Ryan Graves

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Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves is a former United States Navy F-A-18 Super Hornet pilot and unidentified aerial phenomena advocate who reported persistent UAP encounters off the US East Coast beginning in late 2013 and 2014 while serving with his squadron out of Virginia Beach, Virginia. He holds a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering and flew the F/A-18 Super Hornet for eleven years across two deployments. After leaving active duty he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit advocacy organization for aviation personnel who report UAP, and testified before the United States Congress alongside David Grusch and David Fravor at the July 2023 House Oversight Committee UAP hearing.

Encounters (2013–2015)

The encounters began after Graves' squadron — referred to as VF-11 — returned from deployment and upgraded its aircraft radar from the APG-73 to the APG-79 AESA, a transition Graves compared to going from an analog television to an OLED. With the upgraded system, multiple radar contacts began appearing daily in the squadron's military operating area ten to 250 miles off the Virginia coast, appearing only over water. The objects were sometimes completely stationary against winds of up to 120 knots, and at other times traveled at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach or went supersonic at 1.1 to 2 Mach heading east. On FLIR camera the objects appeared as infrared sources with no visible exhaust plume, propellers, or wing surfaces — sometimes registering cold, sometimes emitting as hot objects.

When a pilot from the squadron made the first visual acquisition — at the entry waypoint of the restricted operating area — the object passed between two jets flying in formation and was described as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear or translucent sphere, with the corners of the cube touching the interior of the sphere, estimated at roughly five to fifteen feet in diameter. Pilots from other East Coast squadrons with comparable radar reported the same shape and coloring. After the near-miss, the squadron discovered there had been four additional near-miss events in the preceding month that pilots had been too uncomfortable to report.

The squadron filed formal aviation hazard reports to the fleet, and the FAA issued a NOTAM warning of unknown objects in the operating areas — the only institutional response. In 2015, the squadron moved to a pre-deployment workup cycle aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt off Jacksonville, Florida, where the objects were again present; it was during this workup that the Gimbal video and GOFAST video were recorded. Graves described the Gimbal video object as executing a vertical U-turn within approximately 500 feet — far tighter than the roughly 4,000–6,000 feet needed for an F/A-18 — after which it reversed direction to follow a formation of four to six additional objects flying in a wedge nearby.

Briefings and public advocacy

The encounters became public in December 2017 when the New York Times published a front-page story on Navy pilot UAP encounters, which Graves described as the moment he recognized the broader significance of what the squadron had witnessed. Graves subsequently had a private briefing with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, appearing in uniform after receiving orders the evening before his appearance. He has consistently framed UAP as primarily an aviation safety problem, arguing that institutional reluctance to discuss the phenomenon creates dangerous reporting gaps among pilots.

Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (americansforsafeaerospace.org), which by late 2024 had grown to approximately 135,000 members and received UAP reports from military aviators and commercial airline pilots, including from pilots at every major airline — some of which had begun establishing internal UAP working groups. He has also worked with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to assemble teams of engineers — with a combined total of over 300 years of NASA experience — to develop scientific UAP sensing standards.

See also

References