Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves on His UFO Encounter

Please tell people your credentials, what your background is. Sure. So, you know, my name is Ryan Graves. I have an engineering degree, mechanical and aerospace engineering. I promptly left doing that to go fly F-18s for the Navy as soon as I graduated college. Did that for about a decade, both operationally in combat as well as in an instructor role teaching the new students. And you know, we did witness something while we were flying in our jets, but we witnessed it in the context of our just everyday flying in our missions. And what year was it that you witnessed this? So we started seeing these in 2014 was the earliest that I know, 2013, late 2013, early 2014. And could you describe what it was the very first experience? Yeah, so for me personally, the experience was simply just flying out to the area like I would any other day. And instead of seeing an empty airspace with just my wing person or another squadron doing something a different block, there were all of a sudden a lot of different radar contacts, which is immediately a problem because, you know, we could be hitting one of those or someone working in our area. And this was happening because we upgraded our radar the best we could tell. We were in a earlier radar called the APG-73. And we had come back from deployment. We ended a maintenance phase, it's called. We kind of do a little bit less flying, upgrade the jets if we need to, we need long lasting maintenance. And we upgraded to the APG-79, which was a much better radar. And what is the difference in the capabilities of the upgraded radar system versus the original system? So, you know, kind of frankly speaking, it's like going from an analog TV essentially to like an OLED. It's, you know, a digital modern tool compared to more of like an analog classical radar that has more limited range and has less ability to track multiple targets and things of that nature. So just generally speaking, we would expect to see, you know, more objects if there were any out there or smaller objects, but there shouldn't have been any objects out there. And so how far offshore are you when this is all going down? Our working areas start about 10 miles off the coast. And then it goes out, you know, 100 or 250 miles or so, though we don't usually use those far eastern areas. But we would only see them over the water. So they would really only be in our working areas, maybe slightly, you know, in between the working areas and land, but never over the land, sometimes over the bays that are in the area that are quite large, but never just kind of zooming west over land or anything like that. And is this restricted airspace? It's not. So that's a tricky question. For us operating in a military operating area, it is not restricted in the sense that you have to be there's only one person allowed in there. You could have these little Cessna kind of bumbling in there, but they would get called out pretty quick, both from the kind of air traffic control agency that's working out there, as well as F-18s and the other aircraft that may be working out there. But in a broader sense, when we look at it in relation to our air defense identification zone, which is essentially a band of airspace that surrounds our entire country, if your flight path originates over the water outside of the ATAs and you proceed into that ATAs into our controlled airspace, then you do have to essentially have permission to enter that airspace. It's not a restricted airspace like a traditional bombing range, but it is protected airspace. It's our coastal air. So you have this upgraded radar system. What are you detecting? On the radar, really what we can learn from that is essentially the kinematics of the object. Where is it essentially? What direction is it going? How fast is it going? Things of that nature. We can't necessarily make up the shape or things of that nature. It's a representation. It's like a block on our screen to show that information. When we see that on our radar, we can tell where it's located, perhaps what's located around it, if there's other objects we're detecting, how fast it's going, what direction it's pointed in, what direction it's traveling in. We call that velocity vector. If we see this essentially little circle, we'll have a tail coming off of it. That tail represents the nose of the vehicle, at least as its flight path is going. With that, we would typically see an aircraft just kind of trudging along with a straight line taking occasional turns. These objects had a little bit more of a, I don't want to say random, but more less controlled flight path. That velocity vector would kind of jump around a bit more. They would not proceed in a perfectly straight line, as you would imagine a flight navigation computer would take you, right? It takes you from A to B in the straightest line possible. These objects seemed to kind of be moving in a direction that was not a straight line, but generally proceeding in that direction. They would kind of be meandering slightly, but moving in that general direction, both three-dimensionally and horizontally. Winding around, going up, going down, so they're not on a flat plane and they're not going in a straight line. I don't want to draw too many firm statements like that because we would see them being flat too. We'd see them perfectly stationary up there, regardless of the wind. Really? Mm-hmm. Wow. What kind of wind are you talking about? Oh gosh. At altitude, you can have anywhere up to 120 knots of airspeed. What is that in miles per hour? It's about 130, 140 miles per hour. They're completely stationary with 140 mile an hour wind. Correct. How would something do that? It's confusing to me as well. Even if we had something that could just burn that much energy, like if you had a sphere surrounded by little rockets, just imagining something right now. And if you wanted to keep that perfectly stationary against gravity, you could just fire all the rockets at the bottom really fast and hopefully keep it flat. It's going to have tiny little variations. Then if you have wind hitting it and all this, you could potentially have those rockets try to counter it, but it would never be perfectly still in winds like that. Because the wind's not perfectly still either, right? Exactly. It changes and varies. It does. So it's almost like it's the wind. It's not even really fighting the wind, it seems. It just seems like it's just there in a way. Wow. So the first time you see these things, what are your thoughts? Yeah. The first time really was, well, what is this? It's not a UFO or something mysterious at this point. It's at what we're thinking at this point we see on the radar is just, well, our radar is broken. These perhaps don't represent physical objects yet because we hadn't visually seen these or seen them on our camera yet. And so we're kind of like, hey, what's going on here? Is anyone all seeing this kind of thing? But not really investigating it, right? It's just kind of like, all right, there's stuff out there, but maybe next time we'll take a look. But the way our systems work, when we have all these contacts on our radar, and if we kind of just, oops, left one out with our little cursor there, all our sensors go to it. Our FLIR goes to it, which is our camera system. All our weapons, they have their own little eyes in some sense, and they all look in that direction. And so eventually, someone had one of these selected