves gave nearly a decade later, the pilots were forced to terminate their mission. The squadron submitted a safety report, but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report sightings of UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) as they’ve been rebranded by researchers in recent years. Over time, Graves said his crew experienced multiple similar near misses.
“It could have taken out an aircraft,” Graves said.
Today, Graves runs Americans for Safe Aerospace, a military pilot-led nonprofit and the world’s largest UAP advocacy organization which he founded in 2023. The organization works to reduce the stigma of reporting UAP sightings, Graves said, and has been in contact with more than 1,000 military and commercial pilots who have reported seeing UAPs. The outfit helps the FBI investigate sightings, and has referred more than 80 cases to the bureau for further investigation.
“It’s absolutely critical that we pay attention to this,” Graves said.
The Red Rippers and early UAP encounters
Graves joined the Navy in 2009, shortly after graduating from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He soon found himself piloting a Super Hornet tactical aircraft with the famed Red Rippers, the Navy’s oldest continuously active fighter squadron which was commissioned in 1927.
The Rippers didn’t start encountering UAPs until about 2014, when the group was sent to Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia. Graves said his squadron had recently upgraded its radar systems when the phenomena began.
“As soon as we did that we began to detect these objects, at a minimum, with our radar system, pretty much whenever we were flying, they were out there as well,” Graves said. “The jets with the older radars, because it took a while for them to all be completely upgraded, they were not able to detect the objects.”
At first, Graves said, they thought it was a radar error or a bug with the software. But then they started to correlate the detections across multiple sensors in the jets as they got closer to the objects, including electrical optical systems, infrared systems, missile systems, and others.
“You can’t have a radar glitch affecting the other sensors,” Graves said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
He continued, “That’s when we had to realize that these were truly physical objects, not just radar errors, and that’s when we tried to visually ID one by finding one that was stationary and [then] trying to slow down and fly up close to it. … But when we did that, at least initially, even with all our sensors [telling] us exactly where it is, and all that being pumped into our augmented reality helmet, telling us exactly where to look, we still couldn’t visually find these objects.”
Seeing a UAP in real time wasn’t easy, Graves said. “We’d turn back around after coming past it, and we’d reacquire it on our sensors, but it would have been slightly displaced,” he said. “And that was kind of the status quo—we’d see them completely stationary, we’d see them all the way up to Mach 1.2 [or] 1.1. … We’d often see them in the .6 to .8 Mach range, which is about 250 to 350 knots” (more than 300 miles per hour in some cases).
Sometimes the UAP would seem to be meandering around, while other times they would be moving in circular patterns, Graves said. Sometimes they’d be bombing east, at least the fast ones. He added that there would be about three to eight in a working area, apparently operating independently of each other.
What military pilots saw in US airspace
One day, as two of the Red Rippers were flying, one of the UAPs flew in between the two jets, which were about 100 to 150 feet apart, and came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft, Graves said.
“He described it as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere,” he recalled.
The pilot canceled the flight. When he returned and told Graves what happened, they had to file an official safety report on the incident, because it was considered a near midair collision.
“That’s when it kind of bubbled up … out of the backroom chatter and into the, OK, what’s going on here? conversation,” Graves said. “The safety officer did an [investigation and] started asking other pilots [and] did a survey of how many other people had encountered these objects, because the claim was this was something that was recurring, and as it turned out there were four other near-midairs that had occurred in the past month that went unreported. That says a lot, the fact that those went unreported among … that level of professionals. … Even though they were near mid-airs, [they] were obviously reportable incidents.”
Many of the pilots, Graves recalled, didn’t know how to deal with UAPs because they didn’t know what they were. Eventually, the Rippers simply tried to avoid them.
“We cancelled training because there were too many of them in the areas,” Graves said. “Or we’d move into a different sub-area if one was available, and that was that.”
Still, he said the Rippers kept seeing the UAPs. They saw them over Jacksonville when they were preparing for deployment, and also potentially in the MIddle East when they went overseas.
“It appeared we were seeing them when we were on deployment too, but we couldn’t inspect them because we were too busy and on such a narrow path where we were flying, we couldn’t just zip over and check something out,” Graves said. “It was very congested airspace too, so it was hard to say.”
Graves said he never saw a UAP with his own eyes while he was flying.
“I tried, I tried, but it just wasn’t my experience,” he said. However, he did spot them “on the sensor systems. … We probably all only got a handful of chances to do it, and then the ones that [happened] later were basically accidental ones where people were uninformed of this being an issue, or had a near mid-air [collision] from something they didn’t even detect on their systems.”
UAPs go mainstream
In 2017, the New York Times broke a story about the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that spent years investigating reports of UAPs. The story included two videos, released by the Department of Defense’s threat ID program, of UAPs that the Red Rippers encountered off the coast of Jacksonville.
The videos became known as “Go Fast” and “Gimbal,” and have become two of the most famous UAP sightings ever recorded. The former appears to show an object flying over the water as the Super Hornet attempts to get a lock on it. “Whoa! Got It! Ha ha ha! Whoo hoo!” an unknown man is heard shouting. “What the fuck is that?”
The “Gimbal” video, which was shot a few weeks before “Go Fast,” shows an object tilting like a spinning top pitching against the wind. The pilot says there is a fleet of objects, but only one is seen in the clip. Two men are heard speaking and one of them says that he thinks it’s a drone. It moves fast against the wind, and then, to the astonishment of the pilots, begins rotating. “Look at that thing!” one of them shouts.
Graves said he was working as a naval flight instructor in Mississippi when the story broke. He hadn’t thought about the UAP incidents in a while, but recognized the videos his squadron had recorded. What stood out in the article, Graves said, was how the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program faced the same hurdles his squadron faced.
