Ryan Graves — Former U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot and aviation safety officer; UAP witness/whistleblower who testified to Congress and now leads UAP study efforts at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
The gist
Ryan Graves recounts how a 2014 radar upgrade (APG-79) revealed unidentified objects that his squadron began seeing every day in their training airspace off Virginia Beach and Jacksonville. He describes the objects' impossible behaviors: hovering stationary in 120-knot winds, racetrack patterns for 13+ hours, no visible propulsion or heat plume, and a near mid-air with a dark cube inside a translucent sphere. He breaks down the famous 'gimbal' FLIR video and explains how the lack of scientific instruments and a secretive classification system have stalled real analysis. The back half is a long Rogan-led speculation on AI, the singularity, human evolution merging with technology, and whether UAP represent non-human intelligence monitoring humanity.
Big reveals
- Graves' squadron began detecting the objects in late 2013/early 2014 only after upgrading from the APG-73 to the much more capable APG-79 radar.
- The objects could hold perfectly stationary against 120-knot winds, then accelerate to 0.6-0.8 Mach, with no visible propulsion or heat signature.
- A pilot from his squadron nearly hit one at the area entry point and described it as a dark gray cube inside a clear translucent sphere.
- After a near mid-air, the squadron filed safety hazard reports and a FAA NOTAM was eventually issued warning of unknown objects in their operating areas.
- In the gimbal incident the object reversed direction with a ~500-foot vertical U-turn, far tighter than an F-18's ~4,000-6,000 foot turn radius.
- When an admiral was called to watch the gimbal FLIR footage, he glanced at it for about five seconds and walked out, suggesting he'd seen it before.
- Graves was summoned with under a day's notice to brief the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, ordered into uniform the night before.
- At a merge (closing to ~500 feet) pilots could see the object on FLIR but nothing was visually present, raising questions about visibility or physicality.
Things worth remembering
- Graves likens the radar upgrade to going from an analog TV to a modern OLED in detection capability.
- Even a small ribbon of tinfoil sucked into an engine can take out an aircraft, which is why the objects were treated as a flight-safety hazard.
- An F-18 costs about $30,000 an hour to fly, so the pilots had little dedicated time to study the objects.
- Three rough object types are described: the cube-in-sphere, the gimbal, and the Tic Tac reported by Commander David Fravor (~25 feet wide).
- The 2017 New York Times front-page story is cited as the moment UAP discussion became publicly legitimate.
- Reports indicate the number of objects seems to be increasing and occurring wherever sensors are looking, coast to coast.
- Fravor's Tic Tac reportedly dropped from above 50,000 feet to 50 feet in under a second.
- A 1952 incident saw seven radar 'pips' appear over restricted Washington DC airspace, including the White House and Capitol.
- A commercial pilot over Medellin, Colombia filmed a cube-shaped object, breaking cockpit phone rules to capture it.
- Graves notes a Navy intelligence unit released a patch depicting a UFO, then removed it about a week later calling it an accident.