and flew close enough so that as they look at their FLIR system, their camera, they could see something that was at the spot represented on the radar, right? So there was something there. So they were seeing it visually with their own eyes? Not at this point, just on the FLIR system. The FLIR system. And so that's a regular camera and also an infrared camera. And so typically we'll roll around in infrared just because it returns a better image typically. So yeah, it didn't look like an object they were seeing on the FLIR. It just looked like a source of IR energy in a sense, almost as if someone was shining a flashlight. But something had to be there to be reflecting that energy or creating it. So at this point, to answer your question, now we're like, OK, this isn't just an error on our radar. This is perhaps, we're thinking this is real. We have to really respect this as a safety hazard now. Even if it's just a small, however small ribbon of tinfoil, right? Like that sucked down the engine to still take out an aircraft, right? So we have to be very respectful of that. Like a Mylar balloon type thing? Potentially, right, yeah. But how fast are these things going? So sometimes stationary, right? Sometimes they would be going around 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, which is at altitude about 240 to 330 knots around there. So somewhere in the range of an airplane. Yeah, a fighter aircraft would be kind of flying around at those air speeds, except sometimes they would be perfectly stationary as well. Right. So it's not exhibiting any sort of patterns that you've recognized in the past? No, they have actually. So although- With the stationary, no, right? Correct. With the stationary, no. With the meandering kind of flight path, no. But I would also see them essentially fly what we call a racetrack pattern. And essentially what that means is they fly in a straight path, and then they do like a 180 degree turn in a certain direction, then they fly a straight path, then turn again. So that's what we call a racetrack pattern as opposed to a circular holding pattern. We did witness racetrack patterns. In fact, I think there's been some cases off the West Coast just the past couple weeks where people have also been observing object flying in racetrack patterns high at altitude with lights. So I do recognize that behavior, but I don't necessarily think that means we have to attribute it to normal behavior necessarily. That type of flight path is important because it's a very efficient way to fly. Right. If you have to maintain the position in a certain area, you want to minimize how much you're turning. Because any time you're turning in an aircraft, you're using more energy than if you were just flying straight and level. And so by having a racetrack pattern, it's an efficient way of holding in a position by maximizing straight and level time and minimizing your turn time. And how long would these things stay up there for? So from my experience, from our experience, and again, we weren't studying these, but they were always out there. They were always out there when we took off, we'd see them, and then we'd go to land, they would still be out there. Like every day? Every day. Every day. Every day. And then you go from not having any idea that these things are out there to upgraded radar system to seeing them every day. What is the thought? How are you feeling when these... Is there an evolution of the thought pattern of how you're addressing these things and thinking about them? Initially, you're thinking they're errors. When do you start getting a thought that like, what the fuck is this thing? So that happened when we visually saw one. And the first time we visually saw one, the object was directly at what we call the entry point of the area. So that box that I told you about in the sky that starts 10 miles off the coast, there's a particular GPS location and altitude where incoming traffic will fly in and outbound traffic will fly in the exact same spot, but will fly out 1000 feet lower. There were two aircraft from my squadron, VFA-11, and we flew... Excuse me, they flew, took off as a flight of two. That means they're essentially flying in a formation like this. And as they hit the area, one of these objects went right between the aircraft. The lead air crew saw the object. The Dash 2 aircraft crew did not, which is not surprising because they're usually... You're very focused on flying formation. You're just staring right at that aircraft. The lead really has actual leeway to look around. So he saw it and he immediately came back. I have to assume he didn't have it on his radar because he wouldn't have flown through this object at the entrance point. He turned around, flew back, landed, and I was in the ready room when he'd come back. And he had all his gear on, which typically is not a good thing because you want to get that stuff off as fast as possible. So usually means there's a problem of some nature. He was just sitting there saying, hey, I was hit with those damn things. And we all knew what he was referring to, even though we didn't necessarily have a name for it just because we were seeing these so much. And he described it. He described it just as a black or dark gray cube. And that cube was inside of a clear translucent sphere. And essentially the apex or the corners of that cube, best he could tell, were touching inside of that sphere. And that description mirrors many of the descriptions that people have had of these, whatever you want to call them. They're calling them UAPs now for some strange reason. UFOs is a, I don't know, does it have a dirty connotation to it? And is it tainted because of so many crazy people talking about UFOs? Is that what it is? It does come with a lot of assumptions baked in. Yeah, it baked in. That's, yeah. So that's something, but whatever it is, that is a design that people have reported seeing before, that this translucent sphere and this cube, can you see through the cube? Not to my understanding, no. So it's some sort of solid black cube that's inside this translucent sphere. And it's just floating around and flying around the sky. So that's a good point. Is it floating around? Is it flying around? It's doing both, which is strange, right? Because you could think of that description and be like, okay, that's some kind of weird balloon maybe with stuff in it. And that's certainly one way, if you just view that angle of it, then it seems explainable. But when that, the balloon-like object starts cruising around at 0.8 Mach, that nullifies that particular idea. And you'll see that a lot where it's not just like that one picture or that one behavior. It's really, you kind of have to zoom out a bit and look at everything in relation to each other and say, okay, why is this weird? Okay, it was hanging out in a racetrack pattern. That's not exotic, but when you learn it was doing it for perhaps 13 hours. 13 hours. Perhaps they were out there all the time. I land and I go back. And we weren't on a Intel mission to analyze these, right? We're going to do our training. It's very expensive, 30K an hour to fly these things, right? So really the only time we can put energy into looking at these things when we're kind of transiting back and forth or waiting for a fight to start. And so it's never like a dedicated analysis. It's not like a dedicated analysis. It's not like a dedicated analysis. It's not like a dedicated analysis. 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