“For me it seemed like the issues that we were having, that we assumed would get resolved, had ended up somewhere in the Pentagon and they had hit their own roadblocks, and this was essentially their cry for help,” Graves said.
According to the Times, that is basically what happened. The program was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, from deep within the Pentagon’s maze. It launched in 2007, and the Department of Defense claimed it was shut down in 2012—but Elizondo continued to work with officials from the Navy and the CIA.
Most of the funding, which came at the request of US Sen. Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, went to an aerospace research company run by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Reid’s, according to the Times. The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. In 2017, Elizondo resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. He also stressed the need to pay more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.”
Testifying before Congress: Graves’ role in 2023 UAP Hearings
The aforementioned New York Times reporting, which has continued since the initial stories were published in 2017, was a dream come true for many who are interested in UAPs, as it gave mainstream credibility to the long stigmatized subject. The topic even caught the attention of members of Congress, and in July 2023 the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena and its implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency.
The hearings made international headlines. Three military veterans testified during the proceedings, including a former Air Force intelligence officer, retired Maj. David Grusch, who claimed the US government has operated a secret “multi-decade” reverse engineering program of recovered vessels. He also said the US has recovered non-human “biologics” from alleged crash sites. While he noted that he had been denied access to some government UFO programs, Grusch told the committee that he knew the “exact locations” of UAPs in US possession. He testified that while he hadn’t personally seen any alien vehicles or alien bodies, his opinions are based on the accounts of more than 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years in his role with the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, which he served on before becoming a whistleblower.
Another person who made headlines at the hearing was Ryan Graves, who was blunt about the seriousness of the situation. “I can tell you that advanced UAP are a national security and an aviation safety problem,” he said in his testimony.
Graves told the committee that incidents of UAPs in American airspace are grossly underreported, that the stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security, and that the government knows more about UAP than is shared publicly. He also said excessive classification practices are keeping crucial information hidden.
“These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine,” Graves testified. “Military aircrews and commercial pilots, trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena.”
He also recounted the incidents the Red Rippers experienced when they saw objects on their sensors and in near-miss incidents. “The UAP we encountered and tracked on multiple sensors behaved in ways that surpassed our understanding and technology,” Graves testified. “The UAP could accelerate at speeds up to Mach 1, hold their position against hurricane-force winds, and outlast our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day.
“They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces, or propulsion—nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines,” he testified. “I am a formally trained engineer and I have no explanation for this.”
Pentagon pushback and ongoing controversy
Since the New York Times began reporting on UAPs, the Pentagon, government officials, and media have have worked to debunk and discredit some of the Times footage and sources.
Last November, Dr. Jon Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which was established in 2022 to “lead the US government’s efforts to address UAP using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach,” claimed that the object seen in the “Go Fast” video wasn’t actually going that fast at all. It only appeared to be moving at a high speed due to a “trick of the eye” called parallax that made the object appear anomalous—or out of the ordinary—when it was not, according to the AARO.
Kosloski still didn’t identify the object though. In response, Graves and others have said that the AARO conclusions fail to debunk the video, and that they weren’t surprised that the Pentagon called the clip into question.
“They’d been waiting to do that for years,” Graves said. He added that neither he, nor other members of the Red Rippers, ever claimed the object was moving at an especially high speed or that the object’s speed is what made it stand out.
“The pilots never say it’s going fast,” Graves said. “What’s not captured in the ‘Go Fast’ is the fact that there are three other objects [flying] abreast, in a line formation about a mile separated from each other.”
Graves said that the AARO is focused on resolving cases, and that he has been in meetings with them and debriefed with witnesses that have debriefed with them. He said the specialized office isn’t respectful of witnesses, and are generally trying to end meetings with an easy explanation for reported incidents.
“Their motivation, their incentive, is to resolve these cases as quickly as possible,” Graves said. “And that’s generally what they do.”
The future of UAP reporting and national security
Today, Graves lives in Southern New Hampshire. In 2023, he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, and recounted in our interview that after talking about his experiences on 60 Minutes and Joe Rogan’s podcast, pilots started reaching out to him and sharing their experiences.
“People started coming to me,” Graves said. “They would email me and look me up on LinkedIn and share their own personal experiences. Most of them at this time were pilots, military pilots, commercial pilots, veterans, and other professionals that people would usually trust in decision making positions.”
At first, Graves said he didn’t know what to do with all the stories, but in time he decided to start Americans for Safe Aerospace, in part so he could act on what people were sharing. In the years since, he and his organization have spoken with more than 1,000 pilots, in some cases working with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the FBI.
“In certain cases that have the potential to have national security implications, with the pilots’ permission [and] witness’ permission, we introduce them to a group that we helped establish at the FBI, who now investigates these cases,” Graves said. “They are very active, they have a high level of buy-in, and are very motivated to do this work. … It’s not just ones that might be drones over nuclear bases, they want the weird ones too.”
Graves said he has referred more than 80 cases to the FBI. He continued, “Some of these people have been holding on to these stories for 20 [or] 30 years, and maybe have only told their wives. … Other people have reached out to me who are super excited about what we’re doing, they’ve never seen anything, they’re a pilot, and then six months later I hear back that they’ve seen something, or that they and their co-pilot had an experience.”
In one particular report, a pilot told Graves they were flying a fully loaded commercial airliner over South Africa when they nearly collided with an object that appeared to be a massive black triangle, 200 yards on each side. The object had lights on its apexes.
“It started off the horizon off their nose, they didn’t know what they were looking at at first, and [then] they realized it was another aircraft coming directly at them from slightly above,” Graves said. “It came up very quickly, extremely rapid speed, much, much faster than they were going.”
The pilot, Graves noted, never reported the incident.
“It came within 500-feet of their aircraft,” he said. “How do you process something like that?